The Bride of Fu-Manchu Read Free Page A

“What’s wrong? Been overdoing it again?”
    I struggled upright. Then, in a moment, I became fully awake. And as I looked up at Petrie, seated on the low wall beside a big wine jar which had been converted into a flower pot, I realized that this was a very sick man.
    He wore no hat, and his dark hair, liberally streaked with grey, was untidy—which I knew to be unusual. He was smoking a cigarette and staring at me in that penetrating way which medical men cultivate. But his eyes were unnaturally bright, although deep shadows lay beneath them.
    “Been for a swim,” I replied; “Fell asleep and dreamed horribly.”
    Dr. Petrie shook his head and knocked ash from his cigarette into the soil in the wine jar.
    “Blackwater fever plays hell even with a constitution like yours,” he replied gravely. “Really, Sterling, you mustn’t take liberties for a while.”
    In pursuit of my profession, that of an orchid hunter, I had been knocked out by a severe attack of blackwater on the Upper Amazon. My native boys left me where I lay, and I owed my life to a German prospector who, guided by kindly Providence, found me and brought me down to Manaos.
    “Liberties be damned, doctor,” I growled, standing up to mix him a drink. “If ever a man took liberties with his health, that man is yourself! You’re worked to death!”
    “Listen,” he said, checking me. “Forget me and my health. I’m getting seriously worried.”
    “Not another case?”
    He nodded.
    “Admitted early this morning.”
    “Who is it this time?”
    “Another open-air worker, Sterling, a jobbing gardener. He was working in a villa, leased by some Americans, as a matter of fact, on the slope just this side of Ste Claire de la Roche—”
    “Ste Claire de la Roche?” I echoed.
    “Yes—the place you are so keen to explore.”
    “D’you think you can save him?”
    He frowned doubtfully.
    “Cartier and the other French doctors are getting in a perfect panic,” he replied. “If the truth leaks out, the Riviera will be deserted. And they know it! I’m rather pessimistic myself. I lost another patient today.”
    “What!”
    Petrie ran his fingers through his hair.
    “You see,” he went on, “diagnosis is so tremendously difficult. I found trypanasomes in the blood of the first patient I examined here; and although I never saw a tsetse fly in France, I was forced to diagnose sleeping sickness. I risked Bayer’s 205”—he smiled modestly—“with one or two modifications of my own; and by some miracle the patient pulled through.”
    “Why a miracle? It’s the accepted treatment, isn’t it?”
    He stared at me, and I thought how haggard he looked.
    “It’s one of ’em,” he replied, “for sleeping sickness. But this was not sleeping sickness!”
    “What!”
    “Hence the miracle. You see, I made cultures; and under the microscope they gave me a shock. I discovered that these parasites didn’t really conform to any species so far classified. They were members of the sleeping sickness family, but new members. Then— just before the death of another patient at the hospital—I made a great discovery, on which I have been working ever since—”
    “Overworking!”
    “Forget it.” He was carried away by his subject. “D’you know what I found, Sterling? I found bacillus pestis adhering to one of the parasites!”
    “Bacillus pestis?”
    “Plague!”
    “Good God!”
    “But—here’s the big point: the trypanasomes (the parasites which cause sleeping sickness) were a new variety, as I have mentioned. So was the plague bacillus . It presented obviously new features! Crowning wonder—although you may not appreciate it—parasite and bacillus affiliated and working in perfect harmony!”
    “You’ve swamped me, doctor,” I confessed. “But I have a hazy idea that there’s something tremendous behind this.”
    “Tremendous? There’s something awful . Nature is upsetting her own laws—as we know them.”
    This, from Dr. Petrie,