CHAPTER XXI.
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.”
see you tomorrow for CHAPTER XXII: IN THE EMPORIUM
