The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents | Page 2

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' loonatic.
Blowed if there aint."
"It's old George," said old Tootles, "and he's drivin' a loonatic, as you
say. Aint he a-clawin' out of the keb? Wonder if he's after 'Arry 'Icks?"