Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 170, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 July 1915 — The SCARIET PLAGUE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The SCARIET PLAGUE

by JACK LONDON

(OPVKIOHr 101-V- 49 AVCLVnaB MmiBNW SW»DICATB'

CHAPTER IV. Beginning of Life Anew. "But I must go on with my story. I traveled through a deserted land. As the time went by I began to yearn more and more for human beings. But I never found one, and I grew lonelier and lonelier. I crossed Livermore valley and the mountains between It and the great valley of the San Joaquin. You have never seen that valley. but It is very large and it is the home of the wild horse. There are great droves there, thousands and tens of thousands. I revisited it thirty years after, so 1 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 bad been less in evidence, for I found many villages and towns untouched by fire. But they were filled by the pestilential dead, and I passed by without exploring them. It was near Lathrop that, out of my loneliness, I picked up a pair of oollie 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 these very dogs there that you hoys have today. But in sixty years the collie strain has worked out. Those 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 ot the old man’s tale. Urged to hurry by Edwin, Ganser went on:

"There is little more to tell. With my two dogs and my pony, and riding a horse I had managed to capture, I crossed the San Joaquin and went on to a wonderful valley in the Sierras called Yosemite. In the great hotel there I found a prodigious supply of tinned provisions. The pasture was abundant, as was the game, and the river that ran through the valley was full of trout. I remained there three years in an utter loneliness that none but a man who has once been highly civilised can understand. Then I could stand it no more. I felt that I was going craxy. Like the dog, 1 was a social animal and needed my kind. I reasoned that since I had survived the plague, there was a possibility that others had survived. Also, I reasoned that after three years the plague germs must all be gone and the land be clean again. “With my horse and dogs and pony, I set out. Again I crossed the San Joaquin valley, the mountains beyond, and came down into Livermore valley. The change in those three years was amazing. All the land had been splendidly tilled, and now I could scarcely recognize it, such was the sea of rank vegetation that had overrun the agricultural handiwork of man You see, the wheat, the vegetables, and orchard trees had always been cared for and nursed by man, so that they were soft and tender. The weeds and wild bushes and such things, on the contrary, had always been fought by man, so that they were tough and resistant As a result when the hand of man was removed the wild vegetation smothered and destroyed practically all the domesticated vegetation. The coyotes were greatly increased, and it was at this time that I first encountered wolves, straying in twos and threes and small packs, down from the wild 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 being. Oh, my grandsons, how can I describe to you my emotions, when, astride my horse and dropping down the hillside to the lake, I saw the smoke of a campfire rising through the trees. Almost did my heart stop beating. I felt that I was going crazy. Then I heard the cry of a babe —a human babe. And dogs barked and my dogs answered. I did not know but that I was the one human alive in the whole world. It could not be true that there 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 outfitting rock and fishing. I was overcome. I stopped my horse. I tried to call out, but ,eould 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 hand 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. , "Tims I remained, until I heard my *

dogs snarling, and 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 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 uarrbw-mlud-ed, suspicious man, and he drew away from me. Yet did I cling to his hand and cry.” Granser’s voice faltered and broke at the recollection, and the weak tears streamed down his cheeks while the boys looked on and giggled. “Yet did I cry,” he continued, “and desire to embrace him, though the Chauffeur was a brute, a perfect brute —the most abhorrent man I have ever known. His name was . . , strange, how I have forgotten his name. Everybody called him Chauffeur —it was the name of his occupation, and it stuck. That is how, to this day, the tribe he founded is called the Chauffeur tribe. “He was a violent, unjust man. Why the plague spared him I can never undersland. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the universe. Why did he live? —an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well. All he could talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garage —and especially with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid swindlings of the persons who had employed him In the days before the coming of the plague. And yet he was spared, while hundreds of millions, yea, billions, of better men were destroyed: “I went on with him to his camp, and there I saw her, Vesta, the one woman. It was glorious and . . . pitiful. There she was, Vesta Van Warden, the young wife of John Van Warden, clad in rags, with marred and scarred and toil-calloused hands, bending over the campfire and doing scullion work—she, Vesta, who had been born to the purple of the greatest baronage of wealth the world had ever known. John Van Warden, her husband, worth one billion eight hundred millions, and president of the Board of Industrial Magnates, had been the ruler of America. Also, sitting on the Industrial Board of Control, he had been one of the seven men who ruled the world. And she herself had come of equally noble stock. Her father, Philip Saxon, had been President of the Board of Industrial Magnates up to the time of his death. This office was in process of becoming hereditary, and had Philip Saxon had a son that son would have succeeded him. But his only child was Vesta, the perfect flower of generations of the highest culture this planet has ever produced. It was not until the engagement between Vesta and Van Warden took place that Saxon indicated the latter as his successor. It was, lam 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 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. Here was a sad story. She was the one survivor in a million, as I had been, as the Chauffeur had been. On a crowning eminence of the Alameda Hills, overlooking San Francisco Bay, Van Warden had built a vast summer palace. It was surrounded by a park of a thousand acres. When the plague broke out. Van Warden sent her there. Armed guards patrolled the boundaries of the park, and nothing entered in the way of provisions or even mall 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 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 Veata 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 briers. He UA--7 *.~c-

lowed, 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 be compelled her to do, while he, a proper savage, elected to He 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 understone to the other boys. “I remember him before he died. He was a corker. But he did things, and he made things go. You know, dad married his daughter, an’ you ought to see the way he knocked the spots outa dad. The Chauffeur was a son of a gun. He made us kids stand around. Even when he was croakin’ he reached out for me once an’ laid my head open with that long stick he kept always beside him.” Hare-Lip rubbed his bullet head reminiscently, and the boys returned to the old man, who was maundering ecstatically about Vesta, the squaw of the founder of the Chauffeur tribe. “And so I say to you that you cannot understand the awfulness of the situation. The Chauffeur was a servant, understand, a servant. And he cringed, with bowed head, to such os 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 a Mrs. Goldwin, wife of one of the great magnates. It was on a landing stage, just as she was embarking in her private dirigible, that she dropped her parasol. A servant picked it up and made the mistake of handing it to her —to her, one of the greatest royal ladies of the land! She shrank back, as though he were a leper, and indicated her secretary to receive it Also, she ordered her secretary to ascertain the creature’s name and to see that he was immediately discharged' from service. And such a woman was Vesta Van Warden. And her the Chauffeur beat and made his slave. “ —Bill —that was it; Bill, the Chauffeur. That was his name. He was a

wretched, primitive man, wholly devoid of the finer instincts and chivalrous promptings of a cultured soul. No, there is no absolute justice, for to him fell that wonder of womanhood, Vesta Van Warden. The grievousness of this you will never understand, my grandsons; for you are yourselves primitive little savages, unaware of aught else but savagery. Why should Vesta not have been mine? I was a man of culture and refinement, a professor in a great university. Even so, In the time before the plague, such was her exalted position, she would not have deigned to know that I existed. Mark, then, the abysmal degradation to which she fell at the hands of the Chauffeur. Nothing less than the destruction of all mankind had made it possible that I should know her, look in her eyes, converse with her, touch her hand —aye, and love her and know that her feelings toward me were very kindly. I have reason to believe that she, even she, would have loved me, there being no other man in the world except the Chauffeur. Why, when it destroyed eight billions of souls, did not the plague destroy just one more man, and that man the Chauffeur? (TO BE CONTINUED.)

With My Horse and Dogs and Pony I Set Out.