"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 holding the lock. By not looking down, however, I managed to walk on the level reasonably 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 play jokes, to surprise people, to pat men on the back, throw people's hats off, and generally enjoy in my extraordinary advantage.
"But hardly had I come into Great Portland Street, however, when I heard a clashing concussion and was hit violently behind, and turning saw a man carrying a basket of soda-water siphons, and looking in amazement at his load. 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 took 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 stupidity, backed against a shop window and prepared to escape from out of the confusion. In a moment I should be trapped by a crowd and inevitably discovered. I pushed by the butcher boy, who luckily did not turn to see the nothingness that pushed him aside, and dodged behind the cab. I hurried straight across the road, which was happily clear, and hardly paying attention to which way I went, in the fright of detection the incident had given, plunged into the afternoon crowds 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 side of the road, the roughness of which I found painful to my feet, and almost immediately the shaft of a cab hit me under the shoulder, reminding me that I was already bruised severely. I staggered out of the way of the cab, avoided a pram by a convulsive movement, and found myself behind the cab. A happy thought saved me, and as this drove slowly along I followed immediately behind it, trembling and astonished at my adventure. And not only trembling, but shivering. It was a bright day in January and I was stark naked and the thin layer of mud that covered the road was freezing. Foolish as it seems to me now, I had not taken into consideration that, transparent or not, I was still affected by 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 beginnings of a cold, and with the bruises 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 felt 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 trouble I was in.
"We went slowly past Mudie's, and there a tall woman with five or six yellow-labelled books hailed my cab, and I jumped out just in time to escape her, narrowly missing a railway van in my escape. I went off up the road to Bloomsbury Square, intending to head north past the Museum and so get into the quiet district. I was not excessively cold, 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 ran towards 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 sound 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 in front. Such a crowd, singing in the roadway and filling the pavement, I could not hope to penetrate, and fearing 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, and stood there waiting for the crowd to pass. 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, playing 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 children stopping at the railings next to me. 'Look at those,' said one. 'Look at what?' said the other. 'Why - those footmarks - bare. Like what you make 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 pàinted steps. The passing people elbowed and pushed them, but their confounded intelligence was cught. 'Thud, thud, thud, When, thud, shall we see, thud, his face, thud, thud.' 'A barefoot man has gone up those steps, ' said one. 'And he hasn't come down again. And his foot was bleeding.'
"The thick of the crowd had already passed. 'Looky there, Ted,' said 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 strange,' said the elder. 'Very strange! It's just like the ghost of a foot, isn't it?' He hesitated and advanced with outstretched hand. A man stopped to see what he was doing, and then a girl. In another moment he would have touched me. Then I saw what to do. I made a step, the boy jumped back with an exclamation, and with a rapid movement I swung myself over into the doorway 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 on 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 some one. 'Feet! Look! Feet running!' Everybody in the road, except my three pursuers, was following the Salvation Army, and this not only impeded me but them. There was an eddy of surprise and interrogation. At the cost of knocking 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 crowd would have been after me.
"Twice I turned corners, thrice I crossed the road and came back on my tracks, and then, as my feet grew hot and dry, the damp impressions began to disappear. 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 Travistock 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. My back had now become very stiff and sore, my throat was 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 ran awy 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 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."