The Last Test
By ADOLPHE de CASTRO
EDITOR'S NOTE--Dr. de Castro was author with Ambrose
Bierce of _The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter_.
(At that time he used his full name, Gustaf Adolf de
Castro Danziger, which he has since shortened to his
ancestral Spanish form, Adolphe de Castro.) We commend
_The Last Test_ to those who appreciate a truly
artistic story, with its suggestions of unthinkable
horrors from the elder world, which sweep through
the story like a cold breeze from the tomb.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales November 1928.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Few persons know the inside of the Clarendon story, or even that there
is an inside not reached by the newspapers. It was a San Francisco
sensation in the days before the fire, both because of the panic and
menace that kept it company, and because of its close linkage with
the governor of the state. Governor Dalton, it will be recalled, was
Clarendon's best friend, and later married his sister. Neither Dalton
nor Mrs. Dalton would ever discuss the painful affair, but somehow the
facts have leaked out to a limited circle. But for that, and for the
years which have given a sort of vagueness and impersonality to the
actors, one would still pause before probing into secrets so strictly
guarded at the time.
The appointment of Dr. Alfred Clarendon as medical director of San
Quentin Penitentiary in 189- was greeted with the keenest enthusiasm
throughout California. San Francisco had at last the honor of harboring
one of the greatest biologists and physicians of the period, and solid
pathological leaders from all over the world might be expected to flock
thither to study his methods, profit by his advice and researches, and
learn how to cope with their own local problems. California, almost
over night, would become a center of medical scholarship with earthwide
influence and reputation.
Governor Dalton, anxious to spread the news in its fullest
significance, saw to it that the press carried ample and dignified
accounts of his new appointee. Pictures of Dr. Clarendon and his new
home near old Goat Hill, sketches of his career and manifold honors,
and popular accounts of his salient scientific discoveries were all
presented in the principal California dailies, till the public soon
felt a sort of reflected pride in the man whose studies of pyemia in
India, of the pest in China, and of every sort of kindred disorder
elsewhere would soon enrich the world of medicine with an antitoxin of
revolutionary importance--a basic antitoxin combating the whole febrile
principle at its very source, and ensuring the ultimate conquest and
extirpation of fever in all its diverse forms.
Back of the appointment stretched an extended and not wholly unromantic
history of early friendship, long separation, and dramatically renewed
acquaintance. James Dalton and the Clarendon family had been friends
in New York ten years before--friends and more than friends, since the
doctor's only sister, Georgina, was the sweetheart of Dalton's youth,
while the doctor himself had been his closest associate and almost his
protegé in the days of school and college. The father of Alfred and
Georgina, a Wall Street pirate of the ruthless elder breed, had known
Dalton's father well; so well, indeed, that he had finally stripped
him of all he possessed in a memorable afternoon's fight on the stock
exchange. Dalton Senior, hopeless of recuperation and wishing to give
his one adored child the benefit of his insurance, had promptly blown
out his brains; but James had not sought to retaliate. It was, as he
viewed it, all in the game; and he wished no harm to the father of the
girl he meant to marry and of the budding young scientist whose admirer
and protector he had been throughout their years of fellowship and
study. Instead, he turned to the law, established himself in a small
way, and in due course of time asked "Old Clarendon" for Georgina's
hand.
Old Clarendon had refused very firmly and loudly, vowing that no
pauper and upstart lawyer was fit to be his son-in-law; and a scene
of considerable violence had occurred. James, telling the wrinkled
freebooter at last what he ought to have been told long before,
had left the house and the city in a high temper; and was embarked
within a month upon the California life which was to lead him to
the governorship through many a fight with ring and politician. His
farewells to Alfred and Georgina had been brief, and he had never
known the aftermath of that scene in the Clarendon library. Only by a
day did he miss the news of Old Clarendon's death from apoplexy, and
by so missing it, changed the course of his whole career. He had not
written Georgina in the decade that followed; knowing her loyalty to
her father, and waiting till his own fortune and position might remove
all obstacles to the match. Nor had he sent any word to Alfred, whose
calm indifference in the face of affection and hero-worship had always
savored of conscious destiny and the self-sufficiency of genius. Secure
in the ties of a constancy rare even then, he had worked and risen
with thoughts only of the future; still a bachelor, and with a perfect
intuitive faith that Georgina also was waiting.
In this faith Dalton was not deceived. Wondering perhaps why no
message ever came, Georgina found no romance save in her dreams and
expectations; and in the course of time became busy with the new
responsibilities brought by her brother's rise to greatness. Alfred's
growth had not belied the promise of his youth, and the slim boy had
darted quietly up the steps of science with a speed and permanence
almost dizzying to contemplate. Lean and ascetic, with steel-rimmed
pince-nez and pointed brown beard, Dr. Alfred Clarendon was an
authority at twenty-five and an international figure at thirty.
Careless of worldly affairs with the negligence of genius, he depended
vastly on the care and management of his sister, and was secretly
thankful that her memories of James had kept her from other and more
tangible alliances.
* * * * *
Georgina conducted the business and household of the great
bacteriologist, and was proud of his strides toward the conquest
of fever. She bore patiently with his eccentricities, calmed his
occasional bursts of fanaticism, and healed those breaches with his
friends which now and then resulted from his unconcealed scorn of
anything less than a single-minded devotion to pure truth and its
progress. Clarendon was undeniably irritating at times to ordinary
folk; for he never tired of depreciating the service of the individual
as contrasted with the service of mankind as a whole, and in censuring
men of learning who mingled domestic life or outside interests with
their pursuit of abstract science. His enemies called him a bore; but
his admirers, pausing before the white heat of ecstasy into which
he would work himself, became almost ashamed of ever having had any
standards or aspirations outside the one divine sphere of unalloyed
knowledge.
The doctor's travels were extensive and Georgina generally accompanied
him on the shorter ones. Three times, however, he had taken long,
lone jaunts to strange and distant places in his studies of exotic
fevers and half-fabulous plagues; for he knew that it is out of the
unknown lands of cryptic and immemorial Asia that most of the earth's
diseases spring. On each of these occasions he had brought back curious
mementoes which added to the eccentricity of his home, not least among
which was the needlessly large staff of eight Tibetan servants picked
up somewhere in U-tsang during an epidemic of which the world never
heard, but amidst which Clarendon had discovered and isolated the
germ of black fever. These men, taller than most Tibetans and clearly
belonging to a stock but little investigated in the outside world, were
of a skeletonic leanness which made one wonder whether the doctor had
sought to symbolize in them the anatomical models of his college years.
Their aspect, in the loose black silk robes of Boupa priests which he
chose to give them, was grotesque in the highest degree; and there was
an unsmiling silence and stiffness in their motions which enhanced
their air of fantasy and gave Georgina a queer, awed feeling of having
stumbled into the pages of _Vathek_ or the _Arabian Nights_.
But queerest of all was the general factotum or clinic-man, whom
Clarendon addressed as Surama, and whom he had brought back with him
after a long stay in Northern Africa, during which he had studied
certain odd intermittent fevers among the mysterious Saharan Tuaregs,
whose descent from the primal race of lost Atlantis is an old
archeological rumor. Surama, a man of great intelligence and seemingly
inexhaustible erudition, was as morbidly lean as the Tibetan servants;
with swarthy, parchmentlike skin drawn so tightly over his bald pate
and hairless face that every line of the skull stood out in ghastly
prominence--this death's-head effect being heightened by lusterlessly
burning black eyes set with a depth which left to common visibility
only a pair of dark, vacant sockets. Unlike the ideal subordinate, he
seemed despite his impassive features to spend an effort in concealing
such emotions as he possessed. Instead, he carried about an insidious
atmosphere of irony or amusement, accompanied at certain moments by
a deep, guttural chuckle like that of a giant turtle which has just
torn to pieces some furry animal and is ambling away toward the sea.
His race appeared to be Caucasian, but could not be classified more
closely than that. Some of Clarendon's friends thought he looked like
a high-caste Hindoo notwithstanding his accent-less speech, while many
agreed with Georgina--who disliked him--when she gave her opinion that
a Pharaoh's mummy, if miraculously brought to life, would form a very
apt twin for this sardonic skeleton.
Dalton, absorbed in his up-hill political battles and isolated from
Eastern interests through the peculiar self-sufficiency of the old
West, had not followed the meteoric rise of his former comrade;
Clarendon had actually heard nothing of one so far outside his chosen
world of science as the governor. Being of independent and even of
abundant means, the Clarendons had for many years stuck to their old
Manhattan mansion in East Nineteenth Street; whose ghosts must have
looked sorely askance at the bizarrerie of Surama and the Tibetans.
Then, through the doctor's wish to transfer his base of medical
observation, the great change had suddenly come, and they had crossed
the continent to take up a secluded life in San Francisco; buying the
gloomy old Bannister place near Goat Hill, overlooking the bay, and
establishing their strange household in a rambling, French-roofed relic
of mid-Victorian design and gold-rush parvenu display, set amidst
high-walled grounds in a region still half suburban.
Dr. Clarendon, though better satisfied than in New York, still felt
cramped for lack of opportunities to apply and test his pathological
theories. Unworldly as he was, he had never thought of using his
reputation as an influence to gain public appointment; though more and
more he realized that only the medical directorship of a government or
a charitable institution--a prison, almshouse, or hospital--would give
him a field of sufficient width to complete his researches and make his
discoveries of the greatest use to humanity and science at large.
Then he had run into James Dalton by sheer accident one afternoon in
Market Street as the governor was swinging out of the Royal Hotel.
Georgina had been with him, and an almost instant recognition had
heightened the drama of the reunion. Mutual ignorance of one another's
progress had bred long explanations and histories, and Clarendon was
pleased to find that he had so important an official for a friend.
Dalton and Georgina, exchanging many a glance, felt more than a trace
of their youthful tenderness; and a friendship was then and there
revived which led to frequent calls and a fuller and fuller exchange of
confidences.
James Dalton learned of his old protegé's need for political
appointment, and sought, true to his protective rôle of school and
college days, to devise some means of giving "Little Alf" the needed
position and scope. He had, it is true, wide appointive powers; but the
legislature's constant attacks and encroachments forced him to exercise
these with the utmost discretion. At length, however, scarcely three
months after the sudden reunion, the foremost institutional medical
office in the state fell vacant. Weighing all the elements with care,
and conscious that his friend's achievements and reputation would
justify the most substantial rewards, the governor felt at last able
to act. Formalities were few, and on the 8th of November, 189--, Dr.
Alfred Schuyler Clarendon became medical director of the California
State Penitentiary at San Quentin.
2
In scarcely more than a month the hopes of Dr. Clarendon's admirers
were amply fulfilled. Sweeping changes in methods brought to the
prison's medical routine an efficiency never before dreamed of; and
though the subordinates were naturally not without jealousy, they
were obliged to admit the magical results of a really great man's
superintendence. Then came a time when mere appreciation might well
have grown to devout thankfulness at a providential conjunction of
time, place, and man; for one morning Dr. Jones came to his new chief
with a grave face to announce his discovery of a case which he could
not but identify as that selfsame black fever whose germ Clarendon had
found and classified.
Dr. Clarendon showed no surprize, but kept on at the writing before him.
"I know," he said evenly; "I came across that case yesterday. I'm glad
you recognized it. Put the man in a separate ward, though I don't
believe this fever is contagious."
Dr. Jones, with his own opinion of the malady's contagiousness, was
glad of this deference to caution; and hastened to execute the order.
Upon his return Clarendon rose to leave, declaring that he would
himself take charge of the case alone. Disappointed in his wish to
study the great man's methods and technique, the junior physician
watched his chief stride away toward the lone ward where he had placed
the patient, more critical of the new regime than at any time since
admiration had displaced his first jealous pangs.
Reaching the ward, Clarendon entered hastily, glancing at the bed and
stepping back to see how far Dr. Jones's obvious curiosity might have
led him. Then, finding the corridor still vacant, he shut the door and
turned to examine the sufferer. The man was a convict of a peculiarly
repulsive type, and seemed to be racked by the keenest throes of
agony. His features were frightfully contracted, and his knees drawn
sharply up in the mute desperation of the stricken. Clarendon studied
him closely, raising his tightly shut eyelids, took his pulse and
temperature, and finally dissolving a tablet in water, forced the
solution between the sufferer's lips. Before long the height of the
attack abated, as shown by the relaxing body and returning normality of
expression, and the patient began to breathe more easily. Then, by a
soft rubbing of the ears, the doctor caused the man to open his eyes.
There was life in them, for they moved from side to side, though they
lacked the fine fire which we are wont to deem the image of the soul.
Clarendon smiled as he surveyed the peace his help had brought, feeling
behind him the power of an all-capable science. He had long known of
this case, and had snatched the victim from death with the work of a
moment. Another hour and this man would have gone--yet Jones had seen
the symptoms for days before discovering them, and having discovered
them, did not know what to do.
Man's conquest of disease, however, can not be perfect. Clarendon,
assuring the dubious trusty-nurses that the fever was not contagious,
had had the patient bathed, sponged in alcohol, and put to bed; but
was told the next morning that the case was lost. The man had died
after midnight in the most intense agony, and with such cries and
distortions of face that the nurses were driven almost to panic. The
doctor took this news with his usual calm, whatever his scientific
feelings may have been, and ordered the burial of the patient in
quicklime. Then, with a philosophic shrug of the shoulders, he made the
usual rounds of the penitentiary.
Two days later the prison was hit again. Three men came down at once
this time, and there was no concealing the fact that a black fever
epidemic was under way. Clarendon, having adhered so firmly to his
theory of non-contagiousness, suffered a distinct loss of prestige,
and was handicapped by the refusal of the trusty-nurses to attend the
patients. Theirs was not the soul-free devotion of those who sacrifice
themselves to science and humanity. They were convicts, serving only
because of the privileges they could not otherwise buy, and when the
price became too great they preferred to resign the privileges.
But the doctor was still master of the situation. Consulting with the
warden and sending urgent messages to his friend the governor, he saw
to it that special rewards in cash and in reduced terms were offered
to the convicts for the dangerous nursing service; and by this method
succeeded in getting a very fair quota of volunteers. He was steeled
for action now, and nothing could shake his poise and determination.
Additional cases brought only a curt nod, and he seemed a stranger
to fatigue as he hastened from bedside to bedside all over the vast
stone home of sadness and evil. More than forty cases developed within
another week, and nurses had to be brought from the city. Clarendon
went home very seldom at this stage, often sleeping on a cot in the
warden's quarters, and always giving himself up with typical abandon to
the service of medicine and of mankind.
* * * * *
Then came the first mutterings of that storm which was soon to convulse
San Francisco. News will out, and the menace of black fever spread over
the town like a fog from the bay. Reporters trained in the doctrine of
"sensation first" used their imagination without restraint, and gloried
when at last they were able to produce a case in the Mexican quarter
which a local physician--fonder perhaps of money than of truth or civic
welfare--pronounced black fever.
That was the last straw. Frantic at the thought of the crawling death
so close upon them, the people of San Francisco went mad en masse, and
embarked upon that historic exodus of which all the country was soon
to hear over busy wires. Ferries and rowboats, excursion steamers and
launches, railways and cable cars, bicycles and carriages, moving-vans
and work carts, all were pressed into instant and frenzied service.
Sausalito and Tamalpais, as lying in the direction of San Quentin,
shared in the flight; while housing space in Oakland, Berkeley,
and Alameda rose to fabulous prices. Tent colonies sprang up, and
improvised villages lined the crowded southward highways from Millbrae
to San Jose. Many sought refuge with friends in Sacramento, while the
fright-shaken residue forced by various causes to stay behind could do
little more than maintain the basic necessities of a nearly dead city.
Business, save for quack doctors with "sure cures" and "preventives"
for use against the fever, fell rapidly to the vanishing-point. At
first the saloons offered "medicated drinks," but soon found that the
populace preferred to be duped by charlatans of more professional
aspect. In strangely noiseless streets persons peered into one
another's faces to glimpse possible plague symptoms, and shopkeepers
began more and more to refuse admission to their clientele, each
customer seeming to them a fresh fever menace. Legal and judicial
machinery began to disintegrate as attorneys and county clerks
succumbed one by one to the urge for flight. Even the doctors deserted
in large numbers, many of them pleading the need of vacations among the
mountains and the lakes in the northern part of the state. Schools and
colleges, theaters and cafés, restaurants and saloons, all gradually
closed their doors; and in a single week San Francisco lay prostrate
and inert with only its light, power, and water service even half
normal, with newspapers in skeletonic form, and with a crippled parody
on transportation maintained by the horse and cable cars.
This was the lowest ebb. It could not last long, for courage and
observation are not altogether dead in mankind; and sooner or later
the non-existence of any widespread black fever epidemic outside San
Quentin became too obvious a fact to deny, notwithstanding several
actual cases and the undeniable spread of typhoid in the insanitary
suburban tent colonies. The leaders and editors of the community
conferred and took action, enlisting in their service the very
reporters whose energies had done so much to bring on the trouble, but
now turning their "sensation first" avidity into more constructive
channels. Editorials and fictitious interviews appeared, telling of
Dr. Clarendon's complete control of the disease, and of the absolute
impossibility of its diffusion beyond the prison walls. Reiteration
and circulation slowly did their work, and gradually a slim backward
trickle of urbanites swelled into a vigorous refluent stream. One of
the first healthy symptoms was the start of a newspaper controversy of
the approved acrimonious kind, attempting to fix blame for the panic
wherever the various participants thought it belonged. The returning
doctors, jealously strengthened by their timely vacations, began
striking at Clarendon, assuring the public that they as well as he
would keep the fever in leash, and censuring him for not doing even
more to check its spread within San Quentin.
Clarendon had, they averred, permitted far more deaths than were
necessary. The veriest tyro in medicine knew how to check fever
contagion; and if this renowned savant did not do it, it was clearly
because he chose for scientific reasons to study the final effects of
the disease, rather than to prescribe properly and save the victims.
This policy, they insinuated, might be proper enough among convicted
murderers in a penal institution, but it would not do in San Francisco,
where life was still a precious and sacred thing. Thus they went on,
and the papers were glad to publish all they wrote, since the sharpness
of the campaign, in which Dr. Clarendon would doubtless join, would
help to obliterate confusion and restore confidence among the people.
But Clarendon did not reply. He only smiled, while his singular
clinic-man Surama indulged in many a deep, testudinous chuckle. He
was at home more nowadays, so that reporters began besieging the gate
of the great wall the doctor had built around his house, instead of
pestering the warden's office at San Quentin. Results, though, were
equally meager; for Surama formed an impassable barrier between the
doctor and the outer world--even after the reporters had got into
the grounds. The newspaper men getting access to the front hall had
glimpses of Clarendon's singular entourage and made the best they
could in a "write-up" of Surama and the queer skeletonic Tibetans.
Exaggeration, of course, occurred in every fresh article, and the net
effect of the publicity was distinctly adverse to the great physician.
Most persons hate the unusual, and hundreds who could have excused
heartlessness or incompetence stood ready to condemn the grotesque
taste manifested in the chuckling attendant and the eight black-robed
Orientals.
* * * * *
Early in January an especially persistent young man from the _Observer_
climbed the moated eight-foot brick wall in the rear of the Clarendon
grounds and began a survey of the varied outdoor appearances which
trees concealed from the front walk. With quick, alert brain he took in
everything--the rose-arbor, the aviaries, the animal cages where all
sorts of mammalia from monkeys to guinea-pigs might be seen and heard,
the stout wooden clinic building with barred windows in the northwest
corner of the yard--and bent searching glances throughout the thousand
square feet of intramural privacy. A great article was brewing, and
he would have escaped unscathed but for the barking of Dick, Georgina
Clarendon's gigantic and beloved St. Bernard. Surama, instant in
his response, had the youth by the collar before a protest could be
uttered, and was presently shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, and
dragging him through the trees to the front yard and the gate.
Breathless explanations and quavering demands to see Dr. Clarendon
were useless. Surama only chuckled and dragged his victim on. Suddenly
a positive fright crept over the dapper scribe, and he began to wish
desperately that this unearthly creature would speak, if only to prove
that he really was a being of honest flesh and blood belonging to this
planet. He became deathly sick, and strove not to glimpse the eyes
which he knew must lie at the base of those gaping black sockets. Soon
he heard the gate open and felt himself propelled violently through;
in another moment waking rudely to the things of earth as he landed
wetly and muddily in the ditch which Clarendon had had dug around the
entire length of the wall. Fright gave place to rage as he heard the
massive gate slam shut, and he rose dripping to shake his fist at the
forbidding portal. Then, as he turned to go, a soft sound grated behind
him, and through a small wicket in the gate he felt the sunken eyes of
Surama and heard the echoes of a deep-voiced, blood-freezing chuckle.
This young man, feeling perhaps justly that his handling had been
rougher than he deserved, resolved to revenge himself upon the
household responsible for his treatment. Accordingly he prepared a
fictitious interview with Dr. Clarendon, supposed to be held in the
clinic building, during which he was careful to describe the agonies
of a dozen black fever patients whom his imagination ranged on orderly
rows of couches. His master-stroke was the picture of one especially
pathetic sufferer gasping for water, while the doctor held a glass of
the sparkling fluid just out of his reach, in a scientific attempt to
determine the effect of a tantalizing emotion on the course of the
disease. This invention was followed by paragraphs of insinuating
comment so outwardly respectful that it bore a double venom. Dr.
Clarendon was, the article ran, undoubtedly the greatest and most
single-minded scientist in the world; but science is no friend to
individual welfare, and one would not like to have one's gravest ills
drawn out and aggravated merely to satisfy an investigator on some
point of abstract truth. Life is too short for that.
Altogether, the article was diabolically skilful, and succeeded in
horrifying nine readers out of ten against Dr. Clarendon and his
supposed methods. Other papers were quick to copy and enlarge upon
its substance, taking the cue it offered, and commencing a series of
"faked" interviews which fairly ran the gamut of derogatory fantasy. In
no case, however, did the doctor condescend to offer a contradiction.
He had no time to waste on fools and liars, and cared little for
the esteem of a thoughtless rabble he despised. When James Dalton
telegraphed his regrets and offered aid, Clarendon replied with an
almost boorish curtness. He did not heed the barking of dogs, and could
not bother to muzzle them. Nor would he thank anyone for messing with a
matter wholly beneath notice. Silent and contemptuous, he continued his
duties with tranquil evenness.
But the young reporter's spark had done its work. San Francisco was
insane again, and this time as much with rage as with fear. Sober
judgment became a lost art; and though no second exodus occurred,
there ensued a reign of vice and recklessness born of desperation, and
suggesting parallel phenomena in mediæval times of pestilence. Hatred
ran riot against the man who had found the disease and was struggling
to restrain it, and a light-headed public forgot his great services
to knowledge in their efforts to fan the flames of resentment. They
seemed, in their blindness, to hate him in person, rather than the
plague which had come to their breeze-cleaned and usually healthy city.
Then the young reporter, playing in the Neronic fire he had kindled,
added a crowning personal touch of his own. Remembering the indignities
he had suffered at the hands of the cadaverous clinic-man, he prepared
a masterly article on the home and environment of Dr. Clarendon, giving
especial prominence to Surama, whose very aspect he declared sufficient
to scare the healthiest person into any sort of fever. He tried to
make the gaunt chuckler appear equally ridiculous and terrible,
succeeding best, perhaps, in the latter half of his intention, since
a tide of horror always welled up whenever he thought of his brief
proximity to the creature. He collected all the rumors current about
the man, elaborated on the unholy depth of his reputed scholarship,
and hinted darkly that it could have been no godly realm of secret and
eon-weighted Africa wherein Dr. Clarendon had found him.
Georgina, who followed the papers closely, felt crushed and hurt by
these attacks upon her brother, but James Dalton, who called often
at the house, did his best to comfort her. In this he was warm and
sincere; for he wished not only to console the woman he loved, but
to utter some measure of the reverence he had always felt for the
starward-bound genius who had been his youth's closest comrade. He told
Georgina how greatness can never be exempted from the shafts of envy,
and cited the long, sad list of splendid brains crushed beneath vulgar
heels. The attacks, he pointed out, formed the truest of all proofs of
Alfred's solid eminence.
"But they hurt just the same," she rejoined, "and all the more because
I know that Al really suffers from them, no matter how indifferent he
tries to be."
Dalton kissed her hand in a manner not then obsolete among well-born
persons.
"And it hurts me a thousand times more, knowing that it hurts you and
Alf. But never mind, Georgie, we'll stand together and pull through it!"
* * * * *
Thus it came about that Georgina came more and more to rely on the
strength of the steel-firm, square-jawed governor who had been her
youthful swain, and more and more to confide in him the things she
feared. The press attacks and the epidemic were not quite all. There
were aspects of the household which she did not like. Surama, cruel
in equal measure to man and beast, filled her with the most unnamable
repulsion; and she could not but feel that he meant some vague,
indefinable harm to Alfred. She did not like the Tibetans, either, and
thought it very peculiar that Surama was able to talk with them. Alfred
would not tell her who or what Surama was, but had once explained
rather haltingly that he was a much older man than would be commonly
thought credible, and that he had mastered secrets and been through
experiences calculated to make him a colleague of phenomenal value for
any scientist seeking nature's hidden mysteries.
Urged by her uneasiness, Dalton became a still more frequent visitor at
the Clarendon home, though he saw that his presence was deeply resented
by Surama. The bony clinic-man formed the habit of glaring peculiarly
from those spectral sockets when admitting him, and would often,
after closing the gate when he left, chuckle monotonously in a manner
that made his flesh creep. Meanwhile Dr. Clarendon seemed oblivious
of everything save his work at San Quentin, whither he went each day
in his launch--alone save for Surama, who managed the wheel while
the doctor read or collated his notes. Dalton welcomed these regular
absences, for they gave him constant opportunities to renew his suit
for Georgina's hand. When he would overstay and meet Alfred, however,
the latter's greeting was always friendly despite his habitual reserve.
In time the engagement of James and Georgina grew to be a definite
thing, and the two awaited only a favorable chance to speak to Alfred.
The governor, whole-souled in everything and firm in his protective
loyalty, spared no pains in spreading propaganda on his old friend's
behalf. Press and officialdom both felt his influence, and he even
succeeded in interesting scientists in the East, many of whom came
to California to study the plague and investigate the anti-fever
bacillus which Clarendon was so rapidly isolating and perfecting.
These doctors and biologists, however, did not obtain the information
they wished; so that several of them left with a very unfortunate
impression. Not a few prepared articles hostile to Clarendon, accusing
him of an unscientific and fame-seeking attitude, and intimating that
he concealed his methods through a highly unprofessional desire for
ultimate personal profit.
Others, fortunately, were more liberal in their judgments, and
wrote enthusiastically of Clarendon and his work. They had seen the
patients, and could appreciate how marvelously he held the dread
disease in leash. His secrecy regarding the antitoxin they deemed
quite justifiable, since its public diffusion in unperfected form
could not but do more harm than good. Clarendon himself, whom many of
their number had met before, impressed them more profoundly than ever,
and they did not hesitate to compare him with Jenner, Lister, Koch,
Pasteur, Metchnikoff, and the rest of those whose whole lives have
served pathology and humanity. Dalton was careful to save for Alfred
all the magazines that spoke well of him, often bringing them in person
as an excuse to see Georgina. They did not, however, produce much
effect save a contemptuous smile; and Clarendon would generally throw
them to Surama, whose deep, disturbing chuckle upon reading formed a
close parallel to the doctor's own ironic amusement.
* * * * *
One Monday evening early in February Dalton called with the definite
intention of asking Clarendon for his sister's hand. Georgina herself
admitted him to the grounds, and as they walked toward the house he
stopped to pat the great dog which rushed up and laid friendly forepaws
on his breast. It was Dick, Georgina's cherished St. Bernard, and
Dalton was glad to feel that he had the affection of a creature which
meant so much to her.
Dick was excited and glad, and turned the governor nearly half about
with his vigorous pressure as he gave a soft quick bark and sprang
off through the trees toward the clinic. He did not vanish, though,
but presently stopped and looked back, softly barking again as if
he wished Dalton to follow. Georgina, fond of obeying her huge pet's
playful whims, motioned to James to see what he wanted; and they both
walked slowly after him as he trotted relievedly to the rear of the
yard where the top of the clinic building stood silhouetted against the
stars above the great brick wall.
The outline of lights within showed around the edges of the dark
window-curtains, so they knew that Alfred and Surama were at work.
Suddenly from the interior came a thin, subdued sound like a cry of
a child--a plaintive call of "Mamma! Mamma!" at which Dick barked,
while James and Georgina started perceptibly. Then Georgina smiled,
remembering the parrots that Clarendon always kept for experimental
uses, and patted Dick on the head either to forgive him for having
fooled her and Dalton, or to console him for having been fooled himself.
As they turned slowly toward the house Dalton mentioned his resolve
to speak to Alfred that evening about their engagement, and Georgina
supplied no objection. She knew that her brother would not relish the
loss of a faithful manager and companion, but believed his affection
would place no barrier in the way of her happiness.
Later that evening Clarendon came into the house with a springy step
and aspect less grim than usual. Dalton, seeing a good omen in this
easy buoyancy, took heart as the doctor wrung his hand with a jovial
"Ah, Jimmy, how's politics this year?" He glanced at Georgina, and she
quietly excused herself, while the two men settled down to a chat on
general subjects. Little by little, amidst many reminders of their old
youthful days, Dalton worked toward his point; till at last he came out
plainly with the crucial query.
"Alf, I want to marry Georgina. Have we your blessing?"
Keenly watching his old friend, Dalton saw a shadow steal over his
face. The dark eyes flashed for a moment, then veiled themselves as
wonted placidity returned. So science or selfishness was at work after
all!
"You're asking an impossibility, James. Georgina isn't the aimless
butterfly she was years ago. She has a place in the service of truth
and mankind now, and that place is here. She's decided to devote her
life to my work--to the household that makes my work possible--and
there's no room for desertion or personal caprice."
Dalton waited to see if he had finished. The same old
fanaticism--humanity versus the individual--and the doctor was going to
let it spoil his sister's life! Then he tried to answer.
"But look here, Alf, do you mean to say that Georgina, in particular,
is so necessary to your work that you must make a slave and martyr
of her? Use your sense of proportion, man! If it were a question of
Surama or somebody in the utter thick of your experiments it might be
different; but after all, Georgina is only a housekeeper to you in the
last analysis. She has promised to be my wife and says that she loves
me. Have you the right to cut her off from the life that belongs to
her? Have you the right----"
"That'll do, James!" Clarendon's face was set and white. "Whether or
not I have the right to govern my own family is no business of an
outsider."
"Outsider--you can say that to a man who----" Dalton almost choked as
the steely voice of the doctor interrupted him again.
"An outsider to my family, and from now on an outsider to my home.
Dalton, your presumption goes just a little too far! Good evening,
Governor!"
And Clarendon strode from the room without extending his hand.
Dalton hesitated for a moment, almost at a loss what to do, when
presently Georgina entered. Her face showed that she had spoken with
her brother, and Dalton took both her hands impetuously.
"Well, Georgie, what do you say? I'm afraid it's a choice between Alf
and me. You know how I feel--you know how I felt before, when it was
your father I was up against. What's your answer this time?"
He paused as she responded slowly.
"James, dear, do you believe that I love you?"
He nodded and pressed her hands expectantly.
"Then, if you love me, you'll wait a while. Don't think of Al's
rudeness. He's to be pitied. I can't tell you the whole thing now,
but you know how worried I am--what with the strain of his work, the
criticisms, and the staring and cackling of that horrible creature
Surama! I'm afraid he'll break down--he shows the strain more than
anyone outside the family could tell. I can see it, for I've watched
him all my life. He's changing--slowly bending under his burdens--and
he puts on his extra bruskness to hide it. You can see what I mean,
can't you, dear?"
She paused, and Dalton nodded again, pressing one of her hands to his
breast. Then she concluded.
"So promise me, dear, to be patient. I must stand by him; I must! I
must!"
Dalton did not speak for a while, but his head inclined in what was
almost a bow of reverence. There was more of Christ in this devoted
woman than he had thought any human being possessed; and in the face of
such love and loyalty he could do no urging.
Words of sadness and parting were brief; and James, whose blue eyes
were misty, scarcely saw the gaunt clinic-man as the gate to the
street was at last opened to him. But when it slammed to behind him
he heard that blood-curdling chuckle he had come to recognize so well,
and knew that Surama was there--Surama, whom Georgina had called her
brother's evil genius. Walking away with a firm step, Dalton resolved
to be watchful, and to act at the first sign of trouble.
3
Meanwhile San Francisco, the epidemic still on the lips of all,
seethed with anti-Clarendon feeling. Actually the cases outside the
penitentiary were very few, and confined almost wholly to the lower
Mexican element whose lack of sanitation was a standing invitation
to disease of every kind; but politicians and the people needed no
more than this to confirm the attacks made by the doctor's enemies.
Seeing that Dalton was immovable in his championship of Clarendon,
the malcontents, medical dogmatists, and ward-heelers turned their
attention to the state legislature; lining up the anti-Clarendonists
and the governor's old enemies with great shrewdness, and preparing to
launch a law--with a veto-proof majority--transferring the authority
for minor institutional appointments from the chief executive to the
various boards or commissions concerned.
In the furtherance of this measure no lobbyist was more active than
Clarendon's chief assistant, Dr. Jones. Jealous of his superior from
the first, he now saw an opportunity for turning matters to his liking;
and he thanked fate for the circumstance--responsible indeed for his
present position--of his relationship to the chairman of the prison
board. The new law, if passed, would certainly mean the removal of
Clarendon and the appointment of himself in his stead; so, mindful of
his own interest, he worked hard for it. Jones was all that Clarendon
was not--a natural politician and sycophantic opportunist who served
his own advancement first and science only incidentally. He was poor,
and avid for salaried position, quite in contrast to the wealthy and
independent savant he sought to displace. So with a rat-like cunning
and persistence he labored to undermine the great biologist above him,
and was one day rewarded by the news that the new law was passed.
Thenceforward the governor was powerless to make appointments to the
state institutions, and the medical directorship of San Quentin lay at
the disposal of the prison board.
Of all this legislative turmoil Clarendon was singularly oblivious.
Wrapped wholly in matters of administration and research, he was blind
to the treason of "that ass Jones" who worked by his side, and deaf to
all the gossip of the warden's office. He had never in his life read
the newspapers, and the banishment of Dalton from his house cut off
his last real link with the world of outside events. With the naïveté
of a recluse, he at no time thought of his position as insecure. In
view of Dalton's loyalty, and of his forgiveness of even the greatest
wrongs, as shown in his dealings with the elder Clarendon who had
crushed his father to death on the stock exchange, the possibility of a
gubernatorial dismissal was, of course, out of the question; nor could
the doctor's political ignorance envisage a sudden shift of power which
might place the matter of retention or dismissal in very different
hands. Thereupon he merely smiled with satisfaction when Dalton left
for Sacramento; convinced that his place in San Quentin and his
sister's place in his household were alike secure from disturbance. He
was accustomed to having what he wanted, and fancied his luck was still
holding out.
The first week in March, a day or so after the enactment of the new
law, the chairman of the prison board called at San Quentin. Clarendon
was out, but Dr. Jones was glad to show the august visitor--his own
uncle, incidentally--through the great infirmary, including the fever
ward made so famous by press and panic. By this time converted against
his will to Clarendon's belief in the fever's non-contagiousness,
Jones smilingly assured his uncle that nothing was to be feared, and
encouraged him to inspect the patients in detail--especially a ghastly
skeleton, once a very giant of bulk and vigor, who was, he insinuated,
slowly and painfully dying because Clarendon would not administer the
proper medicine.
"Do you mean to say," cried the chairman, "that Dr. Clarendon refuses
to let the man have what he needs, knowing his life could be saved?"
"Just that," snapped Dr. Jones, pausing as the door opened to admit
none other than Clarendon himself. Clarendon nodded coldly to Jones and
surveyed the visitor, whom he did not know, with disapproval.
"Dr. Jones, I thought you knew this case was not to be disturbed at
all. And haven't I said that visitors aren't to be admitted except by
special permission?"
But the chairman interrupted before his nephew could introduce him.
"Pardon me, Dr. Clarendon, but am I to understand that you refuse to
give this man the medicine that would save him?"
Clarendon glared coldly, and rejoined with steel in his voice.
"That's an impertinent question, sir. I am in authority here, and
visitors are not allowed. Please leave the room at once."
The chairman, his sense of drama secretly tickled, answered with
greater pomp and hauteur than were necessary.
"You mistake me, sir! I, not you, am master here. You are addressing
the chairman of the prison board. I must say, moreover, that I deem
your activity a menace to the welfare of the prisoners, and must
request your resignation. Henceforth Dr. Jones will be in charge, and
if you wish to remain until your formal dismissal you will take your
orders from him."
It was Wilfred Jones's great moment. Life never gave him another such
climax, and we need not grudge him this one. After all he was a small
rather than a bad man, and he had only obeyed a small man's code of
looking to himself at all costs. Clarendon stood still, gazing at the
speaker as if he thought him mad, till in another second the look of
triumph on Dr. Jones's face convinced him that something important was
indeed afoot. He was icily courteous as he replied.
"No doubt you are what you claim to be, sir. But fortunately my
appointment came from the governor of the state, and can therefore be
revoked only by him."
The chairman and his nephew both stared perplexedly, for they had not
realized to what lengths unworldly ignorance can go. Then the older
man, grasping the situation, explained at some length.
"Had I found that the current reports did you an injustice," he
concluded, "I would have deferred action; but the case of this poor man
and your own arrogant manner left me no choice. As it is----"
But Dr. Clarendon interrupted with a new razor-sharpness in his voice.
"As it is, I am the director in charge at present, and I ask you to
leave this room at once."
The chairman reddened and exploded.
"Look here, sir, who do you think you're talking to? I'll have you
chucked out of here--damn your impertinence!"
But he had time only to finish the sentence. Transformed by the insult
to a sudden dynamo of hate, the slender scientist launched out with
both fists in a burst of preternatural strength of which no one would
have thought him capable. And if his strength was preternatural, his
accuracy of aim was no less so; for not even a champion of the ring
could have wrought a neater result. Both men--the chairman and Dr.
Jones--were squarely hit; the one full in the face and the other on the
point of the chin. Going down like felled trees, they lay motionless
and unconscious on the floor; while Clarendon, now clear and completely
master of himself, took his hat and cane and went out to join Surama
in the launch. Only when seated in the moving boat did he at last give
audible vent to the frightful rage that consumed him. Then, with face
convulsed, he called down imprecations from the stars and the gulfs
beyond the stars; so that even Surama shuddered, made an elder sign
that no book of history records, and forgot to chuckle.
4