“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.