Герберт Уэллс - Кентервильское привидение. Человек-невидимка / The Canterville Ghost. The Invisible Man

Kemp stood staring at the headless dressing-gown. “It’s incredible,” he said. “But it’s real! Good-night,” said Kemp.

Suddenly the dressing-gown walked quickly towards him. “No attempts to catch me! Or —” said the dressing-gown.

Kemp’s face changed a little. “I thought you called me a partner,” he said.

Kemp closed the door behind him, and the key was turned upon him. “Am I dreaming? Has the world gone mad, or have I?” Kemp said. “Locked out of my own bedroom!” He shook his head hopelessly, and went downstairs to his consulting-room, and began walking to and fro.

“Invisible!” he said. “Is there such a thing as an invisible animal?… In the sea – yes. Thousands – millions! In the sea there are more things invisible than visible! I never thought of that before… And in the ponds too! All those little things in ponds – bits of colourless jelly!… But in air! No! It can’t be. But after all – why not?”

He took the morning paper, and read the account of a “Strange Story from Iping”.

“He wore a diguise!” said Kemp. “He was hiding! No one knew what had happened to him.”

He took the St. James’s Gazette, opened it, and read: “A Village in Sussex [178]Goes Mad”.

“Lord!” said Kemp, reading an account of the events in Iping. “Ran through the streets striking right and left. Mr. Jaffers and Mr. Huxter in great pain – still unable to describe what they saw. Vicar in terror. Windows smashed.”

He dropped the paper and stared in front of him, then re-read the article.

“He’s not only invisible,” he said, “but he’s mad!”

He was too excited to sleep that night. In the morning he gave the servant instructions to lay breakfast for two in the study. The morning’s paper came with an account of remarkable events in Burdock. Kemp now knew what had happened at the “Jolly Cricketers”. It seems like rage growing to mania! What can he do! And he’s upstairs free as the air. “What ought I to do?” he said.

He wrote a note, and addressed it to “Colonel Adye, Burdock.”

The Invisible Man woke up as Kemp was doing this. He awoke in a bad temper, and Kemp heard a chair knocked over and a glass smashed. Kemp hurried upstairs.

“What’s the matter?” asked Kemp, when the Invisible Man opened the door.

“Nothing,” was the answer.

“But the smash?”

“Fit of temper,” said the Invisible Man.

“You often have them.”

“I do.”

“All the facts are out about you,” said Kemp. “All that happened in Iping and down the hill. The world knows of the invisible man. But no one knows you are here.”

The Invisible Man swore.

“The secret’s out. I don’t know what your plans are, but, of course, I’ll help you. There’s breakfast in the study,” said Kemp, speaking as easily as possible.

Are the following statements true or false? Correct the false ones.

1. Griffin worked at his discovery alone. He had kept it a secret from everybody.

2. Kemp felt hurt when Griffin locked himself in Kemp’s room.

3. Kemp thought that it was possible to make an animal invisible.

4. Dr. Kemp was astonished by newspaper accounts of what Griffin had done in Iping. He thought Griffin was a dangerous criminal.

5. Dr. Kemp didn’t inform anybody that Griffin was in his house.

6. Dr. Kemp was ready to help Griffin.

1. What do you think of Griffin’s behaviour in the chapter? How does it characterize him? What did Kemp think of him?

2. What do you think Dr. Kemp decided to do? Do you think he was right? Why (not)?

“Before we can do anything else,” said Kemp at breakfast, “I must understand a little more about this invisibility of yours.” He had sat down, after one nervous look out of the window.

“It’s simple,” said Griffin.

“No doubt to you, but —” Kemp laughed.

“Well, to me it seemed wonderful at first. You know I dropped medicine and took up physics? Well, I did. Light interested me. I had hardly worked for six months before I found a general principle of pigments and refraction – a formula. It was an idea how to lower the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air, and so to make it invisible.”

“That’s odd!” said Kemp. “But still I don’t quite see…”

“You know quite well that either a body absorbs light or it reflects or refracts it,” said Griffin. “If it neither reflects or refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot be visible. You see a red box, for example, because the colour absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the red part of the light to you. If it did not absorb any part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining white box. A diamond box would neither absorb much of the light nor reflect much from the surface, but just here and there the light would be reflected and refracted, so that you would see some brilliant reflections. A glass box would not be so brilliant, not so clearly visible as a diamond box, because there would be less refraction and reflection. See that? From certain points you would see quite clearly through it. Some kinds of glass would be more visible than others. A box of very thin glass would be hard to see in a bad light, because it would absorb hardly any light and refract and reflect very little. And if you put a sheet of glass in water, it would almost vanish, because light passing from water to glass is only a little refracted or reflected. It is almost as invisible as any gas in air.”

“Yes,” said Kemp, “Any schoolboy nowadays knows all that.”

“And here is another fact any schoolboy will know. If a sheet of glass is smashed and beaten into a powder, it becomes much more visible while it is in the air. This is because light is refracted and reflected from many surfaces of the powdered glass. In the sheet of glass there are only two surfaces, in the powder the light is reflected or refracted by each piece it passes through. But if the powdered glass is put into water it vanishes. The powdered glass and water have much the same refraction index, that is, the light is very little refracted or reflected in passing from one to the other.

“The powdered glass might vanish in air, if its refraction index could be the same as that of air. Then there would be no refraction or reflection as the light passed from glass to air.”

“Yes, yes,” said Kemp. “But a man’s not powdered glass!”

“No,” said Griffin. “He’s more transparent!”

“Nonsense!”

“Have you already forgotten your physics in ten years? Just think of all the things that are transparent and seem not to be so! Paper, for example, is made of transparent fibres, and it is white and visible for the same reason that a powder of glass is white and visible. If you oil white paper, so that there is no longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, it becomes as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but bone, Kemp, flesh, hair, and nerves; in fact, the whole man, except the red of his blood and the dark pigment of hair, are all made of transparent, colourless tissue. Most fibres of a living tissue are no more visible than water.”

“Of course!” cried Kemp. “I was thinking only last night of the sea jelly-fish!”

“Yes! And I knew all that a year after I left London – six years ago. But I kept it to myself. Oliver, my professor, was a thief of ideas! And you know the system of the scientific world. I went on working, I did not publish anything, I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment – a reality. I told no one, because I wanted to become famous. I took up the question of pigments, and suddenly – by accident – I made a discovery in physiology.”