H.P. Lovecraft. The Last Test
The Last Test
by H. P. Lovecraft and Adolphe de Castro
Written 1927
Published November 1928 in Weird Tales, Volume 12, No. 5, 625-56.
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 leaked out to a limited
circle. But for that, and for the years which have give 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
great 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 appointments stretched an extended and now 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
protege, 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 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 was also 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 eccentricism, calmed his occasional bouts 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 towards the sea. His race appeared to be Caucasian, but
could not be classified more clearly 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 protege'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 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 devour
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 final 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 this 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 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 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 Oakley, 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