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The Invisible Man
Chapter 20. IN OXFORD STREET
"In going downstairs the first time, I found an unexpected difficulty because I couldn't see my feet".
I stumbled twice, and there was an unusual clumsiness in gripping the bolt.
By not looking down, however, I managed to walk on the level fairly well.
"My mood, I say, was one of great happiness".
I felt like a seeing man might feel, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind.
I wanted to joke, surprise people, clap men on the back, throw their hats away, and enjoy my strange advantage.
"I had hardly come out onto Great Portland Street, and my room was close to the big clothes shop there."
"I heard a loud crash and was hit hard from behind."
Turning, I saw a man carrying a basket of soda-water bottles, looking in amazement at his load.
Although the blow really hurt me, I found something so funny in his surprise that I laughed out loud.
'The devil's in the basket,' I said, and suddenly twisted it out of his hand.
He let go immediately, and I swung the whole weight into the air.
"But a foolish cabman, standing outside a pub, made a sudden rush for it, and his reaching fingers hit me with terrible force under the ear".
I let the whole thing fall with a crash onto the cabman.
Then, with shouts and the noise of feet around me, people coming out of shops, vehicles stopping, I realized what I had done to myself.
Cursing my stupidity, I backed against a shop window and prepared to escape from the confusion.
In a moment I'd be stuck in a crowd and surely discovered.
I pushed past a butcher's boy, who luckily didn't turn to see the nothing that pushed him aside, and dodged behind the cabman's four-wheeled carriage.
I don't know how they settled the matter.
I hurried straight across the road.
It was happily clear, I hardly noticed which way I went.
The incident had given me a fear of discovery.
I plunged into the afternoon crowd 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 stepped on".
I took to the gutter, the roughness of which I found painful to my feet.
Then the shaft of a slow-moving cab hit me hard under the shoulder blade, reminding me that I was already badly bruised.
I staggered out of the way of the cab, avoided a baby carriage by a sudden movement, and found myself behind the cab.
A sudden idea saved me, and as the cab drove on, I followed close behind it, trembling and surprised at my adventure.
And not only trembling, but shivering.
It was a bright day in January, and I was completely naked, and the thin mud that covered the road was freezing.
Foolish as it seems to me now, I hadn't thought that, transparent or not, I was still open to the weather and all its effects.
"Then suddenly a bright idea came into my head".
I ran around and got into the cab.
I was shivering, scared, and sniffing with the first signs of a cold.
With the bruises in my lower back growing more painful, I drove slowly along Oxford Street and past Tottenham Court Road.
My mood was as different from that in which I had set out ten minutes ago as it's possible to imagine.
This invisibility, indeed, was a strange and terrible thing to be living with.
The one thought that filled my mind was, how was I to get out of the trouble I was in.
"We crawled past Mudie's, and there a tall woman with five or six yellow-labeled books called my cab".
I jumped out just in time to escape her, narrowly missing a railway van in my flight.
I ran up the roadway to Bloomsbury Square, planning to go north past the Museum and so get into the quiet area.
I was now terribly cold, and the strangeness of my situation so frightened me that I cried softly as I ran.
At the north corner of the Square, a little white dog ran out of the Pharmaceutical Society's offices, and immediately came for me, nose down.
"I had never realized it before, but the nose is to a dog's mind what the eye is to a seeing man's mind".
Dogs notice the smell of a moving man as men notice his sight.
This dog began barking and jumping, showing, as it seemed to me, only too clearly that it knew I was there.
I crossed Great Russell Street, looked over my shoulder, and went along Montague Street before I saw what I was running toward.
I became aware of a loud sound of music.
Looking along the street, I saw people coming out of Russell Square.
They wore red shirts, and the Salvation Army flag was at the front.
Such a crowd, singing in the roadway and making fun on the pavement, I couldn't hope to get through.
Afraid to go back and get further from home, I ran up the white steps of a house by the museum railings.
I stood there until the crowd had passed.
Happily the dog stopped at the noise of the band too, hesitated, and turned back, running to Bloomsbury Square again.
The band came on, singing loudly.
They sang a hymn about "When shall we see His face?" with unconscious irony.
It seemed a very long time before the crowd's tide washed along the pavement by me.
Thud, thud, thud, came the drum with a shaking sound, and for a moment I didn't notice two boys stopping at the railings near me.
'See them,' said one, 'See what?' said the other.
'Why, those footmarks, Bare, Like what you make in mud.'
"I looked down and saw the boys had stopped and were staring at the muddy footmarks I had left behind me up the newly whitened steps".
The passing people pushed them, but their clever attention was caught.
'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 hasn't come down again, and his foot was bleeding.'
"The thick of the crowd had already passed".
'Look there, Ted,' said the younger of the detectives, with surprise in his voice, and pointed straight to my feet.
I looked down and saw at once the faint suggestion of their shape drawn in splashes of mud.
For a moment I was frozen.
"'Why, that's strange,' said the elder".
'Very strange! It's just like the ghost of a foot, isn't it?' He hesitated and came forward with his hand out.
A man stopped short to see what he was catching, and then a girl.
In another moment he'd have touched me.
Then I saw what to do.
I stepped, the boy cried and jumped back, and I swung into the next house's entrance.
The smaller boy was sharp-eyed enough to follow the movement.
He recovered from his sudden surprise before I reached the pavement.
Then he shouted that the feet had gone over the wall.
"They ran around and saw my new footmarks appear on the lower step and on the pavement".
'What's happening?' asked someone, 'Feet! Look! Feet running!'
"Everyone in the road, except my three followers, was pouring along after the Salvation Army, and this blow not only stopped me but them".
There was a swirl of surprise and questions.
At the cost of knocking over one young man, I got through.
In another moment I was running fast around the circle of Russell Square, with six or seven surprised people following my footmarks.
There was no time for explanation, or else the whole crowd would have been after me.
Twice I turned corners, three times I crossed the road and returned, and as my feet grew dry the wet marks began to disappear.
At last I had a moment to breathe and rubbed my feet clean with my hands, and so got away completely.
The last I saw of the chase was a small group of maybe a dozen people.
They were studying a slowly drying footprint from a puddle in Tavistock Square.
The footprint seemed as alone and impossible to understand as Crusoe's single discovery.
"This running warmed me a little, and I went on with better courage through the maze of less busy roads that run around here".
My back was stiff and sore, my tonsils hurt from the cabman's fingers, and my neck was scratched by his nails.
My feet hurt very much, and I was limping from a small cut on one foot.
I saw in time a blind man coming towards me, and I fled limping, for I feared his sharp senses.
Once or twice accidental collisions happened, and I left people amazed, with strange curses ringing in their ears.
Then something silent and soft touched my face, and across the Square fell a thin veil of slowly falling snowflakes.
I had caught a cold, and no matter what I did, I couldn't avoid an occasional sneeze.
And every dog that came in sight, with its pointing nose and curious sniffing, was a terror to me.
"Men and boys came running, first one then others, shouting as they ran."
"It was a fire, they ran toward my room and, looking back, I saw black smoke above roofs and telephone wires."
"My clothes and all my things were there, except my checkbook and the three books of notes."
"Those three books waited for me in Great Portland Street, and I had burned my boats as the place was on fire."
The Invisible Man paused and thought.
Kemp glanced nervously out of the window.
"Yes?" he said.
"Go on."