object:1f.lovecraft - The Last Test
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
with Adolphe de Castro
I.
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 honour of
harbouring 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 centre 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 honours,
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
protégé 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
savoured 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 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 Thibetan 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 Thibetans 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 symbolise in them the anatomical models of his college years.
Their aspect, in the loose black silk robes of Bonpa 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
archaeological rumour. Surama, a man of great intelligence and
seemingly inexhaustible erudition, was as morbidly lean as the Thibetan
servants; with swarthy, parchment-like 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
lustrelessly 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 no
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 accentless
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 uphill 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 Thibetans.
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 realised 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 explanation 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 protégé’s need for political
appointment, and sought, true to his protective role 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 eighth of November, 189-, Dr.
Alfred Schuyler Clarendon became medical director of the California
State Penitentiary at San Quentin.
II.
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 where 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 shewed no surprise, but kept on at the writing before
him.
“I know,” he said evenly; “I came across that case yesterday. I’m glad
you recognised 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 shewn 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, cannot 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, theatres 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 unsanitary
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 meagre; 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 Thibetans.
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-arbour, 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 a 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 tantalising 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 mediaeval 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 rumours 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
aeon-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 Thibetans, 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 favourable 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 marvellously 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, 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 fore
paws 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 shewed 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 shewed 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 shews 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 brusqueness 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 recognise 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.
III.
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 laboured 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 naiveté 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 shewn 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 shew 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 vigour, 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
realised 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.
IV.
Georgina soothed her brother’s hurt as best she could. He had come home
mentally and physically exhausted and thrown himself on the library
lounge; and in that gloomy room, little by little, the faithful sister
had taken in the almost incredible news. Her consolations were
instantaneous and tender, and she made him realise how vast, though
unconscious, a tribute to his greatness the attacks, persecution, and
dismissal all were. He had tried to cultivate the indifference she
preached, and could have done so had personal dignity alone been
involved. But the loss of scientific opportunity was more than he could
calmly bear, and he sighed again and again as he repeated how three
months more of study in the prison might have given him at last the
long-sought bacillus which would make all fever a thing of the past.
Then Georgina tried another mode of cheering, and told him that surely
the prison board would send for him again if the fever did not abate,
or if it broke out with increased force. But even this was ineffective,
and Clarendon answered only in a string of bitter, ironic, and
half-meaningless little sentences whose tone shewed all too clearly how
deeply despair and resentment had bitten.
“Abate? Break out again? Oh, it’ll abate all right! At least, they’ll
think it has abated. They’d think anything, no matter what happens!
Ignorant eyes see nothing, and bunglers are never discoverers. Science
never shews her face to that sort. And they call themselves doctors!
Best of all, fancy that ass Jones in charge!”
Ceasing with a quick sneer, he laughed so daemoniacally that Georgina
shivered.
The days that followed were dismal ones indeed at the Clarendon mansion
Depression, stark and unrelieved, had taken hold of the doctor’s
usually tireless mind; and he would even have refused food had not
Georgina forced it upon him. His great notebook of observations lay
unopened on the library table, and his little gold syringe of
anti-fever serum—a clever device of his own, with a self-contained
reservoir, attached to a broad gold finger ring, and single-pressure
action peculiar to itself—rested idly in a small leather case beside
it. Vigour, ambition, and the desire for study and observation seemed
to have died within him; and he made no inquiries about his clinic,
where hundreds of germ cultures stood in their orderly phials awaiting
his attention.
The countless animals held for experiments played, lively and well fed,
in the early spring sunshine; and as Georgina strolled out through the
rose-arbour to the cages she felt a strangely incongruous sense of
happiness about her. She knew, though, how tragically transient that
happiness must be; since the start of new work would soon make all
these small creatures unwilling martyrs to science. Knowing this, she
glimpsed a sort of compensating element in her brother’s inaction, and
encouraged him to keep on in a rest he needed so badly. The eight
Thibetan servants moved noiselessly about, each as impeccably effective
as usual; and Georgina saw to it that the order of the household did
not suffer because of the master’s relaxation.
Study and starward ambition laid aside in slippered and dressing-gowned
indifference, Clarendon was content to let Georgina treat him as an
infant. He met her maternal fussiness with a slow, sad smile, and
always obeyed her multitude of orders and precepts. A kind of faint,
wistful felicity came over the languid household, amidst which the only
dissenting note was supplied by Surama. He indeed was miserable, and
looked often with sullen and resentful eyes at the sunny serenity in
Georgina’s face. His only joy had been the turmoil of experiment, and
he missed the routine of seizing the fated animals, bearing them to the
clinic in clutching talons, and watching them with hot brooding gaze
and evil chuckles as they gradually fell into the final coma with
wide-opened, red-rimmed eyes, and swollen tongue lolling from
froth-covered mouth.
Now he was seemingly driven to desperation by the sight of the carefree
creatures in their cages, and frequently came to ask Clarendon if there
were any orders. Finding the doctor apathetic and unwilling to begin
work, he would go away muttering under his breath and glaring curses
upon everything; stealing with cat-like tread to his own quarters in
the basement, where his voice would sometimes ascend in deep, muffled
rhythms of blasphemous strangeness and uncomfortably ritualistic
suggestion.
All this wore on Georgina’s nerves, but not by any means so gravely as
her brother’s continued lassitude itself. The duration of the state
alarmed her, and little by little she lost the air of cheerfulness
which had so provoked the clinic-man. Herself skilled in medicine, she
found the doctor’s condition highly unsatisfactory from an alienist’s
point of view; and she now feared as much from his absence of interest
and activity as she had formerly feared from his fanatical zeal and
overstudy. Was lingering melancholy about to turn the once brilliant
man of intellect into an innocuous imbecile?
Then, toward the end of May, came the sudden change. Georgina always
recalled the smallest details connected with it; details as trivial as
the box delivered to Surama the day before, postmarked Algiers, and
emitting a most unpleasant odour; and the sharp, sudden thunderstorm,
rare in the extreme for California, which sprang up that night as
Surama chanted his rituals behind his locked basement door in a droning
chest-voice louder and more intense than usual.
It was a sunny day, and she had been in the garden gathering flowers
for the dining-room. Re-entering the house, she glimpsed her brother in
the library, fully dressed and seated at the table, alternately
consulting the notes in his thick observation book, and making fresh
entries with brisk assured strokes of the pen. He was alert and vital,
and there was a satisfying resilience about his movements as he now and
then turned a page, or reached for a book from the rear of the great
table. Delighted and relieved, Georgina hastened to deposit her flowers
in the dining-room and return; but when she reached the library again
she found that her brother was gone.
She knew, of course, that he must be in the clinic at work, and
rejoiced to think that his old mind and purpose had snapped back into
place. Realising it would be of no use to delay the luncheon for him,
she ate alone and set aside a bite to be kept warm in case of his
return at an odd moment. But he did not come. He was making up for lost
time, and was still in the great stout-planked clinic when she went for
a stroll through the rose-arbour.
As she walked among the fragrant blossoms she saw Surama fetching
animals for the test. She wished she could notice him less, for he
always made her shudder; but her very dread had sharpened her eyes and
ears where he was concerned. He always went hatless around the yard,
and the total hairlessness of his head enhanced his skeleton-like
aspect horribly. Now she heard a faint chuckle as he took a small
monkey from its cage against the wall and carried it to the clinic, his
long, bony fingers pressing so cruelly into its furry sides that it
cried out in frightened anguish. The sight sickened her, and brought
her walk to an end. Her inmost soul rebelled at the ascendancy this
creature had gained over her brother, and she reflected bitterly that
the two had almost changed places as master and servant.
Night came without Clarendon’s return to the house, and Georgina
concluded that he was absorbed in one of his very longest sessions,
which meant total disregard of time. She hated to retire without a talk
with him about his sudden recovery; but finally, feeling it would be
futile to wait up, she wrote a cheerful note and propped it before his
chair on the library table; then started resolutely for bed.
She was not quite asleep when she heard the outer door open and shut.
So it had not been an all-night session after all! Determined to see
that her brother had a meal before retiring she rose, slipped on a
robe, and descended to the library, halting only when she heard voices
from behind the half-opened door. Clarendon and Surama were talking,
and she waited till the clinic-man might go.
Surama, however, shewed no inclination to depart; and indeed, the whole
heated tenor of the discourse seemed to bespeak absorption and promise
length. Georgina, though she had not meant to listen, could not help
catching a phrase now and then, and presently became aware of a
sinister undercurrent which frightened her very much without being
wholly clear to her. Her brother’s voice, nervous, incisive, held her
notice with disquieting persistence.
“But anyway,” he was saying, “we haven’t enough animals for another
day, and you know how hard it is to get a decent supply at short
notice. It seems silly to waste so much effort on comparative trash
when human specimens could be had with just a little extra care.”
Georgina sickened at the possible implication, and caught at the hall
rack to steady herself. Surama was replying in that deep, hollow tone
which seemed to echo with the evil of a thousand ages and a thousand
planets.
“Steady, steady—what a child you are with your haste and impatience!
You crowd things so! When you’ve lived as I have, so that a whole life
will seem only an hour, you won’t be so fretful about a day or week or
month! You work too fast. You’ve plenty of specimens in the cages for a
full week if you’ll only go at a sensible rate. You might even begin on
the older material if you’d be sure not to overdo it.”
“Never mind my haste!” the reply was snapped out sharply; “I have my
own methods. I don’t want to use our material if I can help it, for I
prefer them as they are. And you’d better be careful of them anyway—you
know the knives those sly dogs carry.”
Surama’s deep chuckle came.
“Don’t worry about that. The brutes eat, don’t they? Well, I can get
you one any time you need it. But go slow—with the boy gone, there are
only eight, and now that you’ve lost San Quentin it’ll be hard to get
new ones by the wholesale. I’d advise you to start in on Tsanpo—he’s
the least use to you as he is, and—“
But that was all Georgina heard. Transfixed by a hideous dread from the
thoughts this talk excited, she nearly sank to the floor where she
stood, and was scarcely able to drag herself up the stairs and into her
room. What was the evil monster Surama planning? Into what was he
guiding her brother? What monstrous circumstances lay behind these
cryptic sentences? A thousand phantoms of darkness and menace danced
before her eyes, and she flung herself upon the bed without hope of
sleep. One thought above the rest stood out with fiendish prominence,
and she almost screamed aloud as it beat itself into her brain with
renewed force. Then Nature, kinder than she expected, intervened at
last. Closing her eyes in a dead faint, she did not awake till morning,
nor did any fresh nightmare come to join the lasting one which the
overheard words had brought.
With the morning sunshine came a lessening of the tension. What happens
in the night when one is tired often reaches the consciousness in
distorted forms, and Georgina could see that her brain must have given
strange colour to scraps of common medical conversation. To suppose her
brother—only son of the gentle Frances Schuyler Clarendon—guilty of
savage sacrifices in the name of science would be to do an injustice to
their blood, and she decided to omit all mention of her trip
downstairs, lest Alfred ridicule her fantastic notions.
When she reached the breakfast table she found that Clarendon was
already gone, and regretted that not even this second morning had given
her a chance to congratulate him on his revived activity. Quietly
taking the breakfast served by stone-deaf old Margarita, the Mexican
cook, she read the morning paper and seated herself with some
needlework by the sitting-room window overlooking the great yard. All
was silent out there, and she could see that the last of the animal
cages had been emptied. Science was served, and the lime-pit held all
that was left of the once pretty and lively little creatures. This
slaughter had always grieved her, but she had never complained, since
she knew it was all for humanity. Being a scientist’s sister, she used
to say to herself, was like being the sister of a soldier who kills to
save his countrymen from their foes.
After luncheon Georgina resumed her post by the window, and had been
busily sewing for some time when the sound of a pistol shot from the
yard caused her to look out in alarm. There, not far from the clinic,
she saw the ghastly form of Surama, a revolver in his hand, and his
skull-face twisted into a strange expression as he chuckled at a
cowering figure robed in black silk and carrying a long Thibetan knife.
It was the servant Tsanpo, and as she recognised the shrivelled face
Georgina remembered horribly what she had overheard the night before.
The sun flashed on the polished blade, and suddenly Surama’s revolver
spat once more. This time the knife flew from the Mongol’s hand, and
Surama glanced greedily at his shaking and bewildered prey.
Then Tsanpo, glancing quickly at his unhurt hand and at the fallen
knife, sprang nimbly away from the stealthily approaching clinic-man
and made a dash for the house. Surama, however, was too swift for him,
and caught him in a single leap, seizing his shoulder and almost
crushing him. For a moment the Thibetan tried to struggle, but Surama
lifted him like an animal by the scruff of the neck and bore him off
toward the clinic. Georgina heard him chuckling and taunting the man in
his own tongue, and saw the yellow face of the victim twist and quiver
with fright. Suddenly realising against her own will what was taking
place, a great horror mastered her and she fainted for the second time
within twenty-four hours.
When consciousness returned, the golden light of late afternoon was
flooding the room. Georgina, picking up her fallen work-basket and
scattered materials, was lost in a daze of doubt; but finally felt
convinced that the scene which had overcome her must have been all too
tragically real. Her worst fears, then, were horrible truths. What to
do about it, nothing in her experience could tell her; and she was
vaguely thankful that her brother did not appear. She must talk to him,
but not now. She could not talk to anybody now. And, thinking
shudderingly of the monstrous happening behind those barred clinic
windows, she crept into bed for a long night of anguished
sleeplessness.
Rising haggardly on the following day, Georgina saw the doctor for the
first time since his recovery. He was bustling about preoccupiedly,
circulating between the house and the clinic, and paying little
attention to anything besides his work. There was no chance for the
dreaded interview, and Clarendon did not even notice his sister’s
worn-out aspect and hesitant manner.
In the evening she heard him in the library, talking to himself in a
fashion most unusual for him, and she felt that he was under a great
strain which might culminate in the return of his apathy. Entering the
room, she tried to calm him without referring to any trying subject,
and forced a steadying cup of bouillon upon him. Finally she asked
gently what was distressing him, and waited anxiously for his reply,
hoping to hear that Surama’s treatment of the poor Thibetan had
horrified and outraged him.
There was a note of fretfulness in his voice as he responded.
“What’s distressing me? Good God, Georgina, what isn’t? Look at the
cages and see if you have to ask again! Cleaned out—milked dry—not a
cursed specimen left; and a line of the most important bacterial
cultures incubating in their tubes without a chance to do an ounce of
good! Days’ work wasted—whole programme set back—it’s enough to drive a
man mad! How shall I ever get anywhere if I can’t scrape up some decent
subjects?”
Georgina stroked his forehead.
“I think you ought to rest a while, Al dear.”
He moved away.
“Rest? That’s good! That’s damn good! What else have I been doing but
resting and vegetating and staring blankly into space for the last
fifty or a hundred or a thousand years? Just as I manage to shake off
the clouds, I have to run short of material—and then I’m told to lapse
back again into drooling stupefaction! God! And all the while some
sneaking thief is probably working with my data and getting ready to
come out ahead of me with the credit for my own work. I’ll lose by a
neck—some fool with the proper specimens will get the prize, when one
week more with even half-adequate facilities would see me through with
flying colours!”
His voice rose querulously, and there was an overtone of mental strain
which Georgina did not like. She answered softly, yet not so softly as
to hint at the soothing of a psychopathic case.
“But you’re killing yourself with this worry and tension, and if you’re
dead, how can you do your work?”
He gave a smile that was almost a sneer.
“I guess a week or a month—all the time I need—wouldn’t quite finish
me, and it doesn’t much matter what becomes of me or any other
individual in the end. Science is what must be served—science—the
austere cause of human knowledge. I’m like the monkeys and birds and
guinea-pigs I use—just a cog in the machine, to be used to the
advantage of the whole. They had to be killed—I may have to be
killed—what of it? Isn’t the cause we serve worth that and more?”
Georgina sighed. For a moment she wondered whether, after all, this
ceaseless round of slaughter really was worth while.
“But are you absolutely sure your discovery will be enough of a boon to
humanity to warrant these sacrifices?”
Clarendon’s eyes flashed dangerously.
“Humanity! What the deuce is humanity? Science! Dolts! Just individuals
over and over again! Humanity is made for preachers to whom it means
the blindly credulous. Humanity is made for the predatory rich to whom
it speaks in terms of dollars and cents. Humanity is made for the
politician to whom it signifies collective power to be used to his
advantage. What is humanity? Nothing! Thank God that crude illusion
doesn’t last! What a grown man worships is
truth—knowledge—science—light—the rending of the veil and the pushing
back of the shadow. Knowledge, the juggernaut! There is death in our
own ritual. We must kill—dissect—destroy—and all for the sake of
discovery—the worship of the ineffable light. The goddess Science
demands it. We test a doubtful poison by killing. How else? No thought
for self—just knowledge—the effect must be known.”
His voice trailed off in a kind of temporary exhaustion, and Georgina
shuddered slightly.
“But this is horrible, Al! You shouldn’t think of it that way!”
Clarendon cackled sardonically, in a manner which stirred odd and
repugnant associations in his sister’s mind.
“Horrible? You think what I say is horrible? You ought to hear Surama!
I tell you, things were known to the priests of Atlantis that would
have you drop dead of fright if you heard a hint of them. Knowledge was
knowledge a hundred thousand years ago, when our especial forbears were
shambling about Asia as speechless semi-apes! They know something of it
in the Hoggar region—there are rumours in the farther uplands of
Thibet—and once I heard an old man in China calling on Yog-Sothoth—“
He turned pale, and made a curious sign in the air with his extended
forefinger. Georgina felt genuinely alarmed, but became somewhat calmer
as his speech took a less fantastic form.
“Yes, it may be horrible, but it’s glorious too. The pursuit of
knowledge, I mean. Certainly, there’s no slovenly sentiment connected
with it. Doesn’t Nature kill—constantly and remorselessly—and are any
but fools horrified at the struggle? Killings are necessary. They are
the glory of science. We learn something from them, and we can’t
sacrifice learning to sentiment. Hear the sentimentalists howl against
vaccination! They fear it will kill the child. Well, what if it does?
How else can we discover the laws of disease concerned? As a
scientist’s sister you ought to know better than to prate sentiment.
You ought to help my work instead of hindering it!”
“But, Al,” protested Georgina, “I haven’t the slightest intention of
hindering your work. Haven’t I always tried to help as much as I could?
I am ignorant, I suppose, and can’t help very actively; but at least
I’m proud of you—proud for my own sake and for the family’s sake—and
I’ve always tried to smooth the way. You’ve given me credit for that
many a time.”
Clarendon looked at her keenly.
“Yes,” he said jerkily as he rose and strode from the room, “you’re
right. You’ve always tried to help as best you knew. You may yet have a
chance to help still more.”
Georgina, seeing him disappear through the front door, followed him
into the yard. Some distance away a lantern was shining through the
trees, and as they approached it they saw Surama bending over a large
object stretched on the ground. Clarendon, advancing, gave a short
grunt; but when Georgina saw what it was she rushed up with a shriek.
It was Dick, the great St. Bernard, and he was lying still with
reddened eyes and protruding tongue.
“He’s sick, Al!” she cried. “Do something for him, quick!”
The doctor looked at Surama, who had uttered something in a tongue
unknown to Georgina.
“Take him to the clinic,” he ordered; “I’m afraid Dick’s caught the
fever.”
Surama took up the dog as he had taken poor Tsanpo the day before, and
carried him silently to the building near the wall. He did not chuckle
this time, but glanced at Clarendon with what appeared to be real
anxiety. It almost seemed to Georgina that Surama was asking the doctor
to save her pet.
Clarendon, however, made no move to follow, but stood still for a
moment and then sauntered slowly toward the house. Georgina, astonished
at such callousness, kept up a running fire of entreaties on Dick’s
behalf, but it was of no use. Without paying the slightest attention to
her pleas he made directly for the library and began to read in a large
old book which had lain face down on the table. She put her hand on his
shoulder as he sat there, but he did not speak or turn his head. He
only kept on reading, and Georgina, glancing curiously over his
shoulder, wondered in what strange alphabet this brass-bound tome was
written.
In the cavernous parlour across the hall, sitting alone in the dark a
quarter of an hour later, Georgina came to her decision. Something was
gravely wrong—just what, and to what extent, she scarcely dared
formulate to herself—and it was time that she called in some stronger
force to help her. Of course it must be James. He was powerful and
capable, and his sympathy and affection would shew him the right thing
to do. He had known Al always, and would understand.
It was by this time rather late, but Georgina had resolved on action.
Across the hall the light still shone from the library, and she looked
wistfully at the doorway as she quietly donned a hat and left the
house. Outside the gloomy mansion and forbidding grounds, it was only a
short walk to Jackson Street, where by good luck she found a carriage
to take her to the Western Union telegraph office. There she carefully
wrote out a message to James Dalton in Sacramento, asking him to come
at once to San Francisco on a matter of the greatest importance to them
all.
V.
Dalton was frankly perplexed by Georgina’s sudden message. He had had
no word from the Clarendons since that stormy February evening when
Alfred had declared him an outsider to his home; and he in turn had
studiously refrained from communicating, even when he had longed to
express sympathy after the doctor’s summary ousting from office. He had
fought hard to frustrate the politicians and keep the appointive power,
and was bitterly sorry to watch the unseating of a man who, despite
recent estrangements, still represented to him the ultimate ideal of
scientific competence.
Now, with this clearly frightened summons before him, he could not
imagine what had happened. He knew, though, that Georgina was not one
to lose her head or send forth a needless alarm; hence he wasted no
time, but took the Overland which left Sacramento within the hour,
going at once to his club and sending word to Georgina by a messenger
that he was in town and wholly at her service.
Meanwhile things had been quiescent at the Clarendon home,
notwithstanding the doctor’s continued taciturnity and his absolute
refusal to report on the dog’s condition. Shadows of evil seemed
omnipresent and thickening, but for the moment there was a lull.
Georgina was relieved to get Dalton’s message and learn that he was
close at hand, and sent back word that she would call him when
necessity arose. Amidst all the gathering tension some faint
compensating element seemed manifest, and Georgina finally decided that
it was the absence of the lean Thibetans, whose stealthy, sinuous ways
and disturbing exotic aspect had always annoyed her. They had vanished
all at once; and old Margarita, the sole visible servant left in the
house, told her they were helping their master and Surama at the
clinic.
The following morning—the twenty-eighth of May—long to be
remembered—was dark and lowering, and Georgina felt the precarious calm
wearing thin. She did not see her brother at all, but knew he was in
the clinic hard at work at something despite the lack of specimens he
had bewailed. She wondered how poor Tsanpo was getting along, and
whether he had really been subjected to any serious inoculation, but it
must be confessed that she wondered more about Dick. She longed to know
whether Surama had done anything for the faithful dog amidst his
master’s oddly callous indifference. Surama’s apparent solicitude on
the night of Dick’s seizure had impressed her greatly, giving her
perhaps the kindliest feeling she had ever had for the detested
clinic-man. Now, as the day advanced, she found herself thinking more
and more of Dick; till at last her harassed nerves, finding in this one
detail a sort of symbolic summation of the whole horror that lay upon
the household, could stand the suspense no longer.
Up to that time she had always respected Alfred’s imperious wish that
he be never approached or disturbed at the clinic; but as this fateful
afternoon advanced, her resolution to break through the barrier grew
stronger and stronger. Finally she set out with determined face,
crossing the yard and entering the unlocked vestibule of the forbidden
structure with the fixed intention of discovering how the dog was or of
knowing the reason for her brother’s secrecy.
The inner door, as usual, was locked; and behind it she heard voices in
heated conversation. When her knocking brought no response she rattled
the knob as loudly as possible, but still the voices argued on
unheeding. They belonged, of course, to Surama and her brother; and as
she stood there trying to attract attention she could not help catch
something of their drift. Fate had made her for the second time an
eavesdropper, and once more the matter she overheard seemed likely to
tax her mental poise and nervous endurance to their ultimate bounds.
Alfred and Surama were plainly quarrelling with increasing violence,
and the purport of their speech was enough to arouse the wildest fears
and confirm the gravest apprehensions. Georgina shivered as her
brother’s voice mounted shrilly to dangerous heights of fanatical
tension.
“You, damn you—you’re a fine one to talk defeat and moderation to me!
Who started all this, anyway? Did I have any idea of your cursed
devil-gods and elder world? Did I ever in my life think of your damned
spaces beyond the stars and your crawling chaos Nyarlathotep? I was a
normal scientific man, confound you, till I was fool enough to drag you
out of the vaults with your devilish Atlantean secrets. You egged me
on, and now you want to cut me off! You loaf around doing nothing and
telling me to go slow when you might just as well as not be going out
and getting material. You know damn well that I don’t know how to go
about such things, whereas you must have been an old hand at it before
the earth was made. It’s like you, you damned walking corpse, to start
something you won’t or can’t finish!”
Surama’s evil chuckle came.
“You’re insane, Clarendon. That’s the only reason I let you rave on
when I could send you to hell in three minutes. Enough is enough, and
you’ve certainly had enough material for any novice at your stage.
You’ve had all I’m going to get you, anyhow! You’re only a maniac on
the subject now—what a cheap, crazy thing to sacrifice even your poor
sister’s pet dog, when you could have spared him as well as not! You
can’t look at any living thing now without wanting to jab that gold
syringe into it. No—Dick had to go where the Mexican boy went—where
Tsanpo and the other seven went—where all the animals went! What a
pupil! You’re no fun any more—you’ve lost your nerve. You set out to
control things, and they’re controlling you. I’m about done with you,
Clarendon. I thought you had the stuff in you, but you haven’t. It’s
about time I tried somebody else. I’m afraid you’ll have to go!”
In the doctor’s shouted reply there was both fear and frenzy.
“Be careful, you ——! There are powers against your powers—I didn’t go
to China for nothing, and there are things in Alhazred’s Azif which
weren’t known in Atlantis! We’ve both meddled in dangerous things, but
you needn’t think you know all my resources. How about the Nemesis of
Flame? I talked in Yemen with an old man who had come back alive from
the Crimson Desert—he had seen Irem, the City of Pillars, and had
worshipped at the underground shrines of Nug and Yeb—Iä!
Shub-Niggurath!”
Through Clarendon’s shrieking falsetto cut the deep chuckle of the
clinic-man.
“Shut up, you fool! Do you suppose your grotesque nonsense has any
weight with me? Words and formulae—words and formulae—what do they all
mean to one who has the substance behind them? We’re in a material
sphere now, and subject to material laws. You have your fever; I have
my revolver. You’ll get no specimens, and I’ll get no fever so long as
I have you in front of me with this gun between!”
That was all Georgina could hear. She felt her senses reeling, and
staggered out of the vestibule for a saving breath of the lowering
outside air. She saw that the crisis had come at last, and that help
must now arrive quickly if her brother was to be saved from the unknown
gulfs of madness and mystery. Summoning up all her reserve energy, she
managed to reach the house and get to the library, where she scrawled a
hasty note for Margarita to take to James Dalton.
When the old woman had gone, Georgina had just strength enough to cross
to the lounge and sink weakly down into a sort of semi-stupor. There
she lay for what seemed like years, conscious only of the fantastic
creeping up of the twilight from the lower corners of the great, dismal
room, and plagued by a thousand shadowy shapes of terror which filed
with phantasmal, half-limned pageantry through her tortured and stifled
brain. Dusk deepened into darkness, and still the spell held. Then a
firm tread sounded in the hall, and she heard someone enter the room
and fumble at the match-safe. Her heart almost stopped beating as the
gas-jets of the chandelier flared up one by one, but then she saw that
the arrival was her brother. Relieved to the bottom of her heart that
he was still alive, she gave vent to an involuntary sigh, profound,
long-drawn, and tremulous, and lapsed at last into kindly oblivion.
At the sound of that sigh Clarendon turned in alarm toward the lounge,
and was inexpressibly shocked to see the pale and unconscious form of
his sister there. Her face had a death-like quality that frightened his
inmost spirit, and he flung himself on his knees by her side, awake to
a realisation of what her passing away would mean to him. Long unused
to private practice amidst his ceaseless quest for truth, he had lost
the physician’s instinct of first aid, and could only call out her name
and chafe her wrists mechanically as fear and grief possessed him. Then
he thought of water, and ran to the dining-room for a carafe. Stumbling
about in a darkness which seemed to harbour vague terrors, he was some
time in finding what he sought; but at last he clutched it in shaking
hand and hastened back to dash the cold fluid in Georgina’s face. The
method was crude but effective. She stirred, sighed a second time, and
finally opened her eyes.
“You are alive!” he cried, and put his cheek to hers as she stroked his
head maternally. She was almost glad she fainted, for the circumstance
seemed to have dispelled the strange Alfred and brought her own brother
back to her. She sat up slowly and tried to reassure him.
“I’m all right, Al. Just give me a glass of water. It’s a sin to waste
it this way—to say nothing of spoiling my waist! Is that the way to
behave every time your sister drops off for a nap? You needn’t think
I’m going to be sick, for I haven’t time for such nonsense!”
Alfred’s eyes shewed that her cool, common-sense speech had had its
effect. His brotherly panic dissolved in an instant, and instead there
came into his face a vague, calculating expression, as if some
marvellous possibility had just dawned upon him. As she watched the
subtle waves of cunning and appraisal pass fleetingly over his
countenance she became less and less certain that her mode of
reassurance had been a wise one, and before he spoke she found herself
shivering at something she could not define. A keen medical instinct
almost told her that his moment of sanity had passed, and that he was
now once more the unrestrained fanatic for scientific research. There
was something morbid in the quick narrowing of his eyes at her casual
mention of good health. What was he thinking? To what unnatural extreme
was his passion for experiment about to be pushed? Wherein lay the
special significance of her pure blood and absolutely flawless organic
state? None of these misgivings, however, troubled Georgina for more
than a second, and she was quite natural and unsuspicious as she felt
her brother’s steady fingers at her pulse.
“You’re a bit feverish, Georgie,” he said in a precise, elaborately
restrained voice as he looked professionally into her eyes.
“Why, nonsense, I’m all right,” she replied. “One would think you were
on the watch for fever patients just for the sake of shewing off your
discovery! It would be poetic, though, if you could make your final
proof and demonstration by curing your own sister!”
Clarendon started violently and guiltily. Had she suspected his wish?
Had he muttered anything aloud? He looked at her closely, and saw that
she had no inkling of the truth. She smiled up sweetly into his face
and patted his hand as he stood by the side of the lounge. Then he took
a small oblong leather case from his vest pocket, and taking out a
little gold syringe, he began fingering it thoughtfully, pushing the
piston speculatively in and out of the empty cylinder.
“I wonder,” he began with suave sententiousness, “whether you would
really be willing to help science in—something like that way—if the
need arose? Whether you would have the devotion to offer yourself to
the cause of medicine as a sort of Jephthah’s daughter if you knew it
meant the absolute perfection and completion of my work?”
Georgina, catching the odd and unmistakable glitter in her brother’s
eyes, knew at last that her worst fears were true. There was nothing to
do now but keep him quiet at all hazards and to pray that Margarita had
found James Dalton at his club.
“You look tired, Al dear,” she said gently. “Why not take a little
morphia and get some of the sleep you need so badly?”
He replied with a kind of crafty deliberation.
“Yes, you’re right. I’m worn out, and so are you. Each of us needs a
good sleep. Morphine is just the thing—wait till I go and fill the
syringe and we’ll both take a proper dose.”
Still fingering the empty syringe, he walked softly out of the room.
Georgina looked about her with the aimlessness of desperation, ears
alert for any sign of possible help. She thought she heard Margarita
again in the basement kitchen, and rose to ring the bell, in an effort
to learn of the fate of her message. The old servant answered her
summons at once, and declared she had given the message at the club
hours ago. Governor Dalton had been out, but the clerk had promised to
deliver the note at the very moment of his arrival.
Margarita waddled below stairs again, but still Clarendon did not
reappear. What was he doing? What was he planning? She had heard the
outer door slam, so knew he must be at the clinic. Had he forgotten his
original intention with the vacillating mind of madness? The suspense
grew almost unbearable, and Georgina had to keep her teeth clenched
tightly to avoid screaming.
It was the gate bell, which rang simultaneously in house and clinic,
that broke the tension at last. She heard the cat-like tread of Surama
on the walk as he left the clinic to answer it; and then, with an
almost hysterical sigh of relief, she caught the firm, familiar accents
of Dalton in conversation with the sinister attendant. Rising, she
almost tottered to meet him as he loomed up in the library doorway; and
for a moment no word was spoken while he kissed her hand in his
courtly, old-school fashion. Then Georgina burst forth into a torrent
of hurried explanation, telling all that had happened, all she had
glimpsed and overheard, and all she feared and suspected.
Dalton listened gravely and comprehendingly, his first bewilderment
gradually giving place to astonishment, sympathy, and resolution. The
message, held by a careless clerk, had been slightly delayed, and had
found him appropriately enough in the midst of a warm lounging-room
discussion about Clarendon. A fellow-member, Dr. MacNeil, had brought
in a medical journal with an article well calculated to disturb the
devoted scientist, and Dalton had just asked to keep the paper for
future reference when the message was handed him at last. Abandoning
his half-formed plan to take Dr. MacNeil into his confidence regarding
Alfred, he called at once for his hat and stick, and lost not a moment
in getting a cab for the Clarendon home.
Surama, he thought, appeared alarmed at recognising him; though he had
chuckled as usual when striding off again toward the clinic. Dalton
always recalled Surama’s stride and chuckle on this ominous night, for
he was never to see the unearthly creature again. As the chuckler
entered the clinic vestibule his deep, guttural gurgles seemed to blend
with some low mutterings of thunder which troubled the far horizon.
When Dalton had heard all Georgina had to say, and learned that Alfred
was expected back at any moment with an hypodermic dose of morphine, he
decided he had better talk with the doctor alone. Advising Georgina to
retire to her room and await developments, he walked about the gloomy
library, scanning the shelves and listening for Clarendon’s nervous
footstep on the clinic path outside. The vast room’s corners were
dismal despite the chandelier, and the closer Dalton looked at his
friend’s choice of books the less he liked them. It was not the
balanced collection of a normal physician, biologist, or man of general
culture. There were too many volumes on doubtful borderland themes;
dark speculations and forbidden rituals of the Middle Ages, and strange
exotic mysteries in alien alphabets both known and unknown.
The great notebook of observations on the table was unwholesome, too.
The handwriting had a neurotic cast, and the spirit of the entries was
far from reassuring. Long passages were inscribed in crabbed Greek
characters, and as Dalton marshalled his linguistic memory for their
translation he gave a sudden start, and wished his college struggles
with Xenophon and Homer had been more conscientious. There was
something wrong—something hideously wrong—here, and the governor sank
limply into the chair by the table as he pored more and more closely
over the doctor’s barbarous Greek. Then a sound came, startlingly near,
and he jumped nervously at a hand laid sharply on his shoulder.
“What, may I ask, is the cause of this intrusion? You might have stated
your business to Surama.”
Clarendon was standing icily by the chair, the little gold syringe in
one hand. He seemed very calm and rational, and Dalton fancied for a
moment that Georgina must have exaggerated his condition. How, too,
could a rusty scholar be absolutely sure about these Greek entries? The
governor decided to be very cautious in his interview, and thanked the
lucky chance which had placed a specious pretext in his coat pocket. He
was very cool and assured as he rose to reply.
“I didn’t think you’d care to have things dragged before a subordinate,
but I thought you ought to see this article at once.”
He drew forth the magazine given him by Dr. MacNeil and handed it to
Clarendon.
On page 542—you see the heading, ‘Black Fever Conquered by New Serum
It’s by Dr. Miller of Philadelphia—and he thinks he’s got ahead of you
with your cure. They were discussing it at the club, and MacNeil
thought the exposition very convincing. I, as a layman, couldn’t
pretend to judge; but at all events I thought you oughtn’t to miss a
chance to digest the thing while it’s fresh. If you’re busy, of course,
I won’t disturb you—“
Clarendon cut in sharply.
“I’m going to give my sister an hypodermic—she’s not quite well—but
I’ll look at what that quack has to say when I get back. I know
Miller—a damn sneak and incompetent—and I don’t believe he has the
brains to steal my methods from the little he’s seen of them.”
Dalton suddenly felt a wave of intuition warning him that Georgina must
not receive that intended dose. There was something sinister about it.
From what she had said, Alfred must have been inordinately long
preparing it, far longer than was needed for the dissolving of a
morphine tablet. He decided to hold his host as long as possible,
meanwhile testing his attitude in a more or less subtle way.
“I’m sorry Georgina isn’t well. Are you sure that the injection will do
her good? That it won’t do her any harm?”
Clarendon’s spasmodic start shewed that something had been struck home.
“Do her harm?” he cried. “Don’t be absurd! You know Georgina must be in
the best of health—the very best, I say—in order to serve science as a
Clarendon should serve it. She, at least, appreciates the fact that she
is my sister. She deems no sacrifice too great in my service. She is a
priestess of truth and discovery, as I am a priest.”
He paused in his shrill tirade, wild-eyed, and somewhat out of breath.
Dalton could see that his attention had been momentarily shifted.
“But let me see what this cursed quack has to say,” he continued. “If
he thinks his pseudo-medical rhetoric can take a real doctor in, he is
even simpler than I thought!”
Clarendon nervously found the right page and began reading as he stood
there clutching his syringe. Dalton wondered what the real facts were.
MacNeil had assured him that the author was a pathologist of the
highest standing, and that whatever errors the article might have, the
mind behind it was powerful, erudite, and absolutely honourable and
sincere.
Watching the doctor as he read, Dalton saw the thin, bearded face grow
pale. The great eyes blazed, and the pages crackled in the tenser grip
of the long, lean fingers. A perspiration broke out on the high,
ivory-white forehead where the hair was already thinning. and the
reader sank gaspingly into the chair his visitor had vacated as he kept
on with his devouring of the text. Then came a wild scream as from a
haunted beast, and Clarendon lurched forward on the table, his outflung
arms sweeping books and paper before them as consciousness went dark
like a wind-quenched candle-flame.
Dalton, springing to help his stricken friend, raised the slim form and
tilted it back in the chair. Seeing the carafe on the floor near the
lounge, he dashed some water into the twisted face, and was rewarded by
seeing the large eyes slowly open. They were sane eyes now—deep and sad
and unmistakably sane—and Dalton felt awed in the presence of a tragedy
whose ultimate depth he could never hope or dare to plumb.
The golden hypodermic was still clutched in the lean left hand, and as
Clarendon drew a deep, shuddering breath he unclosed his fingers and
studied the glittering thing that rolled about on his palm. Then he
spoke—slowly, and with the ineffable sadness of utter, absolute
despair.
“Thanks, Jimmy, I’m quite all right. But there’s much to be done. You
asked me a while back if this shot of morphia would do Georgie any
harm. I’m in a position now to tell you that it won’t.”
He turned a small screw in the syringe and laid a finger on the piston,
at the same time pulling with his left hand at the skin of his own
neck. Dalton cried out in alarm as a lightning motion of his right hand
injected the contents of the cylinder into the ridge of distended
flesh.
“Good Lord, Al, what have you done?”
Clarendon smiled gently—a smile almost of peace and resignation,
different indeed from the sardonic sneer of the past few weeks.
“You ought to know, Jimmy, if you’ve still the judgment that made you a
governor. You must have pieced together enough from my notes to realise
that there’s nothing else to do. With your marks in Greek back at
Columbia I guess you couldn’t have missed much. All I can say is that
it’s true.
“James, I don’t like to pass blame along, but it’s only right to tell
you that Surama got me into this. I can’t tell you who or what he is,
for I don’t fully know myself, and what I do know is stuff that no sane
person ought to know; but I will say that I don’t consider him a human
being in the fullest sense, and that I’m not sure whether or not he’s
alive as we know life.
“You think I’m talking nonsense. I wish I were, but the whole hideous
mess is damnably real. I started out in life with a clean mind and
purpose. I wanted to rid the world of fever. I tried and failed—and I
wish to God I had been honest enough to say that I’d failed. Don’t let
my old talk of science deceive you, James—I found no antitoxin and was
never even half on the track of one!
“Don’t look so shaken up, old fellow! A veteran politician-fighter like
you must have seen plenty of unmaskings before. I tell you, I never had
even the start of a fever cure. But my studies had taken me into some
queer places, and it was just my damned luck to listen to the stories
of some still queerer people. James, if you ever wish any man well,
tell him to keep clear of the ancient, hidden places of the earth. Old
backwaters are dangerous—things are handed down there that don’t do
healthy people any good. I talked too much with old priests and
mystics, and got to hoping I might achieve things in dark ways that I
couldn’t achieve in lawful ways.
“I shan’t tell you just what I mean, for if I did I’d be as bad as the
old priests that were the ruin of me. All I need say is that after what
I’ve learned I shudder at the thought of the world and what it’s been
through. The world is cursed old, James, and there have been whole
chapters lived and closed before the dawn of our organic life and the
geologic eras connected with it. It’s an awful thought—whole forgotten
cycles of evolution with beings and races and wisdom and diseases—all
lived through and gone before the first amoeba ever stirred in the
tropic seas geology tells us about.
“I said gone, but I didn’t quite mean that. It would have been better
that way, but it wasn’t quite so. In places traditions have kept on—I
can’t tell you how—and certain archaic life-forms have managed to
struggle thinly down the aeons in hidden spots. There were cults, you
know—bands of evil priests in lands now buried under the sea. Atlantis
was the hotbed. That was a terrible place. If heaven is merciful, no
one will ever drag up that horror from the deep.
“It had a colony, though, that didn’t sink; and when you get too
confidential with one of the Tuareg priests in Africa, he’s likely to
tell you wild tales about it—tales that connect up with whispers you’ll
hear among the mad lamas and flighty yak-drivers on the secret
table-lands of Asia. I’d heard all the common tales and whispers when I
came on the big one. What that was, you’ll never know—but it pertained
to somebody or something that had come down from a blasphemously long
time ago, and could be made to live again—or seem alive again—through
certain processes that weren’t very clear to the man who told me.
“Now, James, in spite of my confession about the fever, you know I’m
not bad as a doctor. I plugged hard at medicine, and soaked up about as
much as the next man—maybe a little more, because down there in the
Hoggar country I did something no priest had ever been able to do. They
led me blindfolded to a place that had been sealed up for
generations—and I came back with Surama.
“Easy, James! I know what you want to say. How does he know all he
knows?—why does he speak English—or any other language, for that
matter—without an accent?—why did he come away with me?—and all that. I
can’t tell you altogether, but I can say that he takes in ideas and
images and impressions with something besides his brain and senses. He
had a use for me and my science. He told me things, and opened up
vistas. He taught me to worship ancient, primordial, and unholy gods,
and mapped out a road to a terrible goal which I can’t even hint to
you. Don’t press me, James—it’s for the sake of your sanity and the
world’s sanity!
“The creature is beyond all bounds. He’s in league with the stars and
all the forces of Nature. Don’t think I’m still crazy, James—I swear to
you I’m not! I’ve had too many glimpses to doubt. He gave me new
pleasures that were forms of his palaeogean worship, and the greatest
of those was the black fever.
“God, James! Haven’t you seen through the business by this time? Do you
still believe the black fever came out of Thibet, and that I learned
about it there? Use your brains, man! Look at Miller’s article here!
He’s found a basic antitoxin that will end all fever within half a
century, when other men learn how to modify it for the different forms.
He’s cut the ground of my youth from under me—done what I’d have given
my life to do—taken the wind out of all the honest sails I ever flung
to the breeze of science! Do you wonder his article gave me a turn? Do
you wonder it shocks me out of my madness back to the old dreams of my
youth? Too late! Too late! But not too late to save others!
“I guess I’m rambling a bit now, old man. You know—the hypodermic. I
asked you why you didn’t tumble to the facts about black fever. How
could you, though? Doesn’t Miller say he’s cured seven cases with his
serum? A matter of diagnosis, James. He only thinks it is black fever.
I can read between his lines. Here, old chap, on page 551, is the key
to the whole thing. Read it again.
“You see, don’t you? The fever cases from the Pacific Coast didn’t
respond to his serum. They puzzled him. They didn’t even seem like any
true fever he knew. Well, those were my cases! Those were the real
black fever cases! And there can’t ever be an antitoxin on earth
that’ll cure black fever!
“How do I know? Because black fever isn’t of this earth! It’s from
somewhere else, James—and Surama alone knows where, because he brought
it here. He brought it and I spread it! That’s the secret, James!
That’s all I wanted the appointment for—that’s all I ever did—just
spread the fever that I carried in this gold syringe and in the
deadlier finger-ring-pump-syringe you see on my index finger! Science?
A blind! I wanted to kill, and kill, and kill! A single pressure on my
finger, and the black fever was inoculated. I wanted to see living
things writhe and squirm, scream and froth at the mouth. A single
pressure of the pump-syringe and I could watch them as they died, and I
couldn’t live or think unless I had plenty to watch. That’s why I
jabbed everything in sight with the accursed hollow needle. Animals,
criminals, children, servants—and the next would have been—“
Clarendon’s voice broke, and he crumpled up perceptibly in his chair.
“That—that, James—was—my life. Surama made it so—he taught me, and kept
me at it till I couldn’t stop. Then—then it got too much even for him.
He tried to check me. Fancy—he trying to check anybody in that line!
But now I’ve got my last specimen. That is my last test. Good subject,
James—I’m healthy—devilish healthy. Deuced ironic, though—the madness
has gone now, so there won’t be any fun watching the agony! Can’t
be—can’t—“
A violent shiver of fever racked the doctor, and Dalton mourned amidst
his horror-stupefaction that he could give no grief. How much of
Alfred’s story was sheer nonsense, and how much nightmare truth he
could not say; but in any case he felt that the man was a victim rather
than a criminal, and above all, he was a boyhood comrade and Georgina’s
brother. Thoughts of the old days came back kaleidoscopically. “Little
Alf”—the yard at Phillips Exeter—the quadrangle at Columbia—the fight
with Tom Cortland when he saved Alf from a pommeling. . . .
He helped Clarendon to the lounge and asked gently what he could do.
There was nothing. Alfred could only whisper now, but he asked
forgiveness for all his offences, and commended his sister to the care
of his friend.
“You—you’ll—make her happy,” he gasped. “She deserves it. Martyr—to—a
myth! Make it up to her, James. Don’t—let—her—know—more—than she has
to!”
His voice trailed off in a mumble, and he fell into a stupor. Dalton
rang the bell, but Margarita had gone to bed, so he called up the
stairs for Georgina. She was firm of step, but very pale. Alfred’s
scream had tried her sorely, but she had trusted James. She trusted him
still as he shewed her the unconscious form on the lounge and asked her
to go back to her room and rest, no matter what sounds she might hear.
He did not wish her to witness the awful spectacle of delirium certain
to come, but bade her kiss her brother a final farewell as he lay there
calm and still, very like the delicate boy he had once been. So she
left him—the strange, moonstruck, star-reading genius she had mothered
so long—and the picture she carried away was a very merciful one.
Dalton must bear to his grave a sterner picture. His fears of delirium
were not vain, and all through the black midnight hours his giant
strength restrained the frenzied contortions of the mad sufferer. What
he heard from those swollen, blackening lips he will never repeat. He
has never been quite the same man since, and he knows that no one who
hears such things can ever be wholly as he was before. So, for the
world’s good, he dares not speak, and he thanks God that his layman’s
ignorance of certain subjects makes many of the revelations cryptic and
meaningless to him.
Toward morning Clarendon suddenly woke to a sane consciousness and
began to speak in a firm voice.
“James, I didn’t tell you what must be done—about everything. Blot out
these entries in Greek and send my notebook to Dr. Miller. All my other
notes, too, that you’ll find in the files. He’s the big authority
today—his article proves it. Your friend at the club was right.
“But everything in the clinic must go. Everything without exception,
dead or alive or—otherwise. All the plagues of hell are in those
bottles on the shelves. Burn them—burn it all—if one thing escapes,
Surama will spread black death throughout the world. And above all burn
Surama! That—that thing—must not breathe the wholesome air of heaven.
You know now—what I told you—you know why such an entity can’t be
allowed on earth. It won’t be murder—Surama isn’t human—if you’re as
pious as you used to be, James, I shan’t have to urge you. Remember the
old text—‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’—or something of the
sort.
“Burn him, James! Don’t let him chuckle again over the torture of
mortal flesh! I say, burn him—the Nemesis of Flame—that’s all that can
reach him, James, unless you can catch him asleep and drive a stake
through his heart. . . . Kill him—extirpate him—cleanse the decent
universe of its primal taint—the taint I recalled from its age-long
sleep. . . .”
The doctor had risen on his elbow, and his voice was a piercing shriek
toward the last. The effort was too much, however, and he lapsed very
suddenly into a deep, tranquil coma. Dalton, himself fearless of fever,
since he knew the dread germ to be non-contagious, composed Alfred’s
arms and legs on the lounge and threw a light afghan over the fragile
form. After all, mightn’t much of this horror be exaggeration and
delirium? Mightn’t old Doc MacNeil pull him through on a long chance?
The governor strove to keep awake, and walked briskly up and down the
room, but his energies had been taxed too deeply for such measures. A
second’s rest in the chair by the table took matters out of his hands,
and he was presently sleeping soundly despite his best intentions.
Dalton started up as a fierce light shone in his eyes, and for a moment
he thought the dawn had come. But it was not the dawn, and as he rubbed
his heavy lids he saw that it was the glare of the burning clinic in
the yard, whose stout planks flamed and roared and crackled heavenward
in the most stupendous holocaust he had ever seen. It was indeed the
“Nemesis of Flame” that Clarendon had wished, and Dalton felt that some
strange combustibles must be involved in a blaze so much wilder than
anything normal pine or redwood could afford. He glanced alarmedly at
the lounge, but Alfred was not there. Starting up, he went to call
Georgina, but met her in the hall, roused as he was by the mountain of
living fire.
“The clinic’s burning down!” she cried. “How is Al now?”
“He’s disappeared—disappeared while I dropped asleep!” replied Dalton,
reaching out a steadying arm to the form which faintness had begun to
sway.
Gently leading her upstairs toward her room, he promised to search at
once for Alfred, but Georgina slowly shook her head as the flames from
outside cast a weird glow through the window on the landing.
“He must be dead, James—he could never live, sane and knowing what he
did. I heard him quarrelling with Surama, and know that awful things
were going on. He is my brother, but—it is best as it is.”
Her voice had sunk to a whisper.
Suddenly through the open window came the sound of a deep, hideous
chuckle, and the flames of the burning clinic took fresh contours till
they half resembled some nameless, Cyclopean creatures of nightmare.
James and Georgina paused hesitant, and peered out breathlessly through
the landing window. Then from the sky came a thunderous peal, as a
forked bolt of lightning shot down with terrible directness into the
very midst of the blazing ruin. The deep chuckle ceased, and in its
place came a frantic, ululant yelp as of a thousand ghouls and
werewolves in torment. It died away with long, reverberant echoes, and
slowly the flames resumed their normal shape.
The watchers did not move, but waited till the pillar of fire had
shrunk to a smouldering glow. They were glad of a half-rusticity which
had kept the firemen from trooping out, and of the wall that excluded
the curious. What had happened was not for vulgar eyes—it involved too
much of the universe’s inner secrets for that.
In the pale dawn, James spoke softly to Georgina, who could do no more
than put her head on his breast and sob.
“Sweetheart, I think he has atoned. He must have set the fire, you
know, while I was asleep. He told me it ought to be burned—the clinic,
and everything in it, Surama, too. It was the only way to save the
world from the unknown horrors he had loosed upon it. He knew, and he
did what was best.
“He was a great man, Georgie. Let’s never forget that. We must always
be proud of him, for he started out to help mankind, and was titanic
even in his sins. I’ll tell you more sometime. What he did, be it good
or evil, was what no man ever did before. He was the first and last to
break through certain veils, and even Apollonius of Tyana takes second
place beside him. But we mustn’t talk about that. We must remember him
only as the Little Alf we knew—as the boy who wanted to master medicine
and conquer fever.”
In the afternoon the leisurely firemen overhauled the ruins and found
two skeletons with bits of blackened flesh adhering—only two, thanks to
the undisturbed lime-pits. One was of a man; the other is still a
subject of debate among the biologists of the coast. It was not exactly
an ape’s or a saurian’s skeleton, but it had disturbing suggestions of
lines of evolution of which palaeontology has revealed no trace. The
charred skull, oddly enough, was very human, and reminded people of
Surama; but the rest of the bones were beyond conjecture. Only well-cut
clothing could have made such a body look like a man.
But the human bones were Clarendon’s. No one disputed this, and the
world at large still mourns the untimely death of the greatest doctor
of his age; the bacteriologist whose universal fever serum would have
far eclipsed Dr. Miller’s kindred antitoxin had he lived to bring it to
perfection. Much of Miller’s late success, indeed, is credited to the
notes bequeathed him by the hapless victim of the flames. Of the old
rivalry and hatred almost none survived, and even Dr. Wilfred Jones has
been known to boast of his association with the vanished leader.
James Dalton and his wife Georgina have always preserved a reticence
which modesty and family grief might well account for. They published
certain notes as a tribute to the great man’s memory, but have never
confirmed or contradicted either the popular estimate or the rare hints
of marvels that a very few keen thinkers have been known to whisper. It
was very subtly and slowly that the facts filtered out. Dalton probably
gave Dr. MacNeil an inkling of the truth, and that good soul had not
many secrets from his son.
The Daltons have led, on the whole, a very happy life; for their cloud
of terror lies far in the background, and a strong mutual love has kept
the world fresh for them. But there are things which disturb them
oddly—little things, of which one would scarcely ever think of
complaining. They cannot bear persons who are lean or deep-voiced
beyond certain limits, and Georgina turns pale at the sound of any
guttural chuckling. Senator Dalton has a mixed horror of occultism,
travel, hypodermics, and strange alphabets which most find hard to
unify, and there are still those who blame him for the vast proportion
of the doctor’s library that he destroyed with such painstaking
completeness.
MacNeil, though, seemed to realise. He was a simple man, and he said a
prayer as the last of Alfred Clarendon’s strange books crumbled to
ashes. Nor would anyone who had peered understandingly within those
books wish a word of that prayer unsaid.
Return to “The Last Test”
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