by Robert Reed
the most wonderful achievement of our tremendous civilization was
food—its inconceivable abundance, its infinite variety, its marvel-
lous delicacy . O my grandsons, life was life in those days, when we
had such wonderful things to eat .”
This was beyond the boys, and they let it slip by, words and
thoughts, as a mere senile wandering in the narrative .
“Our food-getters were called freemen . This was a joke . We of
the ruling classes owned all the land, all the machines, everything .
These food-getters were our slaves . We took almost all the food they
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 755
got, and left them a little so that they might eat, and work, and get
us more food—”
“I’d have gone into the forest and got food for myself,” Hare-Lip
announced; “and if any man tried to take it away from me, I’d have
killed him .”
The old man laughed .
“Did I not tell you that we of the ruling class owned all the land,
all the forest, everything? Any food-getter who would not get food
for us, him we punished or compelled to starve to death . And very
few did that . They preferred to get food for us, and make clothes for
us, and prepare and administer to us a thousand—a mussel-shell,
Hoo-Hoo—a thousand satisfactions and delights . And I was Profes-
sor Smith in those days—Professor James Howard Smith . And my
lecture courses were very popular—that is, very many of the young
men and women liked to hear me talk about the books other men
had written .
“And I was very happy, and I had beautiful things to eat . And my
hands were soft, because I did no work with them, and my body was
clean all over and dressed in the softest garments—
“He surveyed his mangy 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 unless you fall into the
water or go swimming .”
“Neither do you Granzer,” Hoo-Hoo 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 .
“You do not know what soap is, and I shall not tell you, for I am
telling the story of the Scarlet Death . You know what sickness is . We
called it a disease . Very many of the diseases came from what we
called germs . Remember that word—germs . A germ is a very small
thing. It is like a woodtick, such as you find on the dogs in the spring
of the year when they run in the forest . Only the germ is very small .
It is so small that you cannot see it—”
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Hoo-Hoo began to laugh .
“You’re a queer un, Granser, talking about things you can’t see .
If you can’t see ’em, how do you know they are? That’s what I want
to know . How do you know anything you can’t see?”
“A good question, a very good question, Hoo-Hoo . But we did
see—some of them . We had what we called microscopes and ultra-
microscopes, and we put them to our eyes and looked through them,
so that we saw things larger than they really were, and many things
we could not see without the microscopes at all . Our best ultrami-
croscopes could make a germ look forty thousand times larger . A
mussel-shell is a thousand fingers like Edwin’s. Take forty mussel-
shells, and by as many times larger was the germ when we looked at
it through a microscope . And after that, we had other ways, by using
what we called moving pictures, of making the forty-thousand-times
germ many, many thousand times larger still . And thus we saw all
these things which our eyes of themselves could not see . Take a
grain of sand . Break it into ten pieces . Take one piece and break it
into ten . Break one of those pieces into ten, and one of those into
ten, and one of those into ten, and one of those into ten, and do it
all day, and maybe, by sunset, you will have a piece as small as one
of the germs .” The boys were openly incredulous . Hare-Lip sniffed
and sneered and Hoo-Hoo snickered, until Edwin nudged them to
be silent .
“The woodtick sucks the blood of the dog, but the germ, being
so very small, goes right into the blood of the body, and there it has
many children . In those days there would be as many as a billion—a
crab-shell, please—as many as that crab-shell in one man’s body .
We called germs micro-organisms . When a few million, or a billion,
of them were in a man, in all the blood of a man, he was sick . These
germs were a disease . There were many different kinds of them—
more different kinds than there are grains of sand on this beach .
We knew only a few of the kinds . The micro-organic world was an
invisible world, a world we could not see, and we knew very little
about it . Yet we did know something . There was the bacillus anthra-
cis; there was the micrococcus; there was the Bacterium termo, and
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 757
the Bacterium lactis—that’s what turns the goat milk sour even to
this day, Hare-Lip; and there were Schizomycetes without end . And
there were many others .…”
Here the old man launched into a disquisition on germs and their
natures, using words and phrases of such extraordinary length and
meaninglessness, that the boys grinned at one another and looked
out over the deserted ocean till they forgot the old man was babbling
on .“But the Scarlet Death, Granser,” Edwin at last suggested .
Granser recollected himself, and with a start tore himself away
from the rostrum of the lecture-hall, where, to another world audi-
ence, he had been expounding the latest theory, sixty years gone, of
germs and germ-diseases .
“Yes, yes, Edwin; I had forgotten . Sometimes the memory of the
past is very strong upon me, and I forget that I am a dirty old man,
clad in 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 sons and daughters married into the
Chauffeurs, the Sacramen-tos, and the Palo-Altos . You, Hare-Lip,
are of the Chauffeurs . You, Edwin, are of the Sacramentos . And you,
Hoo-Hoo, are of the Palo-Altos . Your tribe takes its name from a
town that was near the seat of another great institution of learning . It
was called Stanford University . Yes, I remember now . It is perfectly
clear . I was telling you of the Scarlet Death . Where was I in my
story?”
“You was telling about germs, the things you can’t see but which
make men sick,” Edwin prompted .
“Yes, that’s where I was. A man did not notice at first when only
a few of these germs got into his body . But each germ broke in half
&n
bsp; 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 that was in him . It might be measles, it might be
THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London | 758
influenza, it might be yellow fever; it might be any of thousands and
thousands of kinds of diseases .
“Now this is the strange thing about these germs . There were
always new ones coming to live in men’s bodies . Long and long and
long ago, when there were only a few men in the world, there were
few diseases . But as men increased and lived closely together in
great cities and civilizations, new diseases arose, new kinds of germs
entered their bodies . Thus were countless millions and billions of
human beings killed . And the more thickly men packed together, the
more terrible were the new diseases that came to be . Long before
my time, in the middle ages, there was the Black Plague that swept
across Europe . It swept across Europe many times . There was tuber-
culosis, that entered into men wherever they were thickly packed .
A hundred years before my time there was the bubonic plague .
And in Africa was the sleeping sickness . The bacteriologists fought
all these sicknesses and destroyed them, just as you boys fight the
wolves away from your goats, or squash the mosquitoes that light on
you . The bacteriologists—”
“But, Granser, what is a what-you-call-it?” Edwin interrupted .
“You, Edwin, are a goatherd . Your task is to watch the goats .
You know a great deal about goats . A bacteriologist watches germs .
That’s his task, and he knows a great deal about them . So, as I was
saying, the bacteriologists fought with the germs and destroyed
them—sometimes . There was leprosy, a horrible disease . A hundred
years before I was born, the bacteriologists discovered the germ of
leprosy . They knew all about it . They made pictures of it . I have seen
those pictures . But they never found a way to kill it . But in 1984,
there was the Pantoblast Plague, a disease that broke out in a country
called Brazil and that killed millions of people . But the bacteriolo-
gists found it out, and found the way to kill it, so that the Pantoblast
Plague went no farther . They made what they called a serum, which
they put into a man’s body and which killed the pantoblast germs
without killing the man . And in 1910, there was Pellagra, and also
the hookworm . These were easily killed by the bacteriologists . But
in 1947 there arose a new disease that had never been seen before .
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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 any-
thing; and the bacteriologists were eleven years in discovering how
to kill that particular germ and save the babies .
“In spite of all these diseases, and of all the new ones that contin-
ued to arise, there were more and more men in the world . This was
because it was easy to get food . The easier it was to get food, the
more men there were; the more men there were, the more thickly
were they packed together on the earth; and the more thickly they
were packed, the more new kinds of germs became diseases . There
were warnings . Soldervetzsky, as early as 1929, told the bacteriolo-
gists that they had no guaranty against some new disease, a thousand
times more deadly than any they knew, arising and killing by the
hundreds of millions and even by the billion . You see, the micro-
organic world remained a mystery to the end . They knew there
was such a world, and that from time to time armies of new germs
emerged from it to kill men .
“And that was all they knew about it . For all they knew, in that in-
visible micro-organic world there might be as many different kinds
of germs as there are grains of sand on this beach . And also, in that
same invisible world it might well be that new kinds of germs came
to be . It might be there that life originated—the ‘abysmal fecundity,’
Soldervetzsky called it, applying the words of other men who had
written before him .…”
It was at this point that Hare-Lip rose to his feet, an expression of
huge contempt on his face .
“Granser,” he announced, “you make me sick with your gabble .
Why don’t you tell about the Red Death? If you ain’t going to, say
so, an’ we’ll start back for camp .”
The old man looked at him and silently began to cry . The weak
tears of age rolled down his cheeks and all the feebleness of his
eighty-seven years showed in his grief-stricken countenance .
“Sit down,” Edwin counselled soothingly . “Granser’s all right .
He’s just gettin’ to the Scarlet Death, ain’t you, Granser? He’s just
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goin’ to tell us about it right now . Sit down, Hare-Lip . Go ahead,
Granser .”
III
The old man wiped the tears away on his grimy knuckles and
took up the tale in a tremulous, piping voice that soon strengthened
as he got the swing of the narrative .
“It was in the summer of 2013 that the Plague came . I was twenty-
seven years old, and well do I remember it . Wireless despatches—”
Hare-Lip spat loudly his disgust, and Granser hastened to make
amends .
“We talked through the air in those days, thousands and thou-
sands of miles . And the word came of a strange disease that had
broken out in New York . There were seventeen millions of people
living then in that noblest city of America . Nobody thought anything
about the news . It was only a small thing . There had been only a few
deaths . It seemed, though, that they had died very quickly, and that
one of the first signs of the disease was the turning red of the face
and all the body . Within twenty-four hours came the report of the
first case in Chicago. And on the same day, it was made public that
London, the greatest city in the world, next to Chicago, had been
secretly fighting the plague for two weeks and censoring the news
despatches—that is, not permitting the word to go forth to the rest of
the world that London had the plague .
“It looked serious, but we in California, like everywhere else,
were not alarmed. We were sure that the bacteriologists would find
a way to overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other
germs in the past . But the trouble was the astonishing quickness
with which this germ destroyed human beings, and the fact that it
inevitably killed any human body it entered . No one ever recov-
ered . 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
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the death-cart . But this new plague was quicker than that—much
quicker .
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“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 in-
crease. Then came the scarlet rash, spreading like wildfire over the
face and body . Most persons never noticed the increase in heat and
heart-beat, and the first they knew was when the scarlet rash came
out . Usually, they had convulsions at the time of the appearance of
the rash . But these convulsions did not last long and were not very
severe . If one lived through them, he became perfectly quiet, and
only did he feel a numbness swiftly creeping up his body from the
feet. The heels became numb first, then the legs, and hips, and when
the numbness reached as high as his heart he died . They did not
rave or sleep . Their minds always remained cool and calm up to the
moment their heart numbed and stopped . And another strange thing
was the rapidity of decomposition . No sooner was a person dead
than the body seemed to fall to pieces, to fly apart, to melt away
even as you looked at it . That was one of the reasons the plague
spread so rapidly . All the billions of germs in a corpse were so im-
mediately released .
“And it was because of all this that the bacteriologists had so
little chance in fighting the germs. They were killed in their labo-
ratories even as they studied the germ of the Scarlet Death . They
were heroes . As fast as they perished, others stepped forth and took
their places. It was in London that they first isolated it. The news
was telegraphed everywhere . Trask was the name of the man who
succeeded in this, but within thirty hours he was dead . Then came
the struggle in all the laboratories to find something that would kill
the plague germs . All drugs failed . You see, the problem was to get
a drug, or serum, that would kill the germs in the body and not kill
the body. They tried to fight it with other germs, to put into the body
of a sick man germs that were the enemies of the plague germs—”
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“And you can’t see these germ-things, Granser,” Hare-Lip object-
ed, “and here you gabble, gabble, gabble about them as if they was
anything, when they’re nothing at all . Anything you can’t see, ain’t,
