“Oh, exquisite fluid, what magic words are hidden in thine ebon heart! What lover’s raptures and what gems of thought! Let others turn to dusty ledgers your celestial stream, to bills of lading and to dull notorial deeds; to me you are the poet’s dream, the freaksome fancy of the essayist, the stuff that shapes itself in precious prose. In you, oh most divine elixir, fame and fortune are dissolved. In you, enchanted liquid, strange stories simmer, and bright humour bubbles up. Oh, magical bottle, of whom I will make life and light, gold and jewels, laughter and tears, thrill to your dusky heart with the sense of immortality!”
It was while surveying the garbage heap in the rear of Mrs. Switcher’s premises that there came to me the idea of a short story, to be called The Microbe.
Through reading an article in a magazine Mr. Perkins, a middle-aged clerk in a dry-salter’s warehouse, becomes interested in the Germ Theory. Half-contemptuous at first, he begins to make a study of it, and soon is quite fascinated. Being of a high-strung, imaginative nature, the thing gets on his nerves, and he begins to think germs, to dream germs, to dread germs every moment of his life. He fears them in the air he breathes, in the food he eats, even on the library books that tell him all about them.
Mr. Perkins becomes obsessed. He refuses to kiss the somewhat overblown rose of his affections, to enter a train, an omnibus, a theatre. He analyses his food, sterilises his water, disinfects his room daily, till his landlady gives him notice. Finally he can no longer breathe the air of a microbe-infected office, and he resigns the situation he has held for twenty years to become a tramp. Yet even here, in the wind on the heath, on the hill’s top, by the yeasty sea, there is no peace for him. He broods, he fasts, he becomes a monomaniac. Then he thinks of the germs in his own body, of the good microbes and the naughty microbes fighting their vendetta from birth to death, his very blood their battleground.
No longer can he bear it. He realises the impossibility of escape. He himself is a little world, a civil war of microbes. How he hates them! Yet there remains to him his revenge. Ha! Ha! He has the power to destroy that world. So beggared, broken, desperate, he returns to London, and with a wild shriek of joy he throws himself from the Tower Bridge.
Yea, even in the end he has been destroyed by a microbe, the most deadly of all, the terrible Microbe called Fear.
One morning, dreamily incubating my story, I happened to glance out of my window. I was gazing absently on my corner of the lugubrious square when a little figure of a girl came into view. She wore a grey mantle, and her face was like a splash of white. Walking with a quick, determined step, in a moment she had disappeared.
In about five minutes I happened to look up again. There was the same slim figure rounding the corner, to again disappear.
“Something automatic about this,” I said; “it’s getting interesting.” So, taking out my watch, I judged the time, and in another five minutes I looked up. Yes, there was my girl in grey walking with the same purposeful stride.
“This is getting monotonous,” I observed, after I had seen her appear and disappear a few more times. “Such persistent pedestrianism destroys my powers of concentration. Let me then sally forth and see what this mysterious young female is celebrating. Perhaps if I stare at her hard enough she will choose either Russell or Bloomsbury Square for her constitutional, and not distract a poor, hard-working story-grinder at his labours.”