“This again,” said the Bacteriologist, slipping a glass slide under the
microscope, “is a preparation of the celebrated Bacillus of cholera—the
cholera germ.”
The pale-faced man peered down the microscope. He was evidently not
accustomed to that kind of thing, and held a limp white hand over his
disengaged eye. “I see very little,” he said.
“Touch this screw,” said the Bacteriologist; “perhaps the microscope is
out of focus for you. Eyes vary so much. Just the fraction of a turn
this way or that.”
“Ah! now I see,” said the visitor. “Not so very much to see, after all.
Little streaks and shreds of pink. And yet those little particles, those
mere atomies, might multiply and devastate a city! Wonderful!”
He stood up, and releasing the glass slip from the microscope, held it
in his hand towards the window. “Scarcely visible,” he said,
scrutinising the preparation. He hesitated. “Are these—alive? Are they
dangerous now?”
“Those have been stained and killed,” said the Bacteriologist. “I wish,
for my own part, we could kill and stain every one of them in the
universe.”
“I suppose,” the pale man said with a slight smile, “that you scarcely
care to have such things about you in the living—in the active state?”
“On the contrary, we are obliged to,” said the Bacteriologist. “Here,
for instance—” He walked across the room and took up one of several
sealed tubes. “Here is the living thing. This is a cultivation of the
actual living disease bacteria.” He hesitated. “Bottled cholera, so to
speak.”
A slight gleam of satisfaction appeared momentarily in the face of the
pale man. “It’s a deadly thing to have in your possession,” he said,
devouring the little tube with his eyes. The Bacteriologist watched the
morbid pleasure in his visitor’s expression. This man, who had visited
him that afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend,
interested him from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank
black hair and deep grey eyes, the haggard expression and nervous
manner, the fitful yet keen interest of his visitor were a novel change
from the phlegmatic deliberations of the ordinary scientific worker with
whom the Bacteriologist chiefly associated. It was perhaps natural, with
a hearer evidently so impressionable to the lethal nature of his topic,
to take the most effective aspect of the matter.
He held the tube in his hand thoughtfully. “Yes, here is the pestilence
imprisoned. Only break such a little tube as this into a supply of
drinking-water, say to these minute particles of life that one must
needs stain and examine with the highest powers of the microscope even
to see, and that one can neither smell nor taste—say to them, ‘Go forth,
increase and multiply, and replenish the cisterns,’ and
Death—mysterious, untraceable Death, Death swift and terrible, Death
full of pain and indignity—would be released upon this city, and go
hither and thither seeking his victims. Here he would take the husband
from the wife, here the child from its mother, here the statesman from
his duty, and here the toiler from his trouble. He would follow the
water-mains, creeping along streets, picking out and punishing a house
here and a house there where they did not boil their drinking-water,
creeping into the wells of the mineral-water makers, getting washed into
salad, and lying dormant in ices. He would wait ready to be drunk in the
horse-troughs, and by unwary children in the public fountains. He would
soak into the soil, to reappear in springs and wells at a thousand
unexpected places. Once start him at the water-supply, and before we
could ring him in and catch him again he would have decimated the
metropolis.”
He stopped abruptly. He had been told rhetoric was his weakness.
“But he is quite safe here, you know—quite safe.”
The pale-faced man nodded. His eyes shone. He cleared his throat. “These
Anarchist—rascals,” said he, “are fools, blind fools—to use bombs when
this kind of thing is attainable. I think—”
A gentle rap, a mere light touch of the finger-nails was heard at the
door. The Bacteriologist opened it. “Just a minute, dear,” whispered his
wife.
When he re-entered the laboratory his visitor was looking at his watch.
“I had no idea I had wasted an hour of your time,” he said. “Twelve
minutes to four. I ought to have left here by half-past three. But your
things were really too interesting. No, positively, I cannot stop a
moment longer. I have an engagement at four.”
He passed out of the room reiterating his thanks, and the Bacteriologist
accompanied him to the door, and then returned thoughtfully along the
passage to his laboratory. He was musing on the ethnology of his
visitor. Certainly the man was not a Teutonic type nor a common Latin
one. “A morbid product, anyhow, I am afraid,” said the Bacteriologist to
himself. “How he gloated on those cultivations of disease-germs!” A
disturbing thought struck him. He turned to the bench by the
vapour-bath, and then very quickly to his writing-table. Then he felt
hastily in his pockets, and then rushed to the door. “I may have put it
down on the hall table,” he said.
“Minnie!” he shouted hoarsely in the hall.
“Yes, dear,” came a remote voice.
“Had I anything in my hand when I spoke to you, dear, just now?”
Pause.
“Nothing, dear, because I remember—”
“Blue ruin!” cried the Bacteriologist, and incontinently ran to the
front door and down the steps of his house to the street.
Minnie, hearing the door slam violently, ran in alarm to the window.
Down the street a slender man was getting into a cab. The
Bacteriologist, hatless, and in his carpet slippers, was running and
gesticulating wildly towards this group. One slipper came off, but he
did not wait for it. “He has gone _mad_!” said Minnie; “it’s that horrid
science of his;” and, opening the window, would have called after him.
The slender man, suddenly glancing round, seemed struck with the same
idea of mental disorder. He pointed hastily to the Bacteriologist, said
something to the cabman, the apron of the cab slammed, the whip swished,
the horse’s feet clattered, and in a moment cab, and Bacteriologist
hotly in pursuit, had receded up the vista of the roadway and
disappeared round the corner.
Minnie remained straining out of the window for a minute. Then she drew
her head back into the room again. She was dumbfounded. “Of course he is
eccentric,” she meditated. “But running about London—in the height of
the season, too—in his socks!” A happy thought struck her. She hastily
put her bonnet on, seized his shoes, went into the hall, took down his
hat and light overcoat from the pegs, emerged upon the doorstep, and
hailed a cab that opportunely crawled by. “Drive me up the road and
round Havelock Crescent, and see if we can find a gentleman running
about in a velveteen coat and no hat.”
“Velveteen coat, ma’am, and no ’at. Very good, ma’am.” And the cabman
whipped up at once in the most matter-of-fact way, as if he drove to
this address every day in his life.
Some few minutes later the little group of cabmen and loafers that
collects round the cabmen’s shelter at Haverstock Hill were startled by
the passing of a cab with a ginger-coloured screw of a horse, driven
furiously.
They were silent as it went by, and then as it receded—“That’s ’Arry
’Icks. Wot’s _he_ got?” said the stout gentleman known as Old Tootles.
“He’s a-using his whip, he is, _to_ rights,” said the ostler boy.
“Hullo!” said poor old Tommy Byles; “here’s another bloomin’ loonattic.
Blowed if there ain’t.”
“It’s old George,” said Old Tootles, “and he’s drivin’ a loonattic, _as_
you say. Ain’t he a-clawin’ out of the keb? Wonder if he’s after ’Arry
’Icks?”
The group round the cabmen’s shelter became animated. Chorus: “Go it,
George!” “It’s a race.” “You’ll ketch ’em!” “Whip up!”
“She’s a goer, she is!” said the ostler boy.
“Strike me giddy!” cried Old Tootles. “Here! _I’m_ a-goin’ to begin in a
minute. Here’s another comin’. If all the kebs in Hampstead ain’t gone
mad this morning!”
“It’s a fieldmale this time,” said the ostler boy.
“She’s a followin’ _him_,” said Old Tootles. “Usually the other way
about.”
“What’s she got in her ’and?”
“Looks like a ’igh ’at.”
“What a bloomin’ lark it is! Three to one on old George,” said the
ostler boy. “Nexst!”
Minnie went by in a perfect roar of applause. She did not like it, but
she felt that she was doing her duty, and whirled on down Haverstock
Hill and Camden Town High Street, with her eyes ever intent on the
animated back view of old George, who was driving her vagrant husband so
incomprehensibly away from her.
The man in the foremost cab sat crouched in the corner, his arms tightly
folded, and the little tube that contained such vast possibilities of
destruction gripped in his hand. His mood was a singular mixture of fear
and exultation. Chiefly he was afraid of being caught before he could
accomplish his purpose, but behind this was a vaguer but larger fear of
the awfulness of his crime. But his exultation far exceeded his fear. No
Anarchist before him had ever approached this conception of his.
Ravachol, Vaillant, all those distinguished persons whose fame he had
envied dwindled into insignificance beside him. He had only to make sure
of the water-supply, and break the little tube into a reservoir. How
brilliantly he had planned it, forged the letter of introduction and got
into the laboratory, and how brilliantly he had seized his opportunity!
The world should hear of him at last. All those people who had sneered
at him, neglected him, preferred other people to him, found his company
undesirable, should consider him at last. Death, death, death! They had
always treated him as a man of no importance. All the world had been in
a conspiracy to keep him under. He would teach them yet what it is to
isolate a man. What was this familiar street? Great Saint Andrew’s
Street, of course! How fared the chase? He craned out of the cab. The
Bacteriologist was scarcely fifty yards behind. That was bad. He would
be caught and stopped yet. He felt in his pocket for money, and found
half-a-sovereign. This he thrust up through the trap in the top of the
cab into the man’s face. “More,” he shouted, “if only we get away.”
The money was snatched out of his hand. “Right you are,” said the
cabman, and the trap slammed, and the lash lay along the glistening side
of the horse. The cab swayed, and the Anarchist, half-standing under the
trap, put the hand containing the little glass tube upon the apron to
preserve his balance. He felt the brittle thing crack, and the broken
half of it rang upon the floor of the cab. He fell back into the seat
with a curse, and stared dismally at the two or three drops of moisture
on the apron.
He shuddered.
“Well! I suppose I shall be the first. _Phew!_ Anyhow, I shall be a
Martyr. That’s something. But it is a filthy death, nevertheless. I
wonder if it hurts as much as they say.”
Presently a thought occurred to him—he groped between his feet. A little
drop was still in the broken end of the tube, and he drank that to make
sure. It was better to make sure. At any rate, he would not fail.
Then it dawned upon him that there was no further need to escape the
Bacteriologist. In Wellington Street he told the cabman to stop, and got
out. He slipped on the step, and his head felt queer. It was rapid
stuff, this cholera poison. He waved his cabman out of existence, so to
speak, and stood on the pavement with his arms folded upon his breast
awaiting the arrival of the Bacteriologist. There was something tragic
in his pose. The sense of imminent death gave him a certain dignity. He
greeted his pursuer with a defiant laugh.
“Vive l’Anarchie! You are too late, my friend. I have drunk it. The
cholera is abroad!”
The Bacteriologist from his cab beamed curiously at him through his
spectacles. “You have drunk it! An Anarchist! I see now.” He was about
to say something more, and then checked himself. A smile hung in the
corner of his mouth. He opened the apron of his cab as if to descend, at
which the Anarchist waved him a dramatic farewell and strode off towards
Waterloo Bridge, carefully jostling his infected body against as many
people as possible. The Bacteriologist was so preoccupied with the
vision of him that he scarcely manifested the slightest surprise at the
appearance of Minnie upon the pavement with his hat and shoes and
overcoat. “Very good of you to bring my things,” he said, and remained
lost in contemplation of the receding figure of the Anarchist.
“You had better get in,” he said, still staring. Minnie felt absolutely
convinced now that he was mad, and directed the cabman home on her own
responsibility. “Put on my shoes? Certainly, dear,” said he, as the cab
began to turn, and hid the strutting black figure, now small in the
distance, from his eyes. Then suddenly something grotesque struck him,
and he laughed. Then he remarked, “It is really very serious, though.
“You see, that man came to my house to see me, and he is an Anarchist.
No—don’t faint, or I cannot possibly tell you the rest. And I wanted to
astonish him, not knowing he was an Anarchist, and took up a cultivation
of that new species of Bacterium I was telling you of, that infest, and
I think cause, the blue patches upon various monkeys; and, like a fool,
I said it was Asiatic cholera. And he ran away with it to poison the
water of London, and he certainly might have made things look blue for
this civilised city. And now he has swallowed it. Of course I cannot say
what will happen, but you know it turned that kitten blue, and the three
puppies—in patches, and the sparrow—bright blue. But the bother is I
shall have all the trouble and expense of preparing some more.
“Put on my coat on this hot day! Why? Because we might meet Mrs. Jabber.
My dear, Mrs. Jabber is not a draught. But why should I wear a coat on a
hot day because of Mrs. ——. Oh! _very_ well.”