Tales

Of the unexplained, of the unexpected

The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents by H. G. Wells

An anarchist tricks his way into a chemist’s laboratory, interested – only interested, mind – in a test-tube which the scientist proffers to him to examine. What is in this one? he asks; and he is told that it is dread cholera, bitter cholera, the most terrible cholera. A drop in the water supply might yet mean death, awful death, to millions. If only it were strategically supplied.

What does the anarchist do at such a moment, when given such an opportunity to act as he most fervently wishes someone might?

Across town, another man is going about a much more sedate day. He is not an interesting man. He has never fallen in love, never married, never undertaken a difficult voyage. A small income and a gentle nature have contented him with a life of slow idleness. Only the study of orchids gives his days a little flavour and meaning – and he is off to speculate on some of the orchid bulbs now. Brought back, so he hears, from afar – by the poor unfortunate explorer who perished in the attempt, at the very moment of collecting the samples now on sale. His housekeeper shudders. She has a bad feeling – bizarre, unaccountable – about all of this.

Men see what they want to see, after all. Do they not? Some men go hunting for treasure, too, and their fates are often just as bad as the explorer. On an island far distant, another man – and old traveller of seasoning and vintage – finds himself marooned, but not without a companion. A strange egg, one that was oddly well preserved despite what he assumed to be its centuries of gestation, begins to hatch. The creature is unknown to science. The traveller, bored and isolated, is for some time delighted.

On the other side of the world, meanwhile, a scientist who specialises in the observation of the heavens sits silently in his observatory. All is darkness outside, save the celestial bodies he wishes to examine in their courses. And yet, he suddenly starts. Something has obscured his telescope, upset the lens. If only for a moment. It is a large creature of some kind – and it wants to get into the building. Something terrible and frightening now descends upon the astronomer, far away from others’ eyes.

In London once more, we meet a jolly taxidermist who has two stories to tell: one of the wholesale creation (the complete fabrication, the making up) of whole species of imaginary extinct fauna, sponsored mostly by the insatiable, irrational demands of collectors; and another, the story of the time a collection of ostriches were imprudent enough to be on a ship at the same time as a rich Indian prince character. One of them (one of the ostriches, he says) even went as far – if you can believe it – to eat one of the Hindu’s diamonds. But here’s the catch: no one aboard the ship knew which ostrich had been the one to enjoy so expensive a meal. No one knew in whose stomach the diamond now sat.

Down the river, a man laid up with an injured leg observes the passing traffic along the Thames. What he sees pleases him; it is a pageant laid on for his express entertainment, seeing as he cannot move. But not all shows of this kind end in friendship and flowers, as he may well know.

An artist in his studio, meanwhile, looks at a picture he is trying to finish. Inspired by the dull source of an organ-grinder the painter induced to pose, the picture has no animation. It has no life. Unless, perhaps, a little application of something more to the eyebrows – perhaps a little more red about the lips. Is there, just possibly, a touch more of the sinister about this picture than the painter had first imagined he might convey in these oils?

As night falls, an ordinary man is confronted by one he initially takes to be a derelict, but who instead offers to sell him an immense stone, insisting, absolutely insisting, that it is an uncut diamond and that it has been grown as one grows crystals of no value, of pure decoration.

And in an engineer’s shed, quite nearby, a new arrival to these islands finds in the whirling, screaming dynamo that powers all he sees before him a kind of idol, some manner of protector, a new kind of god.