“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
gutter, the roughness of which I found painful to my feet, and
forthwith the shaft of a crawling hansom dug me forcibly under the
shoulder blade, reminding me that I was already bruised severely. I
staggered out of the way of the cab, avoided a perambulator by a
convulsive movement, and found myself behind the hansom. A happy
thought saved me, and as this drove slowly along I followed in its
immediate wake, trembling and astonished at the turn of my adventure.
And not only trembling, but shivering. It was a bright day in January
and I was stark naked and the thin slime of mud that covered the road
was freezing. Foolish as it seems to me now, I had not reckoned that,
transparent or not, I was still amenable to 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 first
intimations of a cold, and with the bruises in the small 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
sallied forth 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 scrape I was in.
“We crawled past Mudie’s, and there a tall woman with five or six
yellow-labelled books hailed my cab, and I sprang out just in time to
escape her, shaving a railway van narrowly in my flight. I made off up
the roadway to Bloomsbury Square, intending to strike north past the
Museum and so get into the quiet district. I was now cruelly chilled,
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 incontinently made for 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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