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"In spite of all these diseases,
and of all the new ones that continued to arise, there were more and more
men in the world. This was because it was easy to get food. The easier it
was to get food, the more men there were; the more men there were, the
more thickly were they packed together on the earth; and the more thickly
they were packed, the more new kinds of germs became diseases. There were
warnings. Soldervetzsky, as early as 1929, told the bacteriologists that
they had no guaranty against some new disease, a thousand times more
deadly than any they knew, arising and killing by the hundreds of millions
and even by the billion. You see, the micro-organic world remained a
mystery to the end. They knew there was such a world, and that from time
to time armies of new germs emerged from it to kill men.
invisible micro-organic world there might be as many different kinds of
germs as there are grains of sand on this beach. And also, in that same
invisible world it might well be that new kinds of germs came to be. It
might be there that life originated—the 'abysmal fecundity,' Soldervetzsky
called it, applying the words of other men who had written before
him...."
It was at this point that Hare-Lip rose to
his feet, an expression of huge contempt on his face.
don't you tell about the Red Death? If you ain't going to, say so, an'
we'll start back for camp."
The old man looked at
him and silently began to cry. The weak tears of age rolled down his
cheeks and all the feebleness of his eighty-seven years showed in his
grief-stricken countenance.
"Sit down," Edwin
counselled soothingly. "Granser's all right. He's just gettin' to the
Scarlet Death, ain't you, Granser? He's just goin' to tell us about it
right now. Sit down, Hare-Lip. Go ahead, Granser."
the tale in a tremulous, piping voice that soon strengthened as he got the
swing of the narrative.
"It was in the summer of
2013 that the Plague came. I was twenty-seven years old, and well do I
remember it. Wireless despatches—"
Hare-Lip spat loudly his
disgust, and Granser hastened to make amends.
"We
talked through the air in those days, thousands and thousands of miles.
And the word came of a strange disease that had broken out in New York.
There were seventeen millions of people living then in that noblest city
of America. Nobody thought anything about the news. It was only a small
thing. There had been only a few deaths. It seemed, though, that they had
died very quickly, and that one of the first signs of the disease was the
turning red of the face and all the body. Within twenty-four hours came
the report of the first case in Chicago. And on the same day, it was made
public that London, the greatest city in the world, next to Chicago, had
been secretly fighting the plague for two weeks and censoring the news
despatches—that is, not permitting the word to go forth to the rest of the
world that London had the plague.