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.
"Then I became aware of a blare of music, and looking along the street saw a number of people advancing out of Russell Square, red shirts, and the banner of the Salvation Army to the fore.
Such a crowd, chanting in the roadway and scoffing on the pavement, I could not hope to penetrate, and dreading to go back and farther from home again, and deciding on the spur of the moment, I ran up the white steps of a house facing the museum railings, and stood there until the crowd should have passed.
Happily the dog stopped at the noise of the band too, hesitated, and turned tail, running back to Bloomsbury Square again.
"On came the band, bawling with unconscious irony some hymn about 'When shall we see His face?' and it seemed an interminable time to me before the tide of the crowd washed along the pavement by me.
Thud, thud, thud, came the drum with a vibrating resonance, and for the moment I did not notice two urchins stopping at the railings by me.
'See 'em,' said one.
'See what?' said the other.
'Why—them footmarks—bare.
Like what you makes in mud.'
"I looked down and saw the youngsters had stopped and were gaping at the muddy footmarks I had left behind me up the newly whitened steps.
The passing people elbowed and jostled them, but their confounded intelligence was arrested.
'Thud, thud, thud, when, thud, shall we see, thud, his face, thud, thud.'
'There's a barefoot man gone up them steps, or I don't know nothing,' said one.
'And he ain't never come down again. And his foot was a-bleeding.'
"The thick of the crowd had already passed.
'Looky there, Ted,' quoth the younger of the detectives, with the sharpness of surprise in his voice, and pointed straight to my feet.
I looked down and saw at once the dim suggestion of their outline sketched in splashes of mud.
For a moment I was paralysed.
"'Why, that's rum,' said the elder.
'Dashed rum!
It's just like the ghost of a foot, ain't it?'
He hesitated and advanced with outstretched hand.
A man pulled up short to see what he was catching, and then a girl.
In another moment he would have touched me.
Then I saw what to do.
I made a step, the boy started back with an exclamation, and with a rapid movement I swung myself over into the portico of the next house.
But the smaller boy was sharp-eyed enough to follow the movement, and before I was well down the steps and upon the pavement, he had recovered from his momentary astonishment and was shouting out that the feet had gone over the wall.
"They rushed round and saw my new footmarks flash into being on the lower step and upon the pavement.
'What's up?' asked someone.
'Feet!
Look!
Feet running!'
"Everybody in the road, except my three pursuers, was pouring along after the Salvation Army, and this blow not only impeded me but them.
There was an eddy of surprise and interrogation.
At the cost of bowling over one young fellow I got through, and in another moment I was rushing headlong round the circuit of Russell Square, with six or seven astonished people following my footmarks.
There was no time for explanation, or else the whole host would have been after me.