The sky was as brass from the glowing East upwards, a stifling heat
radiated from stone and wood and iron--a close, reeking heat that drove
one back from the very mention of food. The five million odd people
that go to make up London, even in the cream of the holiday season,
panted and gasped and prayed for the rain that never came. For the
first three weeks in August the furnace fires of the sun poured down
till every building became a vapour bath with no suspicion of a breeze
to temper the fierceness of it. Even the cheap press had given up
sunstroke statistics. The heat seemed to have wilted up the journalists
and their superlatives.
More or less the drought had lasted since April. Tales came up
from the provinces of stagnant rivers and quick, fell spurts of
zymotic diseases. For a long time past the London water companies
had restricted their supplies. Still, there was no suggestion of
alarm, nothing as yet looked like a water famine. The heat was almost
unbearable but, people said, the wave must break soon, and the
metropolis would breathe again.
Professor Owen Darbyshire shook his head as he looked at the brassy,
star-powdered sky. He crawled homewards towards Harley Street with
his hat in his hand, and his grey frock coat showing a wide expanse
of white shirt below. There was a buzz of electric fans in the hall
of No. 411, a murmur of them overhead. And yet the atmosphere was hot
and heavy. There was one solitary light in the dining-room--a room
all sombre oak and dull red walls as befitted a man of science--and a
visiting card glistened on the table. Darbyshire read the card with a
gesture of annoyance:
James P. Chase
_Morning Telephone_
"I'll have to see him," the Professor groaned, "I'll have to see the
man if only to put him off. Is it possible these confounded pressmen
have got hold of the story already?"
With just a suggestion of anxiety on his strong clean-shaven face,
the professor parted the velvet curtains leading to a kind of
study-laboratory, the sort of place you would expect to find in the
house of a man whose speciality is the fighting of disease in bulk.
Darbyshire was the one man who could grapple with an epidemic, the one
man always sent for.
The constant pestering of newspaper men was no new thing.
Doubtless Chase aforesaid was merely plunging around after
sensations--journalistic curry for the hot weather. Still, the pushing
little American might have stumbled on the truth. Darbyshire took down
his telephone and churned the handle.
"Are you there? Yes, give me 30795, Kensington.... That you, Longdale?
Yes, it's Darbyshire. Step round here at once, will you? Yes, I know
it's hot, and I wouldn't ask you to come if it wasn't a matter of the
last importance."
A small thin voice promised as desired and Darbyshire hung up his
receiver. He then lighted a cigarette, and proceeded to con over some
notes that he had taken from his pocket. These he elaborated in pencil
in a small but marvellously clear handwriting. As he lay back in his
chair he did not look much like the general whose army is absolutely
surrounded, but he was. And that square, lean head held a secret that
would have set London almost mad at a whisper.
Darbyshire laid the sheets down and fell into a reverie. He was roused
presently by the hall bell and Dr Longdale entered. The professor
brightened.
"That's right," he said. "Good to see somebody, Longdale. I've had an
awful day. Verity, if Mr. Chase comes again ask him in here."
"Mr. Chase said he would return in an hour, sir," the large butler
replied. "And I'm to show him in here? Yes, Sir."
But already Darbyshire had hustled his colleague beyond the velvet
curtains. Longdale's small clear figure was quivering with excitement.
His dark eyes fairly blazed behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles.
"Well," he gasped, "I suppose it's come at last?"
"Of course it has," Darbyshire replied, "Sooner or later it was an
absolute certainty. Day by day for a month I have watched the sky and
wondered where the black hand would show. And when these things do
come they strike where you most dread them. Still, in this case, the
Thames----"
"Absolutely pregnant," Longdale exclaimed. "Roughly speaking,
four-fifths of London's water supply comes from the Thames. How many
towns, villages drain into the river before it reaches Sunbury or
thereabouts where most of the water companies have their intake? Why,
scores of them. And for the best part of a month the Thames has been
little better than a ditch stagnating under a brazen sunshine. Will our
people ever learn anything, Darbyshire? Is London and its six million
people always to groan under the tyranny of a monopoly? Say there's an
outbreak of typhoid somewhere up the river between here and Oxford. It
gets a grip before the thing is properly handled, the village system of
drainage is a mere matter of percolation. In eight-and-forty hours the
Thames is one floating tank of deadly poison. And, mind you, this thing
is bound to happen sooner or later."
"It has happened," Darbyshire said quietly, "and in a worse form
than you think. Just listen to this extract from an eastern counties
provincial paper:
"'STRANGE AFFAIR AT ALDENBURGH
"'A day or two ago the barque Santa Anna came ashore at Spur, near
Aldenburgh, and quickly became a total wreck. The vessel was piled
high on the Spur, and, the strong tide acting upon the worn-out hull,
quickly beat it to pieces. The crew of eight men presumably took to
their boats, for nothing has been seen of them since. How the Santa
Anna came to be wrecked on a clear, calm night remains a mystery
for the present. The barque was presumedly inbound for some foreign
port and laden with oranges, thousands of which have been picked up
at Aldenburgh lately. The coastguards presume the barque to be a
Portuguese.'
"Naturally you want to know what this has to do with the Thames,"
Darbyshire observed. "I'm going to tell you. The Santa Anna was
deliberately wrecked for a purpose which you will see later. The crew
for the most part landed not far away and, for reasons of their own,
sank their boat. It isn't far from Aldenburgh to London: in a short
time the Portuguese were in the Metropolis. Two or three of them
remained there, and five of them proceeded to tramp to Ashchurch,
which is on the river, and not far from Oxford. Being short of money,
their idea was to tramp across to Cardiff and get a ship there. Being
equally short of our language, they get out of their way to Ashchurch.
Then three of them are taken ill, and two of them die. The local
practitioner sends for the medical officer of health. The latter gets
frightened and sends for me. I have just got back. Look here."
Darbyshire produced a phial of cloudy fluid, some of which he proceeded
to lay on the glass of a powerful microscope. Longdale fairly staggered
back from the eyepiece. "Bubonic! The water reeks with the bacillus!
I haven't seen it so strongly marked since we were in New Orleans
together. Darbyshire, you don't mean to say that this sample came
from----"
"The Thames? But I do. Ashchurch drains directly into the river. And
for some few days those sailors have been suffering from a gross form
of bubonic fever. Now you see why they ran the Santa Anna ashore and
deserted her. One of the crew died of plague, and the rest abandoned
her. We won't go into the hideous selfishness of it; it was a case of
the devil take the hindmost."
"It's an awful thing," Longdale groaned.
"Frightful," Darbyshire murmured. He was vaguely experimenting with
some white precipitate on a little water taken from the phial. He
placed a small electric battery on the table. "The great bulk of the
London water supply comes from the Thames. Speaking from memory, only
the New River and one other company draw their supply from the Lea.
If the supply were cut off, places like Hoxton and Haggerstone and
Battersea, in fact all the dense centres of population where disease is
held in on the slenderest of threads, would suffer fearfully. And there
is that deadly poison spreading and spreading, hourly drawing nearer to
the metropolis into which presently it will be ladled by the million
gallons. People will wash in it, drink it. Mayfair will take its chance
with Whitechapel."
"At any hazard the supply must be cut off!" Longdale cried.
"And deprive four-fifths of London of water altogether!" Darbyshire
said grimly. "And London grilling like a furnace! No flushing of
sewers, no watering of roads, not even a drop to drink. In two days
London would be a reeking, seething hell--try and picture it, Longdale."
"I have, often," Longdale said gloomily. "Sooner or later it had to
come. Now is your chance, Darbyshire--that process of sterilisation of
yours."
Darbyshire smiled. He moved in the direction of the velvet curtains. He
wanted those notes of his; he wanted to prove a startling new discovery
to his colleague. The notes were there, but they seemed to have been
disturbed. On the floor lay a torn sheet from a notebook with shorthand
cypher; thereon Darbyshire flew to the bell and rang it violently.
"Verity," he exclaimed, "has that infernal--I mean, has Mr Chase been
here again?"
"Well, he have, sir," Verity said slowly, "he come just after Mr
Longdale. So I asked him to wait, which he did, then he come out again
after a bit, saying as you seemed to be busily engaged he would call
again."
"Um! Did he seem to be excited, Verity?"
"Well, he did, sir; white and very shiny about the eyes, and----"
"That will do. Go and call me a hansom, at once," Darbyshire cried,
as he dashed back into the inner room. "Here's a pretty thing; that
confounded American journalist, Chase--you know him--has heard all
we said and has helped himself to my notes; the whole thing will be
blazing in the _Telephone_ to-morrow, and perhaps half-a-dozen papers
besides. Those fellows would wreck the empire for what they call a
'scoop.'"
"Awful!" Longdale groaned. "What are you going to do?"
Derbyshire responded that he was going to convince the editor of the
_Telephone_ that no alarmist article was to appear on the morrow.
He would be back again in an hour and Longdale was to wait. The
situation was not quite so hopeless as it seemed on the face of it.
There was a rattle of wheels outside and Darbyshire plunged hatless
into the night.
"Offices of the _Telephone_," he cried. "A sovereign if I'm there in
twenty minutes."
The cab plunged on headlong. The driver was going to earn that
sovereign or know the reason why. He drove furiously into Trafalgar
Square, a motor car crossed him recklessly, and a moment later
Darbyshire was shot out on to his head from the cab. He lay there with
no interest in mundane things. A languid crowd gathered, a doctor in
evening dress appeared.
"Concussion of the brain," he said in a cool matter of fact tone. "By
Jove, it's Dr. Derbyshire. Here, police; hurry up with the ambulance;
he must be removed to Charing Cross at once."