by Robert Reed
“Now the Chauffeur had been one of the servants that ran away .
Returning, two months afterward, he discovered Vesta in a little
summer pavilion where there had been no deaths and where she
had established herself . He was a brute . She was afraid, and she
ran away and hid among the trees. That night, on foot, she fled into
the mountains—she, whose tender feet and delicate body had never
known the bruise of stones nor the scratch of briars . He followed,
and that night he caught her . He struck her . Do you understand? He
beat her with those terrible fists of his and made her his slave. It
was she who had to gather the firewood, build the fires, cook, and
do all the degrading camp-labor—she, who had never performed a
menial act in her life . These things he compelled her to do, while
he, a proper savage, elected to lie around camp and look on . He
did nothing, absolutely nothing, except on occasion to hunt meat or
catch fish.”
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“Good for Chauffeur,” Hare-Lip commented in an undertone to
the other boys . “I remember him before he died . He was a corker .
But he did things, and he made things go . You know, Dad married
his daughter, an’ you ought to see the way he knocked the spots
outa Dad . The Chauffeur was a son-of-a-gun . He made us kids stand
around . Even when he was croaking he reached out for me, once, an’
laid my head open with that long stick he kept always beside him .”
Hare-Lip rubbed his bullet head reminiscently, and the boys re-
turned to the old man, who was maundering ecstatically about Vesta,
the squaw of the founder of the Chauffeur Tribe .
“And so I say to you that you cannot understand the awfulness
of the situation . The Chauffeur was a servant, understand, a servant .
And he cringed, with bowed head, to such as she . She was a lord of
life, both by birth and by marriage . The destinies of millions, such
as he, she carried in the hollow of her pink-white hand . And, in the
days before the plague, the slightest contact with such as he would
have been pollution . Oh, I have seen it . Once, I remember, there was
Mrs . Goldwin, wife of one of the great magnates . It was on a landing
stage, just as she was embarking in her private dirigible, that she
dropped her parasol . A servant picked it up and made the mistake
of handing it to her—to her, one of the greatest royal ladies of the
land! She shrank back, as though he were a leper, and indicated her
secretary to receive it . Also, she ordered her secretary to ascertain
the creature’s name and to see that he was immediately discharged
from service . And such a woman was Vesta Van Warden . And her
the Chauffeur beat and made his slave .
“—Bill—that was it; Bill, the Chauffeur . That was his name . He
was a wretched, primitive man, wholly devoid of the finer instincts
and chivalrous promptings of a cultured soul . No, there is no abso-
lute justice, for to him fell that wonder of womanhood, Vesta Van
Warden . The grievous-ness of this you will never understand, my
grandsons; for you are yourselves primitive little savages, unaware
of aught else but savagery . Why should Vesta not have been mine?
I was a man of culture and refinement, a professor in a great univer-
sity . Even so, in the time before the plague, such was her exalted
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 785
position, she would not have deigned to know that I existed . Mark,
then, the abysmal degradation to which she fell at the hands of the
Chauffeur . Nothing less than the destruction of all mankind had
made it possible that I should know her, look in her eyes, converse
with her, touch her hand—ay, and love her and know that her feel-
ings toward me were very kindly . I have reason to believe that she,
even she, would have loved me, there being no other man in the
world except the Chauffeur . Why, when it destroyed eight billions
of souls, did not the plague destroy just one more man, and that man
the Chauffeur?
“Once, when the Chauffeur was away fishing, she begged me to
kill him . With tears in her eyes she begged me to kill him . But he
was a strong and violent man, and I was afraid . Afterwards, I talked
with him . I offered him my horse, my pony, my dogs, all that I pos-
sessed, if he would give Vesta to me . And he grinned in my face and
shook his head . He was very insulting . He said that in the old days
he had been a servant, had been dirt under the feet of men like me
and of women like Vesta, and that now he had the greatest lady in
the land to be servant to him and cook his food and nurse his brats .
‘You had your day before the plague,’ he said; ‘but this is my day,
and a damned good day it is . I wouldn’t trade back to the old times
for anything .’ Such words he spoke, but they are not his words . He
was a vulgar, low-minded man, and vile oaths fell continually from
his lips .
“Also, he told me that if he caught me making eyes at his woman
he’d wring my neck and give her a beating as well . What was I to
do? I was afraid. He was a brute. That first night, when I discovered
the camp, Vesta and I had great talk about the things of our vanished
world . We talked of art, and books, and poetry; and the Chauffeur
listened and grinned and sneered . He was bored and angered by our
way of speech which he did not comprehend, and finally he spoke
up and said: ‘And this is Vesta Van Warden, one-time wife of Van
Warden the Magnate—a high and stuck-up beauty, who is now my
squaw . Eh, Professor Smith, times is changed, times is changed .
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 786
Here, you, woman, take off my moccasins, and lively about it . I
want Professor Smith to see how well I have you trained .’
“I saw her clench her teeth, and the flame of revolt rise in her
face. He drew back his gnarled fist to strike, and I was afraid, and
sick at heart . I could do nothing to prevail against him . So I got up to
go, and not be witness to such indignity . But the Chauffeur laughed
and threatened me with a beating if I did not stay and behold . And I
sat there, perforce, by the campfire on the shore of Lake Temescal,
and saw Vesta, Vesta Van Warden, kneel and remove the moccasins
of that grinning, hairy, apelike human brute .
“—Oh, you do not understand, my grandsons . You have never
known anything else, and you do not understand .
“‘Halter-broke and bridle-wise,’ the Chauffeur gloated, while she
performed that dreadful, menial task. ‘A trifle balky at times, Profes-
sor, a trifle balky; but a clout alongside the jaw makes her as meek
and gentle as a lamb .’
“And another time he said: ‘We’ve got to start all over and re-
plenish the earth and multiply . You’re handicapped, Professor . You
ain’t got no wife, and we’re up against a regular Garden-of-Eden
proposition . But I ain’t proud . I’ll tell you what, Professor .’ He
pointed at their little infant, barely a year old .
‘There’s your wife,
though you’ll have to wait till she grows up . It’s rich, ain’t it? We’re
all equals here, and I’m the biggest toad in the splash . But I ain’t
stuck up—not I . I do you the honor, Professor Smith, the very great
honor of betrothing to you my and Vesta Van Warden’s daughter .
Ain’t it cussed bad that Van Warden ain’t here to see?’”
VI
“I lived three weeks of infinite torment there in the Chauffeur’s
camp . And then, one day, tiring of me, or of what to him was my bad
effect on Vesta, he told me that the year before, wandering through
the Contra Costa Hills to the Straits of Carquinez, across the Straits
he had seen a smoke . This meant that there were still other hu-
man beings, and that for three weeks he had kept this inestimably
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 787
precious information from me . I departed at once, with my dogs and
horses, and journeyed across the Contra Costa Hills to the Straits . I
saw no smoke on the other side, but at Port Costa discovered a small
steel barge on which I was able to embark my animals . Old canvas
which I found served me for a sail, and a southerly breeze fanned
me across the Straits and up to the ruins of Vallejo . Here, on the
outskirts of the city, I found evidences of a recently occupied camp .
“Many clam-shells showed me why these humans had come to
the shores of the Bay . This was the Santa Rosa Tribe, and I followed
its track along the old railroad right of way across the salt marshes
to Sonoma Valley . Here, at the old brickyard at Glen Ellen, I came
upon the camp . There were eighteen souls all told . Two were old
men, one of whom was Jones, a banker . The other was Harrison, a
retired pawnbroker, who had taken for wife the matron of the State
Hospital for the Insane at Napa . Of all the persons of the city of
Napa, and of all the other towns and villages in that rich and popu-
lous valley, she had been the only-survivor . Next, there were the
three young men—Cardiff and Hale, who had been farmers, and
Wainwright, a common day-laborer . All three had found wives . To
Hale, a crude, illiterate farmer, had fallen Isadore, the greatest prize,
next to Vesta, of the women who came through the plague . She was
one of the world’s most noted singers, and the plague had caught
her at San Francisco . She has talked with me for hours at a time,
telling me of her adventures, until, at last, rescued by Hale in the
Mendocino Forest Reserve, there had remained nothing for her to
do but become his wife . But Hale was a good fellow, in spite of his
illiteracy . He had a keen sense of justice and right-dealing, and she
was far happier with him than was Vesta with the Chauffeur .
“The wives of Cardiff and Wainwright were ordinary women, ac-
customed to toil with strong constitutions—just the type for the wild
new life which they were compelled to live . In addition were two
adult idiots from the feeble-minded home at 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, Hare-
Lip, in spite of the sneers of your father . Her I took for wife . She
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 788
was the mother of your father, Edwin, and of yours, Hoo-Hoo . And
it was our daughter, Vera, who married your father, Hare-Lip—your
father, Sandow, who was the oldest son of Vesta Van Warden and
the Chauffeur .
“And so it was that I became the nineteenth member of the Santa
Rosa Tribe . There were only two outsiders added after me . One was
Mungerson, descended from the Magnates, who wandered alone
in the wilds of Northern California for eight years before he came
south and joined us . He it was who waited twelve years more be-
fore he married my daughter, Mary . The other was Johnson, the man
who founded the Utah Tribe . That was where he came from, Utah,
a country that lies very far away from here, across the great des-
erts, to the east . It was not until twenty-seven years after the plague
that Johnson reached California . In all that Utah region he reported
but three survivors, himself one, and all men . For many years these
three men lived and hunted together, until, at last, desperate, fearing
that with them the human race would perish utterly from the planet,
they headed westward on the possibility of finding women survivors
in California . Johnson alone came through the great desert, where
his two companions died . He was forty-six years old when he joined
us, and he married the fourth daughter of Isadore and Hale, and his
eldest son married your aunt, Hare-Lip, who was the third daughter
of Vesta and the Chauffeur . Johnson was a strong man, with a will
of his own . And it was because of this that he seceded from the
Santa Rosans and formed the Utah Tribe at San José . It is a small
tribe—there are only nine in it; but, though he is dead, such was his
influence and the strength of his breed, that it will grow into a strong
tribe and play a leading part in the recivilization of the planet .
“There are only two other tribes that we know of—the Los An-
gelitos and the Carmelitos . The latter started from one man and
woman . He was called Lopez, and he was descended from the an-
cient Mexicans and was very black . He was a cowherd in the ranges
beyond Carmel, and his wife was a maidservant in the great Del
Monte Hotel. It was seven years before we first got in touch with
the Los Ange-litos . They have a good country down there, but it is
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too warm . I estimate the present population of the world at between
three hundred and fifty and four hundred—provided, of course, that
there are no scattered little tribes elsewhere in the world . If there
be such, we have not heard from them . Since Johnson crossed the
desert from Utah, no word nor sign has come from the East or any-
where else . The great world which I knew in my boyhood and early
manhood is gone . It has ceased to be . I am the last man who was
alive in the days of the plague and who knows the wonders of that
far-off time . We, who mastered the planet—its earth, and sea, and
sky—and who were as very gods, now live in primitive savagery
along the water courses of this California country .
“But we are increasing rapidly—your sister, Hare-Lip, already
has four children . We are increasing rapidly and making ready for
a new climb toward civilization . In time, pressure of population
will compel us to spread out, and a hundred generations from now
we may expect our descendants to start across the Sierras, oozing
slowly along, generation by generation, over the great continent to
the colonization of the East—a new Aryan drift around the world .
“But it will be slow, very slow; we have so far to climb . We fell
so hopelessly far . If only one physicist or one chemist had survived!
But it was not to be, and we have forgotten everything . The Chauf-
&nbs
p; feur started working in iron . He made the forge which we use to
this day . But he was a lazy man, and when he died he took with him
all he knew of metals and machinery . What was I to know of such
things? I was a classical scholar, not a chemist . The other men who
survived were not educated . Only two things did the Chauffeur ac-
complish—the brewing of strong drink and the growing of tobacco .
It was while he was drunk, once, that he killed Vesta. I firmly believe
that he killed Vesta in a fit of drunken cruelty though he always
maintained that she fell into the lake and was drowned .
“And, my grandsons, let me warn you against the medicine-men .
They call themselves doctors, travestying what was once a noble
profession, but in reality they are medicine-men, devil-devil men,
and they make for superstition and darkness . They are cheats and
liars . But so debased and degraded are we, that we believe their lies .
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 790
They, too, will increase in numbers as we increase, and they will
strive to rule us . Yet are they liars and charlatans . Look at young
Cross-Eyes, posing as a doctor, selling charms against sickness,
giving good hunting, exchanging promises of fair weather for good
meat and skins, sending the death-stick, performing a thousand
abominations . Yet I say to you, that when he says he can do these
things, he lies . I, Professor Smith, Professor James Howard Smith,
say that he lies . I have told him so to his teeth . Why has he not sent
me the death-stick? Because he knows that with me it is without
avail . But you, Hare-Lip, so deeply are you sunk in black supersti-
tion that did you awake this night and find the death-stick beside
you, you would surely die . And you would die, not because of any
virtues in the stick, but because you are a savage with the dark and
clouded mind of a savage .
“The doctors must be destroyed, and all that was lost must be
discovered over again . Wherefore, earnestly, I repeat unto you cer-
tain things which you must remember and tell to your children after
you. You must tell them that when water is made hot by fire, there
resides in it a wonderful thing called steam, which is stronger than
ten thousand men and which can do all man’s work for him . There
are other very useful things. In the lightning flash resides a similarly