The River of Death

The River of Death
A Tale of London In Peril
by Fred M. White
From Pearson's Magazine, 1904

I.
THE sky was as brass from the glowing East upwards, a stifling heat
radiated from stone and wood and iron - a close, reeking heat that drove
one back from the very mention of food. The five million odd people
that go to make up London, even in the cream of the holiday season,
panted and gasped and prayed for the rain that never came. For the first
three weeks in August the furnace fires of the sun poured down till
every building became a vapour bath with no suspicion of a breeze to
temper the fierceness of it. Even the cheap press had given up sunstroke
statistics. The heat seemed to have wilted up the journalists and their
superlatives.
More or less the drought had lasted since April. Tales came up from the
provinces of stagnant rivers and quick, fell spurts of zymotic diseases.
For a long time past the London water companies had restricted their
supplies. Still, there was no suggestion of alarm, nothing as yet looked
like a water famine. The heat was almost unbearable but, people said,
the wave must break soon, and the metropolis would breathe again.
Professor Owen Darbyshire shook his head as he looked at the brassy,
star-powdered sky. He crawled homewards towards Harley Street with
his hat in his hand, and his grey frock coat showing a wide expanse of
white shirt below. There was a buzz of electric fans in the hall of No.
411, a murmur of them overhead. And yet the atmosphere was hot and
heavy. There was one solitary light in the dining-room - a room all

sombre oak and dull red walls as befitted a man of science - and a
visiting card glistened on the table. Darbyshire read the card with a
gesture of annoyance:
"James P Chase,
Morning Telephone."
"I'll have to see him," the Professor groaned, "I'll have to see the man if
only to put him off. Is it possible these confounded pressmen have got
hold of the story already?"
With just a suggestion of anxiety on his strong clean-shaven face, the
professor parted the velvet curtains leading to a kind of
study-laboratory, the sort of place you would expect to find in the
house of a man whose speciality is the fighting of disease in bulk.
Darbyshire was the one man who could grapple with an epidemic, the
one man always sent for.
The constant pestering of newspaper men was no new thing. Doubtless
Chase afore-said was merely plunging around after sensations -
journalistic curry for the hot weather. Still, the pushing little American
might have stumbled on the truth. Darbyshire took down his telephone
and churned the handle.
"Are you there? Yes, give me 30795, Kensington . . . That you,
Longdale? Yes, it's Darbyshire. Step round here at once, will you? Yes,
I know it's hot, and I wouldn't ask you to come if it wasn't a matter of
the last importance."
A small thin voice promised as desired and Darbyshire hung up his
receiver. He then lighted a cigarette, and proceeded to con over some
notes that he had taken from his pocket. These he elaborated in pencil
in a small but marvellously clear handwriting. As he lay back in his
chair he did not look much like the general whose army is absolutely
surrounded, but he was. And that square, lean head held a secret that
would have set London almost mad at a whisper.

Darbyshire laid the sheets down and fell into a reverie. He was roused
presently by the hall bell and Dr Longdale entered. The professor
brightened.
"That's right," he said. " Gad to see somebody, Longdale. I've had an
awful day. Verity, if Mr. Chase comes again ask him in here."
"Mr. Chase said he would return in an hour, sir," the large butler
replied. "And I'm to show, him in here? Yes, Sir."
But already Darbyshire had hustled his colleague beyond the velvet
curtains. Longdale's small clear figure was quivering with excitement.
His dark eyes fairly blazed behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles.
"Well," he gasped, "I suppose it's come at last?"
"Of course it has,' Darbyshire replied, "Sooner or later it was an
absolute certainty. Day by day for a month I have watched the sky and
wondered where the black hand would show. And when these things do
come they strike where you most dread them. Still, in this case, the
Thames--"
"Absolutely pregnant," Longdale exclaimed. "Roughly speaking,
four-fifths of London's water supply comes from the Thames. How
many towns, villages drain into the river before it reaches Sunbury or
thereabouts where most of the water companies have their intake ?
Why, scores