Chapter M: R. S. Andrews: The Perfect Tribute; François Coppee: The (7)

“To follow out their destiny, I s’pose. They’re the kind of folks
who have missions. Reformers, we call ’em—who want to enforce their
peculiar ideas and habits on other people. Sometimes we call them
expansionists—fond of colonizing territory that doesn’t belong to
them. They wanted to get through the cells to the lymph-passages,
thence on to the brain and spinal marrow. Know what that means?
Hydrophobia.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, say, now! You’re too easy.”

“Come, come,” said the other, good-naturedly; “don’t guy him. He
never had our advantages. You see, neighbor, we get these points
from the subjective brain, which knows all things and gives us our
instructions. We’re the white corpuscles,—phagocytes, the scientists
call us,—and our work is to police the blood-vessels, and kill off
invaders that make trouble. Those red-and-gray chumps can’t take
care of themselves, and we must protect ’em. Understand? But this
invasion was too much for us, and we had to have help from outside.
You must have come in with the first crowd—think I saw you—in at the
bite. Second crowd came in through an inoculation tube, and just in
time to pull you through.”

“I don’t know,” answered our bewildered friend. “In at the bite?
What bite? I was swimming round comfortable-like, and there was a
big noise, and then I was alongside of a big white wall, and then—”

“Exactly; the dog’s tooth. You got into bad company, friend, and
you’re well out of it. That first gang is the microbe of rabies, not
very well known yet, because a little too small to be seen by most
microscopes. All the scientists seem to have learned about ’em is
that a colony a few hundred generations old—which they call a
culture, or serum—is death on the original bird; and that’s what
they sent in to help out. Pasteur’s dead, worse luck, but sometime
old Koch’ll find out what we’ve known all along—that it’s only
variation from type.”

“Koch!” he answered eagerly and proudly. “Oh, I know Koch; I’ve met
him. And I know about microscopes, too. Why, Koch had me under his
microscope once. He discovered my family, and named us—the comma
bacilli—the Spirilli of Asiatic Cholera.”

In silent horror they drew away from him, and then conversed
together. Other white warriors drifting along stopped and joined the
conference, and when a hundred or more were massed before him, they
spread out to a semi-spherical formation and closed in.

“What’s the matter?” he asked nervously. “What’s wrong? What are you
going to do? I haven’t done anything, have I?”

“It’s not what you’ve done, stranger,” said his quondam friend, “or
what we’re going to do. It’s what you’re going to do. You’re going
to die. Don’t see how you got past quarantine, anyhow?”

“What—why—I don’t want to die. I’ve done nothing. All I want is
peace and quiet, and a place to swim where it isn’t too light nor
too dark. I mind my own affairs. Let me alone—you hear me—let me
alone!”

They answered him not. Slowly and irresistibly the hollow formation
contracted—individuals slipping out when necessary—until he was
pushed, still protesting, into the nearest movable cave. The walls
crashed together and his life went out. When he was cast forth he
was in five pieces.

And so our gentle, conservative, non-combative cholera microbe, who
only wanted to be left alone to mind his own affairs, met this
violent death, a martyr to prejudice and an unsympathetic
environment.

* * * * *

Extract from hospital record of the case of John Anderson:

August 18. As period of incubation for both cholera and
hydrophobia has passed and no initial symptoms of either
disease have been noticed, patient is this day discharged,
cured.

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A DILEMMA
By S. WEIR MITCHELL