The Scarlet Plague Page #16

"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

								

was a maidservant in the great Del Monte Hotel. It was seven years
before we first got in touch with the Los Angelitos. They have a
good country down there, but it is 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 anywhere 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 Chauffeur
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 accomplish--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. 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 superstition 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 certain 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 strong servant of
man, which was of old his slave and which some day will be his slave
again.

[Illustration: I have stored many books in a cave 179]

“Quite a different thing is the alphabet. It is what enables me to
know the meaning of fine markings, whereas you boys know only rude
picture-writing. In that dry cave on Telegraph Hill, where you see me
often go when the tribe is down by the sea, I have stored many books.
In them is great wisdom. Also, with them, I have placed a key to the
alphabet, so that one who knows picture-writing may also know print.
Some day men will read again; and then, if no accident has befallen my
cave, they will know that Professor James Howard Smith once lived and
saved for them the knowledge of the ancients.

“There is another little device that men inevitably will rediscover. It
is called gunpowder. It was what enabled us to kill surely and at long
distances. Certain things which are found in the ground, when combined
in the right proportions, will make this gunpowder. What these things
are, I have forgotten, or else I never knew. But I wish I did know. Then
would I make powder, and then would I certainly kill Cross-Eyes and rid
the land of superstition--”

“After I am man-grown I am going to give Cross-Eyes all the goats,
and meat, and skins I can get, so that he'll teach me to be a doctor,”
 Hoo-Hoo asserted. “And when I know, I'll make everybody else sit up and
take notice. They'll get down in the dirt to me, you bet.”

The old man nodded his head solemnly, and murmured:

“Strange it is to hear the vestiges and remnants of the complicated
Aryan speech falling from the lips of a filthy little skin-clad savage.
All the world is topsy-turvy. And it has been topsy-turvy ever since the
plague.”

“You won't make me sit up,” Hare-Lip boasted to the would-be
medicine-man. “If I paid you for a sending of the death-stick and it
didn't work, I'd bust in your head--understand, you Hoo-Hoo, you?”

“I'm going to get Granser to remember this here gunpowder stuff,” Edwin
said softly, “and then I'll have you all on the run. You, Hare-Lip, will
do my fighting for me and get my meat for me, and you, Hoo-Hoo, will
send the death-stick for me and make everybody afraid. And if I catch
Hare-Lip trying to bust your head, Hoo-Hoo, I'll fix him with that same
gunpowder. Granser ain't such a fool as you think, and I'm going to
listen to him and some day I'll be boss over the whole bunch of you.”

The old man shook his head sadly, and said:

“The gunpowder will come. Nothing can stop it--the same old story over
and over. Man will increase, and men will fight. The gunpowder will
enable men to kill millions of men, and in this way only, by fire and
blood, will a new civilization, in some remote day, be evolved. And of
what profit will it be? Just as the old civilization passed, so will the
new. It may take fifty thousand years to build, but it will pass. All
things pass. Only remain cosmic force and matter, ever in flux, ever
acting and reacting and realizing the eternal types--the priest, the

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