The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells Chapter 21 In Oxford Street

The Invisible Man

by H.G. Wells

Chapter 21

In Oxford Street

"In going downstairs the first time I found an unexpected difficulty

because I could not see my feet; indeed I stumbled twice, and there

was an unaccustomed clumsiness in gripping the bolt. By not looking

down, however, I managed to walk on the level passably well.

"My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man

might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the

blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to

clap men on the back, fling people's hats astray, and generally

revel in my extraordinary advantage.

"But hardly had I emerged upon Great Portland Street, however (my

lodging was close to the big draper's shop there), when I heard a

clashing concussion and was hit violently behind, and turning saw

a man carrying a basket of soda-water syphons, and looking in

amazement at his burden. Although the blow had really hurt me, I

found something so irresistible in his astonishment that I laughed

aloud. 'The devil's in the basket,' I said, and suddenly twisted

it out of his hand. He let go incontinently, and I swung the whole

weight into the air.

"But a fool of a cabman, standing outside a public house, made a

sudden rush for this, and his extending fingers took me with

excruciating violence under the ear. I let the whole down with a

smash on the cabman, and then, with shouts and the clatter of feet

about me, people coming out of shops, vehicles pulling up, I

realised what I had done for myself, and cursing my folly, backed

against a shop window and prepared to dodge out of the confusion. In

a moment I should be wedged into a crowd and inevitably discovered.

I pushed by a butcher boy, who luckily did not turn to see the

nothingness that shoved him aside, and dodged behind the cab-man's

four-wheeler. I do not know how they settled the business. I hurried

straight across the road, which was happily clear, and hardly

heeding which way I went, in the fright of detection the incident

had given me, plunged into the afternoon throng of Oxford Street.

"I tried to get into the stream of people, but they were too thick

for me, and in a moment my heels were being trodden upon. I took to

the gutter, the roughness of which I found painful to my feet, and

forthwith the shaft of a crawling hansom dug me forcibly under the

shoulder blade, reminding me that I was already bruised severely. I

staggered out of the way of the cab, avoided a perambulator by a

convulsive movement, and found myself behind the hansom. A happy

thought saved me, and as this drove slowly along I followed in its

immediate wake, trembling and astonished at the turn of my

adventure. And not only trembling, but shivering. It was a bright

day in January and I was stark naked and the thin slime of mud that

covered the road was freezing. Foolish as it seems to me now, I had

not reckoned that, transparent or not, I was still amenable to the

weather and all its consequences.

"Then suddenly a bright idea came into my head. I ran round and got

into the cab. And so, shivering, scared, and sniffing with the first

intimations of a cold, and with the bruises in the small of my back

growing upon my attention, I drove slowly along Oxford Street and

past Tottenham Court Road. My mood was as different from that in

which I had sallied forth ten minutes ago as it is possible to

imagine. This invisibility indeed! The one thought that possessed

me was--how was I to get out of the scrape I was in.

"We crawled past Mudie's, and there a tall woman with five or six

yellow-labelled books hailed my cab, and I sprang out just in time

to escape her, shaving a railway van narrowly in my flight. I made

off up the roadway to Bloomsbury Square, intending to strike north

past the Museum and so get into the quiet district. I was now

cruelly chilled, and the strangeness of my situation so unnerved me

that I whimpered as I ran. At the northward corner of the Square a

little white dog ran out of the Pharmaceutical Society's offices,

and incontinently made for me, nose down.

"I had never realised it before, but the nose is to the mind of a

dog what the eye is to the mind of a seeing man. Dogs perceive the

scent of a man moving as men perceive his vision. This brute began

barking and leaping, showing, as it seemed to me, only too plainly

that he was aware of me. I crossed Great Russell Street, glancing

over my shoulder as I did so, and went some way along Montague

Street before I realised what I was running towards.

"Then I became aware of a blare of music, and looking along the

street saw a number of people advancing out of Russell Square, red

shirts, and the banner of the Salvation Army to the fore. Such a

crowd, chanting in the roadway and scoffing on the pavement, I

could not hope to penetrate, and dreading to go back and farther

from home again, and deciding on the spur of the moment, I ran up

the white steps of a house facing the museum railings, and stood

there until the crowd should have passed. Happily the dog stopped

at the noise of the band too, hesitated, and turned tail, running

back to Bloomsbury Square again.

"On came the band, bawling with unconscious irony some hymn about

'When shall we see His face?' and it seemed an interminable time

to me before the tide of the crowd washed along the pavement by me.

Thud, thud, thud, came the drum with a vibrating resonance, and for

the moment I did not notice two urchins stopping at the railings by

me. 'See 'em,' said one. 'See what?' said the other. 'Why--them

footmarks--bare. Like what you makes in mud.'

"I looked down and saw the youngsters had stopped and were gaping

at the muddy footmarks I had left behind me up the newly whitened

steps. The passing people elbowed and jostled them, but their

confounded intelligence was arrested. 'Thud, thud, thud, when,

thud, shall we see, thud, his face, thud, thud.' 'There's a

barefoot man gone up them steps, or I don't know nothing,' said

one. 'And he ain't never come down again. And his foot was

a-bleeding.'

"The thick of the crowd had already passed. 'Looky there, Ted,'

quoth the younger of the detectives, with the sharpness of surprise

in his voice, and pointed straight to my feet. I looked down and

saw at once the dim suggestion of their outline sketched in

splashes of mud. For a moment I was paralysed.

"'Why, that's rum,' said the elder. 'Dashed rum! It's just like

the ghost of a foot, ain't it?' He hesitated and advanced with

outstretched hand. A man pulled up short to see what he was

catching, and then a girl. In another moment he would have touched

me. Then I saw what to do. I made a step, the boy started back with

an exclamation, and with a rapid movement I swung myself over into

the portico of the next house. But the smaller boy was sharp-eyed

enough to follow the movement, and before I was well down the

steps and upon the pavement, he had recovered from his momentary

astonishment and was shouting out that the feet had gone over the

wall.

"They rushed round and saw my new footmarks flash into being on the

lower step and upon the pavement. 'What's up?' asked someone.

'Feet! Look! Feet running!'

"Everybody in the road, except my three pursuers, was pouring along

after the Salvation Army, and this blow not only impeded me but them.

There was an eddy of surprise and interrogation. At the cost of

bowling over one young fellow I got through, and in another moment

I was rushing headlong round the circuit of Russell Square, with

six or seven astonished people following my footmarks. There was

no time for explanation, or else the whole host would have been

after me.

"Twice I doubled round corners, thrice I crossed the road and came

back upon my tracks, and then, as my feet grew hot and dry, the

damp impressions began to fade. At last I had a breathing space

and rubbed my feet clean with my hands, and so got away altogether.

The last I saw of the chase was a little group of a dozen people

perhaps, studying with infinite perplexity a slowly drying

footprint that had resulted from a puddle in Tavistock Square, a

footprint as isolated and incomprehensible to them as Crusoe's

solitary discovery.

"This running warmed me to a certain extent, and I went on with a

better courage through the maze of less frequented roads that runs

hereabouts. My back had now become very stiff and sore, my tonsils

were painful from the cabman's fingers, and the skin of my neck

had been scratched by his nails; my feet hurt exceedingly and I

was lame from a little cut on one foot. I saw in time a blind

man approaching me, and fled limping, for I feared his subtle

intuitions. Once or twice accidental collisions occurred and I left

people amazed, with unaccountable curses ringing in their ears.

Then came something silent and quiet against my face, and across

the Square fell a thin veil of slowly falling flakes of snow. I had

caught a cold, and do as I would I could not avoid an occasional

sneeze. And every dog that came in sight, with its pointing nose

and curious sniffing, was a terror to me.

"Then came men and boys running, first one and then others, and

shouting as they ran. It was a fire. They ran in the direction of

my lodging, and looking back down a street I saw a mass of black

smoke streaming up above the roofs and telephone wires. It was my

lodging burning; my clothes, my apparatus, all my resources indeed,

except my cheque-book and the three volumes of memoranda that

awaited me in Great Portland Street, were there. Burning! I had

burnt my boats--if ever a man did! The place was blazing."

The Invisible Man paused and thought. Kemp glanced nervously out of

the window. "Yes?" he said. "Go on."