The Scarlet Plague Page #13

"The Scarlet Plague" by Jack London, published in 1912, is a post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2073, sixty years after a deadly pandemic—called the Scarlet Plague—wiped out most of humanity in 2013.

• Novel

								

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 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 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 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 outjutting 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.”

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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.

“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.”

“Good for Chauffeur,” Hare-Lip commented in an undertone to the other
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