“You may imagine their astonishment to find
the room empty. One of the younger men rushed
to the window at once, flung it up and stared out.
His staring eyes and thick-lipped bearded face came
a foot from my face. I was half minded to hit
his silly countenance, but I arrested my doubled fist.
He stared right through me. So did the others
as they joined him. The old man went and peered
under the bed, and then they all made a rush for the
cupboard. They had to argue about it at length
in Yiddish and Cockney English. They concluded
I had not answered them, that their imagination had
deceived them. A feeling of extraordinary elation
took the place of my anger as I sat outside the window
and watched these four people—for the old
lady came in, glancing suspiciously about her like
a cat, trying to understand the riddle of my behaviour.
“The old man, so far as I could understand his
patois, agreed with the old lady that I was
a vivisectionist. The sons protested in garbled
English that I was an electrician, and appealed to
the dynamos and radiators. They were all nervous
about my arrival, although I found subsequently that
they had bolted the front door. The old lady
peered into the cupboard and under the bed, and one
of the young men pushed up the register and stared
up the chimney. One of my fellow lodgers, a coster-monger
who shared the opposite room with a butcher, appeared
on the landing, and he was called in and told incoherent
things.
“It occurred to me that the radiators, if they
fell into the hands of some acute well-educated person,
would give me away too much, and watching my opportunity,
I came into the room and tilted one of the little
dynamos off its fellow on which it was standing, and
smashed both apparatus. Then, while they were
trying to explain the smash, I dodged out of the room
and went softly downstairs.
“I went into one of the sitting-rooms and waited
until they came down, still speculating and argumentative,
all a little disappointed at finding no ‘horrors,’
and all a little puzzled how they stood legally towards
me. Then I slipped up again with a box of matches,
fired my heap of paper and rubbish, put the chairs
and bedding thereby, led the gas to the affair, by
means of an india-rubber tube, and waving a farewell
to the room left it for the last time.”
“You fired the house!” exclaimed Kemp.
“Fired the house. It was the only way to
cover my trail—and no doubt it was insured.
I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and
went out into the street. I was invisible, and
I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary
advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was
already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful
things I had now impunity to do.”
CHAPTER XXI
IN OXFORD STREET
“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 gripping the bolt. By not looking
down, however, I managed to walk on the level passably
well.
