The Invisible Man

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

He turned round abruptly. "I robbed the old man—robbed my father.

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

Chapter XX 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 College 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, and 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 my father. 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 home 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 side-walk, 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[1] 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, 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 place. I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a desolation. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to the general inanity of life.[2] 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 cipher 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 these Rontgen vibrations; I don't know that these others of mine have been described, yet they are obvious enough. I needed two little dynamos—principally, 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 soft and white in the flicker of the flashes, 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."