The Stolen Bacillus--H. G. WellsThe Stolen Bacillus
BY H. G. Wells
'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, scrutinizing 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 watermains, 
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 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 the cab, 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 ain't.'

'It's old George,' said Old Tootles, 'and he's drivin' a loonatic, 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-following 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. 
'Next!'

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 of Old George, who 
was driving her vagrant husband so incomprehensively 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. Ravacho!, 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, 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 arm 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 
dramataic 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 civilized 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.'



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