Chapter 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 thousands 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 recovered. 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 the death-cart. But this new plague was quicker
than that--much quicker.
"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 increase. 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 immediately released.
"And it was because of all this that the bacteriologists had so little
chance in fighting the germs. They were killed in their laboratories
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--"
"And you can't see these germ-things, Granser," Hare-Lip objected, "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, that's what. Fighting things that ain't with things that ain't! They must have been all fools in them days. That's why they croaked. I ain't goin' to believe in such rot, I tell you that."
Granser promptly began to weep, while Edwin hotly took up his defence.
"Look here, Hare-Lip, you believe in lots of things you can't see."
Hare-Lip shook his head.