CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The Lancet office was closed. Disappointment swelled through Snow in a way he hadn't felt since he was a child and a promised trip to the sea was canceled. A green shade covered the window and a small, annoyingly neat printed sign read "Will Open Again For Business on The Fifteenth of September. Cholera death of many staff members."

Four days from now, he thought. Snow stood for a moment, at a loss for what to do next. The manuscript felt heavy and burdensome in his hand. He tapped it against his leg, feeling foolish, trying to think.

He could take it to another journal, but felt a shamefaced reluctance to do so. Nothing else really carried the same weight as The Lancet, not even the British Journal of Medicine, which had published his things before.

A newsboy pushed past him with a stack of Times, shouting as he went, "Plague Wanes! Plague Declines!"

Snow stopped the boy and bought one. The first line of the story read, "The sudden break in hot weather seems to be responsible for a dramatic decline in cholera deaths."

Snow grabbed the boy by the collar. "Who wrote this?" he shouted. When the boy didn't answer immediately he had to restrain himself from striking out.

"Don't know, guvnor. I just sells ‘em." He didn't look at all afraid, just startled and amused. When Snow let go, the boy carefully patted his collar back into place. "Got no right to bend a fellow around like that," he muttered, looking annoyed and yet oddly pleased, as if this one insane toff had connected him closer to real news.

It was strange, thought Snow, that in all these years of knowing Caleb he had never seen his office. Shared office, that is. A tiny room. Another desk, its owner absent, was so close that it must have been difficult for the two men to move through the room at the same time. On Caleb's desk a cup of tea and a stale-looking half loaf took up the only clear spot amid stacks of proofs. Caleb turned a pencil around in his hands, pausing before answering Snow's question.

He finally said, "Snow, you've got to believe I have no control over these things."

"Then I suppose it's out of the question that you print this tomorrow?" Snow tossed over a one-page abstract of the pump story that he'd scratched out while waiting to see Caleb.

Caleb picked it up with a skepticism and read it quickly. "I can try," he said in a clipped voice. "But the chief editor doesn't want anything that might cause a panic. Contagion theories don't appeal to him. And if you want to know the truth, the public is getting tired of cholera."

"How do you know such nonsense as that?"

"Look, yesterday our three lead stories were on cholera and two other papers did the action on the Crimean front and a family murder in Manchester. And their sales were double ours."

"You can't be serious. We're talking about large numbers of deaths being prevented by this one bit of information."

"Snow, whatever the reason, the epidemic is over. It's old news now. Cholera's a summer plague, isn't it? It's September now. Summer's gone. Next week, ask any man on the street about cholera, and he'll say, ‘Oh, that was ages ago."

"But, Beersdon, you've got to print something about the pump. You know it's true."

"I''ll see what I can do," said his former friend. "What about The Lancet? I thought you were going to try there."

"They're closed for four days." Snow's voice sounded whining and petulant to his own ears but he didn't care.

Caleb shrugged, moved the pencil again. "I'll see what I can do."