“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.”
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 cottage 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; 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 him. 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 house,
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 pavement, and the strange sense of detachment
I felt from the squalid respectability, the sordid
commercialism of the place.
