The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London
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Title: The Scarlet Plague
Author: Jack London
Illustrator: Gordon Grant
Release Date: June 29, 2007 [eBook #21970]
[Most recently updated: March 28, 2023]
Language: English
Produced by: David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SCARLET PLAGUE ***
![[Illustration]](images/cover.jpg)
THE SCARLET PLAGUE
By Jack London
Illustrated By Gordon Grant
1915
CONTENTS
THE SCARLET PLAGUE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Illustrations
Slowly he Pulled the Bowstring Taut 020
Rabbit is Good, Very Good 026
This Attracted the Old Man’s Nostrils 033
With a Sling Such As David Carried 036
I Was a Professor of English Literature 054
Sixty Years Since I Have Seen a Piece of
Soap. 059
Granser, You Make Me Sick With Your Gabble
071
But This New Plague Was Quicker 078
The Telephone Bell Rang 088
Fled from the City by Millions 092
I Heard Sounds of Rioting and Of Pistol Shots
098
Look at Yourself in the Mirror 100
Now in the Time of Calamity They Turned on Us
108
He Told Me he Had Been Cruelly Beaten 112
We Thrust Her Forth from the Building 121
She Fell Like a Plummet to the Earth 132
With My Horse and Dogs And Pony, I Set out
144
Everybody Called Him Chauffeur 149
Vesta the One Woman 150
There She Was, Boiling Fish-chowder 153
And Her the Chauffeur Beat and Made his Slave
158
Found Evidences of a Recently Occupied Camp
169
I Have Stored Many Books in a Cave 179
THE SCARLET PLAGUE
I
The way led along upon what had once been the embankment of a railroad.
But no train had run upon it for many years. The forest on either side
swelled up the slopes of the embankment and crested across it in a green
wave of trees and bushes. The trail was as narrow as a man’s body, and was
no more than a wild-animal runway. Occasionally, a piece of rusty iron,
showing through the forest-mould, advertised that the rail and the ties
still remained. In one place, a ten-inch tree, bursting through at a
connection, had lifted the end of a rail clearly into view. The tie had
evidently followed the rail, held to it by the spike long enough for its
bed to be filled with gravel and rotten leaves, so that now the crumbling,
rotten timber thrust itself up at a curious slant. Old as the road was, it
was manifest that it had been of the mono-rail type.
An old man and a boy travelled along this runway. They moved slowly, for
the old man was very old, a touch of palsy made his movements tremulous,
and he leaned heavily upon his staff. A rude skull-cap of goat-skin
protected his head from the sun. From beneath this fell a scant fringe of
stained and dirty-white hair. A visor, ingeniously made from a large leaf,
shielded his eyes, and from under this he peered at the way of his feet on
the trail. His beard, which should have been snow-white but which showed
the same weather-wear and camp-stain as his hair, fell nearly to his waist
in a great tangled mass. About his chest and shoulders hung a single,
mangy garment of goat-skin. His arms and legs, withered and skinny,
betokened extreme age, as well as did their sunburn and scars and
scratches betoken long years of exposure to the elements.
The boy, who led the way, checking the eagerness of his muscles to the
slow progress of the elder, likewise wore a single garment—a
ragged-edged piece of bear-skin, with a hole in the middle through which
he had thrust his head. He could not have been more than twelve years old.
Tucked coquettishly over one ear was the freshly severed tail of a pig. In
one hand he carried a medium-sized bow and an arrow.
On his back was a quiverful of arrows. From a sheath hanging about his
neck on a thong, projected the battered handle of a hunting knife. He was
as brown as a berry, and walked softly, with almost a catlike tread. In
marked contrast with his sunburned skin were his eyes—blue, deep
blue, but keen and sharp as a pair of gimlets. They seemed to bore into
aft about him in a way that was habitual. As he went along he smelled
things, as well, his distended, quivering nostrils carrying to his brain
an endless series of messages from the outside world. Also, his hearing
was acute, and had been so trained that it operated automatically. Without
conscious effort, he heard all the slight sounds in the apparent quiet—heard,
and differentiated, and classified these sounds—whether they were of
the wind rustling the leaves, of the humming of bees and gnats, of the
distant rumble of the sea that drifted to him only in lulls, or of the
gopher, just under his foot, shoving a pouchful of earth into the entrance
of his hole.
Suddenly he became alertly tense. Sound, sight, and odor had given him a
simultaneous warning. His hand went back to the old man, touching him, and
the pair stood still. Ahead, at one side of the top of the embankment,
arose a crackling sound, and the boy’s gaze was fixed on the tops of the
agitated bushes. Then a large bear, a grizzly, crashed into view, and
likewise stopped abruptly, at sight of the humans. He did not like them,
and growled querulously. Slowly the boy fitted the arrow to the bow, and
slowly he pulled the bowstring taut. But he never removed his eyes from
the bear.
The old man peered from under his green leaf at the danger, and stood as
quietly as the boy. For a few seconds this mutual scrutinizing went on;
then, the bear betraying a growing irritability, the boy, with a movement
of his head, indicated that the old man must step aside from the trail and
go down the embankment. The boy followed, going backward, still holding
the bow taut and ready. They waited till a crashing among the bushes from
the opposite side of the embankment told them the bear had gone on. The
boy grinned as he led back to the trail.
“A big un, Granser,” he chuckled.
The old man shook his head.
“They get thicker every day,” he complained in a thin, undependable
falsetto. “Who’d have thought I’d live to see the time when a man would be
afraid of his life on the way to the Cliff House. When I was a boy, Edwin,
men and women and little babies used to come out here from San Francisco
by tens of thousands on a nice day. And there weren’t any bears then. No,
sir. They used to pay money to look at them in cages, they were that
rare.”
“What is money, Granser?”
Before the old man could answer, the boy recollected and triumphantly
shoved his hand into a pouch under his bear-skin and pulled forth a
battered and tarnished silver dollar. The old man’s eyes glistened, as he
held the coin close to them.
“I can’t see,” he muttered. “You look and see if you can make out the
date, Edwin.”
The boy laughed.
“You’re a great Granser,” he cried delightedly, “always making believe
them little marks mean something.”
The old man manifested an accustomed chagrin as he brought the coin back
again close to his own eyes.
“2012,” he shrilled, and then fell to cackling grotesquely. “That was the
year Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States by the
Board of Magnates. It must have been one of the last coins minted, for the
Scarlet Death came in 2013. Lord! Lord!—think of it! Sixty years
ago, and I am the only person alive to-day that lived in those times.
Where did you find it, Edwin?”
The boy, who had been regarding him with the tolerant curiousness one
accords to the prattlings of the feeble-minded, answered promptly.
“I got it off of Hoo-Hoo. He found it when we was herdin’ goats down near
San José last spring. Hoo-Hoo said it was money. Ain’t you hungry,
Granser?”
The ancient caught his staff in a tighter grip and urged along the trail,
his old eyes shining greedily.
“I hope Hare-Lip ’s found a crab... or two,” he mumbled. “They’re good
eating, crabs, mighty good eating when you’ve no more teeth and you’ve got
grandsons that love their old grandsire and make a point of catching crabs
for him. When I was a boy—”
But Edwin, suddenly stopped by what he saw, was drawing the bowstring on a
fitted arrow. He had paused on the brink of a crevasse in the embankment.
An ancient culvert had here washed out, and the stream, no longer
confined, had cut a passage through the fill. On the opposite side, the
end of a rail projected and overhung. It showed rustily through the
creeping vines which overran it. Beyond, crouching by a bush, a rabbit
looked across at him in trembling hesitancy. Fully fifty feet was the
distance, but the arrow flashed true; and the transfixed rabbit, crying
out in sudden fright and hurt, struggled painfully away into the brush.
The boy himself was a flash of brown skin and flying fur as he bounded
down the steep wall of the gap and up the other side. His lean muscles
were springs of steel that released into graceful and efficient action. A
hundred feet beyond, in a tangle of bushes, he overtook the wounded
creature, knocked its head on a convenient tree-trunk, and turned it over
to Granser to carry.
“Rabbit is good, very good,” the ancient quavered, “but when it comes to a
toothsome delicacy I prefer crab. When I was a boy—”
“Why do you say so much that ain’t got no sense?” Edwin impatiently
interrupted the other’s threatened garrulousness.
The boy did not exactly utter these words, but something that remotely
resembled them and that was more guttural and explosive and economical of
qualifying phrases. His speech showed distant kinship with that of the old
man, and the latter’s speech was approximately an English that had gone
through a bath of corrupt usage.
“What I want to know,” Edwin continued, “is why you call crab ‘toothsome
delicacy’? Crab is crab, ain’t it? No one I never heard calls it such
funny things.”
The old man sighed but did not answer, and they moved on in silence. The
surf grew suddenly louder, as they emerged from the forest upon a stretch
of sand dunes bordering the sea. A few goats were browsing among the sandy
hillocks, and a skin-clad boy, aided by a wolfish-looking dog that was
only faintly reminiscent of a collie, was watching them. Mingled with the
roar of the surf was a continuous, deep-throated barking or bellowing,
which came from a cluster of jagged rocks a hundred yards out from shore.
Here huge sea-lions hauled themselves up to lie in the sun or battle with
one another. In the immediate foreground arose the smoke of a fire, tended
by a third savage-looking boy. Crouched near him were several wolfish dogs
similar to the one that guarded the goats.
The old man accelerated his pace, sniffing eagerly as he neared the fire.
“Mussels!” he muttered ecstatically. “Mussels! And ain’t that a crab,
Hoo-Hoo? Ain’t that a crab? My, my, you boys are good to your old
grandsire.”
Hoo-Hoo, who was apparently of the same age as Edwin, grinned.
“All you want, Granser. I got four.”
The old man’s palsied eagerness was pitiful. Sitting down in the sand as
quickly as his stiff limbs would let him, he poked a large rock-mussel
from out of the coals. The heat had forced its shells apart, and the meat,
salmon-colored, was thoroughly cooked. Between thumb and forefinger, in
trembling haste, he caught the morsel and carried it to his mouth. But it
was too hot, and the next moment was violently ejected. The old man
spluttered with the pain, and tears ran out of his eyes and down his
cheeks.
The boys were true savages, possessing only the cruel humor of the savage.
To them the incident was excruciatingly funny, and they burst into loud
laughter. Hoo-Hoo danced up and down, while Edwin rolled gleefully on the
ground. The boy with the goats came running to join in the fun.
“Set ’em to cool, Edwin, set ’em to cool,” the old man besought, in the
midst of his grief, making no attempt to wipe away the tears that still
flowed from his eyes. “And cool a crab, Edwin, too. You know your
grandsire likes crabs.”
From the coals arose a great sizzling, which proceeded from the many
mussels bursting open their shells and exuding their moisture. They were
large shellfish, running from three to six inches in length. The boys
raked them out with sticks and placed them on a large piece of driftwood
to cool.
“When I was a boy, we did not laugh at our elders; we respected them.”
The boys took no notice, and Granser continued to babble an incoherent
flow of complaint and censure. But this time he was more careful, and did
not burn his mouth. All began to eat, using nothing but their hands and
making loud mouth-noises and lip-smackings. The third boy, who was called
Hare-Lip, slyly deposited a pinch of sand on a mussel the ancient was
carrying to his mouth; and when the grit of it bit into the old fellow’s
mucous membrane and gums, the laughter was again uproarious. He was
unaware that a joke had been played on him, and spluttered and spat until
Edwin, relenting, gave him a gourd of fresh water with which to wash out
his mouth.
“Where’s them crabs, Hoo-Hoo?” Edwin demanded. “Granser’s set upon having
a snack.”
Again Granser’s eyes burned with greediness as a large crab was handed to
him. It was a shell with legs and all complete, but the meat had long
since departed. With shaky fingers and babblings of anticipation, the old
man broke off a leg and found it filled with emptiness.
“The crabs, Hoo-Hoo?” he wailed. “The crabs?”
“I was fooling Granser. They ain’t no crabs! I never found one.”
The boys were overwhelmed with delight at sight of the tears of senile
disappointment that dribbled down the old man’s cheeks. Then, unnoticed,
Hoo-Hoo replaced the empty shell with a fresh-cooked crab. Already
dismembered, from the cracked legs the white meat sent forth a small cloud
of savory steam. This attracted the old man’s nostrils, and he looked down
in amazement.
The change of his mood to one of joy was immediate. He snuffled and
muttered and mumbled, making almost a croon of delight, as he began to
eat. Of this the boys took little notice, for it was an accustomed
spectacle. Nor did they notice his occasional exclamations and utterances
of phrases which meant nothing to them, as, for instance, when he smacked
his lips and champed his gums while muttering: “Mayonnaise! Just think—mayonnaise!
And it’s sixty years since the last was ever made! Two generations and
never a smell of it! Why, in those days it was served in every restaurant
with crab.”
When he could eat no more, the old man sighed, wiped his hands on his
naked legs, and gazed out over the sea. With the content of a full
stomach, he waxed reminiscent.
“To think of it! I’ve seen this beach alive with men, women, and children
on a pleasant Sunday. And there weren’t any bears to eat them up, either.
And right up there on the cliff was a big restaurant where you could get
anything you wanted to eat. Four million people lived in San Francisco
then. And now, in the whole city and county there aren’t forty all told.
And out there on the sea were ships and ships always to be seen, going in
for the Golden Gate or coming out. And airships in the air—dirigibles
and flying machines. They could travel two hundred miles an hour. The mail
contracts with the New York and San Francisco Limited demanded that for
the minimum. There was a chap, a Frenchman, I forget his name, who
succeeded in making three hundred; but the thing was risky, too risky for
conservative persons. But he was on the right clew, and he would have
managed it if it hadn’t been for the Great Plague. When I was a boy, there
were men alive who remembered the coming of the first aeroplanes, and now
I have lived to see the last of them, and that sixty years ago.”
The old man babbled on, unheeded by the boys, who were long accustomed to
his garrulousness, and whose vocabularies, besides, lacked the greater
portion of the words he used. It was noticeable that in these rambling
soliloquies his English seemed to recrudesce into better construction and
phraseology. But when he talked directly with the boys it lapsed, largely,
into their own uncouth and simpler forms.
“But there weren’t many crabs in those days,” the old man wandered on.
“They were fished out, and they were great delicacies. The open season was
only a month long, too. And now crabs are accessible the whole year
around. Think of it—catching all the crabs you want, any time you
want, in the surf of the Cliff House beach!”
A sudden commotion among the goats brought the boys to their feet. The
dogs about the fire rushed to join their snarling fellow who guarded the
goats, while the goats themselves stampeded in the direction of their
human protectors. A half dozen forms, lean and gray, glided about on the
sand hillocks and faced the bristling dogs. Edwin arched an arrow that
fell short. But Hare-Lip, with a sling such as David carried into battle
against Goliath, hurled a stone through the air that whistled from the
speed of its flight. It fell squarely among the wolves and caused them to
slink away toward the dark depths of the eucalyptus forest.
The boys laughed and lay down again in the sand, while Granser sighed
ponderously. He had eaten too much, and, with hands clasped on his paunch,
the fingers interlaced, he resumed his maunderings.
“‘The fleeting systems lapse like foam,’” he mumbled what was evidently a
quotation. “That’s it—foam, and fleeting. All man’s toil upon the
planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals,
destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation.
And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again,
sweeping his handiwork away—the weeds and the forest inundated his
fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves
on the Cliff House beach.” He was appalled by the thought. “Where four
million people disported themselves, the wild wolves roam to-day, and the
savage progeny of our loins, with prehistoric weapons, defend themselves
against the fanged despoilers. Think of it! And all because of the Scarlet
Death—”
The adjective had caught Hare-Lip’s ear.
“He’s always saying that,” he said to Edwin. “What is scarlet?”
“‘The scarlet of the maples can shake me like the cry of bugles going
by,’” the old man quoted.
“It’s red,” Edwin answered the question. “And you don’t know it because
you come from the Chauffeur Tribe. They never did know nothing, none of
them. Scarlet is red—I know that.”
“Red is red, ain’t it?” Hare-Lip grumbled. “Then what’s the good of
gettin’ cocky and calling it scarlet?”
“Granser, what for do you always say so much what nobody knows?” he asked.
“Scarlet ain’t anything, but red is red. Why don’t you say red, then?”
“Red is not the right word,” was the reply. “The plague was scarlet. The
whole face and body turned scarlet in an hour’s time. Don’t I know? Didn’t
I see enough of it? And I am telling you it was scarlet because—well,
because it was scarlet. There is no other word for it.”
“Red is good enough for me,” Hare-Lip muttered obstinately. “My dad calls
red red, and he ought to know. He says everybody died of the Red Death.”
“Your dad is a common fellow, descended from a common fellow,” Granser
retorted heatedly. “Don’t I know the beginnings of the Chauffeurs? Your
grandsire was a chauffeur, a servant, and without education. He worked for
other persons. But your grandmother was of good stock, only the children
did not take after her. Don’t I remember when I first met them, catching
fish at Lake Temescal?”
“What is education?” Edwin asked.
“Calling red scarlet,” Hare-Lip sneered, then returned to the attack on
Granser. “My dad told me, an’ he got it from his dad afore he croaked,
that your wife was a Santa Rosan, an’ that she was sure no account. He
said she was a hash-slinger before the Red Death, though I don’t
know what a hash-slinger is. You can tell me, Edwin.”
But Edwin shook his head in token of ignorance.
“It is true, she was a waitress,” Granser acknowledged. “But she was a
good woman, and your mother was her daughter. Women were very scarce in
the days after the Plague. She was the only wife I could find, even if she
was a hash-slinger, as your father calls it. But it is not nice to
talk about our progenitors that way.”
“Dad says that the wife of the first Chauffeur was a lady—”
“What’s a lady?” Hoo-Hoo demanded.
“A lady ’s a Chauffeur squaw,” was the quick reply of Hare-Lip.
“The first Chauffeur was Bill, a common fellow, as I said before,” the old
man expounded; “but his wife was a lady, a great lady. Before the Scarlet
Death she was the wife of Van Worden. He was President of the Board of
Industrial Magnates, and was one of the dozen men who ruled America. He
was worth one billion, eight hundred millions of dollars—coins like
you have there in your pouch, Edwin. And then came the Scarlet Death, and
his wife became the wife of Bill, the first Chauffeur. He used to beat
her, too. I have seen it myself.”
Hoo-Hoo, lying on his stomach and idly digging his toes in the sand, cried
out and investigated, first, his toe-nail, and next, the small hole he had
dug. The other two boys joined him, excavating the sand rapidly with their
hands till there lay three skeletons exposed. Two were of adults, the
third being that of a part-grown child. The old man trudged along on the
ground and peered at the find.
“Plague victims,” he announced. “That’s the way they died everywhere in
the last days. This must have been a family, running away from the
contagion and perishing here on the Cliff House beach. They—what are
you doing, Edwin?”
This question was asked in sudden dismay, as Edwin, using the back of his
hunting knife, began to knock out the teeth from the jaws of one of the
skulls.
“Going to string ’em,” was the response.
The three boys were now hard at it; and quite a knocking and hammering
arose, in which Granser babbled on unnoticed.
“You are true savages. Already has begun the custom of wearing human
teeth. In another generation you will be perforating your noses and ears
and wearing ornaments of bone and shell. I know. The human race is doomed
to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it
begins its bloody climb upward to civilization. When we increase and feel
the lack of room, we will proceed to kill one another. And then I suppose
you will wear human scalp-locks at your waist, as well—as you,
Edwin, who are the gentlest of my grandsons, have already begun with that
vile pigtail. Throw it away, Edwin, boy; throw it away.”
“What a gabble the old geezer makes,” Hare-Lip remarked, when, the teeth
all extracted, they began an attempt at equal division.
They were very quick and abrupt in their actions, and their speech, in
moments of hot discussion over the allotment of the choicer teeth, was
truly a gabble. They spoke in monosyllables and short jerky sentences that
was more a gibberish than a language. And yet, through it ran hints of
grammatical construction, and appeared vestiges of the conjugation of some
superior culture. Even the speech of Granser was so corrupt that were it
put down literally it would be almost so much nonsense to the reader.
This, however, was when he talked with the boys.
When he got into the full swing of babbling to himself, it slowly purged
itself into pure English. The sentences grew longer and were enunciated
with a rhythm and ease that was reminiscent of the lecture platform.
“Tell us about the Red Death, Granser,” Hare-Lip demanded, when the teeth
affair had been satisfactorily concluded.
“The Scarlet Death,” Edwin corrected.
“An’ don’t work all that funny lingo on us,” Hare-Lip went on. “Talk
sensible, Granser, like a Santa Rosan ought to talk. Other Santa Rosans
don’t talk like you.”
II
The old man showed pleasure in being thus called upon. He cleared his
throat and began.
“Twenty or thirty years ago my story was in great demand. But in these
days nobody seems interested—”
“There you go!” Hare-Lip cried hotly. “Cut out the funny stuff and talk
sensible. What’s interested? You talk like a baby that don’t know
how.”
“Let him alone,” Edwin urged, “or he’ll get mad and won’t talk at all.
Skip the funny places. We’ll catch on to some of what he tells us.”
“Let her go, Granser,” Hoo-Hoo encouraged; for the old man was already
maundering about the disrespect for elders and the reversion to cruelty of
all humans that fell from high culture to primitive conditions.
The tale began.
“There were very many people in the world in those days. San Francisco
alone held four millions—”
“What is millions?” Edwin interrupted.
Granser looked at him kindly.
“I know you cannot count beyond ten, so I will tell you. Hold up your two
hands. On both of them you have altogether ten fingers and thumbs. Very
well. I now take this grain of sand—you hold it, Hoo-Hoo.” He
dropped the grain of sand into the lad’s palm and went on. “Now that grain
of sand stands for the ten fingers of Edwin. I add another grain. That’s
ten more fingers. And I add another, and another, and another, until I
have added as many grains as Edwin has fingers and thumbs. That makes what
I call one hundred. Remember that word—one hundred. Now I put this
pebble in Hare-Lip’s hand. It stands for ten grains of sand, or ten tens
of fingers, or one hundred fingers. I put in ten pebbles. They stand for a
thousand fingers. I take a mussel-shell, and it stands for ten pebbles, or
one hundred grains of sand, or one thousand fingers....” And so on,
laboriously, and with much reiteration, he strove to build up in their
minds a crude conception of numbers. As the quantities increased, he had
the boys holding different magnitudes in each of their hands. For still
higher sums, he laid the symbols on the log of driftwood; and for symbols
he was hard put, being compelled to use the teeth from the skulls for
millions, and the crab-shells for billions. It was here that he stopped,
for the boys were showing signs of becoming tired.
“There were four million people in San Francisco—four teeth.”
The boys’ eyes ranged along from the teeth and from hand to hand, down
through the pebbles and sand-grains to Edwin’s fingers. And back again
they ranged along the ascending series in the effort to grasp such
inconceivable numbers.
“That was a lot of folks, Granser,” Edwin at last hazarded.
“Like sand on the beach here, like sand on the beach, each grain of sand a
man, or woman, or child. Yes, my boy, all those people lived right here in
San Francisco. And at one time or another all those people came out on
this very beach—more people than there are grains of sand. More—more—more.
And San Francisco was a noble city. And across the bay—where we
camped last year, even more people lived, clear from Point Richmond, on
the level ground and on the hills, all the way around to San Leandro—one
great city of seven million people.—Seven teeth... there, that’s it,
seven millions.”
Again the boys’ eyes ranged up and down from Edwin’s fingers to the teeth
on the log.
“The world was full of people. The census of 2010 gave eight billions for
the whole world—eight crab-shells, yes, eight billions. It was not
like to-day. Mankind knew a great deal more about getting food. And the
more food there was, the more people there were. In the year 1800, there
were one hundred and seventy millions in Europe alone. One hundred years
later—a grain of sand, Hoo-Hoo—one hundred years later, at
1900, there were five hundred millions in Europe—five grains of
sand, Hoo-Hoo, and this one tooth. This shows how easy was the getting of
food, and how men increased. And in the year 2000 there were fifteen
hundred millions in Europe. And it was the same all over the rest of the
world. Eight crab-shells there, yes, eight billion people were alive on
the earth when the Scarlet Death began.
“I was a young man when the Plague came—twenty-seven years old; and
I lived on the other side of San Francisco Bay, in Berkeley. You remember
those great stone houses, Edwin, when we came down the hills from Contra
Costa? That was where I lived, in those stone houses. I was a professor of
English literature.”
Much of this was over the heads of the boys, but they strove to comprehend
dimly this tale of the past.
“What was them stone houses for?” Hare-Lip queried.
“You remember when your dad taught you to swim?” The boy nodded. “Well, in
the University of California—that is the name we had for the houses—we
taught young men and women how to think, just as I have taught you now, by
sand and pebbles and shells, to know how many people lived in those days.
There was very much to teach. The young men and women we taught were
called students. We had large rooms in which we taught. I talked to them,
forty or fifty at a time, just as I am talking to you now. I told them
about the books other men had written before their time, and even,
sometimes, in their time—”
“Was that all you did?—just talk, talk, talk?” Hoo-Hoo demanded.
“Who hunted your meat for you? and milked the goats? and caught the fish?”
“A sensible question, Hoo-Hoo, a sensible question. As I have told you, in
those days food-getting was easy. We were very wise. A few men got the
food for many men. The other men did other things. As you say, I talked. I
talked all the time, and for this food was given me—much food, fine
food, beautiful food, food that I have not tasted in sixty years and shall
never taste again. I sometimes think the most wonderful achievement of our
tremendous civilization was food—its inconceivable abundance, its
infinite variety, its marvellous delicacy. O my grandsons, life was life
in those days, when we had such wonderful things to eat.”
This was beyond the boys, and they let it slip by, words and thoughts, as
a mere senile wandering in the narrative.
“Our food-getters were called freemen. This was a joke. We of the
ruling classes owned all the land, all the machines, everything. These
food-getters were our slaves. We took almost all the food they got, and
left them a little so that they might eat, and work, and get us more food—”
“I’d have gone into the forest and got food for myself,” Hare-Lip
announced; “and if any man tried to take it away from me, I’d have killed
him.”
The old man laughed.
“Did I not tell you that we of the ruling class owned all the land, all
the forest, everything? Any food-getter who would not get food for us, him
we punished or compelled to starve to death. And very few did that. They
preferred to get food for us, and make clothes for us, and prepare and
administer to us a thousand—a mussel-shell, Hoo-Hoo—a thousand
satisfactions and delights. And I was Professor Smith in those days—Professor
James Howard Smith. And my lecture courses were very popular—that
is, very many of the young men and women liked to hear me talk about the
books other men had written.
“And I was very happy, and I had beautiful things to eat. And my hands
were soft, because I did no work with them, and my body was clean all over
and dressed in the softest garments—
“He surveyed his mangy goat-skin with disgust.
“We did not wear such things in those days. Even the slaves had better
garments. And we were most clean. We washed our faces and hands often
every day. You boys never wash unless you fall into the water or go
swimming.”
“Neither do you Granzer,” Hoo-Hoo retorted.
“I know, I know, I am a filthy old man, but times have changed. Nobody
washes these days, there are no conveniences. It is sixty years since I
have seen a piece of soap.
“You do not know what soap is, and I shall not tell you, for I am telling
the story of the Scarlet Death. You know what sickness is. We called it a
disease. Very many of the diseases came from what we called germs.
Remember that word—germs. A germ is a very small thing. It is like a
woodtick, such as you find on the dogs in the spring of the year when they
run in the forest. Only the germ is very small. It is so small that you
cannot see it—”
Hoo-Hoo began to laugh.
“You’re a queer un, Granser, talking about things you can’t see. If you
can’t see ’em, how do you know they are? That’s what I want to know. How
do you know anything you can’t see?”
“A good question, a very good question, Hoo-Hoo. But we did see—some
of them. We had what we called microscopes and ultramicroscopes, and we
put them to our eyes and looked through them, so that we saw things larger
than they really were, and many things we could not see without the
microscopes at all. Our best ultramicroscopes could make a germ look forty
thousand times larger. A mussel-shell is a thousand fingers like Edwin’s.
Take forty mussel-shells, and by as many times larger was the germ when we
looked at it through a microscope. And after that, we had other ways, by
using what we called moving pictures, of making the forty-thousand-times
germ many, many thousand times larger still. And thus we saw all these
things which our eyes of themselves could not see. Take a grain of sand.
Break it into ten pieces. Take one piece and break it into ten. Break one
of those pieces into ten, and one of those into ten, and one of those into
ten, and one of those into ten, and do it all day, and maybe, by sunset,
you will have a piece as small as one of the germs.” The boys were openly
incredulous. Hare-Lip sniffed and sneered and Hoo-Hoo snickered, until
Edwin nudged them to be silent.
“The woodtick sucks the blood of the dog, but the germ, being so very
small, goes right into the blood of the body, and there it has many
children. In those days there would be as many as a billion—a
crab-shell, please—as many as that crab-shell in one man’s body. We
called germs micro-organisms. When a few million, or a billion, of them
were in a man, in all the blood of a man, he was sick. These germs were a
disease. There were many different kinds of them—more different
kinds than there are grains of sand on this beach. We knew only a few of
the kinds. The micro-organic world was an invisible world, a world we
could not see, and we knew very little about it. Yet we did know
something. There was the bacillus anthracis; there was the micrococcus;
there was the Bacterium termo, and the Bacterium lactis—that’s
what turns the goat milk sour even to this day, Hare-Lip; and there were
Schizomycetes without end. And there were many others....”
Here the old man launched into a disquisition on germs and their natures,
using words and phrases of such extraordinary length and meaninglessness,
that the boys grinned at one another and looked out over the deserted
ocean till they forgot the old man was babbling on.
“But the Scarlet Death, Granser,” Edwin at last suggested.
Granser recollected himself, and with a start tore himself away from the
rostrum of the lecture-hall, where, to another world audience, he had been
expounding the latest theory, sixty years gone, of germs and
germ-diseases.
“Yes, yes, Edwin; I had forgotten. Sometimes the memory of the past is
very strong upon me, and I forget that I am a dirty old man, clad in
goat-skin, wandering with my savage grandsons who are goatherds in the
primeval wilderness. ‘The fleeting systems lapse like foam,’ and so lapsed
our glorious, colossal civilization. I am Granser, a tired old man. I
belong to the tribe of Santa Rosans. I married into that tribe. My sons
and daughters married into the Chauffeurs, the Sacramen-tos, and the
Palo-Altos. You, Hare-Lip, are of the Chauffeurs. You, Edwin, are of the
Sacramentos. And you, Hoo-Hoo, are of the Palo-Altos. Your tribe takes its
name from a town that was near the seat of another great institution of
learning. It was called Stanford University. Yes, I remember now. It is
perfectly clear. I was telling you of the Scarlet Death. Where was I in my
story?”
“You was telling about germs, the things you can’t see but which make men
sick,” Edwin prompted.
“Yes, that’s where I was. A man did not notice at first when only a few of
these germs got into his body. But each germ broke in half and became two
germs, and they kept doing this very rapidly so that in a short time there
were many millions of them in the body. Then the man was sick. He had a
disease, and the disease was named after the kind of a germ that was in
him. It might be measles, it might be influenza, it might be yellow fever;
it might be any of thousands and thousands of kinds of diseases.
“Now this is the strange thing about these germs. There were always new
ones coming to live in men’s bodies. Long and long and long ago, when
there were only a few men in the world, there were few diseases. But as
men increased and lived closely together in great cities and
civilizations, new diseases arose, new kinds of germs entered their
bodies. Thus were countless millions and billions of human beings killed.
And the more thickly men packed together, the more terrible were the new
diseases that came to be. Long before my time, in the middle ages, there
was the Black Plague that swept across Europe. It swept across Europe many
times. There was tuberculosis, that entered into men wherever they were
thickly packed. A hundred years before my time there was the bubonic
plague. And in Africa was the sleeping sickness. The bacteriologists
fought all these sicknesses and destroyed them, just as you boys fight the
wolves away from your goats, or squash the mosquitoes that light on you.
The bacteriologists—”
“But, Granser, what is a what-you-call-it?” Edwin interrupted.
“You, Edwin, are a goatherd. Your task is to watch the goats. You know a
great deal about goats. A bacteriologist watches germs. That’s his task,
and he knows a great deal about them. So, as I was saying, the
bacteriologists fought with the germs and destroyed them—sometimes.
There was leprosy, a horrible disease. A hundred years before I was born,
the bacteriologists discovered the germ of leprosy. They knew all about
it. They made pictures of it. I have seen those pictures. But they never
found a way to kill it. But in 1984, there was the Pantoblast Plague, a
disease that broke out in a country called Brazil and that killed millions
of people. But the bacteriologists found it out, and found the way to kill
it, so that the Pantoblast Plague went no farther. They made what they
called a serum, which they put into a man’s body and which killed the
pantoblast germs without killing the man. And in 1910, there was Pellagra,
and also the hookworm. These were easily killed by the bacteriologists.
But in 1947 there arose a new disease that had never been seen before. It
got into the bodies of babies of only ten months old or less, and it made
them unable to move their hands and feet, or to eat, or anything; and the
bacteriologists were eleven years in discovering how to kill that
particular germ and save the babies.
“In spite of all these diseases, and of all the new ones that continued to
arise, there were more and more men in the world. This was because it was
easy to get food. The easier it was to get food, the more men there were;
the more men there were, the more thickly were they packed together on the
earth; and the more thickly they were packed, the more new kinds of germs
became diseases. There were warnings. Soldervetzsky, as early as 1929,
told the bacteriologists that they had no guaranty against some new
disease, a thousand times more deadly than any they knew, arising and
killing by the hundreds of millions and even by the billion. You see, the
micro-organic world remained a mystery to the end. They knew there was
such a world, and that from time to time armies of new germs emerged from
it to kill men.
“And that was all they knew about it. For all they knew, in that invisible
micro-organic world there might be as many different kinds of germs as
there are grains of sand on this beach. And also, in that same invisible
world it might well be that new kinds of germs came to be. It might be
there that life originated—the ‘abysmal fecundity,’ Soldervetzsky
called it, applying the words of other men who had written before him....”
It was at this point that Hare-Lip rose to his feet, an expression of huge
contempt on his face.
“Granser,” he announced, “you make me sick with your gabble. Why don’t you
tell about the Red Death? If you ain’t going to, say so, an’ we’ll start
back for camp.”
The old man looked at him and silently began to cry. The weak tears of age
rolled down his cheeks and all the feebleness of his eighty-seven years
showed in his grief-stricken countenance.
“Sit down,” Edwin counselled soothingly. “Granser’s all right. He’s just
gettin’ to the Scarlet Death, ain’t you, Granser? He’s just goin’ to tell
us about it right now. Sit down, Hare-Lip. Go ahead, Granser.”
III
The old man wiped the tears away on his grimy knuckles and took up the
tale in a tremulous, piping voice that soon strengthened as he got the
swing of the narrative.
“It was in the summer of 2013 that the Plague came. I was twenty-seven
years old, and well do I remember it. Wireless despatches—”
Hare-Lip spat loudly his disgust, and Granser hastened to make amends.
“We talked through the air in those days, thousands and thousands of
miles. And the word came of a strange disease that had broken out in New
York. There were seventeen millions of people living then in that noblest
city of America. Nobody thought anything about the news. It was only a
small thing. There had been only a few deaths. It seemed, though, that
they had died very quickly, and that one of the first signs of the disease
was the turning red of the face and all the body. Within twenty-four hours
came the report of the first case in Chicago. And on the same day, it was
made public that London, the greatest city in the world, next to Chicago,
had been secretly fighting the plague for two weeks and censoring the news
despatches—that is, not permitting the word to go forth to the rest
of the world that London had the plague.
“It looked serious, but we in California, like everywhere else, were not
alarmed. We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to
overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the past.
But the trouble was the astonishing quickness with which this germ
destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any human
body it entered. No one ever recovered. There was the old Asiatic cholera,
when you might eat dinner with a well man in the evening, and the next
morning, if you got up early enough, you would see him being hauled by
your window in the death-cart. But this new plague was quicker than that—much
quicker.
“From the moment of the first signs of it, a man would be dead in an hour.
Some lasted for several hours. Many died within ten or fifteen minutes of
the appearance of the first signs.
“The heart began to beat faster and the heat of the body to increase. Then
came the scarlet rash, spreading like wildfire over the face and body.
Most persons never noticed the increase in heat and heart-beat, and the
first they knew was when the scarlet rash came out. Usually, they had
convulsions at the time of the appearance of the rash. But these
convulsions did not last long and were not very severe. If one lived
through them, he became perfectly quiet, and only did he feel a numbness
swiftly creeping up his body from the feet. The heels became numb first,
then the legs, and hips, and when the numbness reached as high as his
heart he died. They did not rave or sleep. Their minds always remained
cool and calm up to the moment their heart numbed and stopped. And another
strange thing was the rapidity of decomposition. No sooner was a person
dead than the body seemed to fall to pieces, to fly apart, to melt away
even as you looked at it. That was one of the reasons the plague spread so
rapidly. All the billions of germs in a corpse were so immediately
released.
“And it was because of all this that the bacteriologists had so little
chance in fighting the germs. They were killed in their laboratories even
as they studied the germ of the Scarlet Death. They were heroes. As fast
as they perished, others stepped forth and took their places. It was in
London that they first isolated it. The news was telegraphed everywhere.
Trask was the name of the man who succeeded in this, but within thirty
hours he was dead. Then came the struggle in all the laboratories to find
something that would kill the plague germs. All drugs failed. You see, the
problem was to get a drug, or serum, that would kill the germs in the body
and not kill the body. They tried to fight it with other germs, to put
into the body of a sick man germs that were the enemies of the plague
germs—”
“And you can’t see these germ-things, Granser,” Hare-Lip objected, “and
here you gabble, gabble, gabble about them as if they was anything, when
they’re nothing at all. Anything you can’t see, ain’t, that’s what.
Fighting things that ain’t with things that ain’t! They must have been all
fools in them days. That’s why they croaked. I ain’t goin’ to believe in
such rot, I tell you that.”
Granser promptly began to weep, while Edwin hotly took up his defence.
“Look here, Hare-Lip, you believe in lots of things you can’t see.”
Hare-Lip shook his head.
“You believe in dead men walking about. You never seen one dead man walk
about.”
“I tell you I seen ’em, last winter, when I was wolf-hunting with dad.”
“Well, you always spit when you cross running water,” Edwin challenged.
“That’s to keep off bad luck,” was Hare-Lip’s defence.
“You believe in bad luck?”
“Sure.”
“An’ you ain’t never seen bad luck,” Edwin concluded triumphantly. “You’re
just as bad as Granser and his germs. You believe in what you don’t see.
Go on, Granser.”
Hare-Lip, crushed by this metaphysical defeat, remained silent, and the
old man went on. Often and often, though this narrative must not be
clogged by the details, was Granser’s tale interrupted while the boys
squabbled among themselves. Also, among themselves they kept up a
constant, low-voiced exchange of explanation and conjecture, as they
strove to follow the old man into his unknown and vanished world.
“The Scarlet Death broke out in San Francisco. The first death came on a
Monday morning. By Thursday they were dying like flies in Oakland and San
Francisco. They died everywhere—in their beds, at their work,
walking along the street. It was on Tuesday that I saw my first death—Miss
Collbran, one of my students, sitting right there before my eyes, in my
lecture-room. I noticed her face while I was talking. It had suddenly
turned scarlet. I ceased speaking and could only look at her, for the
first fear of the plague was already on all of us and we knew that it had
come. The young women screamed and ran out of the room. So did the young
men run out, all but two. Miss Collbran’s convulsions were very mild and
lasted less than a minute. One of the young men fetched her a glass of
water. She drank only a little of it, and cried out:
“‘My feet! All sensation has left them.’
“After a minute she said, ‘I have no feet. I am unaware that I have any
feet. And my knees are cold. I can scarcely feel that I have knees.’
“She lay on the floor, a bundle of notebooks under her head. And we could
do nothing. The coldness and the numbness crept up past her hips to her
heart, and when it reached her heart she was dead. In fifteen minutes, by
the clock—I timed it—she was dead, there, in my own classroom,
dead. And she was a very beautiful, strong, healthy young woman. And from
the first sign of the plague to her death only fifteen minutes elapsed.
That will show you how swift was the Scarlet Death.
“Yet in those few minutes I remained with the dying woman in my classroom,
the alarm had spread over the university; and the students, by thousands,
all of them, had deserted the lecture-room and laboratories. When I
emerged, on my way to make report to the President of the Faculty, I found
the university deserted. Across the campus were several stragglers
hurrying for their homes. Two of them were running.
“President Hoag, I found in his office, all alone, looking very old and
very gray, with a multitude of wrinkles in his face that I had never seen
before. At the sight of me, he pulled himself to his feet and tottered
away to the inner office, banging the door after him and locking it. You
see, he knew I had been exposed, and he was afraid. He shouted to me
through the door to go away. I shall never forget my feelings as I walked
down the silent corridors and out across that deserted campus. I was not
afraid. I had been exposed, and I looked upon myself as already dead. It
was not that, but a feeling of awful depression that impressed me.
Everything had stopped. It was like the end of the world to me—my
world. I had been born within sight and sound of the university. It had
been my predestined career. My father had been a professor there before
me, and his father before him. For a century and a half had this
university, like a splendid machine, been running steadily on. And now, in
an instant, it had stopped. It was like seeing the sacred flame die down
on some thrice-sacred altar. I was shocked, unutterably shocked.
“When I arrived home, my housekeeper screamed as I entered, and fled away.
And when I rang, I found the housemaid had likewise fled. I investigated.
In the kitchen I found the cook on the point of departure. But she
screamed, too, and in her haste dropped a suitcase of her personal
belongings and ran out of the house and across the grounds, still
screaming. I can hear her scream to this day. You see, we did not act in
this way when ordinary diseases smote us. We were always calm over such
things, and sent for the doctors and nurses who knew just what to do. But
this was different. It struck so suddenly, and killed so swiftly, and
never missed a stroke. When the scarlet rash appeared on a person’s face,
that person was marked by death. There was never a known case of a
recovery.
“I was alone in my big house. As I have told you often before, in those
days we could talk with one another over wires or through the air. The
telephone bell rang, and I found my brother talking to me. He told me that
he was not coming home for fear of catching the plague from me, and that
he had taken our two sisters to stop at Professor Bacon’s home. He advised
me to remain where I was, and wait to find out whether or not I had caught
the plague.
“To all of this I agreed, staying in my house and for the first time in my
life attempting to cook. And the plague did not come out on me. By means
of the telephone I could talk with whomsoever I pleased and get the news.
Also, there were the newspapers, and I ordered all of them to be thrown up
to my door so that I could know what was happening with the rest of the
world.
“New York City and Chicago were in chaos. And what happened with them was
happening in all the large cities. A third of the New York police were
dead. Their chief was also dead, likewise the mayor. All law and order had
ceased. The bodies were lying in the streets un-buried. All railroads and
vessels carrying food and such things into the great city had ceased
runnings and mobs of the hungry poor were pillaging the stores and
warehouses. Murder and robbery and drunkenness were everywhere. Already
the people had fled from the city by millions—at first the rich, in
their private motor-cars and dirigibles, and then the great mass of the
population, on foot, carrying the plague with them, themselves starving
and pillaging the farmers and all the towns and villages on the way.
“The man who sent this news, the wireless operator, was alone with his
instrument on the top of a lofty building. The people remaining in the
city—he estimated them at several hundred thousand—had gone
mad from fear and drink, and on all sides of him great fires were raging.
He was a hero, that man who staid by his post—an obscure
newspaperman, most likely.
“For twenty-four hours, he said, no transatlantic airships had arrived,
and no more messages were coming from England. He did state, though, that
a message from Berlin—that’s in Germany—announced that
Hoffmeyer, a bacteriologist of the Metchnikoff School, had discovered the
serum for the plague. That was the last word, to this day, that we of
America ever received from Europe. If Hoffmeyer discovered the serum, it
was too late, or otherwise, long ere this, explorers from Europe would
have come looking for us. We can only conclude that what happened in
America happened in Europe, and that, at the best, some several score may
have survived the Scarlet Death on that whole continent.
“For one day longer the despatches continued to come from New York. Then
they, too, ceased. The man who had sent them, perched in his lofty
building, had either died of the plague or been consumed in the great
conflagrations he had described as raging around him. And what had
occurred in New York had been duplicated in all the other cities. It was
the same in San Francisco, and Oakland, and Berkeley. By Thursday the
people were dying so rapidly that their corpses could not be handled, and
dead bodies lay everywhere. Thursday night the panic outrush for the
country began. Imagine, my grandsons, people, thicker than the salmon-run
you have seen on the Sacramento river, pouring out of the cities by
millions, madly over the country, in vain attempt to escape the ubiquitous
death. You see, they carried the germs with them. Even the airships of the
rich, fleeing for mountain and desert fastnesses, carried the germs.
“Hundreds of these airships escaped to Hawaii, and not only did they bring
the plague with them, but they found the plague already there before them.
This we learned, by the despatches, until all order in San Francisco
vanished, and there were no operators left at their posts to receive or
send. It was amazing, astounding, this loss of communication with the
world. It was exactly as if the world had ceased, been blotted out. For
sixty years that world has no longer existed for me. I know there must be
such places as New York, Europe, Asia, and Africa; but not one word has
been heard of them—not in sixty years. With the coming of the
Scarlet Death the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably. Ten
thousand years of culture and civilization passed in the twinkling of an
eye, ‘lapsed like foam.’
“I was telling about the airships of the rich. They carried the plague
with them and no matter where they fled, they died. I never encountered
but one survivor of any of them—Mungerson. He was afterwards a Santa
Rosan, and he married my eldest daughter. He came into the tribe eight
years after the plague. He was then nineteen years old, and he was
compelled to wait twelve years more before he could marry. You see, there
were no unmarried women, and some of the older daughters of the Santa
Rosans were already bespoken. So he was forced to wait until my Mary had
grown to sixteen years. It was his son, Gimp-Leg, who was killed last year
by the mountain lion.
“Mungerson was eleven years old at the time of the plague. His father was
one of the Industrial Magnates, a very wealthy, powerful man. It was on
his airship, the Condor, that they were fleeing, with all the family, for
the wilds of British Columbia, which is far to the north of here. But
there was some accident, and they were wrecked near Mount Shasta. You have
heard of that mountain. It is far to the north. The plague broke out
amongst them, and this boy of eleven was the only survivor. For eight
years he was alone, wandering over a deserted land and looking vainly for
his own kind. And at last, travelling south, he picked up with us, the
Santa Rosans.
“But I am ahead of my story. When the great exodus from the cities around
San Francisco Bay began, and while the telephones were still working, I
talked with my brother. I told him this flight from the cities was
insanity, that there were no symptoms of the plague in me, and that the
thing for us to do was to isolate ourselves and our relatives in some safe
place. We decided on the Chemistry Building, at the university, and we
planned to lay in a supply of provisions, and by force of arms to prevent
any other persons from forcing their presence upon us after we had retired
to our refuge.
“All this being arranged, my brother begged me to stay in my own house for
at least twenty-four hours more, on the chance of the plague developing in
me. To this I agreed, and he promised to come for me next day. We talked
on over the details of the provisioning and the defending of the Chemistry
Building until the telephone died. It died in the midst of our
conversation. That evening there were no electric lights, and I was alone
in my house in the darkness. No more newspapers were being printed, so I
had no knowledge of what was taking place outside.
“I heard sounds of rioting and of pistol shots, and from my windows I
could see the glare of the sky of some conflagration in the direction of
Oakland. It was a night of terror. I did not sleep a wink. A man—why
and how I do not know—was killed on the sidewalk in front of the
house. I heard the rapid reports of an automatic pistol, and a few minutes
later the wounded wretch crawled up to my door, moaning and crying out for
help. Arming myself with two automatics, I went to him. By the light of a
match I ascertained that while he was dying of the bullet wounds, at the
same time the plague was on him. I fled indoors, whence I heard him moan
and cry out for half an hour longer.
“In the morning, my brother came to me. I had gathered into a handbag what
things of value I purposed taking, but when I saw his face I knew that he
would never accompany me to the Chemistry Building. The plague was on him.
He intended shaking my hand, but I went back hurriedly before him.
“‘Look at yourself in the mirror,’ I commanded.
“He did so, and at sight of his scarlet face, the color deepening as he
looked at it, he sank down nervelessly in a chair.
“‘My God!’ he said. ‘I’ve got it. Don’t come near me. I am a dead man.’
“Then the convulsions seized him. He was two hours in dying, and he was
conscious to the last, complaining about the coldness and loss of
sensation in his feet, his calves, his thighs, until at last it was his
heart and he was dead.
“That was the way the Scarlet Death slew. I caught up my handbag and fled.
The sights in the streets were terrible. One stumbled on bodies
everywhere. Some were not yet dead. And even as you looked, you saw men
sink down with the death fastened upon them. There were numerous fires
burning in Berkeley, while Oakland and San Francisco were apparently being
swept by vast conflagrations. The smoke of the burning filled the heavens,
so that the midday was as a gloomy twilight, and, in the shifts of wind,
sometimes the sun shone through dimly, a dull red orb. Truly, my
grandsons, it was like the last days of the end of the world.
“There were numerous stalled motor cars, showing that the gasoline and the
engine supplies of the garages had given out. I remember one such car. A
man and a woman lay back dead in the seats, and on the pavement near it
were two more women and a child. Strange and terrible sights there were on
every hand. People slipped by silently, furtively, like ghosts—white-faced
women carrying infants in their arms; fathers leading children by the
hand; singly, and in couples, and in families—all fleeing out of the
city of death. Some carried supplies of food, others blankets and
valuables, and there were many who carried nothing.
“There was a grocery store—a place where food was sold. The man to
whom it belonged—I knew him well—a quiet, sober, but stupid
and obstinate fellow, was defending it. The windows and doors had been
broken in, but he, inside, hiding behind a counter, was discharging his
pistol at a number of men on the sidewalk who were breaking in. In the
entrance were several bodies—of men, I decided, whom he had killed
earlier in the day. Even as I looked on from a distance, I saw one of the
robbers break the windows of the adjoining store, a place where shoes were
sold, and deliberately set fire to it. I did not go to the groceryman’s
assistance. The time for such acts had already passed. Civilization was
crumbling, and it was each for himself.”
IV
I went away hastily, down a cross-street, and at the first corner I saw
another tragedy. Two men of the working class had caught a man and a woman
with two children, and were robbing them. I knew the man by sight, though
I had never been introduced to him. He was a poet whose verses I had long
admired. Yet I did not go to his help, for at the moment I came upon the
scene there was a pistol shot, and I saw him sinking to the ground. The
woman screamed, and she was felled with a fist-blow by one of the brutes.
I cried out threateningly, whereupon they discharged their pistols at me
and I ran away around the corner. Here I was blocked by an advancing
conflagration. The buildings on both sides were burning, and the street
was filled with smoke and flame. From somewhere in that murk came a
woman’s voice calling shrilly for help. But I did not go to her. A man’s
heart turned to iron amid such scenes, and one heard all too many appeals
for help.
“Returning to the corner, I found the two robbers were gone. The poet and
his wife lay dead on the pavement. It was a shocking sight. The two
children had vanished—whither I could not tell. And I knew, now, why
it was that the fleeing persons I encountered slipped along so furtively
and with such white faces. In the midst of our civilization, down in our
slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred a race of barbarians, of savages; and
now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon us like the wild beasts
they were and destroyed us. And they destroyed themselves as well.
“They inflamed themselves with strong drink and committed a thousand
atrocities, quarreling and killing one another in the general madness. One
group of workingmen I saw, of the better sort, who had banded together,
and, with their women and children in their midst, the sick and aged in
litters and being carried, and with a number of horses pulling a
truck-load of provisions, they were fighting their way out of the city.
They made a fine spectacle as they came down the street through the
drifting smoke, though they nearly shot me when I first appeared in their
path. As they went by, one of their leaders shouted out to me in
apologetic explanation. He said they were killing the robbers and looters
on sight, and that they had thus banded together as the only-means by
which to escape the prowlers.
“It was here that I saw for the first time what I was soon to see so
often. One of the marching men had suddenly shown the unmistakable mark of
the plague. Immediately those about him drew away, and he, without a
remonstrance, stepped out of his place to let them pass on. A woman, most
probably his wife, attempted to follow him. She was leading a little boy
by the hand. But the husband commanded her sternly to go on, while others
laid hands on her and restrained her from following him. This I saw, and I
saw the man also, with his scarlet blaze of face, step into a doorway on
the opposite side of the street. I heard the report of his pistol, and saw
him sink lifeless to the ground.
“After being turned aside twice again by advancing fires, I succeeded in
getting through to the university. On the edge of the campus I came upon a
party of university folk who were going in the direction of the Chemistry
Building. They were all family men, and their families were with them,
including the nurses and the servants. Professor Badminton greeted me, I
had difficulty in recognizing him. Somewhere he had gone through flames,
and his beard was singed off. About his head was a bloody bandage, and his
clothes were filthy.
“He told me he had prowlers, and that his brother had been killed the
previous night, in the defence of their dwelling.
“Midway across the campus, he pointed suddenly to Mrs. Swinton’s face. The
unmistakable scarlet was there. Immediately all the other women set up a
screaming and began to run away from her. Her two children were with a
nurse, and these also ran with the women. But her husband, Doctor Swinton,
remained with her.
“‘Go on, Smith,’ he told me. ‘Keep an eye on the children. As for me, I
shall stay with my wife. I know she is as already dead, but I can’t leave
her. Afterwards, if I escape, I shall come to the Chemistry Building, and
do you watch for me and let me in.’
“I left him bending over his wife and soothing her last moments, while I
ran to overtake the party. We were the last to be admitted to the
Chemistry Building. After that, with our automatic rifles we maintained
our isolation. By our plans, we had arranged for a company of sixty to be
in this refuge. Instead, every one of the number originally planned had
added relatives and friends and whole families until there were over four
hundred souls. But the Chemistry Building was large, and, standing by
itself, was in no danger of being burned by the great fires that raged
everywhere in the city.
“A large quantity of provisions had been gathered, and a food committee
took charge of it, issuing rations daily to the various families and
groups that arranged themselves into messes. A number of committees were
appointed, and we developed a very efficient organization. I was on the
committee of defence, though for the first day no prowlers came near. We
could see them in the distance, however, and by the smoke of their fires
knew that several camps of them were occupying the far edge of the campus.
Drunkenness was rife, and often we heard them singing ribald songs or
insanely shouting. While the world crashed to ruin about them and all the
air was filled with the smoke of its burning, these low creatures gave
rein to their bestiality and fought and drank and died. And after all,
what did it matter? Everybody died anyway, the good and the bad, the
efficients and the weaklings, those that loved to live and those that
scorned to live. They passed. Everything passed.
“When twenty-four hours had gone by and no signs of the plague were
apparent, we congratulated ourselves and set about digging a well. You
have seen the great iron pipes which in those days carried water to all
the city-dwellers. We feared that the fires in the city would burst the
pipes and empty the reservoirs. So we tore up the cement floor of the
central court of the Chemistry Building and dug a well. There were many
young men, undergraduates, with us, and we worked night and day on the
well. And our fears were confirmed. Three hours before we reached water,
the pipes went dry.
“A second twenty-four hours passed, and still the plague did not appear
among us. We thought we were saved. But we did not know what I afterwards
decided to be true, namely, that the period of the incubation of the
plague germs in a human’s body was a matter of a number of days. It slew
so swiftly when once it manifested itself, that we were led to believe
that the period of incubation was equally swift. So, when two days had
left us unscathed, we were elated with the idea that we were free of the
contagion.
“But the third day disillusioned us. I can never forget the night
preceding it. I had charge of the night guards from eight to twelve, and
from the roof of the building I watched the passing of all man’s glorious
works. So terrible were the local conflagrations that all the sky was
lighted up. One could read the finest print in the red glare. All the
world seemed wrapped in flames. San Francisco spouted smoke and fire from
a score of vast conflagrations that were like so many active volcanoes.
Oakland, San Leandro, Haywards—all were burning; and to the
northward, clear to Point Richmond, other fires were at work. It was an
awe-inspiring spectacle. Civilization, my grandsons, civilization was
passing in a sheet of flame and a breath of death. At ten o’clock that
night, the great powder magazines at Point Pinole exploded in rapid
succession. So terrific were the concussions that the strong building
rocked as in an earthquake, while every pane of glass was broken. It was
then that I left the roof and went down the long corridors, from room to
room, quieting the alarmed women and telling them what had happened.
“An hour later, at a window on the ground floor, I heard pandemonium break
out in the camps of the prowlers. There were cries and screams, and shots
from many pistols. As we afterward conjectured, this fight had been
precipitated by an attempt on the part of those that were well to drive
out those that were sick. At any rate, a number of the plague-stricken
prowlers escaped across the campus and drifted against our doors. We
warned them back, but they cursed us and discharged a fusillade from their
pistols. Professor Merryweather, at one of the windows, was instantly
killed, the bullet striking him squarely between the eyes. We opened fire
in turn, and all the prowlers fled away with the exception of three. One
was a woman. The plague was on them and they were reckless. Like foul
fiends, there in the red glare from the skies, with faces blazing, they
continued to curse us and fire at us. One of the men I shot with my own
hand. After that the other man and the woman, still cursing us, lay down
under our windows, where we were compelled to watch them die of the
plague.
“The situation was critical. The explosions of the powder magazines had
broken all the windows of the Chemistry Building, so that we were exposed
to the germs from the corpses. The sanitary committee was called upon to
act, and it responded nobly. Two men were required to go out and remove
the corpses, and this meant the probable sacrifice of their own lives,
for, having performed the task, they were not to be permitted to reenter
the building. One of the professors, who was a bachelor, and one of the
undergraduates volunteered. They bade good-bye to us and went forth. They
were heroes. They gave up their lives that four hundred others might live.
After they had performed their work, they stood for a moment, at a
distance, looking at us wistfully. Then they waved their hands in farewell
and went away slowly across the campus toward the burning city.
“And yet it was all useless. The next morning the first one of us was
smitten with the plague—a little nurse-girl in the family of
Professor Stout. It was no time for weak-kneed, sentimental policies. On
the chance that she might be the only one, we thrust her forth from the
building and commanded her to be gone.
“She went away slowly across the campus, wringing her hands and crying
pitifully. We felt like brutes, but what were we to do? There were four
hundred of us, and individuals had to be sacrificed.
“In one of the laboratories three families had domiciled themselves, and
that afternoon we found among them no less than four corpses and seven
cases of the plague in all its different stages.
“Then it was that the horror began. Leaving the dead lie, we forced the
living ones to segregate themselves in another room. The plague began to
break out among the rest of us, and as fast as the symptoms appeared, we
sent the stricken ones to these segregated rooms. We compelled them to
walk there by themselves, so as to avoid laying hands on them. It was
heartrending. But still the plague raged among us, and room after room was
filled with the dead and dying. And so we who were yet clean retreated to
the next floor and to the next, before this sea of the dead, that, room by
room and floor by floor, inundated the building.
“The place became a charnel house, and in the middle of the night the
survivors fled forth, taking nothing with them except arms and ammunition
and a heavy store of tinned foods. We camped on the opposite side of the
campus from the prowlers, and, while some stood guard, others of us
volunteered to scout into the city in quest of horses, motor cars, carts,
and wagons, or anything that would carry our provisions and enable us to
emulate the banded workingmen I had seen fighting their way out to the
open country.
“I was one of these scouts; and Doctor Hoyle, remembering that his motor
car had been left behind in his home garage, told me to look for it. We
scouted in pairs, and Dombey, a young undergraduate, accompanied me. We
had to cross half a mile of the residence portion of the city to get to
Doctor Hoyle’s home. Here the buildings stood apart, in the midst of trees
and grassy lawns, and here the fires had played freaks, burning whole
blocks, skipping blocks and often skipping a single house in a block. And
here, too, the prowlers were still at their work. We carried our automatic
pistols openly in our hands, and looked desperate enough, forsooth, to
keep them from attacking us. But at Doctor Hoyle’s house the thing
happened. Untouched by fire, even as we came to it the smoke of flames
burst forth.
“The miscreant who had set fire to it staggered down the steps and out
along the driveway. Sticking out of his coat pockets were bottles of
whiskey, and he was very drunk. My first impulse was to shoot him, and I
have never ceased regretting that I did not. Staggering and maundering to
himself, with bloodshot eyes, and a raw and bleeding slash down one side
of his bewhiskered face, he was altogether the most nauseating specimen of
degradation and filth I had ever encountered. I did not shoot him, and he
leaned against a tree on the lawn to let us go by. It was the most
absolute, wanton act. Just as we were opposite him, he suddenly drew a
pistol and shot Dombey through the head. The next instant I shot him. But
it was too late. Dombey expired without a groan, immediately. I doubt if
he even knew what had happened to him.
“Leaving the two corpses, I hurried on past the burning house to the
garage, and there found Doctor Hoyle’s motor car. The tanks were filled
with gasoline, and it was ready for use. And it was in this car that I
threaded the streets of the ruined city and came back to the survivors on
the campus. The other scouts returned, but none had been so fortunate.
Professor Fairmead had found a Shetland pony, but the poor creature, tied
in a stable and abandoned for days, was so weak from want of food and
water that it could carry no burden at all. Some of the men were for
turning it loose, but I insisted that we should lead it along with us, so
that, if we got out of food, we would have it to eat.
“There were forty-seven of us when we started, many being women and
children. The President of the Faculty, an old man to begin with, and now
hopelessly broken by the awful happenings of the past week, rode in the
motor car with several young children and the aged mother of Professor
Fairmead. Wathope, a young professor of English, who had a grievous
bullet-wound in his leg, drove the car. The rest of us walked, Professor
Fairmead leading the pony.
“It was what should have been a bright summer day, but the smoke from the
burning world filled the sky, through which the sun shone murkily, a dull
and lifeless orb, blood-red and ominous. But we had grown accustomed to
that blood-red sun. With the smoke it was different. It bit into our
nostrils and eyes, and there was not one of us whose eyes were not
bloodshot. We directed our course to the southeast through the endless
miles of suburban residences, travelling along where the first swells of
low hills rose from the flat of the central city. It was by this way,
only, that we could expect to gain the country.
“Our progress was painfully slow. The women and children could not walk
fast. They did not dream of walking, my grandsons, in the way all people
walk to-day. In truth, none of us knew how to walk. It was not until after
the plague that I learned really to walk. So it was that the pace of the
slowest was the pace of all, for we dared not separate on account of the
prowlers. There were not so many now of these human beasts of prey. The
plague had already well diminished their numbers, but enough still lived
to be a constant menace to us. Many of the beautiful residences were
untouched by fire, yet smoking ruins were everywhere. The prowlers, too,
seemed to have got over their insensate desire to burn, and it was more
rarely that we saw houses freshly on fire.
“Several of us scouted among the private garages in search of motor cars
and gasoline. But in this we were unsuccessful. The first great flights
from the cities had swept all such utilities away. Calgan, a fine young
man, was lost in this work. He was shot by prowlers while crossing a lawn.
Yet this was our only casualty, though, once, a drunken brute deliberately
opened fire on all of us. Luckily, he fired wildly, and we shot him before
he had done any hurt.
“At Fruitvale, still in the heart of the magnificent residence section of
the city, the plague again smote us. Professor Fairmead was the victim.
Making signs to us that his mother was not to know, he turned aside into
the grounds of a beautiful mansion. He sat down forlornly on the steps of
the front veranda, and I, having lingered, waved him a last farewell. That
night, several miles beyond Fruitvale and still in the city, we made camp.
And that night we shifted camp twice to get away from our dead. In the
morning there were thirty of us. I shall never forget the President of the
Faculty. During the morning’s march his wife, who was walking, betrayed
the fatal symptoms, and when she drew aside to let us go on, he insisted
on leaving the motor car and remaining with her. There was quite a
discussion about this, but in the end we gave in. It was just as well, for
we knew not which ones of us, if any, might ultimately escape.
“That night, the second of our march, we camped beyond Haywards in the
first stretches of country. And in the morning there were eleven of us
that lived. Also, during the night, Wathope, the professor with the
wounded leg, deserted us in the motor car. He took with him his sister and
his mother and most of our tinned provisions. It was that day, in the
afternoon, while resting by the wayside, that I saw the last airship I
shall ever see. The smoke was much thinner here in the country, and I
first sighted the ship drifting and veering helplessly at an elevation of
two thousand feet. What had happened I could not conjecture, but even as
we looked we saw her bow dip down lower and lower. Then the bulkheads of
the various gas-chambers must have burst, for, quite perpendicular, she
fell like a plummet to the earth.
“And from that day to this I have not seen another airship. Often and
often, during the next few years, I scanned the sky for them, hoping
against hope that somewhere in the world civilization had survived. But it
was not to be. What happened with us in California must have happened with
everybody everywhere.
“Another day, and at Niles there were three of us. Beyond Niles, in the
middle of the highway, we found Wathope. The motor car had broken down,
and there, on the rugs which they had spread on the ground, lay the bodies
of his sister, his mother, and himself.
“Wearied by the unusual exercise of continual walking, that night I slept
heavily. In the morning I was alone in the world. Canfield and Parsons, my
last companions, were dead of the plague. Of the four hundred that sought
shelter in the Chemistry Building, and of the forty-seven that began the
march, I alone remained—I and the Shetland pony. Why this should be
so there is no explaining. I did not catch the plague, that is all. I was
immune. I was merely the one lucky man in a million—just as every
survivor was one in a million, or, rather, in several millions, for the
proportion was at least that.”
V
“For two days I sheltered in a pleasant grove where there had been no
deaths. In those two days, while badly depressed and believing that my
turn would come at any moment, nevertheless I rested and recuperated. So
did the pony. And on the third day, putting what small store of tinned
provisions I possessed on the pony’s back, I started on across a very
lonely land. Not a live man, woman, or child, did I encounter, though the
dead were everywhere. Food, however, was abundant. The land then was not
as it is now. It was all cleared of trees and brush, and it was
cultivated. The food for millions of mouths was growing, ripening, and
going to waste. From the fields and orchards I gathered vegetables,
fruits, and berries. Around the deserted farmhouses I got eggs and caught
chickens. And frequently I found supplies of tinned provisions in the
store-rooms.
“A strange thing was what was taking place with all the domestic animals.
Everywhere they were going wild and preying on one another. The chickens
and ducks were the first to be destroyed, while the pigs were the first to
go wild, followed by the cats. Nor were the dogs long in adapting
themselves to the changed conditions. There was a veritable plague of
dogs. They devoured the corpses, barked and howled during the nights, and
in the daytime slunk about in the distance. As the time went by, I noticed
a change in their behavior. At first they were apart from one another,
very suspicious and very prone to fight. But after a not very long while
they began to come together and run in packs. The dog, you see, always was
a social animal, and this was true before ever he came to be domesticated
by man. In the last days of the world before the plague, there were many
many very different kinds of dogs—dogs without hair and dogs with
warm fur, dogs so small that they would make scarcely a mouthful for other
dogs that were as large as mountain lions. Well, all the small dogs, and
the weak types, were killed by their fellows. Also, the very large ones
were not adapted for the wild life and bred out. As a result, the many
different kinds of dogs disappeared, and there remained, running in packs,
the medium-sized wolfish dogs that you know to-day.”
“But the cats don’t run in packs, Granser,” Hoo-Hoo objected.
“The cat was never a social animal. As one writer in the nineteenth
century said, the cat walks by himself. He always walked by himself, from
before the time he was tamed by man, down through the long ages of
domestication, to to-day when once more he is wild.
“The horses also went wild, and all the fine breeds we had degenerated
into the small mustang horse you know to-day. The cows likewise went wild,
as did the pigeons and the sheep. And that a few of the chickens survived
you know yourself. But the wild chicken of to-day is quite a different
thing from the chickens we had in those days.
“But I must go on with my story. I travelled through a deserted land. As
the time went by I began to yearn more and more for human beings. But I
never found one, and I grew lonelier and lonelier. I crossed Livermore
Valley and the mountains between it and the great valley of the San
Joaquin. You have never seen that valley, but it is very large and it is
the home of the wild horse. There are great droves there, thousands and
tens of thousands. I revisited it thirty years after, so I know. You think
there are lots of wild horses down here in the coast valleys, but they are
as nothing compared with those of the San Joaquin. Strange to say, the
cows, when they went wild, went back into the lower mountains. Evidently
they were better able to protect themselves there.
“In the country districts the ghouls and prowlers had been less in
evidence, for I found many villages and towns untouched by fire. But they
were filled by the pestilential dead, and I passed by without exploring
them. It was near Lathrop that, out of my loneliness, I picked up a pair
of collie dogs that were so newly free that they were urgently willing to
return to their allegiance to man. These collies accompanied me for many
years, and the strains of them are in those very dogs there that you boys
have to-day. But in sixty years the collie strain has worked out. These
brutes are more like domesticated wolves than anything else.”
Hare-Lip rose to his feet, glanced to see that the goats were safe, and
looked at the sun’s position in the afternoon sky, advertising impatience
at the prolixity of the old man’s tale. Urged to hurry by Edwin, Granser
went on.
“There is little more to tell. With my two dogs and my pony, and riding a
horse I had managed to capture, I crossed the San Joaquin and went on to a
wonderful valley in the Sierras called Yosemite. In the great hotel there
I found a prodigious supply of tinned provisions. The pasture was
abundant, as was the game, and the river that ran through the valley was
full of trout. I remained there three years in an utter loneliness that
none but a man who has once been highly civilized can understand. Then I
could stand it no more. I felt that I was going crazy. Like the dog, I was
a social animal and I needed my kind. I reasoned that since I had survived
the plague, there was a possibility that others had survived. Also, I
reasoned that after three years the plague germs must all be gone and the
land be clean again.
“With my horse and dogs and pony, I set out. Again I crossed the San
Joaquin Valley, the mountains beyond, and came down into Livermore Valley.
The change in those three years was amazing. All the land had been
splendidly tilled, and now I could scarcely recognize it, ‘such was the
sea of rank vegetation that had overrun the agricultural handiwork of man.
You see, the wheat, the vegetables, and orchard trees had always been
cared for and nursed by man, so that they were soft and tender. The weeds
and wild bushes and such things, on the contrary, had always been fought
by man, so that they were tough and resistant. As a result, when the hand
of man was removed, the wild vegetation smothered and destroyed
practically all the domesticated vegetation. The coyotes were greatly
increased, and it was at this time that I first encountered wolves,
straying in twos and threes and small packs down from the regions where
they had always persisted.
“It was at Lake Temescal, not far from the one-time city of Oakland, that
I came upon the first live human beings. Oh, my grandsons, how can I
describe to you my emotion, when, astride my horse and dropping down the
hillside to the lake, I saw the smoke of a campfire rising through the
trees. Almost did my heart stop beating. I felt that I was going crazy.
Then I heard the cry of a babe—a human babe. And dogs barked, and my
dogs answered. I did not know but what I was the one human alive in the
whole world. It could not be true that here were others—smoke, and
the cry of a babe.
“Emerging on the lake, there, before my eyes, not a hundred yards away, I
saw a man, a large man. He was standing on an outjutting rock and fishing.
I was overcome. I stopped my horse. I tried to call out but could not. I
waved my hand. It seemed to me that the man looked at me, but he did not
appear to wave. Then I laid my head on my arms there in the saddle. I was
afraid to look again, for I knew it was an hallucination, and I knew that
if I looked the man would be gone. And so precious was the hallucination,
that I wanted it to persist yet a little while. I knew, too, that as long
as I did not look it would persist.
“Thus I remained, until I heard my dogs snarling, and a man’s voice. What
do you think the voice said? I will tell you. It said: ‘Where in hell
did you come from??’
“Those were the words, the exact words. That was what your other
grandfather said to me, Hare-Lip, when he greeted me there on the shore of
Lake Temescal fifty-seven years ago. And they were the most ineffable
words I have ever heard. I opened my eyes, and there he stood before me, a
large, dark, hairy man, heavy-jawed, slant-browed, fierce-eyed. How I got
off my horse I do not know. But it seemed that the next I knew I was
clasping his hand with both of mine and crying. I would have embraced him,
but he was ever a narrow-minded, suspicious man, and he drew away from me.
Yet did I cling to his hand and cry.”
Granser’s voice faltered and broke at the recollection, and the weak tears
streamed down his cheeks while the boys looked on and giggled.
“Yet did I cry,” he continued, “and desire to embrace him, though the
Chauffeur was a brute, a perfect brute—the most abhorrent man I have
ever known. His name was... strange, how I have forgotten his name.
Everybody called him Chauffeur—it was the name of his occupation,
and it stuck. That is how, to this day, the tribe he founded is called the
Chauffeur Tribe.
“He was a violent, unjust man. Why the plague germs spared him I can never
understand. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical notions about
absolute justice, that there is no justice in the universe. Why did he
live?—an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the face of nature, a
cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well. All he could talk about was
motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages—and especially, and
with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid swindlings of the
persons who had employed him in the days before the coming of the plague.
And yet he was spared, while hundreds of millions, yea, billions, of
better men were destroyed.
“I went on with him to his camp, and there I saw her, Vesta, the one
woman. It was glorious and... pitiful. There she was, Vesta Van Warden,
the young wife of John Van Warden, clad in rags, with marred and scarred
and toil-calloused hands, bending over the campfire and doing scullion
work—she, Vesta, who had been born to the purple of the greatest
baronage of wealth the world had ever known. John Van Warden, her husband,
worth one billion, eight hundred millions and President of the Board of
Industrial Magnates, had been the ruler of America. Also, sitting on the
International Board of Control, he had been one of the seven men who ruled
the world. And she herself had come of equally noble stock. Her father,
Philip Saxon, had been President of the Board of Industrial Magnates up to
the time of his death. This office was in process of becoming hereditary,
and had Philip Saxon had a son that son would have succeeded him. But his
only child was Vesta, the perfect flower of generations of the highest
culture this planet has ever produced. It was not until the engagement
between Vesta and Van Warden took place, that Saxon indicated the latter
as his successor. It was, I am sure, a political marriage. I have reason
to believe that Vesta never really loved her husband in the mad passionate
way of which the poets used to sing. It was more like the marriages that
obtained among crowned heads in the days before they were displaced by the
Magnates.
“And there she was, boiling fish-chowder in a soot-covered pot, her
glorious eyes inflamed by the acrid smoke of the open fire. Hers was a sad
story. She was the one survivor in a million, as I had been, as the
Chauffeur had been. On a crowning eminence of the Alameda Hills,
overlooking San Francisco Bay, Van Warden had built a vast summer palace.
It was surrounded by a park of a thousand acres. When the plague broke
out, Van Warden sent her there. Armed guards patrolled the boundaries of
the park, and nothing entered in the way of provisions or even mail matter
that was not first fumigated. And yet did the plague enter, killing the
guards at their posts, the servants at their tasks, sweeping away the
whole army of retainers—or, at least, all of them who did not flee
to die elsewhere. So it was that Vesta found herself the sole living
person in the palace that had become a charnel house.
“Now the Chauffeur had been one of the servants that ran away. Returning,
two months afterward, he discovered Vesta in a little summer pavilion
where there had been no deaths and where she had established herself. He
was a brute. She was afraid, and she ran away and hid among the trees.
That night, on foot, she fled into the mountains—she, whose tender
feet and delicate body had never known the bruise of stones nor the
scratch of briars. He followed, and that night he caught her. He struck
her. Do you understand? He beat her with those terrible fists of his and
made her his slave. It was she who had to gather the firewood, build the
fires, cook, and do all the degrading camp-labor—she, who had never
performed a menial act in her life. These things he compelled her to do,
while he, a proper savage, elected to lie around camp and look on. He did
nothing, absolutely nothing, except on occasion to hunt meat or catch
fish.”
“Good for Chauffeur,” Hare-Lip commented in an undertone to the other
boys. “I remember him before he died. He was a corker. But he did things,
and he made things go. You know, Dad married his daughter, an’ you ought
to see the way he knocked the spots outa Dad. The Chauffeur was a
son-of-a-gun. He made us kids stand around. Even when he was croaking he
reached out for me, once, an’ laid my head open with that long stick he
kept always beside him.”
Hare-Lip rubbed his bullet head reminiscently, and the boys returned to
the old man, who was maundering ecstatically about Vesta, the squaw of the
founder of the Chauffeur Tribe.
“And so I say to you that you cannot understand the awfulness of the
situation. The Chauffeur was a servant, understand, a servant. And he
cringed, with bowed head, to such as she. She was a lord of life, both by
birth and by marriage. The destinies of millions, such as he, she carried
in the hollow of her pink-white hand. And, in the days before the plague,
the slightest contact with such as he would have been pollution. Oh, I
have seen it. Once, I remember, there was Mrs. Goldwin, wife of one of the
great magnates. It was on a landing stage, just as she was embarking in
her private dirigible, that she dropped her parasol. A servant picked it
up and made the mistake of handing it to her—to her, one of the
greatest royal ladies of the land! She shrank back, as though he were a
leper, and indicated her secretary to receive it. Also, she ordered her
secretary to ascertain the creature’s name and to see that he was
immediately discharged from service. And such a woman was Vesta Van
Warden. And her the Chauffeur beat and made his slave.
“—Bill—that was it; Bill, the Chauffeur. That was his name. He
was a wretched, primitive man, wholly devoid of the finer instincts and
chivalrous promptings of a cultured soul. No, there is no absolute
justice, for to him fell that wonder of womanhood, Vesta Van Warden. The
grievous-ness of this you will never understand, my grandsons; for you are
yourselves primitive little savages, unaware of aught else but savagery.
Why should Vesta not have been mine? I was a man of culture and
refinement, a professor in a great university. Even so, in the time before
the plague, such was her exalted position, she would not have deigned to
know that I existed. Mark, then, the abysmal degradation to which she fell
at the hands of the Chauffeur. Nothing less than the destruction of all
mankind had made it possible that I should know her, look in her eyes,
converse with her, touch her hand—ay, and love her and know that her
feelings toward me were very kindly. I have reason to believe that she,
even she, would have loved me, there being no other man in the world
except the Chauffeur. Why, when it destroyed eight billions of souls, did
not the plague destroy just one more man, and that man the Chauffeur?
“Once, when the Chauffeur was away fishing, she begged me to kill him.
With tears in her eyes she begged me to kill him. But he was a strong and
violent man, and I was afraid. Afterwards, I talked with him. I offered
him my horse, my pony, my dogs, all that I possessed, if he would give
Vesta to me. And he grinned in my face and shook his head. He was very
insulting. He said that in the old days he had been a servant, had been
dirt under the feet of men like me and of women like Vesta, and that now
he had the greatest lady in the land to be servant to him and cook his
food and nurse his brats. ‘You had your day before the plague,’ he said;
‘but this is my day, and a damned good day it is. I wouldn’t trade back to
the old times for anything.’ Such words he spoke, but they are not his
words. He was a vulgar, low-minded man, and vile oaths fell continually
from his lips.
“Also, he told me that if he caught me making eyes at his woman he’d wring
my neck and give her a beating as well. What was I to do? I was afraid. He
was a brute. That first night, when I discovered the camp, Vesta and I had
great talk about the things of our vanished world. We talked of art, and
books, and poetry; and the Chauffeur listened and grinned and sneered. He
was bored and angered by our way of speech which he did not comprehend,
and finally he spoke up and said: ‘And this is Vesta Van Warden, one-time
wife of Van Warden the Magnate—a high and stuck-up beauty, who is
now my squaw. Eh, Professor Smith, times is changed, times is changed.
Here, you, woman, take off my moccasins, and lively about it. I want
Professor Smith to see how well I have you trained.’
“I saw her clench her teeth, and the flame of revolt rise in her face. He
drew back his gnarled fist to strike, and I was afraid, and sick at heart.
I could do nothing to prevail against him. So I got up to go, and not be
witness to such indignity. But the Chauffeur laughed and threatened me
with a beating if I did not stay and behold. And I sat there, perforce, by
the campfire on the shore of Lake Temescal, and saw Vesta, Vesta Van
Warden, kneel and remove the moccasins of that grinning, hairy, apelike
human brute.
“—Oh, you do not understand, my grandsons. You have never known
anything else, and you do not understand.
“‘Halter-broke and bridle-wise,’ the Chauffeur gloated, while she
performed that dreadful, menial task. ‘A trifle balky at times, Professor,
a trifle balky; but a clout alongside the jaw makes her as meek and gentle
as a lamb.’
“And another time he said: ‘We’ve got to start all over and replenish the
earth and multiply. You’re handicapped, Professor. You ain’t got no wife,
and we’re up against a regular Garden-of-Eden proposition. But I ain’t
proud. I’ll tell you what, Professor.’ He pointed at their little infant,
barely a year old. ‘There’s your wife, though you’ll have to wait till she
grows up. It’s rich, ain’t it? We’re all equals here, and I’m the biggest
toad in the splash. But I ain’t stuck up—not I. I do you the honor,
Professor Smith, the very great honor of betrothing to you my and Vesta
Van Warden’s daughter. Ain’t it cussed bad that Van Warden ain’t here to
see?’”
VI
“I lived three weeks of infinite torment there in the Chauffeur’s camp.
And then, one day, tiring of me, or of what to him was my bad effect on
Vesta, he told me that the year before, wandering through the Contra Costa
Hills to the Straits of Carquinez, across the Straits he had seen a smoke.
This meant that there were still other human beings, and that for three
weeks he had kept this inestimably precious information from me. I
departed at once, with my dogs and horses, and journeyed across the Contra
Costa Hills to the Straits. I saw no smoke on the other side, but at Port
Costa discovered a small steel barge on which I was able to embark my
animals. Old canvas which I found served me for a sail, and a southerly
breeze fanned me across the Straits and up to the ruins of Vallejo. Here,
on the outskirts of the city, I found evidences of a recently occupied
camp.
“Many clam-shells showed me why these humans had come to the shores of the
Bay. This was the Santa Rosa Tribe, and I followed its track along the old
railroad right of way across the salt marshes to Sonoma Valley. Here, at
the old brickyard at Glen Ellen, I came upon the camp. There were eighteen
souls all told. Two were old men, one of whom was Jones, a banker. The
other was Harrison, a retired pawnbroker, who had taken for wife the
matron of the State Hospital for the Insane at Napa. Of all the persons of
the city of Napa, and of all the other towns and villages in that rich and
populous valley, she had been the only survivor. Next, there were the
three young men—Cardiff and Hale, who had been farmers, and
Wainwright, a common day-laborer. All three had found wives. To Hale, a
crude, illiterate farmer, had fallen Isadore, the greatest prize, next to
Vesta, of the women who came through the plague. She was one of the
world’s most noted singers, and the plague had caught her at San
Francisco. She has talked with me for hours at a time, telling me of her
adventures, until, at last, rescued by Hale in the Mendocino Forest
Reserve, there had remained nothing for her to do but become his wife. But
Hale was a good fellow, in spite of his illiteracy. He had a keen sense of
justice and right-dealing, and she was far happier with him than was Vesta
with the Chauffeur.
“The wives of Cardiff and Wainwright were ordinary women, accustomed to
toil with strong constitutions—just the type for the wild new life
which they were compelled to live. In addition were two adult idiots from
the feeble-minded home at Eldredge, and five or six young children and
infants born after the formation of the Santa Rosa Tribe. Also, there was
Bertha. She was a good woman, Hare-Lip, in spite of the sneers of your
father. Her I took for wife. She was the mother of your father, Edwin, and
of yours, Hoo-Hoo. And it was our daughter, Vera, who married your father,
Hare-Lip—your father, Sandow, who was the oldest son of Vesta Van
Warden and the Chauffeur.
“And so it was that I became the nineteenth member of the Santa Rosa
Tribe. There were only two outsiders added after me. One was Mungerson,
descended from the Magnates, who wandered alone in the wilds of Northern
California for eight years before he came south and joined us. He it was
who waited twelve years more before he married my daughter, Mary. The
other was Johnson, the man who founded the Utah Tribe. That was where he
came from, Utah, a country that lies very far away from here, across the
great deserts, to the east. It was not until twenty-seven years after the
plague that Johnson reached California. In all that Utah region he
reported but three survivors, himself one, and all men. For many years
these three men lived and hunted together, until, at last, desperate,
fearing that with them the human race would perish utterly from the
planet, they headed westward on the possibility of finding women survivors
in California. Johnson alone came through the great desert, where his two
companions died. He was forty-six years old when he joined us, and he
married the fourth daughter of Isadore and Hale, and his eldest son
married your aunt, Hare-Lip, who was the third daughter of Vesta and the
Chauffeur. Johnson was a strong man, with a will of his own. And it was
because of this that he seceded from the Santa Rosans and formed the Utah
Tribe at San José. It is a small tribe—there are only nine in it;
but, though he is dead, such was his influence and the strength of his
breed, that it will grow into a strong tribe and play a leading part in
the recivilization of the planet.
“There are only two other tribes that we know of—the Los Angelitos
and the Carmelitos. The latter started from one man and woman. He was
called Lopez, and he was descended from the ancient Mexicans and was very
black. He was a cowherd in the ranges beyond Carmel, and his wife was a
maidservant in the great Del Monte Hotel. It was seven years before we
first got in touch with the Los Angelitos. They have a good country down
there, but it is too warm. I estimate the present population of the world
at between three hundred and fifty and four hundred—provided, of
course, that there are no scattered little tribes elsewhere in the world.
If there be such, we have not heard from them. Since Johnson crossed the
desert from Utah, no word nor sign has come from the East or anywhere
else. The great world which I knew in my boyhood and early manhood is
gone. It has ceased to be. I am the last man who was alive in the days of
the plague and who knows the wonders of that far-off time. We, who
mastered the planet—its earth, and sea, and sky—and who were
as very gods, now live in primitive savagery along the water courses of
this California country.
“But we are increasing rapidly—your sister, Hare-Lip, already has
four children. We are increasing rapidly and making ready for a new climb
toward civilization. In time, pressure of population will compel us to
spread out, and a hundred generations from now we may expect our
descendants to start across the Sierras, oozing slowly along, generation
by generation, over the great continent to the colonization of the East—a
new Aryan drift around the world.
“But it will be slow, very slow; we have so far to climb. We fell so
hopelessly far. If only one physicist or one chemist had survived! But it
was not to be, and we have forgotten everything. The Chauffeur started
working in iron. He made the forge which we use to this day. But he was a
lazy man, and when he died he took with him all he knew of metals and
machinery. What was I to know of such things? I was a classical scholar,
not a chemist.. The other men who survived were not educated. Only two
things did the Chauffeur accomplish—the brewing of strong drink and
the growing of tobacco. It was while he was drunk, once, that he killed
Vesta. I firmly believe that he killed Vesta in a fit of drunken cruelty
though he always maintained that she fell into the lake and was drowned.
“And, my grandsons, let me warn you against the medicine-men. They call
themselves doctors, travestying what was once a noble profession,
but in reality they are medicine-men, devil-devil men, and they make for
superstition and darkness. They are cheats and liars. But so debased and
degraded are we, that we believe their lies. They, too, will increase in
numbers as we increase, and they will strive to rule us. Yet are they
liars and charlatans. Look at young Cross-Eyes, posing as a doctor,
selling charms against sickness, giving good hunting, exchanging promises
of fair weather for good meat and skins, sending the death-stick,
performing a thousand abominations. Yet I say to you, that when he says he
can do these things, he lies. I, Professor Smith, Professor James Howard
Smith, say that he lies. I have told him so to his teeth. Why has he not
sent me the death-stick? Because he knows that with me it is without
avail. But you, Hare-Lip, so deeply are you sunk in black superstition
that did you awake this night and find the death-stick beside you, you
would surely die. And you would die, not because of any virtues in the
stick, but because you are a savage with the dark and clouded mind of a
savage.
“The doctors must be destroyed, and all that was lost must be discovered
over again. Wherefore, earnestly, I repeat unto you certain things which
you must remember and tell to your children after you. You must tell them
that when water is made hot by fire, there resides in it a wonderful thing
called steam, which is stronger than ten thousand men and which can do all
man’s work for him. There are other very useful things. In the lightning
flash resides a similarly strong servant of man, which was of old his
slave and which some day will be his slave again.
“Quite a different thing is the alphabet. It is what enables me to know
the meaning of fine markings, whereas you boys know only rude
picture-writing. In that dry cave on Telegraph Hill, where you see me
often go when the tribe is down by the sea, I have stored many books. In
them is great wisdom. Also, with them, I have placed a key to the
alphabet, so that one who knows picture-writing may also know print. Some
day men will read again; and then, if no accident has befallen my cave,
they will know that Professor James Howard Smith once lived and saved for
them the knowledge of the ancients.
“There is another little device that men inevitably will rediscover. It is
called gunpowder. It was what enabled us to kill surely and at long
distances. Certain things which are found in the ground, when combined in
the right proportions, will make this gunpowder. What these things are, I
have forgotten, or else I never knew. But I wish I did know. Then would I
make powder, and then would I certainly kill Cross-Eyes and rid the land
of superstition—”
“After I am man-grown I am going to give Cross-Eyes all the goats, and
meat, and skins I can get, so that he’ll teach me to be a doctor,” Hoo-Hoo
asserted. “And when I know, I’ll make everybody else sit up and take
notice. They’ll get down in the dirt to me, you bet.”
The old man nodded his head solemnly, and murmured:
“Strange it is to hear the vestiges and remnants of the complicated Aryan
speech falling from the lips of a filthy little skin-clad savage. All the
world is topsy-turvy. And it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.”
“You won’t make me sit up,” Hare-Lip boasted to the would-be medicine-man.
“If I paid you for a sending of the death-stick and it didn’t work, I’d
bust in your head—understand, you Hoo-Hoo, you?”
“I’m going to get Granser to remember this here gunpowder stuff,” Edwin
said softly, “and then I’ll have you all on the run. You, Hare-Lip, will
do my fighting for me and get my meat for me, and you, Hoo-Hoo, will send
the death-stick for me and make everybody afraid. And if I catch Hare-Lip
trying to bust your head, Hoo-Hoo, I’ll fix him with that same gunpowder.
Granser ain’t such a fool as you think, and I’m going to listen to him and
some day I’ll be boss over the whole bunch of you.”
The old man shook his head sadly, and said:
“The gunpowder will come. Nothing can stop it—the same old story
over and over. Man will increase, and men will fight. The gunpowder will
enable men to kill millions of men, and in this way only, by fire and
blood, will a new civilization, in some remote day, be evolved. And of
what profit will it be? Just as the old civilization passed, so will the
new. It may take fifty thousand years to build, but it will pass. All
things pass. Only remain cosmic force and matter, ever in flux, ever
acting and reacting and realizing the eternal types—the priest, the
soldier, and the king. Out of the mouths of babes comes the wisdom of all
the ages. Some will fight, some will rule, some will pray; and all the
rest will toil and suffer sore while on their bleeding carcasses is reared
again, and yet again, without end, the amazing beauty and surpassing
wonder of the civilized state. It were just as well that I destroyed those
cave-stored books—whether they remain or perish, all their old
truths will be discovered, their old lies lived and handed down. What is
the profit—”
Hare-Lip leaped to his feet, giving a quick glance at the pasturing goats
and the afternoon sun.
“Gee!” he muttered to Edwin, “The old geezer gets more long-winded every
day. Let’s pull for camp.”
While the other two, aided by the dogs, assembled the goats and started
them for the trail through the forest, Edwin stayed by the old man and
guided him in the same direction. When they reached the old right of way,
Edwin stopped suddenly and looked back. Hare-Lip and Hoo-Hoo and the dogs
and the goats passed on. Edwin was looking at a small herd of wild horses
which had come down on the hard sand. There were at least twenty of them,
young colts and yearlings and mares, led by a beautiful stallion which
stood in the foam at the edge of the surf, with arched neck and bright
wild eyes, sniffing the salt air from off the sea.
“What is it?” Granser queried.
“Horses,” was the answer. “First time I ever seen ’em on the beach. It’s
the mountain lions getting thicker and thicker and driving ’em down.”
The low sun shot red shafts of light, fan-shaped, up from a cloud-tumbled
horizon. And close at hand, in the white waste of shore-lashed waters, the
sea-lions, bellowing their old primeval chant, hauled up out of the sea on
the black rocks and fought and loved.
“Come on, Granser,” Edwin prompted. And old man and boy, skin-clad and
barbaric, turned and went along the right of way into the forest in the
wake of the goats.
THE END
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