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-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."
CHAPTER XXII 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."