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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-mold,
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 goatskin 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
goatskin. 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 bearskin, 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 all 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 bearskin 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 Jose 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 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 sandon a mussel the 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 foolin', 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 looked down in
savory steam. This attracted 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 clue, 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 or 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 be
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 a 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 Warden. 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 nudged 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 goatskin 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 in
swimming."
"Neither do you, Granser," Hoo-Hoo retorted.
"I know, I know. I am a filthy old man. But times have changed. No-body
washes these days, and 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 goatskin,
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 Sacramentos, 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 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-Up 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." Ê
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 dispatches—"
Hare-Up 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 dispatches—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 defense.
"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 Colibran'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 unburied. All railroads and vessels
carrying food and such things into the great city had ceased running, 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 stayed 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 dispatches 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 dispatches, 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
paeced 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 in 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 mid
-day 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, and 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 been cruelly beaten by 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 re-enter 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, 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 plagues 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
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 today. 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 corning 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 to greatest baronage of wealth the
world has 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 croakin', 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 grievousness 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, ape-like 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 Jose. 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 oily 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-Up, 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-Up, 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, fanshaped, 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. | L******d
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