by Robert Reed
separate on account of the prowlers . There were not so many now of
these human beasts of prey . The plague had already well diminished
their numbers, but enough still lived to be a constant menace to us .
Many of the beautiful residences were untouched by fire, yet smok-
ing ruins were everywhere . The prowlers, too, seemed to have got
over their insensate desire to burn, and it was more rarely that we
saw houses freshly on fire.
“Several of us scouted among the private garages in search of
motor cars and gasoline. But in this we were unsuccessful. The first
great flights from the cities had swept all such utilities away. Calgan,
a fine young man, was lost in this work. He was shot by prowlers
while crossing a lawn . Yet this was our only casualty, though, once,
a drunken brute deliberately opened fire on all of us. Luckily, he
fired wildly, and we shot him before he had done any hurt.
“At Fruitvale, still in the heart of the magnificent residence sec-
tion of the city, the plague again smote us . Professor Fair-mead was
the victim . Making signs to us that his mother was not to know, he
turned aside into the grounds of a beautiful mansion . He sat down
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 777
forlornly on the steps of the front veranda, and I, having lingered,
waved him a last farewell . That night, several miles beyond Fruit-
vale and still in the city, we made camp . And that night we shifted
camp twice to get away from our dead . In the morning there were
thirty of us . I shall never forget the President of the Faculty . During
the morning’s march his wife, who was walking, betrayed the fatal
symptoms, and when she drew aside to let us go on, he insisted on
leaving the motor car and remaining with her . There was quite a
discussion about this, but in the end we gave in . It was just as well,
for we knew not which ones of us, if any, might ultimately escape .
“That night, the second of our march, we camped beyond Hay-
wards in the first stretches of country. And in the morning there
were eleven of us that lived . Also, during the night, Wathope, the
professor with the wounded leg, deserted us in the motor car . He
took with him his sister and his mother and most of our tinned provi-
sions . It was that day, in the afternoon, while resting by the wayside,
that I saw the last airship I shall ever see . The smoke was much
thinner here in the country, and I first sighted the ship drifting and
veering helplessly at an elevation of two thousand feet . What had
happened I could not conjecture, but even as we looked we saw her
bow dip down lower and lower . Then the bulkheads of the various
gas-chambers must have burst, for, quite perpendicular, she fell like
a plummet to the earth .
“And from that day to this I have not seen another airship . Often
and often, during the next few years, I scanned the sky for them,
hoping against hope that somewhere in the world civilization had
survived . But it was not to be . What happened with us in California
must have happened with everybody everywhere .
“Another day, and at Niles there were three of us . Beyond Niles,
in the middle of the highway, we found Wathope . The motor car had
broken down, and there, on the rugs which they had spread on the
ground, lay the bodies of his sister, his mother, and himself .
“Wearied by the unusual exercise of continual walking, that night
I slept heavily. In the morning I was alone in the world. Canfield
and Parsons, my last companions, were dead of the plague . Of the
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 778
four hundred that sought shelter in the Chemistry Building, and of
the forty-seven that began the march, I alone remained—I and the
Shetland pony . Why this should be so there is no explaining . I did
not catch the plague, that is all . I was immune . I was merely the one
lucky man in a million—just as every survivor was one in a million,
or, rather, in several millions, for the proportion was at least that .”
V
“For two days I sheltered in a pleasant grove where there had
been no deaths . In those two days, while badly depressed and believ-
ing that my turn would come at any moment, nevertheless I rested
and recuperated . So did the pony . And on the third day, putting what
small store of tinned provisions I possessed on the pony’s back, I
started on across a very lonely land . Not a live man, woman, or child,
did I encounter, though the dead were everywhere . Food, however,
was abundant . The land then was not as it is now . It was all cleared
of trees and brush, and it was cultivated . The food for millions of
mouths was growing, ripening, and going to waste. From the fields
and orchards I gathered vegetables, fruits, and berries . Around the
deserted farmhouses I got eggs and caught chickens . And frequently
I found supplies of tinned provisions in the store-rooms .
“A strange thing was what was taking place with all the domestic
animals . Everywhere they were going wild and preying on one an-
other. The chickens and ducks were the first to be destroyed, while
the pigs were the first to go wild, followed by the cats. Nor were the
dogs long in adapting themselves to the changed conditions . There
was a veritable plague of dogs . They devoured the corpses, barked
and howled during the nights, and in the daytime slunk about in the
distance . As the time went by, I noticed a change in their behavior .
At first they were apart from one another, very suspicious and very
prone to fight. But after a not very long while they began to come
together and run in packs . The dog, you see, always was a social
animal, and this was true before ever he came to be domesticated
by man . In the last days of the world before the plague, there were
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 779
many many very different kinds of dogs—dogs without hair and
dogs with warm fur, dogs so small that they would make scarcely a
mouthful for other dogs that were as large as mountain lions . Well,
all the small dogs, and the weak types, were killed by their fellows .
Also, the very large ones were not adapted for the wild life and bred
out . As a result, the many different kinds of dogs disappeared, and
there remained, running in packs, the medium-sized wolfish dogs
that you know to-day .”
“But the cats don’t run in packs, Granser,” Hoo-Hoo objected .
“The cat was never a social animal . As one writer in the nine-
teenth 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 de-
generated into the small mustang horse you know to-day . The cows
likewise went wild, as did the pigeons and the sheep . And that a few
of the chickens survived you know yourself . But the wild chicken of
to-day is quite a different thing from the chickens we had in those
days .
“But I must go on with my story . I travelled through a deserted
land . As the time went by I began to yearn more and more for hu-
man beings . But I never found one, and I grew lonelier and lonelier .
I crossed Livermore Valley and the mountains between it and the
great valley of the San Joaquin . You have never seen that valley,
but it is very large and it is the home of the wild horse . There are
great droves there, thousands and tens of thousands . I revisited it
thirty years after, so I know . You think there are lots of wild horses
down here in the coast valleys, but they are as nothing compared
with those of the San Joaquin . Strange to say, the cows, when they
went wild, went back into the lower mountains . Evidently they were
better able to protect themselves there .
“In the country districts the ghouls and prowlers had been less
in evidence, for I found many villages and towns untouched by fire.
But they were filled by the pestilential dead, and I passed by without
exploring them . It was near Lathrop that, out of my loneliness, I
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 780
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 col-
lie strain has worked out . These brutes are more like domesticated
wolves than anything else .”
Hare-Lip rose to his feet, glanced to see that the goats were safe,
and looked at the sun’s position in the afternoon sky, advertising
impatience at the prolixity of the old man’s tale . Urged to hurry by
Edwin, Granser went on .
“There is little more to tell . With my two dogs and my pony, and
riding a horse I had managed to capture, I crossed the San Joaquin
and went on to a wonderful valley in the Sierras called Yosemite .
In the great hotel there I found a prodigious supply of tinned provi-
sions . The pasture was abundant, as was the game, and the river that
ran through the valley was full of trout . I remained there three years
in an utter loneliness that none but a man who has once been highly
civilized can understand . Then I could stand it no more . I felt that I
was going crazy . Like the dog, I was a social animal and I needed
my kind . I reasoned that since I had survived the plague, there was a
possibility that others had survived . Also, I reasoned that after three
years the plague germs must all be gone and the land be clean again .
“With my horse and dogs and pony, I set out . Again I crossed
the San Joaquin Valley, the mountains beyond, and came down into
Livermore Valley . The change in those three years was amazing . All
the land had been splendidly tilled, and now I could scarcely rec-
ognize it, such was the sea of rank vegetation that had overrun the
agricultural handiwork of man . You see, the wheat, the vegetables,
and orchard trees had always been cared for and nursed by man, so
that they were soft and tender . The weeds and wild bushes and such
things, on the contrary, had always been fought by man, so that they
were tough and resistant . As a result, when the hand of man was
removed, the wild vegetation smothered and destroyed practically
all the domesticated vegetation . The coyotes were greatly increased,
and it was at this time that I first encountered wolves, straying in
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 781
twos and threes and small packs down from the regions where they
had always persisted .
“It was at Lake Temescal, not far from the one-time city of Oak-
land, that I came upon the first live human beings. Oh, my grand-
sons, how can I describe to you my emotion, when, astride my horse
and dropping down the hillside to the lake, I saw the smoke of a
campfire rising through the trees. Almost did my heart stop beating.
I felt that I was going crazy . Then I heard the cry of a babe—a hu-
man babe . And dogs barked, and my dogs answered . I did not know
but what I was the one human alive in the whole world . It could not
be true that here were others—smoke, and the cry of a babe .
“Emerging on the lake, there, before my eyes, not a hundred
yards away, I saw a man, a large man . He was standing on an outjut-
ting rock and fishing. I was overcome. I stopped my horse. I tried
to call out but could not . I waved my hand . It seemed to me that the
man looked at me, but he did not appear to wave . Then I laid my
head on my arms there in the saddle . I was afraid to look again, for
I knew it was an hallucination, and I knew that if I looked the man
would be gone . And so precious was the hallucination, that I wanted
it to persist yet a little while . I knew, too, that as long as I did not
look it would persist .
“Thus I remained, until I heard my dogs snarling, and a man’s
voice . What do you think the voice said? I will tell you . It said:
‘Where in hell did you come from?’
“Those were the words, the exact words . That was what your
other grandfather said to me, Hare-Lip, when he greeted me there
on the shore of Lake Temescal fifty-seven years ago. And they were
the most ineffable words I have ever heard . I opened my eyes, and
there he stood before me, a large, dark, hairy man, heavy-jawed,
slant-browed, fierce-eyed. How I got off my horse I do not know.
But it seemed that the next I knew I was clasping his hand with both
of mine and crying . I would have embraced him, but he was ever a
narrow-minded, suspicious man, and he drew away from me . Yet
did I cling to his hand and cry .”
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 782
Granser’s voice faltered and broke at the recollection, and the
weak tears streamed down his cheeks while the boys looked on and
giggled .
“Yet did I cry,” he continued, “and desire to embrace him, though
the Chauffeur was a brute, a perfect brute—the most abhorrent man
I have ever known . His name was…strange, how I have forgotten
his name . Everybody called him Chauffeur—it was the name of
his occupation, and it stuck . That is how, to this day, the tribe he
founded is called the Chauffeur Tribe .
“He was a violent, unjust man . Why the plague germs spared him
I can never understand . It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysi-
cal notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the uni-
verse . Why did he live?—an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the
face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well . All he could
talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages—and
especially, and with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid
swindlings of the persons who had employed him in the days before
the coming of the plague . And yet he was spared, while hundreds of
millions, yea, billions, of better men were destroyed .
“I went on with him to his camp, and there I saw her, Vesta, the one
woman . I
t was glorious and…pitiful . There she was, Vesta Van War-
den, the young wife of John Van Warden, clad in rags, with marred
and scarred and toil-calloused hands, bending over the campfire and
doing scullion work—she, Vesta, who had been born to the purple of
the greatest baronage of wealth the world had ever known . John Van
Warden, her husband, worth one billion, eight hundred millions and
President of the Board of Industrial Magnates, had been the ruler
of America . Also, sitting on the International Board of Control, he
had been one of the seven men who ruled the world . And she herself
had come of equally noble stock . Her father, Philip Saxon, had been
President of the Board of Industrial Magnates up to the time of his
death. This office was in process of becoming hereditary, and had
Philip Saxon had a son that son would have succeeded him . But
his only child was Vesta, the perfect flower of generations of the
highest culture this planet has ever produced . It was not until the
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 783
engagement between Vesta and Van Warden took place, that Saxon
indicated the latter as his successor . It was, I am sure, a political
marriage . I have reason to believe that Vesta never really loved her
husband in the mad passionate way of which the poets used to sing .
It was more like the marriages that obtained among crowned heads
in the days before they were displaced by the Magnates .
“And there she was, boiling fish-chowder in a soot-covered pot,
her glorious eyes inflamed by the acrid smoke of the open fire. Hers
was a sad story . She was the one survivor in a million, as I had
been, as the Chauffeur had been . On a crowning eminence of the
Alameda Hills, overlooking San Francisco Bay, Van Warden had
built a vast summer palace . It was surrounded by a park of a thou-
sand acres . When the plague broke out, Van Warden sent her there .
Armed guards patrolled the boundaries of the park, and nothing en-
tered in the way of provisions or even mail matter that was not first
fumigated . And yet did the plague enter, killing the guards at their
posts, the servants at their tasks, sweeping away the whole army of
retainers—or, at least, all of them who did not flee to die elsewhere.
So it was that Vesta found herself the sole living person in the palace
that had become a charnel house .