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
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 cafeterias, restaurants and
saloons, all gradually closed their doors; and in a single week San
Francisco lay prostate 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 commentary 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 that 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, 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 tree
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 arranged 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-weighed 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 replied, "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
persona.
"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 help but feel 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
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 time 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
impression 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 the 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 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 inquiry.
"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 - or the household that makes my work possible - and there's no
room for desertion or personal caprice."
Dalton waited to see if 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 out 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
