“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.”

CHAPTER XX

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.