The Invisible Man (12 page)

He dropped the paper, and his eye went seeking. "Ah!" he said, and
caught up the
St. James' Gazette
, lying folded up as it arrived.
"Now we shall get at the truth," said Dr. Kemp. He rent the paper
open; a couple of columns confronted him. "An Entire Village in
Sussex goes Mad" was the heading.

"Good Heavens!" said Kemp, reading eagerly an incredulous account
of the events in Iping, of the previous afternoon, that have
already been described. Over the leaf the report in the morning
paper had been reprinted.

He re-read it. "Ran through the streets striking right and left.
Jaffers insensible. Mr. Huxter in great pain—still unable to
describe what he saw. Painful humiliation—vicar. Woman ill with
terror! Windows smashed. This extraordinary story probably a
fabrication. Too good not to print—
cum grano
!"

He dropped the paper and stared blankly in front of him. "Probably
a fabrication!"

He caught up the paper again, and re-read the whole business. "But
when does the Tramp come in? Why the deuce was he chasing a tramp?"

He sat down abruptly on the surgical bench. "He's not only
invisible," he said, "but he's mad! Homicidal!"

When dawn came to mingle its pallor with the lamp-light and cigar
smoke of the dining-room, Kemp was still pacing up and down, trying
to grasp the incredible.

He was altogether too excited to sleep. His servants, descending
sleepily, discovered him, and were inclined to think that
over-study had worked this ill on him. He gave them extraordinary
but quite explicit instructions to lay breakfast for two in the
belvedere study—and then to confine themselves to the basement
and ground-floor. Then he continued to pace the dining-room until
the morning's paper came. That had much to say and little to tell,
beyond the confirmation of the evening before, and a very badly
written account of another remarkable tale from Port Burdock. This
gave Kemp the essence of the happenings at the "Jolly Cricketers,"
and the name of Marvel. "He has made me keep with him twenty-four
hours," Marvel testified. Certain minor facts were added to the
Iping story, notably the cutting of the village telegraph-wire.
But there was nothing to throw light on the connexion between
the Invisible Man and the Tramp; for Mr. Marvel had supplied no
information about the three books, or the money with which he was
lined. The incredulous tone had vanished and a shoal of reporters
and inquirers were already at work elaborating the matter.

Kemp read every scrap of the report and sent his housemaid out to
get everyone of the morning papers she could. These also he
devoured.

"He is invisible!" he said. "And it reads like rage growing to
mania! The things he may do! The things he may do! And he's
upstairs free as the air. What on earth ought I to do?"

"For instance, would it be a breach of faith if—? No."

He went to a little untidy desk in the corner, and began a note. He
tore this up half written, and wrote another. He read it over and
considered it. Then he took an envelope and addressed it to "Colonel
Adye, Port Burdock."

The Invisible Man awoke even as Kemp was doing this. He awoke in an
evil temper, and Kemp, alert for every sound, heard his pattering
feet rush suddenly across the bedroom overhead. Then a chair was
flung over and the wash-hand stand tumbler smashed. Kemp hurried
upstairs and rapped eagerly.

"What's the matter?" asked Kemp, when the Invisible Man admitted him.

"Nothing," was the answer.

"But, confound it! The smash?"

"Fit of temper," said the Invisible Man. "Forgot this arm; and it's
sore."

"You're rather liable to that sort of thing."

"I am."

Kemp walked across the room and picked up the fragments of broken
glass. "All the facts are out about you," said Kemp, standing up
with the glass in his hand; "all that happened in Iping, and down
the hill. The world has become aware of its invisible citizen. But
no one knows you are here."

The Invisible Man swore.

"The secret's out. I gather it was a secret. I don't know what your
plans are, but of course I'm anxious to help you."

The Invisible Man sat down on the bed.

"There's breakfast upstairs," said Kemp, speaking as easily as
possible, and he was delighted to find his strange guest rose
willingly. Kemp led the way up the narrow staircase to the
belvedere.

"Before we can do anything else," said Kemp, "I must understand a
little more about this invisibility of yours." He had sat down,
after one nervous glance out of the window, with the air of a man
who has talking to do. His doubts of the sanity of the entire
business flashed and vanished again as he looked across to
where Griffin sat at the breakfast-table—a headless, handless
dressing-gown, wiping unseen lips on a miraculously held serviette.

"It's simple enough—and credible enough," said Griffin, putting
the serviette aside and leaning the invisible head on an invisible
hand.

"No doubt, to you, but—" Kemp laughed.

"Well, yes; to me it seemed wonderful at first, no doubt. But now,
great God! ... But we will do great things yet! I came on the stuff
first at Chesilstowe."

"Chesilstowe?"

"I went there after I left London. You know I dropped medicine and
took up physics? No; well, I did.
Light
fascinated me."

"Ah!"

"Optical density! The whole subject is a network of riddles—a
network with solutions glimmering elusively through. And being but
two-and-twenty and full of enthusiasm, I said, 'I will devote my
life to this. This is worth while.' You know what fools we are at
two-and-twenty?"

"Fools then or fools now," said Kemp.

"As though knowing could be any satisfaction to a man!

"But I went to work—like a slave. And I had hardly worked and
thought about the matter six months before light came through one
of the meshes suddenly—blindingly! I found a general principle
of pigments and refraction—a formula, a geometrical expression
involving four dimensions. Fools, common men, even common
mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression
may mean to the student of molecular physics. In the books—the
books that tramp has hidden—there are marvels, miracles! But this
was not a method, it was an idea, that might lead to a method by
which it would be possible, without changing any other property of
matter—except, in some instances colours—to lower the refractive
index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air—so far as all
practical purposes are concerned."

"Phew!" said Kemp. "That's odd! But still I don't see quite ... I
can understand that thereby you could spoil a valuable stone, but
personal invisibility is a far cry."

"Precisely," said Griffin. "But consider, visibility depends on the
action of the visible bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light,
or it reflects or refracts it, or does all these things. If it
neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of
itself be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because
the colour absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the
red part of the light, to you. If it did not absorb any particular
part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining
white box. Silver! A diamond box would neither absorb much of the
light nor reflect much from the general surface, but just here
and there where the surfaces were favourable the light would
be reflected and refracted, so that you would get a brilliant
appearance of flashing reflections and translucencies—a sort of
skeleton of light. A glass box would not be so brilliant, not so
clearly visible, as a diamond box, because there would be less
refraction and reflection. See that? From certain points of view
you would see quite clearly through it. Some kinds of glass would
be more visible than others, a box of flint glass would be brighter
than a box of ordinary window glass. A box of very thin common
glass would be hard to see in a bad light, because it would absorb
hardly any light and refract and reflect very little. And if you
put a sheet of common white glass in water, still more if you
put it in some denser liquid than water, it would vanish almost
altogether, because light passing from water to glass is only
slightly refracted or reflected or indeed affected in any way.
It is almost as invisible as a jet of coal gas or hydrogen is in
air. And for precisely the same reason!"

"Yes," said Kemp, "that is pretty plain sailing."

"And here is another fact you will know to be true. If a sheet of
glass is smashed, Kemp, and beaten into a powder, it becomes much
more visible while it is in the air; it becomes at last an opaque
white powder. This is because the powdering multiplies the surfaces
of the glass at which refraction and reflection occur. In the sheet
of glass there are only two surfaces; in the powder the light is
reflected or refracted by each grain it passes through, and very
little gets right through the powder. But if the white powdered
glass is put into water, it forthwith vanishes. The powdered glass
and water have much the same refractive index; that is, the light
undergoes very little refraction or reflection in passing from one
to the other.

"You make the glass invisible by putting it into a liquid of nearly
the same refractive index; a transparent thing becomes invisible if
it is put in any medium of almost the same refractive index. And if
you will consider only a second, you will see also that the powder
of glass might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index
could be made the same as that of air; for then there would be no
refraction or reflection as the light passed from glass to air."

"Yes, yes," said Kemp. "But a man's not powdered glass!"

"No," said Griffin. "He's more transparent!"

"Nonsense!"

"That from a doctor! How one forgets! Have you already forgotten
your physics, in ten years? Just think of all the things that are
transparent and seem not to be so. Paper, for instance, is made up
of transparent fibres, and it is white and opaque only for the same
reason that a powder of glass is white and opaque. Oil white paper,
fill up the interstices between the particles with oil so that there
is no longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and
it becomes as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but cotton
fibre, linen fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and
bone
, Kemp,
flesh
, Kemp,
hair
, Kemp,
nails
and
nerves
, Kemp, in fact
the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black
pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue.
So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the
most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than
water."

"Great Heavens!" cried Kemp. "Of course, of course! I was thinking
only last night of the sea larvae and all jelly-fish!"

"
Now
you have me! And all that I knew and had in mind a year after
I left London—six years ago. But I kept it to myself. I had to do
my work under frightful disadvantages. Oliver, my professor, was a
scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas—he
was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific
world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I
went on working; I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an
experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to
flash my work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous
at a blow. I took up the question of pigments to fill up certain
gaps. And suddenly, not by design but by accident, I made a
discovery in physiology."

"Yes?"

"You know the red colouring matter of blood; it can be made
white—colourless—and remain with all the functions it has now!"

Kemp gave a cry of incredulous amazement.

The Invisible Man rose and began pacing the little study. "You may
well exclaim. I remember that night. It was late at night—in the
daytime one was bothered with the gaping, silly students—and I
worked then sometimes till dawn. It came suddenly, splendid and
complete in my mind. I was alone; the laboratory was still, with the
tall lights burning brightly and silently. In all my great moments
I have been alone. 'One could make an animal—a tissue—transparent!
One could make it invisible! All except the pigments—I could be
invisible!' I said, suddenly realising what it meant to be an albino
with such knowledge. It was overwhelming. I left the filtering I was
doing, and went and stared out of the great window at the stars.
'I could be invisible!' I repeated.

"To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld,
unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility
might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks
I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck,
hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college,
might suddenly become—this. I ask you, Kemp if
you
... Anyone, I
tell you, would have flung himself upon that research. And I worked
three years, and every mountain of difficulty I toiled over showed
another from its summit. The infinite details! And the exasperation!
A professor, a provincial professor, always prying. 'When are you
going to publish this work of yours?' was his everlasting question.
And the students, the cramped means! Three years I had of it—

"And after three years of secrecy and exasperation, I found that to
complete it was impossible—impossible."

"How?" asked Kemp.

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

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

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