CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
1
In a drenching rainstorm Snow arrived home. Even though he was soaked with the rain it wasn't enough to wash away the water from the tunnels. He stank like a corpse tossed up on a beach. There was a taste in his mouth of shit and rotten eggs, worse than anything left from too much bad wine. He felt as if he*d been poisoned.
He rushed up the stairs, stripping off his clothes as he went, and shouted down to Mrs. Jarrett for hot water.
Once Snow had treated a patient obsessed with cleanliness. Every three minutes the woman had looked at her fingers, rubbed them suspiciously, sniffed them, then gone to the nearest water to scrub them once more. Their skin was raw and cracked from so much abrasion. He had tried to keep her from doing it by locking her in a room without water and within an hour she was shrieking convulsively, writhing on the floor, wiping imaginary filth from her skin. In the end he gave up and told her family she should keep washing.
Today he knew exactly how she must have felt.
Mrs. Jarrett appeared at the door of his room with a can of water, looking apprehensive and alarmed at his half-dress and his long absence, and obviously dying to ask what had happened with the police.
He grabbed the lukewarm water from her and shouted, "I don't want just a can of water. Bring up the tub. I need a bath."
"But, Doctor, today's only Friday and you usually don't —"
"I don't give a damn what I usually do. I want a bath this instant."
She hurried off.
"And throw these in the dustbin!" he shouted after her, hurling his sopping linen down the stairs. He poured the can of water over himself as if putting out a fire, not caring if the carpet was ruined.
She finally appeared with the tub and he stood, panting with impatience, until she had filled it.
Once in the steaming bath he felt calmer. The downpour continued outside and its hypnotic dripping soothed him into almost forgetting where he had been. But visions continued flashing before him, of Constable's last stretch toward Bucks, the surge after surge of water, and the crumbling rotten brick all around.
When it was clear that Constable and Bucks were beyond rescue, the rest of the party had rushed back the way they came. Even the brash, path-finding tosher seemed nervous. They all expected to find their way submerged or blocked by crumbled brick.
But the man stopped unexpectedly at a side tunnel, a way they hadn't gone before, and he had led them to a rickety ladder going straight up. Half of the rungs were rusted out. As Snow stood at the base, waiting for his turn to climb, he heard above him rungs snapping in the darkness. One of the policemen shouted in fear before catching himself.
Snow was the last to go up. It seemed that he climbed for an hour, though it was probably only five minutes. The aperture he ascended grew narrower. Holes appeared on either side with rats poking their snouts out, sniffing, annoyed. Finally the light at the top grew much stronger and Snow emerged onto the cobblestones of Jermyn Street, surrounded by expensive shops. He felt as stunned and disoriented as if he*d emerged into the middle of a bedouin camp.
The rest of the party had been waiting for him in the downpour. The early evening rush of cabs, carts, and omnibuses inched around the unexpected hole in the ground, which gaped before them with its grill pulled aside like the door of a liberated prison.
Snow stepped back to the edge and peered into the descending blackness. Although he never would have said that heights bothered him, this long look into the hole's darkness had an effect on him like a drug, so greatly did it change his consciousness and his sense of place. He must have swayed, for one of the policemen grabbed his arm.
"Steady, sir. You be needing an escort home?"
"I'm free to go, then?"
The man looked puzzled. "Go? Of course, sir, whatever you likes. The rest of us has to go on to Scotland Yard, but not you. You're sure, now, you don't want some help?"
2
After the bath Snow dressed and rushed to Lillian's house, dying to get rid of the feeling of distrust that had lingered with him ever since seeing Constable that morning. He would tell her that Constable was dead. He was sure she would finally explain everything to him. Then the two of them, together, could follow the course of the cholera cases to see if the pump handle changed things. By the time he reached Brook Street his mood was almost elated.
She was out, the maid told him. Olympia, too, but not with Lillian. Didn't know where either of them went.
He felt crushed. He was about to leave, but at the last minute wrote a note for her: "Send for me as soon as you return. We must try to find out if the cholera case rate changes."
He went back to his house and straight to his desk.
Snow thanked providence that the pages he'd already worked on that morning in the jail had been in his coat pocket and not in the chloroform case. They were warped and stained with damp, like some old church archive, and seemed more than just notes. Snow found himself unwilling to leaf through them, as if he might find things some spooky other voice had dictated.
A strange reluctance to begin working rose in him. There was no reason for it; the pens lay ready, there was plenty of ink. No one would interrupt him tonight. He had only to start his strings of words and his entire project would be finished. And yet he sat staring at nothing for a full hour.
The stacks of notebooks which had seemed so cryptic and frustrating a week ago lay before him. Every figure in them, every jot and ink blot would fit into his solution like a piece in an ivory Chinese puzzle. They shrank in significance, almost visibly, before his eyes.
They weren't the only puzzle pieces. There were the loose bricks fifty feet under Broad Street, revealing that gaping hole into the lower works of the pump. He could hear again the oddly musical clink that the last few chunks of fired clay made as they fell, rhythmically, onto each other, and the bubbling of the water at the base of the pipe.
Finally, after ten at night, his thoughts were broken by a message from Lillian. Snow tore it open, hoping she would say she*d be there any minute.
New cholera cases in Broad Street down to eight by this afternoon. Urgent family matter has arisen; I will see you when I can.
He crumpled the paper and threw it on the floor. His sense of disappointment was overwhelming. Not about the cases, of course; that was just as he expected, down to the exact hour. There would be a few cases still, from the various buckets and ewers people had filled in the last hours as he stood by the pump. But those supplies would have been drunk soon enough. He had estimated that the soonest a slowing of the epidemic would show would be in forty-eight hours.
But he had hoped Lillian could be at his side for this. He felt there was something deeply wrong. What did she mean by a family matter? She had no family.
He tried hard to put her out of his mind, and to feel triumphant, or at least clever, at finding his final proof. But he couldn't. It all seemed too easy, too obvious. Cholera was scattered all over London, spread by a variety of water sources. Even though he knew it, he still couldn't prove it. Not there, at least; his proof lay in the case concentration on Broad Street. Any idiot could have figured the Broad Street thing out. Stop the Broad Street water supply and you stop the Broad Street cholera. Quod erat dernonstrandum.
As far as laying the blame somewhere, Constable and Bucks were dead, and there was no one left to punish.
Snow would have sworn that Constable was showing classic symptoms of angina from heart failure, and must have been in terrible pain after all the exertion of the search. Snow dwelt on what his last moments must have been like. Constable didn't look the least bit afraid as the water bore down on him. The expression on his face had almost been one of ecstasy, as if a final understanding had broken over him.
Snow got up for one of his rare drinks of whiskey, and forced himself to return to his writing. The phrases started to flow in clear, detached prose, even though his mind was actually filled with sentences lurid enough for a street patterer's murder yarn.
It would make such a good story, he thought. When the ceiling fell in, a few bits of brick had actually hit him and his mouth had filled with dust. After the pain subsided the first thing he noticed was the taste. The dust was salty. As salty as the old stains on Constable's shoes and on the boots of that dead man so many weeks ago. Now he knew where it had come from.
It had probably not been Sir Philip who had started the shortcuts. But someone had helped him to it. Ralph Bucks. And Snow knew, as surely as if he'd been told, where they got the salty sand for these brick works.
Those sand beds, up the river beyond Teddington Weir, had to be replaced every ten weeks or so, and Snow knew now what they did with the old sand. Full of Thames salt and every particle of sewage that passed through the piping system, the sand was carted a mile or two into London and mixed with the mortar. Saved them heaps of money, he supposed.
It wouldn't have been so bad if it had just been dirty. The dirt itself probably wasn't enough to infect the water. But the salt, that was the weak ingredient. The salt could no more hold mortar together than could a mix of spit and flour. It weakened the structures and they collapsed.
Snow could see it before him now, the thin trickle of sewage burbling into the collapsed well over the rusted pipes. Sounding like a pastoral brook, or like the background murmur of a Schubert song. The sound of raw sewage going directly into the pump, straight up the seventy feet and into the water jugs of the Broad Street housewives. There wasn't enough there to taste it or smell it. Just enough to breed cholera.
There was no way to prove whether the pump's water came from Southwark and Vauxhall. Even though the company's water was just as bad as river water, it seemed it was beyond Snow to prove that it invariably caused cholera. And, of course, the pump alone couldn't have caused the cholera all over London.
The city's cholera was from a combination of watery sources; an initial infection from some ship dumping its refuse into the river, the poor drainage all over the city, Southwark and Vauxhall's criminal evasion of the filtering, and the collapsing sewer works under the streets.
Even the people who got Southwark and Vauxhall water weren't all unlucky; some boiled their water, and some probably didn't drink much.
And Snow*s final conclusion was that he didn't think he could prove any of it.
Except the case of the Broad Street pump and the map of cholera around it. Whatever happened elsewhere in the city, if you stopped the Broad Street water supply, you stopped cholera in Broad Street. It was so simple, so clear. Quod erat demonstrandum.
The map of Broad Street and its pump was the key. It showed that cholera was in the water, it came by water, it spread by water. That much Snow knew and could prove. If he could just publish his report and use it to get people to stop drinking city water, his job was done.
The map was on his desk. When he reached home he had spread the paper out flat on the floor until it dried, then carefully refolded it. He didn't want to lose contact with it, and kept his left hand flat on the crisp paper, which seemed to give off a heat of its own.
He took the pages he'd already written and straightened the edges. They made a weighty stack. He put them under a plaster bust of Hippocrates which Caleb had given to him when he got his medical degree, and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper. In the center he wrote the words, "On The Mode of Communication of Cholera." That would do for a title. It would look well in the clear Roman typesetting that The Lancet used.
John Snow published his book in 1855, describing the impact cholera had on London and his use of epidemiology to discover the causative mechanism. To read On The Mode of Communication of Cholera, click here.