The Stolen Bacillus.

Evening Post, Volume XLVIII, Issue 54, 1 September 1894, Page 1 (Supplement)

The Stolen Bacillus.

, 4 11 Tlh'h agaiu," faid tho Bacteriologist, Slipping a glusu slide under tho microscope, " is a preparation of the celebrated bucilltis of cholera— tho cholora germ." Tho pulo- faced mun peered down tho microscope. Ho waa evidently Hob accustomed to that kind of thing', and held a limp white hund oVer his disougaged eyu. 11 1 see very liljle," ho said. > " Touch this screw," said the Bacteriologist ; perhaps tho microscope is out of focus for you. Eyes vary very much. Just tho „. fraction of a turn this way of that." "Ah! Now I tfce,"' said the visitor. 11 Not bo vc^ry much to see, after all. , Little ntreaks> and shreds of pink. And yot thoso Uttlo particles, thoso mere atoraios, might multiply and devastate a city. Wonder* Ho stood up, and roloasing the glass slip from tho mioroscopo, held it in hia hand towards the window. "Scarcely visible," ho said, Bcrutinising the preparation. Ho hesitated. " Are these— alive P Aro they dangerous now ?" "Thoßohave been stajned and killed," aaid the Bacteriologist. " I wish for my own part we could kill and stain every one Of them in the universe." "I suppose," tho pale man said with a filisrht smile, " that you scarcely care to havo such things about you in the living — in tho aotivo stato ?" "On tho contrary. We are obliged to," said tho Bacteriologist. "Hero, for ininstancc "He walked across the room, aud took up one of soveral sealed tubes. ' ' Hero is tha living thiug. This is a cultivation of tho actual living disease, baoteria." A slight gleam shot momentarily from tho eyes of the white-faced man. "It's a deadly tiling to. have in you* possession," he said, devouring the little tube with his Oyt93. The Bacteriologist watched tho morbid pleasure in his visitor's face. This man, who had visited him that afternoon with a nota of introduction from an old friend, interested him from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank blaok 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 topio, to take the most effective aspoot of tho matter. He held tho 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 staiu and examine with the highest powers of the microscope even to see, and that ono can neither smell nor taste — say to them, 'Go forth, increase and multiply, and replenish tho cisterns,' and Doath*mystorious, untracoablo Death, Death swift and torrible, Doath full of pain and indignity—would be tolcnsed upon this oity, and go hither and thither seeking his victims. Here ho would take the husband from the wifo, hore the child from its mother, here the Statesman from his duty, and here tho toiler from his trouble. He would follow tho w^tor- mains, creep along streets, picking out aud punishing a house here and a houso thore, whore they did not boil their drinking-water, creeping into the wells of tho miuerul- water makers, getting washed into salad, and lying dormant in ices. . Ho would wait ready to be drunk in the horsetroughs, 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 tho water supply, aud before we could ring him in and patch him again he would have decimated tho metropolis." •> " But ho Is quite safe here, you know — quite safe." The palo-faced man nodded. His eye shone. He cleared his throat. "These Anarohist rascals," said he, "are fools, blind fools — to use bombs whea this kind of thing is attainable. I think " A gentle rap, a mere light touch of the fiDgor-unils, was heard at the door. The Bacteriologist opened it. " Just a minute, dear," whispered his wifo. 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/ Se passed out of the room reiterating his thanks, and the Bacteriologist accompanied him to the dooi", and then returned thoughtfully along the passage to the 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 produot, anyhow, I am afraid," said the Baoteriologist to himself. " How he gloated on those cultivations of diseasegerms !" A disturbing thought struck ._ him. Ho turned to the bench by tho ' — Vapour bath, and then very f quickly to his writing-table. Then he felt hastily in his i 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 l anything in my hand when I apoke to you, dear, just nowP" Pause. "Nothing, dear, because I remember , "Heavens!" cried the Bacteriologist, and incontinently ran to tho front door and down tho steps of his house to the street. _ Minnio, hearing the door slam violently, ran in alarm to the window. Down the street » slender man was getting into a cab. The Baoteriologist, hatless, and in bin carpet slippers, was running and gesticulating wildly towards this group. One slipper came off, but he did not wait for it. " He ' has gone madl" said Minnie; "it's that horrid science of his," and, opening the' window, would have called after him. The' slonder man, suddenly glancing round, seemed struok with the same idea. He pointed hastily to the Bacteriologist, said something to the cabman, tho apron of the cab slammed, the whip swished, the horse's feet clattered, and in a moment cab and Baotoriologist hotly in pursuit had receded up the vista of the roadway, and dimnpoared round the cotner. - M'unie remained straining out of the -Window for a minute. Then she drew her head back iuto tho room again. She was dumbfounded. "Of course he is eccentric," ahe 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 Havolock Crescent, and see if we can find a gentleman running about in & 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 low minutes later, the little group of cabmen and loafers that collects round the oabmen's shelter at Haverstook Hill, were startled by the passing of a cab with a ginger-coloured screw of a horse, driven furiously. Minnie went by in a perfeot roar of applause. She did not like it, but she felt that eho wns doing her duty, and whirled on down Haverstook Hill and Camden Town High Street, with her eye 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 awfuli ness of his crime. But his exultation far exceeded his fear. No Anarchist before him had ever approached this conception of bis. Ravaohoi, Vaillant, all those dis'tinguiahed 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 town them yet what it is to isolate a man. What was this familiar street? Great Saint Andrew's Street, of course ! How fared tho chase P He craned oat of tho 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 /faco. "More," he shouted, "if only we away." The money was snatched out of his hand. "Bight you are," said tho cabman, and the trap slammed, and the lash lay along the glistening side of the horse. The oab swayed, and the Anarchist, half standing under the trap, put the hand containing the little glass tube upon the apron to proserve his balance. Ho felt the brittlo thing crack, and the broken half of it rang upon the floor of the caj>. Ho fell back into the peat with a curse, "and stared dismally at

the two or throe drops of moisture on the aprou. He shuddered. " Will. I suppose I hli-'H be the first. Plvm! AmhftY, I ahu'l bn h rnnr'yr. That's something. T? it it i» v filthy deuth, nevertheless. 1 wvnd'.T it it hurts aa much as they any ';" Presently a thought occunc-d Id him. He gropo'l liutwccn hU feet. A littlo drop was ntiil in the brol.en end of tho tubo, and ho drau'c that to make sure. At any rato, he would not fail. Then it dawned upou him that there was no fin ther need to escape tho Bacteriologist. In Wellington Street ho told the cabman to frtop, and gut out. He slipped on the step, ana his heud felt queer. It was rapid stuff, this cholera poison. Ho waved his cabman out of existence, so to speak, and stood on tho pavement with his arms folded upon his breast, awaiting tho arrival of the Bautaiulogat. Thore was something tragic in hia posex. The sense of imminent death gave him a certain dignity. He greeted his pursuer with a defiant laugh. " Vive l'Anarehie ! You aro too lato, my friend. I have drunk it. Tho cholora 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 tho 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 infeoted b^dy against as many people as possible. The Bactoriologist was so preocenpied 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 oven-oat. " Very good of you to bring my things," ho saicl, and remained lost in contemplation of the receding figure of the Anarchist. " You had better get in," he said, still staring. Minnie folt absolutely convinced now that he was mad, and directed the oabman homo on her own responsibility. "Put on my shoes? Certain ly, 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 yon the rest. And I wanted to astonish him, not knowing he was an Anarchist, and took np a cultivation of that new spocieß of bacterium I was telling you of, that infest, and I think cause; the blue patches upon various monkyys ; and, like a fool, I said it was Asiatic cholora. And he ran away with it to poison the water of London, aud he certainly might have made things look blue for this civilised city. And now ho has swallowed it. Of course I cannot say what will happen, but you know it turned that kitten blue, and the throo puppies— in patches, and tho sparrow - bright blue. But the bother is, I shall havo all the trouble and exponso of preparing somo 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."— Pall Mall Budget.