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2017 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-2253-7
musaicumbooks@okpublishing.info
2017 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-2253-7
THE front door bell tinkled impatiently; evidently somebody was in a hurry. Alan Hubert answered the call, a thing that even a distinguished physician might do, seeing that it was on the stroke of midnight. The tall, graceful figure of a woman in evening dress stumbled into the hall. The diamonds in her hair shimmered and trembled, her face was full of terror.
“You are Dr. Hubert,” she gasped. “I am Mrs. Fillingham, the artist’s wife, you know. Will you come with me at once… My husband… I had been dining out. In the studio… Oh, please come!”
Hubert asked no unnecessary questions. He knew Fillingham, the great portrait painter, well enough by repute and by sight also, for Fillingham’s house and studio were close by. There were many artists in the Devonshire Park district—that pretty suburb which was one of the triumphs of the builder’s and landscape gardener’s art. Ten years ago it had been no more than a swamp; to-day people spoke complacently of the fact that they lived in Devonshire Park.
Hubert walked up the drive and past the trim lawns with Mrs. Fillingham hanging on his arm, and in at the front door. Mrs. Fillingham pointed to a door on the right. She as too exhausted to speak. There were shaded lights gleaming everywhere, on old oak and armour and on a large portrait of a military-looking man propped up on an easel. On a lay figure was a magnificent foreign military uniform.
Hubert caught all this in a quick mental flash. But the vital interest to him was a human figure lying on his back before the fireplace. The clean-shaven, sensitive face of the artist had a ghastly, purple-black tinge, there was a large swelling in the throat.
“He—he is not dead?” Mrs. Fillingham asked in a frozen whisper.
Hubert was able to satisfy the distracted wife on that head. Fillingham was still breathing. Hubert stripped the shade from a reading lamp and held the electric bulb at the end of its long flex above the sufferer’s mouth, contriving to throw the flood of light upon the back of the throat.
“Diphtheria!” he exclaimed. “Label’s type unless I am greatly mistaken. Some authorities are disposed to scoff at Dr. Label’s discovery. I was an assistant of his for four years and I know better. Fortunately I happen to know what the treatment—successful in two cases—was.”
He hurried from the house and returned a few minutes later breathlessly. He had some strange-looking, needle-like instruments in his hands. He took an electric lamp from its socket and substituted a plug on a flex instead. Then he cleared a table without ceremony and managed to hoist his patient upon it.
“Now please hold that lamp steadily thus,” he said. “Bravo, you are a born nurse! I am going to apply these electric needles to the throat.”
Hubert talked on more for the sake of his companion’s nerves than anything else. The still figure on the table quivered under his touch, his lungs expanded in a long, shuddering sigh. The heart was beating more or less regularly now. Fillingham opened his eyes and muttered something.
“Ice,” Hubert snapped, “have you got any ice in the house?”
It was a well-regulated establishment and there was plenty of ice in the refrigerator. Not until the patient was safe in bed did Hubert’s features relax.
“We’ll pull him through yet,” he said. “I’ll send you a competent nurse round in half-an-hour. I’ll call first thing in the morning and bring Dr. Label with me. He must not miss this on any account.”
Half-an-hour later Hubert was spinning along in a hansom towards Harley Street. It was past one when he reached the house of the great German savant. A dim light was burning in the hall. A big man with an enormous shaggy head and a huge frame attired in the seediest of dress coats welcomed Hubert with a smile.
“So, my young friend,” Label said, “your face promises excitement.”
“Case of Label’s diphtheria,” Hubert said crisply. “Fillingham, the artist, who lives close by me. Fortunately they called me in. I have arranged for you to see my patient the first thing in the morning.”
The big German’s jocular manner vanished. He led Hubert gravely to a chair in his consulting-room and curtly demanded details. He smiled approvingly as Hubert enlarged upon his treatment of the case.
“Undoubtedly your diagnosis was correct,” he said, puffing furiously at a long china pipe. “You have not forgotten what I told you of it. The swelling—which is caused by violent blood poisoning—yielded to the electric treatment. I took the virus from the cases in the north and I tried them on scores of animals. And they all died.
“I find it is the virus of what is practically a new disease, one of the worst in the wide world. I say it recurs again, and it does. So I practise, and practise to find a cure. And electricity is the cure. I inoculate five dogs with the virus and I save two by the electric current. You follow my plans and you go the first stage of the way to cure Fillingham. Did you bring any of that mucous here?”
Hubert produced it in a tiny glass tube. For a little time Label examined it under his microscope. He wanted to make assurance doubly sure.
“It is the same thing,” he said presently. “I knew that it was bound to recur again. Why, it is planted all over our big cities. And electricity is the only way to get rid of it. It was the best method of dealing with sewage, only corporations found it too expensive. Wires in the earth charged to say 10,000 volts. Apply this and you destroy the virus that lies buried under hundreds of houses in London. They laughed at me when I suggested it years ago.”
“Underground,” Hubert asked vaguely.
“Ach, underground, yes. Don’t you recollect that in certain parts of England cancer is more common than in other places? The germs have been turned up in fields. I, myself, have proved their existence. In a little time, perhaps. I shall open the eyes of your complacent Londoners. You live in a paradise, ach Gott! And what was that paradise like ten years ago? Dreary pools and deserted brickfields. And how do you fill it up and level it to build houses upon?”
“By the carting of hundreds of thousands of loads of refuse, of course.”
“Ach, I will presently show you what that refuse was and is. Now go home to bed.”
* * * * *
Mrs. Fillingham remained in the studio with Hubert whilst Label was making his examination overhead. The patient had had a bad night; his symptoms were very grave indeed. Hubert listened more or less vaguely; his mind had gone beyond the solitary case. He was dreading what might happen in the future.
“Your husband has a fine constitution,” he said soothingly.
“He has overtried it lately,” Mrs. Fillingham replied. “At present he is painting a portrait of the Emperor of Asturia. His Majesty was to have sat to-day; he spent the morning here yesterday.”
But Hubert was paying no attention.
The heavy tread of Label was heard as he floundered down the stairs. His big voice was booming. What mattered all the portraits in the world so long as the verdict hung on the German doctor’s lips!
“Oh, there is a chance,” Label exclaimed. “Just a chance. Everything possible is being done. This is not so much diphtheria as a new disease. Diphtheria family, no doubt, but the blood poisoning makes a difficult thing of it.”
Label presently dragged Hubert away after parting with Mrs. Fillingham. He wanted to find a spot where building or draining was going on.
They found some men presently engaged in connecting a new house with the main drainage—a deep cutting some forty yards long by seven or eight feet deep. There was the usual crust of asphalt on the road, followed by broken bricks and the like, and a more or less regular stratum of blue-black rubbish, soft, wet, and clinging, and emitting an odour that caused Hubert to throw up his head.
“You must have broken into a drain somewhere here,” he said.
“We ain’t, sir,” the foreman of the gang replied. “It’s nout but rubbidge as they made up the road with here ten years ago. Lord knows where it came from, but it do smell fearful in weather like this.”
The odour indeed was stifling. All imaginable kinds of rubbish and refuse lay under the external beauties of Devonshire Park in strata ranging from five to forty feet deep. It was little wonder that trees and flowers flourished here. And here—wet, and dark, and festering— was a veritable hotbed of disease. Contaminated rags, torn paper, road siftings, decayed vegetable matter, diseased food, fish and bones all were represented here.
“Every ounce of this ought to have gone through the destructor,” Label snorted. “But no, it is used for the foundations of a suburban paradise. My word, we shall see what your paradise will be like presently. Come along.”
Label picked up a square slab of the blue stratum, put it in a tin, and the tin in his pocket. He was snorting and puffing with contempt.
“Now come to Harley Street with me and I will show you things,” he said.
He was as good as his word. Placed under a microscope, a minute portion of the subsoil from Devonshire Park proved to be a mass of living matter. There were at least four kinds of bacillus here that Hubert had never seen before. With his superior knowledge Label pointed out the fact that they all existed in the mucous taken from Fillingham on the previous evening.
“There you are!” He cried excitedly. “You get all that wet sodden refuse of London and you dump it down here in a heap. You mix with it a heap of vegetable matter so that fermentation shall have every chance. Then you cover it over with some soil, and you let it boil, boil, boil. Then, when millions upon millions of death-dealing microbes are bred and bred till their virility is beyond the scope of science, you build good houses on the top of it. For years I have been prophesying an outbreak of some new disease—or some awful form of an old one—and here it comes. They called me a crank because I asked for high electric voltage to kill the plague—to destroy it by lightning. A couple of high tension wires run into the earth and there you are. See here.”
He took his cube of the reeking earth and applied the battery to it. The mass showed no outward change. But once under the microscope a fragment of it demonstrated that there was not the slightest trace of organic life.
“There!” Label cried. “Behold the remedy. I don’t claim that it will cure in every case, because we hardly touch the diphtheretic side of the trouble. When there has been a large loss of life we shall learn the perfect remedy by experience. But this thing is coming, and your London is going to get a pretty bad scare. You have laid it down like port wine, and now that the thing is ripe you are going to suffer from the consequence. I have written articles in the Lancet, I have warned people, but they take not the slightest heed.”
Hubert went back home thoughtfully. He found the nurse who had Fillingham’s case in hand waiting for him in his consulting-room.
“I am just back from my walk,” she said. “I wish you would call at Dr. Walker’s at Elm Crescent. He has two cases exactly like Mr. Fillingham’s, and he is utterly puzzled.”
Hubert snatched his hat and his electric needles, and hurried away at once. He found his colleague impatiently waiting for him There were two children this time in one of the best appointed houses in Devonshire Park, suffering precisely as Fillingham had done. In each instance the electric treatment gave the desired result. Hubert hastily explained the whole matter to Walker.
“It’s an awful business,” the latter said, “Personally, I have a great respect for Label, and I feel convinced that he is right. If this thing spreads, property in Devonshire Park won’t be worth the price of slum lodgings.” By mid-day nineteen cases of the so-called diphtheria had been notified within the three miles area known as Devonshire Park. Evidently some recent excavations had liberated the deadly microbe. But there was no scare as yet. Label came down again hotfoot with as many assistants as he could get, and took up his quarters with Hubert. They were going to have a busy time.
It was after two before Hubert managed to run across to Fillingham’s again. He stood in the studio waiting for Mrs. Fillingham. His mind was preoccupied and uneasy, yet he seemed to miss something from the studio. It was strange, considering that he had only been in the room twice before.
“Are you looking for anything?” Mrs. Fillingham asked.
“I don’t know,” Hubert exclaimed. “I seem to miss something. I’ve got it—the absence of the uniform.”
“They sent for it,” Mrs. Fillingham said vaguely. She was dazed for want of sleep. “The Emperor had to go to some function, and that was the only uniform of the kind he happened to have. He was to have gone away in it after his sitting to-day. My husband persuaded him to leave it when it was here yesterday, and—”
Hubert had cried out suddenly as if in pain.
“He was here yesterday—here, with your husband, and your husband with the diphtheria on him?”
Then the weary wife understood.
“Good heavens—”
But Hubert was already out of the room. He blundered on until he came to a hansom cab creeping along in the sunshine.
“Buckingham Palace,” he gasped. “Drive like mad. A five-pound note for you if you get me there by three o’clock!”
* * * * *
Already Devonshire Park was beginning to be talked about. It was wonderful how the daily press got to the root of things. Hubert caught sight of more than one contents bill as he drove home that alluded to the strange epidemic.
Dr. Label joined Hubert presently in Mrs. Fillingham’s home, rubbing his huge hands together. He knew nothing of the new dramatic developments. He asked where Hubert had been spending his time.
“Trying to save the life of your friend, the Emperor of Asturia,” Hubert said. “He was here yesterday with Fillingham, and, though he seems well enough at present, he may have the disease on him now. What do you think of that?”
Hubert waited to see the great man stagger before the blow. Label smiled and nodded as he proceeded to light a cigarette.
“Good job too,” he said. “I am honorary physician to the court of Asturia. I go back, there, as you know, when I finish my great work here. The Emperor I have brought through four or five illnesses, and if anything is wrong he always sends for me.”
“But he might get the awful form of diphtheria!”
“Very likely,” Label said coolly. “All these things are in the hands of Providence. I know that man’s constitution to a hair, and if he gets the disease I shall pull him through for certain. I should like him to have it.”
“In the name of all that is practical, why?”
“To startle the public,” Label cried. He was mounted on his hobby now. He paced up and down the room in a whirl of tobacco smoke. “It would bring the matter home to everybody. Then perhaps something will be done. I preach and preach in vain. Only the Lancet backs me up at all. Many times I have asked for a quarter of a million of money, so that I can found a school for the electrical treatment of germ diseases. I want to destroy all malaria. All dirt in bulk, every bit of refuse that is likely to breed fever and the like, should be treated by electricity. I would take huge masses of deadly scourge and mountains of garbage, and render them innocent by the electric current. But no; that costs money, and your poverty-stricken Government cannot afford it. Given a current of 10,000 volts a year or two ago, and I could have rendered this one of the healthiest places in England. You only wanted to run those high voltage wires into the earth here and there, and behold the millions are slain, wiped out, gone for ever. Perhaps I will get it now.”
* * * * *
London was beginning to get uneasy. There had been outbreaks before, but they were of the normal type. People, for instance, are not so frightened of smallpox as they used to be. Modern science has learnt to grapple with the fell disease and rob it of half its terrors. But this new and virulent form of diphtheria was another matter.
Hubert sat over his dinner that night, making mental calculations. There were nearly a thousand houses of varying sizes in Devonshire Park. Would it be necessary to abandon these? He took down a large scale map of London, and hastily marked in blue pencil those areas which had developed rapidly of recent years. In nearly all of these a vast amount of artificial ground had been necessary. Hubert was appalled as he calculated the number of jerry-built erections in these districts.
A servant came in and laid The Evening Wire upon the table. Hubert glanced at it. Nothing had been lost in the way of sensation. The story of the Emperor’s visit to the district had been given great prominence. An inquiry at Buckingham Palace had elicited the fact that the story was true.
Well, perhaps no harm would come of it. Hubert finished a cigar and prepared to go out. As he flung the paper aside a paragraph in the stop press column—a solitary paragraph like an inky island in a sea of white—caught his eye.
“No alarm need be experienced as to the danger encountered by the Emperor of Asturia, but we are informed that His Majesty is prevented from dining at Marlborough House to-night owing to a slight cold and sore throat caught, it is stated, in the draughts at Charing Cross Station. The Emperor will go down to Cowes as arranged to-morrow.”
Hubert shook his head doubtfully. The slight cold and sore throat were ominous. His mind dwelt upon the shadow of trouble as he made his way to the hospital. There had been two fresh cases during the evening and the medical staff were looking anxious and worried. They wanted assistance badly, and Hubert gave his to the full.
It was nearly eleven before Hubert staggered home. In the main business street of the suburb a news-shop was still open.
A flaming placard attracted the doctor’s attention. It struck him like a blow.
“Alarming illness of the Asturian Emperor. His Majesty stricken down by the new disease. Latest bulletin from Buckingham Palace.”
Almost mechanically Hubert bought a paper. There was not much beyond the curt information that the Emperor was dangerously ill.
Arrived home Hubert found a telegram awaiting him. He tore it open. The message was brief but to the point.
“Have been called in to Buckingham Palace, Label’s diphtheria certain. Shall try and see you to-morrow morning. Label.”
London was touched deeply and sincerely. A great sovereign had come over here in the most friendly fashion to show his good feeling for a kindred race. On the very start of a round of pleasure he had been stricken down like this.
The public knew all the details from the progress of that fateful uniform to the thrilling eight o’clock bulletin when the life of Rudolph III was declared to be in great danger. They knew that Dr. Label had been sent for post haste. The big German was no longer looked upon as a clever crank, but the one man who might be able to save London from a terrible scourge. And from lip to lip went the news that over two hundred cases of the new disease had now broken out in Devonshire Park.
People knew pretty well what it was and what was the cause now. Label’s warning had come home with a force that nobody had expected. He had stolen away quite late for half-an-hour to his own house and there had been quite free with the pressmen. He extenuated nothing. The thing was bad, and it was going to be worse. So far as he could see, something of this kind w as inevitable. If Londoners were so blind as to build houses on teeming heaps of filth, why, London must be prepared to take the consequences.
Hubert knew nothing of this. He had fallen back utterly exhausted in his chair with the idea of taking a short rest—for nearly three hours he had been fast asleep. Somebody was shaking him roughly. He struggled back to the consciousness that Label was bending over him.
“Well, you are a nice fellow,” the German grumbled.
“I was dead beat and worn out,” Hubert said apologetically. “How is the Emperor?”
“His Majesty is doing as well as I can expect. It is a very bad case, however. I have left him in competent hands, so that I could run down here. They were asking for you at the hospital, presuming that you were busy somewhere. The place is full, and so arc four houses in the nearest terrace.”
“Spreading like that?” Hubert exclaimed.
“Spreading like that! By this time tomorrow we shall have a thousand cases on our hands. The authorities are doing everything they can to help us, fresh doctors and nurses and stores are coming in all the time.”
“You turn people out of their houses to make way then?”
Label smiled grimly. He laid his hand on Hubert’s shoulder, and piloted him into the roadway. The place seemed to be alive with cabs and vehicles of all kinds. It was as if all the inhabitants of Devonshire Park were going away for their summer holidays simultaneously. The electric arcs shone down on white and frightened faces where joyous gaiety should have been. Here and there a child slept peacefully, but on the whole it was a sorry exodus.
“There you are,” Label said grimly. “It is a night flight from the plague. It has been going on for hours. It would have been finished now but for the difficulty in getting conveyances. Most of the cabmen are avoiding the place as if it were accursed. But money can command everything, hence the scene that you see before you.”
Hubert stood silently watching the procession. There was very little luggage on any of the cabs or conveyances. Families were going wholesale. Devonshire Park for the most part was an exceedingly prosperous district, so that the difficulties of emigration were not great. In their panic the people were abandoning everything in the wild flight for life and safety.
Then he went in again to rest before the unknown labours of to-morrow. Next morning he anxiously opened his morning paper.
It was not particularly pleasant reading beyond the information that the health of the Emperor of Asturia was mentioned, and that he had passed a satisfactory night. As to the rest, the plague was spreading. There were two hundred and fifty cases in Devonshire Park. Label’s sayings had come true at last; it was a fearful vindication of his prophecy. And the worst of it was that no man could possibly say where it was going to end.
* * * * *