Jack London - "The Scarlet Plague" - 1912 - Classic Short Stories - AI Narrator

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jack London, The Scarlet Plague, published in nineteen twelve. Chapter one.
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

(00:22):
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

(00:44):
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. As the road was,
it was manifest that it had been of the mono
rail type. An old man and a boy traveled along

(01:07):
this runway. They moved slowly, for the old man was
very old. A touch of palsy made his movements tremulous,
and he leaned heavily upon his staff. A rude skull
cap of goat skin protected his head from the sun.
From beneath this fell a scant fringe of stained and
dirty white hair. A visor ingeniously made from a large

(01:30):
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 wherein camp stain. As his hair fell nearly
to his waist in a great tangled mass, about his
chest and shoulders hung a single mangy garment of goat skin.

(01:50):
His arms and legs, withered and skinny, betokened extreme age,
as well as did their sunburn, and scars and scratches
betokened long years of exposure to the yellms. The boy
who led the way, checking the eagerness of his muscles
to the slow progress of the elder, likewise wore a
single garment, a ragged edged piece of bear skin with

(02:12):
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 quiver full of arrows from a sheath. Hanging

(02:32):
about his neck on a thong projected the battered handle
of a hunting knife. He was as brown as a
berry and walked softly, with almost a catlike tread. In
marked contrast with his sunburned skin were his eyes blue,
deep blue, but keen and sharp as a pair of gimlets.
They seemed to bore into aft about him in a

(02:54):
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

(03:14):
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 seed 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 hull. Suddenly he became alertly tense. Sound, sight and

(03:41):
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

(04:02):
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,

(04:22):
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

(04:45):
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 gun Granzer, 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

(05:09):
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

(05:34):
old man could answer, the boy recollected and triumphantly shoved
his hand into a pouch under his bare skin and
pulled forth a battered and tarnished silver dollar. The old
man's eyes glistened as he held the coin close to them.
I can't see, he muttered, You look and see if
you can make out the date. Edwin, The boy laughed,

(05:58):
You're a great grandzer, he cried lightedly, 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. Twenty twelve, he shrilled and then
fell to cackling grotesquely. That was the year Morgan the
fifth was appointed President of the United States by the

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Board of Magnates. It must have been one of the
last coins minted for the scarlet Death came in twenty thirteen.
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,

(06:40):
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 who who he found it?
When we was heard in goats down near San Jose
last spring? Who who said it was money? Ain't you hungry?
Granser the ancient caught his staff in a tighter grip

(07:02):
and urged along the trail, his old eyes shining greedily.
I hope har 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

(07:24):
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

(07:46):
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

(08:08):
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 Granzur to carry rabbit is good, very good,

(08:33):
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

(08:56):
qualifying phrases. His speech showed distant kins with that of
the old man, and the latter's speech was approximately in
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

(09:16):
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

(09:37):
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

(09:59):
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

(10:23):
that a crab? Who? Who? Ain't that a crab? My? My,
you boys are good to your old grandsire. Who who?
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

(10:46):
quickly as his stiff limbs would let him, he poked
a large rock muscle from out of the coals. The
heat had forced its shells apart, and the meat salmon colored,
was thoroughly cooked between thumb and four finger. In trembling haste,
he caught the morsel and carried it to his mouth,
but it was too hot, and the next moment was

(11:07):
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. Who who danced up

(11:29):
and down while Edwin rolled gleefully on the ground. The
boy with the goats came running to join in the fun.
Set m to cool Edwin, set m to cool The
old man besought in the midst of his grief, making
no attempt to wipe away the tears that still flowed
from his eyes, and cool a crab, Edwin too. You

(11:52):
know your grandsire likes crabs. From the coals arose a
great sizzling which proceeded from the many muscles burnt, opened
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,

(12:15):
we did not laugh at our elders. We respected them.
The boys took no notice, and Granzer 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,

(12:38):
who was called hair Lip slyly, deposited a pinch of
sand on a muscle the ancient was carrying to his mouth,
and when the grid 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.

(13:02):
Where's them crabs? Who? Who? Edwin demanded? Granzer set upon
having a snack again. Granzar'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,

(13:23):
the old man broke off a leg and found it
filled with emptiness. The crabs Who who? He wailed, the crabs,
I was fooling Granzer. 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

(13:46):
old man's cheeks. Then, unnoticed who who replaced the empty
shell with a fresh cooked crab, already dismembered From the
cracked legs. The white meat sent forth a small cloud
of savory steam. This attracted the old man's nostrils, and
he looked down in amazement. The change of his mood

(14:06):
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

(14:28):
and champed his gums while muttering mayonnaise. Just think mayonnaise,
and its 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,

(14:50):
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 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

(15:12):
restaurant where you could get anything you wanted to eat.
For 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

(15:33):
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

(15:57):
he would have managed it if it hadn't been for
the great place. 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

(16:20):
words he used. It was noticeable that in these rambling
soliloquies his English seemed to recrudesse 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.

(16:42):
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.

(17:05):
The dogs about the fire rushed to join their snarling
fellow who guarded the goats, while the goats themselves stampeded
in the direction of their human protectors. A half dozen forms,
lean and gray, glided about on the sand hillocks and
faced the bristling dogs. Edwin arched an arrow that fell
short but hair lip with a sling, such as David

(17:27):
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
Granzer sighed ponderously. He had eaten too much, and with

(17:49):
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

(18:12):
cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed,
and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping
his handiwork away. The weeds in 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,

(18:35):
the wild wolves roam took 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 hair Lips ear. He's
always saying that. He said to Edwin, what is scarlet?

(18:58):
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

(19:19):
is red, ain't it? Hair Lip grumbled? Then what's the
good of gettin kacky 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?

(19:43):
Was the reply. The plague was scarlet. The whole face
and body turned scarlet in an hour's time, Don't I know?
Didn't I see enough of it? And I am telling
you it was scarlet because well, because it was scarlet,
there is no other word for it. Red is good

(20:04):
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,

(20:25):
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 Temiscal? What is education?
Edwin asked, calling red scarlet, hare Lips sneered, then returned

(20:49):
to the attack on Grandzer. My dad told me and
he got it from his dad. Afore he croaked that
your wife was a saint, a Rosan, and 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

(21:09):
Edwin shook his head in token of ignorance. It is
true she was a waitress. Grans are 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.

(21:31):
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? Who? Who 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

(21:54):
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,

(22:16):
and his wife became the wife of Bill, the first chauffeur.
He used to beat her too. I have seen it myself. Who,
who 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

(22:37):
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 hudged along on the ground and peered at
the find plague victims. He announced, that's the way they

(22:58):
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.

(23:19):
Going to string em was the response. The three boys
were now hard at it, and quite a knocking and
hammering arose, in which granz Aer babbled on unnoticed, you
are true savages. Already has begun the custom of wearing
human teeth. In another generation you will be perforating your

(23:40):
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 air. 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

(24:00):
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 her
lip remarked. When the teeth all extracted, they began an

(24:21):
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

(24:43):
of the conjugation of some superior culture. Even the speech
of Granzer 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 swi of babbling to himself, it slowly
purged itself into pure English. The sentences grew longer and

(25:07):
were enunciated with a rhythm and ease that was reminiscent
of the lecture platform. Tell us about the red death Granzer,
hair Lip demanded, when the teeth affair had been satisfactorily
concluded the scarlet death. Edwin corrected, and don't work all
that funny lingo on us. Hair Lip went on. Talk sensible, Granzer,

(25:30):
like a Santa Rosan ought to talk. Other Santa Rosans
don't talk like you. Chapter two. 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.

(25:54):
There you go, hair lip cried hotly. Cut out the
funny stuff and talk sencible. 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

(26:15):
he tells us. Let her go. Granzer, who who 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.

(26:35):
San Francisco alone held four millions. What is millions? Edwin interrupted.
Grandzer 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

(26:58):
of sand. You hold it. Who who? 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.

(27:22):
That makes what I call one hundred. Remember that word
one hundred. Now I put this pebble in hair 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 muscle shell,

(27:45):
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 mines a crude conception of numbers. As the quantity increased,
he had the boys holding different magnitudes in each of
their hands. For still higher sums, he laid the symbols

(28:08):
on the log of driftwood, and for cymbals 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 boy's eyes ranged along from

(28:29):
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,
Granzer Edwin at last, hazarded like sand on the beach. Here,

(28:49):
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.

(29:13):
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 peopled seventeeth there.
That's it, seven millions. Again, the boy's eyes ranged up
and down from Edwin's fingers to the teeth on the log.

(29:36):
The world was full of people. The census of twenty
ten 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

(29:56):
year eighteen hundred there were one hundred and seventy millions
in euro alone. One hundred years later a grain of sand.
Who who? One hundred years later, at nineteen hundred, there
were five hundred millions in Europe. Five grains of sand,
who who? And this one tooth. This shows how easy
was the getting of food and how men increased. And

(30:19):
in the year two thousand 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

(30:40):
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.

(31:03):
What was them? Stone houses for hair 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

(31:24):
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

(31:45):
even sometimes in their time. Was that all you did?
Just talk, talk, talk? Who who demanded? Who hunted your
meat for you? And milk the goats and caught the fish?
A sensible question? Who who? A sensible question? As I

(32:05):
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,

(32:28):
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 marvelous delicacy. Oh, my grandsons, life
was life in those days when we had such wonderful
things to eat. This was beyond the boys, and they

(32:50):
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

(33:11):
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, hair
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

(33:35):
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 an administer to
us a thousand a mussel shell, who who a thousand
satisfactions and delights? And I was Professor Smith. In those days,

(33:58):
Professor James Howard's and my lecture courses were very popular.
That is, very many of the young men and women
like 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

(34:18):
clean all over and dressed in the softest garments. He
surveyed his mangy goat skin with disgust. We did not
wear such things in those days. Even the slaves had
better garments, and we were most clean. We washed our
faces and hands often every day. You boys never wash

(34:40):
unless you fall into the water or go swimming. Neither
do you. Granzer Who who retorted, I know, I know,
I am a filthy old man. But times have changed.
Nobody washes these days. There are no conveniences. It is
sixty years since I have seen a piece of soap.

(35:00):
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 call germs. Remember that word germs. A germ
is a very small thing. It is like a woodtick,

(35:22):
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. Who who? Began to laugh. You're
a queerun granser talking about things you can't see. If
you can't see em, how do you know they are?

(35:44):
That's what I want to know. How do you know
anything you can't see? A good question, A very good question.
Who who? But we did see some of them. We
had what we called microscopes and ultra microscopes, and we
put them to our eyes and looked through them, so
that we saw things larger than they really were, and

(36:05):
many things we could not see without the microscopes at all.
Our best ultra microscopes could make a germ look forty
thousand times larger. A muscle shell is a thousand fingers
like Edwin's. Take forty muscle 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,

(36:28):
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,

(36:52):
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 lips sniffed and sneered, and
who who snickered until Edwin nudged them to be silent.

(37:14):
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

(37:35):
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

(37:57):
we could not see, and we knew very little about it.
Yet we did know something. There was the Bacillus anthrasis.
There was the micrococcus. There was the bacterium termo, and
the Bacterium lacti is. That's what turns the goat milk
sour even to this day hare lip. And there were
schitzo my seats without end, and there were many others.

(38:19):
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.
Grand Sir Edwin at last suggested Granser recollected himself and

(38:42):
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,

(39:02):
and I forget that I am a dirty old man
clad in goat skin, wandering with my savage grandsons, who
are goatherds in the primeval wilderness. The fleeting systems lapse
like foam, and so lapsed our glorious, colossal civilization. I
am Granser, a tired old man. I belong to the
tribe of Santa Rosans. I married into that tribe. My

(39:27):
sons and daughters married into the Chauffers, the sacrament Tos,
and the palo Altos. You, hair Lip, are of the Chauffurs. You, Edwin,
are of the Sacramentos, and you who who are of
the palo Altos. Your tribe takes its name from a
town that was near the seat of another great institution

(39:49):
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.

(40:14):
A man did not notice at first when only a
few of these germs got into his body. But each
germ broke in half and became two germs, and they
kept doing this very rapidly, so that in a short
time there were many millions of them in the body.
Then the man was sick. He had a disease, and
the disease was named after the kind of a germ

(40:35):
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

(40:56):
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

(41:20):
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

(41:40):
the sleeping sickness. The bacteriologists fought all these sicknesses and
destroyed them, just as you boys fight the wolves away
from your goats, or squashed the mosquitoes that light on you.
The bacteriologists. But Granser, what is a what you call it?
Edwin inter erupted you? Edwin are a goatherd. Your task

(42:05):
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

(42:28):
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 nineteen eighty four there
was the pantoblast plague, a disease that broke out in

(42:48):
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 may what they called a serum which they put
into a man's body, in which killed the pantoblast germs
without killing the man. And in nineteen ten there was

(43:08):
poleagra and also the hookworm. These were easily killed by
the bacteriologists. But in nineteen forty seven 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

(43:30):
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,

(43:51):
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 disease.
There were warnings. Sodervitsky as early as nineteen twenty nine
told the bacteriologists that they had no guarantee against some
new disease a thousand times more deadly than any they knew,

(44:14):
a rising 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

(44:34):
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 Sodrovitsky called it, applying the words of

(44:55):
other men who had written before him. It was at
this point that hare Lip rose to his feet, an
expression of huge contempt on his face. Grand Sir, 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, and we'll start back for camp. The old

(45:17):
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 counseled soothingly. Grandsr's all right,
he's just gettin to the Scarlet Death, ain't you, Grandzer.

(45:39):
He's just goin to tell us about it right now?
Sit down, hair Lip, go ahead, Grand ser Chapter three.
The old man wiped the tears away on his grimy
knuckles and took up the tail in a tremulous piping
voice that soon strengthened as he got the swing of
the narrative. It was in the summer of twenty thirteen

(46:02):
that the plague came. I was twenty seven years old,
and well do I remember it? Wireless despatches. Hare Lip
spat loudly his disgust, and Grandzur hastened to make amends.
We talked through the air in those days, thousands and
thousands of miles, and the word came of a strange

(46:24):
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

(46:44):
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 the Chicago, had been secretly fighting the plague for
two weeks and censoring the news dispatches, that is, not

(47:06):
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

(47:26):
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

(47:49):
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

(48:13):
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,

(48:35):
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

(48:55):
and stopped. And another strange thing was the red 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

(49:19):
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.

(49:44):
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 o drug or serum that would
kill the germs in the body and not kill the body.

(50:05):
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, Granzer, hair Lip objected, and hear 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

(50:27):
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 Grandzer promptly began to weep, while Edwin hotly
took up his defense. Look here, hair Lip, you believe

(50:48):
in lots of things you can't see. Hair Lip shook
his head. You believe in dead men walking about? You
never seen one dead man walk about. I tell you
I m 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

(51:11):
Lip's defense. You believe in bad luck, sure, and 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 hair Lip, crushed

(51:32):
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 tail interrupted. While
the boys squabbled among themselves. Also among themselves, they kept
up a constant, low voiced exchange of explanation and conjecture

(51:53):
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,

(52:13):
walking along the street. It was on Tuesday that I
saw my first death, Miss Colbran, 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

(52:35):
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 Colbrand'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

(52:56):
of it and cried, out, my feet all sensation and
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

(53:16):
of note books 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

(53:39):
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 labratories.

(54:01):
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

(54:23):
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,

(54:49):
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.

(55:12):
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.

(55:37):
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 suit case of her personal belongings
and ran out of the house and across the grounds,

(55:59):
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.

(56:23):
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

(56:45):
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

(57:06):
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

(57:29):
happened with them was happening in all the large cities.
A third of the New York police were dead. Their
chief was also dead. Likewise the mayor. All law and
order had ceased. The bodies were lying in the streets
un buried. All railroads and vessels carrying food and such
things into the great city had ceased. Runnings and mobs

(57:51):
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 in

(58:14):
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

(58:35):
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

(58:57):
of the Metchnikov School, had discovered the seer 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,

(59:20):
and that at the best some several score may have
survived the scarlet death on that whole continent. For one
day longer, the despatches continued to come from New York.
Then they too ceased. The man who had sent them,
perched in his lofty building, had either died of the
plague or been consumed in the great conflagrations he had

(59:41):
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.

(01:00:02):
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 from

(01:00:24):
mountain and desert fastnesses, carried the germs. Hundreds of these
airships escaped to Hawaii, and not only did they bring
the plague with them, but they found the plague already
there before them. This we learned by the despatches. Until
all order in San Francisco vanished, and there were no
operators left at their posts to receive or send. It

(01:00:47):
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

(01:01:07):
has been heard of them. Not in sixty years. With
the coming of the Scarlet Death, the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably.
Ten thousand years of culture and civilization passed in the
twinkling of an eye, lapsed like foam. I was telling
about the airships of the rich. They carried the plague

(01:01:28):
with them, and no matter where they fled, they died.
I never encountered but one survivor of any of them,
Monger Sun. He was afterwards a sainta 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

(01:01:49):
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 Legg, who was killed last year by the mountain lion.
Monger son was eleven years old at the time of

(01:02:11):
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

(01:02:33):
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, traveling south, he picked up with us
the Santa Rosans. But I am ahead of my story.

(01:02:57):
When the great exodus from the cities around San Francisco,
Gobey 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

(01:03:19):
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

(01:03:41):
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. Some more newspapers were being printed, so

(01:04:02):
I had no knowledge of what was taking place outside.
I heard sounds of rioting and of pistol shots, and
from my windows I could see the glare of the
sky of some conflagration in the direction of Oakland. It
was a night of terror. I did not sleep a wink.
A man, why and how I do not know, was

(01:04:22):
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,

(01:04:42):
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

(01:05:06):
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

(01:05:27):
come near me. I am a dead man. Then the
convulsion 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

(01:05:50):
up my hand bag 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

(01:06:15):
of the burning filled the heavens, so that the midday
was as a gloomy twilight, and in the shifts of
wind sometimes the sun shone through dimly, a dull red orb. Truly,
my grandsons, it was like the last days of the
end of the world. There were numerous stalled motor cars,
showing that the gasoline and the engine supplies of the

(01:06:36):
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

(01:06:57):
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

(01:07:17):
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

(01:07:39):
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

(01:08:00):
already passed. Civilization was crumbling, and it was each for himself.
Chapter four. I went away hastily down across 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

(01:08:23):
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

(01:08:45):
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

(01:09:08):
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

(01:09:30):
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

(01:09:51):
themselves as well. They inflamed themselves with strong drink, and
committed a thousand atrocities, quarreling and killing one of 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

(01:10:13):
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

(01:10:34):
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

(01:10:54):
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,

(01:11:17):
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,

(01:11:38):
I came upon a party of university folk who were
going in the direction of the chemistry building. They were
all family men, and their families were with them, including
the nurses and the servants. Professor Badminton greeted me. I
had difficulty in recognizing him somewhere he had gone through flames,
and his beard was singed off. About his head was

(01:12:00):
a bloody bandage, and his clothes were filthy. He told
me he had prowlers and that his brother had been
killed the previous night in the defense of their dwelling.
Midway across the campus, he pointed suddenly to missus Swinton's face.
The unmistakable scarlet was there. Immediately, all the other women

(01:12:22):
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,

(01:12:45):
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 part. We were the last to
be admitted to the chemistry building. After that, with our

(01:13:06):
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

(01:13:29):
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 Defense.

(01:13:52):
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 ribbled songs or insanely shouting,
while the world crashed to ruin about them, and all

(01:14:13):
the air was filled with the smoke of its burning.
These low creatures gave rein to their best reality 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.

(01:14:37):
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

(01:14:57):
tore up the cement floor of the central court of
the Chemistry rebuilding 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

(01:15:19):
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

(01:15:40):
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

(01:16:01):
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, Haywoods all were burning,

(01:16:27):
and to the northward, clear to Point Richmond, other fires
were at work. It was an awe inspiring spectacle. Civilization,
my grandson's 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.

(01:16:50):
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 way
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

(01:17:10):
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

(01:17:31):
drifted against our doors. We warned them back, but they
cursed us and discharged a fuselaide from their pistols. Professor Merriweather,
at one of the windows, was instantly killed, the bullets
striking him squarely between the eyes. We opened fire in turn,
and all the prowlers fled away, with the exception of three,

(01:17:52):
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

(01:18:14):
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

(01:18:37):
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

(01:18:59):
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,

(01:19:19):
the first one of us was smitten with the plague,
a little nurse girl and the family of Professor stout.
It was no time for weak need 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

(01:19:40):
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

(01:20:04):
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

(01:20:24):
on them. It was heart trending, 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

(01:20:46):
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

(01:21:09):
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 Pears
and Dombi, a young undergraduate, accompanied me. We had to

(01:21:31):
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.

(01:21:53):
We carried our automatic pistols openly in our hands, and
looked desperate enough forsooth to keep them from a hacking 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 its
staggered down the steps and out along the driveway. Sticking

(01:22:17):
out of his coat pockets were bottles of whisky, 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 slashed down one side of his bewhiskered face,
he was altogether the most nauseating specimen of degradation and

(01:22:38):
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 Dombi through the head. The next instant,
I shot him, but it was too late. Domby expired

(01:23:01):
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

(01:23:22):
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

(01:23:43):
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

(01:24:05):
motor car with several young children and the aged mother
of Professor Fairmead. What hope, 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

(01:24:26):
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

(01:24:47):
the endless miles of suburban residences, traveling 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

(01:25:10):
way all people walked 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

(01:25:34):
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

(01:25:57):
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. Kalgan, a fine young man,
was lost in this work. He was shot by prowlers
while crossing a lawn. Yet this was our only casualty,

(01:26:18):
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 fair Mead was the victim,

(01:26:39):
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 Verandah,
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

(01:27:02):
get away from our dead. In the morning there were
thirty of us. I shall never forget the president of
the faculty. During the mornings 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

(01:27:23):
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 Heywoods, in the
first stretches of country, and in the morning there were
eleven of us that lived. Also during the night, what

(01:27:44):
hope 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 tin 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

(01:28:04):
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 bout 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

(01:28:26):
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

(01:28:49):
of us. Beyond Niles, in the middle of the highway
we found what hope 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

(01:29:11):
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

(01:29:33):
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 chapter five. For two days
I sheltered in a pleasant grove where there had been

(01:29:53):
no deaths in those two days, while badly depressed and
believing that my turn would come at any more. Nevertheless,
I rested and recuperated, so did the pony, and on
the third day, putting what small store of tin provisions
I possessed on the pony's back. I started on across
a very lonely land. Not a live man, woman, or

(01:30:16):
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

(01:30:38):
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

(01:31:01):
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

(01:31:23):
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

(01:31:44):
by man. In the last days of the world, before
the plague, there were many many very different kinds of dogs,
dogs without hair and dogs with warm fur, dogs so
small that they would make scarcely a mouthful for other
dogs that were as large as mountain lions. Well, all
the small dogs and the weak types were killed by

(01:32:05):
their fellows. Also, the very large ones were not adapted
for the wild life and bread 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.
Grans are who who objected. The cat was never a

(01:32:29):
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

(01:32:51):
small mustang horse you know to day. The cows likewise
went wild, as did the pigeons and the sheep, and
that a few of the chickens and 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 traveled

(01:33:12):
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

(01:33:33):
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,

(01:33:55):
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

(01:34:18):
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.

(01:34:38):
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 perlixity of
the old man's tail, urged to hurry by. Edwin Granser
went on, there is little more to tell. With my

(01:35:02):
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 tin 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

(01:35:26):
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

(01:35:48):
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 Sanwa Lauchen Valley, the mountains beyond, and came down
into Livermore Valley. The change in those three years was amazing.

(01:36:08):
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

(01:36:30):
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

(01:36:52):
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

(01:37:13):
of a camp fire 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,

(01:37:36):
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.

(01:37:58):
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 a 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

(01:38:20):
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, wherein hell did you come from? Those were
the words, the exact words. That was what your other

(01:38:44):
grandfather said to me, hare Lip, when he greeted me
there on the shore of Lake Temiscal 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.

(01:39:05):
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? Grandsar's voice faltered

(01:39:25):
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.

(01:39:49):
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.

(01:40:13):
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

(01:40:34):
had employed him in the days before the coming of
the plague. And yet he was spared, while hundreds of millions,
yea billions of better men were destroyed. I went on
with him to his camp, and there I saw her, Vesta,
the one woman. It was glorious n pitiful. There she

(01:40:55):
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 camp fire and doing scullion work. She Vesta,
who had been born to the purple of the greatest
baronage of wealth the world had ever known, John van Warden,
her husband worth one billion, eight hundred millions in president

(01:41:18):
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.

(01:41:41):
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 that Saxon indicated the latter as his successor.

(01:42:04):
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

(01:42:26):
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

(01:42:48):
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 parking entered in the way
of provisions or even male 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

(01:43:11):
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,

(01:43:33):
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 bruis of
stones nor the scratch of briars. He followed, and that

(01:43:55):
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

(01:44:17):
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

(01:44:38):
a corker, but he did things, and he made things go.
You know, Dad married his daughter, and you ought to
see the way he knocked the spots out a dad.
The chauffeur was a son of a gun. He made
us kids stand around even when he was croaking. He
reached out for me once and laid my head open

(01:44:59):
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

(01:45:21):
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

(01:45:41):
with such as he would have been pollution. Oh, I
have seen it once. I remember there was Missus 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
up and made the mistake of handing it to her,

(01:46:02):
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

(01:46:25):
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.

(01:46:48):
The grievous ness of this you will never understand, my grandsons,
for you are yourselves primitive little savages, unaware of aught
else but savagery. Why should Vesta note I was a
man of culture and refinement, a professor in a great university.
Even so, in the time before the plague, such was

(01:47:09):
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, and love her, and know
that her feelings toward me were very kindly. I have

(01:47:33):
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.

(01:47:55):
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

(01:48:18):
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

(01:48:42):
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.

(01:49:03):
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

(01:49:24):
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

(01:49:45):
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 witnessed
to such indignity. But the chauffeur laughed and threatened me

(01:50:07):
with a beating if I did not stay and behold.
And I sat there, perforce by the camp fire 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.

(01:50:27):
You have never known anything else, and you do not
understand halter broken bridle Wise, the chauffeur gloated while she
performed that dreadful menial task. A trifle balky at times, Professor,
a trifle balky, but a cloud alongside the jaw makes
her as meek and gentle as a lamb. And another

(01:50:49):
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 deed in proposition. But I ain't proud. I'll tell
you what, Professor. He pointed at their little infant, barely

(01:51:10):
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 Investa van Warden's daughter. Ain't it cussed

(01:51:33):
bad that van Warden ain't here to see? Chapter six?
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,

(01:51:56):
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

(01:52:17):
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 Valejo. Here,
on the outskirts of the city, I found evidences of
a recently occupied camp. Many clam shells showed me why

(01:52:40):
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 brick
yard at Glen Ellen, I came upon the camp. There
were eighteen souls all told. Two were old men, one

(01:53:01):
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

(01:53:22):
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 Isidore, the greatest prize next to Vesta, of the
women who came through the plague. She was one of

(01:53:43):
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

(01:54:04):
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

(01:54:25):
from the feeble minded home at El Dredge, 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. Hair Lip, in spite of the
sneers of your father, her eye took for wife. She
was the mother of your father Edwin and of yours

(01:54:47):
who who And it was our daughter Vera who married
your father her Lip, your father Sando, 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 Munger Sun, descended from the Magnates,

(01:55:11):
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

(01:55:33):
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 won, and all men. For many years, these three
men lived and hunted together until at last desperate, fearing

(01:55:54):
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 Isidore and Hale, and his eldest son

(01:56:14):
married your aunt, Herr. Lipp, 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 see seeded 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

(01:56:37):
strength of his breed that it will grow into a
strong tribe and play a leading part in the recivilization
of the planet. There are only two other tribes that
we know of, the Los Angelitos and the Carmelitos. The
latter started from one man and woman. He was called Lopez,
and he was descended from the ancient Mexicans and was

(01:56:58):
very black. He was a cowherd in the ranges beyond Carmel,
and his wife was a maid servant in the great
del Monte Hotel. It was seven years before we first
got in touch with the Los ange Liedos. They have
a good country down there, but it is too warm.
I estimate the present population of the world at between

(01:57:20):
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

(01:57:42):
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 prim of savagery along the water courses of

(01:58:02):
this California country. But we are increasing rapidly. Your sister
hair Lip already has four children. We are increasing rapidly
and making ready for a new climb toward civilization. In time,
pressure of population will compel us to spread out, and
a hundred generations from now we may expect our descendants

(01:58:23):
to start across the Sierras, losing slowly along generation by
generation over the Great Continent, to the colonization of the East.
A new arean 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

(01:58:43):
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 used 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

(01:59:06):
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

(01:59:28):
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

(01:59:50):
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 Charlatan's look at young cross eyes posing as a doctor,
selling charms against sickness, giving good hunting, exchanging promises of

(02:00:12):
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

(02:00:33):
he not sent me the death stick? Because he knows
that with me it is without avail? But you hair
lip so deeply are you sunk in black superstition? That
did you awake this night and find the death stick
beside you? You would surely die, and you would die
not because of any virtues in the stick, but because

(02:00:53):
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

(02:01:14):
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

(02:01:34):
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

(02:01:55):
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

(02:02:17):
is called gunpowder. It was what enabled us to kill Shirley.
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.

(02:02:38):
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 who
who asserted? And when I know, I'll make everybody else
sit up and take notice. They'll get in the dirt

(02:03:00):
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,

(02:03:24):
hare Lip boasted to the wood be medicine a 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? Who who? You? I'm going to get Grandzer
to remember this here gunpowder stuff, Edwin said softly, And
then I'll have you all on the run. You hare

(02:03:45):
Lip will do my fighting for me and get my
meat for me? And you who who? Will send the
death stick for me and make everybody afraid? And if
I catch hare Lip trying to bust your head, who who?
I'll fix him with that same gunpowder. Gransur 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

(02:04:05):
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

(02:04:26):
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,

(02:04:48):
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,

(02:05:09):
without end, the amazing beauty in 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 prophet? Hare Lip leaped
to his feet, giving a quick glance at the pasturing

(02:05:31):
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

(02:05:52):
him in the same direction. When they reached the old
right of way, Edwin stopped suddenly and looked back hare
lip and who who? 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

(02:06:12):
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, grands are queried horses?
Was the answer, First time I ever seen am on

(02:06:33):
the beach. It's the mountain lions getting thicker and thicker
and driving em down the low sun shot red shafts
of light fan shaped up from a cloud tumbled horizon,
and close at hand in the white waste of shore
lashed waters. The sea lions, bellowing their old primeval chant,

(02:06:54):
hauled up out of the sea on the black rocks
and fought and loved. Come on, Grand Sir, Edwin h 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.

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Jack London - "The Scarlet Plague" - 1912

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Jack London - "The Scarlet Plague" - 1912