THE INVISIBLE MAN SLEEPS

Exhausted and wounded as the Invisible Man was, he refused to accept
Kemp's word that his freedom should be respected. He examined the
two windows of the bedroom, drew up the blinds and opened the
sashes, to confirm Kemp's statement that a retreat by them would be
possible. Outside the night was very quiet and still, and the new
moon was setting over the down. Then he examined the keys of the
bedroom and the two dressing-room doors, to satisfy himself that
these also could be made an assurance of freedom. Finally he
expressed himself satisfied. He stood on the hearth rug and Kemp
heard the sound of a yawn.

"I'm sorry," said the Invisible Man, "if I cannot tell you all that
I have done to-night. But I am worn out. It's grotesque, no doubt.
It's horrible! But believe me, Kemp, in spite of your arguments of
this morning, it is quite a possible thing. I have made a discovery.
I meant to keep it to myself. I can't. I must have a partner. And
you.... We can do such things ... But to-morrow. Now, Kemp, I feel
as though I must sleep or perish."

Kemp stood in the middle of the room staring at the headless garment.
"I suppose I must leave you," he said. "It's--incredible. Three
things happening like this, overturning all my preconceptions--would
make me insane. But it's real! Is there anything more that I can
get you?"

"Only bid me good-night," said Griffin.

"Good-night," said Kemp, and shook an invisible hand. He walked
sideways to the door. Suddenly the dressing-gown walked quickly
towards him. "Understand me!" said the dressing-gown. "No attempts
to hamper me, or capture me! Or--"

Kemp's face changed a little. "I thought I gave you my word," he
said.

Kemp closed the door softly behind him, and the key was turned upon
him forthwith. Then, as he stood with an expression of passive
amazement on his face, the rapid feet came to the door of the
dressing-room and that too was locked. Kemp slapped his brow with
his hand. "Am I dreaming? Has the world gone mad--or have I?"

He laughed, and put his hand to the locked door. "Barred out of my
own bedroom, by a flagrant absurdity!" he said.

He walked to the head of the staircase, turned, and stared at the
locked doors. "It's fact," he said. He put his fingers to his
slightly bruised neck. "Undeniable fact!

"But--"

He shook his head hopelessly, turned, and went downstairs.

He lit the dining-room lamp, got out a cigar, and began pacing the
room, ejaculating. Now and then he would argue with himself.

"Invisible!" he said.

"Is there such a thing as an invisible animal? ... In the sea, yes.
Thousands--millions. All the larvae, all the little nauplii and
tornarias, all the microscopic things, the jelly-fish. In the sea
there are more things invisible than visible! I never thought of
that before. And in the ponds too! All those little pond-life
things--specks of colourless translucent jelly! But in air? No!

"It can't be.

"But after all--why not?

"If a man was made of glass he would still be visible."

His meditation became profound. The bulk of three cigars had passed
into the invisible or diffused as a white ash over the carpet before
he spoke again. Then it was merely an exclamation. He turned aside,
walked out of the room, and went into his little consulting-room and
lit the gas there. It was a little room, because Dr. Kemp did not
live by practice, and in it were the day's newspapers. The morning's
paper lay carelessly opened and thrown aside. He caught it up,
turned it over, and read the account of a "Strange Story from Iping"
that the mariner at Port Stowe had spelt over so painfully to Mr.
Marvel. Kemp read it swiftly.

"Wrapped up!" said Kemp. "Disguised! Hiding it! 'No one seems to
have been aware of his misfortune.' What the devil _is_ his game?"

He dropped the paper, and his eye went seeking. "Ah!" he said, and
caught up the _St. James' Gazette_, lying folded up as it arrived.
"Now we shall get at the truth," said Dr. Kemp. He rent the paper
open; a couple of columns confronted him. "An Entire Village in
Sussex goes Mad" was the heading.

"Good Heavens!" said Kemp, reading eagerly an incredulous account
of the events in Iping, of the previous afternoon, that have
already been described. Over the leaf the report in the morning
paper had been reprinted.

He re-read it. "Ran through the streets striking right and left.
Jaffers insensible. Mr. Huxter in great pain--still unable to
describe what he saw. Painful humiliation--vicar. Woman ill with
terror! Windows smashed. This extraordinary story probably a
fabrication. Too good not to print--_cum grano_!"

He dropped the paper and stared blankly in front of him. "Probably
a fabrication!"

He caught up the paper again, and re-read the whole business. "But
when does the Tramp come in? Why the deuce was he chasing a tramp?"

He sat down abruptly on the surgical bench. "He's not only
invisible," he said, "but he's mad! Homicidal!"

When dawn came to mingle its pallor with the lamp-light and cigar
smoke of the dining-room, Kemp was still pacing up and down, trying
to grasp the incredible.

He was altogether too excited to sleep. His servants, descending
sleepily, discovered him, and were inclined to think that
over-study had worked this ill on him. He gave them extraordinary
but quite explicit instructions to lay breakfast for two in the
belvedere study--and then to confine themselves to the basement
and ground-floor. Then he continued to pace the dining-room until
the morning's paper came. That had much to say and little to tell,
beyond the confirmation of the evening before, and a very badly
written account of another remarkable tale from Port Burdock. This
gave Kemp the essence of the happenings at the "Jolly Cricketers,"
and the name of Marvel. "He has made me keep with him twenty-four
hours," Marvel testified. Certain minor facts were added to the
Iping story, notably the cutting of the village telegraph-wire.
But there was nothing to throw light on the connexion between
the Invisible Man and the Tramp; for Mr. Marvel had supplied no
information about the three books, or the money with which he was
lined. The incredulous tone had vanished and a shoal of reporters
and inquirers were already at work elaborating the matter.

Kemp read every scrap of the report and sent his housemaid out to
get every one of the morning papers she could. These also he
devoured.

"He is invisible!" he said. "And it reads like rage growing to
mania! The things he may do! The things he may do! And he's
upstairs free as the air. What on earth ought I to do?"

"For instance, would it be a breach of faith if--? No."

He went to a little untidy desk in the corner, and began a note. He
tore this up half written, and wrote another. He read it over and
considered it. Then he took an envelope and addressed it to "Colonel
Adye, Port Burdock."

The Invisible Man awoke even as Kemp was doing this. He awoke in an
evil temper, and Kemp, alert for every sound, heard his pattering
feet rush suddenly across the bedroom overhead. Then a chair was
flung over and the wash-hand stand tumbler smashed. Kemp hurried
upstairs and rapped eagerly.

After Griffin makes sure the bedroom is secure and after Kemp promises not to turn him in, Griffin goes to sleep. Kemp can't sleep right now. For one thing, he's worried briefly about his sanity . For another thing, Griffin took his bedroom. Instead, Kemp spends some time reading the newspapers from that day. The top news story is about a dangerous invisible man. Kemp remembers all the way back to Chapter 16 and he wonders why Griffin was chasing that tramp. That didn't look like innocent fun. Kemp worries that Griffin may become more unstable and dangerous. He hesitates, but eventually decides to write a note to Colonel Adye. Then he hears Griffin wake up. As usual, Griffin starts his day off by tossing some furniture around. It's good exercise - like yoga for mad scientists.


CERTAIN FIRST PRINCIPLES

"What's the matter?" asked Kemp, when the Invisible Man admitted him.

"Nothing," was the answer.

"But, confound it! The smash?"

"Fit of temper," said the Invisible Man. "Forgot this arm; and it's
sore."

"You're rather liable to that sort of thing."

"I am."

Kemp walked across the room and picked up the fragments of broken
glass. "All the facts are out about you," said Kemp, standing up
with the glass in his hand; "all that happened in Iping, and down
the hill. The world has become aware of its invisible citizen. But
no one knows you are here."

The Invisible Man swore.

"The secret's out. I gather it was a secret. I don't know what your
plans are, but of course I'm anxious to help you."

The Invisible Man sat down on the bed.

"There's breakfast upstairs," said Kemp, speaking as easily as
possible, and he was delighted to find his strange guest rose
willingly. Kemp led the way up the narrow staircase to the
belvedere.

"Before we can do anything else," said Kemp, "I must understand a
little more about this invisibility of yours." He had sat down,
after one nervous glance out of the window, with the air of a man
who has talking to do. His doubts of the sanity of the entire
business flashed and vanished again as he looked across to
where Griffin sat at the breakfast-table--a headless, handless
dressing-gown, wiping unseen lips on a miraculously held serviette.

"It's simple enough--and credible enough," said Griffin, putting
the serviette aside and leaning the invisible head on an invisible
hand.

"No doubt, to you, but--" Kemp laughed.

"Well, yes; to me it seemed wonderful at first, no doubt. But now,
great God! ... But we will do great things yet! I came on the stuff
first at Chesilstowe."

"Chesilstowe?"

"I went there after I left London. You know I dropped medicine and
took up physics? No; well, I did. _Light_ fascinated me."

"Ah!"

"Optical density! The whole subject is a network of riddles--a
network with solutions glimmering elusively through. And being but
two-and-twenty and full of enthusiasm, I said, 'I will devote my
life to this. This is worth while.' You know what fools we are at
two-and-twenty?"

"Fools then or fools now," said Kemp.

"As though knowing could be any satisfaction to a man!

"But I went to work--like a slave. And I had hardly worked and
thought about the matter six months before light came through one
of the meshes suddenly--blindingly! I found a general principle
of pigments and refraction--a formula, a geometrical expression
involving four dimensions. Fools, common men, even common
mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression
may mean to the student of molecular physics. In the books--the
books that tramp has hidden--there are marvels, miracles! But this
was not a method, it was an idea, that might lead to a method by
which it would be possible, without changing any other property of
matter--except, in some instances colours--to lower the refractive
index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air--so far as all
practical purposes are concerned."

"Phew!" said Kemp. "That's odd! But still I don't see quite ... I
can understand that thereby you could spoil a valuable stone, but
personal invisibility is a far cry."

"Precisely," said Griffin. "But consider, visibility depends on the
action of the visible bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light,
or it reflects or refracts it, or does all these things. If it
neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of
itself be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because
the colour absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the
red part of the light, to you. If it did not absorb any particular
part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining
white box. Silver! A diamond box would neither absorb much of the
light nor reflect much from the general surface, but just here
and there where the surfaces were favourable the light would
be reflected and refracted, so that you would get a brilliant
appearance of flashing reflections and translucencies--a sort of
skeleton of light. A glass box would not be so brilliant, nor so
clearly visible, as a diamond box, because there would be less
refraction and reflection. See that? From certain points of view
you would see quite clearly through it. Some kinds of glass would
be more visible than others, a box of flint glass would be brighter
than a box of ordinary window glass. A box of very thin common
glass would be hard to see in a bad light, because it would absorb
hardly any light and refract and reflect very little. And if you
put a sheet of common white glass in water, still more if you
put it in some denser liquid than water, it would vanish almost
altogether, because light passing from water to glass is only
slightly refracted or reflected or indeed affected in any way.
It is almost as invisible as a jet of coal gas or hydrogen is in
air. And for precisely the same reason!"

"Yes," said Kemp, "that is pretty plain sailing."

"And here is another fact you will know to be true. If a sheet of
glass is smashed, Kemp, and beaten into a powder, it becomes much
more visible while it is in the air; it becomes at last an opaque
white powder. This is because the powdering multiplies the surfaces
of the glass at which refraction and reflection occur. In the sheet
of glass there are only two surfaces; in the powder the light is
reflected or refracted by each grain it passes through, and very
little gets right through the powder. But if the white powdered
glass is put into water, it forthwith vanishes. The powdered glass
and water have much the same refractive index; that is, the light
undergoes very little refraction or reflection in passing from one
to the other.

"You make the glass invisible by putting it into a liquid of nearly
the same refractive index; a transparent thing becomes invisible if
it is put in any medium of almost the same refractive index. And if
you will consider only a second, you will see also that the powder
of glass might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index
could be made the same as that of air; for then there would be no
refraction or reflection as the light passed from glass to air."

"Yes, yes," said Kemp. "But a man's not powdered glass!"

"No," said Griffin. "He's more transparent!"

"Nonsense!"

"That from a doctor! How one forgets! Have you already forgotten
your physics, in ten years? Just think of all the things that are
transparent and seem not to be so. Paper, for instance, is made up
of transparent fibres, and it is white and opaque only for the same
reason that a powder of glass is white and opaque. Oil white paper,
fill up the interstices between the particles with oil so that there
is no longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and
it becomes as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but cotton
fibre, linen fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and _bone_, Kemp,
_flesh_, Kemp, _hair_, Kemp, _nails_ and _nerves_, Kemp, in fact
the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black
pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue.
So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the
most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than
water."

"Great Heavens!" cried Kemp. "Of course, of course! I was thinking
only last night of the sea larvae and all jelly-fish!"

"_Now_ you have me! And all that I knew and had in mind a year after
I left London--six years ago. But I kept it to myself. I had to do
my work under frightful disadvantages. Oliver, my professor, was a
scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas--he
was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific
world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I
went on working; I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an
experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to
flash my work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous
at a blow. I took up the question of pigments to fill up certain
gaps. And suddenly, not by design but by accident, I made a
discovery in physiology."

"Yes?"

"You know the red colouring matter of blood; it can be made
white--colourless--and remain with all the functions it has now!"

Kemp gave a cry of incredulous amazement.

The Invisible Man rose and began pacing the little study. "You may
well exclaim. I remember that night. It was late at night--in the
daytime one was bothered with the gaping, silly students--and I
worked then sometimes till dawn. It came suddenly, splendid and
complete in my mind. I was alone; the laboratory was still, with the
tall lights burning brightly and silently. In all my great moments
I have been alone. 'One could make an animal--a tissue--transparent!
One could make it invisible! All except the pigments--I could be
invisible!' I said, suddenly realising what it meant to be an albino
with such knowledge. It was overwhelming. I left the filtering I was
doing, and went and stared out of the great window at the stars.
'I could be invisible!' I repeated.

"To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld,
unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility
might mean to a man--the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks
I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck,
hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college,
might suddenly become--this. I ask you, Kemp if _you_ ... Anyone, I
tell you, would have flung himself upon that research. And I worked
three years, and every mountain of difficulty I toiled over showed
another from its summit. The infinite details! And the exasperation!
A professor, a provincial professor, always prying. 'When are you
going to publish this work of yours?' was his everlasting question.
And the students, the cramped means! Three years I had of it--

"And after three years of secrecy and exasperation, I found that to
complete it was impossible--impossible."

"How?" asked Kemp.

"Money," said the Invisible Man, and went again to stare out of the
window.

He turned around abruptly. "I robbed the old man--robbed my
father.

"The money was not his, and he shot himself."

Actually, Griffin threw some stuff around because he's just kind of an angry guy, as Kemp notes. Kemp tells Griffin that he wants to help, but first, he needs to know his story. So strap yourself in for Griffin's story. Griffin was a medical student at the same time as Kemp, but Griffin switched to physics because he was interested in light. He came up with a loose theory for how to make objects invisible, but needed to figure out a method to actually do it. . If it's not plain sailing for you, you can always read up a little more on the concepts.) Griffin left London six years ago and went to Chesilstowe, where he was a teacher and a student. What he really wanted to do, though, was continue his research into invisibility. Still - and this is his big problem - his professor was "a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas--he was always prying!" . Griffin didn't want to publish his research because then Oliver would get a lot of credit for it. Griffin had done all this work himself. As he notes, "In all my great moments I have been alone" . One night, alone, Griffin figured out how to make a human invisible. Pretty soon he was thinking about making himself invisible, since it would get him out of his life as "a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college" . Harsh! After three years of teaching and research, he didn't have the money he needed to complete his research. So he did the obvious thing: he robbed his dad. Unfortunately, the money he stole was not actually his dad's, and so his dad shot himself.


AT THE HOUSE IN GREAT PORTLAND STREET

For a moment Kemp sat in silence, staring at the back of the
headless figure at the window. Then he started, struck by a thought,
rose, took the Invisible Man's arm, and turned him away from the
outlook.

"You are tired," he said, "and while I sit, you walk about. Have
my chair."

He placed himself between Griffin and the nearest window.

For a space Griffin sat silent, and then he resumed abruptly:

"I had left the Chesilstowe cottage already," he said, "when that
happened. It was last December. I had taken a room in London, a
large unfurnished room in a big ill-managed lodging-house in a slum
near Great Portland Street. The room was soon full of the appliances
I had bought with his money; the work was going on steadily,
successfully, drawing near an end. I was like a man emerging from a
thicket, and suddenly coming on some unmeaning tragedy. I went to
bury him. My mind was still on this research, and I did not lift
a finger to save his character. I remember the funeral, the cheap
hearse, the scant ceremony, the windy frost-bitten hillside, and the
old college friend of his who read the service over him--a shabby,
black, bent old man with a snivelling cold.

"I remember walking back to the empty house, through the place that
had once been a village and was now patched and tinkered by the
jerry builders into the ugly likeness of a town. Every way the
roads ran out at last into the desecrated fields and ended in
rubble heaps and rank wet weeds. I remember myself as a gaunt black
figure, going along the slippery, shiny pavement, and the strange
sense of detachment I felt from the squalid respectability, the
sordid commercialism of the place.

"I did not feel a bit sorry for my father. He seemed to me to be
the victim of his own foolish sentimentality. The current cant
required my attendance at his funeral, but it was really not my
affair.

"But going along the High Street, my old life came back to me
for a space, for I met the girl I had known ten years since.
Our eyes met.

"Something moved me to turn back and talk to her. She was a very
ordinary person.

"It was all like a dream, that visit to the old places. I did not
feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world
into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put
it down to the general inanity of things. Re-entering my room
seemed like the recovery of reality. There were the things I knew
and loved. There stood the apparatus, the experiments arranged and
waiting. And now there was scarcely a difficulty left, beyond the
planning of details.

"I will tell you, Kemp, sooner or later, all the complicated
processes. We need not go into that now. For the most part, saving
certain gaps I chose to remember, they are written in cypher in
those books that tramp has hidden. We must hunt him down. We must
get those books again. But the essential phase was to place the
transparent object whose refractive index was to be lowered between
two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration, of which I
will tell you more fully later. No, not those Roentgen vibrations--I
don't know that these others of mine have been described. Yet
they are obvious enough. I needed two little dynamos, and these I
worked with a cheap gas engine. My first experiment was with a bit
of white wool fabric. It was the strangest thing in the world to
see it in the flicker of the flashes soft and white, and then to
watch it fade like a wreath of smoke and vanish.

"I could scarcely believe I had done it. I put my hand into the
emptiness, and there was the thing as solid as ever. I felt it
awkwardly, and threw it on the floor. I had a little trouble
finding it again.

"And then came a curious experience. I heard a miaow behind me, and
turning, saw a lean white cat, very dirty, on the cistern cover
outside the window. A thought came into my head. 'Everything ready
for you,' I said, and went to the window, opened it, and called
softly. She came in, purring--the poor beast was starving--and
I gave her some milk. All my food was in a cupboard in the
corner of the room. After that she went smelling round the room,
evidently with the idea of making herself at home. The invisible
rag upset her a bit; you should have seen her spit at it! But I
made her comfortable on the pillow of my truckle-bed. And I gave
her butter to get her to wash."

"And you processed her?"

"I processed her. But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp! And
the process failed."

"Failed!"

"In two particulars. These were the claws and the pigment stuff,
what is it?--at the back of the eye in a cat. You know?"

"_Tapetum_."

"Yes, the _tapetum_. It didn't go. After I'd given the stuff to
bleach the blood and done certain other things to her, I gave the
beast opium, and put her and the pillow she was sleeping on, on the
apparatus. And after all the rest had faded and vanished, there
remained two little ghosts of her eyes."

"Odd!"

"I can't explain it. She was bandaged and clamped, of course--so
I had her safe; but she woke while she was still misty, and miaowed
dismally, and someone came knocking. It was an old woman from
downstairs, who suspected me of vivisecting--a drink-sodden old
creature, with only a white cat to care for in all the world. I
whipped out some chloroform, applied it, and answered the door.
'Did I hear a cat?' she asked. 'My cat?' 'Not here,' said I, very
politely. She was a little doubtful and tried to peer past me into
the room; strange enough to her no doubt--bare walls, uncurtained
windows, truckle-bed, with the gas engine vibrating, and the
seethe of the radiant points, and that faint ghastly stinging of
chloroform in the air. She had to be satisfied at last and went
away again."

"How long did it take?" asked Kemp.

"Three or four hours--the cat. The bones and sinews and the fat
were the last to go, and the tips of the coloured hairs. And, as I
say, the back part of the eye, tough, iridescent stuff it is,
wouldn't go at all.

"It was night outside long before the business was over, and nothing
was to be seen but the dim eyes and the claws. I stopped the gas
engine, felt for and stroked the beast, which was still insensible,
and then, being tired, left it sleeping on the invisible pillow and
went to bed. I found it hard to sleep. I lay awake thinking weak
aimless stuff, going over the experiment over and over again, or
dreaming feverishly of things growing misty and vanishing about me,
until everything, the ground I stood on, vanished, and so I came to
that sickly falling nightmare one gets. About two, the cat began
miaowing about the room. I tried to hush it by talking to it, and
then I decided to turn it out. I remember the shock I had when
striking a light--there were just the round eyes shining green--and
nothing round them. I would have given it milk, but I hadn't any. It
wouldn't be quiet, it just sat down and miaowed at the door. I tried
to catch it, with an idea of putting it out of the window, but it
wouldn't be caught, it vanished. Then it began miaowing in different
parts of the room. At last I opened the window and made a bustle. I
suppose it went out at last. I never saw any more of it.

"Then--Heaven knows why--I fell thinking of my father's funeral
again, and the dismal windy hillside, until the day had come. I
found sleeping was hopeless, and, locking my door after me,
wandered out into the morning streets."

"You don't mean to say there's an invisible cat at large!" said
Kemp.

"If it hasn't been killed," said the Invisible Man. "Why not?"

"Why not?" said Kemp. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

"It's very probably been killed," said the Invisible Man. "It
was alive four days after, I know, and down a grating in Great
Titchfield Street; because I saw a crowd round the place, trying
to see whence the miaowing came."

He was silent for the best part of a minute. Then he resumed
abruptly:

"I remember that morning before the change very vividly. I must have
gone up Great Portland Street. I remember the barracks in Albany
Street, and the horse soldiers coming out, and at last I found the
summit of Primrose Hill. It was a sunny day in January--one of those
sunny, frosty days that came before the snow this year. My weary
brain tried to formulate the position, to plot out a plan of action.

"I was surprised to find, now that my prize was within my grasp, how
inconclusive its attainment seemed. As a matter of fact I was worked
out; the intense stress of nearly four years' continuous work left
me incapable of any strength of feeling. I was apathetic, and I
tried in vain to recover the enthusiasm of my first inquiries,
the passion of discovery that had enabled me to compass even the
downfall of my father's grey hairs. Nothing seemed to matter. I saw
pretty clearly this was a transient mood, due to overwork and want
of sleep, and that either by drugs or rest it would be possible to
recover my energies.

"All I could think clearly was that the thing had to be carried
through; the fixed idea still ruled me. And soon, for the money I
had was almost exhausted. I looked about me at the hillside, with
children playing and girls watching them, and tried to think of all
the fantastic advantages an invisible man would have in the world.
After a time I crawled home, took some food and a strong dose of
strychnine, and went to sleep in my clothes on my unmade bed.
Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of
a man."

"It's the devil," said Kemp. "It's the palaeolithic in a bottle."

"I awoke vastly invigorated and rather irritable. You know?"

"I know the stuff."

"And there was someone rapping at the door. It was my landlord
with threats and inquiries, an old Polish Jew in a long grey coat
and greasy slippers. I had been tormenting a cat in the night, he
was sure--the old woman's tongue had been busy. He insisted on
knowing all about it. The laws in this country against vivisection
were very severe--he might be liable. I denied the cat. Then the
vibration of the little gas engine could be felt all over the
house, he said. That was true, certainly. He edged round me into
the room, peering about over his German-silver spectacles, and a
sudden dread came into my mind that he might carry away something
of my secret. I tried to keep between him and the concentrating
apparatus I had arranged, and that only made him more curious. What
was I doing? Why was I always alone and secretive? Was it legal?
Was it dangerous? I paid nothing but the usual rent. His had always
been a most respectable house--in a disreputable neighbourhood.
Suddenly my temper gave way. I told him to get out. He began to
protest, to jabber of his right of entry. In a moment I had him by
the collar; something ripped, and he went spinning out into his own
passage. I slammed and locked the door and sat down quivering.

"He made a fuss outside, which I disregarded, and after a time he
went away.

"But this brought matters to a crisis. I did not know what he
would do, nor even what he had the power to do. To move to fresh
apartments would have meant delay; altogether I had barely twenty
pounds left in the world, for the most part in a bank--and I
could not afford that. Vanish! It was irresistible. Then there
would be an inquiry, the sacking of my room.

"At the thought of the possibility of my work being exposed or
interrupted at its very climax, I became very angry and active. I
hurried out with my three books of notes, my cheque-book--the tramp
has them now--and directed them from the nearest Post Office to a
house of call for letters and parcels in Great Portland Street. I
tried to go out noiselessly. Coming in, I found my landlord going
quietly upstairs; he had heard the door close, I suppose. You would
have laughed to see him jump aside on the landing as I came tearing
after him. He glared at me as I went by him, and I made the house
quiver with the slamming of my door. I heard him come shuffling up
to my floor, hesitate, and go down. I set to work upon my
preparations forthwith.

"It was all done that evening and night. While I was still sitting
under the sickly, drowsy influence of the drugs that decolourise
blood, there came a repeated knocking at the door. It ceased,
footsteps went away and returned, and the knocking was resumed.
There was an attempt to push something under the door--a blue
paper. Then in a fit of irritation I rose and went and flung the
door wide open. 'Now then?' said I.

"It was my landlord, with a notice of ejectment or something. He
held it out to me, saw something odd about my hands, I expect, and
lifted his eyes to my face.

"For a moment he gaped. Then he gave a sort of inarticulate cry,
dropped candle and writ together, and went blundering down the dark
passage to the stairs. I shut the door, locked it, and went to the
looking-glass. Then I understood his terror.... My face was
white--like white stone.

"But it was all horrible. I had not expected the suffering. A night
of racking anguish, sickness and fainting. I set my teeth, though my
skin was presently afire, all my body afire; but I lay there like
grim death. I understood now how it was the cat had howled until I
chloroformed it. Lucky it was I lived alone and untended in my room.
There were times when I sobbed and groaned and talked. But I stuck
to it.... I became insensible and woke languid in the darkness.

"The pain had passed. I thought I was killing myself and I did not
care. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of
seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them
grow clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could
see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my
transparent eyelids. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries
faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last. I gritted
my teeth and stayed there to the end. At last only the dead tips of
the fingernails remained, pallid and white, and the brown stain of
some acid upon my fingers.

"I struggled up. At first I was as incapable as a swathed
infant--stepping with limbs I could not see. I was weak and very
hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing
save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of
my eyes, fainter than mist. I had to hang on to the table and press
my forehead against the glass.

"It was only by a frantic effort of will that I dragged myself back
to the apparatus and completed the process.

"I slept during the forenoon, pulling the sheet over my eyes to shut
out the light, and about midday I was awakened again by a knocking.
My strength had returned. I sat up and listened and heard a
whispering. I sprang to my feet and as noiselessly as possible began
to detach the connections of my apparatus, and to distribute it
about the room, so as to destroy the suggestions of its arrangement.
Presently the knocking was renewed and voices called, first my
landlord's, and then two others. To gain time I answered them. The
invisible rag and pillow came to hand and I opened the window and
pitched them out on to the cistern cover. As the window opened, a
heavy crash came at the door. Someone had charged it with the idea
of smashing the lock. But the stout bolts I had screwed up some
days before stopped him. That startled me, made me angry. I began
to tremble and do things hurriedly.

"I tossed together some loose paper, straw, packing paper and so
forth, in the middle of the room, and turned on the gas. Heavy
blows began to rain upon the door. I could not find the matches. I
beat my hands on the wall with rage. I turned down the gas again,
stepped out of the window on the cistern cover, very softly lowered
the sash, and sat down, secure and invisible, but quivering with
anger, to watch events. They split a panel, I saw, and in another
moment they had broken away the staples of the bolts and stood in
the open doorway. It was the landlord and his two step-sons, sturdy
young men of three or four and twenty. Behind them fluttered the
old hag of a woman from downstairs.

"You may imagine their astonishment to find the room empty. One of
the younger men rushed to the window at once, flung it up and stared
out. His staring eyes and thick-lipped bearded face came a foot
from my face. I was half minded to hit his silly countenance, but I
arrested my doubled fist. He stared right through me. So did the
others as they joined him. The old man went and peered under the
bed, and then they all made a rush for the cupboard. They had to
argue about it at length in Yiddish and Cockney English. They
concluded I had not answered them, that their imagination had
deceived them. A feeling of extraordinary elation took the place
of my anger as I sat outside the window and watched these four
people--for the old lady came in, glancing suspiciously about her
like a cat, trying to understand the riddle of my behaviour.

"The old man, so far as I could understand his _patois_, agreed with
the old lady that I was a vivisectionist. The sons protested in
garbled English that I was an electrician, and appealed to the
dynamos and radiators. They were all nervous about my arrival,
although I found subsequently that they had bolted the front door.
The old lady peered into the cupboard and under the bed, and one of
the young men pushed up the register and stared up the chimney. One
of my fellow lodgers, a coster-monger who shared the opposite room
with a butcher, appeared on the landing, and he was called in and
told incoherent things.

"It occurred to me that the radiators, if they fell into the hands
of some acute well-educated person, would give me away too much,
and watching my opportunity, I came into the room and tilted one of
the little dynamos off its fellow on which it was standing, and
smashed both apparatus. Then, while they were trying to explain the
smash, I dodged out of the room and went softly downstairs.

"I went into one of the sitting-rooms and waited until they came
down, still speculating and argumentative, all a little disappointed
at finding no 'horrors,' and all a little puzzled how they stood
legally towards me. Then I slipped up again with a box of matches,
fired my heap of paper and rubbish, put the chairs and bedding
thereby, led the gas to the affair, by means of an india-rubber
tube, and waving a farewell to the room left it for the last time."

"You fired the house!" exclaimed Kemp.

"Fired the house. It was the only way to cover my trail--and no
doubt it was insured. I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly
and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just
beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility
gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and
wonderful things I had now impunity to do."

Back at Kemp's house, Kemp offers his chair to Griffin, mostly to get Griffin away from the window. Griffin continues his story: after his dad died, he moved into a cheap boardinghouse in London to continue his research. He did go to his dad's funeral , but he didn't really feel sorry for him. You may gather this if you're a very careful reader and read the following sentence: "I did not feel a bit sorry for my father" . In fact, except for his research, the whole world seemed distant and unimportant to Griffin. His research, Griffin adds, is all written down in a code in his books, except for a few parts that he chose to remember himself. Just in case the code wasn't enough. Back at the boardinghouse, Griffin continued his experiments. He made some wool invisible and then he made a neighborhood cat invisible. That cat experiment took a few tries, and the cat didn't seem to like it so much. Unfortunately for Griffin, the cat's noise attracted an old woman who lived in the boardinghouse and who had always suspected Griffin of vivisecting animals. , for the story of a scientist who is doing research on animals.) Eventually, though, Griffin got annoyed by the cat and let it out. Then, as usually happens when one gives away his only friend, Griffin had a little breakdown. He started to have nightmares and was no longer interested in his work. But he took some strychnine and felt energized. He is really a terrible role model. At one point, the old woman and the landlord came up to make sure that Griffin wasn't experimenting on animals. They got into a little bit of a fight, which ended with Griffin pushing the landlord out of his room. Realizing that this would lead to trouble, Griffin decided to disappear. He sent his books off by mail to some place where he could pick them up. Then he started the process of turning himself invisible, which really hurt. During the process, the landlord tried to give Griffin an eviction notice, but Griffin already looked so strange that the landlord kind of ran away. At some point, Griffin became almost totally invisible, except that "an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist" . The landlord and his stepsons tried to break in, which angered Griffin so much that he planned to burn down the house. But he couldn't find any matches. Darn. When the landlord and company finally broke down the door, they couldn't find Griffin. Turns out he was hiding outside the window, "quivering with anger" . Griffin destroyed his equipment, found some matches, and set his room on fire because "t was the only way to cover my trail--and no doubt it was insured" . Now that he was invisible, he started thinking about "the wild and wonderful" things he could do as an Invisible Man . Shmoop has some ideas, too, but we'll let you use your imagination.


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."

Griffin continues his story: While he was still pretty excited to be invisible, he realized that invisibility had some drawbacks. For one thing, he couldn't see his feet, which made walking down stairs a little strange. The fact that people couldn't see him had advantages and disadvantages. Advantage: he got to pretend that a man's bucket was crazy. Disadvantage: a man running to catch the bucket jammed his fingers into Griffin's neck. Also, Griffin was always cold and started to get the sniffles. Oh, and a dog could totally find him. Wandering around London, Griffin came across a Salvation Army march, which drew a crowd. Crowds are dangerous to Griffin, since he can't slip through them - people can feel him even if they don't see him. He tried to get out of the way, but he had stepped in some mud and left muddy footprints. Some street urchins started to follow him, which is never good. Then it started to snow and Griffin got tired of his adventure. Of course, he couldn't go home since he had set his apartment on fire . Back in Kemp's study, listening to this story, Kemp looks out the window. What is he looking for? What does he see? Kemp asks Griffin to go on.


IN THE EMPORIUM

"So last January, with the beginning of a snowstorm in the air
about me--and if it settled on me it would betray me!--weary,
cold, painful, inexpressibly wretched, and still but half convinced
of my invisible quality, I began this new life to which I am
committed. I had no refuge, no appliances, no human being in the
world in whom I could confide. To have told my secret would have
given me away--made a mere show and rarity of me. Nevertheless, I
was half-minded to accost some passer-by and throw myself upon his
mercy. But I knew too clearly the terror and brutal cruelty my
advances would evoke. I made no plans in the street. My sole object
was to get shelter from the snow, to get myself covered and warm;
then I might hope to plan. But even to me, an Invisible Man, the
rows of London houses stood latched, barred, and bolted
impregnably.

"Only one thing could I see clearly before me--the cold exposure
and misery of the snowstorm and the night.

"And then I had a brilliant idea. I turned down one of the roads
leading from Gower Street to Tottenham Court Road, and found myself
outside Omniums, the big establishment where everything is to be
bought--you know the place: meat, grocery, linen, furniture,
clothing, oil paintings even--a huge meandering collection of shops
rather than a shop. I had thought I should find the doors open, but
they were closed, and as I stood in the wide entrance a carriage
stopped outside, and a man in uniform--you know the kind of
personage with 'Omnium' on his cap--flung open the door. I contrived
to enter, and walking down the shop--it was a department where they
were selling ribbons and gloves and stockings and that kind of
thing--came to a more spacious region devoted to picnic baskets and
wicker furniture.

"I did not feel safe there, however; people were going to and fro,
and I prowled restlessly about until I came upon a huge section in
an upper floor containing multitudes of bedsteads, and over these I
clambered, and found a resting-place at last among a huge pile of
folded flock mattresses. The place was already lit up and agreeably
warm, and I decided to remain where I was, keeping a cautious
eye on the two or three sets of shopmen and customers who were
meandering through the place, until closing time came. Then I
should be able, I thought, to rob the place for food and clothing,
and disguised, prowl through it and examine its resources, perhaps
sleep on some of the bedding. That seemed an acceptable plan.
My idea was to procure clothing to make myself a muffled but
acceptable figure, to get money, and then to recover my books
and parcels where they awaited me, take a lodging somewhere and
elaborate plans for the complete realisation of the advantages my
invisibility gave me (as I still imagined) over my fellow-men.

"Closing time arrived quickly enough. It could not have been more
than an hour after I took up my position on the mattresses before I
noticed the blinds of the windows being drawn, and customers being
marched doorward. And then a number of brisk young men began with
remarkable alacrity to tidy up the goods that remained disturbed. I
left my lair as the crowds diminished, and prowled cautiously out
into the less desolate parts of the shop. I was really surprised to
observe how rapidly the young men and women whipped away the goods
displayed for sale during the day. All the boxes of goods, the
hanging fabrics, the festoons of lace, the boxes of sweets in the
grocery section, the displays of this and that, were being whipped
down, folded up, slapped into tidy receptacles, and everything that
could not be taken down and put away had sheets of some coarse
stuff like sacking flung over them. Finally all the chairs were
turned up on to the counters, leaving the floor clear. Directly
each of these young people had done, he or she made promptly for
the door with such an expression of animation as I have rarely
observed in a shop assistant before. Then came a lot of youngsters
scattering sawdust and carrying pails and brooms. I had to dodge
to get out of the way, and as it was, my ankle got stung with the
sawdust. For some time, wandering through the swathed and darkened
departments, I could hear the brooms at work. And at last a good
hour or more after the shop had been closed, came a noise of
locking doors. Silence came upon the place, and I found myself
wandering through the vast and intricate shops, galleries, show-rooms
of the place, alone. It was very still; in one place I remember
passing near one of the Tottenham Court Road entrances and listening
to the tapping of boot-heels of the passers-by.

"My first visit was to the place where I had seen stockings and
gloves for sale. It was dark, and I had the devil of a hunt after
matches, which I found at last in the drawer of the little cash
desk. Then I had to get a candle. I had to tear down wrappings and
ransack a number of boxes and drawers, but at last I managed to turn
out what I sought; the box label called them lambswool pants, and
lambswool vests. Then socks, a thick comforter, and then I went to
the clothing place and got trousers, a lounge jacket, an overcoat
and a slouch hat--a clerical sort of hat with the brim turned down.
I began to feel a human being again, and my next thought was food.

"Upstairs was a refreshment department, and there I got cold meat.
There was coffee still in the urn, and I lit the gas and warmed it
up again, and altogether I did not do badly. Afterwards, prowling
through the place in search of blankets--I had to put up at last
with a heap of down quilts--I came upon a grocery section with
a lot of chocolate and candied fruits, more than was good for me
indeed--and some white burgundy. And near that was a toy department,
and I had a brilliant idea. I found some artificial noses--dummy
noses, you know, and I thought of dark spectacles. But Omniums had
no optical department. My nose had been a difficulty indeed--I had
thought of paint. But the discovery set my mind running on wigs and
masks and the like. Finally I went to sleep in a heap of down
quilts, very warm and comfortable.

"My last thoughts before sleeping were the most agreeable I had had
since the change. I was in a state of physical serenity, and that
was reflected in my mind. I thought that I should be able to slip
out unobserved in the morning with my clothes upon me, muffling my
face with a white wrapper I had taken, purchase, with the money I
had taken, spectacles and so forth, and so complete my disguise. I
lapsed into disorderly dreams of all the fantastic things that had
happened during the last few days. I saw the ugly little Jew of a
landlord vociferating in his rooms; I saw his two sons marvelling,
and the wrinkled old woman's gnarled face as she asked for her cat.
I experienced again the strange sensation of seeing the cloth
disappear, and so I came round to the windy hillside and the
sniffing old clergyman mumbling 'Earth to earth, ashes to ashes,
dust to dust,' at my father's open grave.

"'You also,' said a voice, and suddenly I was being forced towards
the grave. I struggled, shouted, appealed to the mourners, but they
continued stonily following the service; the old clergyman, too,
never faltered droning and sniffing through the ritual. I realised
I was invisible and inaudible, that overwhelming forces had their
grip on me. I struggled in vain, I was forced over the brink, the
coffin rang hollow as I fell upon it, and the gravel came flying
after me in spadefuls. Nobody heeded me, nobody was aware of me. I
made convulsive struggles and awoke.

"The pale London dawn had come, the place was full of a chilly grey
light that filtered round the edges of the window blinds. I sat up,
and for a time I could not think where this ample apartment, with
its counters, its piles of rolled stuff, its heap of quilts and
cushions, its iron pillars, might be. Then, as recollection came
back to me, I heard voices in conversation.

"Then far down the place, in the brighter light of some department
which had already raised its blinds, I saw two men approaching. I
scrambled to my feet, looking about me for some way of escape, and
even as I did so the sound of my movement made them aware of me. I
suppose they saw merely a figure moving quietly and quickly away.
'Who's that?' cried one, and 'Stop there!' shouted the other. I
dashed around a corner and came full tilt--a faceless figure,
mind you!--on a lanky lad of fifteen. He yelled and I bowled him
over, rushed past him, turned another corner, and by a happy
inspiration threw myself behind a counter. In another moment feet
went running past and I heard voices shouting, 'All hands to the
doors!' asking what was 'up,' and giving one another advice how to
catch me.

"Lying on the ground, I felt scared out of my wits. But--odd as
it may seem--it did not occur to me at the moment to take off my
clothes as I should have done. I had made up my mind, I suppose, to
get away in them, and that ruled me. And then down the vista of the
counters came a bawling of 'Here he is!'

"I sprang to my feet, whipped a chair off the counter, and sent it
whirling at the fool who had shouted, turned, came into another
round a corner, sent him spinning, and rushed up the stairs. He
kept his footing, gave a view hallo, and came up the staircase hot
after me. Up the staircase were piled a multitude of those
bright-coloured pot things--what are they?"

"Art pots," suggested Kemp.

"That's it! Art pots. Well, I turned at the top step and swung
round, plucked one out of a pile and smashed it on his silly head
as he came at me. The whole pile of pots went headlong, and I heard
shouting and footsteps running from all parts. I made a mad rush
for the refreshment place, and there was a man in white like a man
cook, who took up the chase. I made one last desperate turn and
found myself among lamps and ironmongery. I went behind the counter
of this, and waited for my cook, and as he bolted in at the head of
the chase, I doubled him up with a lamp. Down he went, and I
crouched down behind the counter and began whipping off my clothes
as fast as I could. Coat, jacket, trousers, shoes were all right,
but a lambswool vest fits a man like a skin. I heard more men
coming, my cook was lying quiet on the other side of the counter,
stunned or scared speechless, and I had to make another dash for
it, like a rabbit hunted out of a wood-pile.

"'This way, policeman!' I heard someone shouting. I found myself in
my bedstead storeroom again, and at the end of a wilderness of
wardrobes. I rushed among them, went flat, got rid of my vest after
infinite wriggling, and stood a free man again, panting and scared,
as the policeman and three of the shopmen came round the corner.
They made a rush for the vest and pants, and collared the trousers.
'He's dropping his plunder,' said one of the young men. 'He _must_
be somewhere here.'

"But they did not find me all the same.

"I stood watching them hunt for me for a time, and cursing my
ill-luck in losing the clothes. Then I went into the refreshment-room,
drank a little milk I found there, and sat down by the fire to
consider my position.

"In a little while two assistants came in and began to talk over
the business very excitedly and like the fools they were. I heard a
magnified account of my depredations, and other speculations as to
my whereabouts. Then I fell to scheming again. The insurmountable
difficulty of the place, especially now it was alarmed, was to get
any plunder out of it. I went down into the warehouse to see if
there was any chance of packing and addressing a parcel, but I
could not understand the system of checking. About eleven o'clock,
the snow having thawed as it fell, and the day being finer and a
little warmer than the previous one, I decided that the Emporium
was hopeless, and went out again, exasperated at my want of
success, with only the vaguest plans of action in my mind."

Griffin continues his story. This is one invisible man who needs to get some stuff off his chest, apparently. With a January snowstorm blowing in to London, Griffin needed to find a place to stay. He couldn't get into a house, so he decided to do the next best thing: go shopping. Seriously, he went to a giant department store named Omniums. Griffin waited until the place closed, then he started searching around for things he could use. He stole some food and clothes. Over by toys, he saw some fake noses, which started him thinking about wigs and other costume stuff that could help him pretend to be normal. Like Halloween all year. He slept in the department store, living out every child's dream. Unfortunately, it wasn't as fun as you'd think: he had nightmares about being forced into his father's grave and buried because no one could see him. Griffin woke up when the workers came back the next morning, and he almost got caught. The workers chased him around the store ; but once again, Griffin took off his clothes to become invisible. Since he couldn't steal clothes, Griffin had to leave the store with nothing - the sort of sad experience we all can empathize with.


IN DRURY LANE

"But you begin now to realise," said the Invisible Man, "the full
disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter--no covering--to
get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a
strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill
myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely
visible again."

"I never thought of that," said Kemp.

"Nor had I. And the snow had warned me of other dangers. I could not
go abroad in snow--it would settle on me and expose me. Rain, too,
would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man--a
bubble. And fog--I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog,
a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went
abroad--in the London air--I gathered dirt about my ankles, floating
smuts and dust upon my skin. I did not know how long it would be
before I should become visible from that cause also. But I saw
clearly it could not be for long.

"Not in London at any rate.

"I went into the slums towards Great Portland Street, and found
myself at the end of the street in which I had lodged. I did not
go that way, because of the crowd halfway down it opposite to the
still smoking ruins of the house I had fired. My most immediate
problem was to get clothing. What to do with my face puzzled me.
Then I saw in one of those little miscellaneous shops--news,
sweets, toys, stationery, belated Christmas tomfoolery, and so
forth--an array of masks and noses. I realised that problem was
solved. In a flash I saw my course. I turned about, no longer
aimless, and went--circuitously in order to avoid the busy ways,
towards the back streets north of the Strand; for I remembered,
though not very distinctly where, that some theatrical costumiers
had shops in that district.

"The day was cold, with a nipping wind down the northward running
streets. I walked fast to avoid being overtaken. Every crossing was
a danger, every passenger a thing to watch alertly. One man as I
was about to pass him at the top of Bedford Street, turned upon
me abruptly and came into me, sending me into the road and almost
under the wheel of a passing hansom. The verdict of the cab-rank
was that he had had some sort of stroke. I was so unnerved by this
encounter that I went into Covent Garden Market and sat down for
some time in a quiet corner by a stall of violets, panting and
trembling. I found I had caught a fresh cold, and had to turn out
after a time lest my sneezes should attract attention.

"At last I reached the object of my quest, a dirty, fly-blown little
shop in a by-way near Drury Lane, with a window full of tinsel
robes, sham jewels, wigs, slippers, dominoes and theatrical
photographs. The shop was old-fashioned and low and dark, and the
house rose above it for four storeys, dark and dismal. I peered
through the window and, seeing no one within, entered. The opening
of the door set a clanking bell ringing. I left it open, and walked
round a bare costume stand, into a corner behind a cheval glass. For
a minute or so no one came. Then I heard heavy feet striding across
a room, and a man appeared down the shop.

"My plans were now perfectly definite. I proposed to make my way
into the house, secrete myself upstairs, watch my opportunity, and
when everything was quiet, rummage out a wig, mask, spectacles, and
costume, and go into the world, perhaps a grotesque but still a
credible figure. And incidentally of course I could rob the house
of any available money.

"The man who had just entered the shop was a short, slight,
hunched, beetle-browed man, with long arms and very short bandy
legs. Apparently I had interrupted a meal. He stared about the shop
with an expression of expectation. This gave way to surprise, and
then to anger, as he saw the shop empty. 'Damn the boys!' he said.
He went to stare up and down the street. He came in again in a
minute, kicked the door to with his foot spitefully, and went
muttering back to the house door.

"I came forward to follow him, and at the noise of my movement he
stopped dead. I did so too, startled by his quickness of ear. He
slammed the house door in my face.

"I stood hesitating. Suddenly I heard his quick footsteps returning,
and the door reopened. He stood looking about the shop like one who
was still not satisfied. Then, murmuring to himself, he examined the
back of the counter and peered behind some fixtures. Then he stood
doubtful. He had left the house door open and I slipped into the
inner room.

"It was a queer little room, poorly furnished and with a number of
big masks in the corner. On the table was his belated breakfast,
and it was a confoundedly exasperating thing for me, Kemp, to have
to sniff his coffee and stand watching while he came in and resumed
his meal. And his table manners were irritating. Three doors opened
into the little room, one going upstairs and one down, but they
were all shut. I could not get out of the room while he was there;
I could scarcely move because of his alertness, and there was a
draught down my back. Twice I strangled a sneeze just in time.

"The spectacular quality of my sensations was curious and novel, but
for all that I was heartily tired and angry long before he had done
his eating. But at last he made an end and putting his beggarly
crockery on the black tin tray upon which he had had his teapot, and
gathering all the crumbs up on the mustard stained cloth, he took
the whole lot of things after him. His burden prevented his shutting
the door behind him--as he would have done; I never saw such a man
for shutting doors--and I followed him into a very dirty underground
kitchen and scullery. I had the pleasure of seeing him begin to wash
up, and then, finding no good in keeping down there, and the brick
floor being cold on my feet, I returned upstairs and sat in his
chair by the fire. It was burning low, and scarcely thinking, I put
on a little coal. The noise of this brought him up at once, and
he stood aglare. He peered about the room and was within an ace
of touching me. Even after that examination, he scarcely seemed
satisfied. He stopped in the doorway and took a final inspection
before he went down.

"I waited in the little parlour for an age, and at last he came up
and opened the upstairs door. I just managed to get by him.

"On the staircase he stopped suddenly, so that I very nearly
blundered into him. He stood looking back right into my face and
listening. 'I could have sworn,' he said. His long hairy hand
pulled at his lower lip. His eye went up and down the staircase.
Then he grunted and went on up again.

"His hand was on the handle of a door, and then he stopped again
with the same puzzled anger on his face. He was becoming aware of
the faint sounds of my movements about him. The man must have had
diabolically acute hearing. He suddenly flashed into rage. 'If
there's anyone in this house--' he cried with an oath, and left the
threat unfinished. He put his hand in his pocket, failed to find
what he wanted, and rushing past me went blundering noisily and
pugnaciously downstairs. But I did not follow him. I sat on the
head of the staircase until his return.

"Presently he came up again, still muttering. He opened the door of
the room, and before I could enter, slammed it in my face.

"I resolved to explore the house, and spent some time in doing so
as noiselessly as possible. The house was very old and tumble-down,
damp so that the paper in the attics was peeling from the walls, and
rat infested. Some of the door handles were stiff and I was afraid
to turn them. Several rooms I did inspect were unfurnished, and
others were littered with theatrical lumber, bought second-hand, I
judged, from its appearance. In one room next to his I found a lot
of old clothes. I began routing among these, and in my eagerness
forgot again the evident sharpness of his ears. I heard a stealthy
footstep and, looking up just in time, saw him peering in at the
tumbled heap and holding an old-fashioned revolver in his hand.
I stood perfectly still while he stared about open-mouthed and
suspicious. 'It must have been her,' he said slowly. 'Damn her!'

"He shut the door quietly, and immediately I heard the key turn in
the lock. Then his footsteps retreated. I realised abruptly that I
was locked in. For a minute I did not know what to do. I walked
from door to window and back, and stood perplexed. A gust of anger
came upon me. But I decided to inspect the clothes before I did
anything further, and my first attempt brought down a pile from an
upper shelf. This brought him back, more sinister than ever. That
time he actually touched me, jumped back with amazement and stood
astonished in the middle of the room.

"Presently he calmed a little. 'Rats,' he said in an undertone,
fingers on lips. He was evidently a little scared. I edged quietly
out of the room, but a plank creaked. Then the infernal little brute
started going all over the house, revolver in hand and locking door
after door and pocketing the keys. When I realised what he was up to
I had a fit of rage--I could hardly control myself sufficiently to
watch my opportunity. By this time I knew he was alone in the house,
and so I made no more ado, but knocked him on the head."

"Knocked him on the head?" exclaimed Kemp.

"Yes--stunned him--as he was going downstairs. Hit him from
behind with a stool that stood on the landing. He went downstairs
like a bag of old boots."

"But--I say! The common conventions of humanity--"

"Are all very well for common people. But the point was, Kemp, that
I had to get out of that house in a disguise without his seeing me.
I couldn't think of any other way of doing it. And then I gagged
him with a Louis Quatorze vest and tied him up in a sheet."

"Tied him up in a sheet!"

"Made a sort of bag of it. It was rather a good idea to keep the
idiot scared and quiet, and a devilish hard thing to get out
of--head away from the string. My dear Kemp, it's no good your
sitting glaring as though I was a murderer. It had to be done. He
had his revolver. If once he saw me he would be able to describe
me--"

"But still," said Kemp, "in England--to-day. And the man was in
his own house, and you were--well, robbing."

"Robbing! Confound it! You'll call me a thief next! Surely, Kemp,
you're not fool enough to dance on the old strings. Can't you see
my position?"

"And his too," said Kemp.

The Invisible Man stood up sharply. "What do you mean to say?"

Kemp's face grew a trifle hard. He was about to speak and checked
himself. "I suppose, after all," he said with a sudden change of
manner, "the thing had to be done. You were in a fix. But still--"

"Of course I was in a fix--an infernal fix. And he made me wild
too--hunting me about the house, fooling about with his revolver,
locking and unlocking doors. He was simply exasperating. You don't
blame me, do you? You don't blame me?"

"I never blame anyone," said Kemp. "It's quite out of fashion. What
did you do next?"

"I was hungry. Downstairs I found a loaf and some rank cheese--more
than sufficient to satisfy my hunger. I took some brandy and
water, and then went up past my impromptu bag--he was lying quite
still--to the room containing the old clothes. This looked out
upon the street, two lace curtains brown with dirt guarding the
window. I went and peered out through their interstices. Outside
the day was bright--by contrast with the brown shadows of the
dismal house in which I found myself, dazzlingly bright. A brisk
traffic was going by, fruit carts, a hansom, a four-wheeler with a
pile of boxes, a fishmonger's cart. I turned with spots of colour
swimming before my eyes to the shadowy fixtures behind me. My
excitement was giving place to a clear apprehension of my position
again. The room was full of a faint scent of benzoline, used, I
suppose, in cleaning the garments.

"I began a systematic search of the place. I should judge the
hunchback had been alone in the house for some time. He was a
curious person. Everything that could possibly be of service to me
I collected in the clothes storeroom, and then I made a deliberate
selection. I found a handbag I thought a suitable possession, and
some powder, rouge, and sticking-plaster.

"I had thought of painting and powdering my face and all that
there was to show of me, in order to render myself visible, but
the disadvantage of this lay in the fact that I should require
turpentine and other appliances and a considerable amount of time
before I could vanish again. Finally I chose a mask of the better
type, slightly grotesque but not more so than many human beings,
dark glasses, greyish whiskers, and a wig. I could find no
underclothing, but that I could buy subsequently, and for the time I
swathed myself in calico dominoes and some white cashmere scarfs. I
could find no socks, but the hunchback's boots were rather a loose
fit and sufficed. In a desk in the shop were three sovereigns and
about thirty shillings' worth of silver, and in a locked cupboard I
burst in the inner room were eight pounds in gold. I could go forth
into the world again, equipped.

"Then came a curious hesitation. Was my appearance really
credible? I tried myself with a little bedroom looking-glass,
inspecting myself from every point of view to discover any
forgotten chink, but it all seemed sound. I was grotesque to the
theatrical pitch, a stage miser, but I was certainly not a physical
impossibility. Gathering confidence, I took my looking-glass down
into the shop, pulled down the shop blinds, and surveyed myself
from every point of view with the help of the cheval glass in the
corner.

"I spent some minutes screwing up my courage and then unlocked the
shop door and marched out into the street, leaving the little man
to get out of his sheet again when he liked. In five minutes a
dozen turnings intervened between me and the costumier's shop. No
one appeared to notice me very pointedly. My last difficulty seemed
overcome."

He stopped again.

"And you troubled no more about the hunchback?" said Kemp.

"No," said the Invisible Man. "Nor have I heard what became of him.
I suppose he untied himself or kicked himself out. The knots were
pretty tight."

He became silent and went to the window and stared out.

"What happened when you went out into the Strand?"

"Oh!--disillusionment again. I thought my troubles were over.
Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose,
everything--save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I
did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had
merely to fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold
me. I could take my money where I found it. I decided to treat
myself to a sumptuous feast, and then put up at a good hotel, and
accumulate a new outfit of property. I felt amazingly confident;
it's not particularly pleasant recalling that I was an ass. I went
into a place and was already ordering lunch, when it occurred to me
that I could not eat unless I exposed my invisible face. I finished
ordering the lunch, told the man I should be back in ten minutes,
and went out exasperated. I don't know if you have ever been
disappointed in your appetite."

"Not quite so badly," said Kemp, "but I can imagine it."

"I could have smashed the silly devils. At last, faint with the
desire for tasteful food, I went into another place and demanded a
private room. 'I am disfigured,' I said. 'Badly.' They looked at
me curiously, but of course it was not their affair--and so at
last I got my lunch. It was not particularly well served, but it
sufficed; and when I had had it, I sat over a cigar, trying to plan
my line of action. And outside a snowstorm was beginning.

"The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realised what a
helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was--in a cold and dirty
climate and a crowded civilised city. Before I made this mad
experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages. That afternoon
it seemed all disappointment. I went over the heads of the things
a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible
to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they
are got. Ambition--what is the good of pride of place when you
cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of woman when
her name must needs be Delilah? I have no taste for politics, for
the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport. What was
I to do? And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a swathed
and bandaged caricature of a man!"

He paused, and his attitude suggested a roving glance at the
window.

"But how did you get to Iping?" said Kemp, anxious to keep his
guest busy talking.

"I went there to work. I had one hope. It was a half idea! I have
it still. It is a full blown idea now. A way of getting back! Of
restoring what I have done. When I choose. When I have done all I
mean to do invisibly. And that is what I chiefly want to talk to
you about now."

"You went straight to Iping?"

"Yes. I had simply to get my three volumes of memoranda and my
cheque-book, my luggage and underclothing, order a quantity of
chemicals to work out this idea of mine--I will show you the
calculations as soon as I get my books--and then I started. Jove!
I remember the snowstorm now, and the accursed bother it was to
keep the snow from damping my pasteboard nose."

"At the end," said Kemp, "the day before yesterday, when they found
you out, you rather--to judge by the papers--"

"I did. Rather. Did I kill that fool of a constable?"

"No," said Kemp. "He's expected to recover."

"That's his luck, then. I clean lost my temper, the fools! Why
couldn't they leave me alone? And that grocer lout?"

"There are no deaths expected," said Kemp.

"I don't know about that tramp of mine," said the Invisible Man,
with an unpleasant laugh.

"By Heaven, Kemp, you don't know what rage _is_! ... To have worked
for years, to have planned and plotted, and then to get some
fumbling purblind idiot messing across your course! ... Every
conceivable sort of silly creature that has ever been created has
been sent to cross me.

"If I have much more of it, I shall go wild--I shall start
mowing 'em.

"As it is, they've made things a thousand times more difficult."

"No doubt it's exasperating," said Kemp, drily.

Griffin continues his story. Oh, when will it end? Griffin was getting more and more upset about the whole invisible situation. He made his way to a costume shop to find wigs, noses, and other stuff, so that he might appear "a grotesque but still a credible figure" . When Griffin found his way to a store, the very alert shop owner almost caught him. The shop owner had a revolver, and he kept locking doors behind him. This made Griffin angry, which seems to be his only emotion. So he knocked out the shop owner and tied him up. Kemp interrupts Griffin's story to tell him that he isn't following "he common conventions of humanity" when he knocks people out in their own homes . Griffin points out, though, that he's not a common person. Back to the story: Griffin went ahead and stole money and clothes. At least now people will be able to see him. Griffin stops his story for a minute in order to give Kemp a long speech about how being invisible isn't so great. For one thing, he can't eat in public because he can't reveal his mouth. Kemp wants to keep him talking, so he asks what happened after he got all dressed up. Griffin continues his story: He got his books and ordered the equipment he would need. All he wanted was to figure out how to reverse the invisibility treatment. Unfortunately, those gossipy people of Iping interfered with this plan. He asks, "Why couldn't they leave me alone?" . Now that everyone has gotten in his way - especially Marvel - Griffin is even angrier than before and plans on killing people. We would be worried about that, but when was the last time one of Griffin's plans went well?


THE PLAN THAT FAILED

"But now," said Kemp, with a side glance out of the window, "what
are we to do?"

He moved nearer his guest as he spoke in such a manner as to
prevent the possibility of a sudden glimpse of the three men who
were advancing up the hill road--with an intolerable slowness, as
it seemed to Kemp.

"What were you planning to do when you were heading for Port
Burdock? _Had_ you any plan?"

"I was going to clear out of the country. But I have altered that
plan rather since seeing you. I thought it would be wise, now the
weather is hot and invisibility possible, to make for the South.
Especially as my secret was known, and everyone would be on the
lookout for a masked and muffled man. You have a line of steamers
from here to France. My idea was to get aboard one and run the
risks of the passage. Thence I could go by train into Spain, or else
get to Algiers. It would not be difficult. There a man might always
be invisible--and yet live. And do things. I was using that tramp
as a money box and luggage carrier, until I decided how to get my
books and things sent over to meet me."

"That's clear."

"And then the filthy brute must needs try and rob me! He _has_ hidden
my books, Kemp. Hidden my books! If I can lay my hands on him!"

"Best plan to get the books out of him first."

"But where is he? Do you know?"

"He's in the town police station, locked up, by his own request, in
the strongest cell in the place."

"Cur!" said the Invisible Man.

"But that hangs up your plans a little."

"We must get those books; those books are vital."

"Certainly," said Kemp, a little nervously, wondering if he heard
footsteps outside. "Certainly we must get those books. But that
won't be difficult, if he doesn't know they're for you."

"No," said the Invisible Man, and thought.

Kemp tried to think of something to keep the talk going, but the
Invisible Man resumed of his own accord.

"Blundering into your house, Kemp," he said, "changes all my plans.
For you are a man that can understand. In spite of all that has
happened, in spite of this publicity, of the loss of my books, of
what I have suffered, there still remain great possibilities, huge
possibilities--"

"You have told no one I am here?" he asked abruptly.

Kemp hesitated. "That was implied," he said.

"No one?" insisted Griffin.

"Not a soul."

"Ah! Now--" The Invisible Man stood up, and sticking his arms akimbo
began to pace the study.

"I made a mistake, Kemp, a huge mistake, in carrying this thing
through alone. I have wasted strength, time, opportunities. Alone--it
is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little,
to hurt a little, and there is the end.

"What I want, Kemp, is a goal-keeper, a helper, and a hiding-place,
an arrangement whereby I can sleep and eat and rest in peace, and
unsuspected. I must have a confederate. With a confederate, with
food and rest--a thousand things are possible.

"Hitherto I have gone on vague lines. We have to consider all that
invisibility means, all that it does not mean. It means little
advantage for eavesdropping and so forth--one makes sounds. It's
of little help--a little help perhaps--in housebreaking and so
forth. Once you've caught me you could easily imprison me. But on
the other hand I am hard to catch. This invisibility, in fact, is
only good in two cases: It's useful in getting away, it's useful in
approaching. It's particularly useful, therefore, in killing. I can
walk round a man, whatever weapon he has, choose my point, strike
as I like. Dodge as I like. Escape as I like."

Kemp's hand went to his moustache. Was that a movement
downstairs?

"And it is killing we must do, Kemp."

"It is killing we must do," repeated Kemp. "I'm listening to your
plan, Griffin, but I'm not agreeing, mind. _Why_ killing?"

"Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The point is, they
know there is an Invisible Man--as well as we know there is an
Invisible Man. And that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a
Reign of Terror. Yes; no doubt it's startling. But I mean it. A
Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and
terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that
in a thousand ways--scraps of paper thrust under doors would
suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill
all who would defend them."

"Humph!" said Kemp, no longer listening to Griffin but to the sound
of his front door opening and closing.

"It seems to me, Griffin," he said, to cover his wandering
attention, "that your confederate would be in a difficult
position."

"No one would know he was a confederate," said the Invisible Man,
eagerly. And then suddenly, "Hush! What's that downstairs?"

"Nothing," said Kemp, and suddenly began to speak loud and fast.
"I don't agree to this, Griffin," he said. "Understand me, I don't
agree to this. Why dream of playing a game against the race? How
can you hope to gain happiness? Don't be a lone wolf. Publish
your results; take the world--take the nation at least--into your
confidence. Think what you might do with a million helpers--"

The Invisible Man interrupted--arm extended. "There are
footsteps coming upstairs," he said in a low voice.

"Nonsense," said Kemp.

"Let me see," said the Invisible Man, and advanced, arm extended,
to the door.

And then things happened very swiftly. Kemp hesitated for a second
and then moved to intercept him. The Invisible Man started and stood
still. "Traitor!" cried the Voice, and suddenly the dressing-gown
opened, and sitting down the Unseen began to disrobe. Kemp made
three swift steps to the door, and forthwith the Invisible Man--his
legs had vanished--sprang to his feet with a shout. Kemp flung the
door open.

As it opened, there came a sound of hurrying feet downstairs and
voices.

With a quick movement Kemp thrust the Invisible Man back, sprang
aside, and slammed the door. The key was outside and ready. In
another moment Griffin would have been alone in the belvedere
study, a prisoner. Save for one little thing. The key had been
slipped in hastily that morning. As Kemp slammed the door it fell
noisily upon the carpet.

Kemp's face became white. He tried to grip the door handle with
both hands. For a moment he stood lugging. Then the door gave six
inches. But he got it closed again. The second time it was jerked a
foot wide, and the dressing-gown came wedging itself into the
opening. His throat was gripped by invisible fingers, and he left
his hold on the handle to defend himself. He was forced back,
tripped and pitched heavily into the corner of the landing. The
empty dressing-gown was flung on the top of him.

Halfway up the staircase was Colonel Adye, the recipient of Kemp's
letter, the chief of the Burdock police. He was staring aghast at
the sudden appearance of Kemp, followed by the extraordinary sight
of clothing tossing empty in the air. He saw Kemp felled, and
struggling to his feet. He saw him rush forward, and go down again,
felled like an ox.

Then suddenly he was struck violently. By nothing! A vast weight,
it seemed, leapt upon him, and he was hurled headlong down the
staircase, with a grip on his throat and a knee in his groin. An
invisible foot trod on his back, a ghostly patter passed downstairs,
he heard the two police officers in the hall shout and run, and the
front door of the house slammed violently.

He rolled over and sat up staring. He saw, staggering down the
staircase, Kemp, dusty and disheveled, one side of his face white
from a blow, his lip bleeding, and a pink dressing-gown and some
underclothing held in his arms.

"My God!" cried Kemp, "the game's up! He's gone!"

Kemp sees some people coming up the hill to his house, so he tries to keep Griffin talking. Griffin says he had planned to go someplace warm, like South America, where he wouldn't have to wear clothes . But since he met Kemp, he's changed his plans. Griffin now realizes how little one person can do on his own. Invisibility is especially useful for killing people, so Griffin plans to establish a new Reign of Terror - with Kemp's help, of course. First, though, he needs to get his books back from Marvel, who is locked up at the jail for his own safety. Suddenly, Griffin hears some people sneaking up in the house, and he realizes that Kemp has betrayed him. Sad and angry, Griffin takes off his clothes. Kemp tries to capture Griffin with the help of the three men, including Colonel Adye, the police captain who got Kemp's letter in Chapter 18. Griffin pushes past them and escapes.


THE HUNTING OF THE INVISIBLE MAN

For a space Kemp was too inarticulate to make Adye understand the
swift things that had just happened. They stood on the landing,
Kemp speaking swiftly, the grotesque swathings of Griffin still on
his arm. But presently Adye began to grasp something of the
situation.

"He is mad," said Kemp; "inhuman. He is pure selfishness. He thinks
of nothing but his own advantage, his own safety. I have listened
to such a story this morning of brutal self-seeking.... He has wounded
men. He will kill them unless we can prevent him. He will create a
panic. Nothing can stop him. He is going out now--furious!"

"He must be caught," said Adye. "That is certain."

"But how?" cried Kemp, and suddenly became full of ideas. "You must
begin at once. You must set every available man to work; you must
prevent his leaving this district. Once he gets away, he may go
through the countryside as he wills, killing and maiming. He dreams
of a reign of terror! A reign of terror, I tell you. You must set a
watch on trains and roads and shipping. The garrison must help. You
must wire for help. The only thing that may keep him here is the
thought of recovering some books of notes he counts of value. I will
tell you of that! There is a man in your police station--Marvel."

"I know," said Adye, "I know. Those books--yes. But the tramp...."

"Says he hasn't them. But he thinks the tramp has. And you must
prevent him from eating or sleeping; day and night the country must
be astir for him. Food must be locked up and secured, all food, so
that he will have to break his way to it. The houses everywhere must
be barred against him. Heaven send us cold nights and rain! The
whole country-side must begin hunting and keep hunting. I tell you,
Adye, he is a danger, a disaster; unless he is pinned and secured,
it is frightful to think of the things that may happen."

"What else can we do?" said Adye. "I must go down at once and begin
organising. But why not come? Yes--you come too! Come, and we
must hold a sort of council of war--get Hopps to help--and the
railway managers. By Jove! it's urgent. Come along--tell me as we
go. What else is there we can do? Put that stuff down."

In another moment Adye was leading the way downstairs. They found
the front door open and the policemen standing outside staring at
empty air. "He's got away, sir," said one.

"We must go to the central station at once," said Adye. "One of you
go on down and get a cab to come up and meet us--quickly. And
now, Kemp, what else?"

"Dogs," said Kemp. "Get dogs. They don't see him, but they wind
him. Get dogs."

"Good," said Adye. "It's not generally known, but the prison
officials over at Halstead know a man with bloodhounds. Dogs. What
else?"

"Bear in mind," said Kemp, "his food shows. After eating, his food
shows until it is assimilated. So that he has to hide after eating.
You must keep on beating. Every thicket, every quiet corner. And
put all weapons--all implements that might be weapons, away. He
can't carry such things for long. And what he can snatch up and
strike men with must be hidden away."

"Good again," said Adye. "We shall have him yet!"

"And on the roads," said Kemp, and hesitated.

"Yes?" said Adye.

"Powdered glass," said Kemp. "It's cruel, I know. But think of what
he may do!"

Adye drew the air in sharply between his teeth. "It's
unsportsmanlike. I don't know. But I'll have powdered glass got
ready. If he goes too far...."

"The man's become inhuman, I tell you," said Kemp. "I am as sure he
will establish a reign of terror--so soon as he has got over the
emotions of this escape--as I am sure I am talking to you. Our
only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind.
His blood be upon his own head."

Kemp explains to Adye that they have to take measures against Griffin because he's insane, a person of "pure selfishness" . They have some advantages, though. For one thing, they know that Griffin wants to get to Marvel and his stolen books. Also, Griffin basically told Kemp his life story, so they have all that information. Kemp knows that they can keep him unstable by making sure he doesn't get a moment to eat or sleep. And of course, he knows that they can use dogs against Griffin. Kemp even suggests that they put powdered glass on the roads, but Adye objects that "t's unsportsmanlike" . At least someone's worried about that. Kemp counters that Griffin is inhuman, that "e has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head" . Man, we wish we could think of a joke to put here, but this is dark.