The Stolen Bacillus

The Bacteriologist placed a glass slide under his microscope and adjusted the focus. "This," he said, "is a preparation of the bacillus of cholera — the cholera germ."

The pale-faced man leaned forward and peered through the eyepiece. He was clearly not accustomed to such instruments, and held a limp white hand over his other eye. "I see very little," he said.

"Turn this screw," said the Bacteriologist. "Perhaps the microscope is not focused for your eyes. Just a fraction of a turn this way or that."

"Ah! Now I see," said the visitor. "Not much to look at, after all. Little streaks of pink. And yet those tiny particles — those mere atoms — could multiply and devastate a city! Wonderful!"

He stood up, released the glass slide from the microscope, and held it toward the window. "Scarcely visible," he said, examining 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, that 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 picked up one of several sealed tubes. "Here is the living thing.

This is a culture of the actual living disease bacteria." He hesitated. "Bottled cholera, so to speak."

A gleam of satisfaction passed over the pale man's face. "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 come that afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend, interested him because of their contrasting natures. The lank black hair, deep grey eyes, haggard look, and nervous manner — the fitful yet keen interest — were a change from the phlegmatic deliberation of his usual scientific associates. It was perhaps natural, with such an impressionable listener, to present the most striking aspect of the matter.

He held the tube thoughtfully. "Yes, here is the pestilence imprisoned. Only break this little tube into a supply of drinking water — say to these minute particles of life, which you can only see under the highest powers of the microscope and can neither smell nor taste — say to them, 'Go forth, increase and multiply, and fill the cisterns,' and death — mysterious, untraceable death, swift and terrible, full of pain and indignity — would be released upon this city, seeking its victims. Here it would take the husband from the wife, here the child from its mother, here the statesman from his duty, here the toiler from his trouble. It would follow the water mains, creeping along streets, punishing one house here and another there where they didn't boil their drinking water, getting into the wells of mineral water makers, washed into salads, lying dormant in ice.

It would wait in horse troughs and public fountains, ready to be drunk by unwary children. It would seep into the soil and reappear in springs and wells at a thousand unexpected places. Once started in the water supply, before we could contain it, it would decimate the metropolis."

He stopped abruptly. He had been told that rhetoric was his weakness.

"But it is quite safe here, you know — quite safe."

The pale-faced man nodded. His eyes shone. He cleared his throat. "These Anarchist rascals," he said, "are fools, blind fools — to use bombs when this kind of thing is attainable. I think——"

A gentle rap, a mere light touch of fingernails on the door, interrupted him. The Bacteriologist opened it. "Just a minute, dear," whispered his wife.

When he returned to the laboratory, his visitor was looking at his watch. "I had no idea I had wasted an hour of your time," he said. "It's twelve minutes to four. I should have left by half past three. But your things were really too interesting. No, I cannot stay a moment longer. I have an engagement at four."

He passed out, repeating his thanks, and the Bacteriologist accompanied him to the door, then returned thoughtfully along the passage. He mused on the man's background. Clearly not Teutonic or Latin. "A morbid product, anyhow," he said to himself. "How he gloated over those cultures of disease germs!" A disturbing thought struck him. He turned to the bench by the vapor bath, then quickly to his writing table. He felt hastily in his pockets and rushed to the door. "I may have put it down on the hall table," he said.

"Minnie!" he shouted hoarsely.

"Yes, dear," came a remote voice.

"Had I anything in my hand when I spoke to you just now, dear?"

Pause.

"Nothing, dear, because I remember——"

"Blue ruin!" cried the Bacteriologist, and immediately ran to the front door and down the steps to the street.

Minnie, hearing the door slam, ran to the window in alarm. Down the street, a slender man was climbing into a cab. The Bacteriologist, hatless and in carpet slippers, was running and waving frantically toward the cab. One slipper came off, but he didn't stop. "He's gone mad!" said Minnie. "It's that horrid science of his." She opened the window to call after him. The slender man glanced around, seemed to share the idea of madness, pointed hastily at the Bacteriologist, said something to the cabman, the cab's apron slammed shut, the whip swished, the horse's hooves clattered, and in a moment the cab and the pursuing Bacteriologist had vanished around the corner.

Minnie stood at the window, straining to see. Then she drew back, dumbfounded. "Of course he's eccentric," she mused. "But running about London — in the season, too — in his socks!" A happy thought struck her. She quickly put on her bonnet, grabbed his shoes, took his hat and light overcoat from the hall pegs, and hailed a passing cab. "Drive me up the road and around Havelock Crescent, and see if you can find a gentleman running about in a velveteen coat and no hat."

"Velveteen coat, ma'am, and no 'at. Very good, ma'am." The cabman whipped up his horse in a matter-of-fact way, as if he drove to that address every day.

A few minutes later, the little group of cabmen and loafers at the cab shelter on Haverstock Hill were startled by the frantic passing of a cab with a ginger-colored horse, driven furiously.

They fell silent as it passed, and then as it receded, the stout gentleman known as Old Tootles said, "That's 'Arry 'Icks. What's he got?"

"He's using his whip, right enough," said the ostler boy.

"Hullo!" said poor old Tommy Byles. "Here's another blooming lunatic. Blowed if there isn't."

"It's old George," said Old Tootles, "and he's driving a lunatic, as you say. Ain't he clawing out of the cab? Wonder if he's after 'Arry 'Icks?"

The group became animated. "Go it, George!" "It's a race!" "You'll catch 'em!" "Whip up!"

"She's a goer, she is!" said the ostler boy.

"Strike me giddy!" cried Old Tootles. "Here! I'm going to begin in a minute. Here's another coming. If all the cabs in Hampstead ain't gone mad this morning!"

"It's a female this time," said the ostler boy.

"She's following him," said Old Tootles. "Usually it's the other way around."

"What's she got in her hand?"

"Looks like a high hat."

"What a blooming lark! Three to one on old George," said the ostler boy. "Next!"

Minnie drove by under a roar of applause. She didn't like it, but she felt she was doing her duty. She whirled down Haverstock Hill and Camden Town High Street, her eyes fixed 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, arms tightly folded, gripping the little tube that contained such vast possibilities of destruction. His mood was a strange mix of fear and exultation. Chiefly he feared being caught before he could accomplish his purpose, but behind that was a vaguer, larger fear of the awfulness of his crime. Yet his exultation far exceeded his fear. No Anarchist before him had conceived such a plan. Ravachol, Vaillant — all those famous figures he envied dwindled into insignificance beside him. He only had to make sure of the water supply and break the tube into a reservoir. How cleverly he had planned it, forged the letter of introduction, gained entry to the laboratory, and seized his opportunity! The world would hear of him at last. All those who had sneered at him, neglected him, preferred others to him, found his company undesirable — they would reckon with him now. Death, death, death!

They had always treated him as a man of no importance. The whole world had conspired to keep him down. He would teach them what it meant to isolate a man. What was this familiar street? Great Saint Andrew's Street, of course! How was the chase going? He craned out of the cab. The Bacteriologist was scarcely fifty yards behind. That was bad. He might be caught and stopped. He felt in his pocket, found half a sovereign, and thrust it 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. "Right you are," said the cabman, the trap slammed, and the lash struck the gleaming side of the horse. The cab swayed. The Anarchist, half standing under the trap, put his hand containing the little glass tube on the apron for balance.

He felt the brittle thing crack; the broken half rang on the floor. He fell back into the seat with a curse, staring at the few drops of moisture on the apron.

He shuddered.

"Well, I suppose I shall be the first. Phew! Anyhow, I'll be a martyr. That's something. But it's 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 small drop remained in the broken end of the tube, and he drank it to make sure. It was better to be certain. At any rate, he would not fail.

Then it dawned on 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 strange. The poison was swift. He waved his cabman away and stood on the pavement, arms folded across his chest, awaiting the arrival of the Bacteriologist. There was something tragic in his pose. The sense of impending 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 at him curiously through his spectacles. "You have drunk it! An Anarchist? I see now." He was about to say more, but stopped, with a smile in the corner of his mouth. He opened the cab's apron as if to descend, but the Anarchist waved a dramatic farewell and strode off toward Waterloo Bridge, carefully brushing against as many people as possible. The Bacteriologist was so absorbed in watching him that he barely noticed Minnie appearing with his hat, shoes, and overcoat.

"Very good of you to bring my things," he said, still staring after the receding figure.

"You had better get in," she said. Minnie was now convinced he was mad, and ordered the cabman home on her own responsibility.

"Put on my shoes? Certainly, dear," he said, as the cab began to turn, hiding the strutting black figure, now small in the distance. Then something grotesque struck him, and he laughed.

Then he said, "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 tell you the rest. And I wanted to astonish him, not knowing he was an Anarchist, and I picked up a culture of that new bacterium I was telling you about — the one that infests and, I think, causes the blue patches on various monkeys.

And like a fool, I said it was Asiatic cholera. And he ran off with it to poison the water of London, and he might certainly have made things look blue for this civilized city. And now he has swallowed it. Of course, I can't 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'll 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 draft. But why should I wear a coat on a hot day because of Mrs.—— Oh! Very well."