30062	----	Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction February 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. THE PLAGUE By TEDDY KELLER _Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!_ Illustrated by Schoenherr * * * * * Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip. Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line--in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause--by saying, "Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator." Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, "Germ War Protection." All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin. "I told you, general," he snapped to the flustered brigadier, "Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge." "But this is incredible," a two-star general wailed. "A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg." Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. "May I remind you, general," he said, "that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out." "But good heavens," a chicken colonel moaned, "this is all so irregular. A noncom!" He said it like a dirty word. "Irregular, hell," the brigadier snorted, the message getting through. "There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work." He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, "We'll clear your office for top priority." Then dead serious, he added, "Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through." Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. "Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office. * * * * * Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. "You look beat," she said. "Brass give you much trouble?" "Not much. We're top priority now." He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. "What's new?" "I've gone though some of these," she said. "Tried to save you a little time." "Thanks. Sit down." She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. "So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague." Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes. "Any water reports?" Andy asked. "Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,--and a bunch more. No indication there. Except"--she fished out a one-page report--"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it." Andy shrugged. "You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help." He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. "Any trends yet?" "It's hitting everybody," Bettijean said helplessly. "Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers--rich, poor--from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary." "What is it?" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. "People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?" "In food?" "How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time--even if it was sabotage?" "On the wind?" "But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country--even Alaska and Hawaii--without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?" Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. "Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?" "I don't know," he said. "I just don't know." For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers. "We've got to find a clue--a trend--an inkling of something." He nodded toward the outer office. "Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington." Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory. He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends. * * * * * It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers. "Sergeant," the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office. Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk. "RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION," the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as "alleged Russian plot" and "germ warfare" and "authorities hopelessly baffled." Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. "That'll help a lot," he growled hoarsely. "Well, then, Sergeant." The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. "So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation." Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder. "Colonel," she said levelly, "you should know better than that." A shocked young captain exploded, "Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to--" "All right," Andy said sharply. For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said, "You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic." He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. "So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work." "Sergeant," the captain said, as if reading from a manual, "insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and--" "Oh, good heavens!" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. "Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man--" "That's enough," the colonel snapped. "I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but...." He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. "I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action." Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth. "But you can't--" "Let's go," Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. "Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep." "But you can't quit now," Bettijean protested. "These brass hats don't know from--" "Corporal!" the colonel roared. * * * * * And from the door, an icy voice said, "Yes, colonel?" The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. "Oh, general," the colonel said. "I was just--" "I know," the brigadier said, stepping into the room. "I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone." "But, general, I--" The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face. "Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?" Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. "Both I guess." The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. "Andy, this is even worse than we had feared." Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him. "I've just come from Intelligence," the general said. "We haven't had a report--nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen--not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had--it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor--was an indication of something big in the works." "A day and half ago," Andy mused. "Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it." "It could be just propaganda," Bettijean said hopefully, "proving that they could cripple us from within." The general nodded. "Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?" Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. "I can sit here and cry." For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him. Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. "We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation." The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, "Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here." "But, general," the colonel wailed, "a noncom? I'm assigned--" The general snorted. "Insubordination cannot be tolerated--unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work." * * * * * The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in. She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. "Did you learn anything?" she asked. Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. "It's crazy," he said. "From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick." "I found a few," she said. "Over in a Virginia hospital." "But I did find," Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, "a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers--business, not government--and new parents and newly engaged girls and...." He shrugged. "Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?" Andy nodded. "I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out." "Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses." "That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?" "Nor a single postal worker." Andy tried to smile. "One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for--" He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out. Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. "This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down." "What?" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. "It's the same thing--only not quite as severe--in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico." "Writers?" "Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit." "This is insane," Andy muttered. "Doctors and dentists are fine--writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that." Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. "Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley." "Somebody in our outer office is organized," Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. "Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together." "What does it show?" "Black-out. By order of somebody higher up--no medical releases. Must mean they've got it." He scratched the growing stubble on his chin. "If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?" "Sure," Bettijean brightened, then sobered. "Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public." "Here's another batch," Andy said. "Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit." "Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases." "And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it." Andy could only shake his head. Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk. Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. "It's here," he said angrily. "It's here somewhere, but we can't find it." "The answer?" "Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What--" * * * * * In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede. "It's not contagious," Andy growled. "Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water." The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, "Poor Janis." "Now," Andy said brightly, "how's that, Janis?" She mustered a smile, and breathed, "Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic." "Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of," Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. "You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet." Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed. "Don't hurry," Andy said, "but I want you to tell me everything that you did--everything you ate or drank--in the last ... oh, twelve hours." He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile. "What time is it?" Janis asked weakly. Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take. One of the girls said, "It's three o'clock in the morning." She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her. "I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine," Janis said. "I came to work as usual and...." Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. "It was about eleven when the relief crew came in." "What did you do then?" Andy asked. "I ... I took a break and...." Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. "And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all." "And that's not all," Andy prompted. "What else?" "Nothing," Janis said too quickly. Andy shook his head. "Tell it all and maybe it'll help." "But ... but...." "Was it something against regulations?" "I ... I don't know. I think...." "I'll vouch for your job in this office." "Well...." She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, "I ... I wrote a letter to my mother." Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. "And you told her about what we were doing here." Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes. "Did you mail it?" "Y ... yes." "You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?" "Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me." She choked down a sob. "Did I do wrong?" "No, I don't think so," Andy said, patting her shoulder. "There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and--. Oh, here's a doctor now." The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl. Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers--Aspen, Taos and college towns--thousands of people sick--but none in that valley in Tennessee--and few government workers--just one girl in his office--and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter--and.... "Hey, wait!" Andy yelled. Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, "Get me a report. Fast." The technician darted out. Andy wheeled to Bettijean. "Get the brass in here. And call the general first." To the doctor, he said, "Give that girl the best of everything." Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy. * * * * * It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. "Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers. "Have you got something?" the brigadier asked. "Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?" Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. "Our problem," he said, "was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't--why girls from small offices were sick--and why senators and postal workers weren't--why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't. "The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But"--he held up a four-cent stamp--"here's the villain, gentlemen." The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp. Bettijean said, "Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets--they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And"--she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck--"Andy, you're wonderful." "The old American ingenuity," the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. "I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do--" "At ease, colonel," the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. "It's your show. What do you suggest?" "Get somebody--maybe even the President--on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then--" He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, "But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard. "But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident--some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. "United States whips mystery virus," or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped." * * * * * The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow. "But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick." Andy chucked. "That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge." The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. "How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up--or to get better acquainted?" Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand. "And while you're gone," the general continued, "I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars." But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes. And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard. THE END * * * * * 
63524	----	The Silver Plague By ALBERT DE PINA Like a tide, the horror of the silver death was sweeping to inundate the inhabited worlds--with only Varon to halt its flood--and he was already marked by the plague he fought. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Fermin, the _Arch-Mutant_, had risen before dawn and in the garnet-colored light that passed for morning on Ganymede, repaired to the magnificent austerity of his cloister where he received an endless series of reports. He had been reading _Seville-Lorca_ the previous evening, delighting in the incredible pages which had been the great historians' dying contribution to their worlds, and to which he had every intention of adding an ironic anti-climax of his own. He sat in an austere Jadite chair basking in the archaic warmth of an open hearth, and watched whimsically for a moment how the darting flames reflected a bright patina on the fur of the somnolent Felirene at his feet. There was a chapter on the Jovian Societies he wanted to re-read. Not for the brilliant, facile style in which _Seville-Lorca_ presented the distilled chronicles of the Jovian Moons, but for that deeper purport which is the notation of the heart. Slowly, Fermin became absorbed in the photo-plastic record on the stand before him, unrolling in synchronized timing with his own reading speed. "... It seems natural, I suppose, human nature being as it is--that the Mother Planet should maintain an attitude of supercilious aloofness. But then, it is axiomatic we can never quite love those we have wronged. And the history of the colonization of the major Jovian Moons is anything but exalting. "When at the close of the 'Great Unrest,' as the twenty-third century is popularly known, it was definitely established that the ratio of Mutants to the grand total of normal populations was becoming an increasingly dangerous potential, they were given their choice of a charter to the newly explored Jovian Moons--a magnanimous gesture which ignored with olympic indifference the fact that at least one--Ganymede--had already a civilization of its own. "The fact that 'Mutants' were the direct result of malignant rays and fiendish gases to which their ancestors had been exposed during the endless wars that ravaged Terra until the twenty-second century, thus damaging and modifying their chromosomes until Mutants began to appear in increasing numbers, was beside the point. * * * * * "Terra was not interested in 'origins' it was only interested in 'conclusions'--and that the sooner the better! For these silver-haired Mutants the color of old ivory, with the piercing silver-grey eyes, were a constant reminder of a recent barbarism, of fratricidal wars so damning that the new apostles of the 'Great Peace' would rather avert their minds. Besides, and this was the deciding factor, the Mutants' infinite capacity for intrigue bid fair to upset Terra's idyllic applecart! "For in a world devoid of want, where strife had ceased under scientific control, where obedience was taken for granted, and robot-labor performed an endless variety of tasks, the blessed Mutants found ways and means of fomenting discontent with admirable logic. Had it been confined to their own ranks, it would have been no problem at all, for as yet their number were negligible--scarcely a million. But the perversity of human nature is sometimes appalling to behold; thus, under the persuasive eloquence of the Mutants, great numbers of the population of the World State began audibly to long for freedom! "What manner of freedom they longed for, was a little difficult for the World-Council to establish. For surely, in the face of universal plenty, freedom from want had been accomplished. Since the Government was a benevolent bureaucracy staffed by scientists, oppression was unknown. And, in the absence of need for labor, thanks to robots, anyone could and did pursue such bents and careers as best suited them, within certain limits. Even pleasure palaces; rejuvenation centers--and pleasures had been socialized. The Government furnished Cinemils, mild stimulants; even the more esoteric delights to all who performed a minimum of work per day. "Of course, we now know (thanks to three hundred years of perspective), what the World-State failed to perceive: That human beings need not so much 'Freedom' per se, as the 'conditions of freedom.' For in a Social Order where everything is provided without effort, effort itself is hopelessly circumscribed. Where the 'Will to Achievement' is subtly neutralized by an established way of life, that precludes 'friction,' such a 'Will' becomes atrophied and progress stagnant. Just as 'resignation' is an inadequate word to describe the psychic exhaustion of a wounded soldier who contemplates with indifference the immediacy of death, so is 'exaltation' insufficient to describe the spiritual change that came over large segments of the World-State under the fine ivory hands of the Mutants. "Fortunately, the Terran Government had the wit to sense an impending explosion that would have scattered their precious 'Peace' to Kingdom Come. Thus began the hurried exodus of both Mutants and malcontents to the Jovian system of Moons. The Mutants went first by unanimous decision of the Council. They demanded to be taken to Ganymede, where with a sigh of infinite relief (on the part of the World-State), they were deposited bag and baggage. Then the malcontents were taken to Callisto, to Io, to Europa, and some even to one or two of those smaller Moons hardly bigger than asteroids. Even in exile, however, the parental hand of Terra followed its strange and wayward children. "For we can suppose without fear of error, that the stately World-State Government felt much as an old and weary hen that has hatched a particularly bewildering brood of ducks. Deep in its heart, Terra felt a guilty sense of blame, and had anyone been able to reach that cold and battered throne, he would have discovered the angry pity and vast misgivings with which it undertook the colonization of the Moons. "But as usual, they failed to take into consideration the 'Unpredictable,' that cosmic accident that recurs always in the lives of men--thus the World-State never even dreamed of what were later on to be called 'The Societies.'" Fermin the Arch-Mutant paused meditatively in his reading, and wondered with faint amusement if _Seville-Lorca_ peering from the summit of some remote Nirvana could see the stupendous drama that was being enacted in the Moons, and write on the spectral pages of a book, a new addition to his "_Annals_." But his sardonic reverie was suddenly arrested in mid-flight, for at his feet the great, golden _Felirene_ had stirred with the preternatural awareness of the feline, its immense green eyes feral as it sensed.... I "_O Moon of my delight_ That knows no waning..." Terra--19th Century. In the semi-darkness, the vast crysto-plast observatory was deserted. For the fifteen Tiers devoted to the feast, overflowed with celebrants who observed the three hundredth anniversary of their landing. All Io seemed devoted to the chief preoccupation in their lives, and, had managed to make of an historic fact, the excuse for a planet-wide bacchanale. Julian Varon removed his black silk mask and stepped to the wide balcony overhanging the plains. The frosty air was like a benison on his narrow, high-cheek-boned face, and the silence was a greater blessing still. Vaguely, he remembered the lines of an ancient poem of the twentieth century, which, by one of those ironies of Fate, had been preserved when far greater masterpieces had faded into oblivion: "_The brandy's very good-- Blue space before me and no sign of man._" Meditatively, he raised the fragile Bacca-glass to his lips and sipped the fiery liquor that Ionians distilled from the fragrant stems and leaves of the _Clavile_ plant. For days, his mind had whirled in hopeless circles, and he wondered with a curious sense of detachment, whether he wouldn't be better off to leave the problem to the scientists. Only, it was his duty as much as any scientist, to search for clues. Julian raised his eyes and gazed at the great tiers of stars that glittered above the towering, purple crags of the _Mallar_ range. Throughout the hours of the Ionian night, the skies had been peopled by the singing of these constellations. But there had been none to hear it, for despite the ravages of the _Silver Plague_, the inhabited Moons of Jupiter had gone mad with revelry, as if they would distill the last drop of pleasure from each passing hour that brought them closer and closer to extinction. "I wonder," Julian spoke aloud, "why decadence always hastens the tempo of pleasure!" He smiled acidly as his own voice sounded strange in his ears. Below him, the blazing tiers within the transparent enveloped, that was Atalanta, capital of Io, the great Galilean satellite, sparkled polychromatically in the night. In the utter silence, a stream of music faint and far away, like a tiny goblin orchestra reached him, as the icy wind plucked with elfin fingers at his cape. And something else reached him, too, that sent the blood racing through his veins as his hypersensitive awareness of danger, translated the sound of stifled breathing behind him into a signal for action. He whirled with a speed that was an index of Jovian training, for in the vastly lighter gravities of the Moons, his muscular coordination was breath-taking. Before him stood a Mutant in the act of crouching for a leap. He was huge, squarely built, his silver mane standing straight out as he sprang with a murderous rush. Julian stepped aside with calculated ease and his left hand moved like a piston into the Mutant's face. There was no time to seek the hidden "electro" under his arm-pit, and power-rapiers had to be checked before entering pleasure palaces. The Mutant bellowed with fury, and rammed a right deep into Julian's ribs, then brought up his left and Julian tasted the claret in his mouth. The silver-haired, silver-eyed being was obviously fighting to kill. And suddenly Julian's vast amazement changed to a cold fury that turned his blue-grey eyes to a smouldering black. He slid two sharp jabs into his enemy, then crossed his right and felt bone give under his fist. He moved in, blasting with both fists like rocket exhausts, and heard the Mutant's breath exploding from his body. The Mutant with supreme effort tossed a fist grenade at him, but Julian had caught the rhythm of the battle and swayed away with it; he made the assailant miss again, then with all his dynamic power sent his right hand crashing home. He saw the Mutant, face askew, slide drunkenly to the blood-patterned floor. Then cool hands were on his wrists, on his brow, and sanity began to return again. "Darling!" Narda said in a husky voice that was distilled music, and drew down his golden head against a priceless gown that was all blue shadows and pin-points of lights, to stanch the blood from his cut lips. Her violet eyes were bright with unshed tears, but in the odd, slurred melody of her haunting voice there was no tremor as she asked, "What on Io's happened? Were you recognized by any chance? _And a Mutant...!_" "Hardly think so ... still.... Oh, forget it, this is not a night for problems. Did anyone ever tell you that your eyes are in Heaven," he grinned irresistibly with a charm that made him seem younger. "No! None of your ... what was it your barbaric ancestors called it?... _blarney!_" It was then she noticed the tell-tale silver flood at the roots of his yellow mane, and her heart stood still. _The Silver Plague!_ Carefully she lighted a cigarette and blew a perfect smoke-ring into the icy air, she brushed an imaginary tobacco speck from lips that were like red roses. And when she spoke Narda was perfectly calm. "I came to find you because they're going to play the _Ecstasiana_ with a native orchestra from Ganymede--the muted viols and flute-like instruments, and those weird violins of that strange race.... We danced it the first time we met. Remember, my dear?" Her eyes were radiant as if all her tears were concentrated in her heart, leaving only their sparkle behind. * * * * * He nodded silently. He was too full of the racking knowledge that all his dreams had been destroyed by this alien malady that turned the hair to gleaming silver, and rendered them sterile. That, and his terrible love for this exquisite, gallant being who had consecrated her youth and brains and loveliness to the only ideal in the chaos of their lives--The _Dekka_. And as they turned to go, the tiny tele-rad on Julian's wrist began to flash a pin-point of light in a complicated code. They both watched instantly alert, translating the urgent message with the ease of years of experience. The message was peremptory--final. They were to repair to the Dekka's ancestral Hall without delay for a plenary session. The laconic order ceased as the instrument went blank. Julian Varon looked at Narda for a long moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders. "We'll have to leave right away, it may be _emergency_!" Narda nodded. "We'll have barely time to change in the spacer." From below, the strain of the _Ecstasiana_ rose to engulf them in a flood of melody. She laid a sculptured hand on his arm. She was silent. She was waiting. The _Dekka's_ summons brooked no delay. For this was no game of mere intrigue, but a gigantic fight instinct with the overwhelming drama of the unseen. The huge Mutant on the floor groaned and rolled to one knee. He had the strength and courage of a _Felirene_. He got up and rushed with scorn and hatred written on his features. He came with all rockets firing. Julian stood there in the battering storm and fought back. He dug his left into the flesh of the Mutant inches deep, then ripped a hook to his jaw. In the clinch that followed he could hear Narda's sobbing breath, as the Mutant's laces pounded low; he countered with secret, murderous tactics of his own. Then, he pulled the trigger on his left hand, aiming with precision at a vital spot. He let it go. He heard the Mutant crash against the floor and lay still. Julian stood for a moment with his tongue on fire, his lungs heaving like bellows with the effort. He bent down and forced himself to search the man, but there were no clues on the giant. * * * * * From above, Atalanta was like a gargantuan bottle left behind by some god in his cups. Narda at the controls brought the intra-Moon spacer spiraling down expertly to a landing behind a concealing rampart of rock. Ahead of them a black, basaltic cliff reared its jagged crags, its boulder-strewn base seemingly impassable. Nevertheless, the two masked and cloaked figures hurried their steps toward the desolate barrier. "We're probably late!" Julian observed. "We seem to be the last to arrive." He drew his dark, _Felirene_-lined cloak closer about him and led the way forward. "Small loss if we've missed the preliminaries!" Narda replied. "I wonder how much longer the _Dekka's_ going to wait? For fifty years Mutants have been appearing in our midst in small numbers--changed overnight, rendered sterile--and the scientists did nothing about it. Lately it has become a plague that threatens the Moons with extinction, and still we're fumbling in the dark! Oh, Julian!" Her voice rose in an ascending scale of grief. "Don't move!" Julian whispered harshly and froze into immobility. He'd detected motion--something that had stirred among the boulders to his right. Instinctively his fingers groped for the handle of the tiny weapon under his arm-pit. No bigger than a toy-gun, its electronic stream was devastating at close quarters. He aimed it at the spot where he had sensed movement and fired as a darker shadow catapulted out of the gloom. The spectral-blue beam of radiance from the weapon met the creature in midair and melted a jagged hole in its side; there was a fiendish scream of agony, then briefly a muffled tumult among the boulders. "What on Jupiter was it?" Narda stepped forward to investigate, but Julian stopped her. "No time now." It mattered little what manner of beast had waylaid them. The Jovian satellites, even frigid Callisto, had teemed with life of their own before colonization by Man. And, since the Terrans had preferred to build stupendous cities within transparent, berylo-plastic shields, shaped like bottles, there had been small point in the systematic destruction of native fauna. The cities were largely self-sustaining, anyway. All commerce and intercourse was carried on by air. Only adventurers and fools would venture into the wastelands ... adventurers and fools, and perhaps, members of the _Dekka_. As they reached the base of the cliff, Julian glanced back at Narda and smiled. "Be alert, I'm forcing issues tonight ... inaction's killing me!" He was like a Martian eagle--poised for battle. Narda sensing his mood smiled thinly in the shadows. She wondered silently what new, macabre mission would be assigned to them this time. And hoped that the summons meant something far more than the usual battle between rival Societies striving to milk the venom from each other's fangs. For on at least three major Moons, Io, Europa and Callisto, men and women were struck by an invisible foe that left them trembling with fever, and when that dwindled away, a tide of silver rose from the roots of their hair, and even the eyes became luminous with the deadly patina. Nothing was known of Ganymede. It was hard to tell in the absence of reports, for Ganymede, aside from its own native civilization, had been colonized by Terran Mutants, who could and did procreate, thus perpetuating their race. But the victims of the Silver Plague were left sterile. It was hard to differentiate. Meanwhile the Moons were dying! And yet, a stubborn feeling in her heart kept insisting that perhaps the _Plague_ was something man-made, and like all poisons should have an antidote. She glanced at Julian and shuddered with anguish--there would be no progeny for them--her own turn might be next! What a fiendish weapon, if _it was a weapon_, she thought. The ultimate in refinement of warfare--a refinement that in their Moons had been going on for three hundred years! * * * * * Narda shivered again, increasingly cold, as she let her mind rove briefly over their past history and their centuries of spurious peace. For nothing as crude as open, physical warfare disturbed ever the equilibrium of the various Moons. On the surface, the various governments maintained the most cordial relations--idyllic almost. But underneath--that was a different story! The most ruthless strife had never abated for even an hour. It might take the form of secretly systematic destruction of vibroponic farms of a world desperately in need of food; or perhaps the categorical embargo of essential supplies non-existent in another Moon. Or the proselyting of vast members of colonists from a sister world by means of economic lures. The loser always paid enormous ransom in whatever it was the victor coveted. Thus the subterranean warfare was carried on by secret Societies, much as hitherto the Ancients on Terra had employed secret agents, members of the powerful "Intelligence." Only that on the "Moons," the Societies had much greater power than the _laissez-faire_ governments themselves. Each Moon had its "Society," disavowed, legendary, invisible. They maintained secret armies of Astro-operatives and space navies always in readiness for _any_ eventuality--or an initial _open_ break that none of them had the courage to be the first to start. But more important still, in their vast, secret laboratories, armies of scientists and technicians toiled ceaselessly on new techniques and inventions. Delved into intricate psychological data that was a miracle of ingenuity, calculated always to prepare as far as possible against the _unpredictable_. The murmuring wind of Io swirled among the stones and laved them with its icy caress, and Narda trembled violently again. This time the spasm failed to abate, and she whispered through chattering teeth: "Please, Julian ... hurry. I'm chilled to the marrow ... d-dear...." "You're what?" His voice was suddenly a rasping in his throat. Julian straightened slowly from where he kneeled at the base of the cliff, where he'd been activating the mechanism of the concealed entrance with the wrist transmitter. He eyed the convulsed form of Narda then touched her burning forehead; he noted the tendons corded at her throat. A cold sweat of anguish beaded his brow as he said casually, "It is cold, darling," and then he punched carefully, precisely, and cried with agony as he felt his hand touch her flesh. He caught her tenderly as she slumped in his arms without a sound. He kissed her cold cheek and sought consolation in the fact that she would not suffer the first harrowing convulsive fever of the Plague. It would last for two hours. _How well he knew from experience the course of the disease!_ And he hoped Narda would not come to before then. Quickly he retraced his steps to where they had left the ship, and deposited her inert form in the control room. Then he prepared a note which he placed in her hand, it read: "_It was the kindest thing to do, darling. Wait until I return. There's hope._" He finally adjusted the wrist-transmitter to the exact wave-length required to open the entrance to the _Dekka's_ Hall of Sessions, raced swiftly toward the cliff like a disembodied shadow. In the distance a golden _Felirene_ wailed its banshee love-call, urgent, savage--as savage as the burning agony that stifled Julian's breath, and as primordial. II _"For this is wisdom-- Not to love and live But to question what Fate Or the Gods may give...."_ Terra--20th Century. "I for one, have no intention of being sterilized by--shall we say--remote control!" The sardonic voice paused for emphasis. That would be _Astran_, Julian thought as he entered the great Hall, vast enough to encompass an army. The satirical tones were all too familiar; he had heard them many, many times during the years he had risen from a mere Astro-operative, through the successive stages of "Facet," Section-Facet Arch-Guardian; Techno-Star and finally had become Control-Facet, representing the flat, top-most facet of the stupendous jewel that hung above the Dais of the _Dekka_. "Dekkans," the voice continued, "despite my great age, I can think of less inglorious ends than to die impotent!" The flaming glory of the immense diamond cut in the shape of a ten-point double star, veiled the speaker. "Perhaps we're not facing a conscious enemy at all--that is, none that we have been able to discover," Astran amended with a dry chuckle distilled of acid. "And believe me, the resources of the _Dekka_ are anything but negligible! However, it may be that through a weakening of our race as a whole because of our existence under a different environment than Earth, we have succumbed to a microorganism native to these Moons, which originally were too alien to fit in mankind's metabolic processes. But now, now that through centuries of adaptation we have subtly changed. _It_ ... whatever it is, filtrable virus, microorganism, or whatever, _has had a chance to take hold_. All of you know the effects of the disease--hypertrophy of pigmentation glands--silver hair and eyes, as well as its one single deadly result--_sterility_!" Astran paused on the ghastly thought and let it sink in. "Our scientists have been unable to isolate the germ, it must be a filtrable virus ... that is their problem. But, if as I suspect there is a ... what was it the barbaric, ancient Romans called it?... a _Deux ex machina_ behind it, then, by the perdurable glory of our Moon, gentlemen, I pledge a holocaust that'll dwarf Jupiter's Red Spot into insignificance!" The capacity for destruction in Astran's cold, dispassionate voice was awesome. In the ensuing silence, Julian's mind trained to the apex of its wide-awakedness, felt the horror-vibration that swept the audience of Dekkans. He saw the coruscating streamers of living fire that blazed from the stupendous double star, and, with a feeling of shock saw that ahead of him an Astro-operative's mask had slid imperceptibly to one side, enough to expose a tell-tale _silver tide that had reached half-an-inch above the hair-roots_! Casually almost, Julian moved with his strange, smooth elegance over the ethereal blueness of the safiro-plast flooring, and the imperturbable gaze of his frigid eyes probed into the suddenly startled glare of the man. Without warning his hand flashed out and came away with the torn mask. A wealth of hair that had been tinted gold but showed unmistakable silver at the roots and parting cascaded to his shoulders. The narrow face of the Mutant, with its thin, high-bridged nose and silver eyes, flushed crimson as he was exposed, and the long claw-like hand darted to his side, groping for the deadly Power-rapier that was _de rigeur_. All in one sinuous motion he lunged with the weapon that described a silver vortex under the fulgurant star. In the utter silence Julian, too, had drawn. The breath of all present seemed to pause for a startled second, then their ranks split to give them room. There could be no interference in a duel, that was the law. There was courage in the Mutant, a fanatical valor that was mirrored in his eyes. He knew his life to be forfeit--and he intended to sell it as dearly as he possibly could. * * * * * Only the singing impact of the blades was heard, as the darting swords parried and cut, swirling streamers of unleashed power. And suddenly, the Mutant seemed to recoil upon himself, as if gathering all his reserves of strength, then he launched himself forward in a vertiginous fury of unholy speed. And that was his undoing, for Julian trained under Jovian gravity could more than match it, and the Mutant staking all on speed, had had to sacrifice his guard. There was a soundless flash, like the glare from a gigantic glass, and where the Mutant's chest had been there was only space, space lit by the spectral-blueness of the Dekka Star. The body fell a charred and twisted thing from which the watchers averted their eyes. The peculiar odor of disintegrated flesh stung their nostrils. For the first time in living memory, a spy had contrived to enter their midst. Julian didn't care to think what would happen to the units who guarded and activated the Neuro-graphs that were posted the length of the entrance corridor. Still, it was obvious that only a mind of great power could have had the satanic ingenuity to plan an invasion of the _Dekka's_ Hall of Sessions. Julian Varon bent over the mutilated form suppressing an impulse to retch. It was unmistakably a _true_ Mutant from Ganymede, where the dark flower of their civilization had reached obscure heights. The features of the man were unmistakeable. As he straightened, Julian raised his left arm exposing the tiny double star at his wrist, symbol of his rank, and belatedly reported to the _Dekka_. "A Ganymedean Mutant, _Serenity_!" Julian spoke, facing toward the Dais where he knew Astran stood behind the veiling curtain of light shed by the diamond star. "This dubious honor is the second one tonight," Julian said with a mirthless laugh. "I've fought one bare-handed, the other with Power-rapiers, I should like the next encounter to be with 'Electro-cannon!' However, perhaps these two encounters are something of a clue. Surely," he paused and swept the assembled Dekkans with his eyes, "they must form part of a definite pattern." "Please continue, Control-Facet," Astran's voice held a note of suppressed excitement. "Simply that it has occurred to me, that while we on Io, the dwellers on Europa and even Callisto have been ravaged by this hellish disease, Ganymede has failed even to _mention_ the scourge in their reports. Even taking for granted their genius for silence and intrigue--their aloofness from their sister-worlds' affairs, such a catastrophe as this Plague should have blasted them out of their shells, _if they have been ravaged, too_! If not," Julian paused deliberately, and into these words he put all the dynamic, irresistible power of his trained voice, "_we should investigate, regardless of consequences_!" "Investigate!" Astran's voice held a grim sardonicism. "If what I _intuit_ is true, we, the Dekka are prepared to underwrite Jovian history for the next hundred years!" Julian sighed with a sudden feeling of exultance, and he knew why. Wryly, he was aware that what Astran termed "intuit" was an integer of vastly complicated cerebro-geometric figures; graphs of brainpower coordinates and emotional integers, whose tendrils root-like delved into the innermost recesses of the human mind. And Astran was perhaps the greatest Cerebro-Geometrician of them all. Quite obviously the scientists of the Dekka had been far from idle. And, the expose of the Mutant spy had been like a piece in a jig-saw puzzle falling into place and revealing the beginnings of a pattern of some sort, but as yet not clear. "Quorum!" Astran's voice rose imperatively. "Astro-operatives and Facets clear the Hall. All others remain." The real session was about to begin. Julian Varon knew it all by heart. The endless series of individual reports on every nook and corner of their worlds, so that each member of the Dekka present would be acquainted with the sum total of their individual experiences. Still they remained masked. * * * * * A great multitude of lesser members surged toward the exit, while those chosen to remain grouped forward under the flaming diamond star, whose light veiled the ten members of the _Dekka_. For the ten leaders of their order of whom Astran was the foremost, might be known by their names, recognized by their voices, but they were never seen. There was a saying that all others "could enter the light, but could never touch the flame." All the waning night, while Io revelled in a fantastic carnival of pleasure, they gave their reports in minute detail, and the ten minds on the dais that formed the Dekka, made calculations with infinite patience and fed them to the Neuro-graphs by their desks complicated cerebro-geometric figurates were set up, and woven into the matrix of their problem. The possible influence of certain key figures in the Societies of other Moons whose intelligence, emotional stability and intellectual attributes were known, was reduced to high-level variables, and again fed to the marvelous machines together with the relevant data culled from the members present. Astran was like a raging juggernaut, asking questions, prodding laggard memories, directing the other nine members of the Dekka. He was tireless, and pitiless. How at his great age he could accomplish it, was a mystery. But it had been that boundless energy and stupendous will that had been responsible for the greatness of Io--not to speak of the _Dekka_. _He must be over two hundred!_ Julian thought with awe, recalling dimly the "Memoirs" of an earlier historian whom Astran had commissioned to compile a history of Io, and in so doing had managed to bedevil that poor man's life to such an extent, that the historian had counted the cessation of Astran's visits as among the compensations for dying!... That had been fifty years ago, when already for a century Astran had led the Dekka. At last, the Neuro-Graph machines, marvelous as they were could do no more. Out of that welter of figures, endless reports and calculations, one master mathematical conclusion remained. _The answer lay in Ganymede!_ It suddenly occurred to Julian just how ghastly was the irony of their position. For their ancestors in gaining all the "conditions of freedom," had gained far more than they'd bargained for, including this epidemic of Mutations that in rendering them sterile sealed the doom of their Moons. Had _Terra_ known it, this was the perfect answer--a few decades and all of them would remain only as a Mars-dry chapter in history. They had sown the whirlwind ... and were reaping extinction! And Julian found a kindred feeling in the vast capacity for sheer destruction that Astran had hinted at tonight. If the answer lay in Ganymede with its dual civilization of Terran mutants and their descendants, and the original Ganymedean race, he meant to visit that stupefying world of cabals and intrigues and unrivaled luxury. * * * * * Julian stood alone at last beside the spacer where lay Narda's unconscious form. He glanced up into the ultra-marine skies blazing with myriad fiery roses, and gazed at the red ruby that was Ganymede reflecting the great Red Spot of the parent world. Finally Julian entered the spacer and tenderly raised Narda's head to pour Sulfalixir down her throat. First he had to take her where she would be cared for, and then ... and then.... With a sigh he took the controls and set the drive. In seconds he was soaring, above the deserted plains. III "_Terra glances--Men bend low-- As Death dances, on tip-toe!_" Io--_27th Century_. Like a shallow bowl hooded in starlight, the secret Ganymedean landing fields came rushing upward as Julian coasted the muted spacer, descending in a great rush of wind. It seemed deserted and bleak, coldly uninviting. There was a brief jar as Julian made contact and brought the small but almost invulnerable semi-cruiser to a partial stop. His fingers were still over the banked keys when it came with mind-shattering suddenness--a burst of intolerable light! The spacer trembled, shuddered like a living thing. Instantly the hidden depression was alive with shadow-shapes as the first shot struck home. Again the livid-orange flare blotted out the starlight with a macabre radiance, and Julian reeled against the panel. He had time for but one thought: "Hidden! Secret, eh!" * * * * * He pressed the stud and drove the "Drive" forward one quarter. The spacer reared like a mammoth stallion and plunged vertiginously into the mass of men and projectors, scattering rocks and limbs in a welter of crushed metal and torn flesh. The pandemonium of screams and explosions was drowned in the roar of the hurtling ship. The warm blood spurted out of Julian's ears and its acrid scent was in his nostrils. The momentum had carried the spacer across the entire field before Julian could bring it to a stop. Reeling with the effects of concussion he drove himself out of the wounded vessel and into the darkness of the tumbled terrain. The city was very near, he knew, even if no garish brilliance heralded it. He had to get to it.... _He had to!_ The "plan" was complete, and even if only one small phase of the plan were defeated, the whole pattern would have to be reconstructed and the element of surprise would be lost. And then he realized grayly that an _awareness_ of the Plan existed. Else how explain such a reception? Violence was out in the open now. And, the _Dekka_ had not been the one to force the issue. Still, the pressure of the thought in his mind--the overwhelming responsibility of his task--was so great, that it drove him with cyclonic power. It lent wings to his strength as he covered the distance in great leaps, and was profoundly grateful for his Jovian training. The tumult behind him receded into the distance, became indistinct. But Julian knew that transmitters would be crackling with warning. His instinctive ruse with the spacer had worked like a miracle, but he knew he could not hope to have disposed of all his attackers. They would be on his trail like bloodhounds in short order! The darkness now was but faintly suffused with the shimmer of starlight, and great sections of the sky were blotted out. He came up against a solid barrier and realized he was in the city. Ahead loomed a vast shadow whose upthrust towers caught glimmers of faint luminescence. "The Temple!" he breathed, and darted like a hunted animal into the silent sanctuary. He didn't deceive himself that he would be inviolate, although that was the law; but it was a respite. Time to get his bearings in the damnable city of darkness and tortuous ways. Once within the lofty nave of the temple, Julian took swift stock of his surroundings. It was illuminated with surpassing skill, soothing, caressing almost. But it suddenly struck him that the perfection of the workmanship had a double purpose--it served primarily to mask the impregnability of the place. It was a veritable fortress instantly convertible if the need arose. It had been built to withstand a siege! Ahead of him was a lofty, jewel-encrusted altar. But no idol was enthroned there. No inscription even. Only the raging inferno of a miniature atomic-vortex held under control by some unknown means and enclosed in a transparent substance which he rightly judged to be an illusion, and was a field of force, in reality. There seemed to be no exit anywhere, except the entrance through which he had come. Julian had suddenly come to the end. He searched like a trapped creature, his whole being convulsed by the urgency of his will, while the tumult of the chase drew nearer and nearer with desperate urgency he explored the altar. "_Surely_," he reasoned, "_there must be some way the priests of the temple reach the nave!_" With frantic fingers he explored the gemmed surfaces, driving his mind to intuit the logical means of ingress not to speak _egress_. The chromatic shimmer of the gems blurred and merged together, formed curiously fantastic patterns, as his senses reeled through the after-effects of concussion. Imperceptibly almost, his probing fingers felt a slight projection on a flat surface. With a swift, jabbing motion he pushed in, and a circular section the size of a small coin slid to one side. There was a thin metallic ring beneath. He twisted it, and the whole section large enough for a stooping man to enter swung silently inward. He hesitated briefly gazing into the dark aperture. He could already hear clearly the shouted commands of his pursuers, as the troops deployed into the branching streets. He entered and the aperture closed. * * * * * When the golden _Felirene_ sprawled on the fabulous rug twitched its plumed tail and narrowed its lambent eyes to slits of emerald fire, Fermin, the Arch-Mutant did not move. He did not raise his head. The silver-grey eyes remained fixed, the slightly narrow skull immobile; outwardly, he seemed absorbed in the photo-plastic record. But the long, fragile finger of his hand pressed one of the gems that studded the milky whiteness of the Jadite chair on which he sat. Imperceptibly the jewel depressed. In the open hearth before him, a burning log of aromatic wood crackled and sent up a shower of sparks like shooting stars against the blue glory of the aquamarine glass columns that flanked it. "The slightest movement means death!" Fermin said softly, in a voice that was calm and poised and unhurried. "Even a spoken word might set _it_ off." In the brooding silence, the subdued hissing of the flames could be heard. "You see, intruder, you're standing in a radio beam that controls a Neuro-flash. The slightest movement disturbs the beam, which in turn releases the "flash." A most deplorable accident...." His voice trailed into a melodious undertone faintly etched with laughter. Then he rose and flung back the folds of his jewelled scarlet robe, bright as fresh blood, with a gesture of fastidious elegance. "Come, _Sappho_ ... let us welcome our guest!" he bade the now crouching, six-foot-long beast whose formidable claws were bared. "This is a memorable occurrence!" He moved with an effortless surety remarkable in its economy of movement; there was something oddly regal and imperturbable in his stride. Beside him, Sappho, the feral creature, paced with a fluid motion almost like flight, its golden fur gleaming with firelight reflections. Across an invisible, if lethal barrier they met. Fermin gazed into the inscrutable eyes, blue-grey and silvered, almost like his own. He appraised the astonishing shoulders of the man, the golden hair with the unmistakable rising tide of silver. Noted the absence of weapons except for the usual power-rapier. "What a magnificent addition to our cause," he meditated. Unhurriedly Fermin retraced his steps to the chair, and depressed another flashing gem that shut off the radio-beam, then came back to the silent man. "How," he inquired in a voice like ice, "did you get in here?" Inwardly Fermin was torn between the desire to let _Sappho_ display her peculiar talents, and that of adding yet another valuable recruit to the cause. He smiled slowly as if reading the intruder's thoughts: "It is safe to speak now," he pointed out. "I've shut off the power." "My entrance is but a detail," Julian answered. His eyes traveled slowly, noting the shock of translucent hair, the silver eyes, then paused briefly at the power-rapier hanging from Fermin's belt. For a second he had an almost uncontrollable desire to laugh at the ghastly irony of it. After waiting for hours in the secret passage, he had to blunder headlong into the presence of the one being in all Ganymede he would have avoided at all costs! "I sought sanctuary and there was the Temple-nave. It's inviolate, isn't it?" (_The point was, should he brazen it out or fight._) "Of course!" "But obviously, I couldn't remain in the Temple forever, so ... I had to find an exit." (_Wonder if the paralysis ray works on a Felirene!_) "Continue, please," Fermin's voice was a smooth purr. "The atomic vortex drew my attention and I found beneath it what I sought. Then, when I came in here and saw you absorbed in those records ... why, I hesitated...." "_As simple as that._" A world of irony lay in Fermin's pellucid tones. The smile of ancient Medusa, would have been mild compared with the change that came over the Arch-Mutant's face. "No doubt, it is also a mere detail that the Atomic-vortex--which represents, incidentally, the Absolute--is absolutely fatal! That secret exit beneath the altar is known only to five other persons besides myself. And, that the slightest miscalculation in manipulating the secondary controls of the last door that leads to this chamber, releases an electronic current sufficient in itself to incinerate a squadron! Remarkable!" Fermin's eyes were flashing molten silver. "And casually strolled through!" The hooded eyes were shadowed with death now. "However," the unhurried voice continued, "_we expected you, Julian Varon_." "Yes, I am Varon," Julian answered with a sort of sardonic calm he reserved for moments when death loomed very near. "I am too near _the flame_ to have dispensed with your attention. The point is, Fermin, I thought you a gentleman, while you seem to consider me a knave. I'm afraid we are both mistaken!" His generous mouth curved in a contemptuous smile, as the taunt struck home. Death was something the members of the Dekka had to learn to accept in advance. * * * * * Fermin chuckled, if anything as vulgar as a chuckle might be said to issue from those chiselled, aristocratic lips, but his face was ashen as his hand grasped the neutralized hilt of his Power-rapier. "My rank is higher than a Prince, Dekkan--I don't have to be a gentleman! My mistake lay in thinking that you might be interested in an offer I was about to make. After all, _you're a sterile Mutant now_." The savage Felirene licked its golden muzzle and gave a muffled roar as if tired of waiting, its prodigious musculature rippled under the metallic sheen of its priceless fur. Fermin stroked it caressingly. "See, even Sappho has lost patience. I regret I must subject you to the Psycho-graph--that is, unless you prefer to tell me the reason for your visit of your own accord." The mellifluous accents were a study in modulation--clear, precise--sardonic. Julian had a flashing remembrance of what a Psycho-graph could do to him. It had happened once before during his twenty-nine years of existence. He relived for an instant the burst of dazzling light, the agonizing fury in his brain, while voices that mocked and danced and probed penetrated deeper and deeper into his consciousness until they became a searing Babel in his mind. Julian had vowed it would never happen again. Suddenly he blanked his mind with swift ruthlessness. And with the same savage ruthlessness he struck. A tiny paralysis beam flashed from the ring on his left little finger and stretched out the Felirene without a sound. His right hand already had sought the Power-rapier and the flashing blade described a scintillant wheel before him. But Fermin's reflexes were quite as swift. His own blade leaped into his long, aristocratic hand, as he sought cunningly to back toward the Jadite chair. But Julian didn't give him that chance he needed, his onslaught drove forward with appalling speed, slashing, parrying, probing like a living thing, until the Arch-Mutant's face went gray, shadowed by the first fear he had known in his extraordinary life. Craftily, the scarlet-robed Arch-dynast feinted to the left, in the secret Ganymedean lure, and to his vast astonishment saw the lure engaged, _and then_, a searing flash that coruscated before his dazzled eyes left him only the neutralized hilt of his rapier in his hand! Fermin had a confused picture of molten drops spilling from the weightless hilt and of golden motes dancing before his eyes, when the paralysis beam convulsed him in a frozen shudder and he tumbled slowly to the rug--graceful even in unconsciousness. Julian did not waste a single precious second. Both Fermin and his _alter ego_ would be out for at least two or three hours, he knew. But his presence might be discovered there any moment. He search the jewelled cabinets that lined one wall. Feverishly he scanned the photo-plastic record on the stand, and even read the flowing hieroglyphics of Ganymede, so much like the written Arabic of forgotten antiquity, which he found in a special compartment over the hearth, and found ... nothing! Nothing but a single word, frozen and faded in a now neutralized telesolidograph screen that flanked the white splendor of the Jadite chair. The word was "_Paradisiac_." And that was the name of perhaps the most glamorous, and the most dangerous pleasure den in their known universe. At last in desperation, he searched the fallen body unceremoniously. The jewelled garments of the Arch-Mutant yielded no records, no secret notes, only a tiny vial fashioned of a single blood-red _Panagran_, which contained a colorless liquid. This, Julian thrust into a pocket. Then like a wraith he melted into the aquamarine penumbra of the titanic columns and disappeared as soundlessly as he had come. Once out in the diluted scarlet of Ganymede's morning, he saw that the temple was ringed with guards. Most of them lounged in the careless sense of security that comes with routine. Julian, the pupils of his eyes dilating, slid along the side of one wall, there was only one guard there--beyond was a wide avenue somewhere along which the Paradisiac was located. He moved as quietly as a _Felirene_, as implacable as death. The guard never even felt the blow that felled him. Then Julian was sprinting madly as shouts rose behind him in the roseate gloom. "Damn this pink fog!" he exclaimed through clenched teeth. Behind him the muffled stamp of scurrying feet and the metallic scraping of power-rapiers became distinct; oaths and imprecations in various dialects grew loud. * * * * * He swerved aside into a half-concealed doorway to hide his progress, for it wouldn't do to have his pursuers see him. A badly aimed power-beam from an old-fashioned heat-ray gun splashed off a wall not a block distant, in incandescent fury. "The fools!" he thought contemptuously. But his eyes scanned the buildings for a sign of the "Paradisiac." He was beyond fear--beyond emotion even. But what bothered him in a sort of dazed wonderment was that the word "Paradisiac" should have been frozen in the neutralized telesolidograph. For his assignment as part of the "Plan" was to meet another member of the Dekka, a Techno-Star, at the "rendezvous!" How Fermin, the Arch-Mutant had managed to obtain that information was incredible! It was an index to plans and forces he had not previously conceived. But the problem now was to find the Paradisiac, he had merely a matter of minutes in which to seek concealment. And in this world of tortuous cabals not to speak of instant death, no blatant signs advertised pleasure, shelter or concealment. The latter was an art that was subtly applied to itself. One either did, or did not, know where to go. Sanctuary was there for the asking--at a price. But the signs were only for the initiate to recognize. Desperately Julian tuned in the secret wave-length of the _Dekka_, and turning his wrist-transmitter to full force, sent out in code a streamlined account of what had transpired since his landing, as a last detail he told briefly of his encounter with Fermin, and of taking the curious vial from the Arch-Mutant. It was then that out of the soft, roseate haze, a brilliant, vari-colored pinwheel flashed briefly, then vanished as if it had never been, not fifty paces from where he stood. And Julian without hesitation was at the blank, beryloid wall in a few strides. With his rapier-scabbard, he tapped a series of sounds, and the wall seemed to part, just wide enough for him to squeeze through the aperture. Behind him, the incredibly resistant plastic wall had closed. In silence he waited, trying to control his labored breathing. Knowing that he was being inspected, and that the translucent barrier before him would or would not open--as _they_ willed. The thought flashed through his mind that perhaps this _sub-rosa_ stronghold of the Dekka, kept ostensibly as a pleasure-den, might have become tainted--a trap instead of a refuge. And in that brief instant of harrowing suspense, Julian became conscious of a presence, something cold and weirdly impersonal, that pervaded the cubicle with its aura. He shifted uneasily, poised with a grim determination. The blood-stained fabric moulded to his superb torso gleamed with the sheen of wet metal under the soporific illumination. There was no sound save his audible breathing. After what seemed eternity--in reality seconds--the wall before him slid silently aside. A long corridor stretched before him. It led to the public rooms. The sudden shock of overwhelming relief had the quality of vertigo. The quadrangle walls seemed to lose solidity and become curved. He shut his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, the wall on the left side of the quadrangle bore a message in brilliant letters as if they'd emerged glowing from the plastic substance itself. It was a message and a question: "PUBLIC ROOMS NOT NEUTRAL. DISGUISE DESIRED?" Julian stared. Behind the silver-grey brilliance of his eyes, a mind trained to irrevocable decisions worked at the level of maximum awareness. His judgment balanced factors and variables. True, his instructions had been to seek sanctuary here, at this place, and on this street that for all its seemingly deserted obscurity was honeycombed with palaces fabulous for luxury and unlimited pleasures. Even the exotic tastes of jaded minds whose more esoteric interests could only be aroused by pain--the wild suffering of crucified flesh--were catered to. Fugitives from half a dozen worlds lost their identity in the opulent warrens where "life" so often could be bought and sold with oblique indifference. But he had to visit the Public Rooms--his only contact with what he had come to seek _was there_! Someone who had devoted a lifetime to the Dekka, in Ganymede. Imperturbably he re-read the fading words, and with a mental squaring of his shoulders, he replied: "Yes. Nothing _organic_, of course. But it must be more than merely skillful!" Instantly the wall glowed again: "THE SIXTH PANEL TO YOUR LEFT AWAITS YOUR PLEASURE." * * * * * Julian strode down the hall and paused before the sixth panel, it opened inwardly with the same silent precision that characterized everything in the place. Thus far he had seen no one. The maximum anonymity was, of course, essential. Still, there was something eerie in the atmosphere of complete detachment. He entered and found himself in a circular room with curving, almost translucent walls. The floor was firm, yet resilient under foot. He felt like a fop at a rejuvenation center, and laughed suddenly at the thought. His whole countenance was lit by that rare smile. From somewhere a slim, completely masked creature glided silently into the room. Julian judged its height at slightly less than five feet; however, beyond the fact that its body was undeniably human, and exquisitely proportioned, Julian was unable to go, for the being's skin-tight garment left not an inch of surface exposed--except its hands. These were long, and marvelously sensitive, with a nervous life of their own as if they acted independently of the Ganymedean's guiding brain. They were measuring him now, taking in the magnificent breadth of shoulder, the long, flat thighs and narrow waist, above which rose the inverted pyramid that was Julian's torso. At last they carefully removed his helmet and paused as if appraising the great shock of golden hair. With a swift motion that took in Julian's entire body, the designer indicated that Julian strip. Again the exquisite hands repeated the gesture--impatiently this time--but Julian, his face set, still hesitated. The designer was a native Ganymedean, beyond doubt--Julian knew that much. But, was it a man or a woman? Julian was well aware that the exquisite beings of fabulous Ganymede, who even when confronted with the outrage that was _The Dynasty_, foisted upon them by the Terran Mutants had disdained arming themselves to the teeth as the rest of the Moons had done, had some very strange ideas about things. And the "Control-Facet" had no intention of disrobing before a woman--even as alien and anonymous a being as the Ganymedeans. His face was beginning to flush with sheer annoyance. As if reading Julian's thoughts, the masked designer shook its head and made an expressive gesture with its hands, as if Julian's nudity would be a thing of such utter unimportance, that it would scarcely be noticed, except as a foundation upon which to achieve a superlative disguise. And Julian had no alternative. It was either disrobe or enter the Public Rooms as he was. Mentally he consigned the stubborn race of Ganymede to the most sulphuric region he could think of, and palming his electro-beam, undressed. The coldly unemotional designer was unable to suppress a gasp! Its ancient, long-forgotten Gods must have been like this; theirs was a cult of beauty, and in Julian it was witnessing a masterpiece. Almost, reverently, the fluttering hands began their work. The Ganymedean's artistry was very great. "_Part of their accursed stubbornness!_" Julian thought. For the Ganymedeans had an exasperating tenacity of purpose which brooked no obstacles until they achieved their ends--it bordered on genius, or madness, or both. Had they devoted it to the art of War, Seville-Lorca's "_Jovian Annals_" would have been a vastly different story. The space-tanned face with its slightly flaring nostrils, and large silver-grey eyes, crowned by the shock of golden mane, began to change subtly under the magical hands of the designer. Slowly the shoulder long hair took on a dull, ruddy sheen, while the coppered complexion paled and a temporary irritant brought a deep flush to his cheeks. With deft movements, the winged brows were darkened and narrowed, and the generous, full lips were pulled slightly inwards and taped with invisi-plastic, until only a thin, cruel curve remained. The Ganymedean stepped back and scrutinized the effect. Quickly it crossed to a part of the circular chamber and then pressed a stud. A great section of the wall sank downward, revealing tier after tier of dazzling costumes already composed. There were gossamer silks from Venus, lustrous as moonlight pools; the opulent gleam of stiff brocades from Mars, as unyielding as the character of that supercilious race. Velvets like crushed petals, embroidered in _Starlimans_, the priceless green diamonds of Mercury; vivid fabrics from distant Neptune, which were not woven at all, but secret plastics worth a small fortune each. And, they were all green--in an infinite gradation of shades, nuances, hues. The artist's hands reached and drew forth a single garment open at the back. And then the real work began. * * * * * Julian's eyes were inscrutable. He had not been asked what effect was to be achieved, or indeed how he wished to be changed. True, nothing of an _organic_ nature had been attempted. But he was not used to this. The Ganymedean designer, whatever it was, was a great artist. Great enough to take liberties, or else possessed of the effrontery of genius. But then, Julian meditated, Ganymedeans were like that. There were times when one didn't know whether to slay them or leave them. Then it occurred to Julian that perhaps the instructions of the _Dekka_ had been specific. But dismissed the thought with a wry smile. Even the Dekka's instructions as to the actual disguise would have been quietly ignored by this creature. It was a work of art, and in that realm, Ganymedeans listened to no one. But his meditation was cut short by the gestures of the artist, which clearly indicated that Julian tilt his head. In his hands he held a tiny bottle, and something like an eye-dropper. "I said _nothing organic_!" Julian reminded him coldly. "A tint, nothing more," the Ganymedean spoke for the first time in soft, slurred accents. "It will only last a few days, then disappear. And, without it, the work is incomplete." Julian submitted reluctantly. The artist was at last finished. One graceful hand motioned toward a huge moon of a mirror suspended by anti-gravitic means, and Julian turned curiously to see what the creature had transformed him into. His astounded gasp was audible in the silent alcove. For he saw a tall, disdainful Martian whose violet eyes looked coldly out a face he couldn't recognize as his own; a mane of ruddy, curling ringlets fell to the neck-line, while thin, cruel lips curving slightly expressed unutterable boredom. For the rest, his body was sheathed in palest silver-green, of a texture like human epidermis--satiny, rippling with his every movement, while a great belt of _Panagrans_ circled his narrow waist. The Ganymedean held up an expressive finger, then flew to a drawer hidden beneath the folds of the costumes. He extracted something and came swiftly back. Julian felt a sharp pain in his left ear-lobe, then the icy sensation of a cauterizer stanching the capillary flow, and something was fastened to his ear. When he gazed into the reflecting moon, he saw a huge, solitary _Starliman_ swirling green fire from his left ear-lobe. The picture of a ruthless, interplanetary fop was superbly complete. Only a Neuro-Graph machine could possibly have revealed his identity now. Julian went over to where his former garments lay on the floor, and fastened his Power-rapier to the jeweled belt, then extracted the vial he had taken from Fermin, taking care that the designer didn't see it, and secreted it on his person. When he straightened up again, the Ganymedean was holding a cloak of rich _ocelandian_ fur which Julian threw about his shoulders. The artist gazed at him for a brief instant, with something like a smile in its brilliant eyes--all that could be seen of his masked face. Then as silently as he had come, he literally walked into a section of the panelling which gave way before him and disappeared in the endless labyrinth that was the Paradisiac. The door of the circular room opened soundlessly. Julian's hand flew to the electro-beam under his arm-pit, but no one came. It was a mute invitation to depart. The long corridor led him to the balcony overhanging the Public Rooms. Below him was a hall so vast, built on a scale so great, that it imparted a feeling of limitless distances, yet he knew this was an illusion. To his right, a crysto-plast conveyor spiralled down in a swirl of imprisoned waters, foaming like a rushing stream, while at the bottom, freed by the deliberately lessened gravity, the worst and best from all the inhabited worlds sat at individual platforms or revolved lazily in the upper levels. The enchantment of fantastic harmonies wove a subtle spell of desire and nameless longings. But although he felt the magic of the extravagantly honeyed chords, Julian reminded himself that was not there to propitiate the eternal caprice of the flesh. IV _"Within my heart, all ecstasy, Within my eyes, all visions dwell. Life--Death, I turn to rhapsody-- I am the deathless Philomel."_ TERRA--20th Century. He swept the assemblage with a glance. Purposely he had stood for seconds in full view. A perfect fop--as frivolous, as dangerous as anything the Paradisiac harbored. The ultimate in elegance. Julian stepped on the conveyor and had the illusion of being borne along on a cataract of foam to where an immaculately garbed Ganymedean bowed and led the way to a secluded platform embowered in the geometrical interlacings of frost crystals. The panel in the table's center instantly suffused with softest light as he sat down, and a note like the echo of a forgotten song rang subdued. "Venusin ... undiluted!" Julian ordered laconically. Mentally he enjoyed in anticipation the exhilarating power of the treacherous drink. It was precisely what a successful adventurer would have ordered there. He waited calmly, conscious that he was the cynosure of many eyes. He knew a thousand dramas were being enacted in the sumptuous den, under the masking surface of convention and social intercourse. The place was like a gigantic cup abrim with beauty--so much of it--in the decors, in the music, in the _flesh_, left him cold. A glowing core of contempt burned within him at the overwhelmingly seductive weakness it induced. Julian knew he had to be as invulnerable as berylo-plast--deaf to all the mellower dictums of the heart. He was here for one single, solitary purpose that was the all-embracing, the tremendous _now_. To meet a bearer of information so secret, so profoundly vital, that its possessor had not dared even transmit it in the highly complicated secret code of the _Dekka_. For that he had braved what he now realized was certain death. It was his task to receive it, and pass it through channels that would reach the ten Dekkan patriarchs. Once more, as he had done when he'd paused at the top of the conveyor, Julian raised his arm and almost imperceptibly made the secret, immemorable gesture of the Dekka. He was impatient. There was no time. Disguise or no disguise, he knew that any minute now, the Paradisiac might erupt like a long-seething volcano. _Why wasn't the person he was to meet here yet?_ Mechanically his fingers groped for the vial he had taken from Fermin, and paused startled as he felt the unmistakable outline of something hard beside the shape of the miniature vial. He drew it out slowly, palmed so that no observer could discern it from even a short distance. It was a tiny plastic disc bearing the words: SUB ROHAN SQUARE. As Julian raised the glass of Venusin to his lips, he swallowed the disc, which he knew would dissolve. _He already had met the informant!_ The thought was almost shocking in its intensity. It could only have been the Ganymedean designer! And yet, the message in itself was disappointing. What could there be beneath Rohan Square, the central plaza before the Temple where he'd met Fermin? Already amidst the perfect glamour, the seductive illusions of the Paradisiac, forces were gathering that no Ganymedean art could dispel, and which were far from being illusory. Neighboring platforms had drawn increasingly near; implacable eyes, devoid of languor or of drugs, gazed with cold intensity at the frost-trellised bower and its solitary occupant. The lighting effects of the Paradisiac had changed, dimmed to an idyllic, translucent twilight, while the music sank to undulations of the B flat tonality that were magical--plucking at the emotions with unerring skill. A draft of fragrance--the heady _florestan_ of Ganymede--made Julian turn his head. Up the brief stairs of his platform a woman was ascending calmly. Julian rose, a tiny frown between his eyes. He had not sent for a companion; then he remembered his brief flash of passion on the conveyor and wondered with startled dismay if these Ganymedeans went so far as to read the most intimate thoughts of their guests! But no, it could not be. He shot a clear violet glance of keen appraisal at the girl. She was a _true_ Mutant. Her utter refinement of features, the classical loveliness stamped with intolerable pride were beyond doubt Ganymedean, as was the hair, almost crystalline, that fell in shining waves to her shoulders. The eyes, an enchanting shade of silvered blue, were smiling with a secret amusement. "Shall one intrude?" The ghost of a smile parted her lips as she sat down, her priceless gown sweeping the platform with the crystal sheen of water. She threw back a shawl as sheer and fantastic as the Veil of Tanit must have been, with a gesture that only a very beautiful woman can achieve. "Enchanted," Julian answered conventionally, but entirely without warmth. He offered her a drink. Maliciously he suggested _Venusin_, certain it would be refused. * * * * * The girl let her glance rove over the wondrous spectacle on the stage that had emerged from the floor in the center of the hall, and, her smile was an adventure as she replied: "Venusin ... weaver of chimeras ... like all this," she waved an alabaster hand, "illusion ... dreams. But even our greatest dreams _betrays_ us sometimes. Yes, let it be Venusin!" Julian wondered, straining all his faculties, whether the veiled warning were a prophecy of things to come, or the ironical skating on thin ice of the enemy itself! And was aware that part of his mind kept harping on the loveliness of this cryptic stranger. _What was her purpose? Had she penetrated his disguise? Was she there to make sure that under the miracle of art there was some one far more dangerous than a dissipated Martian fop?_ His answer came from her slender, fragile hands. _They were twining and untwining like lilies bending before the wind!_ "Let's dance," Julian said suddenly with an emotion he would not analyze. He rose and caught her roughly up to him. He saw her eyes go expressionless with surprise, she was stunned a little. And before she could recover, the irresistible power of Julian's arms had borne her to the greater anonymity of the dance floor in seconds. One moment the lyric quality of the atmosphere was part of them, and then the illusion was shattered as the frost-trellised bower vanished almost simultaneously with their leaving it. Lurid pencils of unleashed power impinged on the crysto-plast table charring it, while the fragile walls disappeared under the barrage. Julian saw a burly Mutant searching for him, atom-blast in hand, while beside him another Dynast, his face stamped with the excesses of Vanadol slipped into the pandemonium the dance-floor had become. With cold ruthlessness Julian aimed his electro-beam and saw the upper part of the Mutant's torso disappear. He saw the other one near the conveyor and the "electro" flashed again. The beam went through the creature and struck the great conveyor releasing the imprisoned waters. An icy geyser of liquid shot upward, and pandemonium broke loose. All the lights went out and madness stalked the swirling humanity that desperately sought to escape. He was in a maelstrom of fighting, shrieking beings and a chaos of noise as tables and chairs crashed. "Let me lead ... my eyes are conditioned to darkness!" Julian felt a tiny hand grasp his arm. "So are mine ... but who...." He could see dimly a tiny, slender figure, scarcely five feet in height, completely masked. Then he remembered the slurred accents of the artist who had achieved his disguise. The Ganymedean already was scurrying toward the same direction in which Julian wanted to go, to the right of where the conveyor had been. Icy water already swirled around his ankles, and the babel of sounds had risen to a crescendo of unleashed fear, when Julian reached the plastic wall. The Ganymedean was ahead of him, and Julian saw him press a spot in the smooth barrier. A draft of icy air struck his face as an aperture appeared. He dived in. * * * * * They must have traveled miles before Julian's Ganymedean guide began to falter, then stopped. The being had silently ignored every question thus far, and twice had asked for silence. Now he turned on a tiny pencil beam and surveyed their surroundings. It was a cavern, musty and icy in temperature; great festoons of dust held together by age-old cobwebs hung from the curved ceiling. The Ganymedean went directly to a section of the rocky wall on the left, and searched the crumbling surface minutely with the pencil-beam until he found what he sought; he made an odd twisting motion with fingers pressed to the wall, and a circular section slid inward; beyond was another tunnel ending in a seemingly blank wall. "You will find a metal disk in the exact center of the wall," the Ganymedean explained hurriedly. "Blast it with your electro-beam. It is the mechanism of a door, the combination to which we do not possess. Be prepared to _destroy instantly everything that meets your eyes_--everything!" He motioned for Julian to enter the tunnel. "You will have only seconds to achieve your purpose. And remember, your life's already forfeit, so do not hesitate now!" "But what _is_ behind that door?" Julian asked, exasperated. "I have a right to know!" He laid a detaining hand on the Ganymedean's shoulder. "_I must know!_" By the spectral radiance of the pencil-beam, the artist eyed Julian with a strange expression in his eyes. "As you will, Dekkan," the being shrugged his shoulders. "You will find a laboratory ... if you live to reach it. It is doubly guarded, although even the Dynasty does not suspect the existence of that door, for it is part of the remains of our own subterranean system. Beyond it ..." the Ganymedean paused, "in that laboratory is stored the blood-plasma of Mutants who have voluntarily submitted to _innoculation with a certain disease_. The resulting modified virus is the _Plague_. It's like a vaccine magnified a thousand times--its victims do not die, they merely become _sterile_!" The Ganymedean turned toward where the corridor curving to the right was lost to view. "I go that way," he said simply. "My place is here." "But ... your message on the disc ... you mentioned Rohan Square!" Julian exclaimed. "If I survive this, how can I...." "_You are standing beneath Rohan Square, and the Temple, Dekkan!_" And that was all. Suddenly he was gone like a wraith that melted into the darkness and the silence, his footsteps muted by the velvet carpet of dust. Julian hesitated no longer. He found the metal disc in the wall, and with the "electro" at low power destroyed the ancient mechanism of the door. As if released from the bond that for so long had held it, the great section rolled back with a crash, carrying away with it a jagged section of plastic covering from its other side. Julian had a vivid glimpse of startled, silver-haired technicians who stared unbelieving at the strange apparition. In that dazed moment of inaction, Julian acted. _He was in!_ The lethal power of the electro-beam in his hand swept like a scythe through the group of Mutants. It was ghastly. The blasted sides of culture vats poured their viscous contents on the floor. There was a livid, billowing flare of incandescence as acids were struck. It was a welter of destruction and supernal fire that roared into the laboratory before any of the Mutants had a chance to act. The acrid smoke, the odor of disintegrated flesh was like a heavy pall. Through it, galvanized figures could be seen descending a winding staircase that led upward from the subterranean lab. The Guards! V Julian poured a withering barrage at the plastic staircase, and saw it disintegrate into golden, dancing motes that merged with the advancing curtain of fire. He could hear frantic commands shouted from above as power beams crossed and criss-crossed the lab. The raging maelstrom was unbearable now, and Julian retreated toward the tunnel. Almost at the doorway a ponderous section of plastic from the caving ceiling struck him on the left shoulder and fractured his collar bone. He held his left arm at the elbow to support the broken clavicle and sprinted down the tunnel to the corridor. Muffled explosions behind him fed the cataract of fire. He pushed shut the circular section of wall and followed as fast as he was able in the direction he had seen the Ganymedean disappear. The corridor seemed endless. Even his tremendous strength was taxed. Charred, the magnificent costume in tatters, his left side a gory welter of blood, he kept on doggedly, on and on, the unnerving fear in his heart--not for his life--but that he might not be able to transmit to the _Dekka_ the ghastly solution of their problem. He kept forcing his legs, and was amazed when a draft of pure, frigid air smote his feverish face. He found himself by the shores of Ganymede's one and only shallow sea. Above him the stars were like freshly washed diamonds; the icy harshness of the wind was like a tonic. He saw a tiny light describe a parabola overhead, and to his mind, inconsequentially came the lines from a famous poem: "_And an errant star falls rapt and free, In the blue cup of the sea...._" And then Julian realized it was no star. He followed with a vast unbelieving wonder, the tiny light winking on and off. _He knew that code!_ Beyond he saw the tremendous looming shadows he had thought to be clouds. For an instant, Time stood still. Julian reeled with a surging wave of relief that was like pain in its intensity. Frantically he worked the wrist transmitter on his useless left arm, while waves of nausea rolled over him, receded and rolled again. He would never know how long he stood there, sending that long-repeated, incoherent message, until his mind spinning down the labyrinth of unconsciousness brought peace.... * * * * * It was a universe later. The blessed peace of _Vanadol_ had vanished pain. Sulfalixir was cutting through the darkness in his brain like a bright sun. Julian opened his eyes and stared ... stared into a face that reminded him of tele-photos that preserved archaic illustrations of ancient Saints. It was hallowed in the bright patina of silver hair, but it was no Mutant, a virile aura of power shone in those intensely blue eyes. The "Saint" smiled; the fact was illumined as if with an inner light. "Peace, Varon! There's no need to speak for we have the information. You gave it to us--piece-meal--I must say." He smiled with kindly humor. "But you gave it. We have synchronized and correlated what you told us in the transmitter before you went to the Paradisiac, and your later message from the shore." "_That voice ... that voice!_" The thought blotted out all else in Julian's mind. It could not be, it was incredible, and yet, no one else in his experience had just that tonal quality ... those ironic overtones.... "You probably wondered," the "Saint" was speaking again, "when you saw our signal, how the Dekkan fleet could be above Ganymede unchallenged. Look!" He activated a telesolidograph standing by the side of Julian's bed. "Every inhabited Moon has its fleet here tonight, my son. When we flashed them the news you gave us of the laboratory where the _Plague_ germs were kept, and of the incredible plan of the Dynasts--the Mutants, they came on at full power. Enough to blast Ganymede out of its orbit! The plan was the most fiendish, the most ingenious weapon of war ever conceived! You must have guessed it of course ... for fifty years they infected our people in slowly increasing numbers, until at last they let loose the Plague." "Narda ...." Julian began as memory agonizingly came back. "That is the name you kept repeating with every other word in your delirium," the stranger smiled. "A Techno-Star, as we found out. She of course, will be one of the very first to be given the antidote, Varon." "Antidote...." Julian's voice was opaque with wonder, it was as if his heart had lurched in his chest. "You brought it," the silver-haired stranger replied. "In the _Panagran_ vial you took from the Arch-Mutant. Our scientists are already reproducing it. It acts both as an immunizer and an antidote. The Mutants had to develop it as a safeguard for the native Ganymedeans. It was the only way they could be assured of even their reluctant loyalty. And the Mutants didn't dare war against the Ganymedeans--they still possess ancient weapons that the Dynasty could not cope with. I wish we could obtain some of them," he sighed wistfully. "What a strangely stubborn race...." But Julian was scarcely listening, an upsurging volcano of hope had set his whole being afire with the immortal, singing flame. Narda ... himself!... He closed his eyes against the tremendous psychic strain. "Once more open war has been averted by a hair's breadth--I'm a little bit sorry, in a way, _Serenity_." Julian opened his eyes startled. "Serenity? You mean '_Control-Facet_.' You _are_ Astran, aren't you?" "Of course, my son! _Don't try to tell me what I mean!_" He smiled with feral delight, then: "We're going to bomb the temple to its foundations--a mere token, of course. I shall have you carried to the observation tower.... It will be a welcome sight. Will you do us the honor of directing the routine, _Serenity_?" 
63631	----	"Phone Me in Central Park" By JAMES McCONNELL There should be an epitaph for every man, big or little, but a really grand and special one for Loner Charlie. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Charles turned over on his side to look at her. She lay quietly in the other bed, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was blonde to perfection, exquisitely shaped, and the rich promise of her body was exposed to his view. "Why?" he thought as he looked at her. "Why did it have to happen like this?" The whole thing was still like a dream to him, and as yet he couldn't decide whether it was a good or a bad dream. A year ago she had been unattainable, a face to conjure with in erotic dreams, far beyond his ken. A year ago she had been a public idol, the most popular actress of the day. And he had been a nobody, full of a nobody's idle hopes and schemes. And now he was lying in the bed next to hers in her swank Manhattan apartment in the most exclusive hotel in town. The unrealness of the situation overwhelmed him. His mind was a picture of confused thoughts. Meanings and answers to his questions slithered out of his reach. "God," he said. It was not an exclamation, nor yet an expletive. It was a mere statement of fact. A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo. Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her. "I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or longer. But not now. Not now." He turned away and walked to the window. "Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead." New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky. It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the circumstances, she would have given herself to any man-- "Why did it have to be her--or me? Why should it have to happen to anybody! Why!" _She would have given herself to any man--_ His thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of protest. To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH! Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through the thick pane of window glass. A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening, attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary meanings. He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His stomach clenched up like an angry fist. "But I don't want to be the last man alive!" he shouted. "I don't know what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know--" A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the window for several minutes. "_Maybe I'm not the last!_" The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with swelling comfort to fill his emptiness. Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them. He had to know--he had to find out. * * * * * As he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now. The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing Rachmaninoff's _Isle of the Dead_ on full automatic. The music haunted him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself. The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced. "That was it," he said to himself. "Pride. We called this the 'Proud Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual, ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles. "We were free. We seemed, almost, to have accomplished something. The world was running well. No wonder we called it the 'Proud Era.' Life was fun, just a bowl of cherries, until...." Two years ago the animals had started dying. Strangely enough the rats had gone first, to anybody's notice. Sales of poison dropped, scientific laboratories chained to a perpetual rodent-cycle began to complain bitterly. Then the lovers who hunted out and haunted the lonely lanes through the countryside began to remark that the locusts were late that year. The Southern states joyously reported that mosquito control was working to an unprecedented degree. The largest cotton crop ever was forecast and rumors from Mexico had it that no one had died from scorpion bite in several weeks. A month later the meat animals, the birds and the household pets began dropping as rapidly as the flies which had dropped earlier. Congress was called into special session, as were all of the national governments around the world. The U.N. met at emergency sessions to cope with the situation. The president of the world-wide Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals committed suicide. Within a year it was obvious to everyone that man was the only animal left on earth. The panic which had begun with the death of the animals was quieted somewhat by the fact that humans seemed immune to the pandemic. But the lakes full of dead fish caused a great stink and residents along the coasts began to move inland. Sales of perfumes and deodorants soared. Then just one year ago, the first human became infected with the strange malady. Within six months, half of the world's population was gone. Less than a month ago no more than a few thousand people remained in New York. And now.... "I've got to find out," Charles told himself. He meant it, of course, but in a sense he was afraid--afraid that his trip to the Bureau might give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. "But I've got to try." He walked on down the bloody street. Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every human on earth. Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive, who was dead, and where everybody was. Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's four billion inhabitants. Four billion names and addresses, compressed into microprint, a tremendous achievement even for the "Proud Era." In all of his life, Charles had never once glanced at The Index. The average person had little necessity to do so since the Bureau information service would answer questions free of charge at any time. Reaching the gigantic building, Charles pushed aside the body of a young man and walked into the main foyer. Passing behind once-guarded doors, he entered the giant computer room and paused in admiration. * * * * * Only once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room. But he still remembered it and he still recalled the powerful emotional experience it had been those many years ago. All children had to have a brain-wave recording made by the Bureau during the first month of their life. And again at the age of 10 each child returned to the Bureau for a recheck. It was for this latter recording that Charles had come to the Bureau some twenty-two years before and a friendly guard had let him peep briefly into the computer room. The impression of intense activity, of organized confusion, of mechanical wonder had remained with him the rest of his life. "So different now," he thought, surveying the room. "Now it's empty, so empty." The machine seemed to reflect the stillness, the very deadness of the world. The silence became unbearable. Charles walked to the master control panel. With newly acquired dexterity he switched the computer screens on and watched them glow to life. All around the world sensitive receiving stations pulsed to activity, sending out searching fingers, hunting for elusive patterns of neutral energy, mapping and tabulating the results. The main computer screen dominated one wall of the room. Other smaller screens clustered around it. On these screens could be graphed the population of any and every part of the globe. An illuminated counter immediately above it would give the numerical strength of the area being sampled while the screen would show population density by individual pinpoints of light that merged to form brightness patterns. "I'll try New York first," he said to himself, knowing that he was a coward, afraid to check the whole world from the start. "I'll start with New York and work up." Charles activated the switches that would flash a schematic map of New York on the screen. "There's bound to be somebody else left here. After all, there were at least twenty of us just a couple of days ago." And one of them, a beautiful woman, had invited him up to her apartment, not because she liked him, but because.... The main screen focused itself, the patterns shifting into a recognizable perceptual image. "Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us alive then." Including the blond young woman who had died just this afternoon.... Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief of Greater New York City--and then concentrated on the single, shining dot at the very heart of the map--and he understood. His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen. One. He gasped. The counter read _one_. Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City. He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer controls. New York State. One. The entire United States. One. The western hemisphere, including islands. (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image). One. The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near East, Africa and then Europe. England! There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter clicked forward. Two! His trembling stopped. He breathed again. "Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the plague. It's only logical that--" He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter clicked again. One. Alone. Alone! Charles screamed. The bottom dropped out from under him! * * * * * Why? Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than the so-called "basic" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth, companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other animals, when he first asked the question: "Why?" But thinking about "why" didn't answer the question itself, Charles thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly free of bodies. "You've got about ten minutes warning," he said to himself. "I guess that most people wanted to die inside of something--inside of anything. Not out in the unprotected open." The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought. Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals.... Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on earth, me. The last. Why me? Average, that's what he was. Height: 5'11". Weight: 165. Age: 32. Status: Married, once upon a time. The Norm, with no significant departures, all down the line. Church member, but not a good one. Could that be it? Could the most normal be the most perfect? Had he led the best of all possible lives? Was that it? Had God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, spared his life, saved him, singled him out because he was most nearly a saint, most nearly Christ-like, most nearly.... Lies--His mind snapped back to reality. He half smiled. Saint? Christ? The Second Coming? He was no saint. Charles sighed. What about--? * * * * * Chance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve, normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin. So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had to be the last to go and that was-- "No," Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening. "No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident. There must be!" He sighed slowly. "So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it," he said in derision to the gravel path as he walked along it. "A hermit in the midst of a city of millions of--No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?" It was hard to realize, even now. "A hermit, alone--and I haven't even got a cave...." Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change things around and make them for the better. No place to hide. And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his "cave." It took him almost an hour to find the proper tools, and better than two hours more of hard, nighttime work to get the hole dug to his satisfaction. It took almost three hours to find the right sort of casket, durable but not too heavy for one man to handle. He carted it out to a grassy plot close to the center of the park where the grave was. He let the coffin down slowly into the depression, then piled up loose dirt on the sloping sides of the hole so that the rain would wash it down over him. "I can't very well bury myself," he said. "I guess it will rain after I'm gone." He looked carefully down at the metallic container. Wait now. There was something wrong, something missing. It was--oh, yes, he caught it. It was the stone. There wasn't any stone to go at the head of the grave. "I'll have to fix that." A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription. "It ought to be something impressive," he thought out loud. "Something fitting the occasion." What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to be proper. "'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth--' No. That sounds too ... too...." Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote: HERE LIES THE BODY OF THE LAST MAN ON EARTH Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting. Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to go with the stone. Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time to wait. "Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it." He smiled. Strange, but now he wanted very much to go on living, alone or not. There were things he could do, ways to keep occupied. He wouldn't mind it so much. But he wanted more and more desperately with each passing second to retain his foothold on the tenuous path of physical existence. The tantalizing thought of "why" puzzled its way back into his mind. But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to forget. * * * * * Charles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and almost fell as he stepped from the curb. "Look at me, nervous as a cat." He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street. "I--" He started to say something, to think something. But some hidden part of his mind clamped down, obscuring the thought, rejecting the concept. The tremor turned to a shake before he reached the far curb, and the first burst of wild pain came as he laid his shoulder against the door to the restaurant. This was the way the plague began, but--His mind quickly repressed the idea. It couldn't be the plague. He was immune! Another burst of pulsating, shattering pain crashed through his body, tearing down the defenses of his mind, putting an end of his thoughts of immunity. Colors flared before his eyes, a persistent, irresistible susurrus flooded his ears. He wanted to protest, but there was no one to listen to him. He appealed to every divinity he knew, all the time knowing it would be useless. His body, out of his voluntary control, tried to run off in all directions at once. Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow home. He couldn't die until then. Ten minutes. He was allotted ten minutes before the end. It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space. He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference. Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all. His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it. Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching for the grave. And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched bare space instead. He was home. He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll into the hole. Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it. He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the empty coffin. The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all. Charles screamed. * * * * * The large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by another of its kind. "It is finished?" asked the second. "Yes. Just now. I am resting." "I can feel the emptiness of it." "It was very good. Where were you?" "On the next planet out. No beauty to it at all; no system. How was yours?" "Beautiful," said the first. "It went according to the strictest semantic relationship following the purest mathematical principles. They made it easy for me." "Good." "Well, where to now?" "There's another system about four thoughts away. We're due there soon." "All right. Let's go." "What's that you have there?" "Oh, this?" replied the first. "It's a higher neural order compendium the Things here made up. It's what I used." "You can't take it with you, you know. They don't allow souvenirs." "I know." "Well?" "All right, all right. You're so good, see if you can compute the scatter probability." The first being moved imperceptably and the heavy plastoid binding of the book disappeared. The thousands of pages dropped softly, caught at the wind like hungry sails, separated, and pulled by the fingers of gravity, went their disparate ways. Here a page scuttled into a broken window of the Chrysler Building (read the names: Aabat, Aabbs, Aabbt). Here a page landed upright on the head of one of the library lions and sloughed softly to the ground (read the names: Looman, Loomana, Loomanabsky). Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj). And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted, promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb). It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible: HERE LIES THE BODY OF THE LAST MAN ON EARTH-- CHARLES J. ZZYZST GO TO HELL! 
51231	----	Syndrome Johnny BY CHARLES DYE Illustrated by EMSH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The plagues that struck mankind could be attributed to one man. But was he fiend ... or savior? The blood was added to a pool of other blood, mixed, centrifuged, separated to plasma and corpuscles, irradiated slightly, pasteurized slightly, frozen, evaporated, and finally banked. Some of the plasma was used immediately for a woman who had bled too much in childbirth. She died. Others received plasma and did not die. But their symptoms changed, including a syndrome of multiple endocrine unbalance, eccentricities of appetite and digestion, and a general pattern of emotional disturbance. An alert hospital administrator investigated the mortality rise and narrowed it to a question of who had donated blood the week before. After city residents were eliminated, there remained only the signed receipts and thumbprints of nine men. Nine healthy unregistered travelers poor enough to sell their blood for money, and among them a man who carried death in his veins. The nine thumbprints were broadcast to all police files and a search began. The effort was futile, for there were many victims who had sickened and grown partially well again without recognizing the strangeness of their illness. Three years later they reached the carrier stage and the epidemic spread to four cities. Three more years, and there was an epidemic which spread around the world, meeting another wave coming from the opposite direction. It killed two out of four, fifty out of a hundred, twenty-seven million out of fifty million. There was hysteria where it appeared. And where it had not appeared there were quarantines to fence it out. But it could not be fenced out. For two years it covered the world. And then it vanished again, leaving the survivors with a tendency toward glandular troubles. Time passed. The world grew richer, more orderly, more peaceful. A man paused in the midst of his work at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Commission. He looked up at the red and green production map of India. "Just too many people per acre," he said. "All our work at improving production ... just one jump ahead of their rising population, one jump ahead of famine. Sometimes I wish to God there would be another plague to give us a breathing spell and a fair chance to get things organized." He went back to work and added another figure. Two months later, he was one of the first victims of the second plague. * * * * * In the dining hall of a university, a biochemical student glanced up from his paper to his breakfast companion. "You remember Johnny, the mythical carrier that they told about during the first and second epidemics of Syndrome Plague?" "Sure. Syndrome Johnny. They use that myth in psychology class as a typical example of mass hysteria. When a city was nervous and expecting the plague to reach them, some superstitious fool would imagine he saw Syndrome Johnny and the population would panic. Symbol for Death or some such thing. People imagined they saw him in every corner of the world. Simultaneously, of course." It was a bright morning and they were at a window which looked out across green rolling fields to a towering glass-brick building in the distance. The student who had gone back to his paper suddenly looked up again. "Some Peruvians here claim they saw Syndrome Johnny--" "Idiotic superstition! You'd think it would have died down when the plague died." The other grinned. "The plague didn't die." He folded his newspaper slowly, obviously advancing an opening for a debate. His companion went on eating. "Another of your wild theories, huh?" Then through a mouthful of food: "All right, if the plague didn't die, where did it go?" "Nowhere. _We have it now._ We all have it!" He shrugged. "A virus catalyst of high affinity for the cells and a high similarity to a normal cell protein--how can it be detected?" "Then why don't people die? Why aren't we sick?" "Because we have sickened and recovered. We caught it on conception and recovered before birth. Proof? Why do you think that the countries which were known as the Hungry Lands are now well-fed, leisured, educated, advanced? Because the birth rate has fallen! Why has the birth rate fallen?" He paused, then very carefully said, "Because two out of three of all people who would have lived have died before birth, slain by Syndrome Plague. We are all carriers now, hosts to a new guest. And"--his voice dropped to a mock sinister whisper--"with such a stranger within our cells, at the heart of the intricate machinery of our lives, who knows what subtle changes have crept upon us unnoticed!" His companion laughed. "Eat your breakfast. You belong on a horror program!" * * * * * A police psychologist for the Federated States of The Americas was running through reports from the Bureau of Social Statistics. Suddenly he grunted, then a moment later said, "Uh-huh!" "Uh-huh what?" asked his superior, who was reading a newspaper with his feet up on the desk. "Remember the myth, of Syndrome Johnny?" "Ghost of Syndrome Plague. Si, what of it?" "Titaquahapahel, Peru, population nine hundred, sent in a claim that he turned up there and they almost caught him. Crime Statistics rerouted the report to Mass Phenomena, of course. Mass Phenomena blew a tube and sent their folder on Syndrome Johnny over here. Every report they ever had on him for ninety years back! A memo came with it." He handed the memo over. The man behind the desk looked at it. It was a small graph and some mathematical symbols. "What is it?" "It means," said the psychologist, smiling dryly, "that every crazy report about our ghost has points of similarity to every other crazy report. The whole business of Syndrome Johnny has been in their 'funny coincidence' file for twenty years. This time the suspect hits the averaged description of Johnny too closely: A solid-looking man, unusual number of visible minor scars, and a disturbing habit of bending his fingers at the first-joint knuckles when he is thinking. The coincidence has gotten too damn funny. There's a chance we've been passing up a crime." "An extensive crime," said the man at the desk softly. He reached for the folder. "Yes, a considerable quantity of murder." He leafed through the folder and then thought a while, looking at the most recent reports. Thinking was what he was paid for, and he earned his excellent salary. "This thumbprint on the hotel register--the name is false, but the thumbprint looks real. Could we persuade the Bureau of Records to give their data on that print?" "Without a warrant? Against constitutional immunity. No, not a chance. The public has been touchy about the right to secrecy ever since that police state was attempted in Varga." "How about persuading an obliging judge to give a warrant on grounds of reasonable suspicion?" "No. We'd have the humanist press down on our necks in a minute, and any judge knows it. We'd have to prove a crime was committed. No crime, no warrant." "It seems a pity we can't even find out who the gentleman is," the Crimes Department head murmured, looking at the thumbprint wistfully. "No crime, no records. No records, no evidence. No evidence, no proof of crime. Therefore, we must manufacture a small crime. He was attacked and he must have defended himself. Someone may have been hurt in the process." He pushed a button. "Do you think if I send a man down there, he could persuade one of the mob to swear out a complaint?" "That's a rhetorical question," said the psychologist, trying to work out an uncertain correlation in his reports. "With that sort of mob hysteria, the town would probably give you an affidavit of witchcraft." * * * * * "Phone for you, Doctor Alcala." The nurse was crisp but quiet, smiling down at the little girl before vanishing again. Ricardo Alcala pushed the plunger in gently, then carefully withdrew the hypodermic needle from the little girl's arm. "There you are, Cosita," he said, smiling and rising from the chair beside the white bed. "Will that make me better, Doctor?" she piped feebly. He patted her hand. "Be a good girl and you will be well tomorrow." He walked out into the hospital corridor to where the desk nurse held out a phone. "Alcala speaking." The voice was unfamiliar. "My deepest apologies for interrupting your work, Doctor. At this late hour I'm afraid I assumed you would be at home. The name is Camba, Federation Investigator on a health case. I would like to consult you." Alcala was tired, but there was nothing to do at home. Nita was at the health resort and Johnny had borrowed all his laboratory space for a special synthesis of some sort, and probably would be too busy even to talk. Interest stirred in him. This was a Federation investigator calling; the man's work was probably important. "Tonight, if that's convenient. I'll be off duty in five minutes." Thirty minutes later they were ordering in a small cantina down the street from the hospital. Julio Camba, Federation Investigator, was a slender, dark man with sharp, glinting eyes. He spoke with a happy theatrical flourish. "Order what you choose, Senor. We're on my expense account. The resources of the Federated States of all The Americas stand behind your menu." Alcala smiled. "I wouldn't want to add to the national debt." "Not at all, Senor. The Federated States are only too happy thus to express a fraction of their gratitude by adding a touch of luxury to the otherwise barren and self-sacrificing life of a scientist." "You shame me," Alcala said dryly. It was true that he needed every spare penny for the health of Nita and the child, and for the laboratory. A penny saved from being spent on nourishment was a penny earned. He picked up the menu again and ordered steak. The investigator lit a cigar, asking casually: "Do you know John Osborne Drake?" * * * * * Alcala searched his memory. "No. I'm sorry...." Then he felt for the first time how closely he was being watched, and knew how carefully his reaction and the tone of his voice had been analyzed. The interview was dangerous. For some reason, he was suspected of something. Camba finished lighting the cigar and dropped the match into an ash-tray. "Perhaps you know John Delgados?" He leaned back into the shadowy corner of the booth. Johnny! Out of all the people in the world, how could the government be interested in him? Alcala tried to sound casual. "An associate of mine. A friend." "I would like to contact the gentleman." The request was completely unforceful, undemanding. "I called, but he was not at home. Could you tell me where he might be?" "I'm sorry, Senor Camba, but I cannot say. He could be on a business trip." Alcala was feeling increasingly nervous. Actually, Johnny was working at his laboratory. "What do you know of his activities?" Camba asked. "A biochemist." Alcala tried to see past the meditative mask of the thin dark face. "He makes small job-lots of chemical compounds. Special bug spray for sale to experimental plantations, hormone spray for fruits, that sort of thing. Sometimes, when he collects some money ahead, he does research." Camba waited, and his silence became a question. Alcala spoke reluctantly, anger rising in him. "Oh, it's genuine research. He has some patents and publications to his credit. You can confirm that if you choose." He was unable to keep the hostility out of his voice. A waiter came and placed steaming platters of food on the table. Camba waited until he was gone. "You know him well, I presume. Is he sane?" The question was another shock. Alcala thought carefully, for any man might be insane in secret. "Yes, so far as I know." He turned his attention to the steak, but first took three very large capsules from a bottle in his pocket. "I would not expect that a doctor would need to take pills," Camba remarked with friendly mockery. "I don't need them," Alcala explained. "Mixed silicones. I'm guinea pigging." "Can't such things be left to the guinea pigs?" Camba asked, watching with revulsion as Alcala uncapped the second bottle and sprinkled a layer of gray powder over his steak. "Guinea pigs have no assimilation of silicones; only man has that." "Yes, of course. I should have remembered from your famous papers, _The Need Of Trace Silicon In Human Diet_ and _Silicon Deficiency Diseases_." * * * * * Obviously Camba had done considerable investigating of Alcala before approaching him. He had even given the titles of the research papers correctly. Alcala's wariness increased. "What is the purpose of the experiment this time?" asked the small dark Federation agent genially. "To determine the safe limits of silicon consumption and if there are any dangers in an overdose." "How do you determine that? By dropping dead?" He could be right. Perhaps the test should be stopped. Every day, with growing uneasiness, Alcala took his dose of silicon compound, and every day, the chemical seemed to be absorbed completely--not released or excreted--in a way that was unpleasantly reminiscent of the way arsenic accumulated without evident damage, then killed abruptly without warning. Already, this evening, he had noticed that there was something faulty about his coordination and weight and surface sense. The restaurant door had swung back with a curious lightness, and the hollow metal handle had had a curious softness under his fingers. Something merely going wrong with the sensitivity of his fingers--? He tapped his fingertips on the heavy indestructible silicone plastic table top. There was a feeling of heaviness in his hands, and a feeling of faint rubbery _give_ in the table. Tapping his fingers gently, his heavy fingers ... the answer was dreamily fantastic. _I'm turning into silicon plastic myself_, he thought. But how, why? He had not bothered to be curious before, but the question had always been--what were supposedly insoluble silicons doing assimilating into the human body at all? Several moments passed. He smoothed back his hair with his oddly heavy hand before picking up his fork again. "I'm turning into plastic," he told Camba. "I beg your pardon?" "Nothing. A joke." Camba was turning into plastic, too. Everyone was. But the effect was accumulating slowly, by generations. * * * * * Camba lay down his knife and started in again. "What connections have you had with John Delgados?" _Concentrate on the immediate situation._ Alcala and Johnny were obviously in danger of some sort of mistaken arrest and interrogation. As Alcala focused on the question, one errant whimsical thought suddenly flitted through the back of his mind. In red advertising letters: TRY OUR NEW MODEL RUST-PROOF, WATERPROOF, HEAT & SCALD RESISTANT, STRONG--EXTRA-LONG-WEARING HUMAN BEING! He laughed inwardly and finally answered: "Friendship. Mutual interest in high ion colloidal suspensions and complex synthesis." Impatience suddenly mastered him. "Exactly what is it you wish to know, Senor? Perhaps I could inform you if I knew the reasons for your interest." Camba chose a piece of salad with great care. "We have reason to believe that he is Syndrome Johnny." Alcala waited for the words to clarify. After a moment, it ceased to be childish babble and became increasingly shocking. He remembered the first time he had met John Delgados, the smile, the strong handclasp. "Call me Johnny," he had said. It had seemed no more than a nickname. The investigator was watching his expression with bright brown eyes. Johnny, yes ... but not Syndrome Johnny. He tried to think of some quick refutation. "The whole thing is preposterous, Senor Camba. The myth of Syndrome Plague Johnny started about a century ago." "Doctor Alcala"--the small man in the gray suit was tensely sober--"John Delgados is very old, and John Delgados is not his proper name. I have traced his life back and back, through older and older records in Argentina, Panama, South Africa, the United States, China, Canada. Everywhere he has paid his taxes properly, put his fingerprints on file as a good citizen should. And he changed his name every twenty years, applying to the courts for permission with good honest reasons for changing his name. Everywhere he has been a laboratory worker, held patents, sometimes made a good deal of money. He is one hundred and forty years old. His first income tax was paid in 1970, exactly one hundred and twenty years ago." "Other men are that old," said Alcala. "Other men are old, yes. Those who survived the two successive plagues, were unusually durable." Camba finished and pushed back his plate. "There is no crime in being long-lived, surely. But he has changed his name five times!" "That proves nothing. Whatever his reasons for changing his name, it doesn't prove that he is Syndrome Johnny any more than it proves he is the cow that jumped over the moon. Syndrome Johnny is a myth, a figment of mob delirium." * * * * * As he said it, he knew it was not true. A Federation investigator would not be on a wild goose chase. The plates were taken away and cups of steaming black coffee put between them. He would have to warn Johnny. It was strange how well you could know a man as well as he knew Johnny, firmly enough to believe that, despite evidence, everything the man did was right. "Why must it be a myth?" Camba asked softly. "It's ridiculous!" Alcala protested. "Why would any man--" His voice cut off as unrelated facts fell into a pattern. He sat for a moment, thinking intensely, seeing the century of plague as something he had never dreamed.... A price. Not too high a price in the long run, considering what was purchased. Of course, the great change over into silicon catalysis would be a shock and require adjustment and, of course, the change must be made in several easy stages--and those who could not adjust would die. "Go on, Doctor," Camba urged softly. "'_Why_ would any man--'" He tried to find a way of explaining which would not seem to have any relationship to John Delgados. "It has been recently discovered"--but he did not say _how_ recently--"that the disease of Syndrome Plague was not a disease. It is an improvement." He had spoken clumsily. "An improvement on life?" Camba laughed and nodded, but there were bitterness and anger burning behind the small man's smile. "People can be improved to death by the millions. Yes, yes, go on, Senor. You fascinate me." "We are stronger," Alcala told him. "We are changed chemically. The race has been improved!" "Come, Doctor Alcala," Camba said with a sneering merriment, "the Syndrome Plagues have come and they have gone. Where is this change?" Alcala tried to express it clearly. "We are stronger. Potentially, we are tremendously stronger. But we of this generation are still weak and ill, as our parents were, from the shock of the change. And we need silicone feeding; we have not adjusted yet. Our illness masks our strength." He thought of what that strength would be! Camba smiled and took out a small notebook. "The disease is connected with silicones, you say? The original name of John Delgados was John Osborne Drake. His father was Osborne Drake, a chemist at Dow Corning, who was sentenced to the electric chair in 1967 for unauthorized bacterial experiments which resulted in an accidental epidemic and eight deaths. Dow Corning was the first major manufactury of silicones in America, though not connected in any way with Osborne Drake's criminal experiments. It links together, does it not?" "It is not a disease, it is strength!" Alcala insisted doggedly. * * * * * The small investigator looked up from his notebook and his smile was an unnatural thing, a baring of teeth. "Half the world died of this strength, Senor. If you will not think of the men and women, think of the children. Millions of children died!" The waiter brought the bill, dropping it on the table between them. "Lives will be saved in the long run," Alcala said obstinately. "Individual deaths are not important in the long run." "That is hardly the philosophy for a doctor, is it?" asked Camba with open irony, taking the bill and rising. They went out of the restaurant in silence. Camba's 'copter stood at the curb. "Would you care for a lift home, Doctor Alcala?" The offer was made with the utmost suavity. Alcala hesitated fractionally. "Why, yes, thank you." It would not do to give the investigator any reason for suspicion by refusing. As the 'copter lifted into the air, Camba spoke with a more friendly note in his voice, as if he humored a child. "Come, Alcala, you're a doctor dedicated to saving lives. How can you find sympathy for a murderer?" Alcala sat in the dark, looking through the windshield down at the bright street falling away below. "I'm not a practicing medico; only one night a week do I come to the hospital. I'm a research man. I don't try to save individual lives. I'm dedicated to improving the average life, the average health. Can you understand that? Individuals may be sick and individuals may die, but the average lives on. And if the average is better, then I'm satisfied." The 'copter flew on. There was no answer. "I'm not good with words," said Alcala. Then, taking out his pen-knife and unfolding it, he said, "Watch!" He put his index finger on the altimeter dial, where there was light, and pressed the blade against the flesh between his finger and his thumb. He increased the pressure until the flesh stood out white on either side of the blade, bending, but not cut. "Three generations back, this pressure would have gone right through the hand." He took away the blade and there was only a very tiny cut. Putting the knife away, he brought out his lighter. The blue flame was steady and hot. Alcala held it close to the dashboard and put his finger directly over it, counting patiently, "One, two, three, four, five--" He pulled the lighter back, snapping it shut. "Three generations ago, a man couldn't have held a finger over that flame for more than a tenth part of that count. Doesn't all this prove something to you?" The 'copter was hovering above Alcala's house. Camba lowered it to the ground and opened the door before answering. "It proves only that a good and worthy man will cut and burn his hand for an unworthy friendship. Good night." Disconcerted, Alcala watched the 'copter lift away into the night, then, turning, saw that the lights were still on in the laboratory. Camba might have deduced something from that, if he knew that Nita and the girl were not supposed to be home. Alcala hurried in. Johnny hadn't left yet. He was sitting at Alcala's desk with his feet on the wastebasket, the way Alcala often liked to sit, reading a technical journal. He looked up, smiling. For a moment Alcala saw him with the new clarity of a stranger. The lean, weathered face; brown eyes with smile deltas at the corners; wide shoulders; steady, big hands holding the magazine--solid, able, and ruthless enough to see what had to be done, and do it. "I was waiting for you, Ric." "The Feds are after you." Ricardo Alcala had been running. He found he was panting and his heart was pounding. Delgados' smile did not change. "It's all right, Ric. Everything's done. I can leave any time now." He indicated a square metal box standing in a corner. "There's the stuff." What stuff? The product Johnny had been working on? "You haven't time for that now, Johnny. You can't sell it. They'd watch for anyone of your description selling chemicals. Let me loan you some money." "Thanks." Johnny was smiling oddly. "Everything's set. I won't need it. How close are they to finding me?" "They don't know where you're staying." Alcala leaned on the desk edge and put out his hand. "They tell me you're Syndrome Johnny." "I thought you'd figured that one out." Johnny shook his hand formally. "The name is John Osborne Drake. You aren't horrified?" "No." Alcala knew that he was shaking hands with a man who would be thanked down all the successive generations of mankind. He noticed again the odd white web-work of scars on the back of Johnny's hand. He indicated them as casually as he could. "Where did you pick those up?" * * * * * John Drake glanced at his hand. "I don't know, Ric. Truthfully. I've had my brains beaten in too often to remember much any more. Unimportant. There are instructions outlining plans and methods filed in safety deposit boxes in almost every big city in the world. Always the same typing, always the same instructions. I can't remember who typed them, myself or my father, but I must have been expected to forget or they wouldn't be there. Up to eleven, my memory is all right, but after Dad started to remake me, everything gets fuzzy." "After he did _what_?" Johnny smiled tiredly and rested his head on one hand. "He had to remake me chemically, you know. How could I spread change without being changed myself? I couldn't have two generations to adapt to it naturally like you, Ric. It had to be done artificially. It took years. You understand? I'm a community, a construction. The cells that carry on the silicon metabolism in me are not human. Dad adapted them for the purpose. I helped, but I can't remember any longer how it was done. I think when I've been badly damaged, organization scatters to the separate cells in my body. They can survive better that way, and they have powers of regrouping and healing. But memory can't be pasted together again or regrown." John Drake rose and looked around the laboratory with something like triumph. "They're too late. I made it, Ric. There's the catalyst cooling over there. This is the last step. I don't think I'll survive this plague, but I'll last long enough to set it going for the finish. The police won't stop me until it's too late." * * * * * Another plague! The last one had been before Alcala was born. He had not thought that Johnny would start another. It was a shock. Alcala walked over to the cage where he kept his white mice and looked in, trying to sort out his feelings. The white mice looked back with beady bright eyes, caged, not knowing they were waiting to be experimented upon. A timer clicked and John Delgados-Drake became all rapid efficient activity, moving from valve to valve. It lasted a half minute or less, then Drake had finished stripping off the lab whites to his street clothes. He picked up the square metal box containing the stuff he had made, tucked it under his arm and held out a solid hand again to Alcala. "Good-by, Ric. Wish me luck. Close up the lab for me, will you?" Alcala took the hand numbly and mumbled something, turned back to the cages and stared blindly at the mice. Drake's brisk footsteps clattered down the stairs. * * * * * Another step forward for the human race. God knew what wonders for the race were in that box. Perhaps something for nerve construction, something for the mind--the last and most important step. He should have asked. There came at last a pressure that was a thought emerging from the depth of intuition. _Doctor Ricardo Alcala will die in the next plague, he and his ill wife Nita and his ill little girl.... And the name of Alcala will die forever as a weak strain blotted from the bloodstream of the race...._ He'd find out what was in the box by dying of it! He tried to reason it out, but only could remember that Nita, already sickly, would have no chance. And Alcala's family genes, in attempting to adapt to the previous steps, had become almost sterile. It had been difficult having children. The next step would mean complete sterility. The name of Alcala would die. The future might be wonderful, but it would not be _his_ future! "Johnny!" he called suddenly, something like an icy lump hardening in his chest. How long had it been since Johnny had left? Running, Alcala went down the long half-lit stairs, out the back door and along the dark path toward the place where Johnny's 'copter had been parked. A light shone through the leaves. It was still there. "Johnny!" John Osborne Drake was putting his suitcase into the rear of the 'copter. "What is it, Ric?" he asked in a friendly voice without turning. _It would be impossible to ask him to change his mind._ Alcala found a rock, raised it behind Syndrome Johnny's back. "I know I'm being anti-social," he said regretfully, and then threw the rock away. His fist was enough like stone to crush a skull. 
1739	----	MANIA*** Transcribed from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition by Jane Duff, proofed by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org. The Black Death and The Dancing Mania. FROM THE GERMAN OF J. F. C. HECKER. TRANSLATED BY B. G. BABINGTON. CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED: _LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_. 1888. INTRODUCTION Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker was one of three generations of distinguished professors of medicine. His father, August Friedrich Hecker, a most industrious writer, first practised as a physician in Frankenhausen, and in 1790 was appointed Professor of Medicine at the University of Erfurt. In 1805 he was called to the like professorship at the University of Berlin. He died at Berlin in 1811. Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker was born at Erfurt in January, 1795. He went, of course--being then ten years old--with his father to Berlin in 1805, studied at Berlin in the Gymnasium and University, but interrupted his studies at the age of eighteen to fight as a volunteer in the war for a renunciation of Napoleon and all his works. After Waterloo he went back to his studies, took his doctor's degree in 1817 with a treatise on the "Antiquities of Hydrocephalus," and became privat-docent in the Medical Faculty of the Berlin University. His inclination was strong from the first towards the historical side of inquiries into Medicine. This caused him to undertake a "History of Medicine," of which the first volume appeared in 1822. It obtained rank for him at Berlin as Extraordinary Professor of the History of Medicine. This office was changed into an Ordinary professorship of the same study in 1834, and Hecker held that office until his death in 1850. The office was created for a man who had a special genius for this form of study. It was delightful to himself, and he made it delightful to others. He is regarded as the founder of historical pathology. He studied disease in relation to the history of man, made his study yield to men outside his own profession an important chapter in the history of civilisation, and even took into account physical phenomena upon the surface of the globe as often affecting the movement and character of epidemics. The account of "The Black Death" here translated by Dr. Babington was Hecker's first important work of this kind. It was published in 1832, and was followed in the same year by his account of "The Dancing Mania." The books here given are the two that first gave Hecker a wide reputation. Many other such treatises followed, among them, in 1865, a treatise on the "Great Epidemics of the Middle Ages." Besides his "History of Medicine," which, in its second volume, reached into the fourteenth century, and all his smaller treatises, Hecker wrote a large number of articles in Encyclopaedias and Medical Journals. Professor J.F.K. Hecker was, in a more interesting way, as busy as Professor A.F. Hecker, his father, had been. He transmitted the family energies to an only son, Karl von Hecker, born in 1827, who distinguished himself greatly as a Professor of Midwifery, and died in 1882. Benjamin Guy Babington, the translator of these books of Hecker's, belonged also to a family in which the study of Medicine has passed from father to son, and both have been writers. B.G. Babington was the son of Dr. William Babington, who was physician to Guy's Hospital for some years before 1811, when the extent of his private practice caused him to retire. He died in 1833. His son, Benjamin Guy Babington, was educated at the Charterhouse, saw service as a midshipman, served for seven years in India, returned to England, graduated as physician at Cambridge in 1831. He distinguished himself by inquiries into the cholera epidemic in 1832, and translated these pieces of Hecker's in 1833, for publication by the Sydenham Society. He afterwards translated Hecker's other treatises on epidemics of the Middle Ages. Dr. B.G. Babington was Physician to Guy's Hospital from 1840 to 1855, and was a member of the Medical Council of the General Board of Health. He died on the 8th of April, 1866. H.M. THE BLACK DEATH CHAPTER I--GENERAL OBSERVATIONS That Omnipotence which has called the world with all its living creatures into one animated being, especially reveals Himself in the desolation of great pestilences. The powers of creation come into violent collision; the sultry dryness of the atmosphere; the subterraneous thunders; the mist of overflowing waters, are the harbingers of destruction. Nature is not satisfied with the ordinary alternations of life and death, and the destroying angel waves over man and beast his flaming sword. These revolutions are performed in vast cycles, which the spirit of man, limited, as it is, to a narrow circle of perception, is unable to explore. They are, however, greater terrestrial events than any of those which proceed from the discord, the distress, or the passions of nations. By annihilations they awaken new life; and when the tumult above and below the earth is past, nature is renovated, and the mind awakens from torpor and depression to the consciousness of an intellectual existence. Were it in any degree within the power of human research to draw up, in a vivid and connected form, an historical sketch of such mighty events, after the manner of the historians of wars and battles, and the migrations of nations, we might then arrive at clear views with respect to the mental development of the human race, and the ways of Providence would be more plainly discernible. It would then be demonstrable, that the mind of nations is deeply affected by the destructive conflict of the powers of nature, and that great disasters lead to striking changes in general civilisation. For all that exists in man, whether good or evil, is rendered conspicuous by the presence of great danger. His inmost feelings are roused--the thought of self-preservation masters his spirit--self-denial is put to severe proof, and wherever darkness and barbarism prevail, there the affrighted mortal flies to the idols of his superstition, and all laws, human and divine, are criminally violated. In conformity with a general law of nature, such a state of excitement brings about a change, beneficial or detrimental, according to circumstances, so that nations either attain a higher degree of moral worth, or sink deeper in ignorance and vice. All this, however, takes place upon a much grander scale than through the ordinary vicissitudes of war and peace, or the rise and fall of empires, because the powers of nature themselves produce plagues, and subjugate the human will, which, in the contentions of nations, alone predominates. CHAPTER II--THE DISEASE The most memorable example of what has been advanced is afforded by a great pestilence of the fourteenth century, which desolated Asia, Europe, and Africa, and of which the people yet preserve the remembrance in gloomy traditions. It was an oriental plague, marked by inflammatory boils and tumours of the glands, such as break out in no other febrile disease. On account of these inflammatory boils, and from the black spots, indicatory of a putrid decomposition, which appeared upon the skin, it was called in Germany and in the northern kingdoms of Europe the Black Death, and in Italy, _la mortalega grande_, the Great Mortality. Few testimonies are presented to us respecting its symptoms and its course, yet these are sufficient to throw light upon the form of the malady, and they are worthy of credence, from their coincidence with the signs of the same disease in modern times. The imperial writer, Kantakusenos, whose own son, Andronikus, died of this plague in Constantinople, notices great imposthumes of the thighs and arms of those affected, which, when opened, afforded relief by the discharge of an offensive matter. Buboes, which are the infallible signs of the oriental plague, are thus plainly indicated, for he makes separate mention of smaller boils on the arms and in the face, as also in other parts of the body, and clearly distinguishes these from the blisters, which are no less produced by plague in all its forms. In many cases, black spots broke out all over the body, either single, or united and confluent. These symptoms were not all found in every case. In many, one alone was sufficient to cause death, while some patients recovered, contrary to expectation, though afflicted with all. Symptoms of cephalic affection were frequent; many patients became stupefied and fell into a deep sleep, losing also their speech from palsy of the tongue; others remained sleepless and without rest. The fauces and tongue were black, and as if suffused with blood; no beverage could assuage their burning thirst, so that their sufferings continued without alleviation until terminated by death, which many in their despair accelerated with their own hands. Contagion was evident, for attendants caught the disease of their relations and friends, and many houses in the capital were bereft even of their last inhabitant. Thus far the ordinary circumstances only of the oriental plague occurred. Still deeper sufferings, however, were connected with this pestilence, such as have not been felt at other times; the organs of respiration were seized with a putrid inflammation; a violent pain in the chest attacked the patient; blood was expectorated, and the breath diffused a pestiferous odour. In the West, the following were the predominating symptoms on the eruption of this disease. An ardent fever, accompanied by an evacuation of blood, proved fatal in the first three days. It appears that buboes and inflammatory boils did not at first come out at all, but that the disease, in the form of carbuncular (_anthrax-artigen_) affection of the lungs, effected the destruction of life before the other symptoms were developed. Thus did the plague rage in Avignon for six or eight weeks, and the pestilential breath of the sick, who expectorated blood, caused a terrible contagion far and near; for even the vicinity of those who had fallen ill of plague was certain death; so that parents abandoned their infected children, and all the ties of kindred were dissolved. After this period, buboes in the axilla and in the groin, and inflammatory boils all over the body, made their appearance; but it was not until seven months afterwards that some patients recovered with matured buboes, as in the ordinary milder form of plague. Such is the report of the courageous Guy de Chauliac, who vindicated the honour of medicine, by bidding defiance to danger; boldly and constantly assisting the affected, and disdaining the excuse of his colleagues, who held the Arabian notion, that medical aid was unavailing, and that the contagion justified flight. He saw the plague twice in Avignon, first in the year 1348, from January to August, and then twelve years later, in the autumn, when it returned from Germany, and for nine months spread general distress and terror. The first time it raged chiefly among the poor, but in the year 1360, more among the higher classes. It now also destroyed a great many children, whom it had formerly spared, and but few women. The like was seen in Egypt. Here also inflammation of the lungs was predominant, and destroyed quickly and infallibly, with burning heat and expectoration of blood. Here too the breath of the sick spread a deadly contagion, and human aid was as vain as it was destructive to those who approached the infected. Boccacio, who was an eye-witness of its incredible fatality in Florence, the seat of the revival of science, gives a more lively description of the attack of the disease than his non-medical contemporaries. It commenced here, not as in the East, with bleeding at the nose, a sure sign of inevitable death; but there took place at the beginning, both in men and women, tumours in the groin and in the axilla, varying in circumference up to the size of an apple or an egg, and called by the people, pest-boils (gavoccioli). Then there appeared similar tumours indiscriminately over all parts of the body, and black or blue spots came out on the arms or thighs, or on other parts, either single and large, or small and thickly studded. These spots proved equally fatal with the pest-boils, which had been from the first regarded as a sure sign of death. No power of medicine brought relief--almost all died within the first three days, some sooner, some later, after the appearance of these signs, and for the most part entirely without fever or other symptoms. The plague spread itself with the greater fury, as it communicated from the sick to the healthy, like fire among dry and oily fuel, and even contact with the clothes and other articles which had been used by the infected, seemed to induce the disease. As it advanced, not only men, but animals fell sick and shortly expired, if they had touched things belonging to the diseased or dead. Thus Boccacio himself saw two hogs on the rags of a person who had died of plague, after staggering about for a short time, fall down dead as if they had taken poison. In other places multitudes of dogs, cats, fowls, and other animals, fell victims to the contagion; and it is to be presumed that other epizootes among animals likewise took place, although the ignorant writers of the fourteenth century are silent on this point. In Germany there was a repetition in every respect of the same phenomena. The infallible signs of the oriental bubo-plague with its inevitable contagion were found there as everywhere else; but the mortality was not nearly so great as in the other parts of Europe. The accounts do not all make mention of the spitting of blood, the diagnostic symptom of this fatal pestilence; we are not, however, thence to conclude that there was any considerable mitigation or modification of the disease, for we must not only take into account the defectiveness of the chronicles, but that isolated testimonies are often contradicted by many others. Thus the chronicles of Strasburg, which only take notice of boils and glandular swellings in the axillae and groins, are opposed by another account, according to which the mortal spitting of blood was met with in Germany; but this again is rendered suspicious, as the narrator postpones the death of those who were thus affected, to the sixth, and (even the) eighth day, whereas, no other author sanctions so long a course of the disease; and even in Strasburg, where a mitigation of the plague may, with most probability, be assumed since the year 1349, only 16,000 people were carried off, the generality expired by the third or fourth day. In Austria, and especially in Vienna, the plague was fully as malignant as anywhere, so that the patients who had red spots and black boils, as well as those afflicted with tumid glands, died about the third day; and lastly, very frequent sudden deaths occurred on the coasts of the North Sea and in Westphalia, without any further development of the malady. To France, this plague came in a northern direction from Avignon, and was there more destructive than in Germany, so that in many places not more than two in twenty of the inhabitants survived. Many were struck, as if by lightning, and died on the spot, and this more frequently among the young and strong than the old; patients with enlarged glands in the axillae and groins scarcely survive two or three days; and no sooner did these fatal signs appear, than they bid adieu to the world, and sought consolation only in the absolution which Pope Clement VI. promised them in the hour of death. In England the malady appeared, as at Avignon, with spitting of blood, and with the same fatality, so that the sick who were afflicted either with this symptom or with vomiting of blood, died in some cases immediately, in others within twelve hours, or at the latest two days. The inflammatory boils and buboes in the groins and axillae were recognised at once as prognosticating a fatal issue, and those were past all hope of recovery in whom they arose in numbers all over the body. It was not till towards the close of the plague that they ventured to open, by incision, these hard and dry boils, when matter flowed from them in small quantity, and thus, by compelling nature to a critical suppuration, many patients were saved. Every spot which the sick had touched, their breath, their clothes, spread the contagion; and, as in all other places, the attendants and friends who were either blind to their danger, or heroically despised it, fell a sacrifice to their sympathy. Even the eyes of the patient were considered a sources of contagion, which had the power of acting at a distance, whether on account of their unwonted lustre, or the distortion which they always suffer in plague, or whether in conformity with an ancient notion, according to which the sight was considered as the bearer of a demoniacal enchantment. Flight from infected cities seldom availed the fearful, for the germ of the disease adhered to them, and they fell sick, remote from assistance, in the solitude of their country houses. Thus did the plague spread over England with unexampled rapidity, after it had first broken out in the county of Dorset, whence it advanced through the counties of Devon and Somerset, to Bristol, and thence reached Gloucester, Oxford and London. Probably few places escaped, perhaps not any; for the annuals of contemporaries report that throughout the land only a tenth part of the inhabitants remained alive. From England the contagion was carried by a ship to Bergen, the capital of Norway, where the plague then broke out in its most frightful form, with vomiting of blood; and throughout the whole country, spared not more than a third of the inhabitants. The sailors found no refuge in their ships; and vessels were often seen driving about on the ocean and drifting on shore, whose crews had perished to the last man. In Poland the affected were attacked with spitting blood, and died in a few days in such vast numbers, that, as it has been affirmed, scarcely a fourth of the inhabitants were left. Finally, in Russia the plague appeared two years later than in Southern Europe; yet here again, with the same symptoms as elsewhere. Russian contemporaries have recorded that it began with rigor, heat, and darting pain in the shoulders and back; that it was accompanied by spitting of blood, and terminated fatally in two, or at most three days. It is not till the year 1360 that we find buboes mentioned as occurring in the neck, in the axillae, and in the groins, which are stated to have broken out when the spitting of blood had continued some time. According to the experience of Western Europe, however, it cannot be assumed that these symptoms did not appear at an earlier period. Thus much, from authentic sources, on the nature of the Black Death. The descriptions which have been communicated contain, with a few unimportant exceptions, all the symptoms of the oriental plague which have been observed in more modern times. No doubt can obtain on this point. The facts are placed clearly before our eyes. We must, however, bear in mind that this violent disease does not always appear in the same form, and that while the essence of the poison which it produces, and which is separated so abundantly from the body of the patient, remains unchanged, it is proteiform in its varieties, from the almost imperceptible vesicle, unaccompanied by fever, which exists for some time before it extends its poison inwardly, and then excites fever and buboes, to the fatal form in which carbuncular inflammations fall upon the most important viscera. Such was the form which the plague assumed in the fourteenth century, for the accompanying chest affection which appeared in all the countries whereof we have received any account, cannot, on a comparison with similar and familiar symptoms, be considered as any other than the inflammation of the lungs of modern medicine, a disease which at present only appears sporadically, and, owing to a putrid decomposition of the fluids, is probably combined with hemorrhages from the vessels of the lungs. Now, as every carbuncle, whether it be cutaneous or internal, generates in abundance the matter of contagion which has given rise to it, so, therefore, must the breath of the affected have been poisonous in this plague, and on this account its power of contagion wonderfully increased; wherefore the opinion appears incontrovertible, that owing to the accumulated numbers of the diseased, not only individual chambers and houses, but whole cities were infected, which, moreover, in the Middle Ages, were, with few exceptions, narrowly built, kept in a filthy state, and surrounded with stagnant ditches. Flight was, in consequence, of no avail to the timid; for even though they had sedulously avoided all communication with the diseased and the suspected, yet their clothes were saturated with the pestiferous atmosphere, and every inspiration imparted to them the seeds of the destructive malady, which, in the greater number of cases, germinated with but too much fertility. Add to which, the usual propagation of the plague through clothes, beds, and a thousand other things to which the pestilential poison adheres--a propagation which, from want of caution, must have been infinitely multiplied; and since articles of this kind, removed from the access of air, not only retain the matter of contagion for an indefinite period, but also increase its activity and engender it like a living being, frightful ill- consequences followed for many years after the first fury of the pestilence was past. The affection of the stomach, often mentioned in vague terms, and occasionally as a vomiting of blood, was doubtless only a subordinate symptom, even if it be admitted that actual hematemesis did occur. For the difficulty of distinguishing a flow of blood from the stomach, from a pulmonic expectoration of that fluid, is, to non-medical men, even in common cases, not inconsiderable. How much greater then must it have been in so terrible a disease, where assistants could not venture to approach the sick without exposing themselves to certain death? Only two medical descriptions of the malady have reached us, the one by the brave Guy de Chauliac, the other by Raymond Chalin de Vinario, a very experienced scholar, who was well versed in the learning of the time. The former takes notice only of fatal coughing of blood; the latter, besides this, notices epistaxis, hematuria, and fluxes of blood from the bowels, as symptoms of such decided and speedy mortality, that those patients in whom they were observed usually died on the same or the following day. That a vomiting of blood may not, here and there, have taken place, perhaps have been even prevalent in many places, is, from a consideration of the nature of the disease, by no means to be denied; for every putrid decomposition of the fluids begets a tendency to hemorrhages of all kinds. Here, however, it is a question of historical certainty, which, after these doubts, is by no means established. Had not so speedy a death followed the expectoration of blood, we should certainly have received more detailed intelligence respecting other hemorrhages; but the malady had no time to extend its effects further over the extremities of the vessels. After its first fury, however, was spent, the pestilence passed into the usual febrile form of the oriental plague. Internal carbuncular inflammations no longer took place, and hemorrhages became phenomena, no more essential in this than they are in any other febrile disorders. Chalin, who observed not only the great mortality of 1348, and the plague of 1360, but also that of 1373 and 1382, speaks moreover of affections of the throat, and describes the back spots of plague patients more satisfactorily than any of his contemporaries. The former appeared but in few cases, and consisted in carbuncular inflammation of the gullet, with a difficulty of swallowing, even to suffocation, to which, in some instances, was added inflammation of the ceruminous glands of the ears, with tumours, producing great deformity. Such patients, as well as others, were affected with expectoration of blood; but they did not usually die before the sixth, and, sometimes, even as late as the fourteenth day. The same occurrence, it is well known, is not uncommon in other pestilences; as also blisters on the surface of the body, in different places, in the vicinity of which, tumid glands and inflammatory boils, surrounded by discoloured and black streaks, arose, and thus indicated the reception of the poison. These streaked spots were called, by an apt comparison, the girdle, and this appearance was justly considered extremely dangerous. CHAPTER III--CAUSES--SPREAD An inquiry into the causes of the Black Death will not be without important results in the study of the plagues which have visited the world, although it cannot advance beyond generalisation without entering upon a field hitherto uncultivated, and, to this hour entirely unknown. Mighty revolutions in the organism of the earth, of which we have credible information, had preceded it. From China to the Atlantic, the foundations of the earth were shaken--throughout Asia and Europe the atmosphere was in commotion, and endangered, by its baneful influence, both vegetable and animal life. The series of these great events began in the year 1333, fifteen years before the plague broke out in Europe: they first appeared in China. Here a parching drought, accompanied by famine, commenced in the tract of country watered by the rivers Kiang and Hoai. This was followed by such violent torrents of rain, in and about Kingsai, at that time the capital of the empire, that, according to tradition, more than 400,000 people perished in the floods. Finally the mountain Tsincheou fell in, and vast clefts were formed in the earth. In the succeeding year (1334), passing over fabulous traditions, the neighbourhood of Canton was visited by inundations; whilst in Tche, after an unexampled drought, a plague arose, which is said to have carried off about 5,000,000 of people. A few months afterwards an earthquake followed, at and near Kingsai; and subsequent to the falling in of the mountains of Ki-ming-chan, a lake was formed of more than a hundred leagues in circumference, where, again, thousands found their grave. In Houkouang and Honan, a drought prevailed for five months; and innumerable swarms of locusts destroyed the vegetation; while famine and pestilence, as usual, followed in their train. Connected accounts of the condition of Europe before this great catastrophe are not to be expected from the writers of the fourteenth century. It is remarkable, however, that simultaneously with a drought and renewed floods in China, in 1336, many uncommon atmospheric phenomena, and in the winter, frequent thunderstorms, were observed in the north of France; and so early as the eventful year of 1333 an eruption of Etna took place. According to the Chinese annuals, about 4,000,000 of people perished by famine in the neighbourhood of Kiang in 1337; and deluges, swarms of locusts, and an earthquake which lasted six days, caused incredible devastation. In the same year, the first swarms of locusts appeared in Franconia, which were succeeded in the following year by myriads of these insects. In 1338 Kingsai was visited by an earthquake of ten days' duration; at the same time France suffered from a failure in the harvest; and thenceforth, till the year 1342, there was in China a constant succession of inundations, earthquakes, and famines. In the same year great floods occurred in the vicinity of the Rhine and in France, which could not be attributed to rain alone; for, everywhere, even on tops of mountains, springs were seen to burst forth, and dry tracts were laid under water in an inexplicable manner. In the following year, the mountain Hong-tchang, in China, fell in, and caused a destructive deluge; and in Pien-tcheon and Leang-tcheou, after three months' rain, there followed unheard-of inundations, which destroyed seven cities. In Egypt and Syria, violent earthquakes took place; and in China they became, from this time, more and more frequent; for they recurred, in 1344, in Ven-tcheou, where the sea overflowed in consequence; in 1345, in Ki-tcheou, and in both the following years in Canton, with subterraneous thunder. Meanwhile, floods and famine devastated various districts, until 1347, when the fury of the elements subsided in China. The signs of terrestrial commotions commenced in Europe in the year 1348, after the intervening districts of country in Asia had probably been visited in the same manner. On the island of Cyprus, the plague from the East had already broken out; when an earthquake shook the foundations of the island, and was accompanied by so frightful a hurricane, that the inhabitants who had slain their Mahometan slaves, in order that they might not themselves be subjugated by them, fled in dismay, in all directions. The sea overflowed--the ships were dashed to pieces on the rocks, and few outlived the terrific event, whereby this fertile and blooming island was converted into a desert. Before the earthquake, a pestiferous wind spread so poisonous an odour, that many, being overpowered by it, fell down suddenly and expired in dreadful agonies. This phenomenon is one of the rarest that has ever been observed, for nothing is more constant than the composition of the air; and in no respect has nature been more careful in the preservation of organic life. Never have naturalists discovered in the atmosphere foreign elements, which, evident to the senses, and borne by the winds, spread from land to land, carrying disease over whole portions of the earth, as is recounted to have taken place in the year 1348. It is, therefore, the more to be regretted, that in this extraordinary period, which, owing to the low condition of science, was very deficient in accurate observers, so little that can be depended on respecting those uncommon occurrences in the air, should have been recorded. Yet, German accounts say expressly, that a thick, stinking mist advanced from the East, and spread itself over Italy; and there could be no deception in so palpable a phenomenon. The credibility of unadorned traditions, however little they may satisfy physical research, can scarcely be called in question when we consider the connection of events; for just at this time earthquakes were more general than they had been within the range of history. In thousands of places chasms were formed, from whence arose noxious vapours; and as at that time natural occurrences were transformed into miracles, it was reported, that a fiery meteor, which descended on the earth far in the East, had destroyed everything within a circumference of more than a hundred leagues, infecting the air far and wide. The consequences of innumerable floods contributed to the same effect; vast river districts had been converted into swamps; foul vapours arose everywhere, increased by the odour of putrified locusts, which had never perhaps darkened the sun in thicker swarms, and of countless corpses, which even in the well- regulated countries of Europe, they knew not how to remove quickly enough out of the sight of the living. It is probable, therefore, that the atmosphere contained foreign, and sensibly perceptible, admixtures to a great extent, which, at least in the lower regions, could not be decomposed, or rendered ineffective by separation. Now, if we go back to the symptoms of the disease, the ardent inflammation of the lungs points out, that the organs of respiration yielded to the attack of an atmospheric poison--a poison which, if we admit the independent origin of the Black Plague at any one place of the globe, which, under such extraordinary circumstances, it would be difficult to doubt, attacked the course of the circulation in as hostile a manner as that which produces inflammation of the spleen, and other animal contagions that cause swelling and inflammation of the lymphatic glands. Pursuing the course of these grand revolutions further, we find notice of an unexampled earthquake, which, on the 25th January, 1348, shook Greece, Italy, and the neighbouring countries. Naples, Rome, Pisa, Bologna, Padua, Venice, and many other cities, suffered considerably; whole villages were swallowed up. Castles, houses, and churches were overthrown, and hundreds of people were buried beneath their ruins. In Carinthia, thirty villages, together with all the churches, were demolished; more than a thousand corpses were drawn out of the rubbish; the city of Villach was so completely destroyed that very few of its inhabitants were saved; and when the earth ceased to tremble it was found that mountains had been moved from their positions, and that many hamlets were left in ruins. It is recorded that during this earthquake the wine in the casks became turbid, a statement which may be considered as furnishing proof that changes causing a decomposition of the atmosphere had taken place; but if we had no other information from which the excitement of conflicting powers of nature during these commotions might be inferred, yet scientific observations in modern times have shown that the relation of the atmosphere to the earth is changed by volcanic influences. Why then, may we not, from this fact, draw retrospective inferences respecting those extraordinary phenomena? Independently of this, however, we know that during this earthquake, the duration of which is stated by some to have been a week, and by others a fortnight, people experienced an unusual stupor and headache, and that many fainted away. These destructive earthquakes extended as far as the neighbourhood of Basle, and recurred until the year 1360 throughout Germany, France, Silesia, Poland, England, and Denmark, and much further north. Great and extraordinary meteors appeared in many places, and were regarded with superstitious horror. A pillar of fire, which on the 20th of December, 1348, remained for an hour at sunrise over the pope's palace in Avignon; a fireball, which in August of the same year was seen at sunset over Paris, and was distinguished from similar phenomena by its longer duration, not to mention other instances mixed up with wonderful prophecies and omens, are recorded in the chronicles of that age. The order of the seasons seemed to be inverted; rains, flood, and failures in crops were so general that few places were exempt from them; and though an historian of this century assure us that there was an abundance in the granaries and storehouses, all his contemporaries, with one voice, contradict him. The consequences of failure in the crops were soon felt, especially in Italy and the surrounding countries, where, in this year, a rain, which continued for four months, had destroyed the seed. In the larger cities they were compelled, in the spring of 1347, to have recourse to a distribution of bread among the poor, particularly at Florence, where they erected large bakehouses, from which, in April, ninety-four thousand loaves of bread, each of twelve ounces in weight, were daily dispensed. It is plain, however, that humanity could only partially mitigate the general distress, not altogether obviate it. Diseases, the invariable consequence of famine, broke out in the country as well as in cities; children died of hunger in their mother's arms--want, misery, and despair were general throughout Christendom. Such are the events which took place before the eruption of the Black Plague in Europe. Contemporaries have explained them after their own manner, and have thus, like their posterity, under similar circumstances, given a proof that mortals possess neither senses nor intellectual powers sufficiently acute to comprehend the phenomena produced by the earth's organism, much less scientifically to understand their effects. Superstition, selfishness in a thousand forms, the presumption of the schools, laid hold of unconnected facts. They vainly thought to comprehend the whole in the individual, and perceived not the universal spirit which, in intimate union with the mighty powers of nature, animates the movements of all existence, and permits not any phenomenon to originate from isolated causes. To attempt, five centuries after that age of desolation, to point out the causes of a cosmical commotion, which has never recurred to an equal extent, to indicate scientifically the influences, which called forth so terrific a poison in the bodies of men and animals, exceeds the limits of human understanding. If we are even now unable, with all the varied resources of an extended knowledge of nature, to define that condition of the atmosphere by which pestilences are generated, still less can we pretend to reason retrospectively from the nineteenth to the fourteenth century; but if we take a general view of the occurrences, that century will give us copious information, and, as applicable to all succeeding times, of high importance. In the progress of connected natural phenomena from east to west, that great law of nature is plainly revealed which has so often and evidently manifested itself in the earth's organism, as well as in the state of nations dependent upon it. In the inmost depths of the globe that impulse was given in the year 1333, which in uninterrupted succession for six and twenty years shook the surface of the earth, even to the western shores of Europe. From the very beginning the air partook of the terrestrial concussion, atmospherical waters overflowed the land, or its plants and animals perished under the scorching heat. The insect tribe was wonderfully called into life, as if animated beings were destined to complete the destruction which astral and telluric powers had begun. Thus did this dreadful work of nature advance from year to year; it was a progressive infection of the zones, which exerted a powerful influence both above and beneath the surface of the earth; and after having been perceptible in slighter indications, at the commencement of the terrestrial commotions in China, convulsed the whole earth. The nature of the first plague in China is unknown. We have no certain intelligence of the disease until it entered the western countries of Asia. Here it showed itself as the Oriental plague, with inflammation of the lungs; in which form it probably also may have begun in China, that is to say, as a malady which spreads, more than any other, by contagion--a contagion that, in ordinary pestilences, requires immediate contact, and only under favourable circumstances of rare occurrence is communicated by the mere approach to the sick. The share which this cause had in the spreading of the plague over the whole earth was certainly very great; and the opinion that the Black Death might have been excluded from Western Europe by good regulations, similar to those which are now in use, would have all the support of modern experience, provided it could be proved that this plague had been actually imported from the East, or that the Oriental plague in general, whenever it appears in Europe, has its origin in Asia or Egypt. Such a proof, however, can by no means be produced so as to enforce conviction; for it would involve the impossible assumption, either that there is no essential difference between the degree of civilisation of the European nations, in the most ancient and in modern times, or that detrimental circumstances, which have yielded only to the civilisation of human society and the regular cultivation of countries, could not formerly keep up the glandular plague. The plague was, however, known in Europe before nations were united by the bonds of commerce and social intercourse; hence there is ground for supposing that it sprang up spontaneously, in consequence of the rude manner of living and the uncultivated state of the earth, influences which peculiarly favour the origin of severe diseases. Now we need not go back to the earlier centuries, for the fourteenth itself, before it had half expired, was visited by five or six pestilences. If, therefore, we consider the peculiar property of the plague, that in countries which it has once visited it remains for a long time in a milder form, and that the epidemic influences of 1342, when it had appeared for the last time, were particularly favourable to its unperceived continuance, till 1348, we come to the notion that in this eventful year also the germs of plague existed in Southern Europe, which might be vivified by atmospherical deteriorations; and that thus, at least in part, the Black Plague may have originated in Europe itself. The corruption of the atmosphere came from the East; but the disease itself came not upon the wings of the wind, but was only excited and increased by the atmosphere where it had previously existed. This source of the Black Plague was not, however, the only one; for far more powerful than the excitement of the latent elements of the plague by atmospheric influences was the effect of the contagion communicated from one people to another on the great roads and in the harbours of the Mediterranean. From China the route of the caravans lay to the north of the Caspian Sea, through Central Asia, to Tauris. Here ships were ready to take the produce of the East to Constantinople, the capital of commerce, and the medium of connection between Asia, Europe, and Africa. Other caravans went from India to Asia Minor, and touched at the cities south of the Caspian Sea, and, lastly, from Bagdad through Arabia to Egypt; also the maritime communication on the Red Sea, from India to Arabia and Egypt, was not inconsiderable. In all these directions contagion made its way; and, doubtless, Constantinople and the harbours of Asia Minor are to be regarded as the foci of infection, whence it radiated to the most distant seaports and islands. To Constantinople the plague had been brought from the northern coast of the Black Sea, after it had depopulated the countries between those routes of commerce, and appeared as early as 1347 in Cyprus, Sicily, Marseilles, and some of the seaports of Italy. The remaining islands of the Mediterranean, particularly Sardinia, Corsica, and Majorca, were visited in succession. Foci of contagion existed also in full activity along the whole southern coast of Europe; when, in January, 1348, the plague appeared in Avignon, and in other cities in the south of France and north of Italy, as well as in Spain. The precise days of its eruption in the individual towns are no longer to be ascertained; but it was not simultaneous; for in Florence the disease appeared in the beginning of April, in Cesena the 1st June, and place after place was attacked throughout the whole year; so that the plague, after it had passed through the whole of France and Germany--where, however, it did not make its ravages until the following year--did not break out till August in England, where it advanced so gradually, that a period of three months elapsed before it reached London. The northern kingdoms were attacked by it in 1349; Sweden, indeed, not until November of that year, almost two years after its eruption in Avignon. Poland received the plague in 1349, probably from Germany, if not from the northern countries; but in Russia it did not make its appearance until 1351, more than three years after it had broken out in Constantinople. Instead of advancing in a north-westerly direction from Tauris and from the Caspian Sea, it had thus made the great circuit of the Black Sea, by way of Constantinople, Southern and Central Europe, England, the northern kingdoms, and Poland, before it reached the Russian territories, a phenomenon which has not again occurred with respect to more recent pestilences originating in Asia. Whether any difference existed between the indigenous plague, excited by the influence of the atmosphere, and that which was imported by contagion, can no longer be ascertained from facts; for the contemporaries, who in general were not competent to make accurate researches of this kind, have left no data on the subject. A milder and a more malignant form certainly existed, and the former was not always derived from the latter, as is to be supposed from this circumstance--that the spitting of blood, the infallible diagnostic of the latter, on the first breaking out of the plague, is not similarly mentioned in all the reports; and it is therefore probable that the milder form belonged to the native plague--the more malignant, to that introduced by contagion. Contagion was, however, in itself, only one of many causes which gave rise to the Black Plague. This disease was a consequence of violent commotions in the earth's organism--if any disease of cosmical origin can be so considered. One spring set a thousand others in motion for the annihilation of living beings, transient or permanent, of mediate or immediate effect. The most powerful of all was contagion; for in the most distant countries, which had scarcely yet heard the echo of the first concussion, the people fell a sacrifice to organic poison--the untimely offspring of vital energies thrown into violent commotion. CHAPTER IV--MORTALITY We have no certain measure by which to estimate the ravages of the Black Plague, if numerical statements were wanted, as in modern times. Let us go back for a moment to the fourteenth century. The people were yet but little civilised. The Church had indeed subdued them; but they all suffered from the ill consequences of their original rudeness. The dominion of the law was not yet confirmed. Sovereigns had everywhere to combat powerful enemies to internal tranquillity and security. The cities were fortresses for their own defence. Marauders encamped on the roads. The husbandman was a feudal slave, without possessions of his own. Rudeness was general, humanity as yet unknown to the people. Witches and heretics were burned alive. Gentle rulers were contemned as weak; wild passions, severity and cruelty, everywhere predominated. Human life was little regarded. Governments concerned not themselves about the numbers of their subjects, for whose welfare it was incumbent on them to provide. Thus, the first requisite for estimating the loss of human life, namely, a knowledge of the amount of the population, is altogether wanting; and, moreover, the traditional statements of the amount of this loss are so vague, that from this source likewise there is only room for probable conjecture. Cairo lost daily, when the plague was raging with its greatest violence, from 10,000 to 15,000; being as many as, in modern times, great plagues have carried off during their whole course. In China, more than thirteen millions are said to have died; and this is in correspondence with the certainly exaggerated accounts from the rest of Asia. India was depopulated. Tartary, the Tartar kingdom of Kaptschak, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia, were covered with dead bodies--the Kurds fled in vain to the mountains. In Caramania and Caesarea none were left alive. On the roads--in the camps--in the caravansaries--unburied bodies alone were seen; and a few cities only (Arabian historians name Maarael-Nooman, Schisur, and Harem) remained, in an unaccountable manner, free. In Aleppo, 500 died daily; 22,000 people, and most of the animals, were carried off in Gaza, within six weeks. Cyprus lost almost all its inhabitants; and ships without crews were often seen in the Mediterranean, as afterwards in the North Sea, driving about, and spreading the plague wherever they went on shore. It was reported to Pope Clement, at Avignon, that throughout the East, probably with the exception of China, 23,840,000 people had fallen victims to the plague. Considering the occurrences of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we might, on first view, suspect the accuracy of this statement. How (it might be asked) could such great wars have been carried on--such powerful efforts have been made; how could the Greek Empire, only a hundred years later, have been overthrown, if the people really had been so utterly destroyed? This account is nevertheless rendered credible by the ascertained fact, that the palaces of princes are less accessible to contagious diseases than the dwellings of the multitude; and that in places of importance, the influx from those districts which have suffered least, soon repairs even the heaviest losses. We must remember, also, that we do not gather much from mere numbers without an intimate knowledge of the state of society. We will therefore confine ourselves to exhibiting some of the more credible accounts relative to European cities. In Florence there died of the Black Plague--60,000 In Venice--100,000 In Marseilles, in one month--16,000 In Siena--70,000 In Paris--50,000 In St. Denys--14,000 In Avignon--60,000 In Strasburg--16,000 In Lubeck--9,000 In Basle--14,000 In Erfurt, at least--16,000 In Weimar--5,000 In Limburg--2,500 In London, at least--100,000 In Norwich--51,100 To which may be added-- Franciscan Friars in German--124,434 Minorites in Italy--30,000 This short catalogue might, by a laborious and uncertain calculation, deduced from other sources, be easily further multiplied, but would still fail to give a true picture of the depopulation which took place. Lubeck, at that time the Venice of the North, which could no longer contain the multitudes that flocked to it, was thrown into such consternation on the eruption of the plague, that the citizens destroyed themselves as if in frenzy. Merchants whose earnings and possessions were unbounded, coldly and willingly renounced their earthly goods. They carried their treasures to monasteries and churches, and laid them at the foot of the altar; but gold had no charms for the monks, for it brought them death. They shut their gates; yet, still it was cast to them over the convent walls. People would brook no impediment to the last pious work to which they were driven by despair. When the plague ceased, men thought they were still wandering among the dead, so appalling was the livid aspect of the survivors, in consequence of the anxiety they had undergone, and the unavoidable infection of the air. Many other cities probably presented a similar appearance; and it is ascertained that a great number of small country towns and villages, which have been estimated, and not too highly, at 200,000, were bereft of all their inhabitants. In many places in France, not more than two out of twenty of the inhabitants were left alive, and the capital felt the fury of the plague, alike in the palace and the cot. Two queens, one bishop, and great numbers of other distinguished persons, fell a sacrifice to it, and more than 500 a day died in the Hotel Dieu, under the faithful care of the sisters of charity, whose disinterested courage, in this age of horror, displayed the most beautiful traits of human virtue. For although they lost their lives, evidently from contagion, and their numbers were several times renewed, there was still no want of fresh candidates, who, strangers to the unchristian fear of death, piously devoted themselves to their holy calling. The churchyards were soon unable to contain the dead, and many houses, left without inhabitants, fell to ruins. In Avignon, the Pope found it necessary to consecrate the Rhone, that bodies might be thrown into the river without delay, as the churchyards would no longer hold them; so likewise, in all populous cities, extraordinary measures were adopted, in order speedily to dispose of the dead. In Vienna, where for some time 1,200 inhabitants died daily, the interment of corpses in the churchyards and within the churches was forthwith prohibited; and the dead were then arranged in layers, by thousands, in six large pits outside the city, as had already been done in Cairo and Paris. Yet, still many were secretly buried; for at all times the people are attached to the consecrated cemeteries of their dead, and will not renounce the customary mode of interment. In many places it was rumoured that plague patients were buried alive, as may sometimes happen through senseless alarm and indecent haste; and thus the horror of the distressed people was everywhere increased. In Erfurt, after the churchyards were filled, 12,000 corpses were thrown into eleven great pits; and the like might, more or less exactly, be stated with respect to all the larger cities. Funeral ceremonies, the last consolation of the survivors, were everywhere impracticable. In all Germany, according to a probable calculation, there seem to have died only 1,244,434 inhabitants; this country, however, was more spared than others: Italy, on the contrary, was most severely visited. It is said to have lost half its inhabitants; and this account is rendered credible from the immense losses of individual cities and provinces: for in Sardinia and Corsica, according to the account of the distinguished Florentine, John Villani, who was himself carried off by the Black Plague, scarcely a third part of the population remained alive; and it is related of the Venetians, that they engaged ships at a high rate to retreat to the islands; so that after the plague had carried off three- fourths of her inhabitants, that proud city was left forlorn and desolate. In Padua, after the cessation of the plague, two-thirds of the inhabitants were wanting; and in Florence it was prohibited to publish the numbers of dead, and to toll the bells at their funerals, in order that the living might not abandon themselves to despair. We have more exact accounts of England; most of the great cities suffered incredible losses; above all, Yarmouth, in which 7,052 died; Bristol, Oxford, Norwich, Leicester, York, and London, where in one burial ground alone, there were interred upwards of 50,000 corpses, arranged in layers, in large pits. It is said that in the whole country scarcely a tenth part remained alive; but this estimate is evidently too high. Smaller losses were sufficient to cause those convulsions, whose consequences were felt for some centuries, in a false impulse given to civil life, and whose indirect influence, unknown to the English, has perhaps extended even to modern times. Morals were deteriorated everywhere, and the service of God was in a great measure laid aside; for, in many places, the churches were deserted, being bereft of their priests. The instruction of the people was impeded; covetousness became general; and when tranquillity was restored, the great increase of lawyers was astonishing, to whom the endless disputes regarding inheritances offered a rich harvest. The want of priests too, throughout the country, operated very detrimentally upon the people (the lower classes being most exposed to the ravages of the plague, whilst the houses of the nobility were, in proportion, much more spared), and it was no compensation that whole bands of ignorant laymen, who had lost their wives during the pestilence, crowded into the monastic orders, that they might participate in the respectability of the priesthood, and in the rich heritages which fell in to the Church from all quarters. The sittings of Parliament, of the King's Bench, and of most of the other courts, were suspended as long as the malady raged. The laws of peace availed not during the dominion of death. Pope Clement took advantage of this state of disorder to adjust the bloody quarrel between Edward III and Philip VI; yet he only succeeded during the period that the plague commanded peace. Philip's death (1350) annulled all treaties; and it is related that Edward, with other troops indeed, but with the same leaders and knights, again took the field. Ireland was much less heavily visited that England. The disease seems to have scarcely reached the mountainous districts of that kingdom; and Scotland too would perhaps have remained free, had not the Scots availed themselves of the discomfiture of the English to make an irruption into their territory, which terminated in the destruction of their army, by the plague and by the sword, and the extension of the pestilence, through those who escaped, over the whole country. At the commencement, there was in England a superabundance of all the necessaries of life; but the plague, which seemed then to be the sole disease, was soon accompanied by a fatal murrain among the cattle. Wandering about without herdsmen, they fell by thousands; and, as has likewise been observed in Africa, the birds and beasts of prey are said not to have touched them. Of what nature this murrain may have been, can no more be determined, than whether it originated from communication with plague patients, or from other causes; but thus much is certain, that it did not break out until after the commencement of the Black Death. In consequence of this murrain, and the impossibility of removing the corn from the fields, there was everywhere a great rise in the price of food, which to many was inexplicable, because the harvest had been plentiful; by others it was attributed to the wicked designs of the labourers and dealers; but it really had its foundation in the actual deficiency arising from circumstances by which individual classes at all times endeavour to profit. For a whole year, until it terminated in August, 1349, the Black Plague prevailed in this beautiful island, and everywhere poisoned the springs of comfort and prosperity. In other countries, it generally lasted only half a year, but returned frequently in individual places; on which account, some, without sufficient proof, assigned to it a period of seven years. Spain was uninterruptedly ravaged by the Black Plague till after the year 1350, to which the frequent internal feuds and the wars with the Moors not a little contributed. Alphonso XI., whose passion for war carried him too far, died of it at the siege of Gibraltar, on the 26th of March, 1350. He was the only king in Europe who fell a sacrifice to it; but even before this period, innumerable families had been thrown into affliction. The mortality seems otherwise to have been smaller in Spain than in Italy, and about as considerable as in France. The whole period during which the Black Plague raged with destructive violence in Europe was, with the exception of Russia, from the year 1347 to 1350. The plagues which in the sequel often returned until the year 1383, we do not consider as belonging to "the Great Mortality." They were rather common pestilences, without inflammation of the lungs, such as in former times, and in the following centuries, were excited by the matter of contagion everywhere existing, and which, on every favourable occasion, gained ground anew, as is usually the case with this frightful disease. The concourse of large bodies of people was especially dangerous; and thus the premature celebration of the Jubilee to which Clement VI. cited the faithful to Rome (1350) during the great epidemic, caused a new eruption of the plague, from which it is said that scarcely one in a hundred of the pilgrims escaped. Italy was, in consequence, depopulated anew; and those who returned, spread poison and corruption of morals in all directions. It is therefore the less apparent how that Pope, who was in general so wise and considerate, and who knew how to pursue the path of reason and humanity under the most difficult circumstances, should have been led to adopt a measure so injurious; since he himself was so convinced of the salutary effect of seclusion, that during the plague in Avignon he kept up constant fires, and suffered no one to approach him; and in other respects gave such orders as averted, or alleviated, much misery. The changes which occurred about this period in the north of Europe are sufficiently memorable to claim a few moments' attention. In Sweden two princes died--Haken and Knut, half-brothers of King Magnus; and in Westgothland alone, 466 priests. The inhabitants of Iceland and Greenland found in the coldness of their inhospitable climate no protection against the southern enemy who had penetrated to them from happier countries. The plague caused great havoc among them. Nature made no allowance for their constant warfare with the elements, and the parsimony with which she had meted out to them the enjoyments of life. In Denmark and Norway, however, people were so occupied with their own misery, that the accustomed voyages to Greenland ceased. Towering icebergs formed at the same time on the coast of East Greenland, in consequence of the general concussion of the earth's organism; and no mortal, from that time forward, has ever seen that shore or its inhabitants. It has been observed above, that in Russia the Black Plague did not break out until 1351, after it had already passed through the south and north of Europe. In this country also, the mortality was extraordinarily great; and the same scenes of affliction and despair were exhibited, as had occurred in those nations which had already passed the ordeal: the same mode of burial--the same horrible certainty of death--the same torpor and depression of spirits. The wealthy abandoned their treasures, and gave their villages and estates to the churches and monasteries; this being, according to the notions of the age, the surest way of securing the favour of Heaven and the forgiveness of past sins. In Russia, too, the voice of nature was silenced by fear and horror. In the hour of danger, fathers and mothers deserted their children, and children their parents. Of all the estimates of the number of lives lost in Europe, the most probable is, that altogether a fourth part of the inhabitants were carried off. Now, if Europe at present contain 210,000,000 inhabitants, the population, not to take a higher estimate, which might easily by justified, amounted to at least 105,000,000 in the sixteenth century. It may therefore be assumed, without exaggeration, that Europe lost during the Black Death 25,000,000 of inhabitants. That her nations could so quickly overcome such a fearful concussion in their external circumstances, and, in general, without retrograding more than they actually did, could so develop their energies in the following century, is a most convincing proof of the indestructibility of human society as a whole. To assume, however, that it did not suffer any essential change internally, because in appearance everything remained as before, is inconsistent with a just view of cause and effect. Many historians seem to have adopted such an opinion; accustomed, as usual, to judge of the moral condition of the people solely according to the vicissitudes of earthly power, the events of battles, and the influence of religion, but to pass over with indifference the great phenomena of nature, which modify, not only the surface of the earth, but also the human mind. Hence, most of them have touched but superficially on the "Great Mortality" of the fourteenth century. We, for our parts, are convinced that in the history of the world the Black Death is one of the most important events which have prepared the way for the present state of Europe. He who studies the human mind with attention, and forms a deliberate judgment on the intellectual powers which set people and States in motion, may perhaps find some proofs of this assertion in the following observations:--at that time, the advancement of the hierarchy was, in most countries, extraordinary; for the Church acquired treasures and large properties in land, even to a greater extent than after the Crusades; but experience has demonstrated that such a state of things is ruinous to the people, and causes them to retrograde, as was evinced on this occasion. After the cessation of the Black Plague, a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable--a grand phenomenon, which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the direction of general organic life. Marriages were, almost without exception, prolific; and double and triple births were more frequent than at other times; under which head, we should remember the strange remark, that after the "Great Mortality" the children were said to have got fewer teeth than before; at which contemporaries were mightily shocked, and even later writers have felt surprise. If we examine the grounds of this oft-repeated assertion, we shall find that they were astonished to see children, cut twenty, or at most, twenty- two teeth, under the supposition that a greater number had formerly fallen to their share. Some writers of authority, as, for example, the physician Savonarola, at Ferrara, who probably looked for twenty-eight teeth in children, published their opinions on this subject. Others copied from them, without seeing for themselves, as often happens in other matters which are equally evident; and thus the world believed in the miracle of an imperfection in the human body which had been caused by the Black Plague. The people gradually consoled themselves after the sufferings which they had undergone; the dead were lamented and forgotten; and, in the stirring vicissitudes of existence, the world belonged to the living. CHAPTER V--MORAL EFFECTS The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence of the Black Plague is without parallel and beyond description. In the eyes of the timorous, danger was the certain harbinger of death; many fell victims to fear on the first appearance of the distemper, and the most stout-hearted lost their confidence. Thus, after reliance on the future had died away, the spiritual union which binds man to his family and his fellow-creatures was gradually dissolved. The pious closed their accounts with the world--eternity presented itself to their view--their only remaining desire was for a participation in the consolations of religion, because to them death was disarmed of its sting. Repentance seized the transgressor, admonishing him to consecrate his remaining hours to the exercise of Christian virtues. All minds were directed to the contemplation of futurity; and children, who manifest the more elevated feelings of the soul without alloy, were frequently seen, while labouring under the plague, breathing out their spirit with prayer and songs of thanksgiving. An awful sense of contrition seized Christians of every communion; they resolved to forsake their vices, to make restitution for past offences, before they were summoned hence, to seek reconciliation with their Maker, and to avert, by self-chastisement, the punishment due to their former sins. Human nature would be exalted, could the countless noble actions which, in times of most imminent danger, were performed in secret, be recorded for the instruction of future generations. They, however, have no influence on the course of worldly events. They are known only to silent eyewitnesses, and soon fall into oblivion. But hypocrisy, illusion, and bigotry stalk abroad undaunted; they desecrate what is noble, they pervert what is divine, to the unholy purposes of selfishness, which hurries along every good feeling in the false excitement of the age. Thus it was in the years of this plague. In the fourteenth century, the monastic system was still in its full vigour, the power of the ecclesiastical orders and brotherhoods was revered by the people, and the hierarchy was still formidable to the temporal power. It was therefore in the natural constitution of society that bigoted zeal, which in such times makes a show of public acts of penance, should avail itself of the semblance of religion. But this took place in such a manner, that unbridled, self-willed penitence, degenerated into lukewarmness, renounced obedience to the hierarchy, and prepared a fearful opposition to the Church, paralysed as it was by antiquated forms. While all countries were filled with lamentations and woe, there first arose in Hungary, and afterwards in Germany, the Brotherhood of the Flagellants, called also the Brethren of the Cross, or Cross-bearers, who took upon themselves the repentance of the people for the sins they had committed, and offered prayers and supplications for the averting of this plague. This Order consisted chiefly of persons of the lower class, who were either actuated by sincere contrition, or who joyfully availed themselves of this pretext for idleness, and were hurried along with the tide of distracting frenzy. But as these brotherhoods gained in repute, and were welcomed by the people with veneration and enthusiasm, many nobles and ecclesiastics ranged themselves under their standard; and their bands were not unfrequently augmented by children, honourable women, and nuns; so powerfully were minds of the most opposite temperaments enslaved by this infatuation. They marched through the cities, in well-organised processions, with leaders and singers; their heads covered as far as the eyes; their look fixed on the ground, accompanied by every token of the deepest contrition and mourning. They were robed in sombre garments, with red crosses on the breast, back, and cap, and bore triple scourges, tied in three or four knots, in which points of iron were fixed. Tapers and magnificent banners of velvet and cloth of gold were carried before them; wherever they made their appearance, they were welcomed by the ringing bells, and the people flocked from all quarters to listen to their hymns and to witness their penance with devotion and tears. In the year 1349, two hundred Flagellants first entered Strasburg, where they were received with great joy, and hospitably lodged by citizens. Above a thousand joined the brotherhood, which now assumed the appearance of a wandering tribe, and separated into two bodies, for the purpose of journeying to the north and to the south. For more than half a year, new parties arrived weekly; and on each arrival adults and children left their families to accompany them; till at length their sanctity was questioned, and the doors of houses and churches were closed against them. At Spires, two hundred boys, of twelve years of age and under, constituted themselves into a Brotherhood of the Cross, in imitation of the children who, about a hundred years before, had united, at the instigation of some fanatic monks, for the purpose of recovering the Holy Sepulchre. All the inhabitants of this town were carried away by the illusion; they conducted the strangers to their houses with songs of thanksgiving, to regale them for the night. The women embroidered banners for them, and all were anxious to augment their pomp; and at every succeeding pilgrimage their influence and reputation increased. It was not merely some individual parts of the country that fostered them: all Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, and Flanders, did homage to the mania; and they at length became as formidable to the secular as they were to the ecclesiastical power. The influence of this fanaticism was great and threatening, resembling the excitement which called all the inhabitants of Europe into the deserts of Syria and Palestine about two hundred and fifty years before. The appearance in itself was not novel. As far back as the eleventh century, many believers in Asia and Southern Europe afflicted themselves with the punishment of flagellation. Dominicus Loricatus, a monk of St. Croce d'Avellano, is mentioned as the master and model of this species of mortification of the flesh; which, according to the primitive notions of the Asiatic Anchorites, was deemed eminently Christian. The author of the solemn processions of the Flagellants is said to have been St. Anthony; for even in his time (1231) this kind of penance was so much in vogue, that it is recorded as an eventful circumstance in the history of the world. In 1260, the Flagellants appeared in Italy as _Devoti_. "When the land was polluted by vices and crimes, an unexampled spirit of remorse suddenly seized the minds of the Italians. The fear of Christ fell upon all: noble and ignoble, old and young, and even children of five years of age, marched through the streets with no covering but a scarf round the waist. They each carried a scourge of leathern thongs, which they applied to their limbs, amid sighs and tears, with such violence that the blood flowed from the wounds. Not only during the day, but even by night, and in the severest winter, they traversed the cities with burning torches and banners, in thousands and tens of thousands, headed by their priests, and prostrated themselves before the altars. They proceeded in the same manner in the villages: and the woods and mountains resounded with the voices of those whose cries were raised to God. The melancholy chaunt of the penitent alone was heard. Enemies were reconciled; men and women vied with each other in splendid works of charity, as if they dreaded that Divine Omnipotence would pronounce on them the doom of annihilation." The pilgrimages of the Flagellants extended throughout all the province of Southern Germany, as far as Saxony, Bohemia, and Poland, and even further; but at length the priests resisted this dangerous fanaticism, without being able to extirpate the illusion, which was advantageous to the hierarchy as long as it submitted to its sway. Regnier, a hermit of Perugia, is recorded as a fanatic preacher of penitence, with whom the extravagance originated. In the year 1296 there was a great procession of the Flagellants in Strasburg; and in 1334, fourteen years before the Great Mortality, the sermon of Venturinus, a Dominican friar of Bergamo, induced above 10,000 persons to undertake a new pilgrimage. They scourged themselves in the churches, and were entertained in the market- places at the public expense. At Rome, Venturinus was derided, and banished by the Pope to the mountains of Ricondona. He patiently endured all--went to the Holy Land, and died at Smyrna, 1346. Hence we see that this fanaticism was a mania of the middle ages, which, in the year 1349, on so fearful an occasion, and while still so fresh in remembrance, needed no new founder; of whom, indeed, all the records are silent. It probably arose in many places at the same time; for the terror of death, which pervaded all nations and suddenly set such powerful impulses in motion, might easily conjure up the fanaticism of exaggerated and overpowering repentance. The manner and proceedings of the Flagellants of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries exactly resemble each other. But, if during the Black Plague, simple credulity came to their aid, which seized, as a consolation, the grossest delusion of religious enthusiasm, yet it is evident that the leaders must have been intimately united, and have exercised the power of a secret association. Besides, the rude band was generally under the control of men of learning, some of whom at least certainly had other objects in view independent of those which ostensibly appeared. Whoever was desirous of joining the brotherhood, was bound to remain in it thirty-four days, and to have fourpence per day at his own disposal, so that he might not be burthensome to any one; if married, he was obliged to have the sanction of his wife, and give the assurance that he was reconciled to all men. The Brothers of the Cross were not permitted to seek for free quarters, or even to enter a house without having been invited; they were forbidden to converse with females; and if they transgressed these rules, or acted without discretion, they were obliged to confess to the Superior, who sentenced them to several lashes of the scourge, by way of penance. Ecclesiastics had not, as such, any pre-eminence among them; according to their original law, which, however, was often transgressed, they could not become Masters, or take part in the Secret Councils. Penance was performed twice every day: in the morning and evening they went abroad in pairs, singing psalms amid the ringing of the bells; and when they arrived at the place of flagellation, they stripped the upper part of their bodies and put off their shoes, keeping on only a linen dress, reaching from the waist to the ankles. They then lay down in a large circle, in different positions, according to the nature of the crime: the adulterer with his face to the ground; the perjurer on one side, holding up three of his fingers, &c., and were then castigated, some more and some less, by the Master, who ordered them to rise in the words of a prescribed form. Upon this they scourged themselves, amid the singing of psalms and loud supplications for the averting of the plague, with genuflexions and other ceremonies, of which contemporary writers give various accounts; and at the same time constantly boasted of their penance, that the blood of their wounds was mingled with that of the Saviour. One of them, in conclusion, stoop up to read a letter, which it was pretended an angel had brought from heaven to St. Peter's Church, at Jerusalem, stating that Christ, who was sore displeased at the sins of man, had granted, at the intercession of the Holy Virgin and of the angels, that all who should wander about for thirty-four days and scourge themselves, should be partakers of the Divine grace. This scene caused as great a commotion among the believers as the finding of the holy spear once did at Antioch; and if any among the clergy inquired who had sealed the letter, he was boldly answered, the same who had sealed the Gospel! All this had so powerful an effect, that the Church was in considerable danger; for the Flagellants gained more credit than the priests, from whom they so entirely withdrew themselves, that they even absolved each other. Besides, they everywhere took possession of the churches, and their new songs, which went from mouth to mouth, operated strongly on the minds of the people. Great enthusiasm and originally pious feelings are clearly distinguishable in these hymns, and especially in the chief psalm of the Cross-bearers, which is still extant, and which was sung all over Germany in different dialects, and is probably of a more ancient date. Degeneracy, however, soon crept in; crimes were everywhere committed; and there was no energetic man capable of directing the individual excitement to purer objects, even had an effectual resistance to the tottering Church been at that early period seasonable, and had it been possible to restrain the fanaticism. The Flagellants sometimes undertook to make trial of their power of working miracles; as in Strasburg, where they attempted, in their own circle, to resuscitate a dead child: they, however, failed, and their unskilfulness did them much harm, though they succeeded here and there in maintaining some confidence in their holy calling, by pretending to have the power of casting out evil spirits. The Brotherhood of the Cross announced that the pilgrimage of the Flagellants was to continue for a space of thirty-four years; and many of the Masters had doubtless determined to form a lasting league against the Church; but they had gone too far. So early as the first year of their establishment, the general indignation set bounds to their intrigues: so that the strict measures adopted by the Emperor Charles IV., and Pope Clement, who, throughout the whole of this fearful period, manifested prudence and noble-mindedness, and conducted himself in a manner every way worthy of his high station, were easily put into execution. The Sorbonne, at Paris, and the Emperor Charles, had already applied to the Holy See for assistance against these formidable and heretical excesses, which had well-nigh destroyed the influence of the clergy in every place; when a hundred of the Brotherhood of the Cross arrived at Avignon from Basle, and desired admission. The Pope, regardless of the intercession of several cardinals, interdicted their public penance, which he had not authorised; and, on pain of excommunication, prohibited throughout Christendom the continuance of these pilgrimages. Philip VI., supported by the condemnatory judgment of the Sorbonne, forbade their reception in France. Manfred, King of Sicily, at the same time threatened them with punishment by death; and in the East they were withstood by several bishops, among whom was Janussius, of Gnesen, and Preczlaw, of Breslau, who condemned to death one of their Masters, formerly a deacon; and, in conformity with the barbarity of the times, had him publicly burnt. In Westphalia, where so shortly before they had venerated the Brothers of the Cross, they now persecuted them with relentless severity; and in the Mark, as well as in all the other countries of Germany, they pursued them as if they had been the authors of every misfortune. The processions of the Brotherhood of the Cross undoubtedly promoted the spreading of the plague; and it is evident that the gloomy fanaticism which gave rise to them would infuse a new poison into the already desponding minds of the people. Still, however, all this was within the bounds of barbarous enthusiasm; but horrible were the persecutions of the Jews, which were committed in most countries, with even greater exasperation than in the twelfth century, during the first Crusades. In every destructive pestilence the common people at first attribute the mortality to poison. No instruction avails; the supposed testimony of their eyesight is to them a proof, and they authoritatively demand the victims of their rage. On whom, then, was it so likely to fall as on the Jews, the usurers and the strangers who lived at enmity with the Christians? They were everywhere suspected of having poisoned the wells or infected the air. They alone were considered as having brought this fearful mortality upon the Christians. They were, in consequence, pursued with merciless cruelty; and either indiscriminately given up to the fury of the populace, or sentenced by sanguinary tribunals, which, with all the forms of the law, ordered them to be burnt alive. In times like these, much is indeed said of guilt and innocence; but hatred and revenge bear down all discrimination, and the smallest probability magnifies suspicion into certainty. These bloody scenes, which disgraced Europe in the fourteenth century, are a counterpart to a similar mania of the age, which was manifested in the persecutions of witches and sorcerers; and, like these, they prove that enthusiasm, associated with hatred, and leagued with the baser passions, may work more powerfully upon whole nations than religion and legal order; nay, that it even knows how to profit by the authority of both, in order the more surely to satiate with blood the sword of long-suppressed revenge. The persecution of the Jews commenced in September and October, 1348, at Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, where the first criminal proceedings were instituted against them, after they had long before been accused by the people of poisoning the wells; similar scenes followed in Bern and Freyburg, in January, 1349. Under the influence of excruciating suffering, the tortured Jews confessed themselves guilty of the crime imputed to them; and it being affirmed that poison had in fact been found in a well at Zoffingen, this was deemed a sufficient proof to convince the world; and the persecution of the abhorred culprits thus appeared justifiable. Now, though we can take as little exception at these proceedings as at the multifarious confessions of witches, because the interrogatories of the fanatical and sanguinary tribunals were so complicated, that by means of the rack the required answer must inevitably be obtained; and it is, besides, conformable to human nature that crimes which are in everybody's mouth may, in the end, be actually committed by some, either from wantonness, revenge, or desperate exasperation: yet crimes and accusations are, under circumstances like these, merely the offspring of a revengeful, frenzied spirit in the people; and the accusers, according to the fundamental principles of morality, which are the same in every age, are the more guilty transgressors. Already in the autumn of 1348 a dreadful panic, caused by this supposed empoisonment, seized all nations; in Germany especially the springs and wells were built over, that nobody might drink of them or employ their contents for culinary purposes; and for a long time the inhabitants of numerous towns and villages used only river and rain water. The city gates were also guarded with the greatest caution: only confidential persons were admitted; and if medicine or any other article, which might be supposed to be poisonous, was found in the possession of a stranger--and it was natural that some should have these things by them for their private use--they were forced to swallow a portion of it. By this trying state of privation, distrust, and suspicion, the hatred against the supposed poisoners became greatly increased, and often broke out in popular commotions, which only served still further to infuriate the wildest passions. The noble and the mean fearlessly bound themselves by an oath to extirpate the Jews by fire and sword, and to snatch them from their protectors, of whom the number was so small, that throughout all Germany but few places can be mentioned where these unfortunate people were not regarded as outlaws and martyred and burnt. Solemn summonses were issued from Bern to the towns of Basle, Freyburg in the Breisgau, and Strasburg, to pursue the Jews as poisoners. The burgomasters and senators, indeed, opposed this requisition; but in Basle the populace obliged them to bind themselves by an oath to burn the Jews, and to forbid persons of that community from entering their city for the space of two hundred years. Upon this all the Jews in Basle, whose number could not have been inconsiderable, were enclosed in a wooden building, constructed for the purpose, and burnt together with it, upon the mere outcry of the people, without sentence or trial, which, indeed, would have availed them nothing. Soon after the same thing took place at Freyburg. A regular Diet was held at Bennefeld, in Alsace, where the bishops, lords, and barons, as also deputies of the counties and towns, consulted how they should proceed with regard to the Jews; and when the deputies of Strasburg--not indeed the bishop of this town, who proved himself a violent fanatic--spoke in favour of the persecuted, as nothing criminal was substantiated against them, a great outcry was raised, and it was vehemently asked, why, if so, they had covered their wells and removed their buckets. A sanguinary decree was resolved upon, of which the populace, who obeyed the call of the nobles and superior clergy, became but the too willing executioners. Wherever the Jews were not burnt, they were at least banished; and so being compelled to wander about, they fell into the hands of the country people, who, without humanity, and regardless of all laws, persecuted them with fire and sword. At Spires, the Jews, driven to despair, assembled in their own habitations, which they set on fire, and thus consumed themselves with their families. The few that remained were forced to submit to baptism; while the dead bodies of the murdered, which lay about the streets, were put into empty wine-casks and rolled into the Rhine, lest they should infect the air. The mob was forbidden to enter the ruins of the habitations that were burnt in the Jewish quarter; for the senate itself caused search to be made for the treasure, which is said to have been very considerable. At Strasburg two thousand Jews were burnt alive in their own burial-ground, where a large scaffold had been erected: a few who promised to embrace Christianity were spared, and their children taken from the pile. The youth and beauty of several females also excited some commiseration, and they were snatched from death against their will; many, however, who forcibly made their escape from the flames were murdered in the streets. The senate ordered all pledges and bonds to be returned to the debtors, and divided the money among the work-people. Many, however, refused to accept the base price of blood, and, indignant at the scenes of bloodthirsty avarice, which made the infuriated multitude forget that the plague was raging around them, presented it to monasteries, in conformity with the advice of their confessors. In all the countries on the Rhine, these cruelties continued to be perpetrated during the succeeding months; and after quiet was in some degree restored, the people thought to render an acceptable service to God, by taking the bricks of the destroyed dwellings, and the tombstones of the Jews, to repair churches and to erect belfries. In Mayence alone, 12,000 Jews are said to have been put to a cruel death. The Flagellants entered that place in August; the Jews, on this occasion, fell out with the Christians and killed several; but when they saw their inability to withstand the increasing superiority of their enemies, and that nothing could save them from destruction, they consumed themselves and their families by setting fire to their dwellings. Thus also, in other places, the entry of the Flagellants gave rise to scenes of slaughter; and as thirst for blood was everywhere combined with an unbridled spirit of proselytism, a fanatic zeal arose among the Jews to perish as martyrs to their ancient religion. And how was it possible that they could from the heart embrace Christianity, when its precepts were never more outrageously violated? At Eslingen the whole Jewish community burned themselves in their synagogue, and mothers were often seen throwing their children on the pile, to prevent their being baptised, and then precipitating themselves into the flames. In short, whatever deeds fanaticism, revenge, avarice and desperation, in fearful combination, could instigate mankind to perform,--and where in such a case is the limit?--were executed in the year 1349 throughout Germany, Italy, and France, with impunity, and in the eyes of all the world. It seemed as if the plague gave rise to scandalous acts and frantic tumults, not to mourning and grief; and the greater part of those who, by their education and rank, were called upon to raise the voice of reason, themselves led on the savage mob to murder and to plunder. Almost all the Jews who saved their lives by baptism were afterwards burnt at different times; for they continued to be accused of poisoning the water and the air. Christians also, whom philanthropy or gain had induced to offer them protection, were put on the rack and executed with them. Many Jews who had embraced Christianity repented of their apostacy, and, returning to their former faith, sealed it with their death. The humanity and prudence of Clement VI. must, on this occasion, also be mentioned to his honour; but even the highest ecclesiastical power was insufficient to restrain the unbridled fury of the people. He not only protected the Jews at Avignon, as far as lay in his power, but also issued two bulls, in which he declared them innocent; and admonished all Christians, though without success, to cease from such groundless persecutions. The Emperor Charles IV. was also favourable to them, and sought to avert their destruction wherever he could; but he dared not draw the sword of justice, and even found himself obliged to yield to the selfishness of the Bohemian nobles, who were unwilling to forego so favourable an opportunity of releasing themselves from their Jewish creditors, under favour of an imperial mandate. Duke Albert of Austria burnt and pillaged those of his cities which had persecuted the Jews--a vain and inhuman proceeding, which, moreover, is not exempt from the suspicion of covetousness; yet he was unable, in his own fortress of Kyberg, to protect some hundreds of Jews, who had been received there, from being barbarously burnt by the inhabitants. Several other princes and counts, among whom was Ruprecht von der Pfalz, took the Jews under their protection, on the payment of large sums: in consequence of which they were called "Jew-masters," and were in danger of being attacked by the populace and by their powerful neighbours. These persecuted and ill- used people, except indeed where humane individuals took compassion on them at their own peril, or when they could command riches to purchase protection, had no place of refuge left but the distant country of Lithuania, where Boleslav V., Duke of Poland (1227-1279) had before granted them liberty of conscience; and King Casimir the Great (1333-1370), yielding to the entreaties of Esther, a favourite Jewess, received them, and granted them further protection; on which account, that country is still inhabited by a great number of Jews, who by their secluded habits have, more than any people in Europe, retained the manners of the Middle Ages. But to return to the fearful accusations against the Jews; it was reported in all Europe that they were in connection with secret superiors in Toledo, to whose decrees they were subject, and from whom they had received commands respecting the coining of base money, poisoning, the murder of Christian children, &c; that they received the poison by sea from remote parts, and also prepared it themselves from spiders, owls, and other venomous animals; but, in order that their secret might not be discovered, that it was known only to their Rabbis and rich men. Apparently there were but few who did not consider this extravagant accusation well founded; indeed, in many writings of the fourteenth century, we find great acrimony with regard to the suspected poison-mixers, which plainly demonstrates the prejudice existing against them. Unhappily, after the confessions of the first victims in Switzerland, the rack extorted similar ones in various places. Some even acknowledged having received poisonous powder in bags, and injunctions from Toledo, by secret messengers. Bags of this description were also often found in wells, though it was not unfrequently discovered that the Christians themselves had thrown them in; probably to give occasion to murder and pillage; similar instances of which may be found in the persecutions of the witches. This picture needs no additions. A lively image of the Black Plague, and of the moral evil which followed in its train, will vividly represent itself to him who is acquainted with nature and the constitution of society. Almost the only credible accounts of the manner of living, and of the ruin which occurred in private life during this pestilence, are from Italy; and these may enable us to form a just estimate of the general state of families in Europe, taking into consideration what is peculiar in the manners of each country. "When the evil had become universal" (speaking of Florence), "the hearts of all the inhabitants were closed to feelings of humanity. They fled from the sick and all that belonged to them, hoping by these means to save themselves. Others shut themselves up in their houses, with their wives, their children and households, living on the most costly food, but carefully avoiding all excess. None were allowed access to them; no intelligence of death or sickness was permitted to reach their ears; and they spent their time in singing and music, and other pastimes. Others, on the contrary, considered eating and drinking to excess, amusements of all descriptions, the indulgence of every gratification, and an indifference to what was passing around them, as the best medicine, and acted accordingly. They wandered day and night from one tavern to another, and feasted without moderation or bounds. In this way they endeavoured to avoid all contact with the sick, and abandoned their houses and property to chance, like men whose death-knell had already tolled. "Amid this general lamentation and woe, the influence and authority of every law, human and divine, vanished. Most of those who were in office had been carried off by the plague, or lay sick, or had lost so many members of their family, that they were unable to attend to their duties; so that thenceforth every one acted as he thought proper. Others in their mode of living chose a middle course. They ate and drank what they pleased, and walked abroad, carrying odoriferous flowers, herbs, or spices, which they smelt to from time to time, in order to invigorate the brain, and to avert the baneful influence of the air, infected by the sick and by the innumerable corpses of those who had died of the plague. Others carried their precaution still further, and thought the surest way to escape death was by flight. They therefore left the city; women as well as men abandoning their dwellings and their relations, and retiring into the country. But of these also many were carried off, most of them alone and deserted by all the world, themselves having previously set the example. Thus it was that one citizen fled from another--a neighbour from his neighbours--a relation from his relations; and in the end, so completely had terror extinguished every kindlier feeling, that the brother forsook the brother--the sister the sister--the wife her husband; and at last, even the parent his own offspring, and abandoned them, unvisited and unsoothed, to their fate. Those, therefore, that stood in need of assistance fell a prey to greedy attendants, who, for an exorbitant recompense, merely handed the sick their food and medicine, remained with them in their last moments, and then not unfrequently became themselves victims to their avarice and lived not to enjoy their extorted gain. Propriety and decorum were extinguished among the helpless sick. Females of rank seemed to forget their natural bashfulness, and committed the care of their persons, indiscriminately, to men and women of the lowest order. No longer were women, relatives or friends, found in the house of mourning, to share the grief of the survivors--no longer was the corpse accompanied to the grave by neighbours and a numerous train of priests, carrying wax tapers and singing psalms, nor was it borne along by other citizens of equal rank. Many breathed their last without a friend to soothe their dying pillow; and few indeed were they who departed amid the lamentations and tears of their friends and kindred. Instead of sorrow and mourning, appeared indifference, frivolity and mirth; this being considered, especially by the females, as conducive to health. Seldom was the body followed by even ten or twelve attendants; and instead of the usual bearers and sextons, mercenaries of the lowest of the populace undertook the office for the sake of gain; and accompanied by only a few priests, and often without a single taper, it was borne to the very nearest church, and lowered into the grave that was not already too full to receive it. Among the middling classes, and especially among the poor, the misery was still greater. Poverty or negligence induced most of these to remain in their dwellings, or in the immediate neighbourhood; and thus they fell by thousands; and many ended their lives in the streets by day and by night. The stench of putrefying corpses was often the first indication to their neighbours that more deaths had occurred. The survivors, to preserve themselves from infection, generally had the bodies taken out of the houses and laid before the doors; where the early morning found them in heaps, exposed to the affrighted gaze of the passing stranger. It was no longer possible to have a bier for every corpse--three or four were generally laid together--husband and wife, father and mother, with two or three children, were frequently borne to the grave on the same bier; and it often happened that two priests would accompany a coffin, bearing the cross before it, and be joined on the way by several other funerals; so that instead of one, there were five or six bodies for interment." Thus far Boccacio. On the conduct of the priests, another contemporary observes: "In large and small towns they had withdrawn themselves through fear, leaving the performance of ecclesiastical duties to the few who were found courageous and faithful enough to undertake them." But we ought not on that account to throw more blame on them than on others; for we find proofs of the same timidity and heartlessness in every class. During the prevalence of the Black Plague, the charitable orders conducted themselves admirably, and did as much good as can be done by individual bodies in times of great misery and destruction, when compassion, courage, and the nobler feelings are found but in the few, while cowardice, selfishness and ill-will, with the baser passions in their train, assert the supremacy. In place of virtue which had been driven from the earth, wickedness everywhere reared her rebellious standard, and succeeding generations were consigned to the dominion of her baleful tyranny. CHAPTER VI--PHYSICIANS If we now turn to the medical talent which encountered the "Great Mortality," the Middle Ages must stand excused, since even the moderns are of opinion that the art of medicine is not able to cope with the Oriental plague, and can afford deliverance from it only under particularly favourable circumstances. We must bear in mind, also, that human science and art appear particularly weak in great pestilences, because they have to contend with the powers of nature, of which they have no knowledge; and which, if they had been, or could be, comprehended in their collective effects, would remain uncontrollable by them, principally on account of the disordered condition of human society. Moreover, every new plague has its peculiarities, which are the less easily discovered on first view because, during its ravages, fear and consternation humble the proud spirit. The physicians of the fourteenth century, during the Black Death, did what human intellect could do in the actual condition of the healing art; and their knowledge of the disease was by no means despicable. They, like the rest of mankind, have indulged in prejudices, and defended them, perhaps, with too much obstinacy: some of these, however, were founded on the mode of thinking of the age, and passed current in those days as established truths; others continue to exist to the present hour. Their successors in the nineteenth century ought not therefore to vaunt too highly the pre-eminence of their knowledge, for they too will be subjected to the severe judgment of posterity--they too will, with reason, be accused of human weakness and want of foresight. The medical faculty of Paris, the most celebrated of the fourteenth century, were commissioned to deliver their opinion on the causes of the Black Plague, and to furnish some appropriate regulations with regard to living during its prevalence. This document is sufficiently remarkable to find a place here. "We, the Members of the College of Physicians of Paris, have, after mature consideration and consultation on the present mortality, collected the advice of our old masters in the art, and intend to make known the causes of this pestilence more clearly than could be done according to the rules and principles of astrology and natural science; we, therefore, declare as follows:-- "It is known that in India and the vicinity of the Great Sea, the constellations which combated the rays of the sun, and the warmth of the heavenly fire, exerted their power especially against that sea, and struggled violently with its waters. (Hence vapours often originate which envelop the sun, and convert his light into darkness.) These vapours alternately rose and fell for twenty-eight days; but, at last, sun and fire acted so powerfully upon the sea that they attracted a great portion of it to themselves, and the waters of the ocean arose in the form of vapour; thereby the waters were in some parts so corrupted that the fish which they contained died. These corrupted waters, however, the heat of the sun could not consume, neither could other wholesome water, hail or snow and dew, originate therefrom. On the contrary, this vapour spread itself through the air in many places on the earth, and enveloped them in fog. "Such was the case all over Arabia, in a part of India, in Crete, in the plains and valleys of Macedonia, in Hungary, Albania, and Sicily. Should the same thing occur in Sardinia, not a man will be left alive, and the like will continue so long as the sun remains in the sign of Leo, on all the islands and adjoining countries to which this corrupted sea-wind extends, or has already extended, from India. If the inhabitants of those parts do not employ and adhere to the following or similar means and precepts, we announce to them inevitable death, except the grace of Christ preserve their lives. "We are of opinion that the constellations, with the aid of nature, strive by virtue of their Divine might, to protect and heal the human race; and to this end, in union with the rays of the sun, acting through the power of fire, endeavour to break through the mist. Accordingly, within the next ten days, and until the 17th of the ensuing month of July, this mist will be converted into a stinking deleterious rain, whereby the air will be much purified. Now, as soon as this rain shall announce itself by thunder or hail, every one of you should protect himself from the air; and, as well before as after the rain, kindle a large fire of vine-wood, green laurel, or other green wood; wormwood and camomile should also be burnt in great quantity in the market-places, in other densely inhabited localities, and in the houses. Until the earth is again completely dry, and for three days afterwards, no one ought to go abroad in the fields. During this time the diet should be simple, and people should be cautious in avoiding exposure in the cool of the evening, at night, and in the morning. Poultry and water-fowl, young pork, old beef, and fat meat in general, should not be eaten; but, on the contrary, meat of a proper age, of a warm and dry, but on no account of a heating and exciting nature. Broth should be taken, seasoned with ground pepper, ginger, and cloves, especially by those who are accustomed to live temperately, and are yet choice in their diet. Sleep in the day- time is detrimental; it should be taken at night until sunrise, or somewhat longer. At breakfast one should drink little; supper should be taken an hour before sunset, when more may be drunk than in the morning. Clear light wine, mixed with a fifth or six part of water, should be used as a beverage. Dried or fresh fruits, with wine, are not injurious, but highly so without it. Beet-root and other vegetables, whether eaten pickled or fresh, are hurtful; on the contrary, spicy pot-herbs, as sage or rosemary, are wholesome. Cold, moist, watery food in is general prejudicial. Going out at night, and even until three o'clock in the morning, is dangerous, on account of dew. Only small river fish should be used. Too much exercise is hurtful. The body should be kept warmer than usual, and thus protected from moisture and cold. Rain-water must not be employed in cooking, and every one should guard against exposure to wet weather. If it rain, a little fine treacle should be taken after dinner. Fat people should not sit in the sunshine. Good clear wine should be selected and drunk often, but in small quantities, by day. Olive oil as an article of food is fatal. Equally injurious are fasting and excessive abstemiousness, anxiety of mind, anger, and immoderate drinking. Young people, in autumn especially, must abstain from all these things if they do not wish to run a risk of dying of dysentery. In order to keep the body properly open, an enema, or some other simple means, should be employed when necessary. Bathing is injurious. Men must preserve chastity as they value their lives. Every one should impress this on his recollection, but especially those who reside on the coast, or upon an island into which the noxious wind has penetrated." On what occasion these strange precepts were delivered can no longer be ascertained, even if it were an object to know it. It must be acknowledged, however, that they do not redound to the credit either of the faculty of Paris, or of the fourteenth century in general. This famous faculty found themselves under the painful necessity of being wise at command, and of firing a point-blank shot of erudition at an enemy who enveloped himself in a dark mist, of the nature of which they had no conception. In concealing their ignorance by authoritative assertions, they suffered themselves, therefore, to be misled; and while endeavouring to appear to the world with _eclat_, only betrayed to the intelligent their lamentable weakness. Now some might suppose that, in the condition of the sciences of the fourteenth century, no intelligent physicians existed; but this is altogether at variance with the laws of human advancement, and is contradicted by history. The real knowledge of an age is shown only in the archives of its literature. Here alone the genius of truth speaks audibly--here alone men of talent deposit the results of their experience and reflection without vanity or a selfish object. There is no ground for believing that in the fourteenth century men of this kind were publicly questioned regarding their views; and it is, therefore, the more necessary that impartial history should take up their cause, and do justice to their merits. The first notice on this subject is due to a very celebrated teacher in Perugia, Gentilis of Foligno, who, on the 18th of June, 1348, fell a sacrifice to the plague, in the faithful discharge of his duty. Attached to Arabian doctrines, and to the universally respected Galen, he, in common with all his contemporaries, believed in a putrid corruption of the blood in the lungs and in the heart, which was occasioned by the pestilential atmosphere, and was forthwith communicated to the whole body. He thought, therefore, that everything depended upon a sufficient purification of the air, by means of large blazing fires of odoriferous wood, in the vicinity of the healthy as well as of the sick, and also upon an appropriate manner of living, so that the putridity might not overpower the diseased. In conformity with notions derived from the ancients, he depended upon bleeding and purging, at the commencement of the attack, for the purpose of purification; ordered the healthy to wash themselves frequently with vinegar or wine, to sprinkle their dwellings with vinegar, and to smell often to camphor, or other volatile substances. Hereupon he gave, after the Arabian fashion, detailed rules, with an abundance of different medicines, of whose healing powers wonderful things were believed. He had little stress upon super-lunar influences, so far as respected the malady itself; on which account, he did not enter into the great controversies of the astrologers, but always kept in view, as an object of medical attention, the corruption of the blood in the lungs and heart. He believed in a progressive infection from country to country, according to the notions of the present day; and the contagious power of the disease, even in the vicinity of those affected by plague, was, in his opinion, beyond all doubt. On this point intelligent contemporaries were all agreed; and, in truth, it required no great genius to be convinced of so palpable a fact. Besides, correct notions of contagion have descended from remote antiquity, and were maintained unchanged in the fourteenth century. So far back as the age of Plato a knowledge of the contagious power of malignant inflammations of the eye, of which also no physician of the Middle Ages entertained a doubt, was general among the people; yet in modern times surgeons have filled volumes with partial controversies on this subject. The whole language of antiquity has adapted itself to the notions of the people respecting the contagion of pestilential diseases; and their terms were, beyond comparison, more expressive than those in use among the moderns. Arrangements for the protection of the healthy against contagious diseases, the necessity of which is shown from these notions, were regarded by the ancients as useful; and by man, whose circumstances permitted it, were carried into effect in their houses. Even a total separation of the sick from the healthy, that indispensable means of protection against infection by contact, was proposed by physicians of the second century after Christ, in order to check the spreading of leprosy. But it was decidedly opposed, because, as it was alleged, the healing art ought not to be guilty of such harshness. This mildness of the ancients, in whose manner of thinking inhumanity was so often and so undisguisedly conspicuous, might excite surprise if it were anything more than apparent. The true ground of the neglect of public protection against pestilential diseases lay in the general notion and constitution of human society--it lay in the disregard of human life, of which the great nations of antiquity have given proofs in every page of their history. Let it not be supposed that they wanted knowledge respecting the propagation of contagious diseases. On the contrary, they were as well informed on this subject as the modern; but this was shown where individual property, not where human life, on the grand scale was to be protected. Hence the ancients made a general practice of arresting the progress of murrains among cattle by a separation of the diseased from the healthy. Their herds alone enjoyed that protection which they held it impracticable to extend to human society, because they had no wish to do so. That the governments in the fourteenth century were not yet so far advanced as to put into practice general regulations for checking the plague needs no especial proof. Physicians could, therefore, only advise public purifications of the air by means of large fires, as had often been practised in ancient times; and they were obliged to leave it to individual families either to seek safety in flight, or to shut themselves up in their dwellings, a method which answers in common plagues, but which here afforded no complete security, because such was the fury of the disease when it was at its height, that the atmosphere of whole cities was penetrated by the infection. Of the astral influence which was considered to have originated the "Great Mortality," physicians and learned men were as completely convinced as of the fact of its reality. A grand conjunction of the three superior planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, in the sign of Aquarius, which took place, according to Guy de Chauliac, on the 24th of March, 1345, was generally received as its principal cause. In fixing the day, this physician, who was deeply versed in astrology, did not agree with others; whereupon there arose various disputations, of weight in that age, but of none in ours. People, however, agree in this--that conjunctions of the planets infallibly prognosticated great events; great revolutions of kingdoms, new prophets, destructive plagues, and other occurrences which bring distress and horror on mankind. No medical author of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries omits an opportunity of representing them as among the general prognostics of great plagues; nor can we, for our part, regard the astrology of the Middle Ages as a mere offspring of superstition. It has not only, in common with all ideas which inspire and guide mankind, a high historical importance, entirely independent of its error or truth--for the influence of both is equally powerful--but there are also contained in it, as in alchemy, grand thoughts of antiquity, of which modern natural philosophy is so little ashamed that she claims them as her property. Foremost among these is the idea of general life which diffuses itself throughout the whole universe, expressed by the greatest Greek sages, and transmitted to the Middle Ages, through the new Platonic natural philosophy. To this impression of an universal organism, the assumption of a reciprocal influence of terrestrial bodies could not be foreign, nor did this cease to correspond with a higher view of nature, until astrologers overstepped the limits of human knowledge with frivolous and mystical calculations. Guy de Chauliac considers the influence of the conjunction, which was held to be all-potent, as the chief general cause of the Black Plague; and the diseased state of bodies, the corruption of the fluids, debility, obstruction, and so forth, as the especial subordinate causes. By these, according to his opinion, the quality of the air, and of the other elements, was so altered that they set poisonous fluids in motion towards the inward parts of the body, in the same manner as the magnet attracts iron; whence there arose in the commencement fever and the spitting of blood; afterwards, however, a deposition in the form on glandular swellings and inflammatory boils. Herein the notion of an epidemic constitution was set forth clearly, and conformably to the spirit of the age. Of contagion, Guy de Chauliac was completely convinced. He sought to protect himself against it by the usual means; and it was probably he who advised Pope Clement VI. to shut himself up while the plague lasted. The preservation of this Pope's life, however, was most beneficial to the city of Avignon, for he loaded the poor with judicious acts of kindness, took care to have proper attendants provided, and paid physicians himself to afford assistance wherever human aid could avail--an advantage which, perhaps, no other city enjoyed. Nor was the treatment of plague-patients in Avignon by any means objectionable; for, after the usual depletions by bleeding and aperients, where circumstances required them, they endeavoured to bring the buboes to suppuration; they made incisions into the inflammatory boils, or burned them with a red-hot iron, a practice which at all times proves salutary, and in the Black Plague saved many lives. In this city, the Jews, who lived in a state of the greatest filth, were most severely visited, as also the Spaniards, whom Chalin accuses of great intemperance. Still more distinct notions on the causes of the plague were stated to his contemporaries in the fourteenth century by Galeazzo di Santa Sofia, a learned man, a native of Padua, who likewise treated plague-patients at Vienna, though in what year is undetermined. He distinguishes carefully _pestilence_ from _epidemy_ and _endemy_. The common notion of the two first accords exactly with that of an epidemic constitution, for both consist, according to him, in an unknown change or corruption of the air; with this difference, that pestilence calls forth diseases of different kinds; epidemy, on the contrary, always the same disease. As an example of an epidemy, he adduces a cough (influenza) which was observed in all climates at the same time without perceptible cause; but he recognised the approach of a pestilence, independently of unusual natural phenomena, by the more frequent occurrence of various kinds of fever, to which the modern physicians would assign a nervous and putrid character. The endemy originates, according to him, only in local telluric changes--in deleterious influences which develop themselves in the earth and in the water, without a corruption of the air. These notions were variously jumbled together in his time, like everything which human understanding separates by too fine a line of limitation. The estimation of cosmical influences, however, in the epidemy and pestilence, is well worthy of commendation; and Santa Sofia, in this respect, not only agrees with the most intelligent persons of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but he has also promulgated an opinion which must, even now, serve as a foundation for our scarcely commenced investigations into cosmical influences. Pestilence and epidemy consist not in alterations of the four primary qualities, but in a corruption of the air, powerful, though quite immaterial, and not cognoscible by the senses--(corruptio aeris non substantialis, sed qualitativa) in a disproportion of the imponderables in the atmosphere, as it would be expressed by the moderns. The causes of the pestilence and epidemy are, first of all, astral influences, especially on occasions of planetary conjunctions; then extensive putrefaction of animal and vegetable bodies, and terrestrial corruptions (corruptio in terra): to which also bad diet and want may contribute. Santa Sofia considers the putrefaction of locusts, that had perished in the sea and were again thrown up, combined with astral and terrestrial influences, as the cause of the pestilence in the eventful year of the "Great Mortality." All the fevers which were called forth by the pestilence are, according to him, of the putrid kind; for they originate principally from putridity of the heart's blood, which inevitably follows the inhalation of infected air. The Oriental Plague is, sometimes, but by no means always occasioned by _pestilence_ (?), which imparts to it a character (_qualitas occulta_) hostile to human nature. It originates frequently from other causes, among which this physician was aware that contagion was to be reckoned; and it deserves to be remarked that he held epidemic small-pox and measles to be infallible forerunners of the plague, as do the physicians and people of the East at the present day. In the exposition of his therapeutical views of the plague, a clearness of intellect is again shown by Santa Sofia, which reflects credit on the age. It seemed to him to depend, 1st, on an evacuation of putrid matters by purgatives and bleeding; yet he did not sanction the employment of these means indiscriminately and without consideration; least of all where the condition of the blood was healthy. He also declared himself decidedly against bleeding _ad deliquium_ (_venae sectio eradicativa_). 2nd, Strengthening of the heart and prevention of putrescence. 3rd, Appropriate regimen. 4th, Improvement of the air. 5th, Appropriate treatment of tumid glands and inflammatory boils, with emollient, or even stimulating poultices (mustard, lily-bulbs), as well as with red-hot gold and iron. Lastly, 6th, Attention to prominent symptoms. The stores of the Arabian pharmacy, which he brought into action to meet all these indications, were indeed very considerable; it is to be observed, however, that, for the most part, gentle means were accumulated, which, in case of abuse, would do no harm: for the character of the Arabian system of medicine, whose principles were everywhere followed at this time, was mildness and caution. On this account, too, we cannot believe that a very prolix treatise by Marsigli di Santa Sofia, a contemporary relative of Galeazzo, on the prevention and treatment of plague, can have caused much harm, although perhaps, even in the fourteenth century, an agreeable latitude and confident assertions respecting things which no mortal has investigated, or which it is quite a matter of indifference to distinguish, were considered as proofs of a valuable practical talent. The agreement of contemporary and later writers shows that the published views of the most celebrated physicians of the fourteenth century were those generally adopted. Among these, Chalin de Vinario is the most experienced. Though devoted to astrology still more than his distinguished contemporary, he acknowledges the great power of terrestrial influences, and expresses himself very sensibly on the indisputable doctrine of contagion, endeavouring thereby to apologise for many surgeons and physicians of his time who neglected their duty. He asserted boldly and with truth, "_that all epidemic diseases might become contagious_, _and all fevers epidemic_," which attentive observers of all subsequent ages have confirmed. He delivered his sentiments on blood-letting with sagacity, as an experienced physician; yet he was unable, as may be imagined, to moderate the desire for bleeding shown by the ignorant monks. He was averse to draw blood from the veins of patients under fourteen years of age; but counteracted inflammatory excitement in them by cupping, and endeavoured to moderate the inflammation of the tumid glands by leeches. Most of those who were bled, died; he therefore reserved this remedy for the plethoric; especially for the papal courtiers and the hypocritical priests, whom he saw gratifying their sensual desires, and imitating Epicurus, whilst they pompously pretended to follow Christ. He recommended burning the boils with a red-hot iron only in the plague without fever, which occurred in single cases; and was always ready to correct those over-hasty surgeons who, with fire and violent remedies, did irremediable injury to their patients. Michael Savonarola, professor in Ferrara (1462), reasoning on the susceptibility of the human frame to the influence of pestilential infection, as the cause of such various modifications of disease, expresses himself as a modern physician would on this point; and an adoption of the principle of contagion was the foundation of his definition of the plague. No less worthy of observation are the views of the celebrated Valescus of Taranta, who, during the final visitation of the Black Death, in 1382, practised as a physician at Montpellier, and handed down to posterity what has been repeated in innumerable treatises on plague, which were written during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Of all these notions and views regarding the plague, whose development we have represented, there are two especially, which are prominent in historical importance:--1st, The opinion of learned physicians, that the pestilence, or epidemic constitution, is the parent of various kinds of disease; that the plague sometimes, indeed, but by no means always, originates from it: that, to speak in the language of the moderns, the pestilence bears the same relation to contagion that a predisposing cause does to an occasional cause; and 2ndly, the universal conviction of the contagious power of that disease. Contagion gradually attracted more notice: it was thought that in it the most powerful occasional cause might be avoided; the possibility of protecting whole cities by separation became gradually more evident; and so horrifying was the recollection of the eventful year of the "Great Mortality," that before the close of the fourteenth century, ere the ill effects of the Black Plague had ceased, nations endeavoured to guard against the return of this enemy by an earnest and effectual defence. The first regulation which was issued for this purpose, originated with Viscount Bernabo, and is dated the 17th January, 1374. "Every plague- patient was to be taken out of the city into the fields, there to die or to recover. Those who attended upon a plague-patient, were to remain apart for ten days before they again associated with anybody. The priests were to examine the diseased, and point out to special commissioners the persons infected, under punishment of the confiscation of their goods and of being burned alive. Whoever imported the plague, the state condemned his goods to confiscation. Finally, none except those who were appointed for that purpose were to attend plague-patients, under penalty of death and confiscation." These orders, in correspondence with the spirit of the fourteenth century, are sufficiently decided to indicate a recollection of the good effects of confinement, and of keeping at a distance those suspected of having plague. It was said that Milan itself, by a rigorous barricade of three houses in which the plague had broken out, maintained itself free from the "Great Mortality" for a considerable time; and examples of the preservation of individual families, by means of a strict separation, were certainly very frequent. That these orders must have caused universal affliction from their uncommon severity, as we know to have been especially the case in the city of Reggio, may be easily conceived; but Bernabo did not suffer himself to be deterred from his purpose by fear--on the contrary, when the plague returned in the year 1383, he forbade the admission of people from infected places into his territories on pain of death. We have now, it is true, no account how far he succeeded; yet it is to be supposed that he arrested the disease, for it had long lost the property of the Black Death, to spread abroad in the air the contagious matter which proceeded from the lungs, charged with putridity, and to taint the atmosphere of whole cities by the vast numbers of the sick. Now that it had resumed its milder form, so that it infected only by contact, it admitted being confined within individual dwellings, as easily as in modern times. Bernabo's example was imitated; nor was there any century more appropriate for recommending to governments strong regulations against the plague that the fourteenth; for when it broke out in Italy, in the year 1399, and still demanded new victims, it was for the sixteenth time, without reckoning frequent visitations of measles and small-pox. In this same year, Viscount John, in milder terms than his predecessor, ordered that no stranger should be admitted from infected places, and that the city gates should be strictly guarded. Infected houses were to be ventilated for at least eight or ten days, and purified from noxious vapours by fires, and by fumigations with balsamic and aromatic substances. Straw, rags, and the like were to be burned; and the bedsteads which had been used, set out for four days in the rain or the sunshine, so that by means of the one or the other, the morbific vapour might be destroyed. No one was to venture to make use of clothes or beds out of infected dwellings unless they had been previously washed and dried either at the fire or in the sun. People were, likewise, to avoid, as long as possible, occupying houses which had been frequented by plague- patients. We cannot precisely perceive in these an advance towards general regulations; and perhaps people were convinced of the insurmountable impediments which opposed the separation of open inland countries, where bodies of people connected together could not be brought, even by the most obdurate severity, to renounce the habit of profitable intercourse. Doubtless it is nature which has done the most to banish the Oriental plague from western Europe, where the increasing cultivation of the earth, and the advancing order in civilised society, have prevented it from remaining domesticated, which it most probably was in the more ancient times. In the fifteenth century, during which it broke out seventeen times in different places in Europe, it was of the more consequence to oppose a barrier to its entrance from Asia, Africa, and Greece (which had become Turkish); for it would have been difficult for it to maintain itself indigenously any longer. Among the southern commercial states, however, which were called on to make the greatest exertions to this end, it was principally Venice, formerly so severely attacked by the Black Plague, that put the necessary restraint upon perilous profits of the merchant. Until towards the end of the fifteenth century, the very considerable intercourse with the East was free and unimpeded. Ships of commercial cities had often brought over the plague: nay, the former irruption of the "Great Mortality" itself had been occasioned by navigators. For, as in the latter end of autumn, 1347, four ships full of plague-patients returned from the Levant to Genoa, the disease spread itself there with astonishing rapidity. On this account, in the following year, the Genoese forbade the entrance of suspected ships into their port. These sailed to Pisa and other cities on the coast, where already nature had made such mighty preparations for the reception of the Black Plague, and what we have already described took place in consequence. In the year 1485, when, among the cities of northern Italy, Milan especially felt the scourge of the plague, a special Council of Health, consisting of three nobles, was established at Venice, who probably tried everything in their power to prevent the entrance of this disease, and gradually called into activity all those regulations which have served in later times as a pattern for the other southern states of Europe. Their endeavours were, however, not crowned with complete success; on which account their powers were increased, in the year 1504, by granting them the right of life and death over those who violated the regulations. Bills of health were probably first introduced in the year 1527, during a fatal plague which visited Italy for five years (1525-30), and called forth redoubled caution. The first lazarettos were established upon islands at some distance from the city, seemingly as early as the year 1485. Here all strangers coming from places where the existence of plague was suspected were detained. If it appeared in the city itself, the sick were despatched with their families to what was called the Old Lazaretto, were there furnished with provisions and medicines, and when they were cured, were detained, together with all those who had had intercourse with them, still forty days longer in the New Lazaretto, situated on another island. All these regulations were every year improved, and their needful rigour was increased, so that from the year 1585 onwards, no appeal was allowed from the sentence of the Council of Health; and the other commercial nations gradually came to the support of the Venetians, by adopting corresponding regulations. Bills of health, however, were not general until the year 1665. The appointment of a forty days' detention, whence quarantines derive their name, was not dictated by caprice, but probably had a medical origin, which is derivable in part from the doctrine of critical days; for the fortieth day, according to the most ancient notions, has been always regarded as the last of ardent diseases, and the limit of separation between these and those which are chronic. It was the custom to subject lying-in women for forty days to a more exact superintendence. There was a good deal also said in medical works of forty-day epochs in the formation of the foetus, not to mention that the alchemists expected more durable revolutions in forty days, which period they called the philosophical month. This period being generally held to prevail in natural processes, it appeared reasonable to assume, and legally to establish it, as that required for the development of latent principles of contagion, since public regulations cannot dispense with decisions of this kind, even though they should not be wholly justified by the nature of the case. Great stress has likewise been laid on theological and legal grounds, which were certainly of greater weight in the fifteenth century than in the modern times. On this matter, however, we cannot decide, since our only object here is to point out the origin of a political means of protection against a disease which has been the greatest impediment to civilisation within the memory of man; a means that, like Jenner's vaccine, after the small-pox had ravaged Europe for twelve hundred years, has diminished the check which mortality puts on the progress of civilisation, and thus given to the life and manners of the nations of this part of the world a new direction, the result of which we cannot foretell. THE DANCING MANIA CHAPTER I--THE DANCING MANIA IN GERMANY AND THE NETHERLANDS SECT. 1--ST. JOHN'S DANCE The effects of the Black Death had not yet subsided, and the graves of millions of its victims were scarcely closed, when a strange delusion arose in Germany, which took possession of the minds of men, and, in spite of the divinity of our nature, hurried away body and soul into the magic circle of hellish superstition. It was a convulsion which in the most extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame, and excited the astonishment of contemporaries for more than two centuries, since which time it has never reappeared. It was called the dance of St. John or of St. Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterised, and which gave to those affected, whilst performing their wild dance, and screaming and foaming with fury, all the appearance of persons possessed. It did not remain confined to particular localities, but was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, like a demoniacal epidemic, over the whole of Germany and the neighbouring countries to the north-west, which were already prepared for its reception by the prevailing opinions of the time. So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at Aix- la-Chapelle, who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one common delusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the churches the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack. This practice of swathing was resorted to on account of the tympany which followed these spasmodic ravings, but the bystanders frequently relieved patients in a less artificial manner, by thumping and trampling upon the parts affected. While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out; and some of them afterwards asserted that they felt as if they had been immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged them to leap so high. Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious notions of the age were strangely and variously reflected in their imaginations. Where the disease was completely developed, the attack commenced with epileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to the ground senseless, panting and labouring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and suddenly springing up began their dance amidst strange contortions. Yet the malady doubtless made its appearance very variously, and was modified by temporary or local circumstances, whereof non-medical contemporaries but imperfectly noted the essential particulars, accustomed as they were to confound their observation of natural events with their notions of the world of spirits. It was but a few months ere this demoniacal disease had spread from Aix- la-Chapelle, where it appeared in July, over the neighbouring Netherlands. In Liege, Utrecht, Tongres, and many other towns of Belgium, the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair, and their waists girt with cloths, that they might, as soon as the paroxysm was over, receive immediate relief on the attack of the tympany. This bandage was, by the insertion of a stick, easily twisted tight: many, however, obtained more relief from kicks and blows, which they found numbers of persons ready to administer: for, wherever the dancers appeared, the people assembled in crowds to gratify their curiosity with the frightful spectacle. At length the increasing number of the affected excited no less anxiety than the attention that was paid to them. In towns and villages they took possession of the religious houses, processions were everywhere instituted on their account, and masses were said and hymns were sung, while the disease itself, of the demoniacal origin of which no one entertained the least doubt, excited everywhere astonishment and horror. In Liege the priests had recourse to exorcisms, and endeavoured by every means in their power to allay an evil which threatened so much danger to themselves; for the possessed assembling in multitudes, frequently poured forth imprecations against them, and menaced their destruction. They intimidated the people also to such a degree that there was an express ordinance issued that no one should make any but square-toed shoes, because these fanatics had manifested a morbid dislike to the pointed shoes which had come into fashion immediately after the "Great Mortality" in 1350. They were still more irritated at the sight of red colours, the influence of which on the disordered nerves might lead us to imagine an extraordinary accordance between this spasmodic malady and the condition of infuriated animals; but in the St. John's dancers this excitement was probably connected with apparitions consequent upon their convulsions. There were likewise some of them who were unable to endure the sight of persons weeping. The clergy seemed to become daily more and more confirmed in their belief that those who were affected were a kind of sectarians, and on this account they hastened their exorcisms as much as possible, in order that the evil might not spread amongst the higher classes, for hitherto scarcely any but the poor had been attacked, and the few people of respectability among the laity and clergy who were to be found among them, were persons whose natural frivolity was unable to withstand the excitement of novelty, even though it proceeded from a demoniacal influence. Some of the affected had indeed themselves declared, when under the influence of priestly forms of exorcism, that if the demons had been allowed only a few weeks' more time, they would have entered the bodies of the nobility and princes, and through these have destroyed the clergy. Assertions of this sort, which those possessed uttered whilst in a state which may be compared with that of magnetic sleep, obtained general belief, and passed from mouth to mouth with wonderful additions. The priesthood were, on this account, so much the more zealous in their endeavours to anticipate every dangerous excitement of the people, as if the existing order of things could have been seriously threatened by such incoherent ravings. Their exertions were effectual, for exorcism was a powerful remedy in the fourteenth century; or it might perhaps be that this wild infatuation terminated in consequence of the exhaustion which naturally ensued from it; at all events, in the course of ten or eleven months the St. John's dancers were no longer to be found in any of the cities of Belgium. The evil, however, was too deeply rooted to give way altogether to such feeble attacks. A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance at Aix-la- Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of those possessed amounted to more than five hundred, and about the same time at Metz, the streets of which place are said to have been filled with eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels, and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder. Secret desires were excited, and but too often found opportunities for wild enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a temporary livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those possessed, and greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection. Above a hundred unmarried women were seen raving about in consecrated and unconsecrated places, and the consequences were soon perceived. Gangs of idle vagabonds, who understood how to imitate to the life the gestures and convulsions of those really affected, roved from place to place seeking maintenance and adventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of this kind the susceptible are infected as easily by the appearance as by the reality. At last it was found necessary to drive away these mischievous guests, who were equally inaccessible to the exorcisms of the priests and the remedies of the physicians. It was not, however, until after four months that the Rhenish cities were able to suppress these impostures, which had so alarmingly increased the original evil. In the meantime, when once called into existence, the plague crept on, and found abundant food in the tone of thought which prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even, though in a minor degree, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth, causing a permanent disorder of the mind, and exhibiting in those cities to whose inhabitants it was a novelty, scenes as strange as they were detestable. SECT. 2--ST. VITUS'S DANCE Strasburg was visited by the "Dancing Plague" in the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there, as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their confused and absurd behaviour, and then by their constantly following swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which were added anxious parents and relations, who came to look after those among the misguided multitude who belonged to their respective families. Imposture and profligacy played their part in this city also, but the morbid delusion itself seems to have predominated. On this account religion could only bring provisional aid, and therefore the town council benevolently took an interest in the afflicted. They divided them into separate parties, to each of which they appointed responsible superintendents to protect them from harm, and perhaps also to restrain their turbulence. They were thus conducted on foot and in carriages to the chapels of St. Vitus, near Zabern and Rotestein, where priests were in attendance to work upon their misguided minds by masses and other religious ceremonies. After divine worship was completed, they were led in solemn procession to the altar, where they made some small offering of alms, and where it is probable that many were, through the influence of devotion and the sanctity of the place, cured of this lamentable aberration. It is worthy of observation, at all events, that the Dancing Mania did not recommence at the altars of the saint, and that from him alone assistance was implored, and through his miraculous interposition a cure was expected, which was beyond the reach of human skill. The personal history of St. Vitus is by no means important in this matter. He was a Sicilian youth, who, together with Modestus and Crescentia, suffered martyrdom at the time of the persecution of the Christians, under Diocletian, in the year 303. The legends respecting him are obscure, and he would certainly have been passed over without notice among the innumerable apocryphal martyrs of the first centuries, had not the transfer of his body to St. Denys, and thence, in the year 836, to Corvey, raised him to a higher rank. From this time forth it may be supposed that many miracles were manifested at his new sepulchre, which were of essential service in confirming the Roman faith among the Germans, and St. Vitus was soon ranked among the fourteen saintly helpers (Nothhelfer or Apotheker). His altars were multiplied, and the people had recourse to them in all kinds of distresses, and revered him as a powerful intercessor. As the worship of these saints was, however, at that time stripped of all historical connections, which were purposely obliterated by the priesthood, a legend was invented at the beginning of the fifteenth century, or perhaps even so early as the fourteenth, that St. Vitus had, just before he bent his neck to the sword, prayed to God that he might protect from the Dancing Mania all those who should solemnise the day of his commemoration, and fast upon its eve, and that thereupon a voice from heaven was heard, saying, "Vitus, thy prayer is accepted." Thus St. Vitus became the patron saint of those afflicted with the Dancing Plague, as St. Martin of Tours was at one time the succourer of persons in small-pox, St. Antonius of those suffering under the "hellish fire," and as St. Margaret was the Juno Lucina of puerperal women. SECT. 3--CAUSES The connection which John the Baptist had with the Dancing Mania of the fourteenth century was of a totally different character. He was originally far from being a protecting saint to those who were attacked, or one who would be likely to give them relief from a malady considered as the work of the devil. On the contrary, the manner in which he was worshipped afforded an important and very evident cause for its development. From the remotest period, perhaps even so far back as the fourth century, St. John's day was solemnised with all sorts of strange and rude customs, of which the originally mystical meaning was variously disfigured among different nations by superadded relics of heathenism. Thus the Germans transferred to the festival of St. John's day an ancient heathen usage, the kindling of the "Nodfyr," which was forbidden them by St. Boniface, and the belief subsists even to the present day that people and animals that have leaped through these flames, or their smoke, are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have originated in similar causes among all the rude nations of the earth, and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-Christian festival. At the period of which we are treating, however, the Germans were not the only people who gave way to the ebullitions of fanaticism in keeping the festival of St. John the Baptist. Similar customs were also to be found among the nations of Southern Europe and of Asia, and it is more than probable that the Greeks transferred to the festival of John the Baptist, who is also held in high esteem among the Mahomedans, a part of their Bacchanalian mysteries, an absurdity of a kind which is but too frequently met with in human affairs. How far a remembrance of the history of St. John's death may have had an influence on this occasion, we would leave learned theologians to decide. It is only of importance here to add that in Abyssinia, a country entirely separated from Europe, where Christianity has maintained itself in its primeval simplicity against Mahomedanism, John is to this day worshipped, as protecting saint of those who are attacked with the dancing malady. In these fragments of the dominion of mysticism and superstition, historical connection is not to be found. When we observe, however, that the first dancers in Aix-la-Chapelle appeared in July with St. John's name in their mouths, the conjecture is probable that the wild revels of St. John's day, A.D. 1374, gave rise to this mental plague, which thenceforth has visited so many thousands with incurable aberration of mind, and disgusting distortions of body. This is rendered so much the more probable because some months previously the districts in the neighbourhood of the Rhine and the Main had met with great disasters. So early as February, both these rivers had overflowed their banks to a great extent; the walls of the town of Cologne, on the side next the Rhine, had fallen down, and a great many villages had been reduced to the utmost distress. To this was added the miserable condition of western and southern Germany. Neither law nor edict could suppress the incessant feuds of the Barons, and in Franconia especially, the ancient times of club law appeared to be revived. Security of property there was none; arbitrary will everywhere prevailed; corruption of morals and rude power rarely met with even a feeble opposition; whence it arose that the cruel, but lucrative, persecutions of the Jews were in many places still practised through the whole of this century with their wonted ferocity. Thus, throughout the western parts of Germany, and especially in the districts bordering on the Rhine, there was a wretched and oppressed populace; and if we take into consideration that among their numerous bands many wandered about, whose consciences were tormented with the recollection of the crimes which they had committed during the prevalence of the Black Plague, we shall comprehend how their despair sought relief in the intoxication of an artificial delirium. There is hence good ground for supposing that the frantic celebration of the festival of St. John, A.D. 1374, only served to bring to a crisis a malady which had been long impending; and if we would further inquire how a hitherto harmless usage, which like many others had but served to keep up superstition, could degenerate into so serious a disease, we must take into account the unusual excitement of men's minds, and the consequences of wretchedness and want. The bowels, which in many were debilitated by hunger and bad food, were precisely the parts which in most cases were attacked with excruciating pain, and the tympanitic state of the intestines points out to the intelligent physician an origin of the disorder which is well worth consideration. SECT. 4--MORE ANCIENT DANCING PLAGUES The Dancing Mania of the year 1374 was, in fact, no new disease, but a phenomenon well known in the Middle Ages, of which many wondrous stories were traditionally current among the people. In the year 1237 upwards of a hundred children were said to have been suddenly seized with this disease at Erfurt, and to have proceeded dancing and jumping along the road to Arnstadt. When they arrived at that place they fell exhausted to the ground, and, according to an account of an old chronicle, many of them, after they were taken home by their parents, died, and the rest remained affected, to the end of their lives, with a permanent tremor. Another occurrence was related to have taken place on the Moselle Bridge at Utrecht, on the 17th day of June, A.D. 1278, when two hundred fanatics began to dance, and would not desist until a priest passed, who was carrying the Host to a person that was sick, upon which, as if in punishment of their crime, the bridge gave way, and they were all drowned. A similar event also occurred so early as the year 1027, near the convent church of Kolbig, not far from Bernburg. According to an oft- repeated tradition, eighteen peasants, some of whose names are still preserved, are said to have disturbed divine service on Christmas Eve by dancing and brawling in the churchyard, whereupon the priest, Ruprecht, inflicted a curse upon them, that they should dance and scream for a whole year without ceasing. This curse is stated to have been completely fulfilled, so that the unfortunate sufferers at length sank knee-deep into the earth, and remained the whole time without nourishment, until they were finally released by the intercession of two pious bishops. It is said that, upon this, they fell into a deep sleep, which lasted three days, and that four of them died; the rest continuing to suffer all their lives from a trembling of their limbs. It is not worth while to separate what may have been true, and what the addition of crafty priests, in this strangely distorted story. It is sufficient that it was believed, and related with astonishment and horror, throughout the Middle Ages; so that when there was any exciting cause for this delirious raving and wild rage for dancing, it failed not to produce its effects upon men whose thoughts were given up to a belief in wonders and apparitions. This disposition of mind, altogether so peculiar to the Middle Ages, and which, happily for mankind, has yielded to an improved state of civilisation and the diffusion of popular instruction, accounts for the origin and long duration of this extraordinary mental disorder. The good sense of the people recoiled with horror and aversion from this heavy plague, which, whenever malevolent persons wished to curse their bitterest enemies and adversaries, was long after used as a malediction. The indignation also that was felt by the people at large against the immorality of the age, was proved by their ascribing this frightful affliction to the inefficacy of baptism by unchaste priests, as if innocent children were doomed to atone, in after-years, for this desecration of the sacrament administered by unholy hands. We have already mentioned what perils the priests in the Netherlands incurred from this belief. They now, indeed, endeavoured to hasten their reconciliation with the irritated, and, at that time, very degenerate people, by exorcisms, which, with some, procured them greater respect than ever, because they thus visibly restored thousands of those who were affected. In general, however, there prevailed a want of confidence in their efficacy, and then the sacred rites had as little power in arresting the progress of this deeply-rooted malady as the prayers and holy services subsequently had at the altars of the greatly-revered martyr St. Vitus. We may therefore ascribe it to accident merely, and to a certain aversion to this demoniacal disease, which seemed to lie beyond the reach of human skill, that we meet with but few and imperfect notices of the St. Vitus's dance in the second half of the fifteenth century. The highly-coloured descriptions of the sixteenth century contradict the notion that this mental plague had in any degree diminished in its severity, and not a single fact is to be found which supports the opinion that any one of the essential symptoms of the disease, not even excepting the tympany, had disappeared, or that the disorder itself had become milder in its attacks. The physicians never, as it seems, throughout the whole of the fifteenth century, undertook the treatment of the Dancing Mania, which, according to the prevailing notions, appertained exclusively to the servants of the Church. Against demoniacal disorders they had no remedies, and though some at first did promulgate the opinion that the malady had its origin in natural circumstances, such as a hot temperament, and other causes named in the phraseology of the schools, yet these opinions were the less examined as it did not appear worth while to divide with a jealous priesthood the care of a host of fanatical vagabonds and beggars. SECT. 5--PHYSICIANS It was not until the beginning of the sixteenth century that the St. Vitus's dance was made the subject of medical research, and stripped of its unhallowed character as a work of demons. This was effected by Paracelsus, that mighty but, as yet, scarcely comprehended reformer of medicine, whose aim it was to withdraw diseases from the pale of miraculous interpositions and saintly influences, and explain their causes upon principles deduced from his knowledge of the human frame. "We will not, however, admit that the saints have power to inflict diseases, and that these ought to be named after them, although many there are who, in their theology, lay great stress on this supposition, ascribing them rather to God than to nature, which is but idle talk. We dislike such nonsensical gossip as is not supported by symptoms, but only by faith--a thing which is not human, whereon the gods themselves set no value." Such were the words which Paracelsus addressed to his contemporaries, who were, as yet, incapable of appreciating doctrines of this sort; for the belief in enchantment still remained everywhere unshaken, and faith in the world of spirits still held men's minds in so close a bondage that thousands were, according to their own conviction, given up as a prey to the devil; while at the command of religion, as well as of law, countless piles were lighted, by the flames of which human society was to be purified. Paracelsus divides the St. Vitus's dance into three kinds. First, that which arises from imagination (_Vitista_, _Chorea imaginativa_, _aestimativa_), by which the original Dancing Plague is to be understood. Secondly, that which arises from sensual desires, depending on the will (_Chorea lasciva_). Thirdly, that which arises from corporeal causes (Chorea naturalis, coacta), which, according to a strange notion of his own, he explained by maintaining that in certain vessels which are susceptible of an internal pruriency, and thence produce laughter, the blood is set in commotion in consequence of an alteration in the vital spirits, whereby involuntary fits of intoxicating joy and a propensity to dance are occasioned. To this notion he was, no doubt, led from having observed a milder form of St. Vitus's dance, not uncommon in his time, which was accompanied by involuntary laughter; and which bore a resemblance to the hysterical laughter of the moderns, except that it was characterised by more pleasurable sensations and by an extravagant propensity to dance. There was no howling, screaming, and jumping, as in the severer form; neither was the disposition to dance by any means insuperable. Patients thus affected, although they had not a complete control over their understandings, yet were sufficiently self-possessed during the attack to obey the directions which they received. There were even some among them who did not dance at all, but only felt an involuntary impulse to allay the internal sense of disquietude, which is the usual forerunner of an attack of this kind, by laughter and quick walking carried to the extent of producing fatigue. This disorder, so different from the original type, evidently approximates to the modern chorea; or, rather, is in perfect accordance with it, even to the less essential symptom of laughter. A mitigation in the form of the Dancing Mania had thus clearly taken place at the commencement of the sixteenth century. On the communication of the St. Vitus's dance by sympathy, Paracelsus, in his peculiar language, expresses himself with great spirit, and shows a profound knowledge of the nature of sensual impressions, which find their way to the heart--the seat of joys and emotions--which overpower the opposition of reason; and whilst "all other qualities and natures" are subdued, incessantly impel the patient, in consequence of his original compliance, and his all-conquering imagination, to imitate what he has seen. On his treatment of the disease we cannot bestow any great praise, but must be content with the remark that it was in conformity with the notions of the age in which he lived. For the first kind, which often originated in passionate excitement, he had a mental remedy, the efficacy of which is not to be despised, if we estimate its value in connection with the prevalent opinions of those times. The patient was to make an image of himself in wax or resin, and by an effort of thought to concentrate all his blasphemies and sins in it. "Without the intervention of any other persons, to set his whole mind and thoughts concerning these oaths in the image;" and when he had succeeded in this, he was to burn the image, so that not a particle of it should remain. In all this there was no mention made of St. Vitus, or any of the other mediatory saints, which is accounted for by the circumstance that at this time an open rebellion against the Romish Church had begun, and the worship of saints was by many rejected as idolatrous. For the second kind of St. Vitus's dance, arising from sensual irritation, with which women were far more frequently affected than men, Paracelsus recommended harsh treatment and strict fasting. He directed that the patients should be deprived of their liberty; placed in solitary confinement, and made to sit in an uncomfortable place, until their misery brought them to their senses and to a feeling of penitence. He then permitted them gradually to return to their accustomed habits. Severe corporal chastisement was not omitted; but, on the other hand, angry resistance on the part of the patient was to be sedulously avoided, on the ground that it might increase his malady, or even destroy him: moreover, where it seemed proper, Paracelsus allayed the excitement of the nerves by immersion in cold water. On the treatment of the third kind we shall not here enlarge. It was to be effected by all sorts of wonderful remedies, composed of the quintessences; and it would require, to render it intelligible, a more extended exposition of peculiar principles than suits our present purpose. SECT. 6--DECLINE AND TERMINATION OF THE DANCING PLAGUE About this time the St. Vitus's dance began to decline, so that milder forms of it appeared more frequently, while the severer cases became more rare; and even in these, some of the important symptoms gradually disappeared. Paracelsus makes no mention of the tympanites as taking place after the attacks, although it may occasionally have occurred; and Schenck von Graffenberg, a celebrated physician of the latter half of the sixteenth century, speaks of this disease as having been frequent only in the time of his forefathers; his descriptions, however, are applicable to the whole of that century, and to the close of the fifteenth. The St. Vitus's dance attacked people of all stations, especially those who led a sedentary life, such as shoemakers and tailors; but even the most robust peasants abandoned their labours in the fields, as if they were possessed by evil spirits; and thus those affected were seen assembling indiscriminately, from time to time, at certain appointed places, and, unless prevented by the lookers-on, continuing to dance without intermission, until their very last breath was expended. Their fury and extravagance of demeanour so completely deprived them of their senses, that many of them dashed their brains out against the walls and corners of buildings, or rushed headlong into rapid rivers, where they found a watery grave. Roaring and foaming as they were, the bystanders could only succeed in restraining them by placing benches and chairs in their way, so that, by the high leaps they were thus tempted to take, their strength might be exhausted. As soon as this was the case, they fell as it were lifeless to the ground, and, by very slow degrees, again recovered their strength. Many there were who, even with all this exertion, had not expended the violence of the tempest which raged within them, but awoke with newly-revived powers, and again and again mixed with the crowd of dancers, until at length the violent excitement of their disordered nerves was allayed by the great involuntary exertion of their limbs; and the mental disorder was calmed by the extreme exhaustion of the body. Thus the attacks themselves were in these cases, as in their nature they are in all nervous complaints, necessary crises of an inward morbid condition which was transferred from the sensorium to the nerves of motion, and, at an earlier period, to the abdominal plexus, where a deep-seated derangement of the system was perceptible from the secretion of flatus in the intestines. The cure effected by these stormy attacks was in many cases so perfect, that some patients returned to the factory or the plough as if nothing had happened. Others, on the contrary, paid the penalty of their folly by so total a loss of power, that they could not regain their former health, even by the employment of the most strengthening remedies. Medical men were astonished to observe that women in an advanced state of pregnancy were capable of going through an attack of the disease without the slightest injury to their offspring, which they protected merely by a bandage passed round the waist. Cases of this kind were not infrequent so late as Schenck's time. That patients should be violently affected by music, and their paroxysms brought on and increased by it, is natural with such nervous disorders, where deeper impressions are made through the ear, which is the most intellectual of all the organs, than through any of the other senses. On this account the magistrates hired musicians for the purpose of carrying the St. Vitus's dancers so much the quicker through the attacks, and directed that athletic men should be sent among them in order to complete the exhaustion, which had been often observed to produce a good effect. At the same time there was a prohibition against wearing red garments, because, at the sight of this colour, those affected became so furious that they flew at the persons who wore it, and were so bent upon doing them an injury that they could with difficulty be restrained. They frequently tore their own clothes whilst in the paroxysm, and were guilty of other improprieties, so that the more opulent employed confidential attendants to accompany them, and to take care that they did no harm either to themselves or others. This extraordinary disease was, however, so greatly mitigated in Schenck's time, that the St. Vitus's dancers had long since ceased to stroll from town to town; and that physician, like Paracelsus, makes no mention of the tympanitic inflation of the bowels. Moreover, most of those affected were only annually visited by attacks; and the occasion of them was so manifestly referable to the prevailing notions of that period, that if the unqualified belief in the supernatural agency of saints could have been abolished, they would not have had any return of the complaint. Throughout the whole of June, prior to the festival of St. John, patients felt a disquietude and restlessness which they were unable to overcome. They were dejected, timid, and anxious; wandered about in an unsettled state, being tormented with twitching pains, which seized them suddenly in different parts, and eagerly expected the eve of St. John's day, in the confident hope that by dancing at the altars of this saint, or of St. Vitus (for in the Breisgau aid was equally sought from both), they would be freed from all their sufferings. This hope was not disappointed; and they remained, for the rest of the year, exempt from any further attack, after having thus, by dancing and raving for three hours, satisfied an irresistible demand of nature. There were at that period two chapels in the Breisgau visited by the St. Vitus's dancers; namely, the Chapel of St. Vitus at Biessen, near Breisach, and that of St. John, near Wasenweiler; and it is probable that in the south-west of Germany the disease was still in existence in the seventeenth century. However, it grew every year more rare, so that at the beginning of the seventeenth century it was observed only occasionally in its ancient form. Thus in the spring of the year 1623, G. Horst saw some women who annually performed a pilgrimage to St. Vitus's chapel at Drefelhausen, near Weissenstein, in the territory of Ulm, that they might wait for their dancing fit there, in the same manner as those in the Breisgau did, according to Schenck's account. They were not satisfied, however, with a dance of three hours' duration, but continued day and night in a state of mental aberration, like persons in an ecstasy, until they fell exhausted to the ground; and when they came to themselves again they felt relieved from a distressing uneasiness and painful sensation of weight in their bodies, of which they had complained for several weeks prior to St. Vitus's Day. After this commotion they remained well for the whole year; and such was their faith in the protecting power of the saint, that one of them had visited this shrine at Drefelhausen more than twenty times, and another had already kept the saint's day for the thirty-second time at this sacred station. The dancing fit itself was excited here, as it probably was in other places, by music, from the effects of which the patients were thrown into a state of convulsion. Many concurrent testimonies serve to show that music generally contributed much to the continuance of the St. Vitus's dance, originated and increased its paroxysms, and was sometimes the cause of their mitigation. So early as the fourteenth century the swarms of St. John's dancers were accompanied by minstrels playing upon noisy instruments, who roused their morbid feelings; and it may readily be supposed that by the performance of lively melodies, and the stimulating effects which the shrill tones of fifes and trumpets would produce, a paroxysm that was perhaps but slight in itself, might, in many cases, be increased to the most outrageous fury, such as in later times was purposely induced in order that the force of the disease might be exhausted by the violence of its attack. Moreover, by means of intoxicating music a kind of demoniacal festival for the rude multitude was established, which had the effect of spreading this unhappy malady wider and wider. Soft harmony was, however, employed to calm the excitement of those affected, and it is mentioned as a character of the tunes played with this view to the St. Vitus's dancers, that they contained transitions from a quick to a slow measure, and passed gradually from a high to a low key. It is to be regretted that no trace of this music has reached out times, which is owing partly to the disastrous events of the seventeenth century, and partly to the circumstance that the disorder was looked upon as entirely national, and only incidentally considered worthy of notice by foreign men of learning. If the St. Vitus's dance was already on the decline at the commencement of the seventeenth century, the subsequent events were altogether adverse to its continuance. Wars carried on with animosity, and with various success, for thirty years, shook the west of Europe; and although the unspeakable calamities which they brought upon Germany, both during their continuance and in their immediate consequences, were by no means favourable to the advance of knowledge, yet, with the vehemence of a purifying fire, they gradually effected the intellectual regeneration of the Germans; superstition, in her ancient form, never again appeared, and the belief in the dominion of spirits, which prevailed in the middle ages, lost for ever its once formidable power. CHAPTER II--THE DANCING MANIA IN ITALY SECT. 1--TARANTISM It was of the utmost advantage to the St. Vitus's dancers that they made choice of a favourite patron saint; for, not to mention that people were inclined to compare them to the possessed with evil spirits described in the Bible, and thence to consider them as innocent victims to the power of Satan, the name of their great intercessor recommended them to general commiseration, and a magic boundary was thus set to every harsh feeling, which might otherwise have proved hostile to their safety. Other fanatics were not so fortunate, being often treated with the most relentless cruelty, whenever the notions of the middle ages either excused or commanded it as a religious duty. Thus, passing over the innumerable instances of the burning of witches, who were, after all, only labouring under a delusion, the Teutonic knights in Prussia not unfrequently condemned those maniacs to the stake who imagined themselves to be metamorphosed into wolves--an extraordinary species of insanity, which, having existed in Greece before our era, spread, in process of time over Europe, so that it was communicated not only to the Romaic, but also to the German and Sarmatian nations, and descended from the ancients as a legacy of affliction to posterity. In modern times Lycanthropy--such was the name given to this infatuation--has vanished from the earth, but it is nevertheless well worthy the consideration of the observer of human aberrations, and a history of it by some writer who is equally well acquainted with the middle ages as with antiquity is still a desideratum. We leave it for the present without further notice, and turn to a malady most extraordinary in all its phenomena, having a close connection with the St. Vitus's dance, and, by a comparison of facts which are altogether similar, affording us an instructive subject for contemplation. We allude to the disease called Tarantism, which made its first appearance in Apulia, and thence spread over the other provinces of Italy, where, during some centuries, it prevailed as a great epidemic. In the present times, it has vanished, or at least has lost altogether its original importance, like the St. Vitus's dance, lycanthropy, and witchcraft. SECT. 2--MOST ANCIENT TRACES--CAUSES The learned Nicholas Perotti gives the earliest account of this strange disorder. Nobody had the least doubt that it was caused by the bite of the tarantula, a ground-spider common in Apulia: and the fear of this insect was so general that its bite was in all probability much oftener imagined, or the sting of some other kind of insect mistaken for it, than actually received. The word tarantula is apparently the same as terrantola, a name given by the Italians to the stellio of the old Romans, which was a kind of lizard, said to be poisonous, and invested by credulity with such extraordinary qualities, that, like the serpent of the Mosaic account of the Creation, it personified, in the imaginations of the vulgar, the notion of cunning, so that even the jurists designated a cunning fraud by the appellation of a "stellionatus." Perotti expressly assures us that this reptile was called by the Romans tarantula; and since he himself, who was one of the most distinguished authors of his time, strangely confounds spiders and lizards together, so that he considers the Apulian tarantula, which he ranks among the class of spiders, to have the same meaning as the kind of lizard called [Greek text], it is the less extraordinary that the unlearned country people of Apulia should confound the much-dreaded ground-spider with the fabulous star-lizard, and appropriate to the one the name of the other. The derivation of the word tarantula, from the city of Tarentum, or the river Thara, in Apulia, on the banks of which this insect is said to have been most frequently found, or, at least, its bite to have had the most venomous effect, seems not to be supported by authority. So much for the name of this famous spider, which, unless we are greatly mistaken, throws no light whatever upon the nature of the disease in question. Naturalists who, possessing a knowledge of the past, should not misapply their talents by employing them in establishing the dry distinction of forms, would find here much that calls for research, and their efforts would clear up many a perplexing obscurity. Perotti states that the tarantula--that is, the spider so called--was not met with in Italy in former times, but that in his day it had become common, especially in Apulia, as well as in some other districts. He deserves, however, no great confidence as a naturalist, notwithstanding his having delivered lectures in Bologna on medicine and other sciences. He at least has neglected to prove his assertion, which is not borne out by any analogous phenomenon observed in modern times with regard to the history of the spider species. It is by no means to be admitted that the tarantula did not make its appearance in Italy before the disease ascribed to its bite became remarkable, even though tempests more violent than those unexampled storms which arose at the time of the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century had set the insect world in motion; for the spider is little if at all susceptible of those cosmical influences which at times multiply locusts and other winged insects to a wonderful extent, and compel them to migrate. The symptoms which Perotti enumerates as consequent on the bite of the tarantula agree very exactly with those described by later writers. Those who were bitten, generally fell into a state of melancholy, and appeared to be stupefied, and scarcely in possession of their senses. This condition was, in many cases, united with so great a sensibility to music, that at the very first tones of their favourite melodies they sprang up, shouting for joy, and danced on without intermission, until they sank to the ground exhausted and almost lifeless. In others, the disease did not take this cheerful turn. They wept constantly, and as if pining away with some unsatisfied desire, spent their days in the greatest misery and anxiety. Others, again, in morbid fits of love, cast their longing looks on women, and instances of death are recorded, which are said to have occurred under a paroxysm of either laughing or weeping. From this description, incomplete as it is, we may easily gather that tarantism, the essential symptoms of which are mentioned in it, could not have originated in the fifteenth century, to which Perotti's account refers; for that author speaks of it as a well-known malady, and states that the omission to notice it by older writers was to be ascribed solely to the want of education in Apulia, the only province probably where the disease at that time prevailed. A nervous disorder that had arrived at so high a degree of development must have been long in existence, and doubtless had required an elaborate preparation by the concurrence of general causes. The symptoms which followed the bite of venomous spiders were well known to the ancients, and had excited the attention of their best observers, who agree in their descriptions of them. It is probable that among the numerous species of their phalangium, the Apulian tarantula is included, but it is difficult to determine this point with certainty, more especially because in Italy the tarantula was not the only insect which caused this nervous affection, similar results being likewise attributed to the bite of the scorpion. Lividity of the whole body, as well as of the countenance, difficulty of speech, tremor of the limbs, icy coldness, pale urine, depression of spirits, headache, a flow of tears, nausea, vomiting, sexual excitement, flatulence, syncope, dysuria, watchfulness, lethargy, even death itself, were cited by them as the consequences of being bitten by venomous spiders, and they made little distinction as to their kinds. To these symptoms we may add the strange rumour, repeated throughout the middle ages, that persons who were bitten, ejected by the bowels and kidneys, and even by vomiting, substances resembling a spider's web. Nowhere, however, do we find any mention made that those affected felt an irresistible propensity to dancing, or that they were accidentally cured by it. Even Constantine of Africa, who lived 500 years after Aetius, and, as the most learned physician of the school of Salerno, would certainly not have passed over so acceptable a subject of remark, knows nothing of such a memorable course of this disease arising from poison, and merely repeats the observations of his Greek predecessors. Gariopontus, a Salernian physician of the eleventh century, was the first to describe a kind of insanity, the remote affinity of which to the tarantula disease is rendered apparent by a very striking symptom. The patients in their sudden attacks behaved like maniacs, sprang up, throwing their arms about with wild movements, and, if perchance a sword was at hand, they wounded themselves and others, so that it became necessary carefully to secure them. They imagined that they heard voices and various kinds of sounds, and if, during this state of illusion, the tones of a favourite instrument happened to catch their ear, they commenced a spasmodic dance, or ran with the utmost energy which they could muster until they were totally exhausted. These dangerous maniacs, who, it would seem, appeared in considerable numbers, were looked upon as a legion of devils, but on the causes of their malady this obscure writer adds nothing further than that he believes (oddly enough) that it may sometimes be excited by the bite of a mad dog. He calls the disease Anteneasmus, by which is meant no doubt the Enthusiasmus of the Greek physicians. We cite this phenomenon as an important forerunner of tarantism, under the conviction that we have thus added to the evidence that the development of this latter must have been founded on circumstances which existed from the twelfth to the end of the fourteenth century; for the origin of tarantism itself is referable, with the utmost probability, to a period between the middle and the end of this century, and is consequently contemporaneous with that of the St. Vitus's dance (1374). The influence of the Roman Catholic religion, connected as this was, in the middle ages, with the pomp of processions, with public exercises of penance, and with innumerable practices which strongly excited the imaginations of its votaries, certainly brought the mind to a very favourable state for the reception of a nervous disorder. Accordingly, so long as the doctrines of Christianity were blended with so much mysticism, these unhallowed disorders prevailed to an important extent, and even in our own days we find them propagated with the greatest facility where the existence of superstition produces the same effect, in more limited districts, as it once did among whole nations. But this is not all. Every country in Europe, and Italy perhaps more than any other, was visited during the middle ages by frightful plagues, which followed each other in such quick succession that they gave the exhausted people scarcely any time for recovery. The Oriental bubo-plague ravaged Italy sixteen times between the years 1119 and 1340. Small-pox and measles were still more destructive than in modern times, and recurred as frequently. St. Anthony's fire was the dread of town and country; and that disgusting disease, the leprosy, which, in consequence of the Crusades, spread its insinuating poison in all directions, snatched from the paternal hearth innumerable victims who, banished from human society, pined away in lonely huts, whither they were accompanied only by the pity of the benevolent and their own despair. All these calamities, of which the moderns have scarcely retained any recollection, were heightened to an incredible degree by the Black Death, which spread boundless devastation and misery over Italy. Men's minds were everywhere morbidly sensitive; and as it happened with individuals whose senses, when they are suffering under anxiety, become more irritable, so that trifles are magnified into objects of great alarm, and slight shocks, which would scarcely affect the spirits when in health, gave rise in them to severe diseases, so was it with this whole nation, at all times so alive to emotions, and at that period so sorely oppressed with the horrors of death. The bite of venomous spiders, or rather the unreasonable fear of its consequences, excited at such a juncture, though it could not have done so at an earlier period, a violent nervous disorder, which, like St. Vitus's dance in Germany, spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a wider range, and still further extending its ravages from its long continuance. Thus, from the middle of the fourteenth century, the furies of _the Dance_ brandished their scourge over afflicted mortals; and music, for which the inhabitants of Italy, now probably for the first time, manifested susceptibility and talent, became capable of exciting ecstatic attacks in those affected, and then furnished the magical means of exorcising their melancholy. SECT. 3--INCREASE At the close of the fifteenth century we find that tarantism had spread beyond the boundaries of Apulia, and that the fear of being bitten by venomous spiders had increased. Nothing short of death itself was expected from the wound which these insects inflicted, and if those who were bitten escaped with their lives, they were said to be seen pining away in a desponding state of lassitude. Many became weak-sighted or hard of hearing, some lost the power of speech, and all were insensible to ordinary causes of excitement. Nothing but the flute or the cithern afforded them relief. At the sound of these instruments they awoke as it were by enchantment, opened their eyes, and moving slowly at first, according to the measure of the music, were, as the time quickened, gradually hurried on to the most passionate dance. It was generally observable that country people, who were rude, and ignorant of music, evinced on these occasions an unusual degree of grace, as if they had been well practised in elegant movements of the body; for it is a peculiarity in nervous disorders of this kind, that the organs of motion are in an altered condition, and are completely under the control of the over-strained spirits. Cities and villages alike resounded throughout the summer season with the notes of fifes, clarinets, and Turkish drums; and patients were everywhere to be met with who looked to dancing as their only remedy. Alexander ab Alexandro, who gives this account, saw a young man in a remote village who was seized with a violent attack of tarantism. He listened with eagerness and a fixed stare to the sound of a drum, and his graceful movements gradually became more and more violent, until his dancing was converted into a succession of frantic leaps, which required the utmost exertion of his whole strength. In the midst of this over-strained exertion of mind and body the music suddenly ceased, and he immediately fell powerless to the ground, where he lay senseless and motionless until its magical effect again aroused him to a renewal of his impassioned performances. At the period of which we are treating there was a general conviction, that by music and dancing the poison of the tarantula was distributed over the whole body, and expelled through the skin, but that if there remained the slightest vestige of it in the vessels, this became a permanent germ of the disorder, so that the dancing fits might again and again be excited ad infinitum by music. This belief, which resembled the delusion of those insane persons who, being by artful management freed from the imagined causes of their sufferings, are but for a short time released from their false notions, was attended with the most injurious effects: for in consequence of it those affected necessarily became by degrees convinced of the incurable nature of their disorder. They expected relief, indeed, but not a cure, from music; and when the heat of summer awakened a recollection of the dances of the preceding year, they, like the St. Vitus's dancers of the same period before St. Vitus's day, again grew dejected and misanthropic, until, by music and dancing, they dispelled the melancholy which had become with them a kind of sensual enjoyment. Under such favourable circumstances, it is clear that tarantism must every year have made further progress. The number of those affected by it increased beyond all belief, for whoever had either actually been, or even fancied that he had been, once bitten by a poisonous spider or scorpion, made his appearance annually wherever the merry notes of the tarantella resounded. Inquisitive females joined the throng and caught the disease, not indeed from the poison of the spider, but from the mental poison which they eagerly received through the eye; and thus the cure of the tarantati gradually became established as a regular festival of the populace, which was anticipated with impatient delight. Without attributing more to deception and fraud than to the peculiar nature of a progressive mental malady, it may readily be conceived that the cases of this strange disorder now grew more frequent. The celebrated Matthioli, who is worthy of entire confidence, gives his account as an eye-witness. He saw the same extraordinary effects produced by music as Alexandro, for, however tortured with pain, however hopeless of relief the patients appeared, as they lay stretched on the couch of sickness, at the very first sounds of those melodies which made an impression on them--but this was the case only with the tarantellas composed expressly for the purpose--they sprang up as if inspired with new life and spirit, and, unmindful of their disorder, began to move in measured gestures, dancing for hour together without fatigue, until, covered with a kindly perspiration, they felt a salutary degree of lassitude, which relieved them for a time at least, perhaps even for a whole year, from their defection and oppressive feeling of general indisposition. Alexandro's experience of the injurious effects resulting from a sudden cessation of the music was generally confirmed by Matthioli. If the clarinets and drums ceased for a single moment, which, as the most skilful payers were tired out by the patients, could not but happen occasionally, they suffered their limbs to fall listless, again sank exhausted to the ground, and could find no solace but in a renewal of the dance. On this account care was taken to continue the music until exhaustion was produced; for it was better to pay a few extra musicians, who might relieve each other, than to permit the patient, in the midst of this curative exercise, to relapse into so deplorable a state of suffering. The attack consequent upon the bite of the tarantula, Matthioli describes as varying much in its manner. Some became morbidly exhilarated, so that they remained for a long while without sleep, laughing, dancing, and singing in a state of the greatest excitement. Others, on the contrary, were drowsy. The generality felt nausea and suffered from vomiting, and some had constant tremors. Complete mania was no uncommon occurrence, not to mention the usual dejection of spirits and other subordinate symptoms. SECT. 4--IDIOSYNCRASIES--MUSIC Unaccountable emotions, strange desires, and morbid sensual irritations of all kinds, were as prevalent as in the St. Vitus's dance and similar great nervous maladies. So late as the sixteenth century patients were seen armed with glittering swords which, during the attack, they brandished with wild gestures, as if they were going to engage in a fencing match. Even women scorned all female delicacy, and, adopting this impassioned demeanour, did the same; and this phenomenon, as well as the excitement which the tarantula dancers felt at the sight of anything with metallic lustre, was quite common up to the period when, in modern times, the disease disappeared. The abhorrence of certain colours, and the agreeable sensations produced by others, were much more marked among the excitable Italians than was the case in the St. Vitus's dance with the more phlegmatic Germans. Red colours, which the St. Vitus's dancers detested, they generally liked, so that a patient was seldom seen who did not carry a red handkerchief for his gratification, or greedily feast his eyes on any articles of red clothing worn by the bystanders. Some preferred yellow, others black colours, of which an explanation was sought, according to the prevailing notions of the times, in the difference of temperaments. Others, again, were enraptured with green; and eye-witnesses describe this rage for colours as so extraordinary, that they can scarcely find words with which to express their astonishment. No sooner did the patients obtain a sight of the favourite colour than, new as the impression was, they rushed like infuriated animals towards the object, devoured it with their eager looks, kissed and caressed it in every possible way, and gradually resigning themselves to softer sensations, adopted the languishing expression of enamoured lovers, and embraced the handkerchief, or whatever other article it might be, which was presented to them, with the most intense ardour, while the tears streamed from their eyes as if they were completely overwhelmed by the inebriating impression on their senses. The dancing fits of a certain Capuchin friar in Tarentum excited so much curiosity, that Cardinal Cajetano proceeded to the monastery, that he might see with his own eyes what was going on. As soon as the monk, who was in the midst of his dance, perceived the spiritual prince clothed in his red garments, he no longer listened to the tarantella of the musicians, but with strange gestures endeavoured to approach the Cardinal, as if he wished to count the very threads of his scarlet robe, and to allay his intense longing by its odour. The interference of the spectators, and his own respect, prevented his touching it, and thus the irritation of his senses not being appeased, he fell into a state of such anguish and disquietude, that he presently sank down in a swoon, from which he did not recover until the Cardinal compassionately gave him his cape. This he immediately seized in the greatest ecstasy, and pressed now to his breast, now to his forehead and cheeks, and then again commenced his dance as if in the frenzy of a love fit. At the sight of colours which they disliked, patients flew into the most violent rage, and, like the St. Vitus's dancers when they saw red objects, could scarcely be restrained from tearing the clothes of those spectators who raised in them such disagreeable sensations. Another no less extraordinary symptom was the ardent longing for the sea which the patients evinced. As the St. John's dancers of the fourteenth century saw, in the spirit, the heavens open and display all the splendour of the saints, so did those who were suffering under the bite of the tarantula feel themselves attracted to the boundless expanse of the blue ocean, and lost themselves in its contemplation. Some songs, which are still preserved, marked this peculiar longing, which was moreover expressed by significant music, and was excited even by the bare mention of the sea. Some, in whom this susceptibility was carried to the greatest pitch, cast themselves with blind fury into the blue waves, as the St. Vitus's dancers occasionally did into rapid rivers. This condition, so opposite to the frightful state of hydrophobia, betrayed itself in others only in the pleasure afforded them by the sight of clear water in glasses. These they bore in their hands while dancing, exhibiting at the same time strange movements, and giving way to the most extravagant expressions of their feeling. They were delighted also when, in the midst of the space allotted for this exercise, more ample vessels, filled with water, and surrounded by rushes and water plants, were placed, in which they bathed their heads and arms with evident pleasure. Others there were who rolled about on the ground, and were, by their own desire, buried up to the neck in the earth, in order to alleviate the misery of their condition; not to mention an endless variety of other symptoms which showed the perverted action of the nerves. All these modes of relief, however, were as nothing in comparison with the irresistible charms of musical sound. Attempts had indeed been made in ancient times to mitigate the pain of sciatica, or the paroxysms of mania, by the soft melody of the flute, and, what is still more applicable to the present purpose, to remove the danger arising from the bite of vipers by the same means. This, however, was tried only to a very small extent. But after being bitten by the tarantula, there was, according to popular opinion, no way of saving life except by music; and it was hardly considered as an exception to the general rule, that every now and then the bad effects of a wound were prevented by placing a ligature on the bitten limb, or by internal medicine, or that strong persons occasionally withstood the effects of the poison, without the employment of any remedies at all. It was much more common, and is quite in accordance with the nature of so exquisite a nervous disease, to hear accounts of many who, when bitten by the tarantula, perished miserably because the tarantella, which would have afforded them deliverance, was not played to them. It was customary, therefore, so early as the commencement of the seventeenth century, for whole bands of musicians to traverse Italy during the summer months, and, what is quite unexampled either in ancient or modern times, the cure of the Tarantati in the different towns and villages was undertaken on a grand scale. This season of dancing and music was called "the women's little carnival," for it was women more especially who conducted the arrangements; so that throughout the whole country they saved up their spare money, for the purpose of rewarding the welcome musicians, and many of them neglected their household employments to participate in this festival of the sick. Mention is even made of one benevolent lady (Mita Lupa) who had expended her whole fortune on this object. The music itself was of a kind perfectly adapted to the nature of the malady, and it made so deep an impression on the Italians, that even to the present time, long since the extinction of the disorder, they have retained the tarantella, as a particular species of music employed for quick, lively dancing. The different kinds of tarantella were distinguished, very significantly, by particular names, which had reference to the moods observed in the patients. Whence it appears that they aimed at representing by these tunes even the idiosyncrasies of the mind as expressed in the countenance. Thus there was one kind of tarantella which was called "Panno rosso," a very lively, impassioned style of music, to which wild dithyrambic songs were adapted; another, called "Panno verde," which was suited to the milder excitement of the senses caused by green colours, and set to Idyllian songs of verdant fields and shady groves. A third was named "Cinque tempi:" a fourth "Moresca," which was played to a Moorish dance; a fifth, "Catena;" and a sixth, with a very appropriate designation, "Spallata," as if it were only fit to be played to dancers who were lame in the shoulder. This was the slowest and least in vogue of all. For those who loved water they took care to select love songs, which were sung to corresponding music, and such persons delighted in hearing of gushing springs and rushing cascades and streams. It is to be regretted that on this subject we are unable to give any further information, for only small fragments of songs, and a very few tarantellas, have been preserved which belong to a period so remote as the beginning of the seventeenth, or at furthest the end of the sixteenth century. The music was almost wholly in the Turkish style (aria Turchesca), and the ancient songs of the peasantry of Apulia, which increased in number annually, were well suited to the abrupt and lively notes of the Turkish drum and the shepherd's pipe. These two instruments were the favourites in the country, but others of all kinds were played in towns and villages, as an accompaniment to the dances of the patients and the songs of the spectators. If any particular melody was disliked by those affected, they indicated their displeasure by violent gestures expressive of aversion. They could not endure false notes, and it is remarkable that uneducated boors, who had never in their lives manifested any perception of the enchanting power of harmony, acquired, in this respect, an extremely refined sense of hearing, as if they had been initiated into the profoundest secrets of the musical art. It was a matter of every day's experience, that patients showed a predilection for certain tarantellas, in preference to others, which gave rise to the composition of a great variety of these dances. They were likewise very capricious in their partialities for particular instruments; so that some longed for the shrill notes of the trumpet, others for the softest music produced by the vibration of strings. Tarantism was at its greatest height in Italy in the seventeenth century, long after the St. Vitus's Dance of Germany had disappeared. It was not the natives of the country only who were attacked by this complaint. Foreigners of every colour and of every race, negroes, gipsies, Spaniards, Albanians, were in like manner affected by it. Against the effects produced by the tarantula's bite, or by the sight of the sufferers, neither youth nor age afforded any protection; so that even old men of ninety threw aside their crutches at the sound of the tarantella, and, as if some magic potion, restorative of youth and vigour, were flowing through their veins, joined the most extravagant dancers. Ferdinando saw a boy five years old seized with the dancing mania, in consequence of the bite of a tarantula, and, what is almost past belief, were it not supported by the testimony of so credible an eye- witness, even deaf people were not exempt from this disorder, so potent in its effect was the very sight of those affected, even without the exhilarating emotions caused by music. Subordinate nervous attacks were much more frequent during this century than at any former period, and an extraordinary icy coldness was observed in those who were the subject of them; so that they did not recover their natural heat until they had engaged in violent dancing. Their anguish and sense of oppression forced from them a cold perspiration; the secretion from the kidneys was pale, and they had so great a dislike to everything cold, that when water was offered them they pushed it away with abhorrence. Wine, on the contrary, they all drank willingly, without being heated by it, or in the slightest degree intoxicated. During the whole period of the attack they suffered from spasms in the stomach, and felt a disinclination to take food of any kind. They used to abstain some time before the expected seizures from meat and from snails, which they thought rendered them more severe, and their great thirst for wine may therefore in some measure be attributable to the want of a more nutritious diet; yet the disorder of the nerves was evidently its chief cause, and the loss of appetite, as well as the necessity for support by wine, were its effects. Loss of voice, occasional blindness, vertigo, complete insanity, with sleeplessness, frequent weeping without any ostensible cause, were all usual symptoms. Many patients found relief from being placed in swings or rocked in cradles; others required to be roused from their state of suffering by severe blows on the soles of their feet; others beat themselves, without any intention of making a display, but solely for the purpose of allaying the intense nervous irritation which they felt; and a considerable number were seen with their bellies swollen, like those of the St. John's dancers, while the violence of the intestinal disorder was indicated in others by obstinate constipation or diarrhoea and vomiting. These pitiable objects gradually lost their strength and their colour, and creeping about with injected eyes, jaundiced complexions, and inflated bowels, soon fell into a state of profound melancholy, which found food and solace in the solemn tolling of the funeral bell, and in an abode among the tombs of cemeteries, as is related of the Lycanthropes of former times. The persuasion of the inevitable consequences of being bitten by the tarantula, exercised a dominion over men's minds which even the healthiest and strongest could not shake off. So late as the middle of the sixteenth century, the celebrated Fracastoro found the robust bailiff of his landed estate groaning, and, with the aspect of a person in the extremity of despair, suffering the very agonies of death from a sting in the neck, inflicted by an insect which was believed to be a tarantula. He kindly administered without delay a potion of vinegar and Armenian bole, the great remedy of those days for the plague of all kinds of animal poisons, and the dying man was, as if by a miracle, restored to life and the power of speech. Now, since it is quite out of the question that the bole could have anything to do with the result in this case, notwithstanding Fracastoro's belief in its virtues, we can only account for the cure by supposing, that a confidence in so great a physician prevailed over this fatal disease of the imagination, which would otherwise have yielded to scarcely any other remedy except the tarantella. Ferdinando was acquainted with women who, for thirty years in succession, had overcome the attacks of this disorder by a renewal of their annual dance--so long did they maintain their belief in the yet undestroyed poison of the tarantula's bite, and so long did that mental affection continue to exist, after it had ceased to depend on any corporeal excitement. Wherever we turn, we find that this morbid state of mind prevailed, and was so supported by the opinions of the age, that it needed only a stimulus in the bite of the tarantula, and the supposed certainty of its very disastrous consequences, to originate this violent nervous disorder. Even in Ferdinando's time there were many who altogether denied the poisonous effects of the tarantula's bite, whilst they considered the disorder, which annually set Italy in commotion, to be a melancholy depending on the imagination. They dearly expiated this scepticism, however, when they were led, with an inconsiderate hardihood, to test their opinions by experiment; for many of them became the subjects of severe tarantism, and even a distinguished prelate, Jo. Baptist Quinzato, Bishop of Foligno, having allowed himself, by way of a joke, to be bitten by a tarantula, could obtain a cure in no other way than by being, through the influence of the tarantella, compelled to dance. Others among the clergy, who wished to shut their ears against music, because they considered dancing derogatory to their station, fell into a dangerous state of illness by thus delaying the crisis of the malady, and were obliged at last to save themselves from a miserable death by submitting to the unwelcome but sole means of cure. Thus it appears that the age was so little favourable to freedom of thought, that even the most decided sceptics, incapable of guarding themselves against the recollection of what had been presented to the eye, were subdued by a poison, the powers of which they had ridiculed, and which was in itself inert in its effect. SECT. 5--HYSTERIA Different characteristics of the morbidly excited vitality having been rendered prominent by tarantism in different individuals, it could not but happen that other derangements of the nerves would assume the form of this whenever circumstances favoured such a transition. This was more especially the case with hysteria, that proteiform and mutable disorder, in which the imaginations, the superstitions, and the follies of all ages have been evidently reflected. The "Carnevaletto delle Donne" appeared most opportunely for those who were hysterical. Their disease received from it, as it had at other times from other extraordinary customs, a peculiar direction; so that, whether bitten by the tarantula or not, they felt compelled to participate in the dances of those affected, and to make their appearance at this popular festival, where they had an opportunity of triumphantly exhibiting their sufferings. Let us here pause to consider the kind of life which the women in Italy led. Lonely, and deprived by cruel custom of social intercourse, that fairest of all enjoyments, they dragged on a miserable existence. Cheerfulness and an inclination to sensual pleasures passed into compulsory idleness, and, in many, into black despondency. Their imaginations became disordered--a pallid countenance and oppressed respiration bore testimony to their profound sufferings. How could they do otherwise, sunk as they were in such extreme misery, than seize the occasion to burst forth from their prisons and alleviate their miseries by taking part in the delights of music? Nor should we here pass unnoticed a circumstance which illustrates, in a remarkable degree, the psychological nature of hysterical sufferings, namely, that many chlorotic females, by joining the dancers at the Carnevaletto, were freed from their spasms and oppression of breathing for the whole year, although the corporeal cause of their malady was not removed. After such a result, no one could call their self-deception a mere imposture, and unconditionally condemn it as such. This numerous class of patients certainly contributed not a little to the maintenance of the evil, for their fantastic sufferings, in which dissimulation and reality could scarcely be distinguished even by themselves, much less by their physicians, were imitated in the same way as the distortions of the St. Vitus's dancers by the impostors of that period. It was certainly by these persons also that the number of subordinate symptoms was increased to an endless extent, as may be conceived from the daily observation of hysterical patients who, from a morbid desire to render themselves remarkable, deviate from the laws of moral propriety. Powerful sexual excitement had often the most decided influence over their condition. Many of them exposed themselves in the most indecent manner, tore their hair out by the roots, with howling and gnashing of their teeth; and when, as was sometimes the case, their unsatisfied passion hurried them on to a state of frenzy, they closed their existence by self destruction; it being common at that time for these unfortunate beings to precipitate themselves into the wells. It might hence seem that, owing to the conduct of patients of this description, so much of fraud and falsehood would be mixed up with the original disorder that, having passed into another complaint, it must have been itself destroyed. This, however, did not happen in the first half of the seventeenth century; for, as a clear proof that tarantism remained substantially the same and quite unaffected by hysteria, there were in many places, and in particular at Messapia, fewer women affected than men, who, in their turn, were in no small proportion led into temptation by sexual excitement. In other places, as, for example, at Brindisi, the case was reversed, which may, as in other complaints, be in some measure attributable to local causes. Upon the whole it appears, from concurrent accounts, that women by no means enjoyed the distinction of being attacked by tarantism more frequently than men. It is said that the cicatrix of the tarantula bite, on the yearly or half- yearly return of the fit, became discoloured, but on this point the distinct testimony of good observers is wanting to deprive the assertion of its utter improbability. It is not out of place to remark here that, about the same time that tarantism attained its greatest height in Italy, the bite of venomous spiders was more feared in distant parts of Asia likewise than it had ever been within the memory of man. There was this difference, however--that the symptoms supervening on the occurrence of this accident were not accompanied by the Apulian nervous disorder, which, as has been shown in the foregoing pages, had its origin rather in the melancholic temperament of the inhabitants of the south of Italy than in the nature of the tarantula poison itself. This poison is therefore, doubtless, to be considered only as a remote cause of the complaint, which, but for that temperament, would be inadequate to its production. The Persians employed a very rough means of counteracting the bad consequences of a poison of this sort. They drenched the wounded person with milk, and then, by a violent rotatory motion in a suspended box, compelled him to vomit. SECT. 6--DECREASE The Dancing Mania, arising from the tarantula bite, continued with all those additions of self-deception and of the dissimulation which is such a constant attendant on nervous disorders of this kind, through the whole course of the seventeenth century. It was indeed, gradually on the decline, but up to the termination of this period showed such extraordinary symptoms that Baglivi, one of the best physicians of that time, thought he did a service to science by making them the subject of a dissertation. He repeats all the observations of Ferdinando, and supports his own assertions by the experience of his father, a physician at Lecce, whose testimony, as an eye-witness, may be admitted as unexceptionable. The immediate consequences of the tarantula bite, the supervening nervous disorder, and the aberrations and fits of those who suffered from hysteria, he describes in a masterly style, not does he ever suffer his credulity to diminish the authenticity of his account, of which he has been unjustly accused by later writers. Finally, tarantism has declined more and more in modern times, and is now limited to single cases. How could it possibly have maintained itself unchanged in the eighteenth century, when all the links which connected it with the Middle Ages had long since been snapped asunder? Imposture grew more frequent, and wherever the disease still appeared in its genuine form, its chief cause, namely, a peculiar cast of melancholy, which formerly had been the temperament of thousands, was now possessed only occasionally by unfortunate individuals. It might, therefore, not unreasonably be maintained that the tarantism of modern times bears nearly the same relation to the original malady as the St. Vitus's dance which still exists, and certainly has all along existed, bears, in certain cases, to the original dancing mania of the dancers of St. John. To conclude. Tarantism, as a real disease, has been denied in toto, and stigmatised as an imposition by most physicians and naturalists, who in this controversy have shown the narrowness of their views and their utter ignorance of history. In order to support their opinion they have instituted some experiments apparently favourable to it, but under circumstances altogether inapplicable, since, for the most part, they selected as the subjects of them none but healthy men, who were totally uninfluenced by a belief in this once so dreaded disease. From individual instances of fraud and dissimulation, such as are found in connection with most nervous affections without rendering their reality a matter of any doubt, they drew a too hasty conclusion respecting the general phenomenon, of which they appeared not to know that it had continued for nearly four hundred years, having originated in the remotest periods of the Middle Ages. The most learned and the most acute among these sceptics is Serao the Neapolitan. His reasonings amount to this, that he considers the disease to be a very marked form of melancholia, and compares the effect of the tarantula bite upon it to stimulating with spurs a horse which is already running. The reality of that effect he thus admits, and, therefore, directly confirms what in appearance only he denies. By shaking the already vacillating belief in this disorder he is said to have actually succeeded in rendering it less frequent, and in setting bounds to imposture; but this no more disproves the reality of its existence than the oft repeated detection of imposition has been able in modern times to banish magnetic sleep from the circle of natural phenomena, though such detection has, on its side, rendered more rare the incontestable effects of animal magnetism. Other physicians and naturalists have delivered their sentiments on tarantism, but as they have not possessed an enlarged knowledge of its history their views do not merit particular exposition. It is sufficient for the comprehension of everyone that we have presented the facts from all extraneous speculation. CHAPTER III--THE DANCING MANIA IN ABYSSINIA SECT. 1--TIGRETIER Both the St. Vitus's dance and tarantism belonged to the ages in which they appeared. They could not have existed under the same latitude at any other epoch, for at no other period were the circumstances which prepared the way for them combined in a similar relation to each other, and the mental as well as corporeal temperaments of nations, which depend on causes such as have been stated, are as little capable of renewal as the different stages of life in individuals. This gives so much the more importance to a disease but cursorily alluded to in the foregoing pages, which exists in Abyssinia, and which nearly resembles the original mania of the St. John's dancers, inasmuch as it exhibits a perfectly similar ecstasy, with the same violent effect on the nerves of motion. It occurs most frequently in the Tigre country, being thence call Tigretier, and is probably the same malady which is called in Ethiopian language Astaragaza. On this subject we will introduce the testimony of Nathaniel Pearce, an eye-witness, who resided nine years in Abyssinia. "The Tigretier," he says he, "is more common among the women than among the men. It seizes the body as if with a violent fever, and from that turns to a lingering sickness, which reduces the patients to skeletons, and often kills them if the relations cannot procure the proper remedy. During this sickness their speech is changed to a kind of stuttering, which no one can understand but those afflicted with the same disorder. When the relations find the malady to be the real tigretier, they join together to defray the expense of curing it; the first remedy they in general attempt is to procure the assistance of a learned Dofter, who reads the Gospel of St. John, and drenches the patient with cold water daily for the space of seven days, an application that very often proves fatal. The most effectual cure, though far more expensive than the former, is as follows:--The relations hire for a certain sum of money a band of trumpeters, drummers, and fifers, and buy a quantity of liquor; then all the young men and women of the place assemble at the patient's house to perform the following most extraordinary ceremony. "I was once called in by a neighbour to see his wife, a very young woman, who had the misfortune to be afflicted with this disorder; and the man being an old acquaintance of mine, and always a close comrade in the camp, I went every day, when at home, to see her, but I could not be of any service to her, though she never refused my medicines. At this time I could not understand a word she said, although she talked very freely, nor could any of her relations understand her. She could not bear the sight of a book or a priest, for at the sight of either she struggled, and was apparently seized with acute agony, and a flood of tears, like blood mingled with water, would pour down her face from her eyes. She had lain three months in this lingering state, living upon so little that it seemed not enough to keep a human body alive; at last her husband agreed to employ the usual remedy, and, after preparing for the maintenance of the band during the time it would take to effect the cure, he borrowed from all his neighbours their silver ornaments, and loaded her legs, arms and neck with them. "The evening that the band began to play I seated myself close by her side as she lay upon the couch, and about two minutes after the trumpets had begun to sound I observed her shoulders begin to move, and soon afterwards her head and breast, and in less than a quarter of an hour she sat upon her couch. The wild look she had, though sometimes she smiled, made me draw off to a greater distance, being almost alarmed to see one nearly a skeleton move with such strength; her head, neck, shoulders, hands and feet all made a strong motion to the sound of the music, and in this manner she went on by degrees, until she stood up on her legs upon the floor. Afterwards she began to dance, and at times to jump about, and at last, as the music and noise of the singers increased, she often sprang three feet from the ground. When the music slackened she would appear quite out of temper, but when it became louder she would smile and be delighted. During this exercise she never showed the least symptom of being tired, though the musicians were thoroughly exhausted; and when they stopped to refresh themselves by drinking and resting a little she would discover signs of discontent. "Next day, according to the custom in the cure of this disorder, she was taken into the market-place, where several jars of maize or tsug were set in order by the relations, to give drink to the musicians and dancers. When the crowd had assembled, and the music was ready, she was brought forth and began to dance and throw herself into the maddest postures imaginable, and in this manner she kept on the whole day. Towards evening she began to let fall her silver ornaments from her neck, arms, and legs, one at a time, so that in the course of three hours she was stripped of every article. A relation continually kept going after her as she danced, to pick up the ornaments, and afterwards delivered them to the owners from whom they were borrowed. As the sun went down she made a start with such swiftness that the fastest runner could not come up with her, and when at the distance of about two hundred yards she dropped on a sudden as if shot. Soon afterwards a young man, on coming up with her, fired a matchlock over her body, and struck her upon the back with the broad side of his large knife, and asked her name, to which she answered as when in her common senses--a sure proof of her being cured; for during the time of this malady those afflicted with it never answer to their Christian names. She was now taken up in a very weak condition and carried home, and a priest came and baptised her again in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, which ceremony concluded her cure. Some are taken in this manner to the market-place for many days before they can be cured, and it sometimes happens that they cannot be cured at all. I have seen them in these fits dance with a _bruly_, or bottle of maize, upon their heads without spilling the liquor, or letting the bottle fall, although they have put themselves into the most extravagant postures. "I could not have ventured to write this from hearsay, nor could I conceive it possible, until I was obliged to put this remedy in practice upon my own wife, who was seized with the same disorder, and then I was compelled to have a still nearer view of this strange disorder. I at first thought that a whip would be of some service, and one day attempted a few strokes when unnoticed by any person, we being by ourselves, and I having a strong suspicion that this ailment sprang from the weak minds of women, who were encouraged in it for the sake of the grandeur, rich dress, and music which accompany the cure. But how much was I surprised, the moment I struck a light blow, thinking to do good, to find that she became like a corpse, and even the joints of her fingers became so stiff that I could not straighten them; indeed, I really thought that she was dead, and immediately made it known to the people in the house that she had fainted, but did not tell them the cause, upon which they immediately brought music, which I had for many days denied them, and which soon revived her; and I then left the house to her relations to cure her at my expense, in the manner I have before mentioned, though it took a much longer time to cure my wife than the woman I have just given an account of. One day I went privately, with a companion, to see my wife dance, and kept at a short distance, as I was ashamed to go near the crowd. On looking steadfastly upon her, while dancing or jumping, more like a deer than a human being, I said that it certainly was not my wife; at which my companion burst into a fit of laughter, from which he could scarcely refrain all the way home. Men are sometimes afflicted with this dreadful disorder, but not frequently. Among the Amhara and Galla it is not so common." Such is the account of Pearce, who is every way worthy of credit, and whose lively description renders the traditions of former times respecting the St. Vitus's dance and tarantism intelligible, even to those who are sceptical respecting the existence of a morbid state of the mind and body of the kind described, because, in the present advanced state of civilisation among the nations of Europe, opportunities for its development no longer occur. The credibility of this energetic but by no means ambitious man is not liable to the slightest suspicion, for, owing to his want of education, he had no knowledge of the phenomena in question, and his work evinces throughout his attractive and unpretending impartiality. Comparison is the mother of observation, and may here elucidate one phenomenon by another--the past by that which still exists. Oppression, insecurity, and the influence of a very rude priestcraft, are the powerful causes which operated on the Germans and Italians of the Middle Ages, as they now continue to operate on the Abyssinians of the present day. However these people may differ from us in their descent, their manners and their customs, the effects of the above mentioned causes are the same in Africa as they were in Europe, for they operate on man himself independently of the particular locality in which he may be planted; and the conditions of the Abyssinians of modern times is, in regard to superstition, a mirror of the condition of the European nations of the middle ages. Should this appear a bold assertion it will be strengthened by the fact that in Abyssinia two examples of superstitions occur which are completely in accordance with occurrences of the Middle Ages that took place contemporarily with the dancing mania. _The Abyssinians have their Christian flagellants, and there exists among them a belief in a Zoomorphism, which presents a lively image of the lycanthropy of the Middle Ages_. Their flagellants are called Zackarys. They are united into a separate Christian fraternity, and make their processions through the towns and villages with great noise and tumult, scourging themselves till they draw blood, and wounding themselves with knives. They boast that they are descendants of St. George. It is precisely in Tigre, the country of the Abyssinian dancing mania, where they are found in the greatest numbers, and where they have, in the neighbourhood of Axum, a church of their own, dedicated to their patron saint, _Oun Arvel_. Here there is an ever-burning lamp, and they contrive to impress a belief that this is kept alight by supernatural means. They also here keep a holy water, which is said to be a cure for those who are affected by the dancing mania. The Abyssinian Zoomorphism is a no less important phenomenon, and shows itself a manner quite peculiar. The blacksmiths and potters form among the Abyssinians a society or caste called in Tigre _Tebbib_, and in Amhara _Buda_, which is held in some degree of contempt, and excluded from the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, because it is believed that they can change themselves into hyaenas and other beasts of prey, on which account they are feared by everybody, and regarded with horror. They artfully contrive to keep up this superstition, because by this separation they preserve a monopoly of their lucrative trades, and as in other respects they are good Christians (but few Jews or Mahomedans live among them), they seem to attach no great consequence to their excommunication. As a badge of distinction they wear a golden ear-ring, which is frequently found in the ears of Hyaenas that are killed, without its having ever been discovered how they catch these animals, so as to decorate them with this strange ornament, and this removes in the minds of the people all doubt as to the supernatural powers of the smiths and potters. To the Budas is also ascribed the gift of enchantment, especially that of the influence of the evil eye. They nevertheless live unmolested, and are not condemned to the flames by fanatical priests, as the lycanthropes were in the Middle Ages. CHAPTER IV--SYMPATHY Imitation--compassion--sympathy, these are imperfect designations for a common bond of union among human beings--for an instinct which connects individuals with the general body, which embraces with equal force reason and folly, good and evil, and diminishes the praise of virtue as well as the criminality of vice. In this impulse there are degrees, but no essential differences, from the first intellectual efforts of the infant mind, which are in a great measure based on imitation, to that morbid condition of the soul in which the sensible impression of a nervous malady fetters the mind, and finds its way through the eye directly to the diseased texture, as the electric shock is propagated by contact from body to body. To this instinct of imitation, when it exists in its highest degree, is united a loss of all power over the will, which occurs as soon as the impression on the senses has become firmly established, producing a condition like that of small animals when they are fascinated by the look of a serpent. By this mental bondage morbid sympathy is clearly and definitely distinguished from all subordinate degrees of this instinct, however closely allied the imitation of a disorder may seem to be to that of a mere folly, of an absurd fashion, of an awkward habit in speech and manner, or even of a confusion of ideas. Even these latter imitations, however, directed as they are to foolish and pernicious objects, place the self-independence of the greater portion of mankind in a very doubtful light, and account for their union into a social whole. Still more nearly allied to morbid sympathy than the imitation of enticing folly, although often with a considerable admixture of the latter, is the diffusion of violent excitements, especially those of a religious or political character, which have so powerfully agitated the nations of ancient and modern times, and which may, after an incipient compliance, pass into a total loss of power over the will, and an actual disease of the mind. Far be it from us to attempt to awaken all the various tones of this chord, whose vibrations reveal the profound secrets which lie hid in the inmost recesses of the soul. We might well want powers adequate to so vast an undertaking. Our business here is only with that morbid sympathy by the aid of which the dancing mania of the Middle Ages grew into a real epidemic. In order to make this apparent by comparison, it may not be out of place, at the close of this inquiry, to introduce a few striking examples:-- 1. "At a cotton manufactory at Hodden Bridge, in Lancashire, a girl, on the fifteenth of February, 1787, put a mouse into the bosom of another girl, who had a great dread of mice. The girl was immediately thrown into a fit, and continued in it, with the most violent convulsions, for twenty-four hours. On the following day three more girls were seized in the same manner, and on the 17th six more. By this time the alarm was so great that the whole work, in which 200 or 300 were employed, was totally stopped, and an idea prevailed that a particular disease had been introduced by a bag of cotton opened in the house. On Sunday the 18th, Dr. St. Clare was sent for from Preston; before he arrived three more were seized, and during that night and the morning of the 19th, eleven more, making in all twenty-four. Of these, twenty-one were young women, two were girls of about ten years of age, and one man, who had been much fatigued with holding the girls. Three of the number lived about two miles from the place where the disorder first broke out, and three at another factory at Clitheroe, about five miles distant, which last and two more were infected entirely from report, not having seen the other patients, but, like them and the rest of the country, strongly impressed with the idea of the plague being caught from the cotton. The symptoms were anxiety, strangulation, and very strong convulsions; and these were so violent as to last without any intermission from a quarter of an hour to twenty-four hours, and to require four or five persons to prevent the patients from tearing their hair and dashing their heads against the floor or walls. Dr. St. Clare had taken with him a portable electrical machine, and by electric shocks the patients were universally relieved without exception. As soon as the patients and the country were assured that the complaint was merely nervous, easily cured, and not introduced by the cotton, no fresh person was affected. To dissipate their apprehensions still further, the best effects were obtained by causing them to take a cheerful glass and join in a dance. On Tuesday the 20th, they danced, and the next day were all at work, except two or three, who were much weakened by their fits." The occurrence here described is remarkable on this account, that there was no important predisposing cause for convulsions in these young women, unless we consider as such their miserable and confined life in the work- rooms of a spinning manufactory. It did not arise from enthusiasm, nor is it stated that the patients had been the subject of any other nervous disorders. In another perfectly analogous case, those attacked were all suffering from nervous complaints, which roused a morbid sympathy in them at the sight of a person seized with convulsions. This, together with the supervention of hysterical fits, may aptly enough be compared to tarantism. 2. "A young woman of the lowest order, twenty-one years of age, and of a strong frame, came on the 13th of January, 1801, to visit a patient in the Charite Hospital at Berlin, where she had herself been previously under treatment for an inflammation of the chest with tetanic spasms, and immediately on entering the ward, fell down in strong convulsions. At the sight of her violent contortions six other female patients immediately became affected in the same way, and by degrees eight more were in like manner attacked with strong convulsions. All these patients were from sixteen to twenty-five years of age, and suffered without exception, one from spasms in the stomach, another from palsy, a third from lethargy, a fourth from fits with consciousness, a fifth from catalepsy, a sixth from syncope, &c. The convulsions, which alternated in various ways with tonic spasms, were accompanied by loss of sensibility, and were invariably preceded by languor with heavy sleep, which was followed by the fits in the course of a minute or two; and it is remarkable that in all these patients their former nervous disorders, not excepting paralysis, disappeared, returning, however, after the subsequent removal of their new complaint. The treatment, during the course of which two of the nurses, who were young women, suffered similar attacks, was continued for four months. It was finally successful, and consisted principally in the administration of opium, at that time the favourite remedy." Now every species of enthusiasm, every strong affection, every violent passion, may lead to convulsions--to mental disorders--to a concussion of the nerves, from the sensorium to the very finest extremities of the spinal chord. The whole world is full of examples of this afflicting state of turmoil, which, when the mind is carried away by the force of a sensual impression that destroys its freedom, is irresistibly propagated by imitation. Those who are thus infected do not spare even their own lives, but as a hunted flock of sheep will follow their leader and rush over a precipice, so will whole hosts of enthusiasts, deluded by their infatuation, hurry on to a self-inflicted death. Such has ever been the case, from the days of the Milesian virgins to the modern associations for self-destruction. Of all enthusiastic infatuations, however, that of religion is the most fertile in disorders of the mind as well as of the body, and both spread with the greatest facility by sympathy. The history of the Church furnishes innumerable proofs of this, but we need go no further than the most recent times. 3. In a methodist chapel at Redruth, a man during divine service cried out with a loud voice, "What shall I do to be saved?" at the same time manifesting the greatest uneasiness and solicitude respecting the condition of his soul. Some other members of the congregation, following his example, cried out in the same form of words, and seemed shortly after to suffer the most excruciating bodily pain. This strange occurrence was soon publicly known, and hundreds of people who had come thither, either attracted by curiosity or a desire from other motives to see the sufferers, fell into the same state. The chapel remained open for some days and nights, and from that point the new disorder spread itself, with the rapidity of lightning, over the neighbouring towns of Camborne, Helston, Truro, Penryn and Falmouth, as well as over the villages in the vicinity. Whilst thus advancing, it decreased in some measure at the place where it had first appeared, and it confined itself throughout to the Methodist chapels. It was only by the words which have been mentioned that it was excited, and it seized none but people of the lowest education. Those who were attacked betrayed the greatest anguish, and fell into convulsions; others cried out, like persons possessed, that the Almighty would straightway pour out His wrath upon them, that the wailings of tormented spirits rang in their ears, and that they saw hell open to receive them. The clergy, when in the course of their sermons they perceived that persons were thus seized, earnestly exhorted them to confess their sins, and zealously endeavoured to convince them that they were by nature enemies to Christ; that the anger of God had therefore fallen upon them; and that if death should surprise them in the midst of their sins the eternal torments of hell would be their portion. The over- excited congregation upon this repeated their words, which naturally must have increased the fury of their convulsive attacks. When the discourse had produced its full effect the preacher changed his subject; reminded those who were suffering of the power of the Saviour, as well as of the grace of God, and represented to them in glowing colours the joys of heaven. Upon this a remarkable reaction sooner or later took place. Those who were in convulsions felt themselves raised from the lowest depths of misery and despair to the most exalted bliss, and triumphantly shouted out that their bonds were loosed, their sins were forgiven, and that they were translated to the wonderful freedom of the children of God. In the meantime their convulsions continued, and they remained during this condition so abstracted from every earthly thought that they stayed two and sometimes three days and nights together in the chapels, agitated all the time by spasmodic movements, and taking neither repose nor nourishment. According to a moderate computation, 4,000 people were, within a very short time, affected with this convulsive malady. The course and symptoms of the attacks were in general as follows:--There came on at first a feeling of faintness, with rigour and a sense of weight at the pit of the stomach, soon after which the patient cried out, as if in the agonies of death or the pains of labour. The convulsions then began, first showing themselves in the muscles of the eyelids, though the eyes themselves were fixed and staring. The most frightful contortions of the countenance followed, and the convulsions now took their course downwards, so that the muscles of the neck and trunk were affected, causing a sobbing respiration, which was performed with great effort. Tremors and agitation ensued, and the patients screamed out violently, and tossed their heads about from side to side. As the complaint increased it seized the arms, and its victims beat their breasts, clasped their hands, and made all sorts of strange gestures. The observer who gives this account remarked that the lower extremities were in no instance affected. In some cases exhaustion came on in a very few minutes, but the attack usually lasted much longer, and there were even cases in which it was known to continue for sixty or seventy hours. Many of those who happened to be seated when the attack commenced bent their bodies rapidly backwards and forwards during its continuance, making a corresponding motion with their arms, like persons sawing wood. Others shouted aloud, leaped about, and threw their bodies into every possible posture, until they had exhausted their strength. Yawning took place at the commencement in all cases, but as the violence of the disorder increased the circulation and respiration became accelerated, so that the countenance assumed a swollen and puffed appearance. When exhaustion came on patients usually fainted, and remained in a stiff and motionless state until their recovery. The disorder completely resembled the St. Vitus's dance, but the fits sometimes went on to an extraordinarily violent extent, so that the author of the account once saw a woman who was seized with these convulsions resist the endeavours of four or five strong men to restrain her. Those patients who did not lose their consciousness were in general made more furious by every attempt to quiet them by force, on which account they were in general suffered to continue unmolested until nature herself brought on exhaustion. Those affected complained more or less of debility after the attacks, and cases sometimes occurred in which they passed into other disorders; thus some fell into a state of melancholy, which, however, in consequence of their religious ecstasy, was distinguished by the absence of fear and despair; and in one patient inflammation of the brain is said to have taken place. No sex or age was exempt from this epidemic malady. Children five years old and octogenarians were alike affected by it, and even men of the most powerful frame were subject to its influence. Girls and young women, however, were its most frequent victims. 4. For the last hundred years a nervous affection of a perfectly similar kind has existed in the Shetland Islands, which furnishes a striking example, perhaps the only one now existing, of the very lasting propagation by sympathy of this species of disorders. The origin of the malady was very insignificant. An epileptic woman had a fit in church, and whether it was that the minds of the congregation were excited by devotion, or that, being overcome at the sight of the strong convulsions, their sympathy was called forth, certain it is that many adult women, and even children, some of whom were of the male sex, and not more than six years old, began to complain forthwith of palpitation, followed by faintness, which passed into a motionless and apparently cataleptic condition. These symptoms lasted more than an hour, and probably recurred frequently. In the course of time, however, this malady is said to have undergone a modification, such as it exhibits at the present day. Women whom it has attacked will suddenly fall down, toss their arms about, writhe their bodies into various shapes, move their heads suddenly from side to side, and with eyes fixed and staring, utter the most dismal cries. If the fit happen on any occasion of pubic diversion, they will, as soon as it has ceased, mix with their companions and continue their amusement as if nothing had happened. Paroxysms of this kind used to prevail most during the warm months of summer, and about fifty years ago there was scarcely a Sabbath in which they did not occur. Strong passions of the mind, induced by religious enthusiasm, are also exciting causes of these fits, but like all such false tokens of divine workings, they are easily encountered by producing in the patient a different frame of mind, and especially by exciting a sense of shame: thus those affected are under the control of any sensible preacher, who knows how to "administer to a mind diseased," and to expose the folly of voluntarily yielding to a sympathy so easily resisted, or of inviting such attacks by affectation. An intelligent and pious minister of Shetland informed the physician, who gives an account of this disorder as an eye-witness, that being considerably annoyed on his first introduction into the country by these paroxysms, whereby the devotions of the church were much impeded, he obviated their repetition by assuring his parishioners that no treatment was more effectual than immersion in cold water; and as his kirk was fortunately contiguous to a freshwater lake, he gave notice that attendants should be at hand during divine service to ensure the proper means of cure. The sequel need scarcely be told. The fear of being carried out of the church, and into the water, acted like a charm; not a single Naiad was made, and the worthy minister for many years had reason to boast of one of the best regulated congregations in Scotland. As the physician above alluded to was attending divine service in the kirk of Baliasta, on the Isle of Unst, a female shriek, the indication of a convulsion fit, was heard; the minister, Mr. Ingram, of Fetlar, very properly stopped his discourse until the disturber was removed; and after advising all those who thought they might be similarly affected to leave the church, he gave out in the meantime a psalm. The congregation was thus preserved from further interruption; yet the effect of sympathy was not prevented, for as the narrator of the account was leaving the church he saw several females writhing and tossing about their arms on the green grass, who durst not, for fear of a censure from the pulpit, exhibit themselves after this manner within the sacred walls of the kirk. In the production of this disorder, which no doubt still exists, fanaticism certainly had a smaller share than the irritable state of women out of health, who only needed excitement, no matter of what kind, to throw them into prevailing nervous paroxysms. When, however, that powerful cause of nervous disorders takes the lead, we find far more remarkable symptoms developed, and it then depends on the mental condition of the people among whom they appear whether in their spread they shall take a narrow or an extended range--whether confined to some small knot of zealots they are to vanish without a trace, or whether they are to attain even historical importance. 5. The appearance of the _Convulsionnaires_ in France, whose inhabitants, from the greater mobility of their blood, have in general been the less liable to fanaticism, is in this respect instructive and worthy of attention. In the year 1727 there died in the capital of that country the Deacon Paris, a zealous opposer of the Ultramontanists, division having arisen in the French Church on account of the bull "Unigenitus." People made frequent visits to his tomb in the cemetery of St. Medard, and four years afterwards (in September, 1731) a rumour was spread that miracles took place there. Patients were seized with convulsions and tetanic spasms, rolled upon the ground like persons possessed, were thrown into violent contortions of their heads and limbs, and suffered the greatest oppression, accompanied by quickness and irregularity of pulse. This novel occurrence excited the greatest sensation all over Paris, and an immense concourse of people resorted daily to the above-named cemetery in order to see so wonderful a spectacle, which the Ultramontanists immediately interpreted as a work of Satan, while their opponents ascribed it to a divine influence. The disorder soon increased, until it produced, in nervous women, _clairvoyance_ (_Schlafwachen_), a phenomenon till then unknown; for one female especially attracted attention, who, blindfold, and, as it was believed, by means of the sense of smell, read every writing that was placed before her, and distinguished the characters of unknown persons. The very earth taken from the grave of the Deacon was soon thought to possess miraculous power. It was sent to numerous sick persons at a distance, whereby they were said to have been cured, and thus this nervous disorder spread far beyond the limits of the capital, so that at one time it was computed that there were more than eight hundred decided Convulsionnaires, who would hardly have increased so much in numbers had not Louis XV directed that the cemetery should be closed. The disorder itself assumed various forms, and augmented by its attacks the general excitement. Many persons, besides suffering from the convulsions, became the subjects of violent pain, which required the assistance of their brethren of the faith. On this account they, as well as those who afforded them aid, were called by the common title of _Secourists_. The modes of relief adopted were remarkably in accordance with those which were administered to the St. John's dancers and the Tarantati, and they were in general very rough; for the sufferers were beaten and goaded in various parts of the body with stones, hammers, swords, clubs, &c., of which treatment the defenders of this extraordinary sect relate the most astonishing examples in proof that severe pain is imperatively demanded by nature in this disorder as an effectual counter-irritant. The Secourists used wooden clubs in the same manner as paviors use their mallets, and it is stated that some _Convulsionnaires_ have borne daily from six to eight thousand blows thus inflicted without danger. One Secourist administered to a young woman who was suffering under spasm of the stomach the most violent blows on that part, not to mention other similar cases which occurred everywhere in great numbers. Sometimes the patients bounded from the ground, impelled by the convulsions, like fish when out of water; and this was so frequently imitated at a later period that the women and girls, when they expected such violent contortions, not wishing to appear indecent, put on gowns make like sacks, closed at the feet. If they received any bruises by falling down they were healed with earth from the grave of the uncanonised saint. They usually, however, showed great agility in this respect, and it is scarcely necessary to remark that the female sex especially was distinguished by all kinds of leaping and almost inconceivable contortions of body. Some spun round on their feet with incredible rapidity, as is related of the dervishes; others ran their heads against walls, or curved their bodies like rope-dancers, so that their heels touched their shoulders. All this degenerated at length into decided insanity. A certain Convulsionnaire, at Vernon, who had formerly led rather a loose course of life, employed herself in confessing the other sex; in other places women of this sect were seen imposing exercises of penance on priests, during which these were compelled to kneel before them. Others played with children's rattles, or drew about small carts, and gave to these childish acts symbolical significations. One Convulsionnaire even made believe to shave her chin, and gave religious instruction at the same time, in order to imitate Paris, the worker of miracles, who, during this operation, and whilst at table, was in the habit of preaching. Some had a board placed across their bodies, upon which a whole row of men stood; and as, in this unnatural state of mind, a kind of pleasure is derived from excruciating pain, some too were seen who caused their bosoms to be pinched with tongs, while others, with gowns closed at the feet, stood upon their heads, and remained in that position longer than would have been possible had they been in health. Pinault, the advocate, who belonged to this sect, barked like a dog some hours every day, and even this found imitation among the believers. The insanity of the Convulsionnaires lasted without interruption until the year 1790, and during these fifty-nine years called forth more lamentable phenomena that the enlightened spirits of the eighteenth century would be willing to allow. The grossest immorality found in the secret meetings of the believers a sure sanctuary, and in their bewildering devotional exercises a convenient cloak. It was of no avail that, in the year 1762, the Grand Secours was forbidden by act of parliament; for thenceforth this work was carried on in secrecy, and with greater zeal than ever; it was in vain, too, that some physicians, and among the rest the austere, pious Hecquet, and after him Lorry, attributed the conduct of the Convulsionnaires to natural causes. Men of distinction among the upper classes, as, for instance, Montgeron the deputy, and Lambert an ecclesiastic (obt. 1813), stood forth as the defenders of this sect; and the numerous writings which were exchanged on the subject served, by the importance which they thus attached to it, to give it stability. The revolution finally shook the structure of this pernicious mysticism. It was not, however, destroyed; for even during the period of the greatest excitement the secret meetings were still kept up; prophetic books, by Convulsionnaires of various denominations, have appeared even in the most recent times, and only a few years ago (in 1828) this once celebrated sect still existed, although without the convulsions and the extraordinarily rude aid of the brethren of the faith, which, amidst the boasted pre-eminence of French intellectual advancement, remind us most forcibly of the dark ages of the St. John's dancers. 6. Similar fanatical sects exhibit among all nations of ancient and modern times the same phenomena. An overstrained bigotry is in itself, and considered in a medical point of view, a destructive irritation of the senses, which draws men away from the efficiency of mental freedom, and peculiarly favours the most injurious emotions. Sensual ebullitions, with strong convulsions of the nerves, appear sooner or later, and insanity, suicidal disgust of life, and incurable nervous disorders, are but too frequently the consequences of a perverse, and, indeed, hypocritical zeal, which has ever prevailed, as well in the assemblies of the Maenades and Corybantes of antiquity as under the semblance of religion among the Christians and Mahomedans. There are some denominations of English Methodists which surpass, if possible, the French Convulsionnaires; and we may here mention in particular the Jumpers, among whom it is still more difficult than in the example given above to draw the line between religious ecstasy and a perfect disorder of the nerves; sympathy, however, operates perhaps more perniciously on them than on other fanatical assemblies. The sect of Jumpers was founded in the year 1760, in the county of Cornwall, by two fanatics, who were, even at that time, able to collect together a considerable party. Their general doctrine is that of the Methodists, and claims our consideration here only in so far as it enjoins them during their devotional exercises to fall into convulsions, which they are able to effect in the strangest manner imaginable. By the use of certain unmeaning words they work themselves up into a state of religious frenzy, in which they seem to have scarcely any control over their senses. They then begin to jump with strange gestures, repeating this exercise with all their might until they are exhausted, so that it not unfrequently happens that women who, like the Maenades, practise these religious exercises, are carried away from the midst of them in a state of syncope, whilst the remaining members of the congregations, for miles together, on their way home, terrify those whom they meet by the sight of such demoniacal ravings. There are never more than a few ecstatics, who, by their example, excite the rest to jump, and these are followed by the greatest part of the meeting, so that these assemblages of the Jumpers resemble for hours together the wildest orgies, rather than congregations met for Christian edification. In the United States of North America communities of Methodists have existed for the last sixty years. The reports of credible witnesses of their assemblages for divine service in the open air (camp meetings), to which many thousands flock from great distances, surpass, indeed, all belief; for not only do they there repeat all the insane acts of the French Convulsionnaires and of the English Jumpers, but the disorder of their minds and of their nerves attains at these meetings a still greater height. Women have been seen to miscarry whilst suffering under the state of ecstasy and violent spasms into which they are thrown, and others have publicly stripped themselves and jumped into the rivers. They have swooned away by hundreds, worn out with ravings and fits; and of the Barkers, who appeared among the Convulsionnaires only here and there, in single cases of complete aberration of intellect, whole bands are seen running on all fours, and growling as if they wished to indicate, even by their outward form, the shocking degradation of their human nature. At these camp-meetings the children are witnesses of this mad infatuation, and as their weak nerves are with the greatest facility affected by sympathy, they, together with their parents, fall into violent fits, though they know nothing of their import, and many of them retain for life some severe nervous disorder which, having arisen from fright and excessive excitement, will not afterwards yield to any medical treatment. But enough of these extravagances, which even in our now days embitter the lives of so many thousands, and exhibit to the world in the nineteenth century the same terrific form of mental disturbance as the St. Vitus's dance once did to the benighted nations of the Middle Ages. 
55506	----	[Transcriber's Note: The author is not named and has not been located elsewhere. Dialect spelling is copied faithfully.] THE WATER-FINDERS [Frontispiece: Three men hung over the bridge.] THE WATER-FINDERS BY THE AUTHOR OF "TWO OF A TRADE" LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK THOMAS NELSON AND SONS CONTENTS. --- I. Willowton in Trouble II. The Chapman Family III. The Dowser IV. The Search for Water V. Old Jimmy's Scruples VI. Public Opinion on the Bridge VII. Tom Chapman "Takes on" at the Well VIII. A Neighbourly Action IX Nurse Blunt Arrives X. Another Fever Victim XI. The Strike at the Well XII. Back to the Work XIII. Rain at Last XIV. The Collapse XV. Friends in Need XVI An Anxious Sunday XVII Geo to the Fore Again XVIII The Rescue XIX Geo again Surprises Himself and his Friends XX Conclusion THE WATER-FINDERS ---- CHAPTER I. WILLOWTON IS IN TROUBLE Willowton is a village of some seventeen thousand population, large enough for the inhabitants to talk of "going up the town" when they mean the broad main street which stands on a gentle slope leading from the railway station to the church. This street, which is paved at the sides with nice old-world, ankle-twisting cobbles, boasts of two drapers', a chemist's, a saddler's, grocer's, and bootmaker's shops. Away in the less aristocratic parts of the village are the butchers and bakers, and the miscellaneous stores so dear to the country housewives. About the middle of the town, in the very widest part, is the bridge, and close to the bridge itself is the Wild Swan public-house, or rather _hotel_, as it calls itself. The little stream that runs under the bridge comes along through miles of cool meadows, now golden with buttercups, for it is May. It comes through many gardens and orchards, now white with apple blossom; and when it leaves the bridge it burrows underground for some little distance, and reappears at the foot of the cottage gardens, to lose itself in pleasant meandering through more flowery meadows, till it passes out of the ken of Heigham folks, and out of our story's picture. It was noon, and the sun was hot and the stream was low. There had been no rain for several weeks. The March winds had blown the seeds about; the wheat even drooped in the fields; April had refused her usual showers, and there was a dry, parched look everywhere while yet it was only May. Three men hung over the bridge, lazily resting their elbows on the parapet, and looking down into the water below at a large trout that was lying under a stone, waiting his opportunity to make his way further upstream to a deeper pool under the garden bank. Of these three "loafers," as the neighbours called them, one was a strong, well-built young man of one or two-and-twenty. His flushed face betrayed the fact that he had already visited the Wild Swan over the way; his great strong limbs were loosely knit; his big hands showed little signs of work; his lazy blue eyes looked as if they had never done anything more harmful or more useful than watch for trout. His companions were of a different type. One was a discontented, surly-looking man of perhaps sixty years of age. He was reported to have been a great traveller. He certainly had been to America, to Australia, and to various ports in Europe, in his position as stoker on a merchant vessel; and he had seen a good deal of the seamy side of life, but not so much as he wished his listeners to believe, and was as bad a companion for a young fellow like George Lummis as could well be. The third man was a cripple. He came out daily on his crutches, and took up his position in the angle of the stone support, which stood out from the bridge a foot of so on to the road. He had a mild, weak face, in which a life's physical suffering was plainly to be read. He had never been of any use to anybody so far, and as far as his acquaintances knew, he had never had any desire to be so. The strongest feeling he possessed was an intense affection and admiration for the great, hulking, lazy six feet of humanity beside him. The three men were in their own way discussing the general prosperity of the village, and abusing the district council, the parson, the doctor, the farmers, and, indeed, everybody who was at all better off or of more consequence than themselves. They were not speaking with any particular virulence, nor were they arguing their points with any warmth; they were only repeating a sort of formula they went through periodically whenever the occasion cropped up. They each knew exactly what the other would say. They had all three heard it so very many times before, and they had their answers all cut and dried, and ready for immediate use. The only variety was that sometimes they began with the parson and ended with the doctor, and sometimes they began with the doctor and ended with the parson. It was all chance, just whichever happened to go over the bridge first. "There he goo!" they would ejaculate, often loud enough for the object of their remarks to hear, "a-drivin' in 'is carriage with a 'orse and liv'ry sarvent, all paid for out o' our club money, that's how that is. And what does he do for it, I should like yew jest te tell me?" etc., etc., etc., _ad lib_. This, of course, if the passer-by happened to be the doctor; if, on the other hand, it was he vicar, it would be,--- "There goo th' parson, pore, hard-workin' chap! Two hundred and fifty pound a year for preachin' t' us of a Sunday--an' a lot o' good that dew us! I'd just like to have him aboard our ship for a fortnight. I'd teach him t' interfere, with his imperence." It was the "traveller" who generally originated these remarks. The cripple always made a point of assenting; he wished to be agreeable, for the traveller was open-handed as well as long-tongued, and a quid of tobacco often found its way into the cripple's pocket after a prolonged debate, in which he took so prominent and important a part. On these occasions George Lummis seldom did more than laugh a short laugh, when he thought it incumbent on him to do so, or even lift a faint protest when his sense of justice smote him (for he _had_ some sense of justice); and it was not so very many years ago that he was a schoolboy, and if he chose to exert his memory he could have told of many kindnesses he had received fro the late vicar and his family, and from that very doctor whom he allowed to be abused so roundly, who had pulled him through a bad attack of typhoid fever when he was a boy of sixteen. "And to very little purpose," the doctor would say to himself sometimes as he drove over the bridge and saw him loafing away the best years of his life with his good-for-nothing companions. "For his own sake I had almost better have let him die." On this particular morning it was the vicar who passed first. He walked slowly and heavily, for he was carrying a weight. The perspiration stood in beads on his forehead, and his straw hat had got pushed back from his brow, so that the full blaze of the sun beat down on his forehead, from which the hair was beginning to recede--"slipping back" he would explain laughingly, "not falling off, forsooth!" His burden, which was in reality a big well-grown boy of fourteen, in the first stage of fever, was wrapped in a big, not overclean-looking blanket, and in his weakness he was unable to assist his bearer to carry him, and, indeed, with the best of intentions, was almost as dead a weight as if he had been in a faint. As the vicar passed over the bridge he kept his eyes fixed straight in front of him. Neither by look nor by gesture did he ask the loungers there to help him, and no one offered to lend a hand. His strength, great as it was, was almost spent when he reached the hospital and gave over his patient to the doctor's charge, and he sat down with a sigh of relief on the wooden settle in the hall. It was cool and fresh in here, almost cold coming out of the dust and the sun. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief; the portress brought him a glass of water. "Too hot yet, Mrs. Smith," he said. "I'll wait till I've cooled down; but I'm as thirsty as a fish!" "And no wonder!" said the matron tartly, but not without a note of admiration in her tones; "I never heard such nonsense. Why couldn't the boy be brought in the ambulance like anybody else, I should like to know, without you having to carry him as if he was a baby! I haven't any patience with those Chapmans, that I haven't!" "Well, nor have I--much," said the vicar reflectively. "That woman is the dirtiest of the whole row. It would be hard to beat her in the parish; but there is something about her--I don't know what it is. She never tells me lies or makes excuses; she never begs, and never complains of other people's good fortune, and is always good-tempered--bother her! She would be so much easier to influence if she had a spice of temper, wouldn't she--eh, Mrs. Smith?" with a twinkle in his big brown eyes; for Mrs. Smith had the defects of her qualities, and possessed the hasty temper that goes so often with a warm heart. "But I must be off. Let Tommy know that I'll call in and see him some time in the afternoon, and hope I shall find him in clover. No, I won't wait for the doctor; I know pretty well what he'll say. I'll be off," and the vicar tossed off his glass of water, put on his hat, this time well tilted over his eyes, and strode down the hill for the second time that morning. His return road lay through the buttercup meadows and over the stream by a little foot-bridge into the village. He passed a long row of well-to-do, prosperous-looking cottages, with bright little gardens in front of them, and the running stream behind them. At the gate of one of these a young girl was standing shading her eyes from the sun. She made a pretty picture in her big shady hat and print blouse, short skirt, blue linen apron, her sleeves rolled up, showing a pair of nice plump arms; for Milly was washing to-day, and was not ashamed to be seen at it. She had a paper in her hand, and was watching for the vicar. Overhead the lilacs and laburnums were fading in the drought, and the few flowers that had come to maturity were dying off before their time. So intent was the vicar on his own thoughts that he was striding past without seeing her. "A letter, sir!" she cried out, holding it out to him over the palings. "Oh!" Mr. Rutland took it and broke the seal. It was a summons to attend a committee meeting of the sanitary board, now sitting at the Union--an informal meeting hastily convened owing to the pressing state of affairs, and to the somewhat unexpected reappearance of the sanitary inspector. "Where's your grandfather?" he asked, folding the paper and putting it in his pocket. "He's gone to toll again. Young Flower is dead." The vicar made a gesture of dismay. "You don't say so! I was with him most of the night. I hoped he was going to pull through. Ah, well!" But turning to Milly again, "Tell Jimmy when he comes in to let my housekeeper know I shan't be back," taking out his watch, "much before two o'clock, and I'll get some bread and cheese at the Union. She needn't think about me. Good-morning," and he went on with a nod. "Good-morning, sir," said Milly demurely, and with a pretty little inclination of her head. Milly was too old to curtsy now, though the school children at Willowton, as indeed all the villages in East Anglia, still keep up the pretty custom of the old-world curtsey. Milly was nearly seventeen, and kept house for her old grandfather, who was parish sexton, clerk, or verger, or all three, just as it pleased him to call himself. CHAPTER II. THE CHAPMAN FAMILY. The Chapmans were a large family, and every year a new little Chapman appeared upon the scene; consequently every year there was a new mouth to feed, and wages, of course, remained much the same. Tom Chapman had married his wife (a girl working in a jam factory in a neighbouring town) when he was nineteen and she was only seventeen. They had muddled along ever since. Tom was as hard-working as most of his acquaintances, which is perhaps not saying much, for they had a rooted objection to what they called a "wet jacket," and seldom worked hard enough to get uncomfortably hot; but still he was an honest, well-meaning man, and if he had a strong feelings on the subject of working over hours on special occasions, and saw no particular reason why he should put himself out to benefit his masters, why, as I said before, he was not in that respect different from his friends. Poor Annie, his wife, was a patient, hard-working, ignorant woman. She had once been pretty, but many children and growing poverty had made her at the age of seven-and-twenty look like most women of forty. She was worn and thin, and was untidy; she was unrefined in her ways and uncouth in her speech; she was badly educated, having been idle at school, and forgotten what little her teachers managed to knock into her unwilling head; but for all this she managed to retain her husband's affection, and to keep him from the public-house. The vicar, who was a bachelor himself, often wondered why Tom Chapman was one of the steadiest young men in the parish, and why he always spent his evenings at home with "such a wife" as he had, and in such a pigsty of a house; for I grieve to say cleanliness in her household was far from being a virtue of Mrs. Chapman's. The house stood at the bottom of Gravel-pit Lane, and was the first of a row of cottages that crept up the steep little hill that led away from the vicarage into the buttercup meadows. The stream did not come anywhere near Gravel-pit Lane, and the water supply was never very good--one well having to serve eight or ten cottages with water; and this year, owing to the unprecedented dryness of the spring, the well was nearly empty. Small wonder, then, that the little Chapmans were even less well washed than usual, and that their dirty pinafores were an ever-increasing source of annoyance to the schoolmistress. It was from this house that the vicar had carried off the patient for the little fever hospital on the side hill above the village. This fever hospital was a pet scheme of his and the doctor's. All through the dry spring they had been prophesying trouble, and had made themselves unpopular in consequence. Now, popularity is a very pleasant thing, and a very useful thing; but there are things better than popularity. Popularity is a fickle, faithless jade. She comes often unbidden and unsought, and sits down by a man's side, and while she is there he may do what he likes. He may scold people for not giving enough in church, he may forget to answer invitations, he may even lose his temper, and say all sorts of things he doesn't mean; but once Madam Popularity has left him, or even shown any signs of approaching departure, this same man may no longer ask your assistance in his charities. He may never offer you advice, or criticise your actions; he may scarcely even presume to wish you good-morning, and when he comes to see you, you imagine he comes to pry into your private affairs. If he gives your boy a penny for opening a gate for him, you are certain he is "up to suffin'," and the luckless penny is nothing but bribery and corruption; in short, all that was right and commendable before is wrong and reprehensible now. It was this that had happened to the vicar of Willowton, and strangely enough, everybody knew it but the vicar! He was far too busy attending to his duties and succouring his people, body and soul, to feel any changes of temperature; and if he had, I will not exactly say that he would not have cared (for, of course, he would; he would not have been human if he had not), but it would have made no difference; he would have persevered in his course just the same. He was, he would have said, "about his Master's work," and it would never have occurred to him to alter his ways once he had made up his mind he was right. The reason of his unpopularity was not difficult to determine--he had been preaching a crusade against dirt and unthriftiness. He had foretold in forcible language, from the pulpit as well as elsewhere, the coming epidemic, which the sanitary commissioner had declared inevitable, with the village in such a shocking state of insanitariness. The inspector called the houses "unsanitary," the vicar called them "dirty"--that was the difference. There was a very great difference between the sound of these two swords, and the vicar made the fatal mistake of using the wrong one. It was a pity, but the vicar was very outspoken, very impetuous, very straightforward. He had said so many times before, and nobody had ever even dreamt of taking offence. They knew it was true, and they were so used to it that they never thought of objecting to hearing the truth blurted out in his good-humoured, friendly manner--never till Corkam came back after his thirty-five years of "foreign travel." "How you do truckle to that chap!" he would say to the men who touched their hats respectfully to him as he passed. "You think, he was cap'en on a wessel at least, and bos'un tight and midshipmite inter ther bargain. Blessed if I are goin' ter knock under to the parson, or a whole cargo o' parsons! that I won't; so there!" and Corkam would lean his elbows on the parapet of the bridge behind him, and stand with an impudent sneer on his coarse, flabby lips at the unsuspecting vicar as he passed. Corkam had "no manners," he thought; "but one mustn't judge too much by appearances, and probably," he would tell himself, if Corkham's rudeness was more than usually aggressive, "he was much better than he looked." For the vicar's creed was of the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians order--of the kind that believeth all things, and hopeth all things; and after all there is nothing like hope in the world. It is so perennial, if you are disappointed in your hopes about one thing, you can always go on hoping about another. And the vicar was very happy in his hopes, though they were often doomed to disappointment. He had good health, good spirits, and a good conscience, and he scarcely knew what it was to have a headache or endure a sleepless night. Truly "a man to be envied," his friend the doctor said, "and there are not many like him!" The vicarage was a small house--a great many gables and very small rooms, all except the hall, which was a large, low-roofed, roomy apartment, with black oak beams supporting the uneven white-washed ceiling. A great gilt-faced grandfather's clock stood in one corner on the right-hand side of the fireplace, which was one of those delightful Queen Anne, urn-shaped grates, with high hobs on either side, on which the vicar's housekeeper kept her master's coffee, or soup, or cocoa, as the case might be, warm when he failed to come in for his meals, which was no uncommon occurrence, especially since the outbreak of the fever, when, as the long-suffering woman constantly complained, "he don't never show his face till the meat is cooked to a cinder, or the water for his tea has boiled itself flat." The vicarage garden ran down to the churchyard on one side, and was bordered on the other by the ubiquitous little stream that wound itself in and out through the village like a shining ribbon. The flowers in the vicar's garden were mostly quaint, old-fashioned things. He knew nothing about flowers himself, but his housekeeper did, and he had the advantage of succeeding a man who had a passion for gardening, and who had stocked the place with bulbs, innumerable tulips, daffodils, crocuses, snowdrops, and aconites, and little old-world hepatica and grape hyacinths. While against the high brick wall, now mellowed with time, were old single pink peonies, great yellow tiger lilies, and mulleins, just coming out over the porch the blue wisteria did her best to flower, but perished in the attempt; while the tropeolum, and other creeping things that Mrs. Crowe had grown so successfully every year against the trellis, died off before they began to climb. It was as if the fever had touched them too, poor things; though Mrs. Crowe did surreptitiously fill her watering-pot at the stream and water them ever evening when the vicar was out of the way; for that gentleman was a very dragon over the water, and the stream, as I said before, was getting daily lower and lower, and water scarcer and scarcer. CHAPTER III. THE DOWSER. The meeting at the Union, mentioned in the first chapter, was stormy, but it resulted in victory. The sudden summoning of the principal people in the parish was occasioned by the appearance of a "water-finder." This the chairman, a gentleman farmer of some local importance, well known in the hunting field, proceeded to explain in a disjointed, halting, and somewhat unconvincing manner. It was evident that he was half ashamed of yielding to what he knew most of his hearers would term foolish superstition, and others would fear as savouring of witchcraft and other forbidden things. The meeting was an open one, concerning as it did, all the parish; and among others our three "loafers" of the bridge had strolled in, and sitting down on a back seat prepared to hear what was going to be said. They had come in from very different motives, and kept together from force of habit. The cripple had come because he wisely never omitted to attend anything that would afford him entertainment and change from the dull monotony of his days; the ex-seaman came, as usual, in the spirit of opposition, with the full determination of opposing whatever decision the authorities should come to; and George accompanied them merely because they asked him. Mr. Rutland, who was late, as we know, slipped in quietly, and took a seat on a bench which was placed along the side of the room. The water-finder had just stepped on to the platform, and with a little nervous cough was beginning to explain his mission. He was a slight, spare man, of perhaps thirty years of age, with an extraordinarily sensitive face--the sort of look one sees sometimes in a great musician or dreamer--his hair fairish, inclined to red, and his complexion that which goes with such hair. There was nothing else remarkable about him but his hands, which were delicately formed, yet strong and nervous. His voice was low and pleasant, but he spoke with some hesitation, and had not the air of confidence that accompanies the necromancer or conjurer. The vicar's keen eye took in all this at a glance, and he involuntarily turned to the audience to see how they took him. His eye fell on the three men on the bench at right angles with him. He saw Corkam arrange his face in the supercilious sneer he knew so well. He saw Farley dart a look at him to get his "cue," and then twist his own poor, pinched features into the best imitation of his "friend's" that he could accomplish. The effect was so completely artificial that the vicar could not restrain a smile of amusement. George's fair, good-natured face expressed absolutely nothing. The water-finder's words were very simple. He protested nothing, and promised nothing. He had discovered a few years ago, he said, that he had the gift of finding water in unexpected places. His powers were not infallible, he explained, but were dependent on many things, the nature of which he was unable to determine. Possibly it was the condition of the atmosphere, possibly the state of his own health, possibly the influence of want of faith in the people who accompanied him on his quest--he was unable to account for it--but certainly there were times when he had failed. At this point his audience shuffled impatiently with their feet, and sundry little grunts and groans were heard, and the short artificial laugh of Farley was plainly distinguishable. The water-finder ran his mild, dreamy eyes along the benches, passed without interest over Farley and Corkam, and rested for a moment on Geo. He had heard, he said, of the dreadful pass that Heigham was likely to come to for want of water, and being in the neighbourhood on a visit to some relations, had called on Mr. Barlow and offered his services. It was for this meeting, he understood, to reject or accept them. He had nothing more to say. Mr. Barlow then rose and proposed a show of hands. This was the signal for a general uproar, and perhaps a dozen or so hands were lifted. The water-finder looked disappointed, the chairman angry, and rough words were shouted from the audience. "We don't want no palaverin', conjurin' chaps here," shouted some. "Down with the sin of witchcraft!" shouted another. "Duck 'im in a 'orse pond, same as they did time agone," shouted the village wag. "My, I'll make 'im swim!" At this juncture the vicar walked up the room, and by a sign from the chairman stepped on to the platform. "We don't want no parsons neither," shouted a ne'er-do-well, who had had a drop on his way; but the parson, if he had lost his popularity, had not lost his power of engaging attention. The chairman rang his bell to secure silence, and a voice from the back of the room shouted "Hear, hear!" "It seems to me," said the vicar, "that all we want is water. It is with the hope of finding a solution to our terrible difficulty that we are met here to-day. Everything, as you all know, that ordinary science and knowledge can show us has been exhausted, and with no result. We are in desperate case. We 'must have water, or we die.' It is true that our stream still runs, and some of our wells yield water; but it is polluted, and breeds fever in those who drink it. But all this is well known; it is idle to recapitulate it. I take it that all we have to decide is whether we accept Mr. Wilman's offer or not. I think there can be no doubt about it. 'The drowning man catches at a straw.' (Mr. Wilman will forgive the allusion.) I trust he is no straw; but, humanly speaking, we are undoubtedly 'drowning men.' It seems to me there is no 'conjuring' or 'witchcraft' about his thing. God has given us all certain powers--'divers gifts' as the Bible has it--and just because we do not understand or cannot explain this reputed gift of water-finding, why reject the possibility of it in our hour of need? Let us give Mr. Wilman a fair trial; let him do his best, and if he fails, well, we are in no worse plight that we were before." The vicar stepped down amid dead silence; his words had not had time to sink in. The chairman rose. "Gentlemen," he said, "my mind is made up. Mr Wilman has free leave to come over my land and find us water where he can. I can't let ignorance or blind prejudice stand in his way. I completely endorse all the vicar's words." "And I too," and a burly Nonconformist tradesman stepped up; "and I'll give you twenty pounds towards the expenses of sinking the well." Ten minutes after this sixty pounds had been subscribed by the influential people present. The meeting was broken up, and the water-finder was casting his eye once more over the audience to select his companions in the quest. "Mr. Barlow will come with me, and I should be glad if you would too, sir," he said to the vicar, who was making his way out. "I only wish I could," he replied heartily--"it would give me the greatest pleasure; but I have got to take two funerals this afternoon, and I must run home and get something to eat first. Many thanks, all the same, and I need scarcely say how anxiously I shall look for the result of your trial." He hurried off as he spoke, and Mr. Barlow and the water-finder walked slowly up the street behind him, and disappeared into the former's house. An hour later they emerged and walked up the street. CHAPTER IV. THE SEARCH FOR WATER It will readily be imagined that the "dowser," as he called himself, was not allowed to go on his quest accompanied only by Mr. Barlow. He was followed, as was only natural, at a fairly respectable distance, by by a selection of all the idle boys and girls in Willowton, and for once Geo Lummis had deserted his friends on the bridge, and followed the little crowd leisurely in the rear, with his hands in his pockets, and his hat tilted at the back of his head. The water-finder carried in his hand a freshly-cut hazel rod, which he had brought from Mr. Barlow's garden. It was about two feet long, and forked at one end. He held it, point downwards, straight in front of him, with a "prong" in each hand, and he walked at a fair pace, his eyes fixed on the rod, and preserving a dead silence. As he went the little procession followed him up the main street over the bridge nearly as far as Gravel-pit Lane. Here the lookers-on noticed the hazel twig jerk outwards unmistakably. Mr. Barlow, who was walking abreast of him, sent an inquiring glance at him. "Only drain water," said the dowser laconically, without slackening his pace. A few more steps brought him to the bottom of Gravel-pit Lane, and Annie Chapman, with a tribe of dirty, bright-eyed children clinging to her bedraggled skirts, came out to see the fun. The sun had gone in, and a sort of thick heat-mist pervaded everything. It was the sort of afternoon that during any other summer than that of 1901 would have ended in a thunderstorm; but it seemed as if the clouds had forgotten how to rain, and the parched ground looked thirstier than ever, while an unsavoury drainy smell rose from the cluster of infected houses. In the garden of the Chapman's house was a condemned well, now, fortunately perhaps, dry. A wooden cover was over the brickwork, and it was safely padlocked. Annie and her brood rested against this as they watched the dowser advancing. He made straight for her gate. At a sign from her one of the children opened it, and he and Mr. Barlow passed through; the crowd remained outside. The door into the untidy sitting-room was open, and without a "with your leave" or "by your leave" the water-finder passed in, the twig jerking violently all the time. Annie coloured, and sprang towards the house. Mr. Barlow, who was following mechanically, stopped. "An Englishman's house is his castle." He waited for permission. Annie was always hospitable in spite of what to her was a sudden inexplicable feeling of shame that the gentlemen should see what a pigsty the house was. She smiled, however, as she held open the door, and drew her fairly clean apron as far over her dress as she could. "Go you in, sir," she said; "though God a'mighty knows what he's after there, I don't." Before Mr. Barlow could take advantage of her invitation, however, the dowser had passed out through the little kitchen into the yard behind, where, stumbling along over Annie's pots and pans and other utensils, which were everywhere but where they ought to be, he stopped short at a high privet fence, neatly clipped; for with the backyard Annie's dominion ended and Tom's began, so the fences and the gate and the palings were in good order. There was no getting over this fence; it ran all the length of the row of houses. The dowser retraced his steps, and led by Mr. Barlow soon reappeared by a circuitous route at the opposite side of the fence. Annie and her children made a big hole in the dusty green of it and peered through. Behind this hedge was a small piece of waste land, or common, where the boys played desultory games of cricket in the hot evenings; and when there was any feed at all on it, the few people who owned donkeys in Willowton turned them out to graze. Just now it was as hard brickbats and guiltless of any signs of green. All the way across this piece the rod jerked and twisted. "There is water here," the dowser said, stopping and wiping his brow. He looked exhausted, and sat down on the bank that ran along the top of the rather shallow gravel-pit that gave the name to the place. "The spring is a deep one, too," he continued thoughtfully--"perhaps eighty or a hundred feet below the surface; but it is a bad place for sinking a well--too dangerous by far with all this gravel. We will try somewhere else." At Mr. Barlow's request, however, he marked the spot with a large stone, for it was impossible to put a stick in the hard ground. "How do you know what depth it is down, may I ask?" said the farmer politely; and the crowd of boys and girls listened eagerly for the answer, and none more eagerly than Geo, who stood a little aloof with an unusual alertness in his bearing. "I know in this way," said the dowser, taking up his twig which he had laid down for a moment and standing over the place indicated. "I judge by the distance from it at which the rod is influenced. Deep-lying water affects a smaller area than that which is nearer the surface. My rod, as I daresay you observed, began to jerk before we reached yonder cottage," pointing back at the Chapman's house. "That must be a couple of hundred yards or more away. No," he added in answer to further questions, "I don't go by any exact scale of measurement. Other people may do so, but I don't. Experience enables me to be pretty certain about it, and I trust to that." Geo was so intensely interested at this conversation that he could not help advancing nearer than manners permitted. The dowser noticed him. "I think I saw you at the meeting," he said, looking kindly at him. "Have you ever seen water found like this before?" Geo touched his hat respectfully. "No, sir," he said, "that I hain't. That's the most wonderful thing I ever see in my life." The dowser smiled. "It does not seem so wonderful to me," he said. "I come of a family of dowsers. My father was one before me, and my grandfather, and I have a sister with the same gift, though I have but lately discovered my own power. There are a good many of us in the south-west of England--Wiltshire, Dorset, Cornwall; I am a Wilts man myself." "Oh, indeed, sir," said Geo because he had nothing else to say. "You do it professionally, I conclude, then?" said Mr. Barlow, inwardly quaking lest Mr. Wilman should demand an exorbitant fee. "Dear me, no--not at all. I do it quite in an amateur way, just for the love of it. A man must sometimes help his fellow-creatures. I am not a rich man. I can't do much in the way of money, but having this gift, I occasionally make use of it. I was taking a holiday just now. I am on a motor car with a friend, and we are stopping a few days in your neighbourhood. I heard of your difficulties, as I think I mentioned at your meeting, and saw my opportunity for indulging in my hobby. When I am at home I am a very busy man, Mr. Barlow. I am sub-agent to Lord Atherthy." "Indeed, sir, indeed," said Mr. Barlow, with considerable relief and a palpable increase of respect. "And I'm sure it is very kind of you. We are as a parish immensely indebted to you; at least, ahem, we shall be when---" "When I find the water, eh? Well, I am not content with this place. I am rested now; I think we'll go on.--You, young man," addressing Geo, "can come alongside if you like, but not too near. Keep, like Mr. Barlow, a few paces behind me." So once more the procession moved on, and the dowser, after walking perhaps some hundred yards away from the place where he professed to have discovered a spring, took up his rod in his accustomed way and strode on. CHAPTER V. OLD JIMMY'S SCRUPLES In the meantime the vicar had eaten a hurried luncheon of bread and cheese in the master's room, and leaving the Union walked quickly down to the church. He had barely time to put on his surplus and stole when the mournful procession came in sight; and with a sad heart he went to meet it, reading, of course, as he went the opening sentences of our beautiful burial service for two more victims of the epidemic--a young girl and a child from Gravel-pit Lane. After the service, when he once more emerged from the vestry, he was followed by the old man in whose person were embodied the three offices of verger, sexton, and clerk--"Jimmy the clerk," as the parish dubbed him. If anybody had asked me to point out a few of the "characters" which are to be found in every village as well as in Willowton, I think, without hesitation, I should have begun with Jimmy Greenacre. I do not know if I shall be able to show you dear old Jimmy just as I saw him, because his quaintness was a great deal made up of a whimsical twist of his funny old face, a touch of humour in the turn of his sentences, and an absurd habit of gabbling his information like an eager child who has been given a few minutes only to say his say--a habit partly the result of having only three or four teeth left in his head, and partly from a laudable desire to use the best and most appropriate words in conversation with those he was pleased to look upon as his betters. In person he was rather inclined to be tall, spare, and sinewy; his hair was thick, and still dark in spite of his seventy-three years; and being an economical gentleman, he was not as intimately acquainted with the barber as the vicar would have liked, but his rugged-lined old face was clean shaven, and tanned to a deep mahogany. He walked with the slow, rather shuffling gait of the agricultural labourer, and stooped a little from the shoulders with the stoop that comes of hard work in early youth. Jimmy had been born and bred in Willowton, and he was destined to die there. In his humble way he was a perfect walking De Brett: he knew the family history of every man, woman, and child in the place, and that of their forebears for the last two generations or more--some people said his memory was far too good! But if they had only known it, they themselves had benefited oftentimes by that same memory. To the vicar he was invaluable. The late incumbent had died very suddenly, and his wife had followed him within a few days. They had no children, and but for old Jimmy, Mr. Rutland would have had to find out everything for himself. But Jimmy knew the ropes, and taught the new vicar to put his hands on them. "Jimmy is as good as a curate to me any day!" the vicar would say with a kindly hand on the old man's shoulder when he introduced him to any of his friends; and old Jimmy would slip away with a pleased chuckle and a modest, "No, no, master; but I does my best, and a carn't due no more--so I carn't." Nor could he. It was due to this passion for genealogies on the part of the old man that he took such a lively interest in Geo Lummis, the "laziest booy," as he termed him in his own mind, in Willowton. "That there chap harn't got a chance, that he harn't," he would tell the vicar. "His fayther was jist sich another, and his grandfa' afore him--poochin', good-fur-noethin's booth on 'em! messin' about all day a' the bridge, and creepin' out a' nights after the trout--ticklin' of 'em, yer mind, and layin' abed the best o' ther mornin' afterwards. This here booy--why, Mr. Morse, he took a likin' tew 'um, and had 'um up here teachin' of 'um all manner a' things. He set 'im tew a trade along av a carpenter in Walden; but he was sune back agen, an' dun no good at all! And here he be, herdin' along a' that scum Corkam, and talkin' all manner a' rubbidge along a' him. His mother's ter blame, I say. She knew well enow how it was with her husband, and here's she a-lettin' a' the booy go th' same way. But there, what can yew expect a' her when yew cum to recollect that her mother, Mary Anne, was--" But when Jimmy went into the next generation the vicar was apt to interrupt him, for he was an impetuous, hasty young man, and not so good a listener as the old man would have wished him to be. But on this occasion Jimmy's words commanded attention. "Look yew there sir!" he exclaimed in a hollow tone, grasping the vicar's arm, and pointing with a gnarled old finger that shook partly from age and partly from excitement--"look you there, sir! There go Mosus to strike th' rock. 'Must we find you water?' he say; and yer know what happened tew 'um, yer know, and so dew he--well!" and Jimmy threw out both hands with a gesture that implied that he, at least, would have no traffic with such evil doings. Mr. Wilman and his following had just come over the common, and were bearing down again on the village, and the vicar was all eagerness to join them. It was tiresome of Jimmy to detain him just now, and Jimmy was as difficult to shake off as a terrier with a rat. "You'll be thankful enough to drink the clear water when we get it, I'll be bound. And as for the means, it isn't for you or me either to criticise Mr. Wilman. God has given him apparently an unusual gift, and he is going to use it for our good. Be off with you and cut the grass, you old goose." "Cut the grass! He, he!" This was a little joke between the vicar and the clerk, and Jimmy never failed to laugh at the sarcasm (it had been so long since there had been a blade of grass to cut). "Well, well, let his punishment fall on his own hid!" said Jimmy piously. "Jimmy," said the vicar, quite seriously this time, "if I wasn't a parson, I should tell you you're a regular old fool. There's a proverb somewhere (you won't find it in the Bible, so don't think you've caught me tripping) that says, 'God helps those who help themselves;' and do you honestly tell me that if we kneel down every Sunday and pray for rain, and don't accept every chance of getting good water that God puts in our way, that He will pay any heed to us? Must we have it in our own special way, or not at all? Jimmy, Jimmy, your argument won't hold water; you'd better come with me and see how it's done." But Jimmy scorned the suggestion, and went off mumbling about judgements to come, and doers of iniquities, and witches, and soothsayers, till he had grumbled himself out of the churchyard and up the lane till he reached his own door. He found the house empty. Milly had been smitten with the quest, and had gone out to the dowser. Jimmy could hardly believe his ears when the next door neighbour--a lame woman who "would have gone on her own account if she could," as she stoutly protested when Jimmy lifted up his voice in a gabble of invective--informed him that Milly had asked her to see to the kettle, and the cake in the oven, while she went off to see the water found. "And small blame, too! Who wouldn't see a miracle when they could in these days when nothing happened that---" "There's no miracle at all about it," grumbled Jimmy, turning round and arguing the other way when he found himself worsted. "Well, then, I don't see that you have no call to make such a to-due about it. If that be so as you say jest ordinary tappin', there can't be no witchcraft nor Satan's work about it. Bless me, if I'd a got your legs I'd have been there long ago." And so it happened that before many minutes were over Jimmy's curiosity had overcome his scruples, and he became one of the fast-increasing crowd. CHAPTER VI. PUBLIC OPINION ON THE BRIDGE The sun was setting, and the long shadows were slanting into the tired faces of the crowd, before the dowser considered he had satisfactorily accomplished his self-imposed task. He had made his circuit of the village, and come back again to the common. He had found and marked three springs: two were, he said, at a considerable depth, some hundred or more feet below the surface; and one, the most conveniently-placed for those who were to benefit by it, was on the edge of the common, perhaps three or four hundred yards from the church. When he and his following returned after their long and successful quest, they found motor car standing at the Wild Swan, puffing and snorting in the impatient way that motors do. The driver, who was most unmistakably out of patience, called out to him to hurry, or "they would not get to Ipswich that night;" and after a brief adieu to Mr. Barlow, and a comprehensive word to the assemblage, he climbed into the car and disappeared in a cloud of dust. Willowton metaphorically rubbed its eyes. It was like a dream. This morning they were to die for want of water; this evening it appeared there was "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink." When the last sound of the departing motor's horn had died away Geo Lummis joined his cronies on the bridge. "Well," said Corkam, in his rancorous voice, "of all the tomfoolery I ever seed in my life, I never seed anything to ekal this! Do yew mean ter tell me as that old bloke with a piece a' stick can find out where the water is, a hundred feet under the earth? Well, if yew think I'm goin' ter believe _that_, why you're greater fules nor I took yer for." "He, he, he!" laughed the cripple admiringly. "He knaw a thing or tew, due Mr. Corkham." "Well," said Corkam, swelling with importance, "if I di'n't I ought ter, for I've been twice ter 'Meriky, and that's moor nor the rest of yer hev." This argument was unanswerable, for nobody else certainly had crossed the Atlantic, or had, for the matter of that, ever experienced the slightest desire to do so; but still, to have been a traveller gives one importance in one's native village, and Corkam never let the American experience be forgotten. There was a tradition that an impudent boy, with an inquiring mind, had once asked him how long he had been there; and there _were_ people in the upper walks of life in Willowton who had expressed an opinion that he had gone over as a stoker in one of the "Cunarders," but had never done more than set his foot on the soil of the other hemisphere. But the fate of the indiscreet boy, whose ears had tingled for some time after his awkward question, had successfully deterred others from indulging in any undue thirst for information on that point, and Corkam was popularly supposed to be a mine of knowledge. It was, therefore, distinctly disappointing to find that the afternoon's excitement was to go for nothing, and that they were, so to speak, "no forrader" than they were before. There was soon quite a little crowd round the "traveller," who was airing his opinions freely, and consequently enjoying himself exceedingly. "And if he hev found water," he was saying--"s'posin', as we'll say, s'posin' there _is_ water where he say--why, he didn't find that for nothin'. Bah! _I_ knaw better'n that. He knaw wot he's about, does that gen'lm; he'll be round here in a month or two, I'll lay a soverin', arstin' for yer wotes for the next election! I knaw 'em; they're all alike--doctors, parsons, jowsers--they don't do anythin' for nothin'. Mark my words, he'll git suffin' out on yer before long. I knaw 'em, an' I ought'er, I'm shore, for ha'int I've bin te 'Meriky?" How long this harangue might have continued one cannot tell, but an interruption was cased by the arrival on the scene of the doctor in his high dog-cart. He pulled up on the bridge and addressed the crowd. "This seems to be a good opportunity of speaking to you, my men, on the subject which will be discussed in the schoolroom to-morrow at dinner-time. Three springs of water are said to have been discovered, and it has been decided to sink wells, if possible, in all three places; and also to clear out those wells which already exist, with a hope that when the rain _does_ come, and the springs begin to work again, the water may be purer and more fit to drink. The wells must be dug at once, the funds must be raised somehow or other; we can't stop to consider how at this moment, for it is a matter, as you all know, of life and death. What we propose to ask of you is to come forward with offers of help. The farmers have kindly consented to spare those of their men who know anything about well-sinking. I am about to send telegrams to several well-known men to come to our assistance, and I now ask you to think the matter over this evening, and those men who are willing to offer their services will, I hope, come in person to the meeting at one o'clock to-morrow, when a selection will be made by a committee, which will be formed this evening. I should like to add that the question of wages will be also settled, and that the vicar and I will be responsible for their prompt payment. All we ask of you is your hearty co-operation in what is for the good of the whole parish." "Hear, hear!" shouted a few voices in the crowd, who, for the most part, received the intimation with sullen silence and imperturbability of countenance. Corkam's words had done their work, and Willowton had veered round again and become incredulous. The doctor drove off, first to call at a fever-smitten house at the extreme end of the village, and then to beat up a committee of influential men for the meeting next day. "Responsible fur the wages, indeed!" sneered Corkam. "I'd like ter know where they're agoin' ter git th'money from! They'll borrer it, I s'pose, and make a good thing out of it. Never fear, yer don't blind _me;_ _I_ know 'em!" "Well," said a man who had hitherto preserved a stony silence, "th' wells have got to be dug somehow, and I don't see what call anybody hev ter bother about where th' money come from so that's good money, and that they come by it honest. I know sumthin' about well-diggin', and I shall go if they'll hev me." "And so'll I, Martin, if yue due," said Tom Chapman, who stood beside him. "I don't know nothin' about it; but I know that's dangerous work, and is well paid, and I can work under yur and due my best." "That you can, booy," said the other man, clapping him on the back, "an' a better mate I don't never want te see." After a little more desultory talk the crowd separated, and they all went home to their evening meal, and to talk the matter over with their wives. CHAPTER VII. TOM CHAPMAN "TAKES ON" AT THE WELL When Tom Chapman opened his door a sight met him that was not a grateful one to a tired man, and would have put most men into a rage, but Tom didn't seem to mind much. He picked his way cheerfully along over all manner of things, picking up a crowing infant as he went that was rolled up in a shawl under the table. "The only safe place in the room!" his wife said. A cry of joy greeted daddy's entrance, and half a dozen grubby little arms encircled his corduroy legs. His wife, with her hair all over her face, looked up from the couch where she was sitting, with the half-dressed youngster jumping about on her knees. "What a mess!" was all Tom said. "So it is Tom dear," said his wife cheerily; "but that'll be all clear in no time.--Off with you, childer." And in a trice all the elder ones were scampering upstairs, laughing with glee, and carrying the greater part of their garments, of which they had already divested themselves, with them. "Go you, Polly," she said to a girl of perhaps eleven years old, "and tuck 'em all up--there's a dear." Polly vanished after the rest. Her mother floundered about collecting oddments for a few minutes, talking volubly all the time, and giving her husband an amusing and graphic description of the dowser's appearance in Gravel-pit Lane. Tom dangled the baby as he listened, and swallowed his impatience as best he could, for there were no signs of supper. Annie was incorrigible, he knew, and he often felt he ought to make a stand against so much untidiness and unpunctuality; but Annie always disarmed him. Worn and weary, tired or ill, she always had a smile for him, and then she had one great and very rare virtue--she _never made_ excuses. She never either denied her faults or tried to explain them away. Tom, like the vicar, sometimes wished she did, for it would have given _him_ an excuse for scolding her; but she never did, and so he learned to put up with it all. And she had also another rare and excellent gift--she could control the children. She never "smacked" or scolded them, and she never nagged at them; but when she told them to do anything, somehow or other, sooner or later--sometimes, certainly, a little "later"--they always obeyed, and that without coercion. In a few minutes there was quiet overhead, for the children were saying their prayers, and Tom sat down to the table, and ate heartily of some very good boiled bacon and a mess of cold beans, washed down with a couple of glasses of fromerty, a drink he had enjoyed a few years before in the hayfield and having asked and learned how it was made, had passed his knowledge on to Annie, who was always quick at anything in the way of cooking, and eager to add to her store of knowledge in that line, to her husband's lasting joy and her own comfort. "Annie," he said, when he had finished and she had rocked the baby to sleep, "I've took on as a well hand--leastways I've said I will work with Martin, and I shall go and offer myself to-morrow at the meetin'." Annie's face fell. "O Tom, I wish you wouldn't. That's such terrible dangerous work, and what ever shall I do if yew get hurt?" "No more dangerous than many other things. That's good pay, and some one must do it. There'll be a rare job to find the men for three wells, to be dug at once the doctor say." "Three wells at once! well, that is a job! Which'll yew be at, I wonder? P'raps they'll set yew on the one atop a th' lane. That 'ud be nice and handy, and yew could run in for yer dinner. And what'll they giv yew a day due yew think, Tom? "I'm sure I don't know. Not less than three bob, I'm thinking, and p'raps more when we git down deep." "Three shillin's a day; why, that's eighteen shillin's a week, and us only gettin' twelve! Why, we'll sune grow rich like that, Tom!" Chapman laughed. There is not much wealth even on eighteen shillings for a family of ten! But the more the merrier, he said, when his friends commiserated him for having so many mouths to fee. "Have you seen th' booy Tommy since th' mornin'?" asked Annie. "No," he said; "I've bin after that dowser since I giv up work. He's all right up there. I allus said that was th' right place for 'm, though you was so set on keepin' him here." "'Twasn't so much that as he wouldn't go, poor booy. He did beg me that hard not to send him away, I hadn't the heart to; and he'd 'a bin here now if Mr. Rutland hadn't come and carried him away in his own arms. And I'm thankful enough now that I let him go, for they let me go up and see him this tea-time, and he was a-lyin' there so comfortable, with plenty a' coolin' drink by his side, and Mrs. Davies lookin' after him a lot better than I could," said Annie with a sigh; but somehow she was learning to recognize her own shortcomings, and realizing how unsuitable a place her cottage was for illness. "And he say to me, 'Mother,' he say, 'I do very well here; don't you take on about me'--for I couldn't help feelin' a bit bad a-leavin' of him there, in spite of all I see of the comfort round him. O Tom, the booards was that clean and the room that sweet!" "Yis, I know," said Tom sympathetically; "and let's hope, now he's away, poor boy, the others will escape the fever. Anyways, the first thing to do is to git pure water, and I've set my mind on that, Annie gal; so don't yew try to put me off th' job." "No--o, I won't," said Annie, as cheerfully as she could; but she didn't really like it, all the same, though the eighteen shillings a week dazzled her eyes. The next morning Chapman and his mate and some half-dozen other men presented themselves at the meeting, and were taken on at the wells. Four of them were sent to the one by the railway station nearest the village, three were employed to empty one of the infected wells, and our two friends, Chapman and Martin, were sent with a couple of men, who had come out from Ipswich, to start the one over the spring the dowser had marked on the edge of the common, between the churchyard and Gravel-pit Lane, just as Annie had hoped. The well-sinking committee, composed of the vicar, the doctor, the squire's agent Mr. Jones, Mr. Barlow, and three of the principal tradesmen in Willowton, lost no time in setting to work that afternoon. Boxer, the largest carpenter in the place, got an order for two cylinders or zones, to be made of the strongest oak planks, and well clamped, in the fashion of a barrel. These cylinders, which were, of course, circular, were about three feet in height, and measured about seven feet in diameter. They were made with an overhanging edge to hold and retain in their places the bricks that were to weight them as they sank into the soil; and a supply of sharp new spades and picks was sent to each well-side by the village ironmonger. Apparently every one was going to reap some benefit from this new scheme, and the prospect of good water, even to the most sceptical, could not fail to be popular. Before the evening was out collecting boxes "For the New Wells" had been put in conspicuous places on the counters of each of the shops, and a large one was fastened on to the church door. There was one placed in a prominent position at the post-office, and old Jimmy tramped off to the station with the doctor's compliments to the stationmaster, and "would he put one in the waiting-room?" Of course the stationmaster was agreeable to this, and Jimmy had the satisfaction of seeing the box he brought hung on a nail near the ticket-collector's window, and of hearing the chink of the station-master's own contribution, and the promise from each of the two porters of all the money they would get in tips for the next three days. "Not that that'll count for much," one of them remarked, with a wink at the old man that caused him to chuckle audibly, "'cos you know, master, we be'an't allowed to take no money." Willowton was not a crowded junction, but only a little ordinary station on the line; yet somehow or other, between them those porters put nearly two shillings into the box. For the next few days, whenever the vicar or the doctor showed himself in the village, he was sure to be stopped and asked for a collecting-card, and before the end of the week there were thirty-six cards at work in Willowton. Some wag suggested that there should be one on the bridge, and that Corkam or Farley should hang it round his neck with a suitable inscription, because they were certain to be always on the spot! But Corkam scowled so at the proposition that what might have really been a most excellent plan was never carried out: for the bridge, as I said before, was the central point of the little town, and few people but passed over it some time in the day; consequently quite good sum might have been collected if anybody had taken charge of a box. Corkam apparently did all the good works he ever meant to accomplish in America, and Farley dared not undertake to collect without his approval. CHAPTER VIII. A NEIGHBOURLY ACTION It was a week after the finding of the water, and Mildred Greenacre was in the little orchard at the back of the cottage. There was a sickly smell in the air of dying May flowers; the parched blossoms fell fast on her head as she stooped over the nearly dried-up stream to fill her water-can. A half-starved looking billy-goat rubbed its horned head coaxingly against her and bleated piteously. It was trying its best to tell her that there was no nourishment in the burned-up grass, which was all it had to live on. Milly was paying very little attention to the poor animal's complaint, for she was kneeling on the bank, holding on to a thorn bush with one hand, while she vainly strove to reach the sunken water with the other. She made a pretty picture in the broad sunlight, and it was not lost upon the "laziest chap in th' place," as he sat idly balancing himself on a gate opening into the field on the other side of the water. For some time, unseen himself, he watched the girl's fruitless endeavours, and then he suddenly lifted up his voice and shouted, so that she started and almost dropped her can. "Hold hard, and I'll help yer!" Milly rose from her stooping position, and looked round to see where the voice came from. Geo came slowly towards her. He came slowly, because it never occurred to him to hurry! If ever he had experienced an impulse to hasten his steps, it was at this moment. "I'll fill yer can," he said laconically, and without raising his eyes to the pretty, flushed face across the stream. "But you can't," said Milly; "you're the wrong side, you see." "I on't be there long, then," replied Geo, measuring the distance with his eye. "Yew git out a' the way, and I'll soon be alongside a' yew." "You're never going to jump?" began Milly, with round eyes of surprise. As she moved aside, but before the sentence was finished, Geo had sprung across. It was not much of a jump--nine feet or so--but Geo had not attempted anything so athletic for many a long day, and it was not surprising that he landed somewhat ungracefully on all fours, and was rather breathless when he picked himself up, only to sit down again very promptly and wipe his brow with a blue-and-white handkerchief. Milly stood looking at him with surprise. "Have you hurt yourself?" she ventured, after a minute. "No, no, thank ye, only a bit shook; the ground is hard." "That it is," said Milly--"like iron. If only the rain would come, what a good job that would be!" "That would indeed! But we've got water to drink at last--leastways we shall have when the wells are dug." "How are they getting on with them?" asked Milly, forgetful of her morning's work for the moment. "Well, the one on the common is gettin' on fairly well. They've got down about fifty feet; but that's 'mazin' hard work, as you can see." [Illustration: "Nurse cast a satisfied glance round"] "And the other, the one by the railway? I haven't been round there these three days, and my grandfather, he won't have nothin' to say to it." Milly smiled as she said this, and an answering smile showed itself on Geo's broad face. "No, so I heard say. He's an old-fashioned old gentleman, he is. He don't go with th' times no-how, do 'ee?" "That he don't," said Milly. "You should hear him goin' on about it!" "Well," said Geo, rising slowly from his recumbent position and taking the can from the girl's hand, "that's a rum job altogether. Them at the bridge can't make nothin' of it, and no more---" "Why do you go with them at the bridge at all?" broke in Milly impatiently. "Who cares what they say or what they don't say, I should like to know?" very haughtily. "Give me my can, please; I can get it myself!" Geo stared at her, at a loss to account for the sudden change in he look and manner. A minute ago she was evidently inclined to be friendly, but now she was equally evidently inclined to be extremely annoyed with him. Geo gave vent to his feelings in a low, long whistle. Milly blushed crimson. "I beg your pardon," she said; "I oughtn't to have said it. That's no business of mine whether you loaf all day on the bridge not. But I have my work to do, and I mustn't loiter here no more, or I shall have grandfather after me." Geo stood quietly by while she made this rather long speech, and was surprised to feel that he did not quite like it. He was inclined to think he liked it better when she flashed out her contempt for his idleness. But being a man of few words, and not much felicity of expression, he merely muttered something unintelligible, and leaning over the bank filled her can. "I'll car' it for you if you're agreeable," he said shamefacedly, and the two moved together towards the cottage. "Thank you kindly," Milly said gently when they reached the door; but she did not ask him to step in, and he turned away awkwardly enough, wishing he had the courage to tell the girl he had not spoken to three time in his life since they were at school together that he was tired of his companions on the bridge, and would gladly change his habits if only she would be friends with him. With a gruff "You're welcome, I'm sure," he slouched off towards the village. As he turned out of the lane by the bridge, Corkam caught sight of him, and called after him,--- "Geo, come here, buoy! What are you arter, slinking away like that? Why, that nigh on time for a pint!" But Geo, for once in his life, turned the other way, and sauntered up the road to the new well by the railway. The men had given up work for a spell, and were sitting in the shadiest spot they could find eating their "'levenses." Geo lay down under the fence with them. "If I'd ha' known what a job this 'oud ha' bin," said one man, "blow me if I'd ha' took it on." "Hard work, is it?" said Geo pleasantly. "Ay, hard work indeed--harder work nor you iver did a' your born days, I'll lay a sovr'in'." For the first time since Geo didn't know when, he felt a twinge of shame at these rough words, and his eyes fell on his own hands, fine, strong, well-shaped, capable hands, tanned with sun and wind, but not hardened with toil like the other men's. A big, good-natured looking man, who had just swallowed a good draught of home-made "small beer," spoke suddenly, as if he had divined the other's thoughts. "They look as if they cold do a day's work as well as mine," he said, holding out a pair of rough, strong limbs, with sinews like those of Longfellow's village blacksmith, and muscles standing out, hard and healthy, as a working man's should be. "Let me feel your muscles, buoy." He gripped Geo's arm as he spoke. "Pulp!" he ejaculated, not ill-naturedly, however--"pulp! How come they like that? Have you had th' fever, buoy!" "Mighty little fever about him," said the man who had spoken first. "That's want a' work wot's the matter a' him! _He_ never had a wet jacket a' his life! He's too much a' th' gentleman, is Mr. George Lummis, and so was his father before 'im--like father, like son. He was a precious sight too grand to keep his own wife when he was alive, and niver did na more nor trap a rabbit when there worn't nothin' to eat in th' house." "You lie!" said George, with sudden anger leaping up in his face, and standing with blazing eyes staring at the sneering workman. "Say what you like about me, but you leave my father alone, or I'll know what for." "Hullo, hullo!" said the good-natured man, who was a stranger, and had no idea of raising such a storm when he remarked on Geo's very apparent strength of frame. "Hullo! stow that; that a sight too hot for quarrelling. We'll ha' to go to work again in twenty minutes, and tha would be a good lot more pleasant to have a whiff a' bacca than commin' to fisticuffs a' this heat. Sit down, young man, and don't be a fule." But Geo was much to irate to follow this obviously good advice. Without appearing to notice the stranger's words, he strolled off with as unconcerned an air as he could to the bridge. His possible good resolutions had all faded away, swallowed up in the blow his vanity had received, and a few minutes later he had joined his friends Farley and Corkam in their far less harmless "'levenses" at the inn. Here he regaled them with an account of his passage of arms with the stranger, and received their sympathy and strongly-expressed advice to do as he pleased, "and be hanged to them!" There might be a late "haysel," and he might get taken on for the time, and put a few pounds in his pocket to tide him over till harvest. So when Milly passed over the bridge at about one o'clock with her grandfather's dinner, which she was taking to him where he was at work to save him the hot walk home and back, she saw Geo with a flushed face and bravado air leaning against the bridge, with his familiar pals on either side. Milly saw, but she took no notice, and passed with her head in the air and an angry spot on either cheek. The girl was furious with herself for having taken an interest, even a momentary one, in such a worthless, good-for-nothing as Geo, and still more annoyed to think that she had let him see it. "That's a tidy maid," said the cripple, with the air of a critic, as she passed, and both men were surprised at Geo's answer. "What's that to you?" said Geo, in a sullen tone; and he crossed over, and became apparently completely engrossed in watching for a trout under a stone. CHAPTER IX. NURSE BLUNT ARRIVES The last days of May were over, and June was here, but since the visit of the dowser there had fallen no drop of rain. The fever was in no-ways abated. There had been several more deaths and several new cases; another young Chapman was down with it; the isolation hospital was full, and a fierce battle was going on among the guardians as to the expediency of admitting sick people into the Union Infirmary. In the meantime, by a subscription raised by the well-to-do in the parish, the services of a trained nurse had been secured, and old Jimmy had been asked to give her a lodging. Everybody knew how clean and neat Milly kept everything, and it was unanimously agreed at the meeting, which had been hastily summoned, that the nurse would be as comfortable there as anywhere else in the village. Old Jimmy at first demurred, on account his granddaughter; but Milly herself soon argued him out of his objections. "The fever is in the air, grandfather," she said. "I take all ordinary precautions against it. I boil and filter every drop of water we drink, and I never let anything dirty lie about anywhere, and am as particular as can be about every morsel of food we eat, and I don't see as I can do no more. If I'm to catch it I shall, but not from the nurse, I know, unless she takes it herself; for this typhoid is not like scarlet fever or smallpox--you can't carry it about in your clothes, but only take it immediate one from another. I'm not afraid of the nurse if you're not." So Jimmy gave in, and one hot evening the nurse arrived. Mrs. Crowe, the vicar's housekeeper, met her at the station, and brought her to her new quarters. The white dust lay thick on the road, and the hedges all along were choked with it. A porter from the station followed with her box on a barrow. A most formidable box it was. It quite frightened Milly when she saw it. She thought she must be having a very grand lady to stay with her. But the nurse soon explained that it was simply filled with linen. "I've brought enough to last me a month or two," she said, "and my aprons weigh so heavy; but if we can't get it up your stairs, why, we can just unpack it in the parlour and carry the things up in our arms. You need not worry about that." Milly had set out a cosy tea in the little front room that opened into the garden--some nice home-made bread (for Milly always did her own baking), some butter and blackberry jam, and a boiled egg and some toast--in case the traveller was hungry after her hot journey. The tea was in a brown earthenware pot--which, as everybody is not fortunate enough to know, makes the very best tea in the world--and the cloth was spotless, and the knives and spoons well polished. Nurse cast a satisfied glance round before she followed Milly to the little bedroom upstairs. She had had plenty of experience, and she knew the signs of good housekeeping almost at a glance. There was no carpet in the room, but the flooring was exquisitely clean; some white curtains of a material that Milly's grandmother, who had made them and hung up forty years ago, had called "dimity;" the little wooden bedstead stood a little out from the wall, and the sheets and pillow-cases were as white as careful washing could make them. A rush-bottomed chair and a little table, with the necessary washing apparatus, completed the furniture. A jug of hot water stood in the basin, and a pair of clean towels and a fresh piece of brown Windsor soap looked inviting. Nurse sat down and removed her bonnet, opened her little black hand-bag, and took out a sponge and a brush and comb; and Milly, with a pleasant "hope she found all to her liking," slipped away to make the tea. She had asked Mrs. Crowe to stay and have a cup with them, for she was, not unnaturally, a little shy of her new lodger. It was her first experience of having any one but her grandfather to look after, and she felt a little anxious. As soon as tea was over Milly put a note into the nurse's hands. It had been left there, she said, by the doctor, who would be much obliged, did not nurse feel too tired, if she would come to him in the cool of the evening, and he would explain her duties to her. The conversation naturally turned on the prevailing topic of the typhoid epidemic. Nurse, who had been a couple of years in a London hospital, had had a good deal of experience of this fever, and she told her listeners many interesting things which were useful for them to know just then. She was a pleasant-faced, kind-looking woman of about forty years of age, with a slightly dictatorial manner, which was perhaps the result of her training; for she had worked for several years as parish nurse in poor districts, and often, as she told them, met with terrible ignorance, and that obstinacy which so often accompanies it. People _would_ not believe in infection, she said; they would not take the most ordinary, the most simple precautions; and what was worse, when they had learned by the bitter experience of the loss of, perhaps, their nearest and their dearest, they still persisted in the utter disregard of cleanliness and health. "And that, no doubt, is the secret of this outbreak at Willowton. I have not been told so, but I take that for granted," said the nurse. "Well, nurse, I should hardly like to go so far as that," said the vicar's housekeeper, standing up as far as her conscience allowed for her native place; "but there is a great deal of that too. But our chief trouble is the water. Nearly all the wells in the place are condemned by the sanitary inspectors, and we really don't know where to get water fit to drink." "Dear me, that is bad!" said nurse. "What are your landlords about? Why isn't something done?" "Oh, dear me, it's no fault of the landlords," said Mrs. Crowe, rather warmly. "It is one gentleman owns the whole place, but he has been out at the war the last two years, and his agent has been doing his best, but up to within the last fortnight there had been no possibility of finding any water. And most of the springs have gone dry." "You say 'up to the last fortnight,' Mrs. Crowe. Do I understand that you have had some water found since then?" "Well, yes; at least so we hope and trust there will be when the wells are dug." And then she proceeded to give nurse a full and highly-coloured description of the "miracle," as some of the people persisted in calling it. "Oh yes, I have heard of dowsers," said nurse. "It's a wonderful thing, and a good many people don't believe in it. But seeing is believing, and from what you say I hope we shall soon see a proof of the power. But we are lingering too long over our tea and chat. I must go up to the doctor's house, for he evidently wants to see me this evening, and I won't waste any more time. Perhaps one of you will show me the way!" "I will," said Mrs. Crowe. "Indeed, it is time I was home too; the vicar will be in and wanting his supper." So the two women went off together, and Milly was left to clear up the tea-things and get a meal ready, for her grandfather would not be in, he told her, till eight o'clock. CHAPTER X. ANOTHER FEVER VICTIM The account the doctor gave Nurse Blunt of the deplorable state of the sickness in Willowton would have made a weaker woman quail, but Nurse Blunt was strong in body and mind. "I mayn't sit up night, sir, as you know," she said, "but I'll do my best all day; and I'll begin at six o'clock to-morrow morning if you'll give me list of the most urgent cases." The doctor took out his pocket-book. "Four cases in Gravel-pit Lane," he read, "two in the main street, three in the back alley. None of these are particularly dangerous ones, but they all require great care, as you know, and the difficulty is to prevent their relations feeding them with forbidden things." "I know that well, sir," said the nurse sorrowfully; "I've had a great many sad experiences of that. Many a poor thing has died through being given solid food at a time when nothing but milk should have been allowed." "Yes," assented the doctor, "of course, it is as you say; and it has been the cause of death to several of our people. I cannot make them see the necessity for following my orders implicitly; they think it does not matter, or I won't find out. Well, perhaps I don't, but nature does, and we soon see the result." "Where shall I go first?" asked nurse. "Well, there is a new case declared only this afternoon--a Mrs. Lummis, a nice woman, a widow. She has no one really to look after her but a lazy ne'er-do-weel of a son. Perhaps you had better go there first. She will not keep you long. Everything will be neat; and though very poor, I fancy she knows what ought to be. If wanted, I'll give you an order for milk. Major Bailey has telegraphed from South Africa that his dairy (and he keeps a lot of cows) is at our disposal. You'd better tell her son he must go for it every morning." He wrote out an order as he spoke. "The others have all got them," he continued. And after receiving a few more important directions, the nurse took her leave and strolled back through the village to her lodgings. Milly and her grandfather were still up when she got back, though they usually "turned in" earlier. Milly, of course, waited to hear whether her lodger wanted anything before she retired for the night. "Nothing, thank you," she said in answer to her inquiries; "but if you'll let me have breakfast at eight o'clock I should be glad. And perhaps you can tell me which of these places comes first. I like to take my patients as they come; it saves time and trouble, and they get to know when to expect me." She handed Milly the doctor's paper, and Milly explained. Nurse took out a pencil and made some notes on the margin. "Oh! and then there's Mrs. Lummis," she said. "I am to go there first. Where does she live?" "Mrs. Lummis!" echoed Milly with surprise. "Is she ill?" "So the doctor says. And it appears she has no one to look after her but a good-for-nothing son. Poor woman! I'm sorry for her, for I shan't be able to give her much of my time with a list like this!" Milly would have liked to say something in defence of George Lummis, for she had, or fancied she had, seen something of another side of his character when he had jumped across the stream and stood beside her so meekly while she spoke to him about his wasting his time on the bridge. She had fancied there was something rather fine about him, he had looked so strong and honest and capable for the moment; but then a little later how different had been his appearance! The remembrance of that kept her quiet; she had nothing to say. Old Jimmy woke up just in time to hear nurse's remark. "Yes," he said, "a good-fur-northin', idlin' young fule." And if Milly had not stopped him with a timely reminder that it was nearly half-past nine, he would have plunged into the history of all poor Geo's antecedents for several generations. As it was, nurse was not particularly interested, and backed up Milly's suggestion that it was high time all good people went to bed. In the meantime, in the little house on the hill that lazy, idle good-for-nothing was making ready for the night. He pulled down the little blind over the open window, and set a jug of milk and water with a glass by his mother's bedside, and smoothed the sheet over her hot and tossing limbs. "You just sing out, mother, if you want anything," he said, speaking in a comfortable, low-toned voice that did not jar on her aching nerves. "Or if you can't sleep. I'll come and set by you. I'd like to do that now if you'd let me." "No, no, Geo my boy, that I won't; I'm quite comfortable as far as that goes. If it wasn't for the heat, maybe I'd get some sleep myself. You go to bed now, and when you wake come in and see after me. I'll call you sure enough if I want you." So Geo came away, and throwing himself on his bed was soon sound asleep. In the house next door a girl was ill. Mrs. Lummis had been helping to nurse her. If only she could be left, her mother would come and see after her, she well knew; for the poor are always at their best in times of illness, and the way they help each other is a pattern to those above them. But the girl was very bad indeed, not likely to recover, and Mrs. Lummis could not look for help from the nearly worn-out mother. It was a comfort that Geo seemed to be so handy. She was lucky, she thought, to have such a son; but she felt anxious, knowing that her illness was likely to be a long one. She knew not of the likelihood of the nurse coming to her. Like everybody else in the village, she knew of her advent, but nobody had told her she had really come. If she had she would have passed a less miserable night, perhaps; for, of course, nothing was farther away from her than sleep. After all she had heard, nurse was rather surprised, when she knocked at the door about seven o'clock next morning, to find it opened to her by a pleasant, bright-faced young man, who looked as if he had just dipped his head into a tub of cold water, so fresh was his colour. "_You_ haven't been up all night, I'll be bound," she inwardly ejaculated; "but you look different from what I expected." "I am the new nurse," she said in answer to the astonishment that shot out of his blue eyes, "and the doctor has sent me to see after your mother. What sort of night has she had?" "Pretty bad," said Geo. "I was just gettin' th' kettle to boil, and thought I'd make her some tea." "Milk is better for her," said the nurse. "That's too early for milk yet," said Geo; "you can't get milk at the shop before eight o'clock." "Oh, well, I've got a ticket for you," and the nurse produced it out of her little black bag. "Why, that's for the Hall!" said Geo with surprise. "Yes, that's all right; the doctor sent it. You'd better take a can and go and fetch it at once. I'll see after your mother if you'll just take me to her." "But I think I'd better first let her know," said Geo, thinking this newcomer was taking rather too much on herself. Nurse read his thoughts and flushed a little. She was so full of the importance of her mission, so anxious to do her work thoroughly, that she sometimes forgot the little courtesies due to everybody, sick or well. "Certainly," she said, rather curtly. "I'll wait till you come down." George disappeared up the steep little staircase that led out of the sitting-room to the bedroom overhead. He was gone a few minutes, and when he came back he said his mother would be glad to see nurse if the doctor had sent her, and he showed her up. The sick woman, who looked thin and flushed with fever, looked half frightened at the nurse for a moment, and then began to cry. "Leave her to me," said nurse to Geo, who did not understand. "She'll be all right in a minute or two." So Geo went off in his usual leisurely way for the milk, and the nurse talked soothingly to the sick woman, took her temperature, which was very high, and gave her some fever medicine. "Are you going to do for her?" asked the nurse bluntly when Geo returned. "I s'pose so," answered Geo in the same way. "Well, I'll call in some time again this afternoon. You need not stop with her all day, but you must come in and out; and give her nothing but milk, but plenty of it. But can you be spared from your work? Oh," as Geo hesitated, "I forgot." Geo saw she had already heard about him. It was unnecessary to explain. "I'll due wot yue say," he said simply, opening the door and letting her out; and then he went back to his mother, who spoke gratefully of the nurse and seemed glad of her help. CHAPTER XI. THE STRIKE AT THE WELL One would have thought that so excellent a work as the digging of the wells would be allowed to go on quietly, but unfortunately the fact that the scheme happened to have been originated by the vicar and the doctor was enough to make some people condemn it; and we all know, when once the thin end of the wedge of discontent and distrust has forced its way into anything, how difficult--nay, how often impossible--it is to dislodge it. And so it was that the men at the railway well, when they had dug to the depth of nearly fifty feet and had found no water, began to get impatient and disheartened. Most of the wells in Willowton were not more than thirty or forty feet deep, and were fed, of course, chiefly by surface drainage; hence their deadly poison. These new wells were on the higher ground above the village, and naturally water was to be found there only at a deeper level; but these men either would not or could not take this in. Two of them had had very little experience whatever in the work, and like all novices, they looked for immediate results; and when these were not forthcoming, they grumbled at the dowser, their employers, and everything else. Their evil counsellors advised a strike for higher wages than the unprecedented amount they were already receiving, and so it happened that one hot morning, when the vicar went up to see how they were progressing, he found the well deserted, and no signs of the men anywhere. He walked up to it and looked in. It was partially covered with planks in the usual way, apparently just as they had left it the night before. He was puzzled. The men had apparently struck. But why? he asked himself. And nothing he could recall threw any light upon the matter. "That is the worst," he thought "of employing irregular workmen." But it had been impossible at such short notice to procure all professional well-sinkers, and he had thought himself very fortunate to have secured two, one for each well; while all the men, except Chapman, had seen the work going on at various farms in the neighbourhood, if they had not actually assisted. They were perfectly well aware of the nature of the work; they had volunteered for it, and gone at it cheerfully enough. The strike was altogether inexplicable. The vicar paid his visit to the Union, and an hour later came on to the bridge, where he saw all four men seated on the parapet, smoking, and talking loudly and ostentatiously, as if they wished to engage the attention of the passers-by. They were a rough-looking gang, however, and nobody seemed inclined to stop. Curiously enough, neither Corkam nor Farley was present. "Good-morning, my men," he said pleasantly when he got within speaking distance. "How is it you are not at work?" A sort of sullen silence had come over them at his approach. No one attempted to break it, but each looked covertly at the other for guidance--all except the stranger, who turned his back and became apparently deeply interested in the ducks on the water. "You're all here, aren't you? No accident, I hope?" said the vicar. "No accident as I know on," answered the foreman at last. He was a man who had been in the choir, but had left for some stupid reason or fancied slight, known only to himself. Mr. Rutland had been extremely kind to him always, and had helped him more than once with money when an accident during harvest had kept him out of work. "Well," said the vicar, turning very red with an evident effort to keep his temper, "since none of you have anything to say, I will wish you good-morning." "Well, but we have something to say," said another man roughly. This man had had three children down with the fever, and the doctor had given them every attention, even sitting up half the night on occasion when two of them had been in a very critical state. He had behaved very differently then from what he was doing now. He thrust his hands into his trousers pockets, and tried to look as callous as he could. The vicar looked at him for the eighth part of a second with disgust. "Well, then, Cadger, stand up and say it properly," he said authoritatively. The man slipped off the parapet, and stood looking very uncomfortable, for all his swagger, under the vicar's scrutiny. "Now, then," said the vicar sharply, "what is it? what is your complaint?" "We've struck," said two or three voices at once. The vicar never once glanced at the graceless creatures still dangling their legs, though less aggressively; he addressed himself to Cadger. "Oh, have you?" he said as calmly as he could. "What have you struck for?" "More wages," said Cadger, glancing at his comrades for directions. "Which you won't have," said the vicar quietly. He was quite calm now and very white. "You agreed for what was considered by yourselves, and by everybody else, a very generous wage. You have no right to ask more. I, for one, will certainly not advocate it. There is reason in all things, and money is not so plentiful in Willowton as you seem to think. I am disappointed in you, Cadger, particularly; I had thought better things of you. I fancied you, at least, were anxious to take your share in lessening the terrible trouble that has been put upon us; but I see now you only thought of your own interest. With my consent, I tell you honestly, you will not get a penny more." "He! he!" laughed one or two of the men; but the vicar never looked round. "But," he added, "I am only one. You can bring your complaint in proper form before the committee, and, of course, if the majority agree, what I say will not stand; so you have your remedy." He walked away as he finished speaking, and Cadger sat down again. He did not say anything, for somehow or other, though he felt very valiant at first, he began now to feel rather small. There was an uncomfortable silence for a few minutes, and then the stranger, whose name was Hayes, knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the root of a tree and spoke. "He don't look such a bad sort," he said reflectively. "I don't mind him so much," said Cadger patronizingly, "when he mind 'is own business." "Oh, indeed!" said the stranger with a twinkle. "Well, now, whatever is 'is business?" "Well, I s'pose that's te preach in th' church, and give the money tue th' poor, and wisit th' sick." "Yis. Well, go on; northin' more'n that?" "Well yis," went on the man, never seeing that Hayes was "pulling his leg:" "he've got ter due th' christenin', and th' marryin', and th' buryin'." "Well, that last ought ter give 'im plenty o' work in this hole," said Hayes rather brutally. "Well, go on. Anythin' more?" "Well, he've got ter see after the schule, an' the clothin' club, an' the parish room, an' sech like things." "And don't he take no trouble about the choir? Don't he have no Bible classes, nor confirmation classes, nor nothin'?" "Oh yis, hev them," Cadger allowed. "Well, then, there's them concerts, and trips to the seaside, and school treats you was tellin' me about the other day. Don't he have nothin' to do with them?" "Oh yis; he manages them, in coorse." "Oh, 'ndeed! Well, now, how about the cricket clubs and the football clubs?" "Oh, he's treasurer for them tue." "Well, then--I don't hold much with parsons myself, but I should like to know wat's _not_ his business!" "That's not 'is business to come interferin' wi' us," said the man who had laughed derisively. It was he who had insulted the memory of Geo's father. "Oh, ain't it? Well--- Don't be angry," as the man fired up; "I only ask for information. Who had the startin' o' these here wells?" Nobody seemed anxious to answer this question, and Hayes did it himself. "Why, the parson hisself, didn't he? And aren't he and the doctor answerable for the money? If any one has a right to say anything, I should think the parson has. But you're on the strike, and right or wrong you're in for it; but I don't mind tellin' of yer I ain't--I'm only one to four, and that's no good holdin' out. But I ain't one a' yer sneakin' sort; I ain't afeared ter speak out, no more'n th' parson, and I tell yer honest I hain't struck. I can't goo on by myself; but I've been a well-sinker all my days, and I know I niver had sech good pay offered to me before, and I'm content. If they don't give in, why, the well, I s'pose will have to be closed. But that don't matter to me; I can get plenty a' jobs at Ipswitch, an' I can go back where I come from, quite agreeable." He put his pipe back into his mouth when he had finished his harangue, and puffed away for some moments in silence; and then the storm broke. The other men were furious at his words. They called him by every opprobrious name they could think of. "All right," he said at last, leisurely pulling off his jacket; "let's fight it out." He stood up boldly in the middle of the road, with his head thrown back and his fists clenched; but nobody seemed inclined to accept his invitation. A butcher's cart that was passing pulled up to see the fun, and in a minute or less there was quite a crowd of small boys standing round the angry group. Encouraged by the "gallery," Hayes, who had hitherto been perfectly good-humoured, was beginning to be really angry, and in another minute would probably have let fly at one or other of his late mates; but the policeman, who happened to be at hand, stepped up in the nick of time and placed a heavy hand on his shoulder. Hayes was sobered in a minute. "All right, master, I don't want to fight. There ain't one a' them but wot I could pound into mincemeat if I liked, but I'll let 'em off since you've come." He pulled down his shirt sleeves as he spoke, and Cadger and his mates took the opportunity of slipping off, and in five minutes the bridge was clear. Indeed, the whole scene had not lasted quarter of an hour; and when Farley and Corkam emerged from the back parlour of the Swan, their mortification and disgust at having missed it knew no bounds. But there had been one silent spectator who concerns our story--it was Geo Lummis. He had heard it all, every word, as he hung over the bridge watching the stream. It was no business of his, so he did not interfere; and knowing that he would be questioned and cross-questioned a hundred times over by both of them if they knew he had been there, he turned off abruptly and went home. CHAPTER XII. BACK TO THE WORK Annie Chapman never had liked her husband working at the well. She said as little as she could, and she scarcely knew why, but a sort of nameless fear always crept over her when people spoke of the work. Though she took her husband his "'levenses" and his "fourses" every day, she never could be induced to look down into its depths, which naturally grew deeper day by day. It was a hot walk though a short one, and Annie's head throbbed with the intensity of the heat, and her feet felt as if they were weighted with lead. It was like walking on hot flags, she thought, as she plodded over the common with the last baby in her arms. The men had rigged up a sort of rough tent with four poles and a stack-cover, and placed a couple of benches underneath it, and Annie stopped to rest under its grateful shade. She was a little early, and Tom was still at work ninety feet below her. She shuddered as she thought of it, and Martin's daughter, who had come on the same errand for her father, laughed at her. "You're never cold, Mrs. Chapman!" she said. "That must be a goose walkin' over your grave." "Likely as not," said Annie, answering in the same vein; "there are plenty on 'em about." The girl laughed. She was a nice, bright, curly-haired, freckly girl. She looked kindly at Annie, and held out her arms for the baby. "I don't believe you half like your husband takin' on with my father," she said. "How do you know?" asked Annie, rather sharply for her. "Why, Chapman told fayther so. He said you was rare put about when he told you, and if it weren't that he think that's only duin' what he oughter, he'd ha' chucked the job long ago. But he would not go back on fayther, he say, after he've giv his word; and he's a good man, he is," she added warmly. "Fayther he think a lot o' him. He's a good un to work, he say, and a good mate tew, and fayther don't say that a' ivrybody, I can tell yew." Annie felt pleased. It is always pleasant to hear nice things, of course, about those we love, and Annie was generally so busy muddling along with her household and children all day that she had very little time for gossiping or exchanging many words with her neighbours; and she scarcely knew how her Tom stood amongst his fellows, for he was quiet and unobtrusive, and was not a man to make many friends. "He think a lot a' your father too," she answered, giving tit for tat with truth. "I wish they'd come up," Annie said at last. "If they're not quick I'll have to go back without seein' Tom." "Why don't you put your head over and call down to him?" said the girl. Annie shuddered again. "Oh no, no, I dursn't" "Well, I will," said her companion. "I know Mr. Hayes'll let me.--Won't you now, Mr. Hayes?" The big man who sat on the edge of the temporary woodwork that was erected at the mouth of the well turned a good-natured, sunburnt visage towards her. "All right, my gal! come on, I'll hold ye. They've got on well to-day. They're down a sight deeper than last time you looked." The man held back the ropes that hung from a windlass over the top, and the girl stooped over the brink. She could see the heads of both men down at what appeared to her an unfathomable depth. She uttered a little cry of dismay. The earth had been getting softer and easier to dig into for the last two days and they had made considerable progress. Martin looked up as the shadow cast by the girl's head and shoulders darkened the pit a little. "Hullo! That's you, my gal, is it? Well, I'm coming. I want my fourses bad, I can tell you." "Well, come on up then, father; and tell Mr. Chapman his wife have been waitin' for him ever so long, and she've got to go home directly, to give the children their teas." "All right, then.--You go up first, Tom." And nothing loath, Tom put his foot into the loop, and gripping the rope with both hands was soon drawn up. "My eye, it is hot up here," he said, as half blinded by the sun he made his way to the tent. Martin soon followed, and the women unpacked their baskets. Annie had brought Tom a bottle of his favourite fromerty and a large harvest-bun. Martin liked tea, so his daughter had a pot full of it rolled up in an old shawl to keep it hot, for Martin held that hot tea is the most cooling of drinks. "Drinkin' cold things when you're hot only makes you all the hotter!" Well, every one to his taste, and the big man preferred beer. He was a stranger, and the same man who had made such cruel remarks on Geo Lummis's muscles. He lodged at Martin's house, so "Martin's gal," as Polly was generally called in the village, had brought his "fourses" too. He quaffed off his half-pint of good home-brew, made by Mrs. Martin herself, and with a sigh of enjoyment flung the drops at the bottom of the glass on to the thirsty ground. "That 'ud be a rum job," he said, as he seated himself on the form, "if that dowser chap ha' happened ar a mistake, and we don't find no water arter all." "We'll find it all right," said Martin decidedly. "He knowed what he was about. He said that was a long way down, and I believe him." That Martin should believe him was quite sufficient for himself and Chapman, for Martin was one of those people that carry about them a quiet power of making every one else trust them. He possessed that nameless intangible quality that we know as "character." Martin was not particularly clever, he was not entertaining or amusing in conversation; but he undoubtedly possessed a great deal of character, and in his quiet, deliberate, commonplace way he carried as much weight as any man in the parish. If it had not been for Martin, it is pretty certain the wells would never have been begun, much less finished. It was Martin whose example made Chapman, Lake, and the other two Willowton men at the railway well come forward in the first instance and volunteer their services. It was Martin who gave the other men courage to come forward with with their offer of work. It was Martin who kept Lake and Chapman up to the mark when, seeing the difficulty and hardness of the work, they wavered, and, urged on by "the bridge," were inclined to strike for more wages. "What, give in," he said, "when we've go so far--sixty feet or more below th' surface? More money yer want? Well, I'm all fur gettin' all we can. I haven't no sort er objection te money myself; but fair play's a jewel, I say, and we've took this risk, and we've jest got te keep it. A few more shillin's won't make our lives na safer, and we've got a good wage--three shillin's a day ter start on, and a shillin' more for every ten feet; and I say that's good pay, and we don't want na better--leastways we didn't ought to. Do you think folks is _made_ o' money?" he asked, warming to his subject. "I don't say as Mr Rutland and the doctor are goin' to pay us out o' their own porckets--in coorse they're not; but they're responsible--that's how I take it. And they are payin' us fair and punctual; and I'm not goin' to say that I don't believe but what if they get more money than they want by their subscription boxes, and they offer me a bonus, that I'll refuse it," with a twinkle in his honest gray eye. "No, if they like to remember the well-diggers when the water is come, I won't hev northin' to say agin it, I'm sure; and nor wud yue now. Jest yue put that in your pipes and smoke it!" He lounged off as he spoke with a "good-night" over his shoulder, and next morning, when, having "smoked it" with much thought overnight, the two men arrived on the scene, they found Martin there before them. He made no remark, and work began as usual. The idea of going back never entered either of their heads again, though the railway-well men had carried out their threat and struck. When Lake, who lived in Gravel-pit Lane, went down with the fever, it was Martin who suggested to Mr. Rutland to get back the stranger, who had only gone away that morning reluctantly; for he was an experienced digger, and saw little risk in the railway well, and would willingly have gone on with the work if he had not been thrown out by the pusillanimity of his mates. He came at once, and both the Willowton men took to him. He was pleasant to work with, for he was both able and hard-working, and never, "shirked a spadeful," as Martin told the vicar, with just a touch of pride at his own sagacity in suggesting him. Mr. Rutland had been doubtful when it was proposed to him. He did not think it wise to bring him in again, but Martin's good sense overruled him. "There's nobody in the place durst come and help us," he said, "time them tue others is out a' work; they wouldn't leave 'em alone, not a minute. That's only a stranger we can hev now, as matters are, and he hadn't northin' ter due with the strike." "Who do you think had then?" asked the vicar, little expecting so prompt a reply. "Why, that scum Corkam!" asserted Martin stoutly. "He's at th' bottom a' most a' these here messes, he is! He goes a-talkin' ar a lot o' rubbidge about 'Meriky (as I don't believe he ever landed on), and he tell 'em a sight o' stories about the big wages over there, and he don't say northin' about the house rent they have to pay, nor the price o' wittles, nor clothin', which I know ('cos my brother lived out in them parts for years) don't leave them not sa very much over for theirselves to due what they like with arter all. And they've got ter goo and leave the old place and their friends and relations, and work a sight harder fur their money than we due here." "Just so, that's just it, Martin," said the vicar. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Corkam has got a little knowledge--a smattering of facts about many countries; but he is like a parrot--he repeats what he has been told, and has never gone into the subject himself,--not had the chance, most likely." "You're right, sir; that's about the size on it! And them chaps on the bridge of an evenin', they'll swaller anythin' he like tue tell 'em. That there young Lummis---" "Oh, George Lummis! Yes, poor fellow, it's heartbreaking to see him idling away his whole life like that. But somehow I fancy George will break loose one of these days. One day Master Corkam will tell him something he can't swallow, or offend his sense of right and wrong, for there's nothing really bad about Geo--at present, at any rate. I still have hopes of Geo, and I hear he is making an excellent nurse to his mother." In speaking thus the vicar was not talking at random. He had for some time past been unaccountably interested in Geo. To his keen sight--lazy, good-for-nothing as he appeared--Geo was full of possibilities. There came into the young fellow's sleepy, handsome face a look sometimes that made you fancy that under certain circumstances he might rise even to some great height of heroism. The vicar had been fortunate enough, as long ago as last summer, to catch that expression one day when he came accidentally upon him lying on the bank in the flowery meadow, lazily dropping leaves into the stream and watching them float way. Mr. Rutland was one of those very rare philanthropists who can resist the temptation of improving the occasion. He saw a whole sermon in the picture before him, and could have drawn half a dozen lessons from the vagaries of the leaves--some of which spun round and round and disappeared rapidly into the flowing water, others that caught in weeds and remained prisoners or drifted under the bank--but he did not. Geo had looked up as he caught the sound of his footstep, and there was a look in his face that took the vicar by surprise. It was, he thought (and he almost felt ashamed of being so imaginative) an expression that might have been on the face of a hero of the middle ages--a look, brave, clear, determined, as of a man braced for some great deed, and yet he was idling away his time on the grass, tipping leaves in the stream. A man of less tact and less human sympathy than the vicar would have stopped and made some remark, or at any rate have given him the customary greeting; but Mr. Rutland refrained, and passed on as if he had not noticed him. There was something fermenting in Geo's brain, he saw, and he felt certain it was, whatever it might be, for good. Nothing, as far as Mr. Rutland knew, ever came of this. Geo worked hard at the "haysel" and the harvest that had followed, it is true, and he took on occasional jobs at various farms in the neighbourhood, but for the most part he idled away his days, as we have already seen. His latent heroism, if he possessed any, remained dormant. But the vicar always remembered the look when people meted out to Geo their not unjust strictures on his useless life. In the meantime Geo was growing daily in the good graces of Nurse Blunt. No patient of hers, she often told Milly, was more carefully tended than Mrs. Lummis. Geo was a born nurse, and was as gentle and dexterous as a woman, and even old Jimmy's grunts of disapproval failed to convince her that there was "nothin' in him." CHAPTER XIII. RAIN AT LAST On the following day the heat became almost intolerable. People went about their work, and got through it somehow, but everything in nature appeared to be at its last gasp. The farmers had given up any further hope of a hay crop, and had begun to feel anxious about the harvest. When night fell the tiny cool breeze that had sprung up most evenings to refresh the earth a little was absent--a dead weight was over everything. The Chapman children were unusually restless, and Tom, tired with his work, grumbled fretfully as his wife moved about, first consoling one child and then the other, and rocking the restless infant to and fro. On such nights as this sleep is well-nigh impossible; and it was well for Annie that she had the children to attend to, for her heart was heavy with a terrible foreboding. Merry, careless Annie was smitten with an unaccountable miserable feeling of coming calamity. It had been growing and growing ever since Tom had "taken on" at the well, and to-night it seemed to have reached its height, and Annie longed most intensely for morning. Never had a night seemed so long and unbearable. The vicar, too, was lying sleepless through the long hot hours, puzzling over the unexpected strike of the well-diggers, wondering at their folly, and coming very near the truth when he thought of the changed aspect of many of his parishioners, when he remembered the averted looks, the nervous salutations that had taken the place of the ready smiles, the respectful yet friendly greetings that only a few short weeks ago met him at every turn. He had really been almost too busy to notice it; and even now he thought this notion that he was losing his hold on the affections of the people he lived for and spent his life for was probably a creation of his own troubled brain, born of the heat and the anxiety and overstrain of those same past weeks. The rain could not be far off now, he thought, for all day long the sky had been overcast, and a steaming, stifling blanket seemed to have been thrown over everything. As he tossed and fretted the first heavy drops pattered on his window-sill. It had come--the blessed, blessed rain--and the long, hard drought was over! He sprang from his bed and stood at the open casement, listening with delight to the growing volume of water that splashed down on to the baked earth and ran off the roofs into the dry, warped water-butts. He stood there, with the welcome spray leaping up and shooting into his face and dropping on to his bare feet, till he felt almost cold; and then with a thankful heart he regained his bed, and for the first time for some nights fell asleep. What mattered anything now? the rain had come--Willowton was saved--"the plague was stayed!" There were others in the clustering houses in the back streets who, sitting up with their sick and dying, felt the bands that had tightened round their weary heads suddenly loosed, felt the killing physical strain give way as the first drops fell on their roofs. Milly Greenacre, from behind her white dimity curtains, rubbed her sleepy eyes and turned over again, with the comforting thought that the rain had at last come. The cattle, lying out in their baked pastures, lifted their thirsty heads, lowing with pleasure for the heaven-sent moisture. The birds in the orchard awoke at dawn, and enjoyed a long-anticipated bath. Milly's white pigeons came out of their cot, and lay on the little gravel-path, with wings upturned, enjoying to the full the fall of the great cool drops. The horses in the far-off farm stables neighed joyfully at each other, and every creature alive drank in new life at every pore; even the fever-stricken patients rallied and gained strength. Soon the grass would grow green again, and the springs would begin to work, and all would be well. And yet nothing in the future could undo the past; nothing could give back to the mourners their loved ones. Willowton had indeed paid the penalty of its own disregard of the laws of health; but now, please God, the others would be saved. All through the day that followed this blessed night the rain fell--not quietly, or even with a break, but heavily, incessantly, and unremittingly. People paddled out in it under cloaks and umbrellas, and rejoiced with each other. The work at the well was necessarily suspended for the time, for the rough wooden shelter over it proved of little protection from the tropical violence of the rain. "That don't kinder rain at all," old Greenacre said; "that come down whole water." CHAPTER XIV. THE COLLAPSE On the third day the rain abated, and work was resumed at the well. For the first few hours it went steadily on; but before noon an awful catastrophe had occurred, and it became known all over Willowton that the brickwork had fallen in, and that Chapman and Hayes were entombed under the _débris._ --- Mr. Rutland was at the Workhouse Infirmary when the news reached him. The doctor was there too, and the two gentlemen drove off at once to the scene of the disaster, where stood Annie Chapman with a white drawn face, her baby in her arms and three other little ones clinging to her skirts as usual. Martin's girl stood by her. The children were out of school, and they too were there, a hundred or more of them with wide eyes and horror-struck faces. What was _not_ there was any sensible, capable man to take command and keep the crowd back; for it was not yet the dinner-hour, and the labourers were still in the fields, and Martin, on the principle that what is important had better be done by yourself, had rushed off, after sending a boy to fetch Mr. Rutland, to telegraph to Ipswich for scientific help from the firm who had supplied Hayes, and who had given advice as to the mode of proceeding at the outset. Martin returned scarcely a minute later than Mr. Rutland and the doctor, and hurriedly informed them of his action in the matter. Having made a clear space of some thirty feet or so round the spot where the unfortunate men were perhaps even now lying with the life crushed out of them, the doctor threw himself on the ground and listened anxiously for some sound of life. If they lived, the men would, of course, shout loudly and untiringly for assistance; and then--as it was was just possible that, even if they could not make themselves heard, some sound might reach them--Mr. Rutland leaned over the chasm and shouted words of encouragement and cheer. But he might have shouted to the empty air, for never a sound reached them. When one o'clock struck from the church tower the vicar sent the children to their homes, and with kindly firmness insisted on Annie Chapman's going back too and getting some refreshment. The children's needs was a good excuse. "I would not keep you away if you wish to come back," he said. "No one has, alas, a greater right to be here than you. Come when the children are gone into school again. I will have the tarpaulin shelter that was taken down on account of the rain put up again, and you can rest there." Annie thanked him with a look; she was beyond speaking, and seemed dazed. "Martin's gal" went home with her, helped her with the children's dinner, and came back to watch with her all that long, weary afternoon. It was two hours before the Ipswich man arrived in a carriage drawn by a strong, fast horse, white with foam, and reeking with the heat of his rapid run. An assistant quickly unpacked the apparatus for lowering the men who had volunteered for the dangerous task of removing the fallen bricks. The accident, the man said, was due to the violence of the rain, which had percolated through the earth so quickly that it had loosened the soil all round the well to a depth of some twenty or thirty feet, and caused the brickwork to bulge inwards and fall. How far down the mischief extended, of course, he was as unable to determine as any one else; but one thing was sufficiently obvious--that _time_ was everything. Another downfall would be almost certain destruction, and the unfortunate men, he said, had two dangers, not one, to contend with. At any moment the springs might begin to work, and they might have escaped death from the fall of the well only to be drowned by the rising water. It was a truly awful predicament, and as it always happens when a real calamity overtakes any of their mates, those who had most reviled them for refusing to strike now came forward with offers of help, and even forbore to make unpleasant remarks of any sort. Corkam, who was, of course, soon on the scene, actually held his tongue too until the work of rescue was fairly set in hand, and each man had been told off to his hours of duty, when he entertained a favoured group with various supercilious remarks, and an assurance that these things were much better done in 'Meriky. No one, however, paid much attention to him. They naturally could think of nothing but the horror and the magnitude of the present catastrophe. Things that had or had not happened years ago in a foreign country mattered very little to any one now in the face of this horrible reality; and Martin told him so pretty plainly, and not a little roughly, with the desirable result that he went off to the bridge to give his friend Farley the latest details. And nobody missed him particularly! CHAPTER XV. FRIENDS IN NEED. Next morning Milly Greenacre was making bread in her little kitchen at the back of the parlour, when an unaccustomed step sounded on the gravel-path. It was a shy, hesitating sort of step, and yet it was unmistakably a man's. Milly looked through the door, and saw Geo Lummis bending his head to enter the porch. She rubbed some of the flour off her arms and bade him enter. "Is it my grandfather you want to see?" she asked him, with that modest self-possession that never deserted her. "Won't you sit down?" she added, drawing a chair forward. "No, miss, thank you," said Geo shyly; "I can't stop. 'Tain't your grandfather that I come after; I wanted to see the nurse if I could." "I'm afraid she won't be in this forenoon," said Milly. "but will you leave a message with me? I'll be sure to give it to her as soon as she comes back." "Well, I hardly know as I can leave a message. The truth is," Geo blurted out suddenly, with a rush of colour into his fair-skinned face, "I want to go and help at the well, and I can't leave mother. I was going to ask if she could come now for a couple of hours and let me go. They are wantin' help badly. I don't seem as if I _could_ stay quiet while them pore chaps are underground, dead or alive; that seem as if we must get at 'em as soon as we can.' "When do you want to go?" asked Milly, in a matter-of-fact tone. "Now, at once, if I could; but nurse haven't been yet, and there's a lot to see to and do for mother, and I don't ever leave her till she is put comfortable for the day. I've jest run over on the chance of finding nurse; but if she isn't here I s'pose I must jest go back and wait till she come." He made a step towards the door. Milly glanced at the clock: it was a quarter-past ten. "I'll come," she said quietly, "when I've finished laying my bread. If you go on, I'll be there in twenty minutes, and I'll wait till nurse comes, and settle with her what can be done." He muttered some incoherent thanks, but they were, except for the sake of his manners, quite unnecessary. The look of gratitude that he cast on Milly was quite a sufficient expression of thanks, as far as she was concerned. As he went out she returned to her bread-making. A quarter of an hour later the bread was safe in its earthen pan, with a snowy cloth laid over it; and Milly had washed her hands, turned down her sleeves, set a tray on the table in the parlour, with nurse's glass of milk and some bread and cheese on it, and had gone in next door to tell her lame neighbour where she was to be found, and to ask her to explain her absence to her grandfather if he returned while she was at Mrs. Lummis's, and also to ask nurse directly she had had her luncheon to call in and tell her what to do. Milly had heard quite enough of the relations between Geo and his mother from Nurse Blunt to be quite certain of her sympathy in the sudden impulsive step she had taken; and she felt sure grandfather would raise no insuperable objection now that all available hands were required at the well. So Milly went upstairs and sat down quietly by the bedside of the sick woman, who was now sufficiently convalescent, in spite of some serious heart weakness, to take an interest in her neighbours, and was glad to see the pretty, bright girl she had often seen and admired at a distance but had never spoken to before. "I promised your son to stop till nurse comes," Milly said pleasantly, "so I hope you will let me do so." The sick woman smiled her willingness, and Geo, with renewed efforts at expressing his thanks, departed. In the meantime there was trouble at the well. The work of rescue had been going on all night, and the men were giving out. Martin, toil-stained and weary, was still there, but the work was practically for the time at a standstill. The men were in absolute need of rest. When Geo reached the scene the director from Ipswich had given the order for a break-off in ten minutes for five hours rest. He was surveying, with some anxiety, the relief men who had arrived in answer to an urgent telegram he had sent a few hours ago. They were weedy-looking, dissipated fellows, and to judge by the director's face were evidently not the material he required. "We must do the best we can with what we can get," he was saying to the doctor, who stood at a little distance holding his impatient horse by the bridle. "These men must be kept from the drink, and then they may do. At any rate, we must take them on this morning; but what I want is a strong, active, light-built young fellow, who won't lose his head in an emergency, and will do as he is told without hesitation." Geo stepped forward. He had been near enough to hear these last words. "Will I do, sir?" Both men faced round at once, and Geo often told Milly afterwards that one of the hardest moments of his life was that when he caught the expression of the doctor's face. It expressed so much contempt, surprise, and distrust that he was cut to the quick, and once more within a few minutes the hot blood surged into his face. But the director's words softened the sting,--- "Do? Why, you're just the man. Who are you, and what do you know about the work?" "My name's Lummis," said Geo, looking him straight in the face, but avoiding the doctor's eye, "and I don't know nothin' about the work; but I heard what you said just now, and I'll do what you tell me to." "All right, then; and as to wages---" "Never mind about the wages, sir, thank you," said Geo respectfully; "whatever you give the others will do for me. I'm ready any time." "Well, off with your coat, then, and come." Geo had his coat off and hung up in the tent in a trice, and was carefully lowered into the well, seated astride on a board, one hand on the rope and in the other a pail. "Now, then, Lummis," said the director, when he was sufficiently deep down the reach the _débris_, "hook your pail on to the hook on your board, and lean over and pick off carefully anything you can reach. Be careful to bear no weight on anything or the whole thing will collapse." "I understand, sir," said Geo, his voice sounding strangely hollow to himself from the depths of the well. Carefully and dexterously Geo detached bricks, and with a small scoop ladled the earth into his pail, and as soon as it was filled he detached it from his board and hooked it on to another hook that dangled from the windlass; and while it was being drawn up, emptied and returned, he raised himself to a sitting posture and stretched his back as best he could, for he had not been long at work before his limbs ached considerably with their unwonted toil. Two hours went by, and still Geo worked on patiently, and often painfully, till the director blew his whistle, and he was hauled up for a welcome rest. Then one of the other men was lowered, and so the work went on, and by nightfall an immense quantity of soil had been removed, but as yet the men below had given no sign. It was during this long terrible time of suspense that Mr Rutland learned part of the secret of Tom Chapman's love of his apparently feckless, untidy wife. Annie still remained untidy, it is true--she had never been anything else--but she certainly was not feckless. As soon as it was daylight each morning she appeared, asking only the most absolutely necessary questions, and receiving the dispiriting answers without a murmur. At seven o'clock she would go home, give the children their breakfast, and get them ready for school; but she was back again at her post before long, there to wait and do any little kind acts or odd jobs for the men, and going on any little errands into the village. In spite of her evident suffering she kept up a brave, even cheerful appearance. Punctually as the school broke up she went away again for a couple of hours. The doctor, to his great surprise, found her to be clever with her fingers, quick to learn how to bind up a cut or bathe a bad bruise; for the work of the rescuers was no easy task, and in their determined efforts to let nothing drop they often did themselves little trifling injuries which were all the better for being treated at once. Everybody was very kind to her, and her boy Tom up at the Union was getting through his fever well. There were crumbs of comfort to be gathered on the way, and Annie was not the woman to refuse them. She too had shared the doctor's surprise when Geo Lummis appeared on the scene as an eager recruit, but unlike the doctor, she showed no sign of it; and when Geo stepped into the tent to hang up his coat, she smiled at him such an entirely approving, grateful, and encouraging smile, that it for the moment wiped out the doctors scorn. Geo knew Tom Chapman, and did not care about him; but for the sake of Tom's wife, he felt now that he would risk anything to restore her husband to her. There are some natures that seem to require some extraordinary circumstance or moral earthquake to "draw them out." Geo's was evidently one of these. He was being distinctly drawn out now--the real Geo was bursting out of his chrysalis. Corkam and "all his works" receded very far as he felt himself swing down into the well. CHAPTER XVI. AN ANXIOUS SUNDAY. At last it was Sunday morning, and the men had now been forty-eight hours in the well. A rumour had got about that they were still alive. The bells rang out for service as usual, and Milly brushed her grandfather's well-worn beaver hat, settled his necktie, and pulled down his coat, just as she had done for the last eight years, and they went off to church together. Somehow it seemed wonderful to Milly that anything should go on as it had done last week, for every one in the village was felling the strain of the anxiety caused by the prolonging of the terrible situation of the entombed men. Geo Lummis and Martin and two other men had been working all night, and just as the "tolling in" began a relief gang arrived, and the four tired men came trooping through the churchyard, as being the shortest cut to their homes. Milly, with several other people, stood aside to let them pass. They looked worn out and weary, toil-stained and depressed. Nobody spoke, and they none of them lifted their eyes as they passed; they were too dead beat for greeting of any sort. Milly cast a glance at Geo. She was beginning to take a very lively interest in that young man, for Geo, seen through his weak but loving mother's spectacles, was a very different person from Geo seen through her grandfather's somewhat prejudiced glasses. Anyway, he was behaving well now, and there was no need to look back. The doctor, who accompanied them as far as the gate, now returned, and affirmed the rumour that it had been satisfactorily ascertained that _one_ of the unfortunate men, at least, was alive--that shouts and knocking had been distinctly heard, but that as yet no means of communication had been effected. This, however, he hoped would be done in the course of an hour or two, and he expected to have really good news for them when they came out of church. Nobody ever quite knew how that service was got through. Most people tried their best to follow, but each one was conscious of a divided attention. Every one was listening with at least one ear for the shout that they knew would go up when the expected communication was affected. It came at last! The vicar had just gone up to the pulpit and given out his text when though the open doors came the distant shout "Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah-h-h!" Many among the congregation started to their feet, some fell to their knees, and others sobbed audibly. The vicar paused with uplifted hand to secure silence till the shouts ceased, and then addressed the people. "There will be no sermon this morning," he said. "I think your own thankful thoughts will be more appropriate than any words of mine;" and after a short prayer of thanksgiving, he gave the blessing and dismissed the congregation. "Not, I beg and pray of you," he said, "to rush off to the scene of action, where your presence can be of no service to the unfortunate men, and for the moment will only hinder the efforts of their rescuers. Leave them a little while, is my advice, till the excitement has cooled down, and then take your places quietly beyond the barrier if you will; but I implore you to remember that the men who are working at the relief want cool heads and steady nerves, and they have come fresh to the work, and at present want no encouraging shouts or chaff to keep them going, as our brave fellows did last night when they hardly knew how to go on." The vicar's advice was good, and, for example's sake, he denied himself the pleasure of hurrying off to the well, and many of his congregation refrained also. It was then twelve o'clock, and by three that afternoon the rescue gang reached the cylinder twenty feet below the surface by tunnelling, only to discover, to their intense dismay, that a mass of woodwork had fallen on to the mouth of it, and that rescue that way was impossible. The foreman, however, managed in a clever way to pull out a small piece of loose wood, and calling down to the men below received the welcome answer, "We are all right, but are in three feet of water. Couldn't you get us a drink?" The foreman shouted up the message, and in a trice a dozen willing messengers were running to the village, returning speedily with jugs of such various liquors as their personal tastes and means suggested. There were beer, porter, milk, brandy, cocoa, cider; but the doctor, who had been on the scene all morning with his improvised ambulance, insisted on milk and beaten up eggs with brandy. The tidings, of course, soon spread, not only over Willowton, but to all the neighbouring villages, and the half-dozen policemen who were on duty had their work cut out for them in keeping the crowd from coming inside the ropes. As it was, every tree in the vicinity was thick with boys and men, and every fence and bank that offered any point of vantage was a mass of eager lookers-on. Now it was that the most dangerous work was to begin. It was decided to endeavour to reach the men by making a hole in the top of the cylinder, and three men were lowered with ropes around them, and instructed to remove the soil in pails. This they did with the greatest care, so as to prevent any falling back--a danger that was very likely to occur. At the end of an hour and a half a slight slip occurred, and the entombed men called out that the mould was coming down upon them. "You're goin' to cover us up and ha' done with us," said Hayes, with a feeble attempt at jocosity; "but give us a drink first." "Sartinly, sartinly, that we will," said one of the men encouragingly, and a few minutes later a bottle of the "egg-flip," with a covered light attached to it, was lowered through the aperture, and the work began again. It was nearly half-past seven when the men were again spoken to. They seemed to be losing heart. They had knocked the light out, they said, and they were wet through and wanted to come up. "So you shall, my boys," shouted the foreman, "as soon as we can get you." And with that they had to be content. CHAPTER XVII. GEO TO THE FORE AGAIN. All through the middle of the day, till six o'clock, Geo Lummis slept. At three o'clock Nurse Blunt came over to Mildred and asked her to go to Mrs. Lummis. "I wouldn't trouble her, Mr. Greenacre," she said, as old Jimmy began to gabble and grumble, "but I _must_ go to the opposite side of the of the parish, and Mrs. Lummis is in that stage when she must be attended to. Your granddaughter will have nothing to do but give her he brandy and milk at the proper times. She has done it before, and I can trust her, which is more than I can say for most of the girls I have had to do with. You'll have to let her go." So grandfather made no further demur, and Milly changed her Sunday gown for a work-a-day one, and went off on her errand of mercy accompanied by the nurse. "That young Lummis is there dead asleep," nurse said as they went along. "Mind you don't wake him going upstairs; he's in the room opposite his mother's, you know. Not that you need be much afraid of disturbing him," she added--"they mostly sleep for hours when they come off work like that--but when you do hear him moving, you'd better slip down and get him a cup of tea ready and some cold meat and bread. I've seen to that; it's in the cupboard to the right of the stove. He should be at work again by seven." "Very well," said Milly; "I'll see to it." So when Geo woke out of his heavy sleep at six o'clock, he, through the open window, could hear the kettle singing on the little stove in the back-house below, and some one moving softly about. There was a comforting sound about it, and he stretched his long limbs luxuriously. Just then the church clock struck the half-hour. He raised himself with a yawn. "Half-past--what was it?" He reached out for the large silver watch that was in the pocket of his coat that hung over the chair. It was half-past six! He flung himself off the bed, dipped his head in a basin of cold water, rubbed it hard with a rough towel, washed his earth-stained hands, and strode across the little passage to his mother's room. She was sleeping peacefully, and he slipped quietly downstairs. Milly stood in the little kitchen, a kettle in her hand, and a tray with a white cloth stood on the table before her. Geo started with astonishment. "I thought I should have to wake you at last!" she said shyly, as he took the kettle from her; "it was getting so late." Geo did not answer very relevantly; he was still lost in astonishment. "Have you done all this?" he said, pointing to the tray. "No; nurse got it ready before she went. I am only making the tea." "Well I take it very kind of you, miss," said Geo heartily. "P'raps you'll have a cup yourself?" Milly was not sorry, and the two sat down in the little kitchen, which, though hot, was the coolest room in the house--the sun was on the other side. They looked out on a little garden to the meadows, in which the grass had begun to grow again. The sound of the running water seemed cool and inviting. "That looks nice out there, don't it?" Geo said, when he had swallowed his third cup of tea and made havoc of the bread and meat. "I s'pose you can get your can filled nowadays after the rain without any help?" Milly laughed. "Oh yes, there's water enough now; I can reach it easily." Geo actually looked disappointed. "I meant I'd ha' liked to ha' got it for you," he said simply. "There goes the quarter-to," said Milly for an answer; "you've not got too much time." "Time enough to have a look round, if you'll come," he said, getting up and looking down on her shyly from his superior height. Milly made no objection, but took up her hat, which she had left in the inner room, and the two strolled out into the meadows. Geo pointed to the chimneys of Milly's home, which could be seen across the stream, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. "If you'll walk up as far as that with me, I could jump across into your orchard, if you don't object, and I'll be punctual at the well. That's a lot shorter than goin' round by the village." Milly thought her grandfather would probably object very much, but she risked it, for she thought a little walk along the water-side with that "lazy, idle good-for-nothing" would be rather pleasant. As they went along they talked about the well. The worst and most dangerous work was to come. "Some one, you see, must go down after them poor chaps," Geo explained. "You see they'll be so cramped and done up they'll never get themselves safe through the opening; for I expect that'll have to be a precious small one from what I see when I left, and you say they've not got at 'em yet." "No," said Milly; "my grandfather called round an hour ago, and he said the hole wasn't no bigger than what would admit an ordinary man, and that they were binding it round with straw and making it as strong as they could, because that man Hayes is so big they're frightened he should break it down, and father said nobody seemed as if they wanted to try it." "Not a doubt about that," said Geo, tightening his lips. Something in his voice made Milly glance up at him. The look on his face was the same one that Mr. Rutland had surprised on it a year ago. "You're never going to do it yourself?" she exclaimed involuntarily. "Not unless I have to," Geo answered quietly, and speaking as if to himself. "But it's got to be done, and I'm not a married man. Martin is, and so are the other two." Milly did not answer. To those who follow dangerous callings in all ranks of life such an argument is unanswerable. Milly understood, and said nothing. They had reached the gate where Geo had sat and watched Milly vainly endeavouring to reach the water only a very short time ago now. The blossom was off the May, of course, but the half-starved buttercups were enjoying a second season. "That's were you stood," said Geo, following out his own thoughts as he opened the gate for her to pass through before him. He nodded across to the overhanging thorn. "You did take me by surprise then," said Milly, smiling as she conjured up the scene. "And there's the billy-goat. He've got more to eat now than he had then; but, all the same, I was jealous of him then. I'd ha' liked to ha' been in his hide jest for the minute when he was rubbin' his head against you, and you was coaxin' and pettin' of him, that I would!" Geo was getting on and no mistake! "Well, he's jealous of you now," said Milly, with some confusion, as the animal, recognizing her voice, strained at his chain and bleated piteously. What Geo's next move might have been is unknown, as just at that critical moment the tiresome church clock boomed out the hour, and Geo pulled himself together. "I must go," he said. "I don't like to be late on a job like this," and before Milly could answer he had sprung across. He turned and gave her a nod as he picked up his cap, which had fallen off, and set off running towards the house. Milly waved her good-bye, and returned slowly through the meadows. The neglected goat bleated imploringly after her, but she never heard it. CHAPTER XVIII. THE RESCUE It was eight o'clock, and the crowd that had come and gone during the afternoon had now gathered again in force. It was known all round that the critical moment had arrived. Everything was ready; the supreme act of bringing the men to the surface alone remained to be accomplished. The rope was carefully lowered, and the watchers held their breath. For some minutes the rope dangled, now and then becoming taut for a moment, and then hanging limp again. It was evident that something was wrong. "What is it?" the foreman shouted anxiously. "We can't do it," came a voice from the bottom. "We're too stiff; we can't get hold." There was a silence for what seemed an interminable space after these words. "Some one must go down to them," said the foreman slowly, his own face growing very white. He knew that whoever went down might be passing to instant death; for though everything that could be done had been done to render the passage safe, yet he had hoped against hope that the necessity of a passage _down_ would be avoided. He was a great stout fellow himself, and not so active as Hayes, who he had trusted, would squeeze himself through. During that pause the workmen looked questioningly at each other, and no one read in his mate's face any desire to try the dangerous experiment. The crowd listened again breathlessly. The foreman cast an imploring look around. "Won't anybody volunteer?" he asked. "I will." It was Geo Lummis who spoke, and a burst of approbation broke from the bystanders. It was as well the men below were in ignorance of the immediate and extreme danger they were suddenly exposed to by the lowering of a third person into the abyss; for their position was this:--The woodwork which had fallen over the mouth of the cylinder had held up the fallen earth when the wall caved in. This mould was now removed, and by the extraordinary skill and care of those engaged in the difficult task the woodwork had not shifted; but it remained to be seen whether the bad passage of a man working his way down with practically no light go guide him, and with the chance of dislodging odd pieces that had stuck fast in their fall, would not bring the whole thing upon their heads and his own, and, as Hayes put it, "finish the job and have done with them." Geo was fully alive to the danger as he adjusted the rope round his body, put his foot into the loop, and gave the command to "lower away." At first he went down very slowly, and then came the order to "lower faster," and the crowd grasped the welcome fact that there was no insuperable obstruction in the cylinder. For a short space of time there was an ominous silence, and then a closed lamp was let down, and the foreman's face cleared. One part of the difficulty had been surmounted; he began to feel more confident of success. --- In the meantime Geo had reached the bottom, and found the men supporting each other as best they could, but stiff and chilled with their long immersion in three feet of water. Hayes tried to raise a feeble cheer, but Chapman was past any attempt at cheerfulness. He had sunk into a sort of sullen apathy. Neither of them was capable of helping himself. At first both men wanted to come up at once, and Geo found himself suddenly confronted with an unforeseen difficulty. Chapman was obviously delirious, and Hayes was showing signs of losing his temper. _"One at a time,"_said Geo decidedly. "Can't you see there's no room for two?" "Well," said Hayes at last, "you can send up him; he's pretty nigh done for, and he've got a missus and little 'uns. Only hurry up and due it." Geo lost no time in securing Chapman as best he could, and with a stern command to him (for he seemed to have completely lost his nerve) to hold on tight and keep his body straight, he chucked at the rope to show all was right, and with a beating heart watched him being drawn higher and higher, till he had passed safely through the aperture. Then he turned to Hayes. This was no time for sentiment, and neither of the men indulged in it. Hayes had his pipe between his teeth. It had long ago been guiltless of tobacco, but it was comforting, all the same. He did not remove it, and he said nothing to Geo, but signified his gratitude by a nod, and what under happier circumstances might have been a wink. When the rope reappeared he seized it, with Geo's assistance, made himself fast, and gave the signal for going up. Geo saw the soles of Hayes's big boots rise over his own head with eyes that dilated with something like fear, and a heart that thumped audibly against his ribs, as for a few moments his own fate hung in the balance. Hayes's broad shoulders, even with the greatest care, might refuse to pass through the aperture without dislodging some of the fallen timber; such a little would send it down on his head. It would be a horrible death, for he would see it coming--coming--coming before it fell, and Geo didn't want to die. The possible nearness of death flashed into his mind, and he scarcely dared look when Hayes reached the hole, and a few broken straws, loosened by his passage through it, floated down on to his upturned face. The ominous words, "You'll cover us up and ha' done with us," occurred to him again with terrible persistence. Minute after minute passed, and the rope did not reappear. Impossible but horrible thought, were they so much taken up with Chapman and Hayes that they had forgotten him? Geo had stepped on to one of the turned-over pails on which the other men had been standing, and the water had reached up to his knees when he had given Hayes his parting shove. He now noticed with surprise that it had suddenly reached considerably over them. He glanced apprehensively to the sides of the well. It was perfectly evident that the water had risen. Higher, higher it crept, till it nearly reached his waist, and then the awful truth flashed on him. _The springs had begun to work!_ CHAPTER XIX GEO AGAIN SURPRISES HIMSELF AND HIS FRIENDS. It was perhaps just as well that Geo was an inexperienced well-sinker, and that he did not know the horrible danger he was in, or with what fearful rapidity a long-dry spring sometimes rises when once it has begun to move; but he shuddered with apprehension as the cold water crept up to his arm-pits, and as it touched his shoulders flesh and blood could stand no more, and he lifted up his voice and shouted with a shout that shook the frail supports above him till he trembled once more for their endurance. It is said that a drowning man sees all his life pass in review before his mental vision, and a wave of remorse for lost opportunities and wasted days swept over him as he stood on the brink, as it were, of eternity. And all the time those ominous words of Hayes were ringing--ringing--ringing in his ears--those ears that soon would be covered with the creeping icy flood. At last! at last! After an eternity of agony the aperture was once more was once more darkened; something was coming down--quick, quicker, the rope was running out from the windlass. Thank God, it had a bucket on the end of it. Splash it went in the water, and filling, sank immediately. Geo shouted as he grasped the rope with his strong hands, twisted his legs round it below, and as they drew him up slid his half-numbed feet into the bucket. --- I don't think that any one who was present will ever forget the moments when Geo's white face appeared above the brickwork, and his dripping garments told the tale of his terrible predicament; for Geo for the moment was past speech, and there went up from the crowd such a roar of admiration and delight as Willowton had never heard before. And there was such a rush of the foremost bystanders to shake their hero by the hand that the policemen had their work cut out for them with a vengeance, for the enthusiasm had passed all bounds. The foreman had said, "Don't make a fuss when they come up," when the other men had been drawn to the surface; for he had seen similar accidents before, and he knew that the men's nerves would not be in a state to stand much excitement. The crowd had behaved in an exemplary manner, and except for the summarily-squashed cheering of a few thoughtless boys, they had been allowed to pass quietly to the conveyances that awaited them, assisted by the parish doctor and a couple more medical men from Ipswich. But it was not to be expected or desired that they would treat Geo in the same way. Martin and Cadger managed the rope, and as he reached the surface Mr. Barlow and the vicar were there to greet him. "You're a brave fellow, Geo," said the vicar, grasping his hand, while the farmer patted him kindly on the back.--"Now, then," he shouted, waving his hat to the crowd, "three cheers for the gallant rescuer. Hip, hip, hip, hur-rah-h!" and once more the ringing cheers rang out. Geo began to feel shy and looked about for a chance of escape, but there was none. He found himself standing with a little group in a clear space into which the vigilant police allowed no one to intrude. Just then a diversion occurred. Over the cheers came the strident discordant sound of a motor horn, and across the common flashed a car, which pulled up sharply, and a gentleman sprang out. The police recognized him, the crowd made way, and he hurried up to the group round the well. It was the dowser. His arrival was well-timed, and among the crowd there were some who knew him before, and without much difficulty he pushed his way through to the enclosure, and in obedience to a signal from Mr Rutland the policeman allowed him to pass under the rope. He looked pale and anxious. "Is it all right?" he shouted when the car stopped. A welcome "Yis, yis, master," allayed his fears. He had followed the movements of the rescuers eagerly since his daily paper had given him news of the catastrophe; but being a busy man, it was not till this morning that he had been able to get away from his work, and had left his home in Gloucestershire almost at break of dawn. Motors are not infallible, and his car had broken down at Swindon; and it being Sunday, there had been great difficulties and consequent delay in getting it repaired. Mr Wilman's eye fell naturally on the central figure of the group, Geo Lummis. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "I was right: there _is_ water in your well!" for Geo was dripping, and the water was running off his clothes and trickling slowly away on the dry soil. "Indeed there is sir, and more'n I cared about!" said Geo dubiously. "I recognize you," said the dowser, smiling. "You are the young man who followed me with Mr. Barlow on the search." "Yes, sir," said Geo quietly, and shivering as he spoke. "You're cold, boy," said Martin. "Hev some a' th' doctor's stuff," and he handed a glass of the egg-flip to him. Geo drank it off, and wrung out his trousers. "Can't we disperse the crowd now?" said Mr. Rutland to the constables; "I should like to get him away." "Not yet awhile, sir," said the constable, with a knowing look. "They're taking round the hat for him, and he deserve it, that he do," he added emphatically. "Best leave 'em a few minutes, if you've no objection sir." Mr. Rutland had no objection, but Geo himself _had_. As a rule, Geo was, as we know, easy-going to a fault, and fell in too readily with anything and everything that his friends liked to suggest; but to his own surprise as much as that of any of the bystanders at these words, which he could not help overhearing, all his pride rose in revolt. His face flushed with sudden red, and his voice rang out with a loud and peremptory _"Stop that!"_ The men who were collecting turned and stared. They were not accustomed to refusals on occasions of this kind, and Geo's sudden bursting into notice astounded them. "I take it very kind of you all," roared Geo, as if he had been accustomed to address a constituency, "but I'd rather you didn't give me nothin'. What I've done any on you would ha' done if I hain't a-been by, and I've liked myself wonderful all this last week, and I find I'm gettin' 'mazin' partial to work." (Cheers and laughter.) "Yes, you may laugh; there do 'pear a bit funny, I'll own, but that's the truth, and nothin' but the truth, and I--I--I mean to _work like a good 'un!_" He ended rather lamely, but the crowd took up the cheers again, and, police or no police, half a dozen strong young fellows broke through the barrier, hoisted Geo on their shoulders, and carried him right away up the village to the tramp of many feet and the tune of "For he's a jolly good fellow," and nobody raised a protest even in the sacred cause of order. Milly Greenacre stood at her garden gate as the stream went by; old Jimmy looked out of his bedroom window in his cotton night-cap, and cheered in his cracked old voice. All his life long Geo will remember the dim outline of Milly's figure, white against the background of the lilac bushes, and the quaint, whimsical face of the old man peering into the darkness, and looking at him, for the first time of his life, with approval. It was only an instantaneous snapshot from the lanterns carried by some of the party that revealed the picture to him, but it was photographed for ever on his brain, and it was not one of the least among the pleasurable things Geo looked back to when all the excitement was over, and he had settled down to steady work as he said he would. CHAPTER XX. CONCLUSION. It is often said that no great work can be accomplished without some correspondingly great sacrifice, and the fever was not stamped out and the water supply made pure without the suffering of an innocent victim in the good cause. And scarcely had the excitement over the accident at the well abated, when Willowton learned that one of the chief directors of the movement--their vicar--was dangerously ill. The long strain, physical and mental, of his resolute fight for the right, the senseless opposition his flock had met him with all through those weary months of work and disappointment, had told on him at last, and when the moment of victory came he succumbed, and three days later he was raging in the delirium of fever. And then, but only then, the wiseacres of the village remarked to each other that they had "minded he looked wonderful quare the last few Sundays--kind a' dazed like;" and the old women had noticed his thin cheeks and restless eye. Yet none of them had ever thought of saying a kind word to him when he called at their cottages, and all had greeted him with the sullen manner they had adopted, as if by common consent, since he had begun his crusade against dirt and insanitariness. On the evening of that day the doctor's dogcart stopped at Mrs. Lummis's door. He had been such a frequent visitor there during her illness that nobody attached any importance to his visit; though Mrs. Lummis was up and about again, but not yet able to do entirely for herself. But the neighbours did stare when, a quarter of an hour later, Geo came out with a bundle and climbed into the cart alongside him, and drove away up the village with him. And they would have stared harder if they had known whither Geo was bound. Geo and his mother were sitting at their evening meal when the doctor had knocked at their door. And they were not alone; Milly Greenacre was with them. The three were laughing merrily over the old lady's reminiscences of her "courting" days, and there was a pleasant sense of comfort and happiness in the air. "I am sorry to interrupt you, Mrs. Lummis," said the doctor, putting his kindly face in at the door, "but I have come to ask you for your nurse." "Come in, sir, come in," said Mrs. Lummis, rising; and the doctor complied, Geo closing the door behind him. "But nurse have been gone these two days, sir," she said wonderingly. "Ah yes. It's not Nurse Blunt I want; it is this good fellow here," looking at Geo, who got very red and looked extremely uncomfortable. "The truth is," went on the doctor, "it is not a woman I want, but a _man_, for the vicar; he is desperately ill, you know." "Yes, sir, we've heard," said Mrs. Lummis sympathetically. "That's a bad job, poor gentleman, I'm sure; but---" "Now, look here," said the doctor, cutting short any possible objections, "this is a matter of life or death; there is no time to lose.--Will you or will you not come?" turning to Geo. "Me, sir! I am sure I don't know. I don't know nothin' about nursing. I---" "You know quite enough. Nurse Blunt will be there when she can, and Mrs. Crowe will do her best. But the truth is, the poor man is violent. It is a strong man I want, with a steady nerve and a good temper. You, I think can answer to this description, and I think, after the pluck and ability you showed during the past week, that I can trust you." Geo's eyes gleamed for a moment under their downcast lids, and he looked at his mother and Milly for inspiration; and the doctor's keen eye noticed with amusement that he sought Milly's counsel first. "Oh, you must go," said Milly warmly, answering the look. "That would be a shame not to go to him. If only I was a man---" "Which you need not wish at all, Milly," said the doctor, laughing, for he had known Milly all her life. "You had better come and help Mrs. Lummis a bit every day, and let her son go.--Come along, Geo; put your night things together and let us be off." And so, as Mrs. Lummis expressed it afterwards, "the doctor was so terrible masterful he took him off before my own eyes as if he'd a-been no more'n a child!" But Geo proved no child, and, indeed, it was no child's work he had to perform. For several nights he and Mrs. Crowe sat up with the sick man, who, until the fever had spent itself, was so strong that Geo had to put forth all his strength at times to hold him when the fits of delirium came on. Then came the inevitable weakness that follows fever, and so for a fortnight the vicar of Willowton lay between life and death. "Quiet, nothing but absolute quiet, can save him," the doctor said. And so the bells were not rung for service; the carts and other vehicles that generally came rattling past the vicarage gate were now turned back at the top of the street, for a faithful guard was always set there to stop all traffic that way. It was old Greenacre's idea. "That there rattlin' is 'mazin' bad for the 'hid,'" he said--"I mind that whin I was ill threugh bein' thrown off a wagon when I was a booy--and they didn't ought ter pass this way." So he established himself on a chair under the shadow of the garden wall, and sat patiently watching the egress through many a long hour, keeping the street. "Jest like a beggar with a tin mug and a paper pinned on his chist," said Corkam, who couldn't resist a sneer. But old Jimmy was not there all day, for there were grateful convalescents in the persons of Tom Chapman and his friends, who took their turn as sentry. So the sick man, so carefully tended within and so guarded without, still hung on between life and death. And as he lay there powerless and speechless, that fickle jade Popularity stole back to his side. Shyly, shamefacedly, almost fearfully, people began to speak well of the man who was in all probability going to give his life for their well-being. He had had the grace to "ketch th' faver" just like one of themselves, and it was going as hard with him as it had gone with many of their own flesh and blood. "He warn't so bad after all," they allowed. "'Twarn't so much his fault that there well fell in." They even remembered how he had watched and prayed by the sick-beds. They went so far as to hope he "wouldn't be took." And the doctor, who read them like a book, smiled to himself as he watched the poison of prejudice gradually dying in their hearts, and common sense and a small measure of justice stealing back into their perverted minds. At last came a day when the good man came gaily down the staircase and opened the door with the welcome words, "A decided change for the better. Please God, we'll pull him through now." And a subdued murmur of joy arose from the little crowd of women and children that gathered every morning round the house to see the doctor go away and hear the latest news. Foremost among these was Annie Chapman--hard working, untidy, cheery Annie. She has improved very little in any respect except in her household arrangements; but though no power on earth could ever succeed in making her tidy, cleanliness has become her ruling passion. She scrubs, and rubs, and washes everything she can lay her hands on, and no future outbreak of fever or any other disease shall ever, she declares, be laid to her door. So out of evil will come good, and the Willowton of the future promises to be a very different place from the fever haunt it has been for the past half-century, if the doctor and the vicar and Annie Chapman can make it so. And now there only remains for us to see how things fared with Geo Lummis, who so suddenly found himself acting so important a part in the annals of the village. Dr. Davies was anxious to keep him under his eye as a professional man-nurse; but Geo struck at that. He was very glad, he said, to have been of use to the gentlemen, both of them, but sick-nursing was no work for him. He pined for the fresh air and the open fields, and, if the truth must be known, for the ripple of the water under the bridge. Not that he meant to return either to his old ways or his old companions, for he has done with Corkam for ever; and Milly Greenacre and he have made their minds to be married as soon as the vicar is well enough to marry them. And as if wonders would never cease, Milly's scruples about leaving her old grandfather alone have all been removed in the most unexpected manner. While Geo has been nursing the vicar all the past month, old Jimmy had been spending all his odd moments with Mrs. Lummis, with the result that he and Geo are going to play at "puss in the corner," and there are going to be two weddings instead of one! Geo is coming to live in the Greenacres' pretty cottage, and old Jimmy is going to hang up his hat on Geo's old peg in his mother's house. A more satisfactory arrangement of all parties could not be imagined: for Jimmy has saved quite a little hoard of money, enough to keep him comfortable, he hopes, for the rest of his life; and Geo has been taken on as a farm labourer by Mr. Barlow, with the promise of an extra teamster's place, and he is looking forward to getting his seven pounds for the harvest which is now about to begin, after which he and Milly are to be made man and wife. THE END 
34603	----	Transcriber's note: A few typographical errors have been corrected: they are listed at the end of the text. * * * * * Page numbers enclosed by curly braces (example: {25}) have been incorporated to facilitate the use of the Table of Contents. * * * * * EPIDEMICS EXAMINED AND EXPLAINED: OR, LIVING GERMS PROVED BY ANALOGY TO BE A SOURCE OF DISEASE. BY JOHN GROVE, M.R.C.S.L. AUTHOR OF "SULPHUR AS A REMEDY IN EPIDEMIC CHOLERA." LONDON: JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. MDCCCL. * * * * * "The tendencies of the mind, the turn of thought of whole ages, have frequently depended on prevailing diseases; for nothing exercises a more potent influence over man, either in disposing him to calmness and submission, or in kindling in him the wildest passions, than the proximity of inevitable and universal danger."--_Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages._ "The grand field of investigation lies immediately before us; we are trampling every hour upon things which to the ignorant seem nothing but dirt, but to the curious are precious as gold."--_Sewell on the Cultivation of the Intellect._ * * * * * TO BENJAMIN GUY BABINGTON, F.R.S., M.D., PHYSICIAN TO GUY'S HOSPITAL, AND PRESIDENT OF THE EPIDEMIOLOGICAL SOCIETY, ETC. ETC. THESE PAGES ARE, BY HIS KIND PERMISSION, Respectfully Dedicated, BY HIS OBLIGED AND FAITHFUL SERVANT, THE AUTHOR. * * * * * {v} PREFACE. The following pages have been written with a view to render some aid in establishing a sound and firm basis for future research, on that absorbing topic, the Causes and Nature of Epidemic Diseases. The amount of information already published on Fevers, on the Exanthemata, and on the Plague, is truly astonishing, and the more so when it is considered, that at present no rational account or explanation is given of the causes of these affections. It appears to me but reasonable to suppose that as every thing on this earth has been created on a wise and unerring principle, Epidemic and Infectious Diseases are only indicative of some serious errors in our social arrangements and habits. The dangers and misery brought upon us by disease, may, as shewn by Dr. Spurzheim and Mr. Combe, be warnings against the infringement of the natural laws. Indeed, what is more rational than to suppose that the Seeds of Disease are coeval with the fall of man. His first disobedience {vi} brought death:--that his subsequent errors should hasten its approaches is not to be marvelled at. The undetected murderer, though he may escape the punishment human justice would inflict upon him for his delinquency, suffers a penalty in the tortures of conscience, infinitely more horrifying than the most ignominious death. The law of nature is triumphant. No less certain, though after a different manner, are the consequences of minor forms of disobedience. It is so ordained, that certain diseases shall arise, under peculiar conditions, which may have been brought about by a train of causes, easily imagined, and difficult to be explained, but all having their origin in the vices and errors of man in his moral and social relations. If man neglects the cultivation of the ground; with rank vegetation, the germs of fever will invisibly grow and multiply; if he harbours that which is rotten and corrupt, he is himself consumed by those agents destined to remove the rottenness and corruption; it is a part of the law of nature that there should be active and energetic agents for this purpose. The seeds of disease, like the seeds of plants, may be shewn to have {vii} their indigenous localities; like them they may be spread and multiplied; like them they may lie dormant, and after awhile spring as it were into active existence; like them, when the soil and other conditions favour, they are ever ready to make their appearance. And this is the law, the germs of all disease exist, and have existed. Despise the dictates of nature, be careless of yourself and those around you, neglect to use the means which a noble intelligence has placed at your command, and above all, transgress the laws of God, then will disease pursue and attend you, as the conscience of the murderer pursues and attends him until he is finally cut off. His wants and necessities, his sufferings and privations, are the basis of the intellectual progress of man. The wonders of Omnipotence are revealed through the whirlwind, the storm, the pestilence, and the famine. The constructive and perceptive faculties of man have been developed by the necessity of protecting himself from injury by winds and rains; his intellectual faculties have been cultivated, by the sufferings of disease having led him to the study of {viii} organization and life, to discover the cause,--and to chemistry, and other sciences for the cure of his ailments. Famine and distress have aroused his emotions, and softened down his asperities, so that what appears at first to be the infliction of a Curse without Pity, is in reality a Judgment with Mercy. It occurred to me, that on the formation of the Epidemiological Society, the first question for consideration should be, What is the nature of those agents, which induce Epidemic Diseases? are they composed of animate or inanimate matter? In other words, do the manifestations of these diseases exhibit the operations of living or of chemical forces. Having, in my study, dwelt on the subject with an earnest desire to find the truth, I put the suggestion, with my ideas, before the public to reject or receive them. If they be rejected, I can but think a full discussion of the enquiry will lead to the most important results. If they be received with favour, I doubt not others, with more ability, will take up the strain and resolve the discords into harmony. J. G. _Wandsworth, September, 1850._ {ix} CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I. IS IT PROBABLE THAT EPIDEMIC, ENDEMIC, AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES, DEPEND UPON VITAL GERMS FOR THEIR MANIFESTATIONS? 11 CHAPTER II. THE NUMBER AND VALUE OF FACTS TO SUPPORT THE PROPOSITION. SECTION I.--On Reproduction 22 SECTION II.--Historical Notice of Epidemic Diseases 34 SECTION III.--The Dispersion of Plants and Diseases 64 SECTION IV.--The Relation between Epidemic and Endemic Diseases 96 CHAPTER III. THE REASONABLENESS OF THE APPLICATION OF THE FACTS TO THE INFERENCE. SECTION I.--The Chemical Theory of Epidemics untenable 108 SECTION II.--The Animalcular Theory of Epidemics untenable 128 SECTION III.--Sketch of the Physiology and Pathology of Plants and Animals 138 CHAPTER IV. RESULTS IN PROOF OF THE TENABLENESS OF THE PROPOSITION. SECTION I.--Observations on some of the Laws of Epidemic Diseases 155 SECTION II.--What is the nature of those Poisons which most resemble the Morbid Poisons in their effects on the body? 166 SECTION III.--What results do we obtain from the effects of remedial agents, in proof of the hypothesis? 176 CONCLUSION 189 * * * * * {1} INTRODUCTION. It is one thing for a man to convince himself, but a very different thing to be able to convince others. I am not now speaking of a conviction arising from the impression made by a few startling facts, nor of one forced on the mind by early prejudices, or by the dogmas of the schools, but of a conviction arising from careful enquiry. In the course of that enquiry, the collector of facts, sees their relations to the idea in his mind, in a multiplicity of ways, from their remaining, each, as one succeeds the other, an appreciable time on the sensorium, and undergoing a certain process of comparison and relation, with all other facts and ideas which have been previously stored up. As the materials for an edifice which have been shaped and prepared in accordance with the completion of the design, so do the facts and ideas which are accumulated {2} in the mind, become shaped and prepared for the elimination of a truth. The ultimate design of the architect can no more be conceived by the examination of the framework of a window, or the capital of a column, than the whole truth of a proposition by the examination of separate facts; the whole must be conceived and all the relations of all the parts thoroughly understood, before the architect can be comprehended or the harmony of his design appreciated. The process of thought in the minds of the architect, and in the framer of a proposition, is never exactly the same as in those who contemplate and examine their completed works. Much may be done, however, by both to aid others in comprehending them. The more accurately they keep in view the course their minds have taken, the more readily will their descriptions be understood. To simplify the elements of our knowledge is to give others a ready access to our thoughts. To arrange the course of our ideas in harmony with the elements of our knowledge should be the end of all writing, as it is the only means of multiplying knowledge. {3} It is not the mere accumulation of facts which constitutes science, any more than a collection of building materials constitutes a house, it is the arrangement and adaptation of the means to the end by which the house becomes built and science cultivated. These reflections have been suggested by the circumstance that for the last 3000 years and upwards, Pestilences have at certain intervals done their work of destruction, and opened the springs of misery to untold millions, and yet I see not that we are much further advanced as to the knowledge of the cause of these inflictions than the Jews in the time of Moses. In the Levitical law, as I shall have occasion more particularly to shew hereafter, were directions specially given in reference to the plague of leprosy; what means should be adopted for the cure of the disease, and for preventing its extension, and moreover pointing very significantly to certain facts having connexion with the cause of the affection. Since that time historians generally, and medical writers in particular, have diligently recorded their observations and accumulated facts, on the various desolating plagues which {4} have afflicted mankind. Some of these men have grappled with the whole subject, and endeavoured to shew the presumed relation of the supposed causes in all their intricacies, but it is hardly necessary to say that all have signally failed in their attempts to furnish us with any practical information. Satisfied in my own mind that the whole subject is beyond the labour of one man, and impressed with the belief that the basis of the enquiry is in anything but a satisfactory state, I have applied myself entirely to the study of the groundwork only, as the primary proceeding for a solid superstructure. The days are past, when imaginary spirits, ethers, and astronomical phenomena, were believed to have any essential influence over our destinies in a physical point of view; we have therefore to deal with _matter_ in some form or other. The question, therefore, which I have proposed for enquiry, is, whether the matter which causes epidemic and endemic diseases, exhibits the properties of inorganic or organized matter. The properties and qualities of organized {5} bodies, as well as those of inorganic matter, need but be stated, and in some instances we may picture to ourselves the object, without having seen it, and not be very far from a true conception. But for this purpose a clear and definite idea must be previously formed, and have taken possession of the mind, of the great general divisions of objects in the material world. Having made these preliminary remarks, I have suggested a certain mode of procedure in making enquiries of this kind, not perhaps in strict accordance with logical systems, but on the principle of nature's operations in our own minds, which appears to me, when reduced to a systematic and simple form, to be sufficiently clear and strict for synthetical application, and so concise as to be usefully and practicably applied. In endeavouring to establish a theory for the explanation of extraordinary phenomena, there are certain rules which should guide us in the thorny and treacherous path of speculation. But these rules readily flow from the train of thought, and if we examine our own minds during their operations, we {6} shall find that the following is the course of our instinctive reflections. It is a course we adopt as the test of theories when formed, and is a guide in all cases for their construction. We first commence with an idea, which exists in our minds in the form of a proposition: then the following rules naturally suggest themselves:-- 1. The probability of the value of our proposition from inference. 2. The number and value of facts to support the proposition. 3. The reasonableness of the application of the facts to the inference. 4. What amount of information in the form of results can be produced in proof of the tenableness of the proposition.[1] In illustration of the value of these rules the history of Dr. Jenner's discovery affords an appropriate example. To use the words of Dr. Gregory, "he appears very early in {7} life to have had his attention fixed by a popular notion among the peasantry of Gloucestershire, of the existence of an affection in the cow, supposed to afford security against the Small Pox; but he was not successful in convincing his professional brethren of the importance of the _idea_." The popular notion of the peasantry originated the idea in Jenner's mind, and it became fixed there as a proposition. 1. He commenced his enquiry by observing that the hands of milkers on the dairy farms were subject to an eruption, and he _inferred_ that the notion of the peasantry bore the stamp of probability, which strengthened the idea in his mind and gave force to the proposition. 2. His next step was to accumulate facts; he found on enquiry that the persons engaged on these farms in milking, possessed an immunity from Small Pox to an extent sufficient to strengthen the value of his proposition. 3. The reasonableness of the application of the facts to the inference is clear from the coincidence that the eruption on the hands of the dairy people bore a striking {8} resemblance to the Small Pox, and as this disease does not usually occur twice in the same individual, the inference was most reasonable that this eruption protected the people from Small Pox. 4. We have but to take the almost universal adoption of vaccination, and its acknowledged prophylactic powers against the propagation of Small Pox to shew the application of our fourth rule.[2] Between the conception of the idea and the accomplishment of Jenner's designs, vaccination seems to have undergone an incubation of nearly twenty years. During that period, with an energy and perseverance only to be obtained by confidence, did this great man brood over and elaborate his idea; and well might the 14th day of May, {9} 1796, be styled the birth day of vaccination, for on that day was a child first inoculated from the hands of a milker. In adopting the above method I have endeavoured to bear in mind M. Quetelet's observations on the requirements necessary for medical authorship; he says, "All reasonable men will, I think, agree on this point, that we must inform ourselves by observation, collect well-recorded facts, render them rigorously comparable, before seeking to discuss them with a view of declaring their relations, and methodically proceeding to the appreciation of causes." * * * * * {10} {11} CHAPTER I. IS IT PROBABLE THAT EPIDEMIC, ENDEMIC, AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES, DEPEND UPON VITAL GERMS FOR THEIR MANIFESTATIONS? It is, I believe, almost universally considered that Epidemic, Endemic, and Infectious diseases, originate from some imaginary poisons of a specific nature, each disease having its own peculiar poison. That this conception should have taken possession of the minds of men, is most natural from the symptoms which characterize these diseases, but when we come to enquire into the nature of these agents, or supposed poisons, we are at once struck with the idea that they exhibit one peculiarity which separates them in a marked manner, from those poisons with which we are familiar; for the poisons of Small Pox, Measles, Scarlet Fever, Hooping Cough, Fever, &c. possess the power of multiplication, or spontaneous increase, a property which attaches only to the organic kingdom, and is never known in the inorganic kingdom. The source of most of the poisons is to be found among mineral or vegetable products. A mineral in combination with an acid or oxygen may become a poison, and {12} nitrogen in various combinations with oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon, or with carbon alone, may become a poison; these combinations are, however, in most instances the products of vegetable life, others again are obtained from the animal kingdom, such as the poison of the serpent, &c. but in all of these instances, there is not one in which the power of self-multiplication is to be found. We are, therefore, constrained to admit that this feature, which distinguishes poisons, is one well worthy attentive consideration. The varieties of poisons may be classified into those which act topically as escharotic poisons, those which act chemically on the blood, and those whose effects are manifested in inducing a speedy annihilation of organic or vital action, as in the case of hydrocyanic acid, which is supposed specifically to affect the nervous centres from which originate the vital manifestations. It is rather remarkable that the vital poisons (as I will call them for distinction), seem to have their appropriate locality in the blood, they do not primarily affect one organ more than another, all the effects we witness resulting from them are to be traced progressively from the blood to other parts of the body. When a person is inoculated with small pox, a very minute portion (indeed it is impossible to say how minute it may be) is sufficient, when absorbed, to excite a certain train of symptoms, all due to absorption of the materies of the disease, and the process by which {13} that materies arrives at maturity, is that known in the vegetable world as the fructification; this process of fructification is a process of development and increase. I here may repeat that among all the poisons known, constituted as they are of various combinations of elementary matter, they are without exception destitute of the power of development or increase. Now, it is pretty accurately known what amount of these poisons is necessary to produce their effects on the living body; we can say how many drops are sufficient of hydrocyanic acid of Scheeles strength, to destroy a man instantaneously. Again, how many grains of arsenious acid are sufficient to induce such an inflammatory condition of the stomach and intestine as will end in death, and how many grains of morphia, will bring about a fatal coma,--but who shall say the amount of the vital poisons necessary to produce their results? It far exceeds the limit of conjecture, to what extent the dilution of miasmatic or contagious matter may be carried, and the poison yet be capable of committing in a short time the most frightful ravages. We may fairly then infer, that if a quantity of matter inappreciable in amount be sufficient to exhibit the characters of growth and increase, that it is endowed with the properties of vitality. That the poisons of scarlet fever, of measles, and of small-pox have this power of growth and increase, is as much a matter of universal belief as that "the sun {14} will rise and set to-morrow, and that all living beings will die." This power of individual increase, or reproduction, is the very summit of vital manifestation; indeed Coleridge, in his Theory of Life, (in which he says, "I define life as the _principle of individuation_, or the power which unites a given _all_ into a whole that is presupposed by all its parts,") places reproduction in the first rank, and expresses his hypothesis thus: "the constituent forces of life in the human living body are, first, the power of length or reproduction; 2nd, the power of surface, or irritability; 3rd, the power of depth, or sensibility--life itself is neither of these separately, but the copula of all three." Extensive research is not required to shew that many thinking men believe in the existence of living organic beings, as the elements of contagious and epidemic diseases; the idea indeed seems to flow spontaneously in that direction. Whenever thought, and enduring contemplation, have been concentrated on the subject, the result appears to have been the same, a firm conviction in each individual mind that a vital force must be in operation; or as Schlegel would define it, "a living reproductive power, capable of and designed to develope and propagate itself."--"Its Maker originally fixed and assigned to it the end towards which all its efforts were ultimately to be directed." Referring further to beings having the property of reproduction and propagation, he says, (using {15} the word nature here evidently as the vital principle for want of a better term,) "Nature indeed is not free like man, but still is not a piece of dead clockwork. _There is life in it._"--"Thus we know that even plants sleep, and that they too as much as animals, though after a different sort, have a true impregnation and propagation." When Schlegel wrote this, how little could he have imagined the intricacy of this proceeding among the lower forms of vegetation. It has been shewn by Suminski, and verified by many others, that the mode of impregnation, and the period at which it occurs in the ferns, do not at all correspond to the general notion on this subject. He has discovered in the early development of the frond of ferns certain cells, which he denominates antheridia, or sperm cells; these contain in their cavity a number of subordinate cells, each containing a spermatazoon. At a certain period of the progress of the frond, the parent cells become ruptured and liberate the spermatoza, these move about in a mucilaginous fluid, which bedews the inferior surface of the frond, and become the means of impregnating the germ cells, or pistillidia, with which they readily come in contact. Thus the process of impregnation in these plants occurs during the germination, or what corresponds to the period of germination in the seeds of exogenous and endogenous plants. I have referred to the discovery of Suminski in {16} this place to recal to the mind the great and incomprehensible wonders of creation, for who could conceive it possible or feasible that even for the impregnation of an inferior vegetable, animal life should form an indispensable and essential appurtenant of the process. Truly may we say with Coleridge, of plants and insects, "so reciprocally inter-dependent and necessary are they to each other, that we can almost as little think of vegetation without insects, as of insects without vegetation." I will make but two more quotations on the supposed vital character of the germs of disease. "That the air and atmosphere of our globe is in the highest degree full of life, I may, I think, take here for granted, and generally admitted. It is, however, of a mixed kind and quality, combining the refreshing breath of spring with the parching simooms of the desert, and where the healthy odours fluctuate in chaotic struggle with the most deadly vapours. What else in general _is the wide-spread and spreading pestilence_, but a living propagation of foulness, corruption, and death? Are not many poisons, _especially animal poisons, in a true sense, living forces_?"--Schlegel.[3] It were useless to multiply quotations to shew {17} that the opinions here entertained are matters of general belief among thinking men.[4] I will at once then conclude with an observation of Dr. C. J. B. Williams: he puts the question, "Does the matter of contagion consist of vegetable seeds? Are infectious diseases the results of the operations and invasions of living parasites, disturbing in sundry ways the structures and functions of the body, each after its own kind, until the vital powers either fail or succeed in expelling the invading tribes from the system?" And this expression, the seeds, is an universal expression, it is a "Household Word" in connexion with disease. That it has obtained this position in the popular vocabulary is alone a proof of the applicability of the term to the thing intended to be {18} signified. Popular notions, as we have seen in the case of Jenner's discovery, are not to be unheeded. An instance occurs to me, it was a popular belief, that in acne punctata, the matter of a sebaceous follicle, was itself, when pressed out, a worm, the dark portion which results from the accumulation of dust upon the matter at the mouth of the follicle was supposed to be the head of the maggot, as it was called; subsequent observation, however, has proved that though this matter is not a worm, it contains an animal within its substance, the Acarus folliculorum. The popular notions found among savage tribes as to the efficacy of certain remedies in the cure of disease have been the means of furnishing us with some of our most valuable medicines, indeed it is almost impossible to say whether originally man did not derive his remedies from the herbs and trees by an instinctive faculty impelling him, as it does the animals when in a state of liberty and with freedom of range, to seek certain plants as they avoid others. It is well known that animals when indisposed will find out some spot as if almost led to it by a visionary guide where the "healing plant" is to be discovered. I am told that sheep have this faculty, and that they will, when affected with the rot, feed upon some plant when they can discover it, which eradicates the disease. Almost every one is familiar with the fact that cats and dogs will crop herbage and eat it; I have {19} seen them frequently leave the house and proceed to the grass in the most business-like manner, partake of some quantity, and quietly return. A close observer of diseased animals might obtain some useful information by noticing the plants cropped by them while in that condition. The observations should be made in a variety of districts in consequence of the uncertain distribution of some even of the most commonly scattered plants; in one year they may be abundant, but in another they may be almost entirely absent from the same spot.[5] Were it only on the fact of reproduction, I would be contented to take my stand that the force of life is the indwelling power of pestilential matter. Reproduction is a law of nature, and the law of nature is the law of God. And where do we find He prevaricates with us? The more we study His laws the more harmony and perfection we find; what is seeming confusion in the ignorance of to-day, is order in the knowledge of to-morrow. If any one ignorant of the law which regulates the diffusion of gases were {20} told that a heavier gas would ascend contrary to its specific gravity through the septum in a vessel containing a lighter gas above the heavier, he would naturally doubt your assertion, and say, "that is contrary to the law of gravity;" but explain to him the principle by which this comes about, and the objects of the law; the order and beauty of the design become manifest. But this is no equivocation, it is evidence there, that subordinate laws exist and nothing more. It has never been found that men have gathered "grapes of thorns and figs of thistles," nor has it ever been discovered that inanimate matter multiplies itself. The seed of disease "is within itself," multiplying and propagating itself; whether it formed a part of creation at the beginning or not, is rather a question to be solved by divines than physicians. When we know, however, the latency of seeds and even of entire plants, and that they may be dried and remain so for years yet being brought again into conditions adapted to their active existence, they, as it were, revive from their sleep, and renew again their reproductive properties: can we wonder if, in the great scheme of nature, existences new to mankind should make their appearance? When the New Zealander saw the surface of his ground producing to him unknown plants, and the skins of his children generating peculiar eruptions, and each propagating its kind, would he look, think you, to the wood or the stones, the air or the water,--for the solution of the {21} mystery? No, he would naturally say these people brought the _seeds_ with them. From the property of reproduction possessed by these forms of matter, we infer the value of the proposition. * * * * * {22} CHAPTER II. THE NUMBER AND VALUE OF FACTS TO SUPPORT THE PROPOSITION. -------- SECTION I. ON REPRODUCTION. It is inferred that the proposition, "_the matter which operates in the production of Epidemic, Endemic, and Infectious Diseases, possesses the property of vitality_," we proceed now to the enumeration of those facts which further elucidate this subject. The facts must necessarily be such as illustrate the identity of properties in the imaginary germs, that are known to exist in demonstrable germs: we take therefore the law of reproduction to be to life, what the law of attraction is to gravitation.[6] {23} But further; do those matters which engender disease furnish to our minds the properties inseparable from life in the abstract? Though the faculty of reproduction is essentially an evidence that the thing which reproduces its kind must be a living body, yet it is only a property or power of living beings and is not itself life, it therefore is necessary to establish the fact that the _materies morbi_ not only has the power of reproduction, but also those properties which in the abstract will prove as far as demonstration can go, that it has the essential properties common to all living bodies. I must again quote from Coleridge, he says: "By life I every where mean the true idea of life, or that most general form under which life manifests itself to us, which includes all its other forms. This I have stated to be the _tendency to individuation_ and the degrees or intensities of life, to consist in the progressive realization of this tendency. The {24} power which is acknowledged to exist wherever the realization is found, must subsist wherever the tendency is manifested. The power which comes forth and stirs abroad in the bird, must be latent in the egg." The tendency to individuation cannot be more strongly marked than in the simple experiment of vaccination: we insert a small particle of the so-called vaccine lymph under the skin, and by this means we multiply to an enormous extent, the power which, in the first instance, we had in the form of minute corpuscles in a dry and apparently inert state; nevertheless, though in this condition there must have existed the tendency to individuation or multiplication of individual existence, and the germs are here to their active existence, as seen in the development of the vaccine vesicle, what the egg is to the bird,[7] as described above; we may, therefore, say that the power which exhibits itself in the production of a vaccine vesicle, must have been latent in the dried matter. It is the opinion of Muller that the entire vital principle of the egg {25} resides in the germinal disk alone, and since _the external influences which act on the germs_ of the most different organic beings are the same, we must regard the simple germinal disk, consisting of granular amorphous matter, as the potential whole of the future animal, endowed with the essential and specific force or principle of the future being, and capable of increasing the very small amount of this specific force and matter, which it already possesses, by the assimilation of new matter. After speaking of inanimate objects, Dr. Carpenter says; "and what compared with the permanence of these is the duration of any structure subject to the conditions of _vitality_? _To be born_, to grow, to arrive at maturity, to decline, to die, to decay, is the sum of the history of every being that lives; from man, in the pomp of royalty, or the pride of philosophy, to the gay and thoughtless insect that glitters for a few hours in the sunbeam and is seen no more; from the stately oak, the monarch of the forest through successive centuries, to the humble fungus which shoots forth and withers in a day." To be born, signifies the faculty of reproduction existing or having existed in an antecedent being to that one born, and also that itself possesses equally a like power. To be born, is the first expression which must be used in speaking of the faculties or properties of living beings as independent existences, the annual formation of buds, trees, and shrubs, is a multiplication of the species; the coral {26} and various budding polypes increase by this process, indeed what is the seed of a plant, or the egg of a bird, or the ovum of mammalia, but cast off buds; in all, the new being was originally a portion of its parent, and if we examine the ovary of the vegetable, the bird, or the mammal, can we find any expression more fitting to designate the process than that of budding. To be born then, is the evidence of an act of one living being, and the commencement of a series of vital phenomena in another, but all these are subsequent to reproduction, and constitute another chain of vital acts, all tending to a similar result, the multiplication of the species.[8] Now, whether we apply the philosophical language of Coleridge, or the language of observation of Muller, in confirmation of the doctrine here inculcated, we arrive at the same point. Do we not witness in the newly formed vaccine vesicle, an increase of the specific force and principle? We certainly have acquired by the process of vaccination a manifold multiplication of power, and is there not also assimilation of new matter in {27} which this power resides? And does not every particle of this new matter contain within itself the same force and principle, as existed in that which generated it? "We revert again to potentiated length in the power of magnetism (reproduction); to surface in the power of electricity, and to the synthesis of both or potentiated depth in constructive, that is chemical affinity."[9] Some may be at a loss to conceive, at first, how irritability may be considered a property of all vegetable matter; that it does exist in some vegetables is certain, but that it does exist in all living beings is equally certain;[10] the term, however, which would appear more appropriate when that irritability does not exhibit itself in an appreciable form, is _impressibility_. Irritability, as commonly understood, is seen in its highest condition in muscular tissue; but "the irritable power and an analogon of voluntary motion first dawn on us in the vegetable world in the stamina and anthers at the period of {28} impregnation."--"The insect world is the exponent of irritability, as the vegetable is of reproduction." The property of irritability attains its acme in man, the most highly organized of all beings; and its gradations pass downwards through the whole scale of animate creation; not so reproduction, for this faculty observes the very opposite direction, for in plants a single impregnation is sufficient for the evolution of myriads of detached lives. Reproduction is a fact, it is an essential property of life, and is a reality to us from observation; but irritability is not so tangible and demonstrable a property. We nevertheless may assume its universality, from the circumstance that we lose sight of it by imperceptible degrees; the irritability of the sensitive plant is as much irritability as that of the highly organized muscle; but because the faculty evades our perception, "in tapering by degrees, becoming beautifully less," we have no reason for pronouncing its total extinction at any one point of the vegetable kingdom,[11] any more than we should have {29} in saying that we see the end of the earth, when describing the extent of our vision as we stand on the sea shore. The extreme limit of our vision is the tangent of the circle in reference to our visual organs; but how many tangential points there may be beyond, it is impossible to say without knowing the dimensions of the circle. I think we are now in a condition to assume, as far as abstraction will conduct us without proceeding to an extreme length, that the _materies morbi_, or, as I will now call them for the sake of clearer distinction, _semina morbi_, possess those properties which in the abstract are common to all living beings. Another argument strikes me as capable of adding further strength to the proposition. We need but be told that a small piece of iron was placed in a certain position with regard to another piece of iron, and that the smaller piece moved through a given space and became attached to the larger, to infer that magnetic force was in operation. Supposing this magnet then to be folded in paper, and that it {30} be promiscuously placed near a compass, the deflection of the needle would indicate that some object in the vicinity was the cause of the deflection; we may farther try what positions the needle takes by varying the position of the packet, and thus point out which is the north and which the south pole of the screw of paper. If we may consider attraction then to be to gravitation what reproduction is to life, we do not err in saying in the one instance that there is a living being, and in the other there is a magnet. The nebular theory, from which some astronomers made the foundation of many speculations, came with so much interest to our minds that the fascination could not be resisted. It was most delightful to revel in the imagination that we possessed a key to the mode of formation of the starry hosts, and when speculation had taken its extreme limits in the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," and the nebulæ had served as the ground work of a gigantic scheme, Lord Ross's monster telescope swept the heavens of its cobwebs. We can imagine this great promoter of science saying to us, Gentlemen, the clouds which have obscured you, are composed of myriads of stars, and comprise systems as vast and as luminous as our own, had you but power of vision to discern them. A new light thus appeared to philosophers, and though no great practical results may flow from the discovery, it is instructive from the fact that the imperfectly aided or unaided vision, should not limit legitimate {31} inference. The nebulæ before Lord Ross's discovery were to the astronomer what the materies of epidemic and infectious disease are to medical men. In the absence however of a giant microscope to reveal such great truths, we may yet dimly shadow them by the light of our reason. It was predicted in 1849 that minute vegetable germs, in all probability all of the same type, were the agents producing epidemic and infectious disease. In 1850, Mr. Oke Spooner says,[12] "On examining the matter of Small {32} Pox and Cow Pox in every stage, he finds its essential character to consist of a number of minute cells not exceeding the 10,000th part of an inch in diameter: being about one-fourth smaller than the globules of the blood, containing within their circumference many still more minute nuclei, and presenting beyond their circumference bud-like cells of the same size and character as those contained within the circle." Should these observations made by Mr. Spooner turn out to be correct, they will but fulfil my anticipations. Then again shall we see the same application of imperfect vision to the limitation or temporary obstruction of solid and determinate knowledge. We may reasonably expect that these bodies, discovered by Mr. Spooner, should be the elementary matters of disease. Their existence was predicted from the probability that living matter must be the agent; moreover, that this matter when discovered {33} would be cellular, most probably resembling the yeast plant as described by Mr. Spooner. It was predicted that a planet would be discovered in a certain position in the heavens, because the perturbations of a comet indicated an attracting body in the path of the eccentric wanderer; the prediction and the fulfilment were almost simultaneous. * * * * * {34} SECTION II. HISTORICAL NOTICE OF EPIDEMIC DISEASES. The earliest notices we have of Pestilences are contained in Holy Writ. The plagues which smote the Egyptians in the time of Moses are not unworthy some comment here. Of those ten plagues, four out of the number were due to the miraculous appearance of myriads of the lower animal tribes, in three instances of insects,[13] viz. lice, flies, and locusts; in the fourth, when Aaron stretched forth his hand with his rod over the streams, over the rivers, and the ponds, frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt. In these instances living beings are made the instruments in God's hand for the punishment of the wicked. These plagues include the second, third, fourth, and eighth. The first plague is mentioned as a conversion of the waters into blood. Now if we may take this expression as being literal, there is no reason to suppose that this blood differed in any respect from ordinary sanguineous liquid; we therefore may assume, as the blood is every where in Scripture spoken of as the _life_, that this fluid was endowed with vital properties. {35} The fifth plague is described as a murrain among beasts; and the sixth, as exhibiting itself as "a boil breaking forth with blains, upon man and upon beast."[14] Now these affections bear a resemblance to the diseases known to us at the present day through authentic records. The Black Death of the 14th century affords in its history but too awful a picture of the horrors of such pestilences. In the tenth plague, the smiting of the first-born, we are not told by what means it was brought about; but we have something even here to lead us to conjecture. In the second visitation of the Black Death, there were destroyed a great many children whom it had formerly spared, and but few women. The seventh plague of hail is within our conception; as is also that of darkness, the ninth plague. It is not a little remarkable that of the ten plagues, seven of them depended upon agents intelligible to our comprehension; we can conceive of {36} the invasion of a country by myriads of loathsome insects and reptiles, and can imagine the wrath of an offended Deity directing the force of a supernatural storm of hail upon a disobedient people; and we can conjecture, though faintly, the consternation of human nature on being subjected to a total darkness of three days' duration, when we consider _that_ darkness has been described, as "a darkness that might be felt." From this abstract we discover that the three plagues whose causes we cannot understand, or rather upon which no light has been thrown by Scripture, bear analogies to those which we recognise, in the writings of modern authors, as fearful pestilences. It is now our province to reflect on the causes supposed to be in operation in the three instances, which become naturally separated from the rest. We are told that a murrain appeared among the cattle, without any preliminary step. When the blains broke out upon man and beast, Moses had been previously directed by the Almighty to take handfuls of the ashes of the furnace, and sprinkle them towards the heaven in the sight of Pharaoh. "_And it shall become small dust in all the land of Egypt_, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man and upon beast, throughout all the land of Egypt." Another coincidence, in connexion with subsequent pestilences, arrests the attention, on the subject of the mysterious appearance on these occasions of {37} matter resembling dust being prevalent about the houses, and on the clothes of the people. Clouds also, and showers of dust-like particles, were not of infrequent occurrence. Indeed, in the summer of 1849, during the progress of the Cholera, several phenomena of a similar nature were observed and authenticated; I myself can bear testimony to one instance of the kind. It was observed by many persons in my neighbourhood after the passage of an ominous and lurid cloud, that as they walked their clothes became covered with a singular dust-like matter of very peculiar appearance. That this phenomenon was not destitute of significance may be gathered from the fact, that on the night of that day several severe cases of Cholera occurred, though our village had been comparatively free for ten days. Hecker, in writing on the Black Death says, the German accounts expressly speak of a "thick stinking mist which advanced from the east,[15] and {38} spread itself over Italy; there could be no deception in so palpable a phenomenon." It is not unworthy of mention, that in the East successive invasions of locusts "which had never perhaps darkened the sun in thicker swarms," preceded the great outbreak of this disease, for they left famine in their train. From 1500 to 1503 in Germany and France, during the prevalence of the sweating sickness, spots of different colours made their appearance, "principally red, but also white, yellow, grey, and black, often in a very short time, on the roofs of houses, on clothes, on the veils and neckerchiefs of women, &c." Blood rain is also mentioned as having occurred at this time, which consisted of the aggregation of minute particles of red matter. In the seven plagues, miraculous operations of the Deity consisted in the unusual manifestation of phenomena, but which in their effects are recognizable as of clear and definite import. The miracles here are,--in the _mode_ of producing the swarms of frogs, locusts, &c. but they are manifest and unmistakeable _causes_ of plague and famine; in the other three, on the contrary, we witness only the effects, the causes are hidden from us; we may, therefore, as in current events, legitimately investigate the subject, and what better course can be adopted than that which classifies the traditionary past with all subsequent history. Presuming such a method of research to be admitted, I have assumed that as {39} the _causes_ of the seven plagues have been distinctly given, the others, though only mentioned in their effects, were due to causes of a nature in some way to be compared with their concomitants, that is to say, if a special intervention of the Deity brought about a miraculous appearance of frogs, lice, &c. there is but little reason to doubt that some other agent was miraculously multiplied and concentrated to induce the murrain, engender the blain, and smite the first-born: as if to lead us into this enquiry, on the visitation of the blain in man and beast, the Bible History tells us that Moses threw ashes of the furnace, which became a dust throughout all the land of Egypt; we cannot imagine that this simply as ashes could have caused the blain, we may conclude that by some special miracle, either the ashes were converted into a specific form of matter capable of inducing the effects recorded, or that an independent septic matter was generated for the purpose. If the latter, the act of throwing the ashes of the furnace into the air may have been intended to signify that the extremely minute division of the particles when thus cast into space, typified the inscrutable and hidden nature of the matter endowed with such marvellous properties.[16] {40} Further on in the book of Leviticus are passages which I cannot forbear transcribing, for they point out to us most indubitably a line of enquiry in reference to diseases of a contagious nature. "The garment also that the plague of leprosy is in, whether it be a woollen garment, or a linen garment, whether it be in the warp or woof, of linen or of woollen, whether in a skin, or in any thing made of skin, and if the plague be greenish or reddish in the garment ... it is a plague of leprosy, and shall be shewed unto the Priest, and the Priest shall look upon the plague and shut up it that hath the plague seven days; and he shall look on the plague on the seventh day; if the plague be spread in the garment, either in the warp, &c. ... the plague is a fretting leprosy, it is unclean. He shall therefore burn that garment ... wherein the plague is, for it is a fretting leprosy; it shall be burnt in the fire. And if the Priest shall look, and behold, the plague be not spread in the garment ... then the Priest shall command that they wash the thing wherein the plague is, and he shall shut it up seven days more: and the Priest shall look on the plague, after that it is washed: and behold if the plague have _not_ changed his colour, and the plague be not spread, it is unclean; thou {41} shalt burn it in the fire; it is fret inward; whether it be bare within or without. And if the Priest look and behold the plague be somewhat dark after the washing of it, then he shall rend it out of the garment ... and if it appear still in the garment either in the warp or the woof ... it is a spreading plague: thou shalt burn that wherein the plague is with fire. And the garment ... which thou shalt wash, if the plague be departed from them, then it shall be washed the second time and shall be clean."--Chap. xiii. 47-58. Again in Deuteronomy. The curse for disobedience: "The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave to thee until he have consumed thee from off the land.--The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the drought, and with blasting, and with _mildew_, and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.--The Lord shall make the rain of thy land _powder_ and _dust_: from heaven shall it come down upon thee until thou be destroyed." It may be said, and I doubt not will be said, all this is unnecessarily dragging the sacred volume into an enquiry totally foreign to its general tenor; on the contrary, however, I maintain by that Book we are to learn the ways of God to man, and further, that no study can impress mankind with so awful, so terrific an idea of his responsible position, as that which leads him into the investigation of the causes {42} by which the Almighty, doubtless in His wisdom, has thought fit at various epochs of this world's history, to place man face to face with pestilence, famine and sudden death. There is no man would less willingly than myself introduce profanely the revelations of Scripture. The observations here made are not, therefore, intended for light or heedless controversy; if they have a significance of any import, let them be alluded to in the same spirit with which they have been quoted; if they convey nothing for approval to the reader, let silence rest upon them. To those who would fain disregard my request, let me recall to their minds the veneration which from childhood I trust we have always felt on hearing or seeing those two words--Holy Bible. It is yet to be determined, whether the greenish or reddish appearance of the garment spoken of, as being contaminated with the plague of the leprosy had any specific relation to the disease itself. The priest orders that the garment shall be shut up seven days, and on the seventh day, if the plague be increased, by which, of course, is meant if the greenish or reddish colour have increased, and from which we may gather that a power of spontaneous increase was possessed by the matter, such a result indicated a fretting leprosy, and the garment was to be burnt. Again, though there may have been no increase, but a persistence of the coloured matter after shutting up and washing the garment, it is to {43} be burnt, for it is fret inward, signifying, that the germs of the affection are still there, and may soon increase. Other rules follow in reference to the plague of leprosy, and the mode of deciding whether an article be unclean or clean is definitely laid down, but our purpose is served in mentioning the above, to shew that in the time of Moses the spontaneous increase of certain minute multiplying germs was supposed to have a close connexion with disease. It is equally clear, that the priests were aware by the order given them, that if the ordinary modes of purifying articles of clothing failed in their effect, the safest and surest method of destroying infectious matter was to resort to the practice of consuming by fire all materials capable of propagating an infectious malady. The facts above noticed, accurately correspond to what we now know as applicable to the matter of infectious and contagious maladies. It is a rule, I believe universally adopted throughout the Poor-houses of this country, to put the clothes of all persons about to become residents in these establishments, into ovens, where they are submitted to a temperature incompatible with the existence of either animal or vegetable life. By this means all living matters are destroyed, but the fabrics and inorganic matters retain their properties intact. This simple proceeding, I am credibly informed, is an effectual preventive of contamination by articles of clothing, a desideratum of no small importance, when it is {44} remembered that the diseases among the poor owe much of their inveteracy to the accumulation of effete organic matters about their persons and clothes. A few more observations are called for on the quotation from Deuteronomy, in which allusion is made to living matter being an agent in the production of disease. In the curse upon the children of Israel for disobedience, we read that they are to be smitten with mildew. No further information, however, is vouchsafed to us, nevertheless, we can conceive the wretched condition of those on whom the curse might fall. Again, we find in a continuation of this curse that the Almighty uses means such as He adopted in the sixth plague of the Egyptians. The ashes of the furnace became a small dust in all the land of Egypt, breaking forth with blains upon man and beast. In the curse of the Israelites the words are: "The Lord shall make the rain of thy land _powder and dust_: from Heaven shall it come down upon thee until thou be destroyed." It might be conjectured that the absence of rain would be sufficient to account for the extinction of the people on whom the curse was pronounced, by the famine and drought necessarily attendant upon the loss of moisture. But this does not appear to be the meaning of the passage, for the powder and dust are mentioned as the agents of destruction; besides, in the continuation of the curse, the locust is to destroy the grain, the worm the grapes, and {45} the olive is to shed his fruit; we may thus take for granted that drought and famine are not to be caused by the showering of powder and dust, it must consequently be supposed that the effects of the dust in the instance of the Egyptians are to be compared and classified with those of the dust which smote the Israelites. As far then as Sacred History conducts us in the enquiry, concerning the causes of pestilences, we gain encouragement in the belief that living germs are the active agents, for in the case of the leprosy, we have evidence of reproduction in connexion with infection, which, if our line of argument be tenable, amounts to demonstration; then, in the other instances of the plagues, by boils and blains, they distinctly bear comparison with the accounts given by profane writers, of the visitations of pestilences on the earth, subsequently to those mentioned in Scripture history. This leads now to the consideration of recorded facts observed and noted during the various Epidemics in the early and subsequent periods of Man's History, as given by those on whom reliance may be fairly placed. Setting aside the uncertain information contained in the writings of the Chinese,[17] a people whose {46} progress in the science and practice of Medicine has nothing to commend it (even as it is at the present day) to the notice either of the physician or the historian, unless it be to the latter as a mark of peculiarity both in a social and political point of view,--passing also over the Egyptians, the Arabians, and the Greeks,--and even Hippocrates himself, we are driven to the Romans for any authentic or precise notice of Epidemic Affections. It has been attributed to Hippocrates that he predicted the appearance of the Plague at Athens, {47} and that when it was introduced into Greece he dispelled it, "by purifying the air with fires into which were thrown sweet-scented herbs and flowers along with other perfumes."[18] But little advantage can be derived from enquiries concerning the first appearance of any disease, for the probability of discovering the primary cause is certainly a {48} hopeless case, if attempted by means of the writings of ancient authors, when it is recollected that with all the science and learning of the ancient Egyptians, the use of optical instruments was not comprised among the paraphernalia of their arts. The knowledge that was limited to the powers of natural vision, where the foundation of knowledge is based upon facts obtained through the aid of that penetrator of nature's secrets, the microscope, offers no advantages to the student of the present day. To say that a disease commenced in the East and travelled westward, and at length found a habitation and a name in every part of the globe, is no more than to say that disease is coeval with the fall of man. The cause is as much hidden in the region of its birth, as in that where it sojourns for a time. The cause of the sweating sickness was as much a mystery in England as in all the other nations of Europe, which were visited by its devastating power. And these observations apply with as much force to one disease as another; for even our indigenous ague, originating in some places so limited that the shadow of a passing cloud may mark the boundary of its dwelling place, as inscrutably evades our vigilance, with all the appliances that art can bring to our assistance, in endeavouring to evoke its extraordinary properties under the cognizance of our senses. If we weigh the air which carries the poison, or analyze it by the most delicate chemical tests, or {49} take the weight of the atmosphere which is charged with it, or if we take the blood which carries the germs of the disease to the tissues of the body, and submit them after the work of destruction is accomplished, to the most rigid inspection, we can but exclaim, "These are Thy marvellous works!" and confess our total inability to fathom the unbounded. If then no practical advantage can accrue from investigating the writings of the ancients on these subjects, beyond comparing their historical statements with those of more recent date, our purpose will be served by occasionally embodying any remarkable observations of the former with those of the latter. In proceeding with this course it were better to confine our minds chiefly to two diseases which appear from history to have been known from the earliest periods, these are the Plague and the Small Pox, mentioning other diseases only _en route_. Passing then, to the sixth century of the Christian era for the first distinct and connected account of the Plague, it appears from a host of testimony, that the history of this disease, as given by Procopius, well merits our attention. Drs. Friend and Hamilton, in their Histories of Medicine, and Gibbon, in his History of Rome, are equally warm in their praise of Procopius: the latter says, he "emulated the skill and diligence of Thucydides in the {50} description of the Plague at Athens." The account given by Procopius of this disease, does not differ materially from that given by subsequent eye-witnesses of similar pestilences. Its point of origin is clearly marked, and its mode of dispersion in all directions distinctly traced from "the neighbourhood of Pelusium, between the Serbonian bog and the eastern channel of the Nile." It commenced in the year 542. It raged in Constantinople in the following year, and it was in this city that our historian gathered the materials which are handed down to us. When, however, we anxiously look for any explanation as to the cause of the malady, we are told that it must have been a direct visitation from Heaven, in consequence of the eccentric characters exhibited in its wide-spreading influence, in not yielding to the scrutiny nor bending to the laws known to prevail, and to regulate the course of other diseases: neither country nor clime, age nor sex, the strong and healthy, nor the weakly and previously diseased, could be said to be free from its indiscriminate destruction. But some phenomena preceding the outbreak of the pestilence are observed as coincidences by all authors. Gibbon thus writes: "I shall conclude this chapter with the comets, the earthquakes, and the plague which astonished or afflicted the age of Justinian." From the accounts given by this author, earthquakes for some years had been threatening and destroying many portions of the globe, {51} that in the ruins of cities and in the chasms of the earth, great was the sacrifice of human life. Constantinople, which suffered so severely from the plague is said to have been shaken for forty days. These great disturbances of the globe have been always looked upon as indicating other and important influences of a secret or hidden nature; these impressions on the minds of the people are traceable throughout the histories of all epidemics, and have been sufficiently distinct among the people of our own time, preceding and during the period of infliction. From this short notice of the Plague of 543, I pass to the ninth century, when Rhazes, the Arabian physician, endeavoured to enlighten the world on the subject of Small Pox.[19] In quoting his opinions, I am not to be understood as subscribing to them, but merely endeavouring to point out some peculiar and interesting observations. First, then, Rhazes attributes the disease to a condition of the blood, which he thus describes, to shew how it happens that in infancy and childhood the disease is most prevalent, and that old age is {52} least liable to the affection.[20] "The blood of infants and children may be compared to _must_, in which the coction leading to perfect ripeness has not yet begun, nor the movement towards fermentation taken place; the blood of young men may be compared to must which has already fermented and made a hissing noise, and has thrown out abundant vapours and its superfluous parts, like wine which is now still and quiet, and arrived at its full strength, and as to the blood of old men, it may be compared to wine which has now lost its strength, and is beginning to grow vapid and sour." "Now the Small Pox arises when the blood putrifies and ferments, so that the superfluous vapours are thrown out of it, and it is changed from the blood of infants which is like must, into the blood of young men which is like wine perfectly ripened: and the Small Pox itself may be compared to the fermentation and the hissing noise which take place at that time." But the cause of the disease is simply alluded to by this author, as depending upon "occult dispositions in the air," and as he speaks here of Measles with the Small Pox he goes on to say--"which necessarily cause these diseases and predispose bodies to them." This notion of Rhazes that there is some peculiar condition of the blood which favours a process resembling fermentation is not without interest. The circumstance that individuals are not {53} usually liable to a second attack of the disease, no doubt directed the attention of this physician to compare the process of fermentation with disease of such a nature, seeing that when the whole of the saccharine matter was converted into spirit, the hissing noise, as he calls it, or the disengagement of carbonic acid gas would cease, and the capacity for fermentation be entirely gone. So that the occult conditions of the air, their power of inducing a disease, and multiplying the matter capable of engendering a similar affection, stood in the mind of Rhazes as analogous if not identical phenomena. We pass now without further comment to the epidemics of the Middle Ages; and here the work of the philosophical Hecker leaves us little else to desire in the way of information, as far as it is obtainable from published records. From the manner in which he has grouped the facts which presented themselves to his mind in the course of a most laborious research, he has saved the student of this subject much toil in acquiring matter for reflection; he has here but to read and digest. I know not how to select from this invaluable work the most striking passages, to strengthen and support my hypothesis, for not a page is destitute of facts corroborative of the doctrine that vital germs are the material agents of pestilential disorders. The opening paragraph to the Black Death is a most cogent illustration of the assertion; it is, as it were, the theme of the work. "That {54} Omnipotence, which has called the world with all _its living creatures into one animated being_, especially reveals himself in the desolation of great pestilences. The powers of creation come into violent collision; the sultry dryness of the atmosphere; the subterranean thunders; the mist of overflowing waters are the harbingers of destruction. Nature is not satisfied with the ordinary alternations of life and death, and the destroying angel waves over man and beast his flaming sword." I must here apologise for large transcripts from Hecker's work, for neither could I command the amount of knowledge there displayed, nor use such appropriate language as the learned translator has employed. It is not doubted that the Black Death was an Oriental plague, only of more than usual severity, and wider spread influence of the infectious nature of this disease, and the active properties of the matter producing it. Hecker says, "articles of this kind--bedding and clothes--removed from the access of air, not only retain the matter of contagion for an indefinite period, _but also increase its activity, and engender it like a living being_, frightful ill consequences followed for many years after the first fury of the pestilence was past."[21] {55} As extraordinary atmospheric and telluric phenomena preceded the Plague in the time of Justinian, so do we find similar instances recorded as the precursor of a similar visitation 700 years later. I am concerned more with those circumstances which refer more especially to my subject, _viz._ the development of organic matter, and the peculiar odours of the atmosphere, the latter being evidence of some foreign and unusual production in our respiratory media. "On the island of Cyprus, before the earthquake, a pestiferous wind spread so poisonous an odour, that many being overpowered by it, fell down suddenly and expired in dreadful agonies. A thick stinking mist advanced from the east, and spread itself over Italy." {56} It is probable that the atmosphere contained foreign and sensibly perceptible admixtures to a great extent, which, at least in the lower regions, could not be decomposed or rendered ineffective by separation. In 1348 an unexampled earthquake shook Greece, Italy, and the neighbouring countries. During this earthquake the wine in the casks became turbid, a proof that changes causing a decomposition of the atmosphere had taken place. "The insect tribe was wonderfully called into life, as if animated beings were destined to complete the destruction which astral and telluric powers had began." "The corruption of the atmosphere came from the east, but the disease itself came not upon the wings of the wind, but was only excited and increased by the atmosphere where it had previously existed." "The most powerful of all the springs of the disease was contagion; for in the most distant countries, which had scarcely yet heard the echo of the first concussion, the people fell a sacrifice to organic poison, the untimely offspring of vital energies thrown into violent commotion." "After the cessation of the Black Plague, a greater fecundity in women was every where remarkable, a grand phenomena, which from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction the prevalence of a higher power in the direction of general organic life." {57} In the article Contagion, of the Essay, Sweating Sickness: "Most fevers which are produced by general causes, propagate themselves for a time spontaneously." "The exhalations of the affected become the germs of a similar decomposition in those bodies which receive them, and produce in these a like attack upon the internal organs, _and thus a merely morbid phenomenon of life, shows that it possesses the fundamental property of all life, that of propagating itself in an appropriate soil. On this point there is no doubt, the phenomena which prove it have been observed from time immemorial, in an endless variety of circumstances, but always with a uniform manifestation of a fundamental law._" Mead, in his Essay on the Plague, makes many observations of great interest and worthy a physician of eminence; and where, in recent times, shall we look for any more definite information concerning the causes of pestilences? It is not a little singular that at the time this book was published, it was read with such avidity that it went through seven editions in one year.[22] From this circumstance we may gather that the public generally took a lively and proper interest in a subject that was not only of domestic, but national importance. Whether this interest was stimulated by the fact that the work was written expressly by order of the {58} government, it is now impossible to say, at any rate much credit is due to the Lords of the Regency for having placed so important a duty upon one so thoroughly and in every way so duly qualified for the task as Dr. Mead. It had been well if some of the advice given at that time, as means of protection against the Plague, had been applied and put in force during the late visitation of epidemic Cholera, for, however the minds of some may be convinced of the non-contagiousness of Cholera, there are many who hold a different opinion, and all will acknowledge, that if not strictly a contagious affection, it is clearly proved to be capable of being carried from place to place, or to use Dr. Copland's words, it is "a portable disease." But this is not the place to discuss the subject of contagion, allusion will be made to it hereafter. To return, Mead's expressions are singularly illustrative of the vital power possessed by the germs of disease; he says, "There are instances of the distemper's being stopt by the winter cold, and yet the seeds of it not destroyed, but only kept unactive, _till the warmth of the following spring has given them new life and force_. His confession as to the hidden cause of the disease, is worthy transcribing: "We are acquainted too little with the laws, by which the small parts of matter act upon each other, to be able precisely to determine the qualities requisite to change animal juices into such acrimonious humours, or to explain {59} how all the distinguishing symptoms attending the disease are produced."[23] On the spread of the Plague is the following:--"The plague is a _real poison_, which being bred in the southern parts of the world, maintains itself there by circulating from infected persons to goods, that when the constitution of the air happens to favour infection, it rages with great violence." Contagious matter is lodged in goods of a loose and soft texture, which being packed up, and carried into other countries, let out, when opened, the imprisoned seeds of contagion, and produce the disease whenever the air is disposed to give them force, "otherwise they may be dispersed without any considerable ill effects." Gibbon thus speaks of the above quoted work: "I have read with pleasure Mead's short but elegant Treatise concerning Pestilential Disorders;" many also might read it at the present day with infinite advantage. Mead most satisfactorily combats the opinions of the French physicians who maintained the non-contagiousness of the Plague. Experience proves beyond doubt, that certain conditions of atmosphere, of {60} which we are ignorant, favour the growth and increase of pestilences as they do of all vegetation. Dr. Bancroft was of opinion that specific contagions are each and severally creatures of Divine Wisdom, as distinctly and designedly exerted for their production, as it was to create the several species of animals and vegetables around us. The indigenous fever of Ireland, which has several times shewn itself in an epidemic form, appears to have been as fatal, as the Plague in the South of Europe. Its devastations have generally been associated or preceded by famine and general distress. Dr. Harty, writing in 1820, says that thrice within the last eighty years has the same fever appeared in its epidemic character. In the year 1741 Ireland lost 80,000 of her inhabitants from this cause. It is a maculated typhus, and considered to be a special product of the Emerald Isle. It has been shewn that fever began to exceed its ordinary rate in those places first where famine and want of employment were most severely felt,[24] and that in such places and under such circumstances, it was most prevalent and fatal. The physicians generally believed it to have been spontaneously produced and not to have been imported. In the last Famine Fever of Ireland, Liverpool and several other places suffered severely from the {61} importation of their Channel neighbours with the disease in some instances, and the infection in others about their persons. Hitherto these have to all appearance been the limits of the affection; we know not, however, how soon the time may come when the invisible bonds which have thus chained the disease to certain localities may be severed, and spreading itself like other pestilences in an aggravated form, attack this country as a last and crowning act of retributive justice. At present it has but cost us money and regrets, but if the history of pestilences is to be heeded, there are many tokens which seem to indicate that a few slight concurrent circumstances only are wanting, to bring the full force of this disease upon us; then will there be a sacrifice of life. Edinburgh and other towns of Scotland have had some visitations already, ourselves but slightly, but let our labouring population suffer to any large extent for want of work, and we shall inevitably be the sufferers from that fever which in consequence of general destitution is now always more or less prevalent in Ireland. The Sweating Sickness prevailed in England alone at first, but at length sought foreign victims. The Cholera is an exotic disease, as well as the Plague, but they occasionally have visited our shores, and their seeds remain among us. The Small Pox is now even not known in some parts of the world, but when once it is established, who can predict the period of its first appearance in an {62} epidemic form. The history of the disease informs us that in all the countries where it has been introduced, sooner or later an epidemic has seized the inhabitants. A disease previously unknown in India appeared at Rangoon in the year 1824, which obtained the name of Scarlatina Rheumatica. Four years afterwards it attacked the Southern States of North America, and though the disease was so impartial as scarcely to spare a single individual of any town to which it extended its influence, it was not accompanied with that mortality which has usually been the characteristic of wide spread epidemics. There is one peculiar feature of all epidemics which may be here mentioned as indicative of some definite, though at present unaccountable cause, operating in the sudden suppression of the disease after a certain period of duration. This distinctive character may almost be considered as a law in reference to these affections; if we take three distinct diseases, the Plague, the Irish Fever and the Cholera, we find the rule apply to all. Of the latter disease we have so recently been witnesses, that I need not quote authorities on this point concerning it. In Dr. Patrick Russell's work on the Plague at Aleppo I find the following remarkable passage. After alluding to the great increase of pestilential effluvia that there must be towards the close of an epidemic, compared with the amount at the onset of the disease, and expressing his {63} astonishment that so many escape infection, he says: "The fact, however unaccountable, is unquestionably certain; the distemper seems to be extinguished by some cause or causes equally unknown, as those which concurred to render it more or less epidemical in its advance and at its height." He then mentions that in Europe the sudden cessation may be partly attributable to the measures adopted for preventing its extension; but "at Aleppo, where the disease is left to run its natural course, and few or no means of purification are employed, it pursues nearly the same progress in different years; it declines and revives in certain seasons, and at length, without the interference of human aid, ceases entirely." The expressions of Dr. Harty on this subject, in connexion with the Irish Fever, would apply as well to all other epidemics: "It is a fact, that though every diversity of management was resorted to for effecting the suppression of the disease, yet, nevertheless, there was an almost simultaneous and apparently spontaneous decline of the epidemic in the various and most remote parts of Ireland. It is not an easy matter to offer a satisfactory explanation of this circumstance, _some general cause must_ no doubt have influenced the subsidence of the disease, yet that cause could not be atmospheric, inasmuch as the decline, though it might be said to be simultaneous, was not sufficiently so to admit of that explanation." * * * * * {64} SECTION III. THE DISPERSION OF PLANTS AND DISEASES. The dispersion of Diseases and the dispersion of Plants, exhibit analogies which might be little expected, on a superficial view of the enquiry. We are led to believe, that the earth as a whole, was not covered with vegetation in a day, the geological history of this planet is one of development, and though at first sight this expression of opinion may appear to savour of doubt in the Mosaic record, a more extended acquaintance with the subject, favours rather and confirms Scripture history. As the peopling of the earth has been a gradual process with the animal creation, so has it been also with the vegetable kingdom. We see at the present day, that plants by various means of transit from place to place, multiply themselves on new soils and in new climes, the same with animals. By other means we observe, or can trace, the extinction from various localities and countries, of members of both the animal and vegetable kingdom. We learn that originally this planet had a temperature much higher than at present, and that the variation of temperature between the equator and the poles, which we now witness, did not obtain in the earlier condition of the globe. We are given to understand, and not without considerable proof, {65} if not demonstration, that the earth was a vast bog, in which rank vegetation grew, and in which the ichthyosauri and plesiosauri, must have floundered about as unwieldy and loathsome bodies. We can readily conceive a condition of atmosphere at this time to have been loaded with pestiferous vapours of an organized nature; it is entirely in accordance with all we know, that it should have been so. Allied forms of plants to those now in existence, are found in the form of fossils, by which comparisons are made, but how the transition into the present Flora took place, or at what period, it is impossible to say. That these plants should have been entirely destroyed during the revolutions of the earth by earthquakes, and their consequences; the collection of waters into the vacuities formed, and their draining off from other places by elevations of the land, is not to be dwelt on without astonishment; then again the ultimate changes of temperature on the surface of the earth, may have been another element in the history of their extinction. But if we may be allowed to imagine that there were organic germs floating in the vapours of the atmosphere, these would hardly be subject to the same influences as those which depended solely on their fixation to the soil for subsistence. The atmosphere, their native element, being influenced by the commotions from below, would be agitated; vortiginous currents would be established, hurricanes would sweep over the stagnant pool and reeking morass, {66} and the higher regions of the air might have thus given protection to these subtle germs, while almost a total extinction of the elegant ferns, the stately palm, and the towering cane was in course of procedure. Then when the strife of the earth and elements had subsided, these would descend with the gentle breezes, and again find in various spots a local habitation-- "Where blue mists, through the unmoving atmosphere, Scatter the seeds of pestilence _and feed unnatural vegetation_." In the new era, when the earth took its present physiognomy, who shall say whether much of the pestiferous matter may not have been enclosed and condensed in the bowels of the earth, and when it is remembered, that earthquakes and convulsions of nature,[25] have invariably preceded the outbreak of {67} any great pestilences, that stinking mists, coming from some unknown regions, and unusual vegetations have made their appearance in concert at these times, what I ask is more natural than to imagine, that they have been let loose during the general convulsion? It may be asked, what is to be said about that revolution of the earth, when the great Deluge spread over the whole face of the globe? It can only be replied, that this is a part of the scheme of cosmogony into which we are not called upon to enter. There are yet strenuous supporters of the partial as well as total submersion of this planet, but whether it be true that the vast torrents which appear to have swept the surface uniformly in a southern direction, were of a date coeval with the deluge, and constituted an essential portion of the phenomena, of which one was, that "the fountains of the great deep were broken up," or whether they were anterior to this catastrophe, will not at all interfere with the conjecture of a very early formation and propagation of the germs of pestilential diseases, for the commotions of a deluge were less likely to interfere with the vapours of the atmosphere, than extensive volcanic and electric disturbances. Moreover, it is rather in favour of this theory, that the {68} regions where the temperature and exhalations most nearly resemble those of the former condition of the earth, are those in which pestilential disorders most frequently arise, and where their virulence has always been most strongly marked. After the various commotions which left the globe, with its present physiognomy of mountains, plains, valleys, rivers, lakes, and oceans; a new Flora and Fauna appeared to adorn and animate the scene of man's existence. Plants and animals were created apparently in adaptation to the numerous climes, which the seasons in the various latitudes or the elevations of the soil, were prepared to render fruitful and useful each in its own sphere. Besides this, the plants of the same latitude, in some instances, differ materially from each other; in this case it seems that the soil has much to do with this peculiarity, for it is certain that the soil and the contiguous atmosphere, have a close and intimate relation; the drought of the desert depends upon the sand, as humid atmosphere is connected with the morass. To illustrate the tendency which vegetation shews in appropriating one locality more than another, I may quote the following: "Some of the volcanic masses of the �olian or Lipari Islands, that have existed beyond the reach of history, are still without a blade of verdure; while others in various parts, of little more than two hundred years date, bear spontaneous vegetation, and the same is seen on two lavas of Etna near each other, for the one {69} of 1536 is still black and arid, while that of 1636, is covered with oaks, fruit trees, and vines." In comparing the diffusion of plants, and the diffusion of diseases, the different modes by which this generally has been effected may be considered under heads, that the comparison may be more readily traced. _First_, seeds are diffused by the atmosphere, either by the prevalence of certain currents, which are produced by known laws, in which case, no difficulty occurs in the explanations; or in a more imperceptible manner, as by those more uncertain atmospheric currents of a partial nature, which, though they seem to have laws governing them, are not yet understood. _Second_, seeds are transported by water across oceans, &c. when they can be floated on any material by which they are preserved, as by wrecks and masses of wood, which have been washed down the rivers. _Third_, they are conveyed by man to all parts of the globe. _Fourth_, a period of latency is observed to apply to them, that is, they require certain essential conditions before germination occurs; so that even in some localities, a plant may not have been known to exist in a particular neighbourhood, but by a train of circumstances, it may make its appearance, and again be a centre of development. 1st. I shall not here wander into the speculation, {70} whether plants had originally one birth-place, as a centre from which they spread by various agencies, as supposed by Linnæus, nor into any enquiry beyond those facts, which may fairly come within our own comprehension, and within our own means of demonstration. Many seeds are provided with means adapting them for floating in the atmosphere, these are by pappi, or winglets and hairs, but it cannot be doubted that the agency of atmospheric currents, is productive of considerable effects in the dispersion of lighter seeds, such as those of mosses, fungi, and lichens--lichens have been discovered in Brittany, which are peculiar to Jamaica, and Monsieur De Candolle concludes, that their seeds had been carried thence by the south-westerly winds, which prevail during a great part of the year on this portion of the French coast. But Humboldt's testimony on the subject of winds is most satisfactory, for he says, "Small singing birds, and even butterflies, are found at sea, at great distances from the coast (as I have several times had opportunities of observing in the Pacific), being carried there by the force of the wind, when storms come off the land." It is generally believed, from abundance of proofs, that the trade winds, and other continuous currents, are means by which plants are conveyed from one country to another.[26] {71} As to the partial currents, Humboldt further says, "The heated crust of the earth occasions an ascending vertical current of air by which light bodies are borne upwards. M. Boussingault, and Don Mariano De Rivero, in ascending the summit of the Silla, one of the gneiss mountains of Caraccas, saw in the middle of the day, about noon, whitish shining bodies rise from the valley to the summit of the mountain, 5755 feet high, and then sink down towards the neighbouring sea coast. These movements continued uninterruptedly for the space of an hour. The whitish shining bodies proved to be small agglomerations of straws, or blades of grass, which were recognized by Professor Kunth, for a species of vilfa, a genus, which together with agrostis, is very abundant in the provinces of Caraccas and Cumana." On the plague of locusts we read, that "the Lord brought an east wind upon the land, all that day and all that night, and when it was morning the east wind brought the locusts." On the Black Death we read, "There were many locusts which had been blown into the sea by a hurricane, and a dense and awful fog was seen in the heavens, rising in the east, and descending upon Italy." Of the Plague of 542, Gibbon says, "The winds might diffuse that subtle venom, but unless the atmosphere be previously disposed for its reception, the plague would soon expire in the cold or {72} temperate regions of the north. The disease alternately languished and revived, but it was not till a calamitous period of fifty-two years, that mankind recovered their health, or the air resumed its pure and salubrious quality." In the history of the Sweating Sickness, of which there were five distinct visitations, we find ample allusions to the atmosphere, and the mode in which the disease was conveyed by this medium. I quote again from Hecker: "It seemed that _the banks of the Severn_ were the _focus of the malady_, and that from hence, a true impestation of the atmosphere, was diffused in every direction. Whithersoever the winds wafted the stinking mists, the inhabitants became infested with the sweating sickness. _These poisonous clouds of mists were observed moving from place to place_, with the disease in their train, affecting one town after another, and morning and evening spreading their nauseating insufferable stench. At greater distances, these clouds being dispersed by the wind, became gradually attenuated yet their dispersion set no bounds to the pestilence, and it was as if they had imparted to the lower strata of the atmosphere, _a kind of ferment which went on engendering itself even without the presence of the thick misty vapour_, and being received into men's lungs, produced the frightful disease everywhere."[27] {73} Mr. K. B. Martin, harbour-master of Ramsgate, in a communication to Lord Carlisle on the Cholera of last autumn, says, "At midnight of the 31st August (1849), the Samson (steam-tug) proceeded to the Goodwin Sands, where the crew were employed under the Trinity agent, assisting in work carried on there by that corporation. While there, at 3 A.M. 1st September, _a hot humid haze, with a bog-like smell_, passed over them; and the greater number of the men there employed instantly felt a nausea. They were in two parties. One man at work on the sand was obliged to be carried to the boat; and before they reached the steam vessel at anchor, the cramps and spasm had supervened upon the vomitings; but here they found two of the party on board similarly affected. Here then is a very marked case without any known predisposing local cause. Doubtless it was atmospheric, and in the hot blast of pestilence which passed over them." Many more instances might be quoted, to shew that the germs of disease, as well as of plants, are borne on the wings of the wind from place to place {74} in one country, and from one country to another, the distance being no obstacle, however great that may be.[28] "Dust and sands," says Sharon Turner, "heavier than many seeds, are borne by the winds and clouds for several hundred miles across the atmosphere, falling on the earth and seas as they pass along." "The clouds not only bring us occasionally meteoric stones, hail, and _epidemics_, but also vegetable seeds."[29] 2nd. The transportation of seeds of plants by water requires very little notice; every one is familiar with the mode in which coral islands, which gradually rise out of the sea, become covered with vegetation. "If new lands are formed, the organic forces are ever ready to cover the naked rock with life.--Lichens form the first covering of the barren {75} rocks, where afterwards lofty forest trees wave their airy summits. The successive growth of mosses, grasses, herbaceous plants and shrubs or bushes, occupies the intervening period of long but undetermined duration." The following may be cited as an instance of the transportation of disease by water. "Cyprus lost almost all its inhabitants, and ships without crews were often seen in the Mediterranean, or afterwards in the North Sea, driving about, _and spreading the plague wherever they went on shore_."[30] It requires no argument to enforce the conviction that cottons, woollens, furs, skins, &c. will retain the matter of infection for almost an indefinite period; instances of the kind have been already given; it is therefore easy to understand that portions of wrecks and ship's goods would be a frequent though unsuspected source of infection. Dr. Halley mentions a case, in which a bale of cotton was put on shore at Bermuda by stealth; it lay above a month without prejudice, where it was hid, but when opened and distributed among the inhabitants, it produced such a contagion that the living scarce sufficed to bury the dead. Dr. Walker found seeds dropt accidentally into the sea in the West Indies cast ashore on the Hebrides. He says, "the sea and rivers waft more seed than sails." The waters of many rivers induce diarrhoea and dysentery.[31] Well water also in many {76} places has a similar effect, especially if any surface drainage happens to find its way into the well. 3rd. The part performed by man himself in the communication of disease to his fellow creatures, is perhaps the most fruitful source of the extensive spread of epidemic and contagious diseases. In the time of Moses, restrictions were laid on those who had the plague of the leprosy to avoid contagion; the dictum for one so affected was, "he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be."[32] All the ancient authors believed in the {77} infectious nature of pestilential fevers, and some other diseases; but, according. to Mr. Adams, they held that no specific virus was the cause, and merely a contamination of the surrounding air by effluvia from the sick. Thucydides, Hippocrates, Procopius, Galen, Plutarch, all recognized the property of communicability from one individual to another of the plague; and Hecker, on the epidemics of the middle ages, abounds with instances in support of contagion. As regards small-pox and measles, Rhazes observes particularly the connection that exists between the condition of the air and the severity or mildness of these diseases, remarking that small-pox seldom happens to old men, except in pestilential, putrid, and malignant constitutions of the air in which this disease is usually prevalent. The history of the introduction of Scarlet Fever, Hooping Cough, Lues, and other diseases into the various countries of the globe, is sufficiently convincing that men carry about with them the seeds of disease; that while these attach themselves to the persons and clothing of those who introduce them into new climes, and flourish independently of cultivation, yet the exotics which they foster with so much care, often disappoint their most sanguine expectations; and these "languishing in our {78} hothouses can give but a very faint idea of the majestic vegetation of the tropical zone." Art in this procedure fails to accomplish here, what nature but too sadly, under some circumstances, effects most readily. The germs of some diseases though of an exotic character, under congenial influences of various kinds, appear to flourish with native vigour: is it not so, also, with some forms of vegetation? The aloe, a native of Mexico, which lives, but does not thrive well, or reproduce under ordinary circumstances in this country, will occasionally send forth a most luxuriant blossom;[33] so rare is this, that some say it occurs every 50 or 100 years, but no law seems to be established on this point, any more than the statement that we may expect pestilential diseases at certain intervals. But that there are intervals of _uncertain_ duration when the aloe will blossom, when the grapes will ripen, and a general productiveness of exotics will occur, is as certain as that seasons will occur when contagion will be rife, and a most unusual multiplication of disease prevail. This is not an imaginary or speculative notion,--all observers of seasons and diseases within the last twenty years, may fully verify the statement. In 1846, a large vine, the black Hambro-grape, {79} ripened its fruit out of doors, and was as fine as any green-house production; but during nine years that the vine has been under my inspection, this was the only time I have witnessed such a result. We are apt to attribute an abundant or scarce fruit season to temperature alone, but this is an error--for we have before remarked, that though certain lands may be in the same degree of latitude, the plants which thrive well on one land, will not do so on the other: in fine, that where reason and analogy would lead one to expect a particular form of vegetation, a totally different Flora is presented to the view. These facts are indeed suggestive of new and important deductions. Is it yet explained why the town of Birmingham should be free from Cholera? There is a large manufacturing population, a great number of poor, the usual overcrowding of individuals in small chambers, a considerable amount of destitution and depravity; irregular habits of living, and unwholesome diet, and doubtless many parts of the town, which on investigation would have yielded all the elements usually considered necessary for the localization of the disease: but no--here was some repelling cause, some opposing agent to the generation and propagation of the pestilential seeds. There are no known laws by which inorganic matter could be supposed to observe such a selection, or such an antagonism. Electricity, magnetism, ozone, gases, exhibit no such elective properties that here they will destroy, and {80} there they will spare; that they can almost depopulate small villages, and scarcely find a victim in Birmingham and Bath. But if we suppose a living, and multiplying matter as the cause of disease, many local causes may conspire to arrest the development of the germs, or perhaps, even utterly destroy them. 4th. As to the time of latency, facts crowd upon us indefinitely, as elements of comparison between vegetation generally, and disease in its early stages and history. The seeds of plants are extraordinarily tenacious of life. What a mysterious arrangement of the ultimate particles of matter must there be, by which the vital force remains apparently inactive for many years, and yet when the conditions arise favourable to its manifestation, as it were by an extraordinary fiat, life appears. Previous to the year 1715, no broom grew in the King's Park, at Stirling; but in that year a camp was formed there, and the surface of the ground consequently was broken in many places. Wherever it was broken, broom sprang up. The plant was subsequently destroyed; but in 1745 a similar growth appeared after the ground had been again broken for a like purpose. Some time afterwards the park was ploughed up, and the broom became generally spread over it. "In several places in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh," says Professor Graham, "the breaking of the surface produces an abundant crop of Fumaria parviflora, {81} although the same plant had never before been observed in the neighbourhood. It is impossible to say the lapse of time since these were buried, before they were again excited to the performance of all their vital functions." Dr. Graham also gives another proof of the vital force existing in seeds. "To the westward of Stirling there is a large peat bog, a great part of which has been flooded away by raising water from the River Teith, and discharging it into the Forth,--the under soil of clay being then cultivated. The clergyman of the parish standing by while the workmen were forming a ditch in this clay, which had been covered with fourteen feet of peat earth, saw some seeds in the clay which was thrown out of the ditch; he took some of them up and sowed them: they germinated and produced a crop of Chrysanthemum septum. What a period of years must have elapsed while the seeds were getting their covering of clay, and while this clay became buried under fourteen feet of peat earth!"[34] {82} What limit can there be to the dispersion of seeds when their vital properties may remain so long unimpaired? The seeds of which we have been speaking were, no doubt many of them, washed away with the waters of the Teith, and carried by the stream into the Forth; and who shall then mark their destination; for we have seen that by such means the most distant lands are supplied with vegetation; for whence come the plants which cover the Coral Islands, unless by the air and the water, and that both contribute, has been incontestably proved. Dr. Lindley states that melon seeds have been known to grow when forty-one years old; maize thirty years, rye forty years, the sensitive plant sixty years, kidney-beans a hundred years. But seeds in general have an indefinite period, apparently, at which they can retain their power of germination; for many of the seeds which had been kept in the herbarium of Tournefort for more than a century, were found to have preserved their fertility. It has now to be shewn that the germs of disease also retain their vital powers in a state of dormancy during a lengthened period. {83} Mead has very judiciously observed, "to breed a distemper, and to give force to it when bred, are two different things." He further remarks, that the seeds of the Plague may confine themselves to a house or two during a hard frosty winter, and be preserved, and again put forth their malignant quality as soon as the warmth of the spring gives them force. It is certainly very remarkable that the Plague of London, which commenced at the latter end of the year 1664, should "lie asleep," as Mead says, from Christmas to the middle of February, and then break out in the same parish. It has been also known that an infected bed laid by for seven years had done infinite mischief on being again brought into use. Indeed, it is quite uncertain for how long a period woollen, fur, linen, cotton, and other articles may retain infectious matter in a dormant state. It has been supposed by some that in closely packed bed and body clothes a multiplication of the germs may and does take place, nor do I see any reason why this should not be the case, for these articles contain within their structure the effluvia of the animal body, and they may possibly there find sufficient nutriment for their development. Nees von Esenbeck believed that some of the minute Cryptogamia were re-produced in the air, we are not therefore exceeding philosophical conjecture when we imagine a basis and substratum, though an unusual one, for the germs of vegetation. Exclusion from air and light, {84} however, as would be the case in packed-up clothes, would _a priori_ give a better colour to the conjecture, as these are the usual conditions necessary for the growth of seeds. Small Pox and Cow Pox matter, which are now proved to be the same virus, the former modified by having been through a process of growth and maturation in the cow, are both remarkable for exhibiting their active properties after having lain dormant for a considerable time. And each, though so closely allied, retaining its specific properties. This peculiarity in the history of Small Pox virus suggests a comparison with some phenomena of vegetation, _viz._ that of grafting or budding. The lower Cryptogamia in their fructifications resemble rather multiplication by buds than by seeds. M. Moyen's idea is that every spore or little globule, independently of its neighbouring one, lives, absorbs, assimilates, grows, and re-produces on its own account; this is certainly the characteristic of the Torula and the Uredo, and doubtless is so of many other of the Cryptogamia, the Protococcus nivalis is another instance. Other modes of cultivation produce also great varieties of results of an unexpected kind. Would any one, says Dr. Walker, imagine that cabbage, cauliflower, savoy, kale, brocoli, and turnip-rooted cabbage, were the same species? yet nothing is more certain than that they are only varieties produced by the cultivation of the Brassica oleracea, {85} a plant which grows wild on the sea-shores of Europe. These varieties in vegetables have now become permanent, and though it is supposed that each is liable to return to its original condition, I am not yet certain that such is the tendency. A deterioration is not unlikely to ensue in the course of time, because the propagation by seeds must necessarily very much approach the system of intermarriage, on which Mr. Walker has so ably written and clearly shewn that as a result we may invariably expect a deterioration of the species. Dr. Darwin has also poetically described what his experience taught him. "So grafted trees with shadowy summits rise, Spread their fair blossoms and perfume the skies, _Till canker taints the vegetable blood_, Mines round the bark and feeds upon the wood; So years successive from perennial roots, The wire or bulb with lessened vigour shoots, Till curled leaves or barren flowers betray A waning lineage verging to decay; Or till amended by connubial powers, Rise seedling progenies from sexual flowers." The minute nature of the germs of disease preclude all possibility of their being submitted, as far as we know at present, to the inspection of the physiologist, but we may infer many facts from results. In the same way, though with humbler {86} ideas, as Cuvier could build up an animal from a single bone, can we by a combination of facts infer the existence of living beings and conjecture their forms. "The re-production or generation of living organized bodies is the great criterion or characteristic which distinguishes animation from mechanism." We find the virus of Small Pox, according to Mr. Ceely's experiments, developing itself as a constitutional disease upon the cow, and becoming modified into a form known as the Cow Pox; this resembles the process of cultivation by which a species is converted into a variety, this variety remains for a certain time persistent; the time is not yet known, but it is known that by degrees, as stated above, a deterioration occurs, and fertility becomes impaired, "a waning lineage verging to decay," and this has been observed as a feature in the result of vaccination. I believe Dr. Gregory was one of the first to notice this fact, and deemed it necessary to obtain fresh lymph from the cow; this has been done, and it is not improbable, if the analogy we have drawn be correct, that the slowly spreading scepticism regarding vaccination may be arrested in its progress. If we can explain the deterioration of cow pox virus on this principle we have a hold at once upon the public, and can assure them that the efficacy of the proceeding is as certain as in the time of Jenner. The people, I contend, have a right to demand of us the reason why vaccination is not so efficacious as formerly, and I {87} affirm as unhesitatingly that we are bound to give the subject our most earnest attention.[35] Now concerning the re-production of Cow Pox matter, and assuming it to resemble that of the lower Cryptogamia, we can easily understand how degeneration in a course of years should ensue, for we find that though the Small Pox is a constitutional disease, that produced by vaccine lymph is a local affection, so that it bears the relation that grafting does to vegetation, and it is not improbable that such a modification takes place in the germs by passing through or becoming generated in the blood of the cow, that they entirely lose their original and characteristic form of reproduction: the seeds of the disease were originally capable of vegetating, if I may be allowed to use the term, by diffusion through the atmosphere; they now, however, have lost that property, and require to be grafted to exhibit any manifestation of vitality. How often will the seeds of a cultivated fruit grow? If you bud it upon another plant, you obtain a being exactly like the parent, but this, as we have seen, deteriorates in a course of years, we have also seen that the virus deteriorates; but not to stretch this point to an unseemly length, I cannot avoid expressing my conviction, that these are elements of comparison, possessing an interest and a practical utility of no small value. {88} I have before said, that the reproduction in the Cryptogamia, rather resembles budding than seeding. If we observe the Torula, or take the process of all formation, generally it will be found to accord more exactly with the budding than the seeding process, and this peculiarity is not confined to vegetation, it is also a marked feature in the reproduction of infusoria, sponges, polypes, &c. "New buds surround the microscopic plant." The reproduction of plants and animals appears to be of two kinds, solitary and sexual; the former occurs in the formation of the buds of trees, and the bulbs of tulips. The microscopic productions of spontaneous vitality propagate by solitary generation only. We have but reached the threshold of this vast and interesting subject, the experiments which suggest themselves to the mind while reflecting upon it, would alone occupy a whole life of leisure, and I can but feel how forcibly Mr. Sewell's words apply to us: "The grand field of investigation lies immediately before us, we are trampling every hour upon things which to the ignorant seem nothing but dirt, but to the curious are precious as gold." It is difficult, perhaps, to bring many instances, in which the germs of disease have lain dormant for a lengthened period, because many may take exception to them, from the fact, that sporadic cases of {89} most epidemic and infectious diseases, are rarely absent from any country in which those diseases have become indigenous, and these cases may be said to be the foci whence originates the epidemic constitution of the air; this, however, would not invalidate the supposition, because one of two inferences must be drawn, either that the germs of disease always exist in a dormant state, requiring circumstances and conditions only for their development, or that the germs are imported from some distant locality, where the disease has occurred, and finding a nidus there, grow and multiply.[36] Whichever notion we take, however, matters very little to the fact of the dormancy of the germs, for in both, a certain period elapses between their transmission and their propagation. It may fairly be presumed, that sometimes one method may apply {90} and sometimes the other, perhaps both during general epidemic conditions of the atmosphere. The Oidium vitis attacked the vines partially last year, and I believe generally spared other forms of vegetation; but this year in my vicinity, cucumbers, melons, and vegetable marrows, are all suffering more or less under the disease.[37] How shall we say, whether are the seeds of last year the cause of the general diffusion at the present time, or were there a sufficient number of old and dormant seeds, universally diffused, and only waiting opportunities for multiplying themselves? We are here on the horns of a dilemma; and spontaneous generation, from which one naturally shrinks, can alone extricate us, if we do not admit diffusion and dormancy. I think I may, without undue assumption, affirm that a period of latency of indefinite duration, applies as cogently to the germs of disease as to those of plants. There is yet one other point in connection with this subject, and that is the apparent extinction of some diseases, at any rate their non-appearance in certain localities, which had been at one time congenial to them, and in which they flourished. We have seen, in illustrating the dormancy of seeds, that the broom must have been a common plant at {91} some considerable period back, in the King's Park at Stirling, or on that site. Then again, the appearance of Fumaria parviflora in the vicinity of Edinburgh, in several places where the ground is broken, is sufficiently convincing that this plant must once have been a common form of vegetation there; and as it had never before been observed in the neighbourhood, there must have been a combination of peculiar circumstances capable of rendering germination impossible, otherwise a continued multiplication, as in other forms of vegetation, would have followed of necessity. But besides these instances, how many are passing under our own eyes of the disappearance of plants under the influence of cultivation, and the generation of the noxious fumes arising from different and innumerable manufactories. In the vicinity of large cities and manufacturing towns, how rarely do we see healthy vegetation; shrubs and animals drag on a sickly and almost unprolific existence, and their term of natural life is much shortened. And if we compare diseases with this peculiar feature of vegetation, how very close do we find the analogies. The Sweating Sickness which appeared in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and at certain intervals multiplied and extended itself at first only in this country, but ultimately more or less over the continent of Europe, has {92} never since the year 1551 shewn any symptom of productiveness, indeed for all we know the disease may be extinct; on the other hand, it is impossible to say whether or not circumstances may arise, under which it may commence again, to put forth its energies and again desolate the land.[38] Since 1665, the Bubo-plague has not found a congenial soil in this country, or if the seeds be here, which is more than probable, the necessary conditions to excite them to activity do not exist. It cannot be imagined that with all the merchandize which comes into this country from the Mediterranean, but that an abundance of the germs of the disease are annually brought into our ports, and disseminated throughout the land. The law by which we have seen that they possess a power of vitality and reproduction, holds now as it did in former times;--the properties of matter never alter, but the conditions under which they exist may be so modified, as to influence their properties, and the usual course of their operations. It is therefore to {93} an alteration or modification of conditions that we are to look for the exemption, during the last two centuries, from an invasion of the Plague. To say what those conditions may be in their totality is difficult, perhaps impossible. We may generalize on the subject, and imagine the reason discovered, but all those causes which were said to have conspired to favour the spread and contamination with Plague, were as distinctly specified and attributed, as the cause of our late infliction with Epidemic Cholera. Why then did we have the Cholera and not the Plague? To what particular element was it--in the mode of living, of destitution, of filth and want of drainage--can it be ascribed that we suffer under one disease, and not under the other? We have made some few observations and comparisons on the mode of dispersion of plants and diseases,--but there is yet one more point which invites notice. Not only do seasons vary in their effects on vegetation in a remarkable and unexplained manner, but there are many localities to which some special form of vegetation attaches, and which appear to have a power of exclusion of other forms; and as yet I have not been able to trace the connexion, nor can I discover it in the writings of botanists and travellers, who would be most likely to have sought an explanation of so interesting and curious a fact. Dr. Prichard has on this subject some very apposite illustrations. "Still further southward, the austral temperated zone completely {94} changes the physiognomy of vegetation, and the Isle of Norfolk has, in common with New Holland, the Auracania found also in the harbour of Balade, and with New Zealand, the Phormium tenax. It is however remarkable, that this vast island, composed of two lands, separated by a channel, though so near New Holland, and lying under the same latitude, differs from it so completely, that they display no resemblance in their vegetation. Yet New Zealand, so rich in genera peculiar to its soil, and little known, has some Indian plants: such as Pepper, the Olea, and a reniform Fern, which is said to exist in the Isle of Maurice." I must quote one more passage from Dr. Prichard's excellent work. "We have one instance of an island at no great distance from a continent, having a peculiar vegetation. Mr. R. Brown has remarked, that there is not even a single indigenous species characterising the vegetation of St. Helena, that has been found either on the banks of the Congo, or on any other part of the Western coast of Africa. Does the diversity of marine and atmospheric currents more completely separate this island from the continent, than its situation would imply; or are the nature of soil and other local circumstances, the cause of so marked a diversity? The last supposition seems the most probable; because not only the species of plants, but likewise the genera in St. Helena, are different from those of the African coast." {95} We are not without instances of diseases, observing this peculiarity which attaches to plants; but their specific characters have hardly been sufficiently considered in reference to climate and situation, together with diet and local influences, to afford us accurate data for comparison. It has, however, been remarked, in every country where Epidemics have prevailed, that some districts or tracts of country, though supposed to possess all the qualities favourable to the development of the diseases, have nevertheless been entirely or nearly free from them. The following passage on the course of the Cholera gives an example of this peculiarity. "Whenever the malady deviated, so to speak, from its normal direction, and passed towards the west, it seemed incapable of propagating itself; and _died away spontaneously, even in places which appeared to be well fitted for its reception_.--The rich fertile and densely peopled countries to the right of the Dneiper, enjoyed an equal freedom from attack, which can only be explained by the fact that they were situated _beyond the line of the disease_." With this I close the subject of the diffusion of plants and diseases, though it would require a volume of itself, to record all that has been noticed. I have endeavoured to select such instances as shall mark distinctly the features which point to comparison without overloading the enquiry. * * * * * {96} SECTION IV. THE RELATION BETWEEN EPIDEMIC AND ENDEMIC DISEASES. Epidemic diseases, which multiply their germs in any climate, and under apparently the most varying conditions of temperature and hygrometric and electrical states of atmosphere, offer many points of contrast with Endemic affections, and many of relationship. The latter are traceable to a certain extent, to geological and geographical positions of the localities where they are observed to prevail, in combination with atmospheric vicissitudes and peculiarities, as well as to extent of cultivation of the soil: it has been remarked that the sickly island (as it is called) of St. Lucia has certain salubrious parts, but these are where sulphur abounds; this geological peculiarity has been deemed sufficient to account for the absence of endemic affections in these parts, and with much force of reason; for in the neighbourhoods where sulphur or sulphurous acid, a compound of sulphur, is an element prevalent in the soil or atmosphere, vegetation and the ague disappear together. Now ague, and other endemic fevers, doubtless originate from some allied, if not identical cause; for the localities in which they appear have so many {97} features in common, that we are constrained to acknowledge that endemic fevers have some relations and analogies, though not yet unravelled. Geographical situation, together with certain vegetation, particularly of grounds which grow rice, is one remarkable for the production of endemic affections. But the soil which generates or gives force to the contaminating matter, is not alone the part where human beings feel its influence most severely. A low marshy ground, prolific of malaria, may be comparatively free; while some neighbouring elevated land, to which prevailing currents of air waft the volatile elements of disease, may be desolated by their virulent and concentrated action. "Malaria may be conveyed a considerable distance from its source, _and be condensed_ in the exhaled vapour, when attracted by hills or acclivities in the vicinity, and when there are no high trees or woods to confine it, or to intercept it in its passage." The inhabitants of the city of Abydos were at one time subject to disease, arising from malaria, generated in some neighbouring marshes; by draining these marshes, which suspended the growth of rank vegetation, the city became healthy. Rome is in like manner even now subject to fevers, having a similar origin. Sir James Clark says, "Among the more prevalent diseases of Rome, malaria fevers are the most remarkable, and claim our first notice." He considers the fevers to be of exactly the same nature as those of Lincolnshire {98} and Essex in this country, of Holland, and certain districts over the greater part of the globe. To the climate, the season, or the concentration of the cause of these fevers, he attributes their varieties. It is the same disease, he says, whether from the swamps of Walcheren, or the pestilential shores of Africa. From July to October the inhabitants of Rome are most subject to these affections. Sir James Clark further says: "It may be stated as a general rule, that houses in confined shaded situations, with damp courts or gardens, or standing water close to them, are unhealthy in every climate and season; but especially in a country subject to intermittent fevers, and during summer and autumn. The exemption of the central parts of a large town from these fevers, is explained by the dryness of the atmosphere, and by the comparative equality of temperature which prevails there." In this respect there is a marked difference between an epidemic and an endemic affection; for when an epidemic disease attacks a city or town we do not discover that the central parts are more exempt than others; indeed, it is rather the contrary; for the most crowded parts of towns and cities are those, if not exactly in the centre, which would be comprised in a space nearer to the centre than the circumference; and it has been in those parts generally where the epidemic influences seem to have exercised the most potent sway. One would more naturally suppose, that a city surrounded by {99} paludal miasm, and not itself being capable of generating the poison, should be more affected at the circumference, from the simple fact that the paludal germs, which rise in the air, are suspended in the fogs and dews of the atmosphere. These, unless widely dispersed by the winds, would remain within a comparatively confined space; and those situations nearest to them would be most subject to their influence. Besides, it has been shewn, that a small wood or hill, or even a wall, has been sufficient to cut off or obstruct the paludal miasm. Without enumerating all the known endemic diseases, two or three may be alluded to for our present purpose; viz. that of shewing that endemic and epidemic diseases have a similar origin.[39] It is well known that under certain favouring conditions an endemic may become a malignant and pestilential disease; that Yellow Fever, which is always endemic in the west, Cholera in the east, and the Plague in the south of Europe and north of Africa, every few years takes on an epidemic form, and desolates considerable tracts of country.[39] The Pestilence which raged in the summer and autumn of 1804 in Spain, commenced at Malaga, and remained for a considerable time confined to its {100} boundaries, in consequence of the measures of precaution that were used, in preventing all communication between the inhabitants of the infected city and those living in the surrounding country. It was only in consequence of persons escaping through the cordon, and passing into the interior of the country, that the disease spread, and extended its ravages to distant places. It appears to be quite clear, that this disease may properly be considered in the first instance of endemic origin; but the tendencies, atmospheric and otherwise, were such as to favour its multiplication in other districts than that in which it first came into active existence. From this we may infer, that the seeds of the disease were dormant, and only became roused into vital activity by fortuitous circumstances. Dr. Rush states, that the endemic disorders of Pennsylvania were converted, by clearing the soil, to bilious and malignant remittents, and to destructive epidemics. Dr. Copland says, it has been observed, especially in warm climates, and in hot seasons in temperate countries, that when the air has been long undisturbed by high winds and thunder-storms, and at the same time hot and moist, endemic diseases have assumed a very severe and even epidemic character. Dr. Robertson also confirms this view. "Endemic diseases, in cases of neglect and preposterous management, are found to become more malignant even in the most temperate climates; and to {101} generate a matter in their course, capable of producing a particular disease in any circumstances. _Indeed the origin of every_ contagious fever unattended with eruptions, with the exception of Plague, must commence in this way." Why Dr. Robertson should except eruptive Fevers and Plague I cannot understand, for they must have had a commencement; and their many points of similarity indicate, if not an identical, an analogous source to other endemic fevers. It will doubtless be generally acknowledged that endemic and epidemic diseases depend upon some unknown agents, having their source in malarious districts, and being capable of assuming either a contagious or non-contagious character, according to circumstances. If, therefore, we find that under any conditions an endemic affection becomes capable of being propagated by contagion, the same law will hold with regard to it as to the Plague; that the power of reproduction in this matter is evidence of life, according to the doctrine laid down in the earlier part of this work. But whether or not infection be admitted, a matter generated in a malarious district, if confined in its effects to that district alone, would not necessarily imply an inorganic nature of the poison; for it is difficult to understand how inorganic poison, prevailing generally over a certain tract of country, could select particular individuals for its victims. If chloroform, chlorine, carbonic acid, sulphuretted hydrogen, or even spores of poisonous fungi, (as {102} supposed by Mitchell, which, as he regards their effects, would act in a similar manner to inorganic compounds) were the agents, all persons would suffer more or less, and the majority be similarly affected. We do not find that uniformity of symptoms, which attend upon the exhibition of poisons in the ordinary acceptation of the term, poisoning. This subject shall be more particularly considered, when treating of the influence of organic germs on animals and plants. The history of the Eclair steamer is particularly interesting, as shewing the extraordinary tenacity with which the germs of disease attach themselves to vessels, which we may call floating houses. The crew of the Eclair contracted Yellow Fever on the coast of Africa, and a number of them died. The remainder, sick and well, landed at Bona Vista, one of the Cape de Verde Islands, and the vessel underwent a process of washing, whitewashing, and fumigating. Nevertheless, on the return of the ship's company, the disease broke out again with equal intensity, and the vessel was ordered home. Sixty-five out of 146 officers and men, who composed the crew, died of the disease before reaching Portsmouth, and twenty-three were sick at the time of arrival. Eight days after the Eclair left Bona Vista, a Portuguese soldier who had mixed with her crew died in the fort which had been occupied by them. Other soldiers then fell sick, and the fort was abandoned. The fever still spread. From the 20th September, when the first soldier {103} was attacked, to the first week in December, the fever continued to rage, and at that period it had found its way into almost all the country villages. The fever was believed to be the genuine black vomit fever; it proved contagious almost without exception to the nurses of the sick. This is an abstract of Mr. Rendell's letter to Lord Aberdeen, Mr. Rendell being British Consul at Bona Vista. Now at the time the fever broke out in the island the weather was extraordinarily hot, and much rain had fallen, and the town itself was badly drained and in a filthy state; can it be imagined then that the seeds of a disease liable to assume a pestilential character should lie dormant or be annihilated under circumstances the most favourable for their development, especially when we know that endemic diseases may assume a malignant character? This is just one of many cases which confirm our opinion in this respect, that plants and diseases are not long in making their appearance where the soil and atmosphere are congenial. The tenacity with which the disease attached itself to the Eclair is sufficiently explained in the absence of due ventilation; in fact, that in the first instance there was no ventilation at all in the hold of the ship. This also the more readily affords a clue to the disaster through all its stages, first in the contraction of the disease as an endemical affection in the vessel; secondly, in the multiplication of the {104} germs in the damp ill-ventilated hold, in a warm climate; and thirdly, the persistence and entire localization of the disease to the vessel when it arrived in the climate of the British shores; while, fourth and lastly, in the unusually hot and damp island of Bona Vista, the seeds of the disease were sown, and, as we might expect, multiplied indefinitely. The consecutive attacks of the crew of the Eclair shew that here a noxious gas or a vaporized inorganic poison could not have been the cause of the disease, for as I have before said, in this case the attacks should have been simultaneous; we find, on the contrary, that as the depressing effects of the melancholy condition of the crew was almost hourly undermining the health of the stoutest of them they as surely became the victims. The Kroomen, or natives on board the ship had not suffered, shewing that they were inured to the miasm, or were destitute of that condition of blood which would be favourable to a propagation of the materies of the disease. The Eclair we learn had left Bona Vista eight days when the first victim breathed his last; this would give perhaps three or four days for the incubation of the disease in the patient, or supposing he had not contracted the germs of the disease before the crew of the Eclair left the fort, some local favouring conditions were the means of keeping the germs in a fertilizing state, for it is clear from this spot the infection spread as from a centre or focus. {105} Such instances as these might be multiplied to extend the length of the enquiry, but, I think, to little advantage. The chief facts to be gathered are that an endemic affection became epidemic and pestilential, contrary to its usual mode, for the Portuguese official physician, on being consulted by the Governor of the Island as to the safety of landing the contaminated crew, said, "No danger at all; I have often brought sick men on shore coming in vessels from the African coast, and I never knew any ill effects to arise." Putting the most reasonable construction on this emphatic and straightforward language, we may presume that ordinary, remittent, and yellow fever had been commonly imported into the island, for it is not to be supposed but that both forms of disease must have existed among those sick men who had "_often been landed_," under the sanction of the Portuguese physician. To take another instance; intermittent fever or ague, is a disease known among almost all nations of the world, but it usually occurs in the endemic form only. It is universally supposed to depend entirely upon marsh effluvia, and we are accustomed to consider it as attaching only to low lying countries;[40] but this is not always the case, for disease in {106} this respect, like vegetation, may be found in various latitudes, to accommodate itself at varying altitudes, to the temperature and climatic relations, so as to appear indigenous. But though our prejudices are in favour of a simple miasmatic source of ague, as its sole cause, there are some who believe in its infectious nature. M. Sigaud, in his work on the Climate and Diseases of Brazil, speaks of Epidemics of _grave intermittent Fever_, and Dr. Copland says, that the epidemic prevalence of ague is a better established fact than its infection, and has been admitted by most writers.[41] We have, therefore, but to go one step further to arrive at infection, after having found that an endemic disease under peculiar circumstances, though but rarely, becomes {107} epidemic. The number of persons attacked by ague in a malarious district, in proportion to the population, is not so great as might be expected, considering that they are always subject by night and day, more or less, to respire the air containing the germs of intermittent fever; we might, therefore, deny the paludal source of the affection, as reasonably as deny infection, if we found that occasionally, persons, though subject to all the usual influences, yet escaped all injurious consequences. There are grades and varieties of infectious diseases, from the most inveterate to the most mild and doubtful; but that all, without exception, which can in any way be traced to a specific generating and organic cause, may assume an exalted infectious character, and that the most inveterate, on the contrary, may more resemble the mild and doubtfully infectious forms, is a conviction that must be forced on all who pursue this enquiry with unbiassed interest. * * * * * {108} CHAPTER III. THE REASONABLENESS OF THE APPLICATION OF THE FACTS TO THE INFERENCE. -------- SECTION I. THE CHEMICAL THEORY OF EPIDEMICS UNTENABLE. It has been inferred that the germs of disease possess the property of vitality, and a number of facts have been adduced to support the proposition that vitality is the indwelling force by which the matter generating epidemic and endemic disease exercises its influence over man and animals. The reasonableness of the application of these facts to the end in view has now to be considered. Chemistry cannot account for epidemics. Our first subject of reflection points to the chemical discoveries of the last few years, and particularly to those of the great German chemist Liebig. We find in the first paragraph of his Organic Chemistry applied to Physiology and Pathology, the following words: "In the animal ovum, as well as in the seed of the plant, we recognize a certain remarkable force, _the source of growth_ or increase in the mass, _and of reproduction_ or of supply of the matter consumed; a force in a state of rest. By the action of external influences, by impregnation, by the presence of air and moisture, the condition {109} of static equilibrium is disturbed. This force is called the _vital force_, _vis vitæ_, or vitality." The doctrine of Liebig, that the vital force manifests itself in two conditions, or rather, that it is known to be in two different states, that of static equilibrium as in the seed, and in a dynamic state, as in that of growth and reproduction, is perfectly applicable to the germs of disease; the static equilibrium is referrible to the matter of vaccine lymph when dried and preserved for use, and the dynamic forces of the matter are known to be in operation during its reproduction and growth in the system of the vaccinated child. Then as to reproduction of matter by any chemical process, our author can furnish us with no examples, for even in his explanation of the causes of disease he is quite silent on this point, merely acknowledging that diseased products must be either rendered "harmless, destroyed, or expelled from the body." He further says, that "in all diseases where the formation of contagious matter and of exanthemata is accompanied by fever, two diseased conditions simultaneously exist, and two processes are simultaneously completed," and that it is by means of the blood as a carrier of oxygen that neutralization or equilibrium is established. Liebig thus admits that an agent exists in the blood, capable of deteriorating it at the expense of the oxygen, which he maintains is contained in the red globules; he further acknowledges that two processes of diseased {110} action are going on at the same time, and though he does not explain them, I imagine him to mean that new contagious matter is generated and eliminated from the blood, and that at the same time, there is that condition of body which he would call simply a diseased state, and characterizes it thus: "Disease occurs when the sum of vital force which tends to neutralize all causes of disturbance, (in other words, when the resistance offered by the vital force) is weaker than the acting cause of the disturbance." If I rightly apprehend his notions, they perfectly harmonize with my ideas, to a certain extent, on the subject. They accord, at any rate, most completely with the theory attempted to be established, and fully confirm the reasonableness of the application of the facts recorded to the inference drawn from other sources. The difference only rests on the question whether vitalized or non-vitalized matter is the _fons et origo mali_. How is the production of new matter, resembling that originally causing the disease, to be explained by any known hypothesis, except on the assumption of living organized matter? Though Liebig and Mulder both deny the fact, that the Torula cerevisiæ is the sole agent in the process of fermentation: they both equally fail in shewing upon what it does depend, and their difficulty rests entirely on their incapacity to explain the uniform reproductive properties of the matter engaged in this, as well as in all other allied operations. Liebig's statement {111} however on this matter requires notice--he says, "that _putrifying_ blood, white of egg, flesh and cheese, produce the same effects in a solution of sugar, as yeast or ferment. The explanation is simply this; that ferment or yeast is nothing but vegetable fibrine, albumen or caseine, in a state of decomposition." This state of decomposition, however, involves a much more complex proceeding, than simply a reduction of matter into its elementary forms of gases, earths, and minerals; for we nowhere find decomposition of this kind going on without the development of some organized bodies, either animal or vegetable: and since we have seen that the spores of the cryptogami are always in existence in the atmosphere, and making their appearance under favouring conditions, and especially when we find that fermentation is invariably accompanied, and I may safely say, preceded by the deposition in the fluid of the sporules of the Torula, we can hardly believe that they are any other than the sole agents of the process. I have now a considerable quantity of the Torula obtained from the urine of a diabetic patient, in which they appeared, as it were, spontaneously. After the urine had been allowed access to the air for a certain time, and the whole of the saccharine matter was converted into new compounds, reproduction of the Torula ceased;--and those which remained when the process was completed, still continue as organic cells, deposited {112} in the bottle in an inert state, but ready, on the addition of fresh sugar, as has been proved, to resume an active existence. These germs, it is now well known, may be dried into powder, so as to be blown away like dust without any, or but little, detriment to their vital energies; and there is now no doubt that they exist in this condition in the air, as do the spores of mucor, aspergillus, oidium, agaricus, and all other fungi. Mulder, however, does allow some properties to the yeast vesicle; he says, "a variety of strange ideas have been entertained respecting the nature of yeast; recent experiments have convinced me that it undoubtedly is a cellular plant consisting of isolated cells. They resemble the composition of cellulose in some respects, but differ from it in many." "These vesicles, consisting of a substance resembling that of cells, do not contribute in the least to the fermentation, but are exosmotically penetrated during fermentation by the protein compound." These chemists seem to have an instinctive horror of allowing any active properties to the yeast vesicle, that is as far as the conversion of sugar into carbonic acid and alcohol is concerned in the act of fermentation. Dr. Carpenter, as if desiring to conciliate the chemical and physiological disputants, considers that the truth is to be found in the mean of the two extremes,--that is, that the process of fermentation is neither entirely dependent on chemical laws, nor on those laws which preside {113} over the growth of reproductive matter, but is a process in which both perform certain offices, each depending on the other to produce the combined result; he thus approaches more nearly to the theory of Mulder, than that of Liebig. But to revert to Mulder, he speaks of the Torula cells being "exosmotically penetrated during the process of fermentation by the protein compound." Now the Torula is acknowledged to be one of the Fungals, and the chemical constituents of the Fungi approach very nearly that of animal tissues. They contain a peculiar principle, residing in and obtainable from them, termed Fungin, which is as highly azotised as animal fibre. The protein compound alluded to, Mulder says, is not gluten, because insoluble in boiling alcohol, and not albumen, because it is very readily dissolved in acetic acid, and he regards it as a superoxide of protein. This superoxide of protein can only have been produced by a vital action in the cells of the Torula, and as the fungi consume oxygen, and give out carbonic acid, we clearly have all the elementary conditions for their growth in almost all decomposing animal and vegetable matters. It is the nature of the fungi to live on organized matter, but always when it has a tendency to decay; it is for this reason they have been called "Scavengers." Again, we can understand why some animalized or nitrogenous matter should be necessary for fermentation, otherwise fungi could not grow, nitrogen being an essential constituent of {114} their structure, and further fermentation does not commence without the presence of oxygen, and like as in animals, this gas supports their existence. The conversion of sugar into alcohol is represented by the following formula:-- RESULT. Sugar. Alcohol. Carbonic Acid. Hydrogen 3 3 Oxygen 3 1 2 Carbon 3 2 1 If therefore the process were merely of a chemical nature, where is the necessity for atmospheric oxygen to accomplish the end? it is quite certain that fermentation cannot go on without its presence. Let us compare the action of ferment or yeast in a dried state to the action of albumen, which Liebig says is sufficient when decomposing to set up fermentation. "The white of eggs when added to saccharine liquors requires a period of three weeks, with a temperature of 96° F. before it will excite fermentation."[42] But any saccharine liquor on exposure to the air, though entirely destitute of albumen or gluten, will ferment, and the Torula may be found in it. I have found the Torula in a great variety of syrups which have spontaneously undergone fermentation. I have also discovered that the development of the cells is delayed or accelerated by the nature of the ingredient used in flavouring {115} the syrups, with other peculiarities which need not here be mentioned. But the conversion of starch into sugar by means of gluten requires some notice, as by some persons it is associated in their minds with the organic process of fermentation.[43] Mulder ascribes the latter in the first instance to the action of heat, evidently believing that the pseudo-catalytic operation of gluten upon starch is the type of all such actions, and regarding them all as simply chemical, but we here distinguish a wide difference; in the latter instance the gluten is decomposed, and rendered unfit for a repetition of the chemical phenomenon, and if it is desired to renew the action fresh gluten must be obtained, and a certain temperature kept up, otherwise the experiment fails. How different is fermentation: in the ordinary temperature of the atmosphere the yeast vesicle will multiply, no incremental or unnatural addition of heat is requisite, and it is one of the commonest and most natural instances of vegeto-chemistry: the grape cannot shed its juice, nor the sugar cane its sap without admitting these germs, which, under certain {116} conditions multiply themselves and convert the saccharine elements into new compounds. The method by which the conversion of starch into sugar is accomplished is thus described by Dr. Ure. He says that if starch one part be boiled with twelve parts of water and left to itself, water merely being stirred in it as it evaporates, at the end of a month or two in summer weather it is changed into sugar and gum, bearing certain proportions to the amount of starch used. But "if we boil two parts of potato starch into a paste, with twenty parts of water, mix this paste with one part of the gluten of wheat flour, and set the mixture for eight hours in a temperature of from 122° to 167° F. the mixture soon loses its pasty character, and becomes by degrees limpid, transparent, and sweet, passing at the same time first into gum and then into sugar."--"The residue has lost the faculty of acting upon fresh portions of starch." Four points of contrast present themselves for notice as elements of comparison with true fermentation. 1st. The starch solution has to be boiled, so that heat, by which it is to be supposed that the starch globule is ruptured, seems to be an essential portion of the chemical change, and even this may in fact alone be sufficient in such a case to produce some elementary change in the starch, and may prepare it for the subsequent catalytic action of some related organic, though not vital material.[44] {117} 2nd. Not only a summer heat is necessary, but a period of one or two months time must elapse before the starch with the water simply becomes converted into sugar, and if artificial heat is to be used to hasten the operation, a temperature from 122° to 167° F. must be resorted to in order to obtain the desired result. 3rd. When even this is accomplished there is no reproduction of the fermenting matter, and artificial and chemical means must again be applied to repeat the experiment. 4th. The conversion of starch into sugar can be accomplished without the presence of gluten at all, by the aid only of temperature and time. It seems to me, therefore, to be entirely unnecessary to occupy more space in the elaboration of a proof of the doctrine that the germs of the Torula are the sole agents in the conversion of saccharine fluids into alcohol and carbonic acid. By another chemical process starch can be converted into sugar, but I am not aware that hitherto any method has been discovered by which sugar can be converted into alcohol except by the process of fermentation proper. I have been thus particular in commenting on this subject, as it bears, in an especial manner, on the question under consideration. {118} The physiologist cannot afford to lose this process from the category of chemico-vital, or biochemical manifestations.[45] The philosophy of the age has a tendency to make every thing chemical; it is true that the Divinity is as much seen in the laws which govern the elementary particles of matter, as in those laws which preside over the transmutation and sustentation of those elementary and inorganic particles, when compounded in the tissues which are engaged in the formation of living beings. The laws by which acids and alkalies neutralize each other, and the affinities single, double and elective, which the particles of matter exhibit, together with the influences of light, heat, and electricity upon almost every condition of matter, are as truly wonderful as the creative power. Man may, in many instances, imitate the processes of nature, he can render iron magnetic, and form alkaloids, but the {119} laws which govern the particles of matter are still the secret of the whole proceedings. We do but interpret the language of nature in discovery, the book is ever open before us, and every atom of the world is a word and a theme, capable of occupying the short span of sublunary existence allotted to man. We have read of "sermons in stones," but a book has been written on a "pebble."[46] To return, as we every where in nature find a gradual transition in the forms, arrangements and properties of matter, so we may expect to find a link between the inorganic and vital chemistry of nature. The fungi, by which we contend this transition appears to be accomplished, are also a link in chemical composition, between the animal and vegetable kingdom, and not only in that, but in their subsisting upon matter which has been organized, they are deoxidizers and reducers, as the vegetable kingdom in its highest function is a compounder. To their functions and offices in the great scheme of creation, we may fairly apply ourselves with a sure and certain result of the most interesting discovery. Is it no hint that wherever decaying organic matter is found, there do we find fungi? is it no hint that they are found in all parts of the world? that even in snow the germs of fungi will grow and multiply to such an extent, according to Capt. Ross, that the protococcus was seen {120} by him, clothing the sides of the mountains at Baffin's Bay, rising, according to his report, to the height of several _hundred feet_, and extending to the distance of _eight miles_? Even stones contain in their interior, or interspaces of their structure, the germs of fungi. A species of Tufa is found in the vicinity of Naples of a porous texture, which, when moistened and shaded, produces vast mushrooms, four or five inches high, and eight or ten inches broad.[47] This author further says: "In the Maremma, where the volcanic tufa is the basis of the soil the surface is intermixed with the animal remains of departed empires, and the ordure of cattle, is covered with grasses of old pasturages, and is wet with heavy dews. Everything, therefore, conspires there to a fungiferous end." They are found growing in and upon both vegetables and animals. Nees von Esenbeck imagined, that minute forms multiplied themselves in the atmosphere; and really, when we consider the amount of effluvia composed of the atoms cast off from the bodies of living or decaying organic matters, which are incessantly passing into the atmosphere, the conjecture is not an unreasonable one. The minuteness of those, which we know are always found growing on decomposing bodies, does not preclude the possibility, nay, further favours {121} the probability, that others infinitely more minute,[48] may be destined to remove the more subtle and vaporous particles which escape into the air. We can, therefore, I think, conclude, that the lower tribes of vegetation, may consistently be regarded as capable of existing in almost any condition, and almost under any circumstances, they may be made to grow in plants by inoculation, as shewn by De Candolle, and Dr. Hassall. If the stem of wheat also is inoculated with vibriones, they will make their appearance in the grain.[49] If the seed contain them and have not lost its germinating properties, these worms will be found again in the grain. If the grain containing them be dried for years, and moistened again with water, these animalcules, according to Bauer and Steinbach, will present all the phenomena of life. This experiment I have witnessed, and can confirm the statement. These animalcules in the diseased grain, have under the microscope the appearance of an immense {122} number of eels crowded together in a small space, and presenting a movement more, perhaps, vermicular than any other, and it is continued for a considerable time. Now if these animalcules, or their ova, can be proved to pass with the sap to the seed, there can be no difficulty in comprehending how germs, considerably more minute and of a vegetable nature, should be found subject to the same peculiar mode of obtaining an entrance into animals and vegetables for sustenance. "It is usually imagined," says Dr. Carpenter, "that the germs liberated by one plant are taken up by the roots of others, and being carried along the current of the sap, are deposited and developed, where vegetation is most active." The chemical theory of disease would be better sustained by a comparison of "the artificial formation of alkaloids," and the phenomena of transformation of blood into the tissues of animals, and their degeneration into effete matters, and of sap into the tissues of plants and their degenerations. Professor Kopp of Strasburg, says, "In a chemical point of view, the alkaloids are remarkable for their composition, for their special properties, both physical and chemical, and for the interesting reactions to which many of them give rise, when exposed to the influence of different reagents. Considered medically, the organic bases are distinguished by their energetic properties. They {123} constitute at the same time, the most violent and sudden poisons, and the most valuable and heroic remedies." Upon this very intricate and interesting part of chemical philosophy, it is rather dangerous to enter without a thorough and practical knowledge of the subject. This, however, falls to the lot of few men. We, who are engaged in the study of disease, and of the best methods of cure, are obliged to take the investigations of the analytical chemist, and examine them for ourselves in the intervals of leisure allowed us during the active exercise of our calling. Though with less advantages for the study of these transcendental relations of organic and inorganic matter, we are not, nevertheless, precluded from forming our opinions on their practical bearings to the phenomena and treatment of disease. That there is a matter of a poisonous nature concerned in the production of endemic and epidemic affections, cannot be doubted by any one; I believe indeed, that the chemical theorists admit this, at all events Liebig does, for he says, "The morbid poison changes in the blood are fermentative, just such as occur in beer making." If we start, then, with the consideration that poisons, in a chemical point of view, are the objects of our research; the obvious course to take is to enquire what is the source of poisons generally, and what their effects on the animal economy? The mineral poisons are entirely excluded from the enquiry by their {124} inaptitude for diffusion, and their uniform effects upon all persons, differing only in degree in their operation. The same objections apply to gaseous poisons, except that to them the property of diffusion would be admitted.[50] We come then to the alkaloids, which constitute, as Kopp says, the most violent and sudden poisons. For the production of alkaloids by artificial means, organic products of some kind are required. Artificial heat, powerful chemical agents or length of time, are, as far as information at present extends, the indispensable requirements to induce these peculiar changes in matter. The only instance I can find, in which elementary matters can by artificial means be combined, so as to resemble the products of nature, is that of the conversion of carbon and nitrogen into cyanogen. But the process by which this is accomplished, leads rather to doubt whether it be really and simply by a combination of _elementary_ carbon and nitrogen. I extract the following from the Annual Report of the Progress of Chemistry, for 1848. "H. Delbruck has performed some experiments on the important subject of the formation of cyanogen. He confirms the statements of Desfosses and Fownes, inasmuch as a _weak but distinct_ formation of cyanogen was observed on igniting {125} _sugar-charcoal_[51] with carbonate of potassa in an atmosphere of nitrogen." The use of sugar-charcoal, may be perhaps an explanation of the weak formation of cyanogen, for in these numerous and successive chemical changes of matter, it is impossible to say how many sources of error may arise. The constant contradictions of each other, and the opposite statements made by chemists, of equal eminence, leave us in a wilderness of doubt, from which we are not likely to be freed, until definite laws shall be discovered to act as a guide in the comprehension of the higher branches of Chemical Philosophy. But supposing that the generation of alkaloids could take place in the body, or some analogous poisonous matter, we have yet to imagine a whole host of peculiar and essential conditions to effect this change, besides an atmospheric agent or agents to set in motion those compositions and decompositions, capable of bringing out these new products from the elements of blood. We are aware that in the blood, carbon and nitrogen are sufficiently abundant as well as saline compounds, to generate cyanides, and, with hydrogen also there in plenty, hydrocyanates, and thus from them many other poisonous products, but how is all this to be effected? And even if effected, it is yet a question if such compounds can in any way simulate the attacks of epidemic disease. We have {126} already shewn that the amount of most poisons necessary to destroy an individual, can be pretty clearly estimated, and their _modus operandi_ is tolerably well understood. Again, the most essential part, in which all chemical theory fails, is an explanation of the reproduction of contagious matter. The catalytic process, by which decompositions are said to be effected, and in which Liebig includes the various fermentations, is one of those chemical relations of matter to matter, considered by some as the probable cause of infection. Mr. Simon, in a late lecture, has said, "I consider the phenomena of infective diseases, to be essentially chemical, and I look to chemistry to enlighten the darkness of their pathology. Qualitative modifications, affecting the molecules of matter as to their modes of action and reaction, are such as form the subject of chemical science; and those humoral changes which arise as the result of infection clearly fall within the terms of its definitions." Further on he adds: "The phenomena of infected diseases appears then, in many respects, to be sui generis. Certainly they are chemical. _Probably_ they belong to that _class_ of chemical actions called _catalytic_."[52] {127} It is not improbable that something resembling a catalytic action may take place in the blood in those diseases of endemic and epidemic origin, but that it can be by a chemical process alone is contrary to all experience of catalytic operations, for except in the instance of fermentation proper, there is no multiplication of the fermentative matter. The action of the matter of contagion seems to stand on the confines between electro-chemical and bio-chemical manifestations, and so long as no chemical explanation can be given for the multiplication of the matter of infection, the most rational course to adopt is to assume that life under some unknown form is, as we every where find it, the sole reproductive agent. * * * * * {128} SECTION II. THE ANIMALCULAR THEORY OF EPIDEMICS UNTENABLE. The animalcular theory of disease, after remaining almost unnoticed for nearly two centuries, has been again revived under the auspices of Dr. Holland in this country, and Henle of Berlin. And though not entirely buried in obscurity, this theory had completely failed to modify the practice of physicians in the treatment of those diseases which were supposed to owe their existence to these invisible atoms of created being. The resuscitated notions and all their amplifications, to which the advance of science has contributed so much, are threatened with a like fate, an absence of all practical results. Though I would not attempt to deny the possibility, nay, even the probability, that insect life may yet be discovered as the cause of some diseases,[53] still {129} there are many and cogent reasons against both, and which are at variance with facts and observations. Where insect life has been found associated with disease, it more especially appears as a consequence than as a cause. Disease, in its most enlarged sense, is a conversion of one form of matter into another; it is a transformation of healthy blood and tissue into new and abnormal products. Where insects in all their variety of forms are discovered, their voracious propensities are their chief characteristics, they are the consumers of matter after its partial disintegration, if animal matter be their food, unless they be carnivorous and predacious, or if herbivorous they usually feed upon the tender shoots of plants. Thus far we are certain of the manner in which insects destroy living matter; it is a process the unassisted eye may every where witness, and which experience has amply attested. To take, however, the animalcular world as it presents itself to us under the microscope, and as the intermediate step between the manifest and the hidden for a fairer and more direct method of reaching the truth, what do we observe to be the ruling law of infusory instinct? They live to feed; the term polygastrica sufficiently implies their natural tendency to consume. The simplest form of animalcular life, seen in the genera of monads, still preserves the animal character by possessing a stomach or stomachs in which the food is received, to be digested for the nourishment of the {130} system; and even some of these minute objects which vary in size from one _two-thousandth_, to one _three-thousandth_ of a line in diameter, are said to be carnivorous and predacious. Upon this fact alone, I would place the improbability of insects being the cause of epidemic disease. Each insect doubtless has its own peculiar food, and whether it be a vegetable or animal feeder, it consumes the matter already organized for conversion into its own tissue, and the only change which could be affected by them in the blood, would necessarily be that of appropriation of some one of the constituents as an element of food; when that food is digested, (taking digestion generally as an identical process,) the excrementitious matter is composed of secretions and disorganized matter, mixed together as an _effete_ product, and destined then for reorganization by the vegetable kingdom. Now all animals, whether they be large or small, live on organized matter,--they convert that matter into an inorganic form, and I cannot help imagining that if epidemic diseases and fevers depended upon animalcular growth and development in the blood or tissues of the body, the excretions or secretions from them would have yielded some information to the searching enquiries of the chemist, supposing that these excretions and secretions were capable of reaching to a sufficient amount in quantity, to bring about those fatal effects of poisoning, we witness in Cholera and other epidemic affections. Insects, I {131} believe are poisonous only by their secretions, and though they are known to multiply with exceeding rapidity, I can hardly imagine that by their development, however rapid, they could produce such a change in the human body, as to bring about the speedy dissolution, and generally gangrenous appearance, that has invariably been observed in those suddenly dying under the influence of epidemic poisons. The vibriones, whose destructive effects on wheat are so well known, are a genus of animalcules, which at first would seem to favour the animalcular theory in a remarkable manner; for on examining them, they do not appear to possess any other structure than a gelatinous absorbing mass, in this respect resembling a vegetable. But Ehrenberg's scrutiny corrected the error of De Blanville, and shewed, that they were far from being agastria, or stomachless animals. The Rev. William Kirby says, "Ehrenberg has studied the vibriones in almost every climate, and has discovered, by keeping them in coloured waters, that they are not the simple animals that Lamarck and others supposed, and that almost all have a mouth and digestive organs, and that numbers of them have many stomachs." All the discoveries indeed which have been made on the minuter forms of animal life, have tended to confirm the doctrine that the stomach is the exponent organ of an animal; that is, in all animals there exists, in a variety of modified conditions, a receptacle for food. Some of the {132} animalcules, however, are still supposed to exist by absorption, as the vinegar eel, _vibrio anguilla_,[54] but when we find that the law is, generally speaking, that the receptacles of food become multiplied in number in these minute beings, and the vibriones which were supposed to be stomachless, have been proved to emulate their associates in the number of these organs; it would be more reasonable to conclude that our imperfect vision is the barrier to their detection, rather than to suppose that they do not exist. Besides, when we are told on undoubted authority that some of the animals of this class, have as many as _forty or fifty_ stomachs; the least we can do, is to allow that all of them possess, at least one digestive organ, though we may not be able to detect it.[55] So far then for the consideration of animalcular structure: let us now more particularly enquire into their destructive habits, and their functions, inasmuch {133} as they may be supposed capable of engendering epidemic diseases and fever. The truly carnivorous animalcules, or those truly herbivorous in their instincts, we may presume to be beyond the limits of our enquiry. We have rather to do with those which take an intermediate position, namely, those which feed upon matter undergoing decomposition, or upon fluids containing organic matters in solution, or suspension. If we take Entozoa generally, they may be considered as most conveniently to be placed in this intermediate class; and here we find still the digestive apparatus, and more than this,--for upon the modifications of the organs appropriated to digestion is their classification founded. "Rudolphi divided the Entozoa into Sterelmintha, or those in which the nutrient tubes without anal outlet are simply excavated in the general parenchyma, and into the Coelelmintha, in which an intestinal canal with proper parietes floats in a distinct abdominal cavity, and has a separate outlet for the excrements."[56] How do these animals obtain their sustenance, and what changes can they produce upon the vital fluid of the body? Analogy is here our only guide. If the trichina spiralis is examined, it is found to be enclosed in a cyst containing fluid; and this is, {134} doubtless, the source of its nutriment, and contains in solution the elements for its nutrition; but in this instance there is no selection, and there can be no locomotion to an extent sufficient to imply searching for food, as the animalcule in its natural state, when taken from the human muscle, is found coiled upon itself, making about two and a half turns. The fluid of the cyst is thus in all likelihood prepared by endosmosis, for the immediate and appropriate nutrition of the parasite. The cyst is thus the part which performs the diseased process, the containing animalcule is merely the consumer of what is prepared for it by the cyst. And this would seem to be the rule with all parasites, of the encysted kind. We have alluded to the vibriones which are found in the fluids of living bodies, and the trichina which is found in the solid muscle; we have now to refer to those which infest the cavities. It was, I believe, Ehrenberg, who shewed that the tartar which accumulates on the teeth is composed of the debris of minute animalcules; in fact, that it consists of calcareous matter, having once formed a portion of the structure of their bodies, the ubiquity of these creatures is therefore as much and clearly established as the lower forms of vegetation. The intestinal worms, of which perhaps the Tænia is the most curious and important to be noticed, are from the locality in which they are found, chiefly injurious by the irritation they set up, and by appropriating {135} to themselves the nutrient juices elaborated in the process of animal digestion, thus depriving the individuals they infest of that which was destined for their own nourishment. In this, as in all associated instances, the character by which these parasitic animals are marked is their consuming propensity. There is, however, one more observation to make upon parasitic growths; but the question is yet unsettled in what kingdom of nature is the acephalocyst, or hydatid, to be placed. Mr. Owen says, "As the best observers agree in stating, that the acephalocyst is impassive under the application of stimuli of any kind, and manifests no contractile power, either partial or general, save such as results from elasticity, in short, neither feels nor moves, it cannot, as the animal kingdom is at present characterized, be referred to that division of organic nature." We thus arrive at the simple cell, and the multiplication of living beings by cell buds; it is the point at which the confines of the animal kingdom are reached, and at which we are driven to speculation. The hydatid lives like a plant, by imbibition; and procreates, like a plant, by budding, either endogenously or exogenously, as regards the original or parent cell.[57] {136} This condition of being, suggested the notion of Protozoa, or first animals, in the same way that the purely cellular plants, that is, each individual, consisting of a single cell, gave the idea of Protophyta, or first plants. Mr. Kirby thus expresses himself on this subject: "The first plants, and the first animals, are scarcely more than animated molecules, and appear analogues of each other; and those above them in each kingdom represent jointed fibrils." Admitting, then, that animals as well as plants exist in the form of simple cells, and that their multiplication proceeds apparently upon the same principle in each, it is nevertheless abundantly manifest, that the cellular form of perfect individuals is infinitely more numerous in the vegetable than in the animal kingdom. {137} From the mosses downwards to the fungi, the whole structure of the plants consists of an aggregation of cells, more or less in number and complicate arrangement, until, through a variety of gradations, we reach the single cell as a perfect individual. It is rather remarkable, that the lower forms of vegetables and animals seem to derive their nutriment from matter of a similar kind; and though the office of plants is as a rule, to convert inorganic into organized matter, it appears that some of the fungi may live as animals do on organic matter when in a state of solution. This, however, is uncertain; for we do not know what are the first signs of decomposition in organized bodies, and for aught we can tell, it may be perpetually going on; so far as the disengagement of carbon from the system is concerned, this is certain; but whether the nitrogenous compounds also are subject to a resolution into their elements in the living body, is another question, and not so easy of solution. The partially decomposed elements of animal structures are, however, particularly adapted for the nutrition of the lower forms of vegetation; it is, indeed, from the decaying organic matters that the fungi derive, it may be said, their entire food. * * * * * {138} SECTION III. SKETCH OF THE PHYSIOLOGY AND PATHOLOGY OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS. Animals and plants depend for their existence upon a nutritive fluid, which permeates their structure; it is the element from which all their secretions are formed, and their organs are nourished. The food of animals is composed of previously organized matters, and is conveyed into a reservoir called a stomach, where it undergoes a process of solution, previously to entering the circulation. At this period, the animal and the plant again present points of resemblance, the lymphatics or absorbent vessels take up the products of digestion, and convey them to the blood-vessels, where mingling with the current of the blood, they are conveyed to the lungs, there to undergo a process of oxygenation before they become fitted for the renovation of the tissues of the body. Such is the nature of the food of man, that it contains all the elements necessary and adapted for transformation into bone, muscle, brain, and parenchyma, as well as the other tissues of the body; besides other elementary matters, which, though they form a very insignificant portion of {139} animal textures, from their constant presence in the vital fluid, evidently perform some important offices in the general economy of life; they are partly, perhaps, occupied in forming constituents of secretions. Plants do not require a stomach,--the humus or soil to which they are fixed is the laboratory, where the nutritive matter is prepared in a state fit for absorption by the spongioles of their roots, and these correspond to the lymphatics of animals; after being taken up by the spongioles, this new fluid mingles with the sap, and passes to the leaves or breathing apparatus of plants, where carbonic acid gas combines with the crude vital liquid, and converts it into a condition fit for all the offices to be performed by the plant: viz. the growth of tissues, and the elaboration of secretions. The tissues, however, of plants, though more simple in their nature, present a much more varied character than those of animals, when the different species are compared. The bones of animals which give them their form, are invariably constituted of phosphate and carbonate of lime, deposited in a matrix of gluten; muscle, nerve, brain, tendons, and ligaments, have nearly, if not completely, an identical composition throughout the whole range of the animal kingdom: their secretions, however, vary much more considerably, as also do the secretions of vegetables. But vegetable tissue may contain, as in the stems of {140} grasses, a considerable amount of silex, and some notable quantity of sulphur, and so essential to their existence is the former element, that they cannot live without its presence in the soil, and also with it an alkali, to render it soluble. A large amount of soda, is an invariable attendant upon the structure of marine plants, as potash is of those growing on the land. Thus, whether we regard the health of animals, or vegetables, we discover, that besides the matters which are absolutely indispensable for the nutriment of the tissues which undergo rapid transformation, those of a more permanent and durable nature require in an almost insensible degree, a restitution of elements; and though not apparently absolutely necessary to preserve vitality in the being, yet have so marked an influence over it, as to indicate an extensive bearing of each individual part, on the whole associated entity. The elementary tissues of both kingdoms have been traced, in whatever form they may be found, to a cellular origin. The minutest vegetable germ, is a cell containing a granular matter within it, and even man himself, in his embryonic state, may be represented as an insignificant point in the realms of space; and might be placed side by side with the smallest particle of living matter, without suffering by the comparison. The laws by which the development of these elementary cells is regulated, so that each advances {141} to its limit, and fulfils its destination, is one of those inscrutable and overwhelming mysteries of nature, which leads the admirer of creation on and on into the abyss of the future, and fills his soul with aspirations for that time, when the veil of ignorance shall be withdrawn. But this is not my subject. The organization of the two animated kingdoms, is then regulated by definite laws, and all matter, whether acting upon them as agents of nutrition or destruction, are equally under their dominion; to investigate and to endeavour to fathom some of these laws, is the aim I have in view. The sap is to the plant, what the blood is to the animal,--the elements of nutrition and secretion are contained in it, and whatever interferes with its normal constitution by subtracting from, or adding to it, deteriorates its qualities, and retards or accelerates the functions of the individual. Excess or deficiency of the natural elements may also be a source of disturbance; if carbonic acid be too abundantly liberated in the soil, as Dr. Lindley expresses it, "plants become gorged;" and if, on the other hand, the elimination be too slow, they become starved. It has been also shewn, that plants though they give out oxygen from their leaves, do not throw it off as animals do carbonic acid from their lungs; but that this arises as a result of digestion, and the fixation of carbon in the system, and that they really respire oxygen as {142} animals do, and give off carbonic acid, both by day and night. That light is the stimulant of the digestive functions, and that, therefore, during the day, the amount of oxygen thrown off, far exceeds the amount of carbonic acid liberated during the same period. The great and important distinction between animals and plants is, that the former possess a nervous system, by which they are subject to a very extended series of psychological relations; it is in these chiefly, if not entirely, that we are to look for the distinctive and well-marked differences of diseased action. In animals there are special media of communication between the sources of dynamic power, and the parts upon which the force is exercised: and again, a return communication exists, which conveys impressions to the source of power, and to use a simple comparison, a system of telegraphing is in incessant and watchful operation. This force is influenced and modified in its action, when exercised in the regulation of nutrition, growth, and reproduction of tissues, by the passions and emotions of the mind. All the secretions and functions of the body are more or less susceptible of being accelerated, retarded or modified by the psychical relations of mind and matter. Though we are apt to imagine that in man alone, these phenomena obtain much importance--there can be but little doubt, that wherever a {143} nervous system exists, whether in the form of aggregated or diffused ganglia, the interdependence of force and organization, each upon the other, bears a certain and definite physiological comparison; the more aggregated the ganglia, the more close, intimate, and extensive the psychical connexions, and the gradations pass downwards, until they appear to be lost on the confines of the vegetable kingdom. The diseases of plants and animals deserve a more careful comparison than, I think, has hitherto been bestowed upon them.[58] If the study of physiology, or an enquiry into the laws which regulate the functions of living beings in a state of health, has been materially aided by the intimate knowledge of vegetable physiology, which, from the simple structure of plants, so favours the experiments of the student, there is every reason to suppose that vegetable pathology may also lead us to an equally important and useful result. It is quite certain, that if a healthy seed, or leaf-bud, be placed in such a situation, that, according to the laws known, it will in all likelihood germinate, if all the elements for its sustenance exist in the soil, and the temperature and hygrometric {144} condition of the atmosphere are adapted to it, a healthy plant will be the result. Light, heat, moisture, and soil are therefore to be considered as the agents required to exist in a certain balance, or proportion, in reference to the health or power of vitality of the plant. Within a certain amount of variation, health may persist in virtue of the power of selection, which appertains to the spongioles of the root in absorbing nutriment; and also as regards light, from the tendency which most plants have to accommodate themselves to any deficiency of this element, by presenting their leafy expansion in that direction where the most of its influence may be obtained. But beyond a certain limit an unhealthy condition sets in. If the soil contain not the inorganic elements, which are absolutely indispensable for the tissues of the plant, or even if they be there and not in a state to be absorbed, a dwindling and degeneration ensue; if light be deficient in quantity, pallor, feebleness, and elongation of tissue follow, with more fluidity and general softness of texture. These conditions of plants have their analogues in the ill-fed and ill-nourished children in some of our manufacturing districts; they are stunted and diseased. Transport a healthy country lad, with the bloom of health on his cheek, from his native hills and valleys, or woods and fields, to the stool behind a desk for eight hours a day, in a narrow street in any city, where the rays of the sun rarely penetrate, it will not be long before {145} the skin of the animal and the cuticle of the plant may be submitted for comparison, when both will testify to the importance of the solar rays, as an indispensable agent in supporting the normal processes of organic life. So far common observation is competent to a solution of the facts; but beyond this we come to the enquiry, what resemblances are there in the early conditions of plants and animals. Each originates from nucleated cells, endowed by the All-seeing Power with a blind impulse of progressive development; the most simple cell of a vegetable multiplies itself by a generation of new cells within it, when the parent dies, and liberates the offspring. Here progression is simply multiplication; it is, as it were, progression in length only. The original cell, however, of animals, which is styled the germinal vesicle, extends or becomes developed into dissimilar parts; and whatever may be the variety, all alike proceed from the original germ cell, and the _tout ensemble_ of parts constitutes the one and indivisible whole; in this instance there is addition besides multiplication, tissues and organs are added in all variety, until the maximum of organic development is attained in the wonderful being, man. Yet how many points of resemblance are there between the vegetable cell and the fully developed human being, in a physiological and pathological point of view. There must be nourishment to sustain both; both require a certain amount of light {146} and heat for their growth and increase, and are dependent upon various unknown causes for active and healthy existence; and when a certain time has expired, all alike return to a condition, in which the particles composing them are subject only to the dominion of the laws which preside over inorganic matter. But during the existence of plants and animals, we discover other features of comparison; plants, as well as animals, are liable to disease; they are subject to functional and organic affections. The former, among plants, are usually traceable to atmospheric vicissitudes or irregularities, changes of situation, &c.; and in man to irregularities of diet, and mental and bodily excesses, as well as to atmospheric vicissitudes.[59] The organic diseases of plants and animals depend upon a repetition, or continuance, of functional derangement. As a consequence of this, the nutrition and reproduction of tissues lose their normal and definite character, wherefrom an indefinite and abnormal result is obtained. There is a limit to abnormal productions, and they are apparently {147} subject to laws, though not yet understood. In animals, they may be either excessive development of natural tissue in natural localities, as obesity and fatty tumours; they may be natural products in unnatural situations, as fatty degenerations of muscular tissue; or altogether new and unnatural products, as tubercle and cancer. In plants, from their greater simplicity of structure, organic affections are perhaps entirely limited to the two first forms of animal organic disease; viz. to undue development of tissue in natural situations, and to the formation of natural tissue in parts of a plant where they are not usually found in a state of nature. The variety of excrescences seen on the stems, branches, and twigs of plants, may be given as instances of the former; and the conversion of stamina into petals, as in double flowers, as an instance of the latter. We derive our sustenance from vegetables, and they from us; they produce for us the soothing opiate and the deadly strychnia; we for them the animating ammonia, and the distortions and sterility of excessive culture; we engender in them, by the latter, debility, disease, and death; and in our turn we become their prey. All this indeed is but a cycle of events, that requires no learned mind to fathom, and to comprehend; it is a matter of every day occurrence, and, though perhaps not entirely unheeded, is not dwelt upon in the fulness of its bearings and importance. {148} Let us now consider the diseases of plants, as a study progressive to those of man; and as their physiology has so extensively served us, we may possibly also find in their pathology much material for instruction; not that it will be attempted to shew that the same diseases affect both kingdoms, but that diseases, though dissimilar in effects, may have similar sources. Unfortunately, there are not many men in this country, who need go further than their own gardens to find abundance of disease among their fruit trees and vegetables. The vine, the apple and the potato, common to most gardens, will furnish specimens. It is an error of a serious kind to suppose, that the parasites which infest plants are not essentially the cause, or, perhaps, more properly speaking, the elements of disease. I confine myself here to disease of parasitic origin, as that is the subject of which I am chiefly treating. That parasitic growths are the elements of disease in some instances, is now beyond dispute. The experiments of Mr. Hassall, detailed in Part II. of the Transactions of the Microscopical Society of London, are most conclusive; and they are of that simple nature, that any one may convince himself of their accuracy, by a repetition of them from the directions there laid down. He says, the decay is communicable at will "to any fruits of the apple and peach kind, no matter {149} how strong their vital energies may be, by the simple act of inoculation of the sound fruit with a portion of decayed matter, containing filaments of the fungi. We may use with success the sporules of such fungi; but in this case the decomposition does not set in so quickly; in the one case, the smaller filaments of the fungi have advanced several stages in their growth; while in the other, the sporules have yet to pass through the several stages of their development." Mr. Hassan, however, seems to speak doubtfully as to the mode in which the disease becomes naturally introduced;[60] how the spores enter the fruit, "is not very clear--though probably, it is by insinuating themselves between the cells of which the cuticle is composed, or perhaps by means of the stomata, where they are present. I may here state that the experiments were made on fruit, while living, and attached to the tree." But why should there be a doubt as to the parts by which the sporules of minute fungi enter the plant, when it is clear, that not only can they enter {150} by the spongioles, but by the stomata of the leaves, and mingle with the sap. It is true, that they make their appearance and grow upon the leaves and the fruit; but these are the situations most adapted for their fructification. I have seen the spores of the fungi which attack the cucumber and vegetable-marrow, in the cells of the hairs, and even their filamentous prolongations; these appropriate the fluids conveyed to the cells of the hair, rupture them, and at length fructify. On referring to Dr. Lindley's Medical and Economic Botany, I find that many fungi are the active elements of disease, and in a manner which renders it highly improbable that they are so in any other way, than by obtaining an entrance to the sap of the plants. Of the microscopic fungus which destroys wheat, the Uredo caries of De Candolle, we find the habitat to be within the ovary of the corn, and that 4,000,000 may be contained in a grain of wheat,--now this and another fungus, the Lanosa nivalis, are said to destroy whole crops of corn: we cannot imagine that such an extensive affection, can have any other source than by means of the spores through the sap, seeing that bruising of the surface, or rupture of the cuticle of the apple, a comparatively soft fruit is necessary to produce the disease artificially in them; besides, a grain of corn containing vibriones, when grown and having fruited, the new fruit also contains them--now here, as this is I believe almost invariably the {151} case, either they or their ova must be carried with the sap to the new germs. It is rather a remarkable fact, that these entophytes appropriate the nutriment destined for the plant in which they grow, they are consequently the means in many instances of its entire destruction, though only partially so in others. There are many Fungi which have this tendency. The Puccinia gramienis, "preys upon the juices of plants, and prevents the grain from swelling." The �cidium urticæ, common on nettles, deprives the plant on which it grows, of the organizable matter, intended for its own nutrition. The Erysiphe communis, overruns and destroys peas. The Botrytis infestans, "attacks the leaves and stems of potatoes." The Oidium abortifaciens, attacks the ovaries of grasses--and the Oidium Tuckeri, "a formidable parasite, destroys the functions of the skin, of the parts it attacks." The latter has been most injurious to the vines, during the last two years. I have known instances in which the vines have been cut down, and every means taken to rid the houses of the disease; but this year, it has made its appearance, with all its former virulence, in the new shoots. This, however, is sufficient to shew that plants are liable to disease, depending upon parasitic growths, which affect their vital powers, and deprive them of their natural nutritive fluids. But somewhat similar diseases belong also to {152} warm climates; in a letter from Cuba, dated Dec. 1843,--Mr. Bastian writes, "_a plague_ has appeared among the orange trees--a mildew attacking the leaves and the blossoms, which finally dry up. It most frequently kills the trees. None of the orange family are exempt; lemons, limes, and their varieties, with the shaddock and forbidden fruit, have all suffered." This disease has continued without intermission, till the present year,--when the same gentleman writes, Feb. 20th, 1850: "The evil exists, although in a diminished degree, so much so, as to have allowed the trees to produce me 30,000 oranges again. In old times, the same plantations produced me 100,000." The West India sugar-canes are also liable to a disease, which the Rev. Mr. Griffiths, in his Natural History of the Island of Barbadoes, speaks of, in the following manner: "This, among diseases peculiar to canes, as among those which happen to men, too justly claims the horrible precedence." This disease is called the Yellow Blast. It is difficult to distinguish the Blast in its infancy, from the effect of dry weather. There are often seen on such sickly canes, many small protuberant knobs, of a soft downy substance. It is likewise observable, that such blades will be full of brownish decaying spots. The disease is very destructive to the canes. It is observed, that the Blast usually appears successively in the same fields, and often in the very same spot of land. {153} This Blast is often found far from "infected places," and the infection always spreads faster to the leeward, or with the wind. "_It is remarkable if canes_ have been once infected with the Blast, although they afterwards to all appearance, seem to recover; yet the juice of such canes will neither afford so much sugar, nor so good of its kind, as if obtained from canes which were never infected." I may here allude to the circumstance, that in the island of Cuba, the destructive mildew is commonly called, _la pesta_. It were needless to multiply instances of other endemic and epidemic diseases of vegetables; they are well known by practical observers to be very numerous, and I believe, in most instances, depending upon fungoid growths. The destruction of vegetables by insects, is of a very different nature to that produced by the fungi; it would be as unreasonable to consider the consumption of corn and herbage by locusts, as a disease of vegetation, as the massacre and devouring of human beings by cannibals, a disease of the human body. It is true that insects are exceedingly destructive to plants, but as far as I am able to obtain information, they appear to be so chiefly by their voracious propensities; they consume the structure of the plant in its entity, and do not primarily interfere with its vitality. The instance of the vibriones, before-mentioned, seems at first to be an exception {154} to the rule, but this is rather apparent, than real; and it may be made to apply more as a confirmation, than an obstacle to the vegetable theory: for if we may fairly compare the diseases of animals with those of plants, the existence of entozoa in the latter, would be considered an essential point to be substantiated. Having now considered the question as to the infeasibility of supposing that chemical fermentation is the basis upon which a theory of diseases can be sustained, and having shewn that life is inseparable from infection, and miasmatic generation;--having explained the phenomena of the dispersion of diseases by comparison with the dispersion of plants, and finally, having demonstrated that the physiology and pathology of plants bear so close a relation to each other, and that their epidemic affections depend upon minute organic germs, I submit to the judgment of my readers, whether there is not much reasonableness in the application of the facts to the inference--that living germs are the cause of epidemic disease in man and animals. * * * * * {155} CHAPTER IV. RESULTS IN PROOF OF THE TENABLENESS OF THE PROPOSITION. -------- SECTION I. OBSERVATIONS ON SOME OF THE LAWS OF EPIDEMIC DISEASES. The results obtained by comparing certain facts connected with Epidemic Affections of animals, with analogous affections in plants, afford, from the few instances I shall here notice, a very strong presumption, that analogous causes operate in the production of these affections. I have already quoted from Hecker, to shew that previously to, and during the Epidemics of the Middle Ages, the minuter forms of animal and vegetable life appeared to be called into existence, much more abundantly than usual; that famines prevailed in consequence of failure of cereal crops, no doubt depending then, as now, upon the various forms of fungiferous growth. I cannot refrain quoting here, a passage or two from our old friend Virgil; for he confirms not only the fact of peculiar showers in {156} connexion with diseases, but he also refers to the rust of corn, thus: 150. "Mox et frumentis labor additus; ut mala culmos Esset rubigo ... ... Intereunt segetes." _Georg. 1._ Then: 311. "Quid tempestates autumni et sidera dicam? . . . . . . 322. "Sæpe etiam[61] immensum coelo venit agmen aquarum Et foedam glomerant tempestatem imbribus atris Collectæ ex alto nubes." _Georg. 1._ The occurrence of black showers in this country has been observed during the present year, and I understand that in the fenny countries of the East, the corn has suffered much from the Uredo. I am not mentioning the circumstances as cause and effect, but merely to call attention to the fact, that unusual phenomena of this kind have been generally associated with disease of the animal and vegetable tribes. The same causes also predispose plants as well as animals, to epidemic attacks of disease. The repeated observations in the public journals on the subject of ventilation, drainage, and over-crowding, render all notice from me needless, to shew that these, though they do not produce the diseases {157} treated of, yet that under the influence of bad air, bad drainage, and over-crowding, epidemics are fostered and spread. Lastly, says the Count Philippo Ré, "I would remark that if _bad cultivation, and especially bad drainage, does not produce bunt or smut, it is certain that those fields, the worst treated in these respects, suffer the most from these diseases_." It has been remarked by many observers, that a greater fecundity has attended upon Pestilences, and this has been proved by comparison, that the births in proportion have far exceeded the ordinary limit.[62] In juxtaposition with this observation, I will place the following, not as a proof, but as a remark made quite independently of the subject of which I am treating. "From the first the diseased ears are larger than the healthy ones, and are sooner matured. What appears singular, but which I have not, perhaps, sufficiently verified, is _that the seeds are more abundant than in a sound ear_." {158} Now these are facts which require amplification, and if these two alone should be shewn upon an extensive field of observation, to apply not only to corn, but to other members of the vegetable kingdom, as I doubt not will be the case, though I am not fully prepared to prove it, it would be difficult to dissociate the fertility of the two living kingdoms from the operations of one and the same, or an analogous law. The epidemic diseases of plants are both infectious and contagious, at times they are observed to be endemic only, and then depending particularly upon some local causes. This is a law of diseases which applies equally to those of men and animals. In connexion with this law is another, which, as far as I am aware, has not hitherto been noticed in connexion with plants. The potato disease, which excited so much interest and created so much anxiety for the poorer classes of society, led the Government of this country to employ the most learned men to investigate the subject, in the hope of propounding some reasons which should explain the cause of the calamity, and thereby deduce a method of eradicating the evil, or, in other words, discover a cure for the disease. Many were the opinions as to the cause of the distemper, which it were useless here to recount, but a method was suggested, to which most people, I believe, looked forward with great anticipations, and this was to obtain native seed, and to sow it on virgin soil. Was the end accomplished? No. {159} For though the seed was sown, and the plants grew, the disease still appeared among the newly imported individuals, to as great an extent, as among the native or domesticated plants. As a parallel to this, it may be stated, that, as regards either endemic or epidemic disease, those persons newly arrived, either in a district or country where these prevail, are even more liable to them than the residents.[63] Again, I have learned, that where the potato disease has been so bad as to render the crop almost valueless, the best plan to be adopted is, to allow the plants to remain in the earth, and thus leave such as retain their germinating powers to come up spontaneously the following year. I certainly saw one large field treated in this way, yield a crop almost without disease. {160} The seasoning, in this instance, seems to bear a comparison with the seasoning of animals and man, under a variety of diseases, which for a time renders them insusceptible of another attack. It therefore does not appear so improbable, that these affections may be regarded, as Unger, the German botanist supposed, the Exanthemata, or Eruptive Fevers of vegetables. Another feature seems to associate the Epidemics of plants and animals, in a manner suggestive of analogous causes operating in both instances. The lungs of animals and the leaves of vegetables, are their respiratory organs, by means of which, the blood in the one case and the sap in the other, derive gas from the air, and impart gas to it, each taking what is thrown off by the other. Now the epidemics among vegetables, have a remarkable tendency to exhibit their effects primarily on the leaves, and particularly on those parts which are appropriated to the function of respiration. It is from the stomates that many of the fungi commence to germinate, and their fructification may be seen sprouting from the opening composed of a chink, surrounded by a peculiar arrangement of cells, which constitute the breathing apparatus of their victim. In the earlier epidemics, of which we read, one of the most remarkable circumstances, was the extraordinary influence the poisonous matter appeared to {161} exercise over the lungs,[64] and they again, were the means of propagating the disease, and spreading the contagious particles through the atmosphere, for we read: "Thus did the plague rage in Avignon for six or eight weeks, and the pestilential breath of the sick, who expectorated blood, caused a terrible contagion far and near, for even the vicinity of those who had fallen ill of plague was certain death; so that parents abandoned their infected children, and all the ties of kindred were dissolved."[65] "The like was seen in Egypt. Here also inflammation of the lungs was predominant." "Here too the _breath_ of the sick spread a deadly contagion." It is more than probable that all infectious matter obtains an entrance to the system through the lungs. Inspiring the air containing the pestilential semina is, indeed, the only plausible explanation of infection; for though the skin is indubitably an absorbing {162} surface, and capable of taking up and conveying to the blood any noxious matter applied to it, yet it is far more probable that the lungs would effect this process with greater rapidity. Then the stomach, the only other absorbing surface to which extraneous matter can be applied, is not likely to be the part where the elements of disease would obtain an entrance to the system, for many facts prove, that infectious matter may be swallowed without any injurious consequences, unless in a very concentrated state. Instances are not easily found of diseased matter having been swallowed, except where diseased vegetables have formed under some combination of circumstances, a portion of diet.[66] Many facts are on record which prove the powerful effect of diseased grain when made into bread, and taken for any length time as a principal article of food. The history of Ergot of Rye is too fresh in the memory of most people to require more than an allusion here. The stomach had no power over the secale, its poisonous properties were retained, after having been submitted to the digestive process, as was evidenced by the abortions and gangrenes it occasioned. But diseased wheat is also capable of inducing {163} gangrene, and it is more than probable, that many diseases might be traced to the use of infected grain of various kinds. An interesting account of a family who lived at Wattisham, near Stowmarket, in Suffolk, and all of whom suffered more or less from living on bread made of smutty wheat, may be found in the Philosophical Transactions. The mother of this family and five of the children, consisting of three girls and two boys, all suffered from gangrene of the extremities; the father lost the nails from his hands, and had ulceration of two of his fingers.[67] Dr. Woollaston wrote thus in a letter on this case: "The corn with which they made their bread was certainly very bad: it was wheat that had been cut in a rainy season, and had lain on the ground till many of the grains were black and totally decayed, but many other poor families in the same village made use of the same corn without receiving any injury from it. One man lost the use of his arm for some time, and still imagines himself that he was afflicted with the same disorder as Downing's family." It is not unlikely this was the case, for numbness and loss of power was one of the well marked characters of the disease. What other afflictions may be due to diseased vegetation and adulterated articles of food, and what loss of life may accrue from cheap and adulterated {164} drugs and chemicals is hardly yet dreamt of.[68] The systematic practice of adulteration of almost every article of diet which comes to table has become a serious question for the legislature to consider. Take only the article of milk, upon which the young children of large towns and cities, make their chief meals, with the addition of bread. How much milk comes into London from the country, how much is obtained from stall and grain-fed cows in the metropolis, and how much is said to be consumed, would be an interesting calculation. It is pretty well known that a mixture is sold by which a retailer of milk may increase his supply by one-third or one-half. It was discovered in Paris that the brains of animals, when prepared in a particular manner, formed, when mixed with a certain proportion of milk and water, a very fine and deceptive cream; in that city this system was carried on to a considerable extent. I could not help alluding to these facts while speaking of diseased grain, for who shall say to what extent a miller in a large way of business, may be able to "work in," as it is called, a considerable amount of smutty corn in the manufacture of flour? Now, as diseased grain is known {165} to induce abortion, it is impossible to tell how small a portion may in some cases produce the effect; we may therefore say with Thomas of Malmesbury, "There is no action of man in this life which is not the beginning of so long a chain of consequences, as that no human providence is high enough to give us a prospect to the end."[69] To return,--associated with these observations are other facts of considerable weight. Before and during pestilences, abortions are more frequent than in ordinary times; infectious and contagious diseases induce abortion; besides this, and independently of disease, conditions of the atmosphere have been known to exist when abortion has been an epidemic affection; of this Dr. Copland says, "to certain states of the atmosphere only can be attributed those frequent abortions sometimes observed which have even assumed an epidemic form, and of which Hippocrates, Fischer, Tessier, Desormeaux, and others have made mention." With this reference I will close the subject of comparison between the affections of the breathing apparatus in animals and plants, merely alluding to the probability that under some conditions of atmosphere, independently of heat, &c. vegetables without any other assignable cause will become abortive. * * * * * {166} SECTION II. WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THOSE POISONS WHICH MOST RESEMBLE THE MORBID POISONS IN THEIR EFFECTS ON THE BODY? In the early part of this book, I considered the nature of poisons generally, and had occasion to remark upon the characters which separated poisons into two distinct classes. 1st, Those which have the power of self multiplication; and 2nd, Those destitute of this property. Of the first we have seen that the poisons of epidemic diseases multiply both in and out of the body. The poisons of infectious diseases, not usually epidemic, do the same. Those of endemic affections, such as ague and some fevers, usually become multiplied out of the body only, but under some circumstances, and peculiar atmospheric conditions, they may be also multiplied within the body. The amount of these poisons necessary to produce their specific effects, may be inappreciable. Of the second class, there are two kinds, those derived from the organic kingdom and those derived from the inorganic kingdom. Of these, the amount necessary to produce their specific effects is appreciable and pretty well known. But among those poisons, consisting of organic {167} products, there is one which seems to hold an intermediate place. This is derived from one of the Fungals, and as it takes this remarkable position as a link of connexion between the two classes of poisons, I may be excused quoting a passage of some length upon this agent, from Dr. Lindley's Vegetable Kingdom. "One of the most poisonous of our fungi, is the Amanita muscaria, so called from its power of killing flies, when steeped in milk. Even this is eaten in Kamchatka, with no other than intoxicating effects, according to the following account by Langsdorf, as translated by Greville. This variety of Amanita muscaria, is used by the inhabitants of the north-eastern parts of Asia in the same manner as wine, brandy, arrack, opium, &c. is by other nations."--"The most singular effect of the amanita is the influence it possesses over the urine. It is said, that from time immemorial, the inhabitants have known that the fungus imparts an intoxicating quality to that secretion, which _continues for a considerable time after taking it_. For instance, a man moderately intoxicated to-day, will by the next morning have slept himself sober, but (as is the custom) by taking a teacup of his urine, he will be _more powerfully intoxicated_ than he was the preceding day. It is, therefore, not uncommon for confirmed drunkards to preserve their urine, as a precious liquor against a scarcity of the fungus. The intoxicating property of the urine _is capable of_ {168} _being propagated_; for every one who partakes of it has his urine similarly affected. Thus with a very few amanitæ, a party of drunkards may keep up their debauch for a week." This property of the amanita, at once places it in a separate category from all other organic poisons, it has yet to be shewn upon what this intoxicating fungus depends for its activity. Whether some secretion is formed in the tissue of the plant, or whether some new arrangement of the particles of matter or modification of the sporules, is brought about by entering the system, it is impossible to say. Langsdorf states that the small deep-coloured specimens of amanita, and thickly covered with warts, are said to be more powerful than those of a larger size and paler colour. As the effect is not produced until from one to two hours after swallowing the bolus, and as a pleasant intoxication may be obtained by this agent for a whole day, and from one dose only, there is a defined line between this and the ordinary narcotics and stimulants in common use. That the digestive powers of the stomach have no influence over the intoxicating properties of the plant, is manifested in the fact, that the active principle passes into the urine, not only not deteriorated but apparently increased, for, as we have seen, a teacup of the urine from a man, intoxicated by taking the amanita into his stomach, will cause him to be more powerfully intoxicated than by the {169} original dose. We have, therefore, but two conjectures left for consideration, either the original intoxicating principle is excreted from the system in a condensed form, in which case its indestructibility by digestion, makes it approach the ordinary organic poisons, or there must be an increase of the toxic agent, in which case we must suppose a reproductive process having taken place in the system. "There is," says Dr. Mitchell, "in the wild regions of our western country, a disease called the _milk sickness_, the _trembles_, the _tires_, the _slows_, the _stiff-joints_, the _puking fever_, _&c._" The animals affected with this disease, "stray irregularly, apparently without motive;" they lose their power of attention, and finally tremble, stagger, and die. "When other animals--men, dogs, cats, poultry, crows, buzzards, and hogs, drink the milk or eat the flesh of a diseased cow, they suffer in a somewhat similar manner." This disease is attributed by Dr. Mitchell to the animals having grazed on pasture contaminated with mildew, and the resemblance to the effects of the amanita, together with the persistence of the specific principle within the fluids and tissues of the body, render it more than probable that to some fungoid growth, is due the peculiar toxic effects here noticed. Further: "The animals made sick by the beef of the first one, have been in their turn the cause of a like affection in others; so that three or four have thus fallen victims successively." De Graaf states, that butter {170} made from the milk of diseased cows, though heated until it caught fire, did not lose its deleterious properties. The urine of diseased animals, collected and reduced by evaporation, produced the characteristic symptoms. All these facts point to some peculiarity in the properties of matter not yet investigated or at least not explained. If we may assume that reproduction is here an element of the persistence and apparent multiplication of active matter, I know only of one instance to compare with it. A gentleman about to deliver a lecture on the properties of arsenic, and its history generally, made two solutions of a given quantity of arsenious acid, in the following manner. He took a certain amount of distilled water, and the same of filtered Thames water, and made his solutions of arsenic by separate boilings, he then as soon as possible placed the liquids in identical bottles, carefully prepared for their reception. In the one which contained the arsenic boiled in river water, the hygrocrocis is now growing, while that boiled in distilled water remains perfectly limpid and free from any vegetable production. There can scarcely be a doubt, that the filtration of river water was not sufficiently purifying to remove the minute spores of some lower forms of vegetation, which not only live in arsenic but have resisted the temperature employed in boiling an arsenical solution to saturation. As to the first class, or truly reproductive and {171} morbid poisons, the most heterogenous ideas have from all time existed. I have introduced the notice of the above poisons, viz. the Amanita, and that which engenders the milk sickness, to compare the results of the morbid poisons on the human body with them, and also to associate them with the effects of diseased grain. From the Amanita and that other fungoid matter which is said to produce the milk sickness, there appears to be a purely toxic action on the system, but in the instance of diseased grain, a blood disease, ending in gangrene, or a specific and peculiar action of the generative organs is the consequence, and where the latter occurs, the poison usually expends itself on these parts, either by inducing abortion, or augmenting the catamenial secretion. Now, the morbid poisons, if studied only in their results, shew that there is a combination of these two actions. There is usually, in the first place, a toxic or poisonous action, and secondly, a deteriorating or decomposing action on the blood, by which there is a tendency to low or asthenic inflammation and gangrene. It matters not what form of fever we take as an illustration, whether intermittent, pestilential, or exanthematous, either will serve the purpose of shewing how completely the effects of vegetable organic poisons resemble those which for the sake of distinction (I suppose) have been denominated Morbid Poisons. Take an attack from the paludal poison. It is {172} usually ushered in with head-ache, weariness, pains in the limbs, and thirst, with other symptoms; all these are indicative of a poisonous agent in the blood: then come the full phenomena of the disease at a longer or shorter interval, and tending ultimately to destroy some organ of the body. The mind suffers during the course of the attack, and delirium occasionally happens. In severe cases of this disease, which were more frequent formerly than now, coma, delirium, and frenzy were observed at the commencement of the attack, and a tendency to rapid disorganization of one or several of the viscera. If we take the effects of poison of Erysipelas, of Scarlet Fever, or Plague, in each we find at the onset more or less general derangement of the system, usually with cerebral disturbance and disordered action of all the dynamic forces of the body, which clearly indicate the action of a poison; then, unless some favourable symptoms arise, the blood exhibits a steady advance towards disorganization, and sphacelation of one or more tissues or parts of the body ensues. In Erysipelas the force of the diseased action is expended on the skin, and subcutaneous cellular tissue; in Scarlet Fever the fauces ulcerate, and slough and the parotids suppurate; in the Plague there is a general tendency to putrefaction, and the formation of glandular abscesses with sphacelas. Without going any further into this matter, for my present intention is merely to draw {173} notice to certain facts, let me now ask, whether or not, do the poisons of the Ergot, the Uredo, and the Amanita, exhibit more analogy in their action on the nervous system, the blood and the tissues, than any other poisonous agents with which we are acquainted? If the whole range of the lower fungi could be examined in reference to their operation on the blood, as decomposers of organic compounds,--if experiments could be made, by which the properties of fungoid matter could be detected, I would venture to say the whole of the phenomena of these diseases could be readily comprehended and their intricacies unravelled. We know that the fungi are poisonous, that at times and seasons, and under variations of climate, they vary in their effects, and perhaps lose altogether these properties. We know that the fungi produce gangrene of the tissues, and disorganization of the blood; we know that their spores pervade the atmosphere, and are ready, under favouring conditions, to increase and multiply; we know that they are ubiquitous, and that those conditions most favourable to their development, are exactly such as are proved to foster and engender disease, and above all, they have been proved to be the elements of some diseases in man, in animals, and in plants. Can as much be said of any other known agents, animate or inanimate, comprised in our category? It has been said, we do not see after death,--the {174} interlacing mycilium, or the sprouting pileus; therefore the fungi are not the agents of disease--it has been said that carbonic acid and alcohol are not found as products of diseased action--consequently disease is not a fermentative process. "In all cases," says Liebig, "where the strictest investigation has failed to demonstrate the presence of organic beings in the contagion of a miasm, or contagious disease, the hypothesis that such beings have cooperated, or do cooperate in the morbid process, must be rejected as totally void of foundation and support." Much as I admire the genius of this great man, it is difficult to refrain from remarking, that I doubt if any of his great discoveries would have been made, if, in the first instance, hypotheses had not formed the basis of all his researches. It has been said, "that casual conjunctions in chemistry, gave us most of our valuable discoveries:" and it is from casual conjunctions that hypotheses are usually formed, the working out proves either their fallacy or their truth, but to say that an hypothesis has no foundation, until demonstrated to be true, is rather knocking down argument. And who, let me ask, has been more prolific of hypotheses than our continental neighbour? Yet he, according to his mode of reasoning, would sweep away all such words from the vocabularies of philosophers. What foundation has the chemical hypothesis of disease, when it fails to explain the most important element {175} of contagious and infectious diseases: viz. the reproductive property of their germs? It is perhaps necessary to say something in explanation of the sudden deaths arising from morbid poisons. They may occur from two causes. One being the result of a concentrated amount of poison germs being inhaled into the lungs, and acting as an ordinary toxic agent; and the other, which I put only hypothetically, the consequence of the rapid evolution of gas in the vessels arising from a sudden decomposition of blood, as it passes through the lungs. The only authority I have for this supposition, is the fact that the blood after death, from pestilential affections, is found to be far advanced towards decomposition; that in Paris last year, two patients were bled while suffering from Cholera, and with the small quantity of blood which flowed, bubbles of air also escaped:[70] and besides this, it was demonstrated by Mr. Herapath, that ammonia was given off from Cholera patients, both by the lungs and skin. These facts, though they are not conclusive, nevertheless render it probable that such an explanation is not entirely out of reason--especially too, when we know how fatal are the effects of uncombined air, when it enters the vessels near to the heart. * * * * * {176} SECTION III. WHAT RESULTS DO WE OBTAIN FROM THE EFFECTS OF REMEDIAL AGENTS, IN PROOF OF THE HYPOTHESIS? I have here used the word hypothesis, because, having so far advanced in the enquiry, I trust sufficient has been said to render the term applicable. Under the term remedial agents, I shall include all those causes, whether natural or artificial, which tend to neutralize or destroy the germs of infection, or miasmatic poison, whether this be effected out of or within the body. First, then, let us consider the results of drainage and cultivation in removing the causes of endemic disease. One well authenticated case is as good as a thousand. I will take one, which, from its source, will be received as unexceptionable; and from its association with a very learned and amusing book, will be accepted as an agreeable reminder of the many pleasant hours spent in the perusal of the poet Southey's "Doctor." "Doncaster is built upon a peninsula, or ridge of land, about a mile across, having a gentle slope from east to west, and bounded on the west by the river; this ridge is composed of three strata; to wit, of the alluvial soil deposited by the river in former {177} ages, and of limestone on the north and west; and of sandstone to the south and east. To the south of this neck of land, lies a tract called Potteric Carr, which is much below the level of the river, and was a morass, or range of fens when our Doctor first took up his abode in Doncaster. This tract extends about four miles in length, and nearly three in breadth, and the security which it afforded against an attack on that side, while the river protected the peninsula by its semicircular bend on the other, was evidently one reason why the Romans fixed upon the site of Doncaster for a station. In Brockett's Glossary of North Country words, Carr is interpreted to mean 'flat marshy land,' 'a pool or lake;' but the etymology of the word is yet to be discovered. "These fens were drained and enclosed pursuant to an Act of Parliament, which was obtained for that purpose in the year 1766. Three principal drains were then cut, fourteen feet wide, and about four miles long, into which the water was conducted from every part of the Carr southward, to the little river Torne, at Rossington Bridge, whence it flows into the Trent. Before these drainings, the ground was liable to frequent inundations; and about the centre there was a decoy for wild ducks; there is still a deep water there of considerable extent, in which very large pike and eels are found. The soil, which was so boggy at first that horses were lost in attempting to drink at the drains, has been brought {178} into good cultivation, (as all such ground may be) to the great improvement of the district; for till this improvement was effected, _intermittent fevers and sore throats were prevalent there, and they have ceased from the time the land was drained_. The most unhealthy season now, is the spring, when cold winds, from the north and north-east, usually prevail during some six weeks; at other times Doncaster is considered to be a healthy place. It has been observed that when endemic(?) diseases arrive there, they uniformly come from the south; and that the state of the weather may be foretold from a knowledge of what it has been at a given time in London, making an allowance of about three days, for the chance of winds. Here, as in all places which lie upon a great and frequented road, the transmission of disease has been greatly facilitated by the increase of travelling." I feel certain of being excused for transcribing this long passage from Southey. It would have been impossible to convey its whole meaning without giving it entire. The continuation of the chapter is no less instructive and applicable to our subject, though more particularly so to an extension of the enquiry. The sore throats and intermittents, from which Doncaster has been freed, by the drainage of Potteric Carr, informs us at once that decomposing matter is the material by which the poison of fever is vivified and sustained, the wet and boggy state of the soil is just the condition, when no drainage exists, to bring into activity the germs of {179} disease, which otherwise would lie latent. So satisfied and acquainted are we with the elements necessary for the production of fever, that we might as certainly bring about an endemic intermittent by forming an artificial bog, as we could be sure of growing mushrooms by making a bed in the manner laid down by gardeners for this purpose. Dr. Lindley also says, "the _Polyporus fomentarius_ has been artificially produced in Germany, but merely by placing wood in a favourable situation, and keeping it well moistened. Five or six crops were obtained in the year." Let warmth, moisture, darkness, and decaying matter be given, and inanimate disintegrated particles will soon be converted into definite forms and combinations instinct with life. It is by the unseen forms of living beings, that the atmosphere is preserved from becoming charged with deadly gases; they take the first rank in the great scheme of animated beings, the plant first, and then the animal. "Let the earth bring forth grass." "Let there be lights in the firmament." "Let the waters bring forth the moving creature, and fowl that may fly," and "Let the earth bring forth the cattle, the creeping thing, and the beast." This is the order of creation, of living things, and the earth was prepared by vegetation for the animal world. The work of conversion is accomplished by vegetation; and this is consumed for the construction of higher organizations. The laws which govern and control the universe, {180} are as definite and as wonderful among invisible atoms, as those which regulate the enormous masses floating in space; and the time will come when the advancing intellect of man will measure and weigh the morbid poisons, as he measures and weighs the stars. Why should the laws of Epidemics be less understood, than the laws which govern the course of comets? The aspirations of man have led him to penetrate the heavens, which charm and inspire him; he studies rather the more violent disturbing elements of nature, the thunder-cloud and the fire of heaven, than the silent pestilence which steals over the earth. I cannot conceive it possible that the Intellects, which are occupied in procuring means for the Majesty of this empire to issue her mandates with the velocity of a spirit to the nethermost parts of the earth, should be incapable of solving so deeply interesting a mystery as the causes and nature of pestilential diseases. It would seem that man prefers to issue a mandate of destruction many thousand miles distant, than to disarm the pestilence at his door. It is barely a century since Galvani observed the twitchings in the muscles of a frog's leg, and the battery, still named after him, has already become an agent of instantaneous communication between places many miles distant. But how many centuries have passed away, each one succeeding the other, with its millions of victims to epidemics? And where are the remedies for the evils? Drainage and cleanliness, with all their advantages, were better understood and more fully carried out by the ancient {181} Romans than by ourselves; there are monuments, though crumbling to decay, to tell us of the vast enterprise of these people and of the value they set upon a healthy and vigorous constitution, and how well they understood the means of warding of disease. Cultivation and drainage are now fully understood to be the basis by which a healthy condition of air is to be obtained, next to that, cleanliness and ventilation; if either be neglected a sickly, mouldy, and unwholesome contamination of atmosphere ensues; the odour of a bog is proverbially mouldy, and so is that of an ill-ventilated house or cellar; dryness, or the fresh pleasant scent of clean water, are the antagonists of these; the aromatic odours of vegetation are opponents of putrefaction, and consequently of the development of the lower forms of life. All empyreumatic matters prevent mouldiness and decomposition; and odours arrest and prevent the growth of mouldiness. The oil of birch, with which the Russia leather is impregnated, and which gives it so pleasant an odour, effectually prevents mouldiness, and consequently decay. Lindley says, "It is a most remarkable circumstance, and one which _deserves particular enquiry_, that the growth of the _minute fungi_, which constitute what is called mouldiness, is _effectually prevented_ by any kind of perfume."[71] Cedar has {182} been used, from time immemorial, for a like purpose; and I doubt not the recommendation of Virgil, before quoted, in reference to the burning of cedar, was founded on some practical utility of this kind, though its _modus operandi_ was unknown to him. Allied to these is a curious circumstance, and worthy attention. I copy the following from an old work on Pestilences. "It is remarkable that when the Plague raged in London, Bucklersbury, which stood in the very heart of the city, was free from that distemper; the reason given for it is, that it was chiefly inhabited by druggists and apothecaries, the scent of whose drugs kept away the infection, which were so unnatural to the pestilential insects, that they were killed or driven away by the strong smell of some sorts of them." "The smell of _rue_, and the smoke of tobacco, were prescribed as remedies against the infection; but especially tar and pitch barrels, which it was imagined preserved Limehouse, and some of the dock-yards from infection."[72] Pitch and tar dealers are everywhere spoken of as being remarkably exempt from infectious diseases. Cold infusion of tar was used in our colonies as a prophylactic against the Small Pox. Bishop {183} Berkeley was induced to try it when this disease raged in his neighbourhood. The trial fully answered expectation--for all those who took tar-water, either escaped the disease, or had it very slightly. Tan yards and places in the immediate vicinity, are said to be free from pestilences. The tanners of Bermondsey are said to have escaped the Plague of London, and one person only died in Gutter Lane, where was a tan yard. The tanners of Rome are also stated to have been free from Plague. Dr. McLean refers to the exemption of tanners at Cairo. _Tannin is prejudicial to most vegetables_,--but Dr. Lindley says it is not always so to fungi. "A species of Rhizomorpha is often developed in tan pits." I should imagine that neither plants nor insects would be found very abundantly, where tannin prevails; yet we find that the gall-nut is formed for the protection of an insect from injury by weather, and as a temporary means of sustenance. The custom of fumigating with odoriferous substances, does not therefore appear upon this view of the matter to be destitute of importance; indeed, the universal practice stamps it at once, as an efficacious remedy for the purposes of disinfection. The introduction of chlorine fumigation, seems to have superseded, in a great measure, the use of fragrant herbs and woods; and it is questionable whether the substitution be altogether desirable or {184} advantageous. Many scents may be agreeably and usefully employed, with much less chance of annoyance to the patient, and considerably less injury to articles of furniture, &c. The fumigations of sulphurous acid and chlorine are, perhaps, more adapted as disinfectants in uninhabited apartments;--their power to destroy vegetation, is well known. They have been used, chiefly, with the idea of neutralizing gaseous exhalations, particularly chlorine, as it tends to combine with hydrogen, to form hydrochloric acid, and then to unite with ammoniacal matters, forming hydrochlorate of ammonia. This, supposing noxious or pestilential effluvia consisted of the ammoniacal exudations variously combined, was an exceedingly efficacious method of rendering them inert; but as we feel convinced that no ammoniacal compound could possibly be the cause of infection, we must look to the influence these gases possess over other forms of matter, and as they are so destructive, even in minute quantities, to vegetable existence, it is possible that their beneficial effects may be due to this property. The immediate neighbourhood of gas works is prejudicial to vegetation, I imagine, from the amount of sulphurous vapours, and to this has been attributed the exemption of persons employed in these works. Many other instances might be cited of a similar nature. I have now to speak of medicinal agents, and here comes a considerable difficulty. {185} If we might believe all that has been written on the sure and certain remedies for the "ills that man is heir to," we should be led to acknowledge that both nature and art were prodigal in antidotes and specifics. The all-bountiful hand of nature, I do not doubt, has at the same time scattered the seeds of good and of evil. The fertilizing showers fall to irrigate the soil, and produce food and nourishment to man; here and there is the reeking morass "feeding unnatural vegetation," and if man takes up his abode in its vicinity, the rains which made it unhealthy, have also made it highly fertile; by labour and cultivation he may convert the mephitic bog into a waving corn-field, and the seeds of life and sustenance be made to supplant the seeds of death and corruption. It is generally believed, that where there are particular and specific diseases, there also may be found appropriate and specific remedies; the discoveries of chemistry, it is not improbable, may in some respects have retarded the progress of natural medicine. In the early ages of the world, the "healing plant" must have formed the staple of medical commerce, for though Tubal Cain[73] has been considered as the first surgical instrument maker, because he was the first artificer in brass and iron, we have not discovered that chemical compounds entered into the composition of physic, till very {186} many years after his time. To the alchemists we owe the science of chemistry, and much of the physic of the present day may be traced to them. The multiplicity of ingredients which at one time entered into the composition of one dose of physic could only be spoken of under the title of "legion." Who shall specify the active and curative ingredient (if there be one), when from five to a hundred may have been exhibited at the same time? It has been the pride of our physicians, that the pharmacopoeia has been simplified; it has not reached its most simple form yet. That many simple plants have specific and wonderful power over disease, is an indubitable fact, but I firmly believe that the laudable, though mistaken efforts of physicians to improve their effect by various combinations, have been the means of throwing many valuable medicines into oblivion; I must also add, that cheap physic and adulterations have had no small share too in the banishment of much valuable physic from ordinary practice. It has been believed, and I think with much reason, that a thorough search into the qualities of plants, would shew that "they are capable of affording not only great relief, but also effectual and specific remedies." "That they are not already found, is rather an argument that we have not been sufficiently inquisitive, than that there are no such plants endued with these virtues." Of the result obtained by medical treatment, in cases of epidemic or infectious disease, it is most {187} difficult to speak, but as my province here is only to shew that living germs are the morbific agents, I have but to refer to such remedies as have been most extolled in controlling these affections. The disinfectants have already been mentioned in a cursory manner. An enumeration only of simple medicines used during the late Epidemic, shall conclude this work, as the treatment in former times could not by any possibility furnish satisfactory information. Aromatics and fragrant stimulants have in all times taken the foremost rank with acids, such as vinegar, lime and lemon juice. Mr. Guthrie's adoption of lemon juice in preference to bark, which he said made him worse while suffering from an attack of fever, during the Peninsular campaign, and his speedy recovery from the disease, though not from its effects, shews, when many others can bear equal testimony to its value, that such a remedy though simple is not to be despised. But to the late Epidemic. Dr. Stevens' saline treatment, appears, on the whole, to have been the most successful. Common salt was used both medically and dietetically, and formed the greatest bulk of the medicine employed. Chlorate of potash and carbonate of soda were added to the medicine. The nitro-hydrochloric acid was used with success at St. Thomas's Hospital. Dr. Copland used chlorate of potash, bicarb. soda, hydrochloric, ether, and camphor water. Dr. Ayre's calomel treatment had as many, if {188} not more, opponents than advocates. Phosphorus had several advocates. Creasote and camphor were lauded by some. The beneficial operation of all these remedies might be explained on the theory here supposed, that living germs are the cause of Epidemic disease, but the specific action of any one remedy has not yet had sufficient attention or trial to enable me to make any deductions of a satisfactory or conclusive nature. In the uncertainty which generally prevailed as to the best method of treating Cholera patients, I was induced (for reasons stated in a pamphlet published last year) to try the efficacy of sulphur, which had been extolled as a specific. In its effects I was not disappointed; but as the results are already before the public, I need not do more than refer to it among other remedies. I did not contemplate even alluding to this subject, as it would extend far beyond my intended limits. This portion of the enquiry would be more properly carried out by keeping records of cases, treated in accordance with the view attempted to be established, and I have not the slightest hesitation in saying, that the most ample success would ultimately attend a well directed practice, based upon the principles inculcated in these pages. * * * * * {189} CONCLUSION. In making the foregoing sketch, I have attempted to put together some ideas on a subject, which has for the last few years been a theme for meditation in leisure hours, viz. What are the causes of Epidemic, Endemic, and Infectious Diseases? The occurrence of Epidemic Cholera last year in this country, awakened a spirit of enquiry. Where there is unrest, whatever may be the cause, there also is disquiet and discontent. When the oracles of the age were consulted in the emergency, the discordant answers perplexed and confused the anxious searcher after truth. In the spring of last year, when the enemy was approaching, unseen and unheard, and the thousands of unconscious victims, who are now lying in their graves, were faithfully trusting and fully relying on the heads of our profession, and the resources of our art, what was the state of our defences, and what the nature or character of our resistance? One considerable body of men would discharge from a little tube of glass, a host of almost invisible globular atoms of sugar, said to be as potent and inscrutably operative as the unseen enemy. These infinitesimal practitioners assured the people that they "_had powerful means of subduing the disease_," {190} but even they differed among themselves, though they carried out to the fullest extent the doctrine of their leader, _similia similibus_, which we may suppose to refer in this case to the minuteness of the opposing armamenta. Without, however, agreeing with this school, I may quote a passage from Dr. Curie, which is, alas! too true: "We have shewn, as they must (allopathists), and many of them do acknowledge, that they have no fixed basis, no natural law upon which their treatment rests." Who can deny the force of this observation? Sheltered by a principle, it matters not how fallacious, a man is placed as behind a barrier. If with any reason it could be shewn that the infinitesimal doses, could by no possibility effect a cure in Cholera; if it could be demonstrated by any line of argument, that a poison, a living poison, circulates with the blood, or lodges in the tissues, the homæopathist must fall; his "electricity and mineral magnetism," and "_powerful concentration of life power towards the digestive canal_," will stand for what they are worth. That minute doses of medicine can exert an active influence over the body is not to be denied, but these must consist of powerful drugs, as arnica, aconite, and nux vomica, with others, and it is more than probable, that of such medicines, an inconceivably small amount may produce a specific effect upon some portion of the organic nervous system. How is it that a dose of nitre or digitalis, "can {191} convert cheerfulness into low spirits," or a grain of red sulphuret of antimony, "excite warmth and lively spirits?"[74] Why should indigo dyers become melancholy, and scarlet dyers choleric?[75] We do not know. But there is one thing we most certainly do know, that a poison may be disarmed by an antidote, and the amount of the latter must be in proportion to that of the former, and as epidemic and contagious diseases do most unquestionably depend upon poisons of a specific nature, and of great amount and activity, an infinitesimal remedy, however it may claim to direct and control the organic forces, under slight and ordinary disturbances, can be no more effectual in destroying the poison of fever, or small pox, than in neutralizing arsenic or prussic acid. The uncertainty which generally prevails as to the treatment of Epidemic diseases, Fevers, &c. induced me to put together the notions which are contained in these pages, in the hope of leading to some definite ideas of the causes of these affections, and consequently to a more uniform and scientific mode of treating them. I have endeavoured to shew that reproduction is a phenomenon inseparable from morbific matter, and that in all probability the vegetable kingdom is the source of the germs. {192} The train of argument adopted is such as appeared to me most natural for such an enquiry, and it rests now only with those who are capable of deciding whether such a course, though (I am sensibly aware) not without many faults in conception and execution, is calculated to advance the science of medicine and the interests of mankind. The real tree of knowledge, possesses in the spongioles of its roots, an elective property, by which truth alone can enter; nourished and sustained by this, it sends a fragrant incense and breathing odour on high, and dispels the mists of ignorance and superstition. In natural causes and reasonable deductions we must seek for instruction and solid information, for in over-straining either nature or art, deformity and error must inevitably be the result. THE END. NORMAN AND SKEEN, PRINTERS, MAIDEN LANE, COVENT GARDEN. * * * * * NOTES [1] "It matters little how vague and false hypotheses may appear at first: experiment will gradually reduce and correct them, and all that is required, is industry to elaborate the proof, and impartiality to secure it from distortion."--_Sewell_ "On the Cultivation of the Intellect." [2] It is stated by Mr. Crosse, of Norwich, that vaccination was adopted in Denmark, and made compulsory in 1800. After the year 1808 Small Pox no longer existed there, and was a thing totally unknown; whereas during the twelve years preceding the introduction of the preventive disease, 5,500 persons died of the Small Pox in Copenhagen alone.--_Dr. Watson's Lectures._ Dr. Blick, an intelligent Danish physician, corroborated the above statement to Dr. Watson himself in the year 1838. [3] Philosophy of Life, Lecture 6, translated by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A. [4] The following I quote from Dr. Fuller on Small Pox and Measles:-- "To this purpose some (and particularly Kircherus) are of opinion that animalcules have been the causes of malignant and pestilential fevers in epidemic times, which differ in essence and symptoms, according to the nature and venoms of those creatures. "Thus the atmosphere and air is filled both from above and beneath with innumerable millions of millions of species or corpuscles, aporrhoeas, steams, vapours, fumes, dust, little insects, &c. all which make it such a wonderful chaotic compost of things that contains the _seeds_ of good and evil to man as surpasseth the understanding (as I suppose) of even the highest order of archangels." [5] I learn from an undoubted authority that the cow when "slack of health" eats with avidity the "field parsley;" the sheep under similar circumstances seeks the ivy, and the goat the plantain. From an equally good source I have the following: that rabbits and hares, when they are what is commonly called _pot-gutted_, seek the green broom, though at a distance of _twenty miles_. [6] "My settled opinion is, that in regard every effect is necessarily such as its cause; it must needs be that every sort of venomous fevers is produced by its proper and peculiar species of virus. "And that the manner and symptoms of every such fever is not so much from the particular constitution of the sick; as from the different nature and genius of their specific venom which caused them. "And I conceive that venomous febrile matters differ not in degree of intenseness only, but in essence and _toto genere_ also; and that venomous fevers are for the most part contagious."--_Thomas Fuller, M. D. 1730._ "Another important class of organic poisons are those which when introduced in almost inappreciable quantities into the system, seem to increase in quantity; and which when communicated in the same inappreciable quantity from the individual poisoned to one who is healthy, excite the same series of febrile phenomena and local inflammation, and the same increase in the quantity of the poisonous agent."--_Med. Chir. Review._ "This unseen influence working in the body, presents very striking analogies to the modes of operation of different poisons."--_Dr. Ormerod on Continued Fever._ [7] I am aware that the vesicle does not here strictly bear the relation to the original germ, supposing one active particle alone to be sufficient for its production, that the egg does to the bird, for in the former case multitudes of active particles may have been generated from one. I have, therefore, merely used this expression to signify an aggregation of vital forces, such as may be imagined to exist in the bird. [8] "At an early period the form of the ovisacs is usually elliptical, and their size extremely minute,--their long diameter measuring in the ox no more than 1/562 of an inch, so that a cubic inch would contain nearly two hundred millions of them. They are _at this time_ quite distinct from the _stroma_ of the ovarium; this forms a cavity in which they are loosely embedded." [9] Coleridge, p. 56. [10] "All vegetables," says Sharon Turner, "from that pettiness which escapes our natural sight, to that magnitude which we feel to be gigantic, have these properties in common with all animals--organization; an interior power of progressive growth, a principle of life, with many phenomena that resemble irritability, excitability, and susceptibility, and a self-reproductive and multiplying faculty."--_Sharon Turner's Sacred History._ [11] "Plants highly sensitive to light are those of the leguminous, or Pea kind. They always close up in the evening and clasp their two upper surfaces together, presenting only their backs to the air. Plants of pinnated leaves, as the Tansy, are more sensible than these to the effects of light. They fold up when light is too strong, as in Robinia; it produces the same effect as want of light. Its leaves close up, apparently, because they are receiving too much. So they do if a hot iron be brought near them. They contract as if to avoid the heat. Sensitive plants, and those of the Oxalis Lent. are so sensitive that the least motion, even a breath of air, will make them close."--_Sir J. Smith._ "The vitality of plants seems to depend upon the existence of an irritability, which although far inferior to that of animals, is nevertheless of an analogous character."--_Lindley's Introduction to Botany._ [12] Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal. July 10th, 1850. No. xiv. p. 367. "Practical Observations on the Vaccination Question." By E. Oke Spooner, M. R. C. S., Blandford. "If we examine the Cow Pox and the Small Pox microscopically, as I have done very carefully in every stage, we find that the essential character consists of a number of minute cells, not exceeding the 10,000th part of an inch in diameter, being about one-fourth smaller than the globules of the blood, containing _within their circumference many still more minute nuclei, and presenting_ beyond their circumference bud-like cells of the same size and character as those contained within the circle. They exactly resemble in everything except the size, the globules of the yeast plant, the Torula Cerevesiæ. Now if we examine more circumstantially the analogies of what I would call the Torula Variolæ with the Torula Cerevesiæ, we observe the following corresponding facts. "What do we accomplish by inoculation as it is called? Simply this. We take on the top of a lancet, or an ivory point, a few of these minute cells or germs, and we put them _in their appropriate nidus_, the subcuticular tissue, where, after a few days if they find their appropriate nutrient elements, they grow and multiply." Simon, Chemistry of Man, vol. i. p. 127. "Macgregor ascertained that the air expired by persons ill of confluent Small Pox, contained as much as _eight_ per cent of carbonic acid, and in proportion as health was restored the percentage was diminished to its natural standard." Carbonic acid is also produced during the process of fermentation and germination. [13] See History of the Jews, p. 71. [14] It is said by Whewell, that the murrain is supposed to have fallen only on the animals which were in the open pasture.--_History of the Jews._ "J. S. Michael Leger, published at Vienna, in 1775, a treatise concerning the mildew as the principal cause of the epidemic disease among cattle. The mildew is that which _burns_ and _dries_ the grass and leaves. It is observed early in the morning, particularly after _thunder-storms_. Its poisonous quality, which does not last above twenty-four hours, never operates but when it is swallowed immediately after its falling."--_Mitchell on Fevers._ [15] "The prevalence of the south-east wind was observed to be particularly favourable to the increase of both cholera and influenza: and I cannot but think that this had some connexion with the general tendency exhibited by the former to spread from east to west. Has the morbific property of this wind aught to do with the haziness of the air when it prevails--a haziness seen in the country remote from smoke, and quite distinct from fog? What is this haze? In the west of England a hazy day in spring is called a _blight_."--_Dr. Williams' Principles of Medicine._ [16] We are to understand also that some peculiar operation took place of a nature difficult to comprehend, which seems also to typify reproduction, for the handfuls of ashes which Moses threw into the air _became a dust in all the land of Egypt_, thus signifying an enormous reproduction of atomic matter. [17] The Chinese affect to trace the origin of Small Pox back to a period of at least 3000 years, or 20 years beyond the era of the Trojan war, 1212, A. C. The Chinese pretend to discriminate no less than 40 different species of Small Pox. "They also pretend to discover whether a person has died by violence or from natural causes, not only after the body has been some time interred and decomposition of the softer parts has commenced, but even after the total disappearance of the soft parts, and when the dry skeleton alone is left."--For the process, see _Hamilton's History of Medicine_, vol. i. p. 31. To give some notion of the state of Medical Science among the Chinese, I may quote the following: "The theory of the circulation of the blood, Du Halde affirms, was known by the Chinese about 400 years after the deluge; be this assertion veracious or not, no correct knowledge up to the present day, do the nation possess of the circulating system of the human frame."--_China and the Chinese, Henry Charles Sirr, M. A._ According to their anatomy, the trachea extends from the larynx through the lungs to the heart, whilst the oesophagus goes over them to the stomach. [18] "And Aaron took as Moses commanded, and ran into the midst of the congregation: and behold the plague was begun among the people; and he put on incense and made an atonement for the people. And he stood between the dead and the living, and the plague was stayed."--_Numbers._ The practice of burning scented herbs has been observed in all times during an invasion of the plague, as a means of protection. Also wearing perfumes and aromatic preparations has been recommended. Whether they have any counteracting influence, it is impossible to say. Virgil in the third Georgic speaks of a murrain among cattle. He says, if any wore a vestment made of wool from an infected sheep, fiery blains and filthy sweat overspread his body, and ere long a pestilential fire preyed upon his infected limbs. In his directions for preserving the health of flocks he says-- "Disce et odoratam stabulis accendere cedrum." The motive for burning the fragrant cedar is not mentioned; we cannot doubt but it was a good one, and having some great practical utility, from the following line-- "Galbaneoque agitare graves nidore chelydros." [19] The earliest mention of this complaint upon which reliance can be placed, is an ancient Arabic MS. preserved in the public library at Leyden. "This year, in fine, the Small Pox and Measles made their first appearance in Arabia." The year alluded to being that of the birth of Mahomet, or the year 572 of the Christian æra.--_Hamilton's History of Medicine_, vol. i. p. 215. [20] Dr. W. A. Greenhill's translation. [21] The Black Assize at Oxford, 1572, is an instance in which a pestilential vapour suddenly appeared in the court, "whereby the judge, several noblemen, and more than 300 others, died within three days." "Of an unaccountable vapour suddenly coming, I have this relation from Richard Humphrey, my neighbour, and a man of veracity, that on Wednesday, April 27, 1727, as he and one Walter, were travelling a-foot from Canterbury; when they came to Rainham, they were assaulted with such a strong loathsome stink, as he thought was like the stench from a corrupted human corpse. They were so offended at it, as thinking it was from carrion in that town, that they would not stay there to rest and refresh themselves, but travelled on for about two hours, mostly in the stench, but sometimes out of it, till they came to the hill that leads down to Chatham: and there they went clear out of it and smelt it no more."--_Dr. Fuller_. It appears that these persons did not fall sick of any disease, but the fact of itself is remarkable enough. [22] Hamilton's History of Medicine. [23] It has been said, that "an induction once carefully drawn, is as perfect from a single instance as it is from ten thousand, and that it is only an uncultivated mind which requires a load and accumulation of knowledge to assist his thoughts."--_Sewell_ "on the Cultivation of the Intellect." [24] See Dr. Alison's Pamphlet on the Fever in Edinburgh. [25] Earthquakes have in all times been considered to have some connexion with pestilences. "A most grievous pestilence broke out in Seleucia, which from thence to Parthia, Greece, and Italy, spread itself through a great part of the world, from the opening of an ancient vault in the temple of Apollo, and that it raged with so much fury as to sweep away a third part of the inhabitants of those countries it visited."--_Dr. Quincy, on the Causes of Pestilential Disease._ "Upon an earthquake the earth sends forth noisome vapours which infect the air; so it was observed to be at Hull in Yorkshire, by the Rev. Mr. Banks, of that place, after a small earthquake there in 1703, it was a most sickly time for a considerable while afterwards, and the greatest mortality that had been known for fifteen years."--_Anonymous_, 1769. [26] See Sharon Turner's Sacred History, text and notes, vol. i. p. 161 & 162. [27] "Each seed includes a plant; that plant, again, Has other seeds, which other plants contain, Those other plants have all their seeds; and those More plants, again, successively enclose. Thus ev'ry single berry that we find, Has really in itself whole forests of its kind. Empire and wealth one acorn may dispense, By fleets to sail a thousand ages hence; Each myrtle-seed includes a thousand groves, Where future bards may warble forth their loves." [28] "On June 5th, 1849, a man and his son, a lad aged 14 years, left Noss to fish, and when five miles out at sea, no vessel being in sight, they both simultaneously became aware of a hot _offensive_ stream of air passing over them. It was so decided, that the crab pots were examined to discover if it were from them, but it did not, and five minutes after the father's attention was directed to the boy, who was vomiting and purging."--_Dr. Roe on the Cholera at Plymouth, Med. Gaz. Aug. 24th, 1850._ [29] Linnæus remarked that Erigeron Canadense was introduced into gardens near Paris from North America. The seeds had been carried by the wind, and this plant was in the course of a century spread over all France, Italy, Sicily and Belgium. [30] Hecker. [31] This is found most generally to be the case where rivers flow through uncultivated tracts of country. The Californian emigrants suffer much from diarrhoea and dysentery, if they drink of the river and certain well waters of that gold district. [32] "Purification from leprosy. As this fearful disease was contagious and hereditary to the third and fourth generation, the separation of lepers from the camp and congregation, and the destruction of infected houses and clothes, was of the utmost importance to the preservation of public health. "Leprosy was of three kinds: 1st, Leprosy in man. 2nd, Leprosy in houses. 3rd, Leprosy in clothes. "Contagious or malignant leprosy was of two kinds, viz. "1st. The white leprosy, or bright berat, which was the most serious and obstinate form which leprosy assumes. It exhibited itself as a bright white and spreading scale, on an elevated base; turning the hair white in patches, which were continually spreading. "2nd. The black leprosy, or dusky berat, which was less serious than the foregoing. It did not change the colour of the hair, nor was there any depression in the dusky spot; but the patches were perpetually spreading, as in the white leprosy."--_Analysis and Summary of Old Testament History._ _Oxford._ [33] The Mexican Aloe blows when nine years old, and then dies. At least this is its usual course in the island of Cuba. [34] "Ground that has not been disturbed for some hundred years, on being ploughed, has frequently surprised the cultivator by the appearance of plants which he never sowed, and often which were then unknown to the country. The principle has been ascertained to be capable of existing in this latent state for above 2000 years, unextinguished, and springing again into active vegetation, as soon as planted in a congenial soil. "In boring for water near Kingston on Thames, some earth was brought up from a depth of 360 feet, and though carefully covered with a hand-glass to prevent the possibility of other seeds being deposited on it, was yet in a short time covered with vegetation. "Turner says, from the depth, these seeds must have been of the diluvian age."--_Jesse's Gleanings._ [35] Hamilton's History of Medicine, vol. ii. p. 276, note. [36] "What I wish you to remark is this, that while almost all men are prone to take the disorder, large portions of the world have remained for centuries entirely exempt from it, until at length it was imported, and that then it infallibly diffused and established itself in those parts."--_Dr. Watson on the Principles and Practice of Physic._ Dr. R. Williams says, "The seeds of intermittent fever lay dormant for months, it was not at all uncommon for cases of intermittent fever to be brought into the hospital eight or ten months after the patients had subjected themselves to the influence of paludal or marsh effluvia." [37] I have observed in the hot-houses, that many of the exotic plants, which are in company with the diseased vines, have been attacked, while others again have been entirely free. [38] By causes of the greatest variety plants may become extinct for a time. It is not very easy to trace them, but one fact may be mentioned in proof of the statement. Dr. Prichard states that vast forests are destroyed either for the purpose of tillage or accidentally by conflagrations. "The same trees do not reappear in the same spots, but they have successors, which seem regularly to take their place. Thus the pine forests of North America when burnt, afford room to forests of oak trees." [39] Hecker says of Chalin de Vinario, that "he asserted boldly and with truth, that _all epidemic diseases might become contagious, and all fevers epidemic_,--which attentive observers of all subsequent ages have confirmed." P. 60. [40] In 1539, the thirty-first year of Henry the Eighth, was great death of burning agues and flixes; and such a drought that welles and small rivers were dryed up, and many cattle dyed for lacke of water; the salt water flowed above London Bridge.--_Stowe._ In 1556, the fourth of Mary, and the third of Philip, about this time began the burning fevers, quarterne agues, and other strange diseases, whereof died many.--_Stowe._ The next winter, 1557, the quarterne agues continued in like manner, or more vehemently than they had done the last yere.--_Stowe._ [41] Every writer on the climate of Egypt has remarked, that the Endemic Fever which is so frequent, originating on the coast, particularly about Alexandria, becomes occasionally so virulent, that it cannot be distinguished from the _true Plague._--_Robertson on the Atmosphere_, vol. 2. p. 384. "Endemial Fevers of every situation become occasionally so aggravated, that they cannot be distinguished from such as originate from contagion; and in every unusual virulence of this Endemic Fever, it is probable that it may be propagated afterwards by contagion as every epidemic." _Ibid._ p. 388. [42] Dr. Ure. [43] "The metamorphosis of starch into sugar depends simply, as is proved by analysis, on the addition of the elements of water. All the carbon of the starch is found in the sugar; none of its elements have been separated, and except the elements of water, no foreign element has been added to it in this transformation."--_Liebig_, _Organic Chemistry_, p. 71. [44] As regards starch there appears to be some peculiar faculty regarding it. It is converted into sugar during the ripening of fruit, and it is just possible that being as it is of a cellular nature, the property of vitality may attach to it until it has, by being converted into sugar, fulfilled its destination. [45] Though I do not consider that the fermentation process is a fac-simile of diseased action, yet I think its phenomena generally afford an apt illustration of the changes which may be effected by living germs. Many able chemists still maintain the entire dependence of fermentation upon the Torula: "M. Blondeau propounds the view that _every kind_ of fermentation is _caused_ by the development of fungi." The varieties of opinions found in the literature of this subject, forms a curious specimen of scientific enquiry, and is sufficient alone to convince us of its vast importance and extensive relations. [46] By Dr. Mantell. [47] Mitchell on Fevers. [48] We wonder, and ask ourselves: "What does SMALL mean in Nature?"--_Schleiden's Lectures on Botany._ [49] Speaking of the bunt in wheat: "It appears certainly to be contagious, from numerous experiments, which shew that the contagious principle lasts a long time. I have tried it myself; some, however, doubt it, but it cannot be denied, that seed sown, infected with bunt, produces plants similarly affected; every one who has had the slightest experience must be convinced of it."--_Essay on the Diseases of Plants._ _Count Ré._ [50] We have already spoken of the effects of these poisons, and have stated that the amount of each poison capable of destroying the body is pretty accurately known. [51] The italics are my own. [52] Gmelin says: "But the mode of action in these transformations, sometimes admits of other explanations; and when this is not the case, our conception of it is by no means sufficiently clear to justify the positive assumption of this, so called contact-action or catalytic force, which, after all, merely states the fact without explaining it"--_Gmelin's Hand-book of Chemistry_, vol. i. p. 115. [53] The history and symptoms of some epidemic diseases, such as cholera and influenza, are not inconsistent with the hypothesis that they are caused by the sudden development of animalcules from ova in the blood. But there is a total want of direct observation in support of this hypothesis.--_Dr. Williams' Principles of Medicine._ [54] Since writing the above, I have referred for information on this subject, and find, that the Anguillula aceti exhibits sexual distinctions; and that the ovaries of the females are situated on each side of the alimentary canal.--_Cyclo. Anat. and Phys. Art. Entozoa._ [55] Speaking of the examination of the infusory animalcules--Mr. Kirby says: "But to us the wondrous spectacle is seen, and known only in part; for those that still escape all our methods of assisting sight, and remain members of the invisible world, may probably _far exceed those that we know_."--_Bridgewater Treatise_, vol. i. p. 158. [56] Mr. Owen has added another class, as the first, called Protelmintha, which comprises the cercariadæ and vibrionidæ. [57] "It is probable that in the waters of our globe an infinity of animal and vegetable molecules are suspended, that are too minute to form the food of even the lowest and minute animals of the visible creation: and therefore an infinite host of invisibles was necessary to remove them as nuisances."--_Bridgewater Treatise_, vol. i. p. 159. "When Creative Wisdom covered the earth with plants, and peopled it with animals, He laid the foundations of the vegetable and animal kingdoms with such as were most easily convertible into nutriment for the tribes immediately above them. The first plants, and the first animals, are scarcely more than animated molecules,* and appear analogues of each other; and those above them in each kingdom represent jointed fibrils."+--_Bridgewater Treatise_, vol. i. p. 162. * Globulina and Monus. + Oscillatoria and Vibrio. [58] "A treatise which should present a systematic arrangement of all the diseases of plants, giving in detail the exact history of each, and adding the means of preventing and curing them, would certainly be of the greatest utility to agriculture." --_Essay on the Diseases of Plants, Count Philippo Ré, translated into Gardener's Chron._ [59] "Plenck published a treatise on Vegetable Pathology, in which he divided diseases into eight classes: 1. External injuries; 2. Flux of juices; 3. Debility; 4. Cachexies; 5. Putrefactions; 6. Excrescences; 7. Monstrosities; and 8. Sterility. And he concludes with an enumeration of the animals which injure plants."--_Essay on the Diseases of Plants, Gardener's Chronicle._ [60] The Bunt. "This disease appears at the moment of the germination of the plant. The affected individuals are of a dark green, and the stem is discoloured. As the ears are issuing from the sheaths, their stalks are of a dark green, but very slender. When the ear has fully grown out, its dull, dirty colour, causes it to be immediately distinguished from the healthy ones, and it soon turns white."--_Essay on the Diseases of Plants._ [61] _Vidi_ understood. [62] "At the close of the year 1665," says Dr. Hodges, "even women, before deemed barren, were said to prove prolific." "After the cessation of the Black Plague, a greater fecundity in women was every where remarkable--a grand phenomenon, which from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the direction of general organic life. Marriages were almost without exception prolific; and double and treble births were more frequent than at other times."--_Hecker_, p. 31. [63] It is stated that on the decline of the Plague, 1665, those who returned early to London, or new comers, were certain to be attacked. In proof of this the 1st week of November, the deaths increased 400, and "physicians reported that above 3000 fell sick that week, mostly new comers." See also Dr. Copland's Dict. Pract. Med. Epidemic and Endemic Diseases. "The hardy mountaineer is a surer victim of paludal fever, whether he visits the low countries of the tropics, or the marshes of a more temperate climate, than the feebler native of those countries."--_Dr. R. Williams on Morbid Poisons._ [64] "Substances presented to the gastro-intestinal surfaces, are mixed up with various secretions, mucus, saliva, gastric juice, bile, pancreatic liquor, and special exudations from the peculiar glands of each successive section, while aerial poisons, unmixed and unfettered, are applied at once to a surface on which, behind scarcely a shadow of a film, circulates the blood prepared, by the habitual action of the respiratory function, to absorb almost every vapour, and every odour, which may not be too irritating to pass the gates of the _glottis_."--_Mitchell on Fevers._ [65] Hecker on the "Black Death." [66] The stomach in some cases is no doubt the medium by which some diseases are contracted. It is well known, that in many places the water induces diarrhoea, the permanent residents, however, may not suffer, but all new comers are more or less affected by drinking it. [67] "Similar effects have been experienced from the use of mouldy provisions."--_Dr. Lindley's Vegetable Kingdom._ [68] "Untold numbers die of the diseases produced by scanty and _unwholesome food_."--_Southey._ A large, nay, a most extensive adulteration of flour with plaster of Paris was detected not many years since. The flour was supplied by a contractor for the manufacture of biscuits for the navy. [69] See Southey's Doctor, vol. ii. interchapter vi. p. 115, for an illustration of this subject. [70] Both these patients died. [71] "A good part of the clove trees which grew so plentifully in the island of Ternate, being felled at the solicitation of the Dutch, in order to heighten the price of that fruit, such a change ensued in the air, _as shewed the salutary effect of the effluvia of clove trees and their blossoms; the whole island, soon after they were cut down, becoming exceeding sickly_." [72] The observation is originally taken from the City Remembrancer, 133. [73] See Hamilton's History of Medicine, vol. i. p. 4. [74] Feuchtersleben's Medical Psychology, p. 176, 177. [75] Ibid. p. 321. * * * * * CHANGES MADE AGAINST PRINTED ORIGINAL. Page 136. "the idea of Protophyta, or first plants": 'Prolophyta' in original. Page 140. "an extensive bearing of each individual part": 'indivdual' in original. 
53611	----	GOSLINGS By J. D. BERESFORD Author of "The Hampdenshire Wonder," etc. London William Heinemann 1913 BOOK I THE NEW PLAGUE I--THE GOSLING FAMILY 1 "Where's the gels gone to?" asked Mr Gosling. "Up the 'Igh Road to look at the shops. I'm expectin' 'em in every minute." "Ho!" said Gosling. He leaned against the dresser; the kitchen was hot with steam, and he fumbled for a handkerchief in the pocket of his black tail coat. He produced first a large red bandanna with which he blew his nose vigorously. "Snuff 'andkerchief; brought it 'ome to be washed," he remarked, and then brought out a white handkerchief which he used to wipe his forehead. "It's a dirty 'abit snuff-taking," commented Mrs Gosling. "Well, you can't smoke in the orfice," replied Gosling. "Must be doin' somethin', I suppose?" said his wife. When the recital of this formula had been accomplished--it was hallowed by a precise repetition every week, and had been established now for a quarter of a century--Gosling returned to the subject in hand. "They does a lot of lookin' at shops," he said, "and then nothin' 'll satisfy 'em but buyin' somethin'. Why don't they keep away from 'em?" "Oh, well; sales begin nex' week," replied Mrs Gosling. "An' that's a thing we 'ave to consider in our circumstances." She left the vicinity of the gas-stove, and bustled over to the dresser. "'Ere, get out of my way, do," she went on, "an' go up and change your coat. Dinner'll be ready in two ticks. I shan't wait for the gells if they ain't in." "Them sales is a fraud," remarked Gosling, but he did not stop to argue the point. He went upstairs and changed his respectable "morning" coat for a short alpaca jacket, slipped his cuffs over his hands, put one inside the other and placed them in their customary position on the chest of drawers, changed his boots for carpet slippers, wetted his hair brush and carefully plastered down a long wisp of grey hair over the top of his bald head, and then went into the bathroom to wash his hands. There had been a time in George Gosling's history when he had not been so regardful of the decencies of life. But he was a man of position now, and his two daughters insisted on these ceremonial observances. Gosling was one of the world's successes. He had started life as a National School boy, and had worked his way up through all the grades--messenger, office-boy, junior clerk, clerk, senior clerk, head clerk, accountant--to his present responsible position as head of the counting-house, with a salary of £26 a month. He rented a house in Wisteria Grove, Brondesbury, at £45 a year; he was a sidesman of the church of St John the Evangelist, Kilburn; a member of Local Committees; and in moments of expansion he talked of seeking election to the District Council. A solid, sober, thoroughly respectable man, Gosling, about whom there had never been a hint of scandal; grown stout now, and bald--save for a little hair over the ears, and that one persistent grey tress which he used as a sort of insufficient wrapping for his naked skull. Such was the George Gosling seen by his wife, daughters, neighbours, and heads of the firm of wholesale provision merchants for whom he had worked for forty-one years in Barbican, E.C. Yet there was another man, hardly realized by George Gosling himself, and apparently so little representative that even his particular cronies in the office would never have entered any description of him, if they had been obliged to give a detailed account of their colleague's character. Nevertheless, if you heard Gosling laughing uproariously at some story produced by one of those cronies, you might be quite certain that it was a story he would not repeat before his daughters, though he might tell his wife--if it were not too broad. If you watched Gosling in the street, you would see that he took a strange, unaccountable interest in the feet and ankles of young women. And if many of Gosling's thoughts and desires had been translated into action, the Vicar of St John the Evangelist would have dismissed his sidesman with disgust, the Local Committees would have had no more of him, and his wife and daughters would have regarded him as the most depraved of criminals. Fortunately, Gosling had never been tempted beyond the powers of his resistance. At fifty-five, he may be regarded as safe from temptation. He seldom put any restraint upon his thoughts, outside business hours; but he had an ideal which ruled his life--the ideal of respectability. George Gosling counted himself--and others counted him also--as respectable a man as could be found in the Metropolitan Police area. There were, perhaps, a quarter of a million other men in the same area, equally respectable. 2 As he was drying his hands, Gosling heard the front door slam and his daughters' voices in the passage below, followed by a shrill exhortation from the kitchen: "Now, gels, 'urry up, dinner's all ready and your father's waitin'!" Gosling trotted downstairs and received the usual salute from his two girls. He noted that they were a shade more effusive than usual. "Want more money for fal-lals," was his inward comment. They were always wanting money for "fal-lals." He adopted his usual line of defence through dinner and constantly brought the subject of conversation back to the need for a reduction of expenses. He did not see Blanche wink at Millie across the table, during these strategic exercises; nor catch the glance of understanding which passed between the girls and their mother. So, as his dinner comforted and cheered him, Gosling began to relax into his usual facetiousness; incredibly believing, despite the invariable precedents of his family history, that his daughters had been convinced of the hopelessness of approaching him for money that evening. The credulous creature even allowed them to make their opening, and then assisted them to a statement of their petition. They were talking of a friend's engagement to be married, and Gosling with an obtuseness he never displayed in business remarked, "Wish my gels 'ud get married." "Talking about us, father?" asked Blanche. "Well, you're the only gels I've got--as I know of," said Gosling. "Well, how can you expect us to get married when we haven't got a decent thing to put on?" returned Blanche. Gosling realized his danger too late. "Pooh! That don't make any difference," he said hastily, adopting a thoroughly unsound line of defence; "I never noticed what your mother was wearing when I courted 'er." "Dessay you didn't," replied Millie, "I dessay most fellows couldn't tell you what a girl was wearing, but it makes just all the difference for all that." "Of course it does," said Blanche. "A girl's got no chance these days unless she can look smart. No fellow's going to marry a dowdy." "It does make a big difference, there's no denyin'," put in Mrs Gosling, as though she was being convinced against her will. "And now the sales are just beginning----" Poor Gosling knew the game was up. They had made no direct attack upon his pocket, yet; but they would not relax their grip of this fascinating subject till they had achieved their object. Blanche was saying that she was ashamed to be seen anywhere; and procrastination would be met at once by the argument--how well he knew it--based on the premise that if you didn't buy at sale-time, you had to pay twice as much later. It was quite useless for Gosling to fidget, throw himself back in his chair, frown, shake his head, and look horribly determined; the course of progress was unalterable from the direct attack: "Do you like to see us going about in rags, father?" through the stage of "Well, well, 'ow much do you want? I simply can't afford----" and the ensuing haggles down to the despairing sigh as the original minimum demanded--in this case no less than five pounds--was forlornly conceded, and clinched by Blanche's, "We must have it before the end of the week, dad, the sales begin on Monday." At the end of it all, he received what compensation they had to offer him; hugs and kisses, offers to do all sorts of impossible things, assistance in getting his armchair into precisely the right position, and him into the chair, and the table cleared and the lamp in just the right place for him to read his half-penny evening paper which was fetched for him from the pocket of his overcoat. And, finally, the crux of Gosling's whole position, a general air of complacency, good-temper and comfort. Gosling was an easy-going man, he hated rows. "Mind you, you two," he remarked with a return to facetiousness as he settled himself with his carpet slippers spread out to the fire--"mind you, I look on this money as an investment. You two gels got to get married; and quick or I shall be in the bankrup'cy Court. Don't you forget as these 'fal-lals' is bought for a purpose." "Oh, don't be so horrid, father," said Blanche, with a change of front; "it sounds as if we were setting traps for men." "Well, ain't you?" asked Gosling. "You said just now----" "Not like that," interrupted Blanche. "It's very different just wanting to look nice. Personally, I'm in no 'urry to get married, thank you." "You wait till Mr Right comes along," put in Mrs Gosling, and then turned the conversation by saying: "Well, father, what's the news this evening?" "Nothin' excitin'," replied Gosling. "Seems this new plague's spreadin' in China." "They're always inventin' new diseases, nowadays, or callin' old ones by new names," said Mrs Gosling. The two girls were busy with a sheet of note-paper and a stump of pencil that seemed to require frequent lubrication; they were making calculations. "This one's quite new, seemingly," returned Gosling. "It's only the men as get it." "No need for us to worry, then," put in Millie, more as a duty, some slight return for benefits promised, than because she took any interest in the subject. Blanche was absorbed; her unseeing gaze was fixed on the mantelpiece and ever and again she removed the point of the pencil from her mouth and wrote feverishly. "Oh, ain't there?" replied Gosling. He turned his head in order to argue from so strong a position. "And where'd you be, and all the rest of the women, if you 'adn't got no men to look after you?" "I expect we could get along pretty well, if we had to," said Millie. Gosling winked at his wife, and indicated by an upward movement of his chin that he was astounded at such innocence. "Who'd buy your 'fal-lals' for you, I should like to know?" he asked. "We'd have to earn money for ourselves," said Millie. "Ah! I'd like to see you or Blanche takin' over my job," replied her father. "Why, I'll lay there's 'alf a dozen mistakes in the figurin' she's doing at the present moment. Let me see!" Blanche descended suddenly from visions of Paradise, and put her hand over the sheet of note-paper. "You can't, father," she said. Gosling looked sly. "Indeed?" he said, with simulated surprise. "And why not? Ain't I to be allowed to judge of the nature of the investment I'm goin' in for? I might give you an 'int or two from the gentleman's point of view." Blanche shook her head. "I haven't added it up yet," she said. Gosling did not press the point; he returned to his original position. "I dunno where you ladies 'ud be if you 'adn't no gentlemen to look after you." Mrs Gosling smirked. "We'll 'ope it won't come to that," she said. "China's a long way off." "Appears as there's been one case in Russia, though," remarked Gosling. He saw that he had rather a good thing in this threat of male extermination, a pleasant, harmless threat to hold over his feminine dependents; a means to emphasize the facts of masculine superiority and of the absolute necessity for masculine intelligence; facts that were not sufficiently well realized in Wisteria Grove, at times. Mrs Gosling yawned surreptitiously. She was doing her best to be pleasant, but the subject bored her. She was a practical woman who worked hard all day to keep her house clean, and received very feeble assistance from the daughters for whom her one ambition was an establishment conducted on lines precisely similar to her own. Millie and Blanche had returned to their calculations and were completely absorbed. "In Russia? Just fancy," commented Mrs Gosling. "In Moscow," said Gosling, studying his Evening News. "'E was an official on the trans-Siberian Railway. 'As soon as the disease was identified as a case of the new plague,'" read Gosling, "'the patient was at once removed to the infectious hospital and strictly isolated. He died within two hours of his admission. Stringent measures are being taken to prevent the infection from spreading.'" "Was 'e a married man?" asked Mrs Gosling. "Doesn't say," replied her husband. "But the point is that if it once gets to Europe, who knows where it'll stop?" "They'll see to that, you may be sure," said Mrs Gosling, with a beautiful faith in the scientific resources of civilization. "It said somethin' about that in the bit you've just read." Gosling was not to be done out of his argument. "Very like," he said. "But now, just supposin' as this 'ere plague did spread to London, and 'alf the men couldn't go to work; where d'you fancy you'd be?" Mrs Gosling was unable to grasp the intricacies of this abstraction. "Well, of course, every one knows as we couldn't get on without the men," she said. "Ah! well there you are, got it in once," said Gosling. "And don't you gels forget it," he added turning to his daughters. Millie only giggled, but Blanche said, "All right, dad, we won't." The girls returned to their calculations; they had arrived at the stage of cutting out all those items which were not "absolutely necessary." Five pounds had proved a miserably inadequate sum on paper. Gosling returned to his Evening News, which presently slipped gently from his hand to the floor. Mrs Gosling looked up from her sewing and put a finger on her lips. The voices of Blanche and Millie were subdued to sibilant whisperings. Gosling had forgotten his economic problems, and his daring abstractions concerning a world despoiled of male activity, especially of that essential activity, as he figured it, the making of money--the wage-earner was enjoying his after-dinner nap, hedged about, protected and cared for by his womankind. There may have been a quarter of a million wage-earners in Greater London at that moment, who, however much they differed from Gosling on such minor questions as Tariff Reform or the capabilities of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, would have agreed with him as a matter of course, on the essentials he had discussed that evening. 3 At half-past nine the click of the letter-box, followed by a resounding double-knock, announced the arrival of the last post. Millie jumped up at once and went out eagerly. Mr Gosling opened his eyes and stared with drunken fixity at the mantelpiece; then, without moving the rest of his body, he began to grope automatically with his left hand for the fallen newspaper. He found it at last, picked it up and pretended to read with sleep-sodden eyes. "It's the post, dear," remarked Mrs Gosling. Gosling yawned enormously. "Who's it for?" he asked. "Millie! Millie!" called Mrs Gosling. "Why don't you bring the letters in?" Millie did not reply, but she came slowly into the room, in her hands a letter which she was examining minutely. "Who's it for, Mill?" asked Blanche, impatiently. "Father," replied Millie, still intent on her study. "It's a foreign letter. I seem to remember the writing, too, only I can't fix it exactly." "'Ere, 'and it over, my gel," said Gosling, and Millie reluctantly parted with her fascinating enigma. "I know that 'and, too," remarked Gosling, and he, also, would have spent some time in the attempt to guess the puzzle without looking up the answer within the envelope, but the three spectators, who were not sharing his interest, manifested impatience. "Well, ain't you going to open it, father?" asked Millie, and Mrs Gosling looked at her husband over her spectacles and remarked, "It must be a business letter, if it comes from foreign parts." "Don't get business letters to this address," returned the head of the house, "besides which it's from Warsaw; we don't do nothin' with Warsaw." At last he opened the letter. The three women fixed their gaze on Gosling's face. "Well?" ejaculated Millie, after a silence of several seconds. "Aren't you going to tell us?" "You'd never guess," said Gosling triumphantly. "Anyone we know?" asked Blanche. "Yes, a gentleman." "Oh! tell us, father," urged the impatient Millie. "It's from the Mr Thrale, as lodged with us once," announced Gosling. "Oh! dear, our Mr Fastidious," commented Blanche, "I thought he was dead long ago." "It must be over four years since 'e left," put in Mrs Gosling. "Getting on for five," corrected Blanche. "I remember I put my hair up while he was here." "What's he say?" asked Millie. "'E says, 'Dear Mr Gosling, I expect you will be surprised to 'ear from me after my five years' silence----'" "I said it was five years," put in Blanche. "Go on, dad!" Dad resumed "... 'but I 'ave been in various parts of the world and it 'as been quite impossible to keep up a correspondence. I am writing now to tell you that I shall be back in London in a few days, and to ask you whether you can find a room for me in Wisteria Grove?'" "Well! I should 'ave thought he'd 'ave written to me to ask that!" said Mrs Gosling. "So 'e should 'ave, by rights," agreed Gosling. "But 'e's a queer card is Mr Thrale." "Bit dotty, if you ask me," said Blanche. "'S that all?" asked Mrs Gosling. "No, 'e says: 'I can't give you an address as I go on to Berlin immediately, but I will look you up the evening after I arrive. Eastern Europe is not safe at the present time. There 'ave been several cases of the new plague in Moscow, but the authorities are doing everything they can--which is much in Russia--to keep the news out of the press, yours sincerely, Jasper Thrale,' and that's the lot," concluded Gosling. "I do think he's a cool hand," commented Blanche. "Of course you won't have him as a paying guest now?" Gosling and his wife looked at each other, thoughtfully. "Well----" hesitated Gosling. "'E might bring the infection," suggested Mrs Gosling. "Oh! no fear of that," returned her husband, "but I dunno as we want a boarder now. Five years ago I 'adn't got my big rise----" "Oh, no, father; what would the neighbours think of us if we started to take boarders again?" protested Blanche. "It wouldn't look well," agreed Mrs Gosling. "Jus' what I was thinking," said the head of the house. "'Owever, there's no 'arm in payin' us a friendly visit." "O' course not," said Mrs Gosling, "though I do think it odd 'e shouldn't 'ave written to me in the first place. "He's dotty!" said Blanche. Gosling shook his head. "Not by a very long chalk 'e ain't," was his firm pronouncement.... "Well, girls, what about bed?" asked Mrs Gosling, putting away the "bit of mending" she had been engaged upon. Gosling yawned again, stretched himself, and rose grunting to his feet. "I'm about ready for my bed," he remarked, and after another yawn he started his nightly round of inspection. When he returned to the sitting-room the others were all ready to retire. Gosling kissed his daughters, and the two girls and their mother went upstairs. Gosling carefully took off the larger pieces of coal from the fire and put them under the grate, rolled up the hearthrug, saw that the window was securely fastened, extinguished the lamp and followed his "womenfolk." As he was undressing his thoughts turned once more to the threat of the new disease which was devastating China. "Rum thing about that new plague," he remarked to his wife. "Seems as it's only men as get it." "They'd never let it spread to England," replied Mrs Gosling. "Oh! there's no fear of that, none whatever," said Gosling, "but it's rum that about women never catching it." The attitude of the Goslings faithfully reflected that of the immense majority of English people. The faith in the hygienic and scientific resources which were at the disposal of the authorities, and the implicit trust in the vigilance and energy of those authorities, were sufficient to allay any fears that were not too imminent. It was some one's duty to look after these things, and if they were not looked after there would be letters in the papers about it. At last, without question, the authorities would be roused to a sense of duty and the trouble, whatever it was, would be stopped. Precisely what authority managed these affairs none of the huge Gosling family knew. Vaguely they pictured Medical Boards, or Health Committees; dimly they connected these things with local government; at the top, doubtless, was some managing authority--in Whitehall probably--something to do with the supreme head of affairs, the much abused but eminently paternal Government. II--THE OPINIONS OF JASPER THRALE 1 "Lord, how I do envy you," said Morgan Gurney. Jasper Thrale sat forward in his chair. "There's no reason why you shouldn't do what I've done--and more," he said. "Theoretically, I suppose not," replied Gurney. "It's just making the big effort to start with. You see I've got a very decent berth and good prospects, and it's comfortable and all that. Only when some fellow like you comes along and tells one yarns of the world outside, I get sort of hankerings after the sea and adventure, and seeing the big things. It's only now and then--ordinary times I'm contented enough." He stuck his pipe in the corner of his mouth and stared into the fire. "The only things that really count are feeling clean and strong and able," said Thrale. "You never really have that feeling if you live in the big cities." "I've felt like that sometimes after a long bicycle ride," interpolated Gurney. "But then the feeling is wasted, you see," said Thrale. "When you feel like that and there is something tremendous to spend it upon, you get the great emotion as well." "Like the glimmer of St Agnes' light, after you'd been eight weeks out of sight of land?" reflected Gurney, going back to one of Thrale's reminiscences. "To feel that you are a part of life, not this dead, stale life of the city, but the life of the whole universe," said Thrale. "I know," replied Gurney. "To-night I've half a mind to chuck my job and go out looking for mystery." "But you won't do it," said Thrale. Gurney sighed and began to analyse the instinct within himself, to find precisely why he wanted to do it. "Well, I must go," said Thrale, getting to his feet, "I've got to find some sort of lodging." "I thought you were going to stay with those Gosling people of yours," said Gurney. "No! That's off. I went to see them last night and they won't have me. The old man's making his £300 a year now, and the family's too respectable to take boarders." Thrale picked up his hat and held out his hand. "But, look here, old chap, why the devil can't you stay here?" asked Gurney. "I didn't know that you'd anywhere to put me," said Thrale. "Oh, yes. There's always a room to be had downstairs," said Gurney. After a brief discussion the arrangement was made. "It's understood I'm to pay my whack," said Thrale. "Of course, if you insist----" When Thrale had gone to fetch his luggage from the hotel, Gurney sat pondering over the fire. He was debating whether he had been altogether wise in pressing his invitation. He was wondering whether the curiously rousing personality of Thrale, and the stories of those still existent corners of the world outside the rules of civilization were good for a civil servant with an income of £600 a year. Gurney, faced with the plain alternatives, could only decide that he would be a fool to throw up a congenial and lucrative occupation such as his own, in order to face present physical discomfort and future penury. He knew that the discomforts would be very real to him at first. His friends would think him mad. And all for the sake of experiencing some high emotion now and again, in order to feel clean and fresh and be able to discover something of the unknown mystery of life. "I suppose there is something of the poet in me," reflected Gurney. "And I expect I should hate the discomforts. One's imagination gets led away...." 2 During the next few evenings the conversations between these two friends were many and protracted. Thrale was the teacher, and Gurney was content to sit at his feet and learn. He had a receptive mind, he was interested in all life, but Uppingham, Trinity Hall, and the Home Civil had constricted his mental processes. At twenty-nine he was losing flexibility. Thrale gave him back his power to think, set him outside the formulas of his school, taught him that however sound his deductions, there was not one of his premises which could not be disputed. Thrale was Gurney's senior by three years, and when Thrale left Uppingham at eighteen, he had gone out into the world. He had a patrimony of some £200 a year; but he had taken only a lump sum of £100 and had started out to appease his furious curiosity concerning life. He had laboured as a miner in the Klondike; had sailed, working his passage as an ordinary seaman, from San Francisco to Southampton; he had been a stockman in Australia, assistant to a planter in Ceylon, a furnace minder in Kimberley and a tally clerk in Hong Kong. For nearly nine years, indeed, he had earned a living in every country of the world except Europe, and then he had come back to London and invested the accumulation of income that his trustee had amassed for him. The mere spending of money had no fascination for him. During the six months he had remained in London he had lived very simply, lodging with the Goslings in Kilburn, and, because he could not live idly, exploring every corner of the great city and writing articles for the journals. He might have earned a large income by this latter means, for he had an originality of outlook and a freshness of style that made his contributions eagerly sought after once he had obtained a hearing--no difficult matter in London for anyone who has something new to say. But experience, not income, was his desire, and at the end of six months he had accepted an offer from the Daily Post as a European correspondent--on space. He was offered £600 a year, but he preferred to be free, and he had no wish to be confined to one capital or country. In those five years he had traversed Europe, sending in his articles irregularly, as he required money. And during that time his chief trustee--a lawyer of the soundest reputation--had absconded, and Thrale found his private income reduced to about £40 a year, the interest on one of the investments he had made, in his own name only, with his former accumulation--two other investments made at the same time had proved unsound. This loss had not troubled him in any way. When he had read in a London journal of his trustee's abscondence--he was later sentenced to fourteen years' penal servitude--Thrale had smiled and dismissed the matter from his mind. He could always earn all the money he required, and had never, not even subconsciously, relied upon his private fortune. He had now come back to London with a definite purpose, he had come to warn England of a great danger.... One other distinguishing mark of Jasper Thrale's life must be understood, a mark which differentiated him from the overwhelming majority of his fellow men--women had no fascination for him. Once in his life, and once only, had he approached and tasted experience--with a pretty little Melbourne cocotte. That experience he had undertaken deliberately, because he felt that until it had been undergone one great factor of life would be unknown to him. He had come away from it filled with a disgust of himself that had endured for months.... 3 Fragments of the long conversations between Thrale and Gurney, the exchange of a few germane ideas among the irrelevant mass, had a bearing upon their immediate future. There was, for instance, a criticism of the Goslings, introduced on one occasion, which had a certain significance in relation to subsequent developments. Some question of Gurney's prompted Thrale to the opinion that the Goslings were in the main precisely like half a million other families of the same class. "But that's just what makes them so interesting," said Gurney, not because he believed it, but because at the moment he wanted to lead the conversation into safe ground, away from the too appealing attractions of the big world outside the little village of London. Thrale laughed. "That's truer than you guess," he said. "Every large generalization, however trite, is a valuable contribution to knowledge--if it's more or less accurate." "Generalize, then, mon vieux," suggested Gurney, "from the characters and doings of your little geese." "I've seen glimmerings of the immortal god in the old man," said Thrale, "like the hint of sunlight seen through a filthy pane of obscured glass. He's a prurient-minded old beast leading what's called a respectable life, but if he could indulge his ruling desire with absolute secrecy, no woman would be safe with him. In his world he can't do that, or thinks he can't, which comes to precisely the same thing. He is too much afraid of being caught, he sees danger where none exists, he looks to all sorts of possibilities, and won't take a million-to-one chance because he is risking his all--which is included in the one word, respectability." "Jolly good thing. What?" remarked Gurney. "Good for society as a whole, apparently," replied Thrale, "but surely not good for the man. I've told you that I have seen glimmerings of the god in him, but outside the routine of his work the man's mind is clogged. He's not much over fifty, and he has no outlet, now, for his desires. He's like a man with choked pores, and his body is poisoned. And in this particular Gosling is certainly no exception either to his class or to the great mass of civilized man. Well, what I wonder is whether in a society which is built up of interdependent units the whole can be sound when the greater number of the constituent units are rotten." "But look here, old chap," protested Gurney, "if things are as you say, and men rule the country, why shouldn't they alter public opinion, and so open the way to do as they jolly well please?" "Because the majority are too much ashamed of their desires to dare the attempt in the first place, and in the second because they don't wish to open the way for other men. They aren't united in this; they are as jealous as women. If they once opened the way to free love, their own belongings wouldn't be safe." "What's your remedy, then?" "Oh! a few thousand more years of moral development," said Thrale, carelessly, "an evolution towards self-consciousness, a fuller understanding of the meaning of life, and a finer altruism." "You don't look far ahead," remarked Gurney. "Do you think anyone can look even a year ahead?" asked Thrale. "There have been some pretty good attempts in some ways--Swedenborg, for instance, and Samuel Butler...." "Yes, yes, that's all right, in some ways--the development of certain sorts of knowledge, for example. But there is always the chance of the unpredictable element coming in and upsetting the whole calculation. Some invention may do it, an unforeseen clash of opinions or an epidemic...." For a time they drifted further away from their original topic till some remark reminded Gurney that he had meant to ask a question and had forgotten it. "By the way," he said, "I wanted to ask you what you meant when you said you had seen a god in old Gosling?" "Just a touch of imagination and wonder, now and again," replied Thrale. "Something he was quite unconscious of himself. I remember standing with him on Blackfriars Bridge, and he looked down at the river and said: 'I s'pose it was clean once, banks and sand and so on, before all this muck came.' Then he looked at me quickly to see if I was laughing at him. That was the god in him trying to create purity out of filth, even though it was only a casual thought. It was smothered again at once. His training reasserted itself. 'Lot better for trade the way it is, though,' was his next remark." "But how can you alter it?" asked Gurney. "My dear chap, you can't alter these things by any cut-and-dried plan, any more than you can dam the Gulf Stream. We can only lay a brick or two in the right place. We aren't the architects; the best of us are only bricklayers, and the best of the best can only lay two or three bricks in a lifetime. Our job is to do that if we can. We can only guess very feebly at the design of the building; and often it is our duty partly to pull down the work that our forefathers built...." Presently Gurney asked if his companion had ever seen a god in Mrs Gosling. Thrale shook his head. "It didn't come within my experience," he said. "Don't condemn her on that account, but she, like all the women I have ever met, has been too intent upon the facts of life ever to see its mystery. Mrs Gosling hadn't the power to conceive an abstract idea; she had to make some application of it to her own particular experience before she could understand the simplest concept. Morality to her signified people who behaved as she and her family did; wickedness meant vaguely, criminals, Sarah Jones who was an unmarried mother, and anyone who didn't believe in the God of the Established Church. Always people, you see, in this connexion; in others it might be things; but ideas apart from people or things she couldn't grasp. Her two daughters thought in precisely the same way...." 4 One Saturday afternoon Thrale came into Gurney's chambers and burst out: "Just Heaven! why you fools stand it I can't imagine!" "What's up now?" asked Gurney. Thrale sat down and drew his chair up to the table. The pupils of his dark eyes were contracted and seemed to glow as if they were illuminated from within. "I was in Oxford Street this morning, watching the women at the sales," he said. "All the biggest shops in London are devoted to women's clothes. Do you realize that? And it's not only that they're the biggest--there are more of them than any other six trades put together can show, bar the drink trade, of course. The north side of Oxford Street from Tottenham Court Road to the Marble Arch is one long succession of huge drapers and milliners. And what in God's name is the sense or reason of it? What do these huge shops sell?" "Dresses, I suppose," ventured Gurney, "and stockings, underlinen, corsets, hats, and so on." "And frippery," said Thrale, fixing his brilliant dark eyes on Gurney, "And frippery. Machine lace, ribbons, yokes, cheap blouses, feathers, insertions, belts, fifty thousand different kinds of bits and rags to be tacked on here and there, worn for a few weeks and then thrown away. Millions of little frivolous, stupid odds and ends that are bought by women and girls of all classes below the motor-class, to make a pretence--gauds and tawdry rubbish not one whit better from the artistic point of view than the shells and feathers of any half-naked Melanesian savage. In fact, meaningless as the Melanesians' decorations are, they do achieve more effect. And what's it all for, I ask you?" Thrale paused, and Gurney offered his solution. "The sex instinct, fundamentally, isn't it?" he said. "The desire--often subconscious, no doubt--to attract." "Well, if that is so," said Thrale, "what terribly unintelligent fools women must be! If women really set out to attract men, they must realize that they are pandering to a sex instinct. Do you think any man is attracted by a litter of odds and ends? Doesn't every woman sneer when they see some Frenchwoman, perhaps, who dresses to display her figure instead of hiding it? Don't they bitterly resent the fact that their own men-folk are resistlessly drawn to stare at, and inwardly desire, such a woman? Don't they know perfectly well that such a woman is attractive to men in a way their own disguised bodies can never be?" "Yes, old chap; but your average middle-class English girl hasn't got the physical attractions to start with," put in Gurney. "Look at it in another way, then," replied Thrale. "Doesn't every woman know perfectly well--haven't you heard them say--that a nurse's dress is very becoming--a plain, more or less tightly-fitting print dress, with linen collars and cuffs? Don't you know yourself that that attire is more attractive to you than any befrilled and bedecorated arrangement of lace, ribbons and gauds? Why are so many men irresistibly attracted by parlourmaids and housemaids?" "Yes," meditated Gurney, "that's all true enough. Well, are women all fools, or what is it?" "The majority of women are sheep," said Thrale. "They follow as they are led, and don't or won't see that they are being led. And the leaders are chiefly men--men who have trumpery to sell. Why do the fashions change every year--sometimes more often than that in matters of detail? Because the trade would smash if they didn't. New fashions must be forced on the buyers, or the returns would drop; women would be able to make their last year's clothes do for another summer. That must be stopped at any cost. Those vast establishments must maintain an enormous turnover if they are to pay their fabulous rents and armies of assistants. There are two means of keeping up the sales, and both are utilized to the full. The first is to supply cheap, miraculously cheap, rubbish which cannot be made to last for more than a season. The second is to alter the fashions which affect the more durable stuffs, so that last year's dresses cannot be used again. This fashion-working scheme reacts upon the poorer buyers, because it compels them to do something to imitate the prevailing mode, if they can't afford to have entirely new frocks. That is where all these bits of frilling and what-not come in; make-believe stuff to imitate the real buyers--the large majority of whom don't buy in Oxford Street, by the way. "Mind you, there is a limit to the sheep-like docility of women in this connexion. They refused, for instance, to return to the crinoline, and they refused the harem skirt--one of the very few sensible devices of the fashion-imposers. And this in the face of the prolonged, strenuous and expensive methods of the fashion ring. With regard to the crinoline, I think that failure was due to over-conceit on the part of the fashion-imposers. They had come to believe that they could make the poor fools of women accept anything, and on the two marked occasions on which they attempted to introduce the crinoline, the contrast to the existing mode was too glaring. If the fraud had been worked more gradually by way of full skirts and flounces, some modification of the crinoline to the necessities of 'buses and tubes might have been foisted upon the buyers." "Oh, my Lord!" ejaculated Gurney; "do you mean to say that women just accept these fashions without any sense or reason at all?" "You're rather a blithering ass, at times, Gurney," remarked Thrale. Gurney smiled. "You don't give me time to think," he said, "I feel like an accumulator being charged. I haven't had time yet to begin working on my own account. You're so mighty--so mighty dynamic--and positive, old chap." "Well, it's so absurdly obvious that there must be a reason for women accepting the fashions, you idiot!" returned Thrale. "And the first and biggest reason is class distinction. The women with money want to brag of it by differentiating themselves from the ruck of their sisters, and the poor women try to imitate them to the best of their ability. Women dress for other women. There is sex rivalry as well as class rivalry at the bottom of it, but they dare not put sex rivalry first and dress to please men alone, because they are afraid of the opinions of other women." "Sounds all right," said Gurney, and sighed. "And we, damned fools of men, stand all this foolishness and pay for it. Pay, by Jove! I should think so! I should like to see the trade returns of all the stuff of this kind that is sold in England alone in one year. They would make the naval estimates look small, I'll warrant. We even imitate the women's foolishness in some degree. There are men's fashions too, but the madness is not so marked; fortunately the body of middle-class men can't afford to make fools of themselves as well as of their women--though they are asses enough to wear linen shirts and collars which are uncomfortable unsightly and expensive to wash." Gurney regarded his lecturer's canvas shirt and collar, and then stood up and observed his own immaculate linen in the glass over the fireplace. "I must say I like stiff collars and shirts," he remarked; "gives one a kind of spruceness." Thrale laughed. "It's only another sex instinct," he said. "Women like men to look 'smart.' When you are playing games with other men, or camping out, you don't care a hang for your 'spruceness.' Oh! and I'll admit the class distinction rot comes in too. You're afraid of public opinion, afraid of being thought common. If the jeunesse dorée started the soft shirt in real earnest, you would soon be able to persuade your women that that looked smart or spruce, or whatever you liked to call it." "Look here, you know," said Gurney, "you're an anarchist, that's what you are." "You're half a woman, Gurney," said Thrale. "You think in names. All people are 'anarchists' who think in ideas instead of following conventions." 5 Not until he had been staying with Gurney for more than a week did Thrale speak explicitly of his purpose in London. But one cold evening at the end of January, as the two men were sitting by a roaring fire that Gurney had built up, the younger man unknowingly opened the subject by saying, "Things are pretty slack at the present moment. The Evening Chronicle has even fallen back on the 'New Plague' for the sake of news." "What do they say?" asked Thrale. He was lying back in his chair, nursing one knee, and staring up at the ceiling. "Oh, the usual rot!" said Gurney "That the thing isn't understood, has never been 'described' by any medical or scientific authority; that it is apparently confined to one little corner of Asia at the present time, but that if it got hold in Europe it might be serious. And then a lot of yap about the unknown forces of Nature; special article by a chap who's been reading too much Wells, I should imagine." "It seems so incredible to us in twentieth-century England that anything really serious could happen," remarked Thrale. "We are so well looked after and cared for. We sit down and wait for some authority to move, with a perfect confidence that when it does move, everything is bound to be all right." "With such an organism as society has become," said Gurney, "things must be worked like that. A certain group to perform one function, other groups for other functions, and so on." "Cell-specialization?" commented Thrale. "Some day to be perfected in socialism." "I believe socialism must come in some form," said Gurney. "Yes, it's an interesting speculation, in some ways," said Thrale, "but the higher forces are about to put a new spoke in the human wheel, and the machinery has to be stopped for a time." "What have you got hold of now?" asked Gurney. "The thoughtful man," went on Thrale, still staring up at the ceiling, "would have asked me to define my expression 'the higher forces.'" "Well, old man, I knew that was beyond even your capacity," returned Gurney, "so I thought we might 'cut the cackle and come to the 'osses.'" Thrale suddenly released his knee and sat upright; then he moved his chair so that he directly confronted his companion. "Look here, Gurney," he said, and the pupils of his eyes contracted till they looked like black crystal glowing with dark red light. "Do you realize how some outside control has always diverted man's progress; how when nations have tended to crystallize into specialized government, some irruption from outside has always broken it up? You can trace the principle through all known history, but the most marked cases are those of the Egyptians and the Incas--two nations which had developed specialized government to a science. There is some power--whether we can credit it with an intelligence in any way comprehensible to us from the feeble basis of our own knowledge, I doubt--but there is some outside power which will not permit mankind to crystallize into an organism. From our, human, point of view, from the point of view of individual comfort and happiness, it would be of enormous benefit to us if we could develop a system of specialization and swamp the individual in the community. And in times of peace and prosperity that is always the direction in which civilization tends to evolve. But beyond a certain point--as the individualists have not failed to point out--that state of perfect government will lead to stagnation, degeneration, death. Now, in the little span of time that we know as the history of mankind, there has been no world-civilization. As soon as a nation tended to become over-civilized and degenerate, some other, younger, more barbarous people flowed over them and wiped them out. In the case of Peru the process had gone very far, owing to the advantages of the Incas' peculiar segregation. But then, you see, the development in the East, the new world (I ought to explain that I find the oldest civilization of the present epoch in America) reached a point in Spain and England which sent them out across a hemisphere to wreck and destroy the Incas. "Well, we have now reached a condition when the nations are in touch with one another and progress becomes more general. We are in sight of a system of European, Colonial and Trans-Atlantic Socialism, more or less reciprocal and carrying the promise of universal peace. Whence, you ask, is any irruption to come that will break up this strong crystallizing system which is admittedly to work for the happiness and comfort of the individual? There has been much talk of an Asiatic invasion, a rebellious India or an invading China, but those civilizations are older than ours; if we can trust the precedents of history in this connexion, the conquerors have always been the younger race." He broke off abruptly. Gurney had been sitting fascinated and hypnotized by the compulsion of Thrale's personality; he had been held by the keen, intent stare of those wonderful dark eyes. When Thrale stopped, however, the tension snapped. "Well," remarked Gurney, "I think that's a jolly good argument to prove that we have, at last, reached a stage of universal progress towards the ideal." "You can't conceive," asked Thrale, "of any cataclysm that would involve a return to the old segregation of nations, and bring about a new epoch beginning with separated peoples evolving on more or less racial lines?" Gurney pondered for a moment or two and then shook his head. "Little wonder," said Thrale, "I had often considered this problem, and I could think of no upheaval which would bring about the familiar effect of submersion. Years ago there was always the possibility of a European war, but even that would have only a temporary effect despite the forecast of Mr Wells in The War in the Air. No, I considered and wondered if my theory was faulty. I was willing to reject it if I could find a flaw...." "And then?" questioned Gurney. Thrale leaned forward again and once more compelled the other's fascinated attention. "And then, when I was in Northern China, seven weeks ago, I saw a solution, so appalling, so inconceivably ghastly, that I rejected it with horror. For days I went about fighting my own conviction. I couldn't believe it! By God, I would not believe it! "There, within a hundred and fifty miles of the border of Tibet, the outside forces have planted a seed which has been maturing in secret for more than a year. There that seed has taken root, and from that centre is spreading more and more rapidly, and it may spread over the whole world. It is like some filthily poisonous and incredibly prolific weed, and its seeds, now that it has once established itself, are borne by every wind, dropping here and there in an ever-widening circle, every seed becoming a fresh centre of distribution outwards." "But what, in Heaven's name, is the weed?" whispered Gurney. "A new disease--a new plague--unknown by man, against which, so far as we know, he has no weapon. In those scattered villages among the mountains there are no men left to work. Everything is done by women. They are prohibited more fiercely than any leper settlement. No one dares to approach within five miles of them. But every week or two another village is smitten, and the inhabitants fly in terror and carry the infection with them. "Gurney, it's come to Europe! There are new centres of distribution in Russia at the present time. If it isn't stopped it will come to England. And it doesn't decimate the population. It wipes the men clean out of existence; not one man in ten thousand, the Chinese say, escapes. "Is it possible that this can be the means of the 'higher forces' I spoke of, the means to segregate the nations once more?" III--LONDON'S INCREDULITY 1 Jasper Thrale's mission was no easy one. England, it appeared, was slightly preoccupied at the moment, and had no ear for warnings. Generally, he was either treated as a fanatic and laughed at, or he was told that he greatly exaggerated the danger and that these matters could safely be entrusted to the Local Government Board, which had brilliantly handled the recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. But there were some exceptions to this rule. His first definite statement had been made to his own editor, Watson Maxwell of the Daily Post. "Yes," said Maxwell, when he had given Thrale a patient hearing, "it is certainly a matter that needs attention. Would you care to go out as our special commissioner and report at length?..." "There isn't time," replied Thrale. "The thing is urgent." Maxwell brought his eyebrows together and looked keenly at his correspondent. "Do you really think it's so serious, Thrale?" he asked. "After all, what evidence have you, beyond the Chinese reports?" "I know there are several cases in Russia," said Thrale. "Yes, yes; I don't doubt that," returned Maxwell, with a touch of impatience. "But unless you can bring evidence to show that this new disease is as deadly as you say, it is not a matter that I could give space to at the present time. For one thing, the Evening Chronicle has been making rather a feature of it for the last three or four days, and I don't see that I could do much unless we had some special inside information. Then, the House will be sitting again next week, and it seems to me not altogether improbable that we shall have a stormy session, which will mean that a good deal of ordinary matter will have to give way...." He broke off, and then added, with a friendly smile: "But if you would go out as our commissioner, we should be glad to make you a proposal." "There will be no need for a commissioner in a week's time," replied Thrale. "You don't seem to understand that I'm not looking out for a job. I don't want to write articles; I don't want to be paid for the information I can supply. I foresee a grave danger, which is growing more grave hourly by reason of the Russian Government's censorship of all reports referring to the plague. It is a danger which should be understood at once. If you send any commissioner, send the cleverest physician you can find, and a bacteriologist." There could be no doubt of Thrale's earnestness, and Maxwell, who was not only a very capable editor, but also an able and intellectual man, was impressed. Unfortunately, the interests of his proprietors at that moment necessitated a great effort to prop up the very unstable Liberal Government, which had been in power for four years and was now on its last legs. It was so essential from the proprietors' point of view--three of them were on the Government front bench--that the dissolution should be postponed until such time as the Ministry could go to the country with a reasonable prospect of success. A tentative English Church Disestablishment Bill was to be introduced in the coming session, and it was hoped that if the Government had to go to the country they could make a platform on that one clear issue. It was a good Bill, designed to win the Nonconformist vote, without completely alienating the High Church party. In other words, the Government was eager at that moment to please the majority of the electors, which is, presumably, the highest object of a representative government. "If it had been at any other time," said Maxwell, and pushed his chair back. Thrale understood that the interview was at an end. He rose from his chair and picked up his hat. "We shall be glad to print any articles you care to send us," said Maxwell, with his kind smile, "but I can't undertake a campaign, you understand, at the present moment." It was nearly four o'clock, but Thrale just managed to catch Groves of the Evening Chronicle. 2 Groves had his hat on, and was just off to tea at his club when Thrale's name was sent in to him. He told the messenger that he would see Mr Thrale in the waiting-room downstairs. Thrale had had some experience of newspaper methods, and he inferred that the reception was equivalent to a refusal to see him. He knew what those interviews in downstairs waiting-rooms implied. It was not the first time that he had been treated like an insurance agent or a tradesman and told, in effect, "Not to-day, thank you." In this case he was mistaken in his inference. Groves had had an eye on Thrale's articles for some time past, and though he thought it a diplomatic essential to keep his man waiting for ten minutes, he had no intention of offending him. Groves came into the waiting-room with a slightly abstracted air. "Sorry to keep you waiting Mr Thrale," he said. "The fact is, that I wanted to finish before I left. Did you want to see me about anything particular?" "Yes," returned Thrale; "I have some facts about the new plague which ought to be given publicity at once." Groves pursed his thick lips and shook his head. "Well, well," he said, "will you come and have tea with me at the club?" He took Thrale's assent for granted, and went out abruptly, leaving his guest to follow. In the taxicab Groves talked of nothing but the lack of originality in invention in reference to aeroplanes. He seemed to take it as a personal affront that no workable adaptation of the aeroplane had been made to short-distance passenger traffic. Indeed, it was not till after "tea"--in Groves' case an euphemism for whisky and soda--that he would approach the subject of Thrale's visit. "The fact is, my dear fellow," he said, "that our campaign hasn't caught on. I'm going to let it down gently and drop it after to-day's edition. You see, we've got to get the Government out this session, and I'm going to start a new campaign. Can't give you any particulars yet, but you'll see the beginning of it next Monday." Like Maxwell, Groves differentiated between the uses of the singular and plural pronouns in speaking of his work. There was a distinction to be inferred between the initiation and responsibilities of the editor and those of his proprietors. Groves was not at all impressed by any earnestness or forebodings. He seemed to think that a touch of the plague in London might be rather a good thing in some ways. People wanted waking up--especially to the importance of getting rid of the present Government. It appeared that Thrale's articles on other subjects would be acceptable to the readers of the Evening Chronicle, but there was no suggestion that he should go out to Russia as a special commissioner. 3 Grant Lacey, of The Times, listened seriously to Thrale's exposition, and then, in a finely delivered speech which lasted twenty minutes, proved to his own complete satisfaction that Thrale's premises, deductions, and whole argument were thoroughly unsound. Lacey, however, was greatly interested in the condition of Russia, and promised Thrale magnificent terms if he would tour St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw--and then return and contribute a special series of articles. References to the new plague would not be prohibited in the series if Thrale still found any cause for alarm. In all, Thrale had interviews with the editors of nine important journals; the other six developed on the general lines already indicated--either he was not taken seriously or was told that the danger was greatly exaggerated. The real causes of his failure were two:--first, the critical position of the Government; second, the precocious campaign of the Evening Chronicle--the latter had taken the wind out of the sails of less enterprising journals. Thrale's next step was to obtain introductions to Ministers and prominent members of the Opposition; but from them he received even less attention--he did not obtain interviews on many occasions--and, if possible, less encouragement. The President of the Local Government Board informed him that the matter was already engaging that department's energies; the others were all manifestly preoccupied with more immediate interests. But little less than a fortnight after the initiation of his campaign Thrale received a special message from the editor of the Daily Post. It was nearly midnight, and the messenger was waiting with a taxicab. The message ran: "Received through news agency report of three cases of plague in Berlin. Can you come down at once?--Maxwell." IV--MR BARKER'S FLAIR 1 Jasper Thrale, in the partial exposition of his philosophy (if that description is not too large for such vague imaginings), had included very definite reference to certain "higher forces" to which he had attributed peculiar powers of interference in humanity's management of its own concerns. Doubtless these powers had control of various instruments, and were able to exercise their influence in any direction and by any means. In the present case it would seem that they were working in devious and subtle ways--and in this at least they differed not at all from the methods attributable to that we have called Providence, or the Laws of Nature; any assumed guide or irrefragible, incomprehensible ordination. It is a common characteristic of these forces that they seem able to control the inconceivably great and the inconceivably small with equal certitude. Not that George Gosling touched any limits. He was moderately large in body and small in intellect, but neither the physical excess nor the mental deficiency marked him out from his fellow men. In the office, indeed, he was regarded by the firm and his colleagues as a capable man of business whose embonpoint was quite consistent with his employment by a firm of wholesale provision merchants. On the Thursday morning that saw the announcement in the morning papers that a case of the new plague was reported in Berlin, Gosling was called into the partners' private office on some matter of accountancy. The senior partner of Barker and Prince was eager, grasping and imaginative; his name had originally been German, and ended, in "stein," but he had changed it for the convenience of his English connexion. Prince was a large rubicund man, friendly and noisy in his manners, but accounted a shrewd buyer. It was not until Gosling was about to depart that the higher forces turned their attention to Barbican and then they suddenly urged Gosling to say, without premeditation on his part, "I see there's a case of this 'ere new plague in Berlin." Mr Prince laughed and winked at his subordinate. "Some of us'll have to start a hareem, soon; who knows?" he said, and laughed again, more loudly than ever. "I suppose you haf not heard any other reports, eh?" asked Mr Barker. "Well, curiously enough, I 'ave," said Gosling. "A young feller who used to lodge with us five years back, come 'ome from Russia about a fortnight since, and 'e tells me as the plague's spreadin' like wildfire in Russia." Mr Prince laughed again, and Mr Barker seemed about to turn his attention to other matters, when the higher forces sent Gosling the one great inspiration of his life. It came to him with startling suddenness, but he gave utterance to it as simply and with as little verve as he spoke his "good morning" to the office-boy. "I been thinkin', sir," he said (he had never once thought of it until this moment), "as it might be well to keep a neye on this plague, so to speak." "Ah! Zo?" said Mr Barker; a phrase which Gosling correctly interpreted as the expression of a desire for the elucidation of his last remark. "Well, I been thinkin', if you'll excuse me, sir," he went on, "as though the plague's only in the bud, so to speak, at the present time, it seems very likely to spread so far as we can judge; and that what with quarantine, p'raps, and p'raps shortage of labour and so on, it might mean 'igher prices for our stuff." "Zo!" said Mr Barker, but this time the monosyllable was reflective. The great inspiration had found fruitful soil. "Brince," continued Barker after a minute's thought, "I haf a flair. We will buy heavily at once. But not through our London house, no; or others will follow us too quickly. You must not go, we will zend Ztewart from Dundee, it will zeem that we prepare for the zhipping strike in the north. We buy heavily; yes? I haf a flair." "But, I say," said Mr Prince, who had the greatest confidence in his partner's insight, "I say, Barker, d'you think this plague's serious?" "I am putting money on it, ain't I?" asked Barker. Prince and Gosling exchanged a scared glance. Until that moment it had not come home to either of them that it was possible for English affairs to be affected by this strange and deadly disease. The remainder of the conversation was complicated and exceedingly technical. 2 When he came back into the counting-house, Gosling looked unnaturally thoughtful. "Anything gorne wrong?" asked his crony, Flack. "There's nothing wrong with the 'ouse, if that's what you mean," replied Gosling mysteriously. "What then?" asked Flack. "It's this 'ere new plague," returned Gosling. "Tchah! That's all my eye," said Flack. He was a narrow-chested, high-shouldered man of sixty, with a thin grey beard, and he had a consistently incredulous mind. Out here in the counting-house, Gosling's thrill of fear was rapidly subsiding, and he had no intention of passing over his own important part in the house's decision to buy for a rise; so he bulged out his cheeks, shook his head and said: "Not by a long chalk it ain't, Flack; not by a long chalk. There was that young feller, Thrale, as I was tellin' you about; 'e gave me a hidea or two, and now s'mornin' we 'ave this very serious news from Berlin." "Papers 'ave to make the worst of everything," said Flack. "It's their livin'." "Anyways," continued Gosling, "I put it quite straight to the 'ouse this mornin', as we might do worse under the circumstances than buy 'eavily...." "You did?" asked Flack, and he cocked up his spectacles and looked at Gosling underneath them. "I did," replied Gosling. "What did Mr Barker say to that?" asked Flack. "He took my advice." "Lord's sakes, you don't tell me so?" said Flack, his spectacles on his forehead. "I'm now about to dictate various letters to our 'ouse in Dundee," replied Gosling, dropping his voice to a whisper, and assuming an air of mysterious importance, "advising them to send our Mr Stewart to Vienna immediate, from where 'e is to proceed to Berlin. 'E is, also, to 'ave private instructions from the 'ouse as to the extent of 'is buyin'--which I may tell you in confidence, Flack, will be enormous--e-normous." Gosling raised his head slowly on the first syllable, brought it down with a jerk on the second, and left the third largely to the imagination. "But d'yer mean to tell me," expostulated Flack, "as all this is on account of this plague? They been usin' that as a blind, my boy." Gosling laid a bunch of swollen fingers on his colleague's arm. "I tell you, Flack, old boy," he said, "that this is serious. When Mr Barker took up my advice, as 'e did very quick, Mr Prince said, 'You don't tell me as you really take this plague serious, Barker?' 'e said. And Mr Barker looked up and says, 'I'm goin' to put all my money on it.'" Gosling paused and then repeated, "Mr Barker says as 'e's goin' to put all our money on it, Flack." "Lord's sakes!" said Flack. Here, indeed, was an argument strong enough to break down even his consistent incredulity. "But d'yer mean to tell me," he persisted, "that Mr Barker thinks as it'll come to England?" "We-el, you know," returned Gosling, "we need not, p'raps go quite so far as that. But it may go far enough to interfere with European markets, there may be trouble with quarantine, and such-like...." "Ah, well, that," said Flack with an air of relief. "Jus' so, jus' so. Mr Barker can see as far through a brick wall as most people, and so I've always said." He dropped his spectacles on to his nose again, and returned to his interrupted accountancy. Gosling went fussily into his own room and rang for his typist--a competent and presentable young woman, among whose duties that of turning her superior's letters into equivalent English was not the lightest. 3 Gosling was very full of importance that day, and during lunch he wore the air of a man who had secret and valuable information. He was too well versed in City methods and too loyal to his own house to give any hint of Barker and Prince's speculations in Austria and Germany; but when the subject of the new plague inevitably came into the conversation, he spoke with an authority that was heightened by the hint of reserve implicit in his every dictum. When the latest joke on the subject, fresh from the Stock Exchange, had been retailed by one of the usual group of lunchers, and had been received with the guffaws it merited, Gosling suddenly screwed his face to an unaccustomed seriousness and said, "But it's serious, you know, extremely serious." And by degrees, from this and many other better informed sources, the rumour ran through the City that the new plague was serious, extremely serious. That afternoon there was a slight drop of prices in certain industrial shares, and a slight rise in wheat and some other imported food stuffs; fluctuations which could not be attributed to ordinary causes. Mr Barker's foresight was justified once again in the eyes of Gosling and Flack. Before five o'clock another letter was posted to Dundee, enforcing haste. In the bosom of his family that evening, Gosling was a little pompous, and talked of economy. But his wife and daughters, although they assumed an air of interest, were quite convinced that the head of the house in Wisteria Grove was making the most of a rumour for his own purposes. As Blanche said to Millie, later, father was always finding some excuse for keeping them short of dress money. That five pounds had proved inadequate to supply even their immediate necessities, and they were already meditating another attack. "We simply must get another three pounds somehow," said Millie. And Blanche quite agreed with her. V--THE CLOSED DOOR 1 There was a lull for forty-eight hours after that announcement of the case of the new plague in Berlin, and Maxwell was beginning to regret his headlines when the news began to come in, this time in volume. The Russian censorship had broken down, and the news agencies were suddenly flooded with reports. There were several thousand cases of the plague in Eastern Russia; the north and south were affected, many men were dying in such towns as Kharkov and Rostov; there were a dozen cases in St Petersburg; there was a such a rush of reports that it was quite impossible to distinguish between those that were probably true and those that were certainly false. The morning papers gave as much space as they could spare, and had even broken up some of the matter dealing with the arrangements for the opening of Parliament on that day. But the evening papers had news that put all previous reports in the shade. Eleven more cases were reported in Berlin, three in Hamburg, five in Prague and one in Vienna. But more important, more thrilling still, was the news that H.I.H. the Grand Duke Kirylo, the Tsar's younger brother, had died of the plague in Moscow, and Professor Schlesinger in Berlin. Until that startling announcement came, the English public had incomprehensibly imagined that only peasants, Chinamen and people of the lower social grades were attacked by this strange new infection. In the later editions it was reported on good authority that Professor Schlesinger had been observing a sample of the blood of the first case of plague that had been recognized in Berlin. Nevertheless the majority of readers, after glancing through the obituary notices of H.I.H. the Grand Duke Kirylo and of the world-famed bacteriologist, turned to the account--only slightly abbreviated--of the opening of Parliament. And in many households the subject of the new plague gave place to the fiercely controversial topic of the English Church Disestablishment Bill, which had been indicated in the King's Speech as a measure that was to be introduced in the forthcoming session. Many opponents of the Bill coupled the two chief items of news and said that the plague was a warning against infidelity. It may be assumed that they found sufficient warrant for the killing of a few thousand Russians, including a prince of the blood and a great German scientist, in the acknowledged importance of England among the nations. The death of half a million or so Chinamen in the first instance had been a delicate hint; now came the more urgent warning. Who knew but that if this sacrilegious Bill were passed, England herself might not be smitten. When warnings are disregarded, judgments follow. The Evangelicals found a weapon ready to their hands.... But what precisely was the nature of the new plague, none of the journals was as yet able to say. The symptoms had not as yet been "described" by any medical authority, for it appeared that, contrary to modern precedent, the doctor himself, despite all precautions, was peculiarly subject to infection. Out of the eleven new cases in Berlin, no less than four were medical men. From the layman's point of view the symptoms were briefly as follows: Firstly, violent pains at the base of the skull, followed by a period of comparative relief which lasted from two to five hours. Then, a numbness in the extremities, followed by rapid paralysis. Death ensued in from twenty-four to forty-eight hours after the pains were first experienced. No case, as yet, was known to have recovered. A well-known physician in London gave it as his opinion that the disease was a hitherto unknown form of cerebro-spinal meningitis of unexampled virulence. He protested that the word "plague" was a false description, but that word had already been impressed on the public mind, and the disease was spoken of as the "new plague" until the end. 2 The next morning all London was reading a heavily-leaded article by Jasper Thrale. It appeared first in the Daily Post, with the announcement that it was not copyright, and all the evening papers took it up, and some of them reprinted it in its entirety. The article began by pointing out that in the recent history of civilization Europe had been subject to a long succession of pestilences. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, wrote Thrale, the Black Death, now commonly supposed to be a form of the bubonic plague, was practically endemic in England. In more recent times small-pox had been responsible for enormous mortality among all classes, and, in our own day, tuberculosis. In the two former examples, Thrale pointed out, and in many other diseases, infectious or contagious, or both, these pestilences had gradually lost virulence. By the elimination of those most susceptible to infection and incapable to resist the onslaught of the disease, and by the survival of those whose vitality was strong enough either to resist attack or to achieve recovery, mankind at last were gradually becoming immune against certain infections which had prevailed in the past. And in a greater or less degree this immunity was without doubt being obtained against a whole host of lesser ills. This comparative immunity, in fact, was one of the means of man's evolution towards a more perfect physical body. "But let us consider for a moment," wrote Thrale, "the appalling danger which threatens us when we are attacked by a pestilence which is entirely new to humanity; new, so far as we know, to the world. In the middle of the fourteenth century the Black Death is recorded in some places to have killed two-thirds of the whole population, and, notwithstanding the modern improvement in sanitation and general hygiene, there is no inherent reason why another pestilence may not appear, which may be even more deadly. And we are faced at the present moment with the awful threat that such a pestilence has appeared, the pestilence commonly known as the 'new plague.' There is no reason why we should consider the appearance as without precedent in history; there is no reason why we should regard its coming as outside the laws of common probability; finally, and most decisively, there is no reason why England should not be smitten. "According to report among the Chinese, this 'new plague' has been spasmodically epidemic in Tibet for more than a century. We have, as yet, no certain facts upon which to base any hypothesis, but is it not credible that during that time some bacterium or bacillus--hitherto harmlessly parasitic, perhaps, in the blood of lower animals--has changed its life habit? In the isolated and sparsely inhabited regions of Tibet, it is possible that for many thousand years the assumed bacterium was never bred in the blood of man; it is possible that when it first found a new host it was comparatively harmless to him, but within a hundred years it may have become so altered by new conditions that it has developed into what is practically a new species. If these theories are relatively true, it is not unlikely that this new bacterium is working out its own destruction by the destruction of its hosts. It may be that it is one of those blind alleys of evolution which reach a certain stage of development and then disappear. But meanwhile what of mankind? We know so little of the history of microscopic life. There is a whole world of evolution in process of which we have no conception, and at this stage, whether my hypothesis be a possible one or not, we are at least sure that an unknown organism--animal or vegetable--has become visible to us in its effects and may alter the whole history of mankind. "I lay stress on these aspects, because we are so hide-bound, so restricted, so conventional in our ideas that we assume, without thought, that the process of life as we know of it from a few thousand years of history can never be interrupted. In our few years of individual existence we become accustomed to certain apparent laws of cause and effect, and will not believe that there can be any exception to those assumed laws. But, now, in the face of recent evidence, it is absolutely essential that we should realize instantly and practically that we are threatened with a new factor in life, which imperils the whole human race. It is no longer safe to comfort ourselves with the belief--begotten of our vanity--that the world was necessarily made for man. It behoves us to take measures for our protection without delay, to undertake our own cause and trust no longer in any beneficent Providence that works always for our ultimate benefit. "These measures of protection are clearly indicated. We must close our doors against the invasion of the plague. Quarantine will not protect us; we must have no traffic with Europe until the danger is past. By the happy accident of our position we can become isolated from the rest of the world. We must close our doors before it is too late." 3 If the people had not been seriously scared by the sudden irruption of news on the day preceding that on which this article was published, they would have ignored Thrale's hyperboles--or laughed. But, caught in a moment of agitation and fear, a certain section of the crowd took up Thrale's suggestion, talked about the "closed door," held meetings, and started propaganda. The Press, with its genius for appreciating and following public opinion, also took up the suggestion, and was automatically divided into two sections, recognizable as Liberal and Conservative. The Times took command of the situation with a leader, in which Thrale's argument was pounded, rather than picked, to pieces; but the Daily Mail produced more effect with two special articles contributed, one by a bacteriologist, the other by a professor of economics. The first had little weight--all argument under that head was as yet founded on the most uncertain hypotheses. The second was so convincing that the less ardent supporters of the "closed door" policy were shaken in their convictions. The writer of the economic article pointed out that an England with closed doors could not feed herself for a month. He was scrupulously fair in his argument, and was at great pains to show that even if preparation was instantly made to lay in large stores of grain from Canada, tinned meats from America, and food-stuffs generally from the many places which were as yet free from any taint of plague, it would still be impossible to provide for more than a three months' isolation. Then, leaving this aspect of the question, he went on to show in detail that even if the food could be supplied, the practical cessation of our enormous foreign trade would mean the destruction of England's commerce, and he wound up with an earnest exhortation to the country at large, warning the people to beware of scaremongers, pessimists, and opportunists who had their own ends to serve, and cared nothing for the general welfare. It was an excellent article in every way; quite one of the best that the Daily Mail had ever published. And as this, too, was declared free of any copyright restrictions, it was largely circulated. The Daily Post replied next morning by pointing out that the celebrated professor of economics was nullifying all his own previous utterances on the case for Tariff Reform, but that retort carried little weight. No one cared if the professor contradicted himself; anyone, except the faddists, could see that the argument of the article was sound, in fact incontrovertible. What had to be done was to put pressure on the Local Government Board. It was true that the Daily Post, the semi-official organ of the Government, affirmed that the Board in question was alert and active, but that announcement was regarded as a cliché; what was wanted were particulars of the preventive measures that were being taken. The members of the great Gosling family, in offices, warehouses and shops followed the line of least resistance, while making some assertion of their rights as citizens. George Gosling's arguments with his crony Flack were excellently representative. "What yer think of this 'closed door' business?" asked Flack. "Goin' a bit too far, in my opinion," returned Gosling judicially. Flack's natural incredulity had inclined him in the same direction, but his colleague's certainty swung him round at once. "I ain't so sure o' that," he said. "Looks to me as things is going pretty bad." "Bad enough, I grant you," returned Gosling. "But there isn't no need for us to lose our 'eads over it. Take it all round, you know, it's pretty certain as things isn't as bad as is made out, whereas, on the other 'and, the 'closed door' policy'd mean ruin and starvation for 'undreds of thousands--there's no gettin' round that." "Better a few 'undred thousands than the 'ole male population," said Flack. "If it come to that, but it won't; no fear, not by a long chalk, it won't," replied Gosling. "What's got to be done is to get the Local Government Board to work. We've got to 'ave a regular system o' quarantine established, that's what we've got to 'ave." It did, indeed, appear the most practical form of prevention at the moment; it is hard to see what other measures could have been adopted. The supporters of the "closed door" policy soon began to lose adherents. The scheme was obviously alarmist, far-fetched and utterly impracticable.... 4 Through February and the early part of March the plague spread through Central Europe, but not with an alarming rapidity. In the second week of March, Berlin was reporting a weekly roll of over five hundred deaths attributable to this cause, and Vienna was second with between four and five hundred. In St Petersburg and Moscow the figures were no higher, and there were as yet comparatively few cases in France, and none in Spain or Portugal. Many authorities were of opinion that the mortality had reached the maximum, and that the plague would work itself out in the course of a few more weeks. Moreover it appeared that the early reports of the highly infectious character of the plague must have been grossly exaggerated, for as yet there had been not a single case in the British Isles despite the enormous traffic between England and the Continent. It is true that the strictest quarantine had been established--it had been ascertained that the period of gestation of the germ was about fifty hours--but not one single case had so far been detained in quarantine ships or hospitals. It was argued from this that the plague was not infectious at all in the ordinary sense, and only mildly contagious; that it flourished in certain centres and was not easily transferable from one centre to another. The only aspect of the thing that was seriously alarming was the horrible mortality among doctors and the specialists who were endeavouring to recognize and isolate the characteristic germ of the disease. Nine English experts who had dared martyrdom in the cause of science had gone to Berlin to make investigations, and not one of them had returned. As a consequence of this strange susceptibility of the investigator, whether medical man or bacteriologist, there was still an extraordinary ignorance of the general nature and action of the disease. Nevertheless, despite this one intimidating aspect of the plague, the general attitude in the middle of March was that the quarantine arrangements were enormously impeding trade and should be relaxed. The foreign governments were alive to the seriousness of the scourge, and were doing all in their power to prevent infection. There had been a scare, but people were calm again, now, and able to realize the extent of the earlier exaggerations. The Government passed the second reading of the English Church Disestablishment Bill by a majority of nineteen, before the Easter recess, and the Goslings, who had grown used to the plague, whose chief attitude towards it was that it was an infernal nuisance which interfered with trade, turned their attention gladly to the new topic; they all thought that a general election at that moment would result in an overwhelming Conservative majority. And as the Liberals had been in power for more than ten years, that eventuality was regarded with complacency. But at this critical moment--to the joy of the Evangelicals--the new plague set to work in earnest. VI--DISASTER 1 Russia was smitten. Once more communication was cut off from Moscow, this time by a different agent. The work of the city was paralysed. Men were falling dead in the street, and there were only women to bury them. A wholesale emigration had begun. The roads were choked with people on foot and in carriages, for the trains had ceased to run. The news filtered in by degrees: it was confirmed, contradicted and definitely confirmed again every few hours. Then came final confirmation, with the news that something approaching war had broken out--a war of defence. Germany had sent troops to the frontier to stem the tide of emigrants from smitten Russia and Poland; and Austria-Hungary was following her example. Parliament re-assembled before the Easter recess had expired. The time for more drastic measures had come, and the Premier explained to the House that it was proposed to bring in a Bill immediately to cut off communication with Europe. There can be no doubt that England was now badly scared, but centuries of protection had established a belief in security which was not easily shaken. The enthusiasts for the "closed door" policy found plenty of recruits, but on the other side there was a solid body of opinion which maintained that the danger was grossly exaggerated. And when the Evening Chronicle came out with a long leader and a backing of expert opinion, to prove that the "Closed Door" Bill--as it was commonly called--was a dodge of the Government's in order to retain office, a well-marked reaction followed against the last and terrible step of cutting off all communication with Europe; and the Conservative party was joined by some avowed Liberals who had personal interests to consider in this connexion. In committee-rooms, members of the Opposition were inclined to be jubilant: "If we can throw out the Government on this Bill we shall simply sweep the country ... all the manufacturers in the North will be with us ... even Scotland, most likely ... we should come back with a record majority...." The prospects were so magnificent that there could be no hesitation in making a party question of the Bill. No time was to be lost, for the Bill was to be rushed, it was an emergency measure, and it was proposed that it should become law within four days. Preparations were already in hand to carry out the provisions enacted. An urgent rally of the Opposition was made, and when the Bill came up for the second reading the Premier addressed a well-filled House. The House was not crowded because a large number of people, including many members of Parliament, were on their way to America. All the big liners were packed on their outward voyage and were returning, contrary to all precedent, in ballast--this ballast was exclusively food-stuffs. The Premier introduced the Bill in a speech which was remarkable for its sincerity and earnestness. He outlined the arrangements that were being made to feed the community, and showed clearly that while communication remained open with America, there was no fear of any serious shortage. Pausing for a moment on this question of intercourse with America, he made a point of the fact that American ports were already closed to emigrants from all European countries with the one exception of Great Britain, and that if a single case of plague were reported in these islands the difficulties of obtaining food-stuffs from America and the Colonies would be enormously increased. He wound up by almost imploring the House not to make a party question of so urgent and necessary a measure at a time when the safety of England was so terribly threatened. He pleaded that at this critical moment, unparalleled in the history of humanity, it was the duty of every man to sink his own personal interests, to be ready to make any sacrifice, for the sake of the community. Mr Brampton, the leader of the Opposition, then completely destroyed the undoubted effect which had been made upon the House. He did not openly speak in a party spirit, but he hinted very plainly that the Bill under consideration was a mere subterfuge to win votes. He poured contempt upon the fear of the plague, which he characterized throughout as the "Russian epidemic," and ended with the advice to keep a cool head, to preserve the British spirit of sturdy resistance instead of shutting our doors and bringing the country to commercial ruin. "Are we all cravens," he concluded, "scurrying like rabbits to our burrows at the first hint of alarm?" The further debate, although lengthy, had comparatively little influence; the House divided, and the Government was defeated by a majority of nine. 2 The news was all over the country by ten o'clock that night, and it was noticeable that a large percentage of the younger generation still regarded the danger as "rather a lark." This threat of the plague held a promise of high adventure; youth can only realize the possibility of death in its relation to others. "I say, if this bally old plague did come" ... remarked a young man of twenty-two, who was sitting with a friend in the little private bar of the "Dun Taw" Hotel. His friend drew his feet up on to the rungs of his tall stool and winked at the barmaid. "Well, go on. What if it did?" remarked that young woman. The young man considered for a moment and then said: "Those that got left would have a rare old time." "It's the women as'd get left, seems to me," replied the barmaid, and scored a point. "I say, surely you don't come from this part of the world?" was the compliment evoked by her wit. "Not me!" was the answer, "I'm a Londoner, I am. Only started yesterday, and sha'n't stay long if to-day's a fair sample. There 'asn't been a dozen customers in all day, and they were in such a 'urry to get their tonic and go that I'm sure they couldn't 'ave told you whether me 'air was black or ches'nut." Both men immediately looked at the crown of pretty fair hair which had been so churlishly slighted. "First thing I noticed about you," said one. The other, who had hardly spoken before, took the cigarette out of his mouth and remarked: "You can never get that colour with peroxide." The barmaid looked a little suspicious. "Oh, he means it all right, kid," put in the younger man quickly. "Dicky's one of the serious sort. Besides, he's in that line; travels for a firm of wholesale chemists." Dicky nodded gravely. "I could see at once it was natural," he remarked with the air of an expert. "Ah! you're one of them that keeps their eyes open," returned the barmaid approvingly, and Dicky modestly acknowledged the compliment by saying that his business necessitated close observation. "Most men are as blind as bats," continued the barmaid, and the examples she gave from her own experience led to an absorbing conversation, which was presently interrupted by the shriek of the swing door. The new-comer was a small, fair man with a neatly waxed moustache. He came up to the counter with the air of an habitué, and remarked, "Hallo! where's Cis? You're new here, aren't you?" The barmaid, recognizing the marks of a regular customer, quietly admitted that this was only her second day at the "Dun Taw." "I've been away for two months," explained the fair man, and ordered "Scotch." He was evidently in the mood for company, for he brought up a stool and, sitting a little way back from the bar, he began to address his three hearers at large. "Only came back from Europe this evening," he said, "and glad to be home, I assure you." He raised his left hand with a gesture intended to convey horror, and drank half his whisky at a gulp. Dicky turned to give his serious attention to the narrative which was plainly to follow, and somewhat ostentatiously observed the details of the new-comer's dress. Dicky had a new-found reputation to maintain. His friend looked bored and a little sulky, and tried to continue his conversation with the barmaid, but that young woman, appreciating the difference in value between a casual and a regular customer, passed a broad hint by with a smile and said: "Europe? Just fancy!" "It's a place to get out of, I assure you," said the fair man. "I've been over there for two months--Germany and Austria chiefly--but for the last fortnight I've been wasting my time. There's nothing doing." "Isn't there?" commented Dicky with great seriousness. "Oh, we're sick to death of this bally plague," put in the other young man quickly. "There's been simply nothing else in the papers for the last I don't know how long. I want to forget it." The fair man reached forward and put down his empty glass on the bar counter. "Same again, Miss," he said, and then: "We'll all be more sick of the plague before we've finished with it. It's a terror. If I was to tell you a few of the things I've seen in the past fortnight, I don't suppose you'd believe me." "That's all right; I'd believe you quick enough," returned the young man. "Point is, what's the good of getting yourself in a funk about it? Personally I don't believe it's coming to England. If it was it would have been here before this. What I say is ..." His pronouncement of opinion ceased abruptly. The fair man's behaviour riveted attention. He was gazing past the barmaid at the orderly rows of shining glasses and various shaped bottles behind her. His mouth was open. He gazed intensely, horribly. The barmaid backed nervously and looked over her shoulder. The two young men hastily rose and pushed back their stools. The same thought was in all their minds. This neat, fair man was on the verge of delirium tremens. In a moment the air of intercourse and joviality that had pervaded the little room was dissipated; in place of it had come shocked surprise and fear. There was an interval of slow desolating silence, and then the convulsive grip of the fair man shattered the glass he held, and the fragments fell tinkling to the floor. "I say, what's up?" stammered the barmaid's admirer, while the barmaid herself shrank back against the shelves and watched nervously. She had had experience. The fair man's head was being pulled slowly backwards by some invisible force. His eyes, staring straight before him, appeared to watch with fierce intensity some point that moved steadily up the wall of shelves behind the counter; up till it reached the ceiling and began to move over the ceiling toward him. Then, quite suddenly, the horrible tension was relaxed; his head fell loosely forward and he clapped both hands to the nape of his neck. He was breathing loudly in short quick gasps. "I say, do you think he's ill?" asked the young man. At the suggestion Dicky made a step towards the sufferer; his knowledge of chemistry gave him a professional air. "He's come from Europe.... Suppose it's the plague," whispered the barmaid. And at that the two young men started back. As the words were spoken realization swept upon them. Mumbling something about "get a doctor," they rushed for the door. One of them made a wide détour--he had to pass the man who sat doubled forward in his chair, frantically gripping the base of his skull. Hardly had the clatter of the swing door subsided before he fell forward on to the floor. He was groaning now, groaning detestably. The barmaid whimpered and stared. "Women don't get it." she said aloud. But she kept to her own side of the counter. Later the owner of the "Dun Taw" identified the fair man--from a distance--as Mr Stewart, of the firm of Barker and Prince. 3 Thrale's "higher forces" had shown their hand. The humble and rotund instrument of their choice had served his purpose, and he was probably the first man in London to receive the news--a delicate acknowledgment, perhaps, of his services. The telegram was addressed to the firm, but as neither of the heads of the house had arrived, Gosling opened it according to precedent. "Gosh!" was his sole exclamation, but the tone of it stirred the interest of Flack, who turned to see his colleague's rather protuberant blue eyes staring with a fishy glare at a flimsy sheet of paper which visibly trembled in the hold of two clusters of fat fingers. Flack lifted his spectacles and holding them on a level with his eyebrows, said, "Bad news?" Gosling sat down, and in the fever of the moment wiped his forehead with his snuff handkerchief, then discovered his mistake and laid the handkerchief carelessly on the desk. This infringement of his invariable practice produced even more effect upon Flack than the staring eyes and wavering fingers. Gosling might be guilty of mild histrionics, but not of such a touch as this. The utter neglect of decency exhibited by the display of that shameful bandanna could only portend calamity. "Lord's sakes, man, what's the matter?" asked Flack, still taking an observation under his spectacles. "It's come, Flack," said Gosling feebly. "It's in Scotland. Our Mr Stewart died of it in Dundee this mornin'." Flack rose from his seat and grabbed the telegram, which was brief and pregnant. "Stewart died suddenly five a.m. Feared plague. Macfie." "Tchah!" said Flack, still staring at the telegram. "'Feared plague.' Lost their 'eads, that's what they've done. Pull yourself together, man. I don't believe a word of it." Gosling swallowed elaborately, discovered his bandanna on the desk and hastily pocketed it. "Might 'a been 'eart-disease, d'you think?" he said eagerly. "We-el," remarked Flack, "I never 'eard as 'is 'eart was affected, did you?" Gosling held out his hand for the telegram, and made a further elaborate study of it, without, however, discovering any hitherto unsuspected evidence relating to the unsoundness of Stewart's heart. "It says 'feared,' of course," he remarked at last. "Macfie wouldn't have said feared if 'e'd been sure." "They'd 'ardly have mentioned plague in a telegram if they 'adn't been pretty certain, though," argued Flack. Gosling was so upset that he had to go out and get a nip of brandy, a thing he had not done since the morning after Blanche was born. The partners looked grave when they heard the news from Dundee, and London generally looked very grave indeed, when they read the full details an hour later in the Evening Chronicle. Stewart, it appeared, had come straight through from Berlin to London via Flushing and Port Victoria, and on landing in England he had managed to escape quarantine. His was not an isolated case. For some weeks it had been possible for British subjects to get past the officials. There was nothing in the regulations to allow such an evasion of the order, but it could be managed occasionally. Stewart had been told to spare no expense. The Evening Chronicle, although it made the most of its opportunity in contents bill and headlines, said that there was no cause for alarm, that these things were managed better in Great Britain than on the Continent; that the case had been isolated from the first moment the plague was recognized (about five hours before death), that the body had been burned, and that the most extensive and elaborate process of disinfection was being carried out--even the sleeping coach in which Stewart had travelled from London to Dundee twelve hours before, had been identified and burned also. London still looked grave, but was nevertheless a little inclined to congratulate itself on the thoroughness of British methods. "We'll never get it in England, you see if we do," was the remark chiefly in vogue among the great Gosling family. But twelve hours or so too late, England was beginning to regret that the Government had been defeated. It was rumoured that the Premier had broken down, had immediately resigned his office, and would not seek re-election as a private member. This rumour was definitely confirmed in the later editions of the evening papers. Mr Brampton had been summoned to Buckingham Palace and was forming a temporary ministry which was to take office. In the circumstances it was deemed inadvisable to plunge the country into a general election at that moment. 4 Mr Stewart died in the small hours of Friday morning, and the next day, Saturday, the 14th of April, was the first day of panic. The day began with comparative quiet. No further case had been notified in Great Britain, but telegraphic communication was interrupted between London and Russia, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and other continental centres. In Germany matters were growing desperate. There had been riots and looting. Military law had been declared in several towns; in some cases the mob had been fired upon. Business was at a standstill, and the plague was spreading like a fire. Between two and three hundred cases were reported from Reims, and upwards of fifty from Paris.... Business houses were being closed in the City of London, and the banks noted a marked tendency among their depositors to withdraw gold; so marked, indeed, that many banks of high standing were glad to be able to close their doors at one o'clock. It was on this Saturday morning, also, that the bottom suddenly fell out of the money market. For weeks past, prices had been falling steadily, but now they dropped to panic figures. Every one was selling, there were no buyers left. Consols were quoted at 53-1/2. The air of London was heavy with foreboding, and throughout the morning the gloom grew deeper. The depressed and worried faces to be met at every turn contrasted strangely with the brilliance of the weather. For April had come with clear skies and soft, warm winds. As the day advanced the atmosphere of depression became continually more marked, and how extraordinary was the effect upon all classes may be judged from the fact that less than 5,000 people paid to witness the third replay between Barnsley and Everton, in the semi-final of the English cup.... In London, men and women hung aimlessly about the streets waiting for the news they dreaded to hear. The theatres were deserted. The feeling of gloom was so real that many women afterwards believed that the sky had been overcast, whereas Nature was in one of her most brilliant moods. It was a few minutes past three when the pressure was exploded by the report of the final catastrophe. "Two more cases of plague in Dundee and one in Edinburgh," was the first announcement. That would have been enough to show that all the vaunted precautions had been useless, and within an hour came the notification of two further cases. Before six o'clock, eight more were notified in Dundee, three more in Edinburgh, and one in Newcastle. The new plague had reached England. It was then that the panic began. VII--PANIC 1 Gurney, when he left his office on that Saturday, was influenced by the general depression. He went to lunch at the "White Vine," in the Haymarket, quite determined to keep himself in hand, to argue himself out of his low spirits. He made a beginning at once. "Every one seems to have a fit of the blues. Ernst," he remarked to the waiter with a factitious cheerfulness. Ernst, less polite than usual, shrugged his shoulders. "There is enough cause already," he said. "Have you had bad news from Germany?" asked Gurney, feeling that he had probably been rather brutal. "Ach Gott! 's'ist bald Keiner mehr da," blubbered Ernst, and he wept without restraint as he arranged the table, occasionally wiping his eyes with his napkin. "I'm most awfully sorry," murmured the embarrassed Gurney, and retreated behind the horror of his evening paper. He found small cause for rejoicing there, however, and discarded it as soon as his lunch had been brought by the red-eyed Ernst. "I wonder what Mark Tapley would have done," Gurney reflected moodily as he attacked his chop. There were few other people in the restaurant, and they were all silent and engrossed. That dreadful cloud hung over England, the spirit of pestilence threatened to take substance, the air was full of horror that might at any moment become a visible shape of destruction. Gurney did not finish his lunch, he lighted a cigarette, left four shillings on the table, and hurried out into the air. He did not look up at the sky as he turned eastwards towards Fleet Street; no one looked up at the sky that afternoon. Heads and shoulders were burdened by an invisible weight which kept all eyes on the ground. Fleet Street was full of people who crowded round the windows of newspaper offices, not with the eagerness of a general election crowd, but with a subdued surliness which ever and again broke out in spurts of violent temper. Gurney, still struggling to maintain his composure, found himself unreasonably irritated when a motor-bus driver shouted at him to get out of the way. It seemed to Gurney that to be knocked down and run over was preferable to being shouted at. The noise of those infernal buses was unbearable, so, also, was that dreadful patter of feet upon the pavement and the dull murmur of mournful voices. Why, in the name of God, could not people keep quiet? He bumped into some one on the pavement as he scrambled out of the way of the bus, and the man swore at him viciously. Gurney responded, and then discovered that the man was known to him. "Hallo!" he said. "You?" "Hallo," responded the other. For a moment they stood awkwardly, staring; then Gurney said, "Any more news?" The man, who was a sub-editor of the Westminster Gazette, shook his head. "I'm just going back now," he said. "There was nothing ten minutes ago." "Pretty awful, isn't it?" remarked Gurney. The sub-editor shrugged his shoulders and hurried away. Presently Gurney found himself wedged among the crowd, watching the Daily Chronicle window. A few minutes after three, a young man with a very white face, fastened a type-written message to the glass. There was a rapid constriction of the crowd. Those behind, Gurney among them, could not read the message, and pressed forward. There were cries of "What is it?... I can't see.... Read it out...." Then those in front gave way slightly, a wave of eagerness agitated the mass of watchers, and the news ran back from the front. "Two more cases of plague in Dundee; one in Edinburgh." And with that the pressure of dread was suddenly dissipated, giving place to something kinetic, dynamic. Now it was fear that took the people by the throat: active, compelling fear. Men looked at each other with terror and something of hate in their eyes, the crowd broke and melted. Every man was going to his own home, possessed by an instinct to fly before it was too late. Gurney shouldered his way out, and stopped a taxi that was crawling past. "Jermyn Street," he said. The driver leaned over and pointed to the Daily Chronicle window. "What's the news?" he asked. "The plague's in Dundee and Edinburgh," said Gurney, and climbed into the cab and slammed the door. "Gawd!" muttered the driver, as he drove recklessly westwards. Sitting in the cab, finding some comfort in the feeling of headlong speed, Gurney was debating whether he would not charter the man to take him right out of London. But he must go home first for money. At the door of the house in Jermyn Street he met Jasper Thrale. 2 "Have you heard?" asked Gurney excitedly. "No. What?" said Thrale, without interest. "There are two more cases in Dundee and one in Edinburgh," said Gurney. The driver of the cab got down from his seat, and looked from Gurney to Thrale with doubt and question. Thrale nodded his head. "I knew it was sure to come," he remarked. "Better get out of this," put in the driver. "Yes, rather," agreed Gurney. "Where to?" asked Thrale. "Well, America." Thrale laughed. "They'll have it in America before you get there," he said. "It'll go there via Japan and 'Frisco." "You seem to know a lot about it," said the driver of the cab. "Do you mean to tell me there's nowhere we can go to?" persisted Gurney. Thrale smiled. "Nowhere in this world," he said. "This plague has come to destroy mankind." He spoke with a quiet assurance that carried conviction. The driver of the cab scowled. "May as well 'ave a run for my money first, then," he said, and thus gave utterance to the thought that was fermenting in many other minds. There was no hope of escape for the mass, only the rich could seek railway termini and take train for Liverpool, Southampton or any port where there was the least hope of finding some ship to take them out of Europe. That night there was panic and riot. The wealthy classes were trying to escape, the mob was trying to "get a run for its money." Yet very little real mischief was done. Two or three companies of infantry were sufficient to clear the streets, and not more than forty people in all were seriously injured.... In Downing Street the new Premier sat alone with his head in his hands, and wondered what could be done to stop the approach of the pestilence. One of the evening papers had suggested that a great line of fire should be built across the north of England. The Premier wondered whether that scheme were feasible. He had never held high office before; he did not know how to deal with these great issues. All his political life he had learned only the art of party tactics. He had learned that art very well, he was a master of debate, and he had shown a wonderful ability to judge the bent of the public mind and to make use of his judgments for party ends. But now that any action of his was divorced from its accustomed object, he was as a man suddenly forced into some new occupation. Whenever he tried to think of some means to stay the progress of the plague his mind automatically began to consider what influence the adoption of such means would have upon the general election which must soon come.... "A line of fire across the north," he was thinking, "would shut off the whole of Scotland. They would never forgive us for that. We should lose the entire Scottish vote--it's bad enough as it is." He sat up late into the night considering what policy he should put before the Cabinet. He tried honestly to consider the position apart from politics, but his mind refused to work in that way.... 3 In Jermyn Street Thrale was arguing with Gurney, trying to persuade him into a philosophic attitude. "Yes, I suppose there's absolutely nothing to be done but sit down and wait," said Gurney. "Personally," returned Thrale, "I have no intention of spending my time flying from country to country like a marked criminal. That way leads to insanity. I've seen men become animals before now under the influence of fear." "Yes, of course, you're quite right," agreed Gurney. "One must exercise self-control. After all, it's only death, and not such a terrible death at that." He got up and began to pace the room restlessly, then went to the window and looked out. Jermyn Street was almost deserted, but distant sounds of shouting came from the direction of Piccadilly. He left the window open and turned back into the room. "It's so infernally hard just to sit still and wait," he said. "If only one could do something." "I doubt, now," said Thrale, quietly, "whether one could ever have done anything. The public and the Government took my warnings in the characteristic way, the only possible way in which you could expect twentieth-century humanity to take a warning--a thrill of fear, perhaps, in some cases; frank incredulity in others; but no result either way that endured for an hour.... Belief in national and personal security, inertia outside the routine of necessary, stereotyped employment; these things are essential to the running of the machine." "I suppose they are," agreed Gurney absently He had sat down again and was sucking automatically at an extinguished pipe. "In a complex civilization," went on Thrale "any initiative on the part of the individual outside his own tiny sphere of energy is just so much grit in the machine. There are recognized methods, they may not be the best, the most efficient, but they are accepted and understood. Every clerk who has to calculate twelve pence to the shilling knows how his work would be lightened if he had only to calculate ten, but he accepts that difficulty, because he can do nothing as an individual to introduce the decimal system. And that spirit of acceptance grows upon him until the individual has the characteristics of the class. Only when a man is stirred by too great discomfort does he open his eyes to the possibility of initiative; then come labour strikes. If labour had a sufficiency of ease and comfort, if its lot were not so violently contrasted with that of even the middle-classes, labour would settle down to complacency. But the contrast is too great, and to attain that complacency of uninitiative we must level down. That was coming; that would have come if this plague...." "What was that?" asked Gurney excitedly, jumping to his feet. "Did you hear firing?" He went to the window again, and leaned out. From Piccadilly came the sound of an army of trampling feet, of confused cries and shouting. "By God, there's a riot," exclaimed Gurney. He spoke over his shoulder. Thrale joined him at the window. "Panic," he said. "Senseless, hysterical panic. It won't last." "I think I shall go out of London," said Gurney. "I'd sooner ... I'd sooner die in the country, I think." He withdrew from the window and began to pace up and down the room again. "Going to stampede with the rest of 'em?" asked Thrale. "Extraordinarily infectious thing, panic." "I don't think it's that exactly ..." hesitated Gurney. "Animal fear," said Thrale. "The terror of the wild thing threatened with the unknown. The runaway horse terrified and rushing to its own destruction. Fly, fly, fly from the threat of peril as you did once on the prairies, when to fly meant safety." "It's so infernally depressing in London," said Gurney. "All right, go and brood on death in the country," replied Thrale. "That may cheer you up a bit. But, take my advice, don't run. Walk at a snail's pace and check the least tendency to hurry. Once you begin to quicken your pace, you will find yourself hurrying desperately--and then stampede the hell of terror at your heels. After all, you know, you may survive. It isn't likely that every man will die." Gurney caught eagerly at that. "No, no, of course it isn't," he said. "But wouldn't one be much more likely to survive if one were living in the country, or by the sea--in some fairly isolated place, for example. I meant to go down to Cornwall for my holiday this year, to a little cottage on the coast about four miles from Padstow; don't you think in pure air and healthy surroundings like that, one would stand a better chance?" "Very likely," said Thrale carelessly. "But don't run. In any case you'd better wait till the middle of the week. The first rush will be over then." "Yes. Perhaps. I'll go on Wednesday, or Tuesday...." Thrale smiled grimly. "Well, good night," he said. "I'm going to bed." When he had gone, Gurney went to the window again. The sounds of riot from Piccadilly had died down to a low, confused murmur. A motor-car whizzed by along Jermyn Street, and two people passed on foot, a man and a woman; the woman was leaning heavily on the man's arm. Gurney turned once more to his pacing of the room. He was trying to realize the unrealizable fact that the world offered no refuge. For a full hour he struggled with himself, with that new, strange instinct which rose up and urged him to fly for his life. At last weary and overborne he threw himself into a chair by the dying fire and began to cry like a lost child; even as Ernst, the waiter, had cried.... 4 The panic emigration lasted until Monday evening, and then came news which checked and stayed the rush for the ports of Liverpool, Southampton and Queenstown. The plague was already in America. It had come, as Thrale had prophesied from the West. At the docks many of those favoured emigrants who had secured berths, hesitated; if it was to be a choice between death in America and death in England, they preferred to die at home. Yet, even on Tuesday morning, when doubt as to the coming of the plague was no longer possible, when Dundee could only give approximate figures of the seizures in that town, reporting them as not less than a thousand, when it was evident that the whole of Scotland was becoming infected with incredible rapidity, and two cases were notified as far south as Durham, there remained still an enormous body of people who stoutly maintained that, bad as things were, the danger was grossly exaggerated, who believed that the danger would soon pass, and who, steadfast to the habits of a lifetime, continued their routine wherever it was possible so to do, determined to resist to the last. To this body, possibly some two-fifths of the whole urban population, was due the comparative maintenance of law and order. In face of the growing destitution due to the wholesale closing of factories, warehouses and offices, necessitated by the now complete cessation of foreign trade and to the hoarding of food stores and gold which was already so marked as to have seriously affected the commerce not dependent on foreign sellers and buyers, a semblance of ordinary life was still maintained. Newspapers were issued, trains and 'buses were running, theatres and music-halls were open, and many normal occupations were carried on. Yet everything was infected. It was as if the cloak of civilization was worn more loosely. Crime was increasing and justice was relaxed. Robberies of food were so common that there was no place for the confinement of those who were convicted. Shopkeepers were becoming at once more reliant upon their own defences, and less scrupulous in their dealings with bona-fide customers. No longer could the protection of the State be exclusively relied upon, the citizen was becoming lost in the individual. Public opinion was being resolved into individual opinion; and with the failing of the great restraint every man was developing an unsuspected side of his character. Thrown upon his own resources, he became continually less civilized, more conscious of possibilities to fulfill long-thwarted tendencies and desires; he began to understand that when it is a case of sauve qui peut, the weakest are trampled under foot. So the cloak of civilization gaped and showed the form of the naked man, with all its blemishes and deformities. And women blenched and shuddered. For woman, as yet, was little, if at all, altered in character by the fear that was brutalizing man. Her faith in the intrinsic rectitude of the beloved conventions was more deeply rooted. Moreover woman fears the strictures of woman, more than man fears the judgments of man. VIII--GURNEY IN CORNWALL 1 Gurney's alternative to flying from the plague was to run away from himself. He shirked the issue in his conversations with Thrale, shuffled, sophisticated, and in a futile endeavour to convince his companion, convinced himself that his reasoning was sound and his motive unprejudiced. It was not until the following Thursday, however, that he took train to Cornwall. He had succeeded in realizing between two and three hundred pounds in gold, and this he took with him. He intended to lay in stores of flour, sugar and other primary necessities; to buy and keep two or three cows, to rear chickens, to grow as much garden produce as possible, especially potatoes; and generally to provide against the coming scarcity of food and the cessation of transport. The bungalow on the shores of Constantine Bay, to which he departed, was a place well suited to the carrying out of these prudent arrangements. It belonged to a friend of his, who was rich enough to indulge his whims, and who had spent a considerable sum of money in building the place and enclosing ground, but who rarely occupied the bungalow himself, and was too careless to bother about letting it. Gurney had the keys in his possession. When he had asked his friend for permission to spend his summer holiday there, he had been told to use the place as if it were his own. "Jolly good thing for me, you know," his friend had said. "Keep it dry and all that." Gurney was not an idle man. Arrived at his bungalow, he lost no time in carrying out the arrangements he had schemed, and for nearly three weeks he was so absorbed in this work, in learning new occupations and perfecting his plan, that he did, indeed, achieve his purpose of running away from himself. He became imbued with a new feeling of security; he received neither letters nor papers from the outside, and the old labourer who assisted him in setting potatoes, who taught him to milk a cow and instructed him generally in the primitive arts of self-supporting toil, seemed to regard all rumours of the new plague which filtered through to the village of St Merryn as some foreign nonsense which had little bearing on life in the county of Cornwall, as represented by the twenty-five or thirty square miles which were to him all the essential world. Gurney began to believe that the plague would never cross the Tamar, and one day in early May, when his provisions against a siege were practically completed, he was stirred to attempt a journey across the peninsula in order to visit an acquaintance in East Looe. Gurney had become conscious of a longing for some companionship. Old Hawken was very good at cows and potatoes, but he was rather deaf and his range of ideas was severely restricted. 2 From Padstow to Looe is not an ideal journey by rail at the best of times, involving as it does, a change of train at Wadebridge, Bodmin Road and Liskeard; but Gurney was in no hurry, and the conversations he overheard in his compartment were not destructive of his new-found complacency. There was, indeed, some mention of the plague, but only in relation to the scarcity of food supply and its effect on trade. One passenger, very obviously a farmer, was congratulating himself that he was getting higher prices for stock than he had ever known, and that as luck would have it he had sown an unusual number of acres with wheat that year. "I'll be gettun sixty or seventy a quarter, sure 'nough," he boasted. Dickenson--Gurney's friend in Looe--regarded the matter more seriously, but he, too, seemed untouched by any fear of personal infection. He was an ardent Liberal, and his chief cause for concern seemed to be that the plague should have come at a time when so much progress was being made with legislation. He was, also, very distressed at the reports of poverty and starvation which abounded, and at the terrible blow to trade generally. But he seemed hopeful that the trouble would pass and be followed by a new era of enlightened government, founded on sound Liberal principles. Gurney stayed the night and the greater part of the next day at Looe. 3 On his return journey he had to wait at Liskeard to pick up the main line train for London, which would take him to Bodmin Road. It was a glorious May evening. The day had been hot, but now there was a cool breeze from the sea, and the long shadow from the high bank of the cutting enwrapped the whole station in a pleasant twilight. Gurney, deliberately pacing the length of the platform, was conscious of physical vigour and a great enjoyment of life. He had an imaginative temperament, and in his moments of exaltation he found the world both interesting and beautiful, an entirely desirable setting for the essential Gurney. So he strolled up and down the platform, regarded any female figure with interest, and was in no way concerned that the train was already an hour late. He had expected it to be late. His own train from Looe, for no particular reason, had been half an hour late. If he missed his connexion at Wadebridge he would only have some seven or eight miles to walk. Fifteen or twenty other people were waiting on the down platform, and presently Gurney became conscious that his fellow-passengers were no longer detached into parties of two and three, but were collected in groups, discussing, apparently, some matter of peculiar interest. Gurney had been lost in his dreams and had hardly noticed the passage of time. He looked at his watch and found that the train was now two hours overdue. The sun had set, but there was still light in the sky. A man detached himself from one of the groups and Gurney approached him. "Two hours late," he remarked by way of introducing himself, and looked at his watch again. The man nodded emphatically. "Funny thing is," he said, "that they've had no information at the office. The stationmaster generally gets advice when the train leaves Plymouth." "Good lord," said Gurney. "Do you mean to say that the train hasn't got to Plymouth yet?" "Looks like it," said the stranger. "They say it's the plague. It's dreadfully bad in London, they tell me." "D'you mean it's possible the train won't come in at all?" asked Gurney. "Oh! I should hardly think that," replied the other. "Oh, no, I should hardly think that, but goodness knows when it will come. Very awkward for me. I want to get to St Ives. It's a long way from here. Have you far to go?" "Well, Padstow," said Gurney. "Padstow!" echoed the stranger. "That's a good step." "Further than I want to walk." "I should say. Thirty miles or so, anyway?" "About that," agreed Gurney. "I wonder where one could get any information. "It's very awkward," was all the help the stranger had to offer. Gurney crossed the line and invaded the stationmaster's office. "Sorry to trouble you," he said, "but do you think this train's been taken off, for any reason?" "Oh, it 'asn't been taken off," said the stationmaster with a wounded air. "It may be a bit late." Gurney smiled. "It's something over two hours behind now, isn't it?" he said. "Well, I can't 'elp it, can I?" asked the stationmaster. "You'll 'ave to 'ave patience." "You've had no advice yet from Plymouth?" persisted Gurney, facing the other's ill-temper. "No, I 'aven't; something's gone wrong with the wire. We can't get no answer," returned the stationmaster. "Now, if you please, I 'ave my work to do." Gurney returned to the down platform and joined a group of men, among whom he recognized the man he had spoken to a few minutes before. The afterglow was dying out of the sky, in the south-west a faint young moon was setting behind the high bank of the cutting. A porter had lighted the station lamps, but they were not turned full on. "The stationmaster tells me that something has gone wrong with the telegraphic communication," said Gurney, addressing the little knot of passengers collectively. "He can't get any answer it seems." "Been an accident likely," suggested some one. "Or the engine-driver's got the plague," said another. "They'd have put another man on." "If they could find one." "If we ain't careful we shall be gettin' the plague down 'ere." After all why not? The horrible suggestion sprang up in Gurney's mind with new force. That remote city seemed suddenly near. He saw in imagination the train leaving Paddington, and only a journey of six or seven hours divided that departure from its arrival at Liskeard. It might come in at any moment, bearing the awful infection. Why should he wait? There was an inn near the station. He might find a conveyance there. "Constantine Bay?" questioned the landlord. "It's near St Merryn," said Gurney, but still the landlord shook his head. "Not far from Padstow," explained Gurney. "Pard-stow!" exclaimed the landlord on a rising note. "Drive over to Pard-stow at this time o' night?" He appeared to think that Gurney was joking. "Well, Bodmin, then," suggested Gurney. "Aw, why not take the train?" asked the landlord. Gurney shrugged his shoulders. "The train doesn't seem to be coming," he said. "Bad job, that," answered the landlord. "Been an accident, sure 'nough; this new plague or something." He was evidently prepared to accept the matter philosophically. "You can't drive me then?" asked Gurney. The landlord shook his head with a grin. He was inclined to look upon this foreigner as rather more foolish than the majority of his kind. Gurney came out of the little inn, and looked down into the station. The number of waiting passengers seemed to be decreasing, but the light was so dim that he could not see into the shadows. "I must keep hold of myself," he was saying. "I mustn't run." A man was coming up the steep incline towards him, and Gurney moved slowly to meet him. He found that it was the stranger he had spoken to on the platform. "Any news?" asked Gurney. "Yes, they've got a message through from Saltash," replied the stranger. "It's the plague right enough. They say they don't know when there'll be another train...." 4 Days grew into weeks, and still there were no trains. Trade was at a standstill, and the prices of home produce mounted steadily. Fish there was, but not in great abundance, and the towns inland, such as Truro and Bodmin, organized a motor service with coast fishing villages, a service which only lasted for a week, by reason of the failure of the petrol supply. After that there was a less effective horse service. Within three weeks after that last train arrived from outside, a new system of exchange was coming into vogue. In this little congeries of communities in Cornwall, men were beginning to learn the uselessness of gold, silver and bronze coins as tokens. Credit had collapsed, and a system of barter was being introduced, mainly between farmer and fisherman. In time it was possible that Cornwall might have become a self-supporting community, for its proportionately few inhabitants were rapidly being depleted by want and starvation; but, although it was the last place in the British Isles to become infected, the plague came there, too, in the end. A steamer sent out from Cardiff on a plundering expedition carried the plague to the Scillies, and a fishing vessel from St Ives carried it on to Newlyn.... IX--THE DEVOLUTION OF GEORGE GOSLING 1 The progress of the plague through London and the world in general was marked, in the earlier stages, by much the same developments as are reported of the plague of 1665. The closed houses, the burial pits, the deserted streets, the outbreaks of every kind of excess, the various symptoms of fear, cowardice, fortitude and courage, evidenced little change in the average of humanity between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries. The most notable difference during these earlier stages was in the enormously increased rapidity with which the population of London was reduced to starvation point. Even before the plague had reached England, want had become general, so general, indeed, as to have demonstrated very clearly the truth of the great economist's contention that England could not exist for three months with closed doors. The coming of the plague threw London on to its own very limited resources. That vast city, which produced nothing but the tokens of wealth, and added nothing to the essentials that support life, was instantly reduced to the state of Paris in the winter of 1870-71; with the difference, however, that London's population could be decreased rapidly by emigration, and was, also, even more rapidly decreased by pestilence. Yet there was a large section of the population which clung with blind obstinacy to the only life it knew how to live. There was, for instance, George Gosling, more fortunate in many respects than the average citizen, who clung desperately to his house in Wisteria Grove until forced out of it by the lack of water. On the ninth day after the first coming of the plague to London--it appeared simultaneously in a dozen places and spread with fearful rapidity--Gosling broke one of the great laws he had hitherto observed with such admirable prudence. The offices and warehouse in Barbican had been shut up (temporarily, it was supposed), and the partners had disappeared from London. But Gosling had a duplicate set of keys, and, inspired by the urgency of his family's need, he determined to dare a journey into the City in order to borrow (he laid great stress on the word) a few necessaries of life from the well-stored warehouse of his firm. In this scheme, planned with some shrewdness, he co-operated with a friend, a fellow-sidesman at the Church of St John the Evangelist. This friend was a coal merchant, and thus fortunately circumstanced in the possession of wagons and horses. These two arranged the details of their borrowing expedition between them. Economically, it was a deal on the lines of the revived methods of exchange and barter. Gosling was willing to exchange certain advantages of knowledge and possession for the hire of wagons and horses. It was decided, for obvious reasons, to admit no other conspirator into the plot, and Boost, the coal merchant, drove one cart and Gosling drove the other. Perhaps it should rather be said that he led the other, for, after a preliminary trial, he decided that he was safer at the horses' heads than behind their tails. The raid was conducted with perfect success. Boost had a head for essentials. The invaluable loads of tinned meats, fruits and vegetables were screened by tarpaulins from the possibly too envious eyes of hungry passers-by--quite a number of vagrants were to be seen in the streets on that day--and Boost and Gosling, disguised in coal-begrimed garments, made the return journey lugubriously calling, "Plague, plague," the cry of the drivers of the funeral carts which had even then become necessary. Their only checks were the various applications they received for the cartage of corpses; applications easily put on one side by pointing to the piled-up carts--they had spent six laborious hours in packing them. "No room; no room," they cried, and on that day the applicants who accosted Boost and Gosling were not the only ones who had to wait for the disposal of their dead. Gosling arrived at Wisteria Grove, hot and outwardly jubilant, albeit with a horrible fear lurking in his mind that he had been in dangerous proximity to those tendered additions to his load. His booty was stored in one of the downstairs rooms--with the assistance of Mrs Gosling and the two girls they managed the unpacking without interruption in two hours and a half--and then, with boarded windows and locked doors, the Goslings sat down to await the passing of horror. Boost died of the plague forty-eight hours after the great adventure, but as he had a wife and four daughters his plunder was not wasted. 2 For nearly a fortnight after the raid the Goslings lay snug in their little house in Wisteria Grove, for they, in company with the majority of English people at this time, had not yet fully appreciated the fact that women were almost immune from infection. In all, not more than eight per cent of the whole female population was attacked, and of this proportion the mortality was almost exclusively among women over fifty years of age. When the first faint rumours of the plague had come to Europe, this curious, almost unprecedented, immunity of women had been given considerable prominence. It had made good copy, theories on the subject had appeared, and the point had aroused more interest than that of the mortality among males--infectious diseases were commonplace enough; this new phase had a certain novelty and piquancy. But the threat of European infection had overwhelmed the interest in the odd predilection of the unknown bacterium, and the more vital question had thrown this peculiarity into the background. Thus the Goslings and most other women feared attack no less than their husbands, brothers and sons, and found justification for their fears in the undoubted fact that women had died of the plague. The Goslings had always jogged along amiably enough; their home life would have passed muster as a tolerably happy one. The head of the family was out of the house from 8.15 a.m. to 7.15 p.m. five days of the week, and it was only occasionally in the evening of some long wet Sunday that there was any open bickering. Now, confinement in that little house, aggravated by fear and by the absence of any interest or diversion coming from outside, showed the family to one another in new aspects. Before two days had passed the air was tense with the suppressed irritation of these four people, held together by scarcely any tie other than that of a conventional affection. By the third day the air was so heavily charged that some explosion was inevitable. It came early in the morning. Gosling had run out of tobacco, and he thought in the circumstances that it would be wiser to send Blanche or Millie than to go himself. So, with an air of exaggerated carelessness, he said: "Look here, Millie, my gel, I wish you'd just run out and see if you can get me any terbaccer." "Not me," replied Millie, with decision. "And why not?" asked Gosling. Millie shrugged her shoulders, and called her sister, who was in the passage. "I say, B., father wants us to go out shopping for him. Are you on?" Blanche, duster in hand, appeared at the doorway. "Why doesn't he go himself?" she asked. "Because," replied her father, getting very red, and speaking with elaborate care, "men's subject to the infection and women is not." "That's all my eye," returned Millie. "Lots of women have got it." "It's well known," said Gosling, still keeping himself in hand, "a matter of common knowledge, that women is comparatively immune." "Oh, that's a man's yarn, that is," said Blanche, "just to save themselves. We all know what men are--selfish brutes!" "Are you going to fetch me that terbaccer or are you not?" shouted Mr Gosling suddenly. "No, we aren't," said Millie, defiantly. "It isn't safe for girls to go about the streets, let alone the risk of infection." She had heard her father shout before, and she was not, as yet, at all intimidated. "Well, then, I say you are!" shouted her father. "Lazy, good-for-nothing creatures, the pair of you! 'Oose paid for everything you've eat or drunk or wore ever since you was born? An' now you won't even go an errand." Then, seeing the ready retort rising to his daughters' lips, he grew desperate, and, advancing a step towards them, he said savagely: "If you don't go, I'll find a way to make yer!" This was a new aspect, and the two girls were a little frightened. Natural instinct prompted them to scream for their mother. She had been listening at the top of the stairs, and she answered the call for help with great promptitude. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Gosling," she said, on a high note. "The streets isn't safe for gels, as you know well enough; and why should my gels risk their lives for the sake of your nasty, dirty, wasteful 'abit of smoking, I should like to know?" Gosling's new-found courage was evaporating at the attack of this third enemy. He had been incensed against his daughters, but he had not yet overcome the habit of giving in to his wife, for the sake of peace. She had managed him very capably for a quarter of a century, but on the occasions when she had found it necessary to use what she called the "rough side of her tongue" she had demonstrated very clearly which of the two was master. "I should have thought I might 'a been allowed a little terbaccer," he said, resentfully. "'Oo risked his life to lay in provisions, I should like to know? An' it's a matter o' common knowledge as women is immune from this plague." "And Mrs Carter, three doors off, carried out dead of it the day before yesterday!" remarked Mrs Gosling, triumphantly. "Oh, 'ere and there, a case or two," replied her husband. "But not one woman to a thousand men gets it, as every one knows." "And how do you know I mightn't be the one?" asked Millie, bold now under her mother's protection. For that morning, the matter remained in abeyance; but Gosling, muttering and grumbling, nursed his injury and meditated on the fact that his daughters had been afraid of him. Things were altered now. There was no convention to tie his hands. He would work himself into a protective passion and defy the three of them. Also, there was an unopened bottle of whisky in the sideboard. Nevertheless, he would have put off the trial of his strength if he had had to seek an opportunity. He was, as yet, too civilized to take the initiative in cold blood. The opportunity, however, soon presented itself in that house. The air had been little cleared by the morning's outbreak, and before evening the real explosion came. A mere trifle originated it--a warning from Gosling that their store of provisions would not last for ever, and a sharp retort from Millie to the effect that her father did not stint himself, followed by a reminder from Mrs Gosling that the raid might be repeated. "Oh! yes, you'd be willing enough for me to die of the plague, I've no doubt!" broke out Gosling. "I can walk six mile to get you pervisions, but you can't go to the corner of the street for my terbaccer." "Pervisions is necessary, terbaccer ain't," said Mrs Gosling. She was not a clever woman. She judged this to be the right opportunity to keep her husband in his place, and relied implicitly on the quelling power of her tongue. Her intuitions were those of the woman who had lived all her life in a London suburb; they did not warn her that she was now dealing with a specimen of half-decivilized humanity. "Oh! ain't it?" shouted Gosling, getting to his feet. His face was purple, and his pale blue eyes were starting from his head. "I'll soon show you what's necessary and what ain't, and 'oose master in this 'ouse. And I say terbaccer is necessary, an' what's more, one o' you three's goin' to fetch it quick! D'ye 'ear--one--o'--you--three!" This inclusion of Mrs Gosling was, indeed, to declare war. Millie and Blanche screamed and backed, but their mother rose to the occasion. She did not reserve herself; she began on her top note; but Gosling did not allow her to finish. He strode over to her and shook her by the shoulders, shouting to drown her strident recriminations. "'Old your tongue! 'old your tongue!" he bawled, and shook her with increasing violence. He was feeling his power, and when his wife crumpled up and fell to the floor in shrieking hysterics, he still strode on to victory. Taking the cowed and terrified Millie by the arm, he dragged her along the passage, unlocked and opened the front door and pushed her out into the street. "And don't you come back without my terbaccer!" he shouted. "How much?" quavered the shrinking Millie. "'Alf-a-crown's worth," replied Gosling fiercely, and tossed the coin down on the little tiled walk that led up to the front door. After Millie had gone he stood at the door for a moment, thankful for the coolness of the air on his heated face. "I got to keep this up," he murmured to himself, with his first thought of wavering. Behind him he heard the sound of uncontrolled weeping and little cries of the "first time in twenty-four years" and "what the neighbours'll think, I don't know." "Neighbours," muttered Gosling, contemptuously, "there aren't any neighbours--not to count." A distant sound of slow wheels caught his ear. He listened attentively, and there came to him the remote monotonous chant of a dull voice crying: "Plague! Plague!" He stepped in quickly and closed the door. 3 Millie found the Kilburn High Road deserted. No traffic of any kind was to be seen in the street, and the rare foot-passengers, chiefly women, had all a furtive air. Starvation had driven them out to raid. No easy matter, as Millie soon found, for all shutters were down, and in many cases shop-fronts were additionally protected by great sheets of strong hoarding. Millie, recovering from her fright, was growing resentful. Her little conventional mind was greatly occupied by the fact that she was out in the High Road wearing house-shoes without heels, in an old print dress, and with no hat to hide the carelessness of her hair-dressing. At the corner of Wisteria Grove she stopped and tried to remedy this last defect; she had red hair, abundant and difficult to control. The sight of the deserted High Road did not inspire her with self-confidence; she still feared the possibility of meeting some one who might recognize her. How could one account for one's presence in a London thoroughfare at seven o'clock on a bright May evening in such attire? Certainly not by telling the truth. The air was wonderfully clear. Coal was becoming very scarce, and few fires had been lighted that day to belch forth their burden of greasy filth into the atmosphere. The sun was sinking, and Millie instinctively clung to the shadow of the pavement on the west side of the road. She, too, slunk along with the evasive air that was common to the few other pedestrians, the majority of them on this same shadowed pavement. That warm, radiant light on the houses opposite seemed to hold some horror for them. So preoccupied was Millie with her resentment that she wandered for two or three hundred yards up the road without any distinct idea of what she was seeking. When realization of the futility of her search came to her, she stopped in the shadow of a doorway. "What is the good of going on?" she argued. "All the shops are shut up." But the thought of her father in his new aspect of muscular tyrant intimidated her. She dared not return without accomplishing her errand. "I'll have another look, anyway," she said; and then: "Who'd have thought he was such a brute?" She rubbed the bruise on her arm; her mouth was twisted into an ugly expression of spiteful resentment. Her thoughts were busy with plans of revenge even as she turned to prosecute her search for the tyrant's tobacco. Here and there shops had been forcibly, burglariously entered, plate-glass windows smashed, and interiors cleared of everything eatable; the debris showed plainly enough that these rifled shops had all belonged to grocers or provision merchants. Into each of these ruins Millie stared curiously, hoping foolishly that she might find what she sought. She ventured into one and carried away a box of soap--they were running short of soap at home. A sense of moving among accessible riches stirred within her, a desire for further pillage. She came at last to a shop where the shutters were still intact, but the door hung drunkenly on one hinge. A little fearfully she peered in and discovered that fortune had been kind to her. The shop had belonged to a tobacconist, and the contents were almost untouched--there had been more crying needs to satisfy in the households of raiders than the desire for tobacco. It was very dark inside, and for some seconds Millie stared into what seemed absolute blackness, but as her eyes became accustomed to the gloom, she saw the interior begin to take outline, and when she moved a couple of steps into the place and allowed more light to come in through the doorway, various tins, boxes and packets in the shelves behind the counter were faintly distinguishable. Once inside, the spirit of plunder took hold of her, and she began to take down boxes of cigars and cigarettes and packets of tobacco, piling them up in a heap on the counter. But she had no basket in which to carry the accumulation she was making, and she was feeling under the counter for some box into which to put her haul, when the shadows round her deepened again into almost absolute darkness. Cautiously she peered up over the counter and saw the silhouette of a woman standing in the doorway. For ten breathless seconds Millie hung motionless, her eyes fixed on the apparition. She was very civilized still, and she was suddenly conscious of committing a crime. She feared horribly lest the figure in the doorway might discover Millicent Gosling stealing tobacco. But the intruder, after recognizing the nature of the shop's contents, moved away with a sigh. Millie heard her dragging footsteps shuffle past the window. That scare decided her movements. She hastily looped up the front of her skirt, bundled into it as much plunder as she could conveniently carry, and made her way out into the street again. She was nearly at the corner of Wisteria Grove before she was molested, and then an elderly woman came suddenly out of a doorway and laid a hand on Millie's arm. "Whacher got?" asked the woman savagely. Millie, shrinking and terrified, displayed her plunder. "Cigars," muttered the woman. "Whacher want with cigars?" She opened the boxes and stirred up the contents of Millie's improvised bundle in an eager search for something to eat. "Gawd's truth! yer must be crazy, yer thievin' little slut!" she grumbled, and pushed the girl fiercely from her. Millie made good her escape, dropping a box of cigars in her flight. Her one thought now was the fear of meeting a policeman. In three minutes she was beating fiercely on the door of the little house in Wisteria Grove, and, disregarding her father's exclamations of pleased surprise when he let her in, she tumbled in a heap on to the mat in the passage. Gosling's first declaration of male superiority had been splendidly successful. 4 A few minutes after Millie's return, Mrs Gosling, red-eyed and timidly vicious, interrupted her husband's perfect enjoyment of the long-desired cigar by the announcement: "The gas is off!" Gosling got up, struck a match, and held it to the sitting-room burner. The match burned steadily. There was no pressure even of air in the pipes. "Turned off at the meter!" snapped Gosling. "'Ere, lemme go an' see!" He spoke with the air of the superior male, strong in his comprehension of the mechanical artifices which so perplex the feminine mind. Mrs Gosling sniffed, and stood aside to let him pass. She had already examined the meter. "Well, we got lamps!" snarled Gosling when he returned. He had always preferred a lamp to read by in the evening. "No oil," returned Mrs Gosling, gloomily. She'd teach him to shake her! Gosling meditated. His parochial mind was full of indignation. Vague thoughts of "getting some one into trouble for this"--even of that last, desperate act of coercion, writing to the papers about it--flitted through his mind. Plainly something must be done. "'Aven't you got any candles?" he asked. "One or two. They won't last long," replied his studiously patient partner. "Well, we'll 'ave to use them to-night and go to bed early," was Gosling's final judgment. His wife left the room with a shrug of forbearing contempt. When she had gone, the head of the house went upstairs and peered out into the street. The sun had set, and an unprecedented mystery of darkness was falling over London. The globes of the tall electric standards, catching a last reflection from the fading sky, glimmered faintly, but were not illuminated from within by any fierce glare of violet light. Darkness and silence enfolded the great dim organism that sprawled its vast being over the earth. The spirit of mystery caught Gosling in its spell. "All dark," he murmured, "and quiet! Lord! how still it is!" Even in his own house there was silence. Downstairs, three injured, resentful women were talking in whispers. Gosling, still sucking his cigar, stood entranced, peering into the darkness; he had ventured so far as to throw up the sash. "It's the stillness of death!" he muttered. Then he cocked his head on one side, for he caught the sound of distant shouting. Somewhere in the Kilburn Road another raid was in progress. "No light," murmured Gosling, "and no fire!" An immediate association suggested itself. "By gosh! and no water!" he added. For some seconds he contemplated with fearful awe the failure of the great essential of life. In the cistern room he was reassured by the sound of a delicious trickle from the ball-cock. "Still going," he said to himself; "but we'll 'ave to be careful. Surely they'll keep the water goin', though; whatever 'appens, they'd surely keep the water on?" 5 Nothing but the failure of the water could have driven them from Wisteria Grove. Half-a-dozen times every day Gosling would climb up to the top of the house to reassure himself. And at last came the day when a dreadful silence reigned under the slates, when no delicious tinkle of water gave promise of maintained security from water famine. "It'll come on again at night," said Gosling to himself. "We'll 'ave to be careful, that's all." He went downstairs and issued orders that no more water was to be drawn that day. "Well, we must wash up the breakfast things," was his wife's reply. "You mustn't wash up nothing," said Gosling, "not one blessed thing. It's better to go dirty than die o' thirst. Hevery drop o' the water in that cistern must be saved for drinkin'." Mrs Gosling noisily put down the kettle she was holding. "Oh! very well, my lord!" she remarked, sarcastically. She looked at her two daughters with a twist of her mouth. There were only two sides in that house; the women were as yet united against the common foe. When Gosling, fatuously convinced of his authority, had gone, his wife quietly filled the kettle and proceeded with her washing up. "Your father thinks 'e knows everything these days," remarked the mother to her allies. There was much whispering for some time. Gosling spent most of the day in the roof, but not until the afternoon did he realize that the cistern was slowly being emptied. His first thought was that one of the pipes leaked, his second that it was time to make a demonstration of force. He found a walking-stick in the hall.... But even when that precious half-cistern of water was only called upon to supply the needs of thirst, and the Goslings, sinking further into the degradation of savagedom, slunk furtive and filthy about the gloomy house, it became evident that a move must be made sooner or later. Two alternatives were presented: they might go north and east to the Lea, or south to the Thames. Gosling chose the South. He knew Putney; he had been born there. He knew nothing of Clapton and its neighbourhood. So one bright, clear day at the end of May, the Goslings set out on their great trek. The head of the house, driven desperate by fear of thirst, raided his late partner's coal sheds and found one living horse and several dead ones. The living horse was partly revived by water from an adjacent butt, and the next day it was harnessed to a coal cart and commandeered to convey the Goslings' provisions to Putney. It died half-a-mile short of their destination, but they were able, by the exercise of their united strength, to get the cart and its burden down to the river. They found an empty house without difficulty, but they had an unpleasant half-hour in removing what remained of one of the previous occupants. Gosling hoped it was not a case of plague. As the body was that of a woman, and terribly emaciated, there were some grounds for his optimism. Gosling was in a state of some bewilderment. When water had been fetched in buckets from the river, and the three women had explored, criticized and sniffed over their new home somewhat in the manner of strange cats, the head of the house settled down to a cigar and a careful consideration of his perplexities. In the first place, he wondered why those horses of Boost's had not been used for food; in the second, he wondered why he had not seen a single man during the whole of the long trek from Brondesbury to Putney. By degrees an unbelievable explanation presented itself: no men were left. He remembered that the few needy-looking women he had seen had looked at him curiously; in retrospect he fancied their regard had had some quality of amazement. Gosling scratched the bristles of his ten-days'-old beard and smoked thoughtfully. He almost regretted that he had stared so fiercely and threateningly at every chance woman they had seen; he might have got some news. But the whole journey had been conducted in a spirit of fear; they had been defending their food, their lives; they had been primitive creatures ready to fight desperately at the smallest provocation. "No man left," said Gosling to himself, and was not convinced. If that indeed were the solution of his perplexity, he was faced with an awful corollary; his own time would come. He thought of Barbican, E.C., of Flack, of Messrs Barker and Prince, of the office staff, and the office itself. He had not been able to rid his mind of the idea that in a few weeks he would be back in the City again. He had several times rehearsed his surprise when he should be told of the depredations in the warehouse; he had wondered only yesterday if he dared go to the office in his beard. But to-night the change of circumstance, the breaking up of old associations, was opening his eyes to new horizons. There might never be an office again for him to go to. If he survived--and he was distinctly hopeful on that score--he might be almost the only man left in London; there might not be more than a few thousand in the whole of England, in Europe.... For a time he dwelt on this fantastic vision. Who would do the work? What work would there be to do? "Got to get food," murmured Gosling, and wondered vaguely how food was "got" when there were no shops, no warehouses, no foreign agents. His mind turned chiefly to meat, since that had been his trade. "'Ave to rear sheep and cattle, I suppose," said Gosling. As an afterthought he added: "An' grow wheat." He sighed heavily. He realized that he had no knowledge on the subject of rearing cattle and growing wheat; he also realized that he was craving for ordinary food again--milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables. He had a nasty-looking place on his leg which he rightly attributed to unwholesome diet. 6 After forty-eight hours' residence in the new house, Gosling began to pluck up his courage and to dare the perils of the streets. He was beginning to have faith in his luck, to believe that the plague had passed away and left him untouched. And as day succeeded day he ventured further afield; he went in search of milk, eggs and vegetables, but he only found young nettles, which he brought home and helped to eat when they had been boiled over a wood fire. They were all glad to eat nettles, and were the better for them. Occasionally he met women on these excursions, and stayed to talk to them. Always they had the same tale to tell--their men were dead, and themselves dying of starvation. One day at the beginning of June he went as far as Petersham, and there at the door of a farmhouse he saw a fine, tall young woman. She was such a contrast to the women he usually met on his expeditions that he paused and regarded her with curiosity. "What do you want?" asked the young woman, suspiciously. "I suppose you 'aven't any milk or butter or eggs to sell?" asked Gosling. "Sell?" echoed the girl, contemptuously. "What 'ave you got to give us as is worth food?" "Well, money," replied Gosling. "Money!" came the echo again. "What's the good of money when there's nothing to buy with it? I wouldn't sell you eggs at a pound apiece." Gosling scratched his beard--it looked quite like a beard by this time. "Rum go, ain't it?" he asked, and smiled. His new acquaintance looked him up and down, and then smiled in return, "You're right," she said. "You're the first man I've seen since father died, a month back." "'Oo's livin' with you?" asked Gosling, pointing to the house. "Mother and sister, that's all." "'Ard work for you to get a livin', I suppose?" "So, so. We're used to farm-work. The trouble's to keep the other women off." "Ah!" replied Gosling reflectively, and the two looked at one another again. "You 'ungry?" asked the girl. "Not to speak of," replied Gosling. "But I'm fair pinin' for a change o' diet. Been livin' on tinned things for five weeks or more." "Come in and have an egg," said the girl. "Thank you," said Gosling, "I will, with pleasure." They grew friendly over that meal--two eggs and a glass of milk. He ate the eggs with butter, but there was no bread. It seemed that the young woman's mother and sister were at work on the farm, but that one of them had always to stay at home and keep guard. They discussed the great change that had come over England, and wondered what would be the end of it; and after a little time, Gosling began to look at the girl with a new expression in his pale blue eyes. "Ah! Hevrything's changed," he said. "Nothin' won't be the same any more, as far as we can see. There's no neighbours now, f'rinstance, and no talk of what's going on--or anythin'." The girl looked at him thoughtfully. "What we miss is some man to look after the place," she said. "We're robbed terrible." Gosling had not meant to go as far as that. He was not unprepared for a pleasant flirtation, now that there were no neighbours to report him at home, but the idea that he could ever separate himself permanently from his family had not occurred to him. "Yes," he said, "you want a man about these days." "Ever done any farm work?" asked the girl. Gosling shook his head. "Well, you'd soon learn," she went on. "I must think it over," said Gosling suddenly. "Shall you be 'ere to-morrow?" "One of us will," said the girl. "Ah! but shall you?" "Why me?" "Well, I've took a fancy to you." "Very kind of you, I'm sure," said the girl, and laughed. Gosling kissed her before he left. 7 He returned the next afternoon and helped to cut and stack sainfoin, and afterwards he watched the young woman milk the cows. It was so late by the time everything was finished that he was persuaded to stay the night. In the new Putney house three women wondered what had happened to "father." They grew increasingly anxious for some days, and even tried in a feeble way to search for him. By the end of the week they accepted the theory that he too had died of the plague. They never saw him again. X--EXODUS 1 In West Hampstead a Jewess, who had once been fat, looked out of the windows of her gaudy house. She was partly dressed in a garish silk negligé. Her face was exceedingly dirty, but the limp, pallid flesh was revealed in those places where she had wiped away her abundant tears. Her body was bruised and stiff, for in a recent raid on a house suspected of containing provisions she had been hardly used by her sister women. She had made the mistake of going out too well dressed; she had imagined that expensive clothes would command respect.... As she looked out she wept again, bewailing her misery. From her earliest youth she had been pampered and spoilt. She had learnt that marriage was her sole object in life, and she had sold herself at a very respectable price. She had received the applause and favour of her family for marrying the man she had chosen as most likely to provide her with the luxury which she regarded as her birth-right. Two days ago she had cooked and eaten the absurdly expensive but diminutive dog upon which she had lavished the only love of which she had been capable. She had wept continuously as she ate her idol, but for the first time she had regretted his littleness. Hunger and thirst were driving her out of the house of which she had been so vain; the primitive pains were awakening in her primitive instincts that had never stirred before. From her window she could see naught but endless streets of brick, stone and asphalt, but beyond that dry, hot, wilderness she knew there were fields--she had seen them out of the corner of her eye when she had motored to Brighton. Fields had never been associated in her mind with food until the strange new stirring of that unsuspected instinct. Food for her meant shops. One went to shops and bought food and bought the best at the lowest price possible. With all her pride of position, she had never hesitated to haggle with shopkeepers. And when the first pinch had come, when her husband had selfishly died of the plague, and her household had deserted her, it was to the shops she had gone, autocratically demanding her rights. She had learned by experience now that she had no longer any rights. She dressed herself in her least-conspicuous clothes, dabbed her face with powder to cover some of the dirt--there was no water, and in any case she did not feel inclined to wash--carefully stowed away all her money and the best of her jewels in a small leather bag, and set out to find the country where food grew out of the ground. Instinct set her face to the north. She took the road towards Hendon.... 2 In every quarter of London, in every great town and city throughout Europe, women were setting their faces towards the country. By the autumn London was empty. The fallen leaves in park squares and suburban streets were swept into corners by the wind, and when the rain came the leaves clung together and rotted, and so continued the long routine of decay and birth. When spring came again, Nature returned with delicate, strong hands to claim her own. For hundreds of years she had been defied in the heart of this great, hard, stone place. Her little tentative efforts had been rudely repulsed, no tender thread of grass had been allowed to flourish for an hour under the feet of the crushing multitude. Yet she had fought with a steady persistence that never relaxed a moment's effort. Whenever men had given her a moment's opportunity, even in the very heart of that city of burning struggle, she had covered the loathed sterility with grass and flowers, dandelions, charlock, grounsel and other life that men call weeds. Now, when her full opportunity came, she set to work in her slow, patient way to wreck and cover the defilement of earth. Her winds swept dust into every corner, and her rain turned it into a shallow bed of soil, ready to receive and nurture the tiny seeds that sailed on little feathered wings, or were carried by bird and insect to some quiet refuge in which they might renew life, and, dying, add fertility to the mother who had brought them forth. Nature came, also, with her hurricanes, her lightnings and her frosts, to rend and destroy. She stripped slates from roofs, thrust out gables and overturned solid walls. She came with fungi to undermine and with the seeds of trees to split asunder. She asked for but a few hundred years of patient, continuous work in order to make of London once more a garden; where the nightingale might sing in Oxford Street and the children of a new race pluck sweet wild flowers over the site of the Bank of England.... 3 The spirit of London had gone out of her, and her body was crumbling and rotting. There was no life in all that vast sprawl of bricks and mortar; the very dogs and cats, deserted by humanity, left her to seek their only food, to seek those other living things which were their natural quarry. In her prime, London had been the chief city of the world. Men and women spoke of her as an entity, wrote of her as of a personality, loved her as a friend. This aggregate of streets and parks, this strange confusion of wealth and squalor, had stood to men and women for something definitely lovable. It was not her population they loved, not the polyglot crowd that swarmed in her streets, but she herself and all the beauty and intoxication of life she had gathered into her embrace. Now she was dead. Whatever fine qualities she had possessed, whatever vices, had gone from her. She sprawled in all her naked ugliness, a huge corpse rotting among the hills, awaiting the slow burial which Nature was tediously preparing. All those wonderful buildings, the great emporiums in the West End, the magnificent banks and insurance offices, museums and picture galleries, regarded as the storehouses of incalculable wealth, vast hotels, palatial private residences, the thundering railway termini, Government offices, Houses of Parliament, theatres, churches and cathedrals, all had become meaningless symbols. All had represented some activity, some ambition of man, and man had fled to the country for food, leaving behind the worthless tokens of wealth that had intrigued him for so many centuries. Gold and silver grew tarnished in huge safes that none wished to rifle, banknotes became mildewed, damp and fungus crept into the museums and picture galleries, and in the whole of Great Britain there was none to grieve. Every living man and woman was back at the work of their ancestors, praying once more to Ceres or Demeter, working with bent back to produce the first essentials of life. Each individual must produce until such time as there was once more a superfluity, until barns were filled and wealth re-created, until the strong had seized from the weak and demanded labour in return for the use of the stolen instrument, until civilization had sprung anew from the soil. Meanwhile London was not a city of the dead, but a dead city. BOOK II THE MARCH OF THE GOSLINGS XI--THE SILENT CITY 1 July came in with temperate heat and occasional showers, ideal weather for the crops; for all the precious growths which must ripen before the famine could be stayed. The sudden stoppage of all imports, and the flight of the great urban population into the country, had demonstrated beyond all question the poverty of England's resources of food supply, and the demonstration was to prove of value although there was no economist left to theorize. England was once again an independent unit, and no longer a member of a great world-body. Indeed England was being subdivided. The unit of organization was shrinking with amazing rapidity. The necessity for concentration grew with every week that passed, the fluidity of the superfluous labour was being resolved by death from starvation. The women who wandered from one farm to the next died by the way. In the Putney house, Mrs Gosling and her daughters were faced by the failure of their food supply. The older woman had little initiative. She was a true Londoner. Her training and all the circumstances of her life had narrowed her imaginative grasp till she was only able to comprehend one issue. And as yet her daughters, and more particularly Millie, were so influenced by their mother's thought that they, also, had shown little evidence of adaptability to the changed conditions. "We shall 'ave to be careful," was Mrs Gosling's first expression of the necessity for looking to the future. She had arranged the bulk of her stores neatly in one room on the second floor, and although a goodly array of tins still faced her she experienced a miserly shrinking from any diminishment of their numbers. Moreover, she had long been without such necessities as flour. Barker and Prince had not dealt in flour. Returning from her daily inspection one morning in the second week of July, Mrs Gosling decided that something must be done at once. Fear of the plague was almost dead, but fear of invasion by starving women had kept them all close prisoners. That house was a fortress. "Look 'ere, gels," said Mrs Gosling when she came downstairs. "Somethin' 'll 'ave to be done." Blanche looked thoughtful. Her own mind had already begun to work on that great problem of their future. Millie, lazy and indifferent, shrugged her shoulders and replied: "All very well, mother, but what can we do?" "Well, I been thinking as it's very likely as things ain't so bad in some places as they are just about 'ere," said Mrs Gosling. "We got plenty o' money left, and it seems to me as two of us 'ad better go out and 'ave a look about, London way. One of us could look after the 'ouse easy enough, now. We 'aven't 'ardly seen a soul about the past fortnight." The suggestion brought a gleam of hope to Blanche. She visualized the London she had known. It might be that in the heart of the town, business had begun again, that shops were open and people at work. It might be that she could find work there. She was longing for the sight and movement of life, after these two awful months of isolation. "I'm on," she said briskly. "Me and Millie had better go, mother, we can walk farther. You can lock up after us and you needn't open the door to anyone. Are you on, Mill?" "We must make ourselves look a bit more decent first," said Millie, glancing at the mirror over the mantelpiece. "Well, of course," returned Blanche, "we brought one box of clothes with us." They spent some minutes in discussing the resources of their wardrobe. "Come to the worst we could fetch some more things from Wisteria. I don't suppose anyone has touched 'em," suggested Blanche. At the mention of the house in Wisteria Grove, Mrs Gosling sighed noticeably. She was by no means satisfied with the place at Putney, and she could not rid herself of the idea that there must be accessible gas and water in Kilburn, as there had always been. "Well, you might go up there one day and 'ave a look at the place," she put in. "It's quite likely they've got things goin' again up there." In less than an hour Blanche and Millie had made themselves presentable. Life had begun to stir again in humanity. The atmosphere of horror which the plague had brought was being lifted. It was as if the dead germs had filled the air with an invisible, impalpable dust, that had exercised a strange power of depression. The spirit of death had hung over the whole world and paralyzed all activity. Now the dust was dispersing. The spirit was withdrawing to the unknown deeps from which it had come. "It is nice to feel decent again," said Blanche. She lifted her head and threw back her shoulders. Millie was preening herself before the glass. "Well, I'm sure you 'ave made yourselves look smart," said their mother with a touch of pride. "They were good girls," she reflected, "if there had been more than a bit of temper shown lately. But, then, who could have helped themselves? It had been a terrible time." The July sun was shining brilliantly as the two young women, presentable enough to attend morning service at the Church of St John the Evangelist, Kilburn, set out to exhibit their charms and to buy food in the dead city. 2 They crossed Putney Bridge and made their way towards Hammersmith. The air was miraculously clear. The detail of the streets was so sharp and bright that it was as if they saw with wonderfully renewed and sensitive eyes. The phenomenon produced a sense of exhilaration. They were conscious of quickened emotion, of a sensation of physical well-being. "Isn't it clean?" said Blanche. "H'm! Funny!" returned Millie. "Like those photographs of foreign places." Under their feet was an accumulation of sharp, dry dust, detritus of stone, asphalt and steel. In corners where the fugitive rubbish had found refuge from the driving wind, the dust had accumulated in flat mounds, broken by scraps of paper or the torn flag of some rain-soaked poster that gave an untidy air of human refuse. Across the open way of certain roads the dust lay in a waved pattern of nearly parallel lines, like the ridged sand of the foreshore. For some time they kept to the pavements from force of habit. "I say, Mill, don't you feel adventurous?" asked Blanche. Millie looked dissatisfied. "It's so lonely, B.," was her expression of feeling. "Never had London all to myself before," said Blanche. Near Hammersmith Broadway they saw a tram standing on the rails. Its thin tentacle still clung to the overhead wire that had once given it life, as if it waited there patiently hoping for a renewal of the exhilarating current. Almost unconsciously Blanche and Millie quickened their pace. Perhaps this was the outermost dying ripple of life, the furthest outpost of the new activity that was springing up in central London. But the tram was guarded by something that in the hot, still air seemed to surround it with an almost visible mist. "Eugh!" ejaculated Millie and shrank back. "Don't go, Blanche. It's awful!" Blanche's hand also had leapt to her face, but she took a few steps forward and peered into the sunlit case of steel and glass. She saw a heap of clothes about the framework of a grotesquely jointed scarecrow, and the gleam of something round, smooth and white. She screamed faintly, and a filthy dog crept, with a thin yelp, from under the seat and came to the door of the tram. For a moment it stood there with an air that was half placatory, wrinkling its nose and feebly raising a stump of propitiatory tail, then, with another protesting yelp, it crept back, furtive and ashamed, to its unlawful meat. The two girls, handkerchief to nose, hurried by breathless, with bent heads. A little past Hammersmith Broadway they had their first sight of human life. Two gaunt faces looked out at them from an upper window. Blanche waved her hand, but the women in the house, half-wondering, half-fearful, at the strange sight of these two fancifully dressed girls, shook their heads and drew back. Doubtless there was some secret hoard of food in that house and the inmates feared the demands of charity. "Well, we aren't quite the last, anyway," commented Blanche. "What were they afraid of?" asked Millie. "Thought we wanted to cadge, I expect," suggested Blanche. "Mean things," was her sister's comment. "Well! we weren't so over-anxious to have visitors," Blanche reminded her. "We didn't want their beastly food," complained the affronted Millie. The shops in Hammersmith did not offer much inducement to exploration. Some were still closely shuttered, others presented goods that offered no temptation, such as hardware; but the majority had already been pillaged and devastated. Most of that work had been done in the early days of the plague when panic had reigned, and many men were left to lead the raids on the preserves of food. Only one great line of shuttered fronts induced the two girls to pause. "No need to go to Wisteria for clothes," suggested Blanche. "How could we get in?" asked Millie. "Oh! get in some way easy enough." "It's stealing," said Millie, and thought of her raid on the Kilburn tobacconist's. "You can't steal from dead people," explained Blanche; "besides, who'll have the things if we don't?" "I suppose it'd be all right," hesitated Millie, obviously tempted. "Well, of course," returned Blanche and paused. "I say, Mill," she burst out suddenly. "There's all the West-end to choose from. Come on!" For a time they walked more quickly. In Kensington High Street they had an adventure. They saw a woman decked in gorgeous silks, strung and studded with jewels from head to foot. She walked with a slow and flaunting step, gesticulating, and talking. Every now and again she would pause and draw herself up with an affectation of immense dignity, finger the ropes of jewels at her breast, and make a slow gesture with her hands. "She's mad," whispered Blanche, and the two girls, terrified and trembling, hastily took refuge in a great square cave full of litter and refuse that had once been a grocer's shop. The woman passed their hiding-place in her stately progress westward without giving any sign that she was conscious of their presence. When she was nearly opposite to them she made one of her stately pauses. "Queen of all the Earth," they heard her say, "Queen and Empress. Queen of the Earth." Her hand went up to her head and touched a strange collection of jewels pinned in her hair, of tiaras and brooches that flashed brighter than the high lights of the brilliant sun. One carelessly fastened brooch fell and she pushed it aside with her foot. "You understand," she said in her high, wavering voice, "you understand, Queen and Empress, Queen of the Earth." They heard the refrain of her gratified ambition repeated as she moved slowly away. A long submerged memory rose to the threshold of Millie's mind. "Thieving slut," she murmured. 3 As they came nearer to representative London the signs of deserted traffic were more numerous. By the Albert Memorial they saw an overturned motor-bus which had smashed into the park railings, and a little further on were two more buses, one standing decently at the curb, the other sprawling across the middle of the road. The wheels of both were axle deep in the dust which had blown against them, and out of the dust a few weak threads of grass were sprouting. There were other vehicles, too, cabs, lorries and carts: not a great number altogether, but even the fifty or so which the girls saw between Kensington and Knightsbridge offered sufficient testimony to the awful rapidity with which the plague had spread. For it seems probable that in the majority of cases the drivers of these deserted vehicles must have been attacked by the first agonizing pains at the base of the skull while they were actually employed in driving their machines. There were few skeletons to be seen. The lull which intervened between the first unmistakable symptoms of the plague and the oncoming of the paralysis had given men time to obey their instinct to die in seclusion, the old instinct so little altered by civilization. Those vestiges of humanity which remained had, for the most part, been cleansed by the processes of Nature, but twice the girls disturbed a horrible cloud of blue flies which rose with an angry buzzing so loud that the girls screamed and ran, leaving the scavengers to swoop eagerly back upon their carrion. Doubtless the thing in the Hammersmith tram had been the body of a woman, recently-dead from starvation. Even from the houses there was now little exhalation. In Knightsbridge, a little past the top of Sloane Street, Blanche and Millie came to a shop which diverted them from their exploration for a time. Most of the huge rolling shutters had been pulled down and secured, but one had stopped half way, and, beyond, the great plate-glass windows were uncovered. One of ten million tragedies had descended swiftly to interrupt the closing of that immense place, and some combination of circumstances had followed to prevent the completion of the work. The imaginative might stop to speculate on the mystery of that half-closed shutter; the two Goslings stopped to admire the wonders behind the glass. For a time the desolation and silence of London were forgotten. In imagination Blanche and Millie were once again units in the vast crowd of antagonists striving valiantly to win some prize in the great competition between the boast of wealth and the pathetic endeavour of make-believe. They stayed to gaze at the "creations" behind the windows, at dummies draped in costly fabrics such as they had only dreamed of wearing. The silks, satins and velvets were whitened now with the thin snow of dust that had fallen upon them, but to Blanche and Millie they appeared still as wonders of beauty. For a minute or two they criticized the models. They spoke at first in low voices, for the deep stillness of London held them in unconscious awe, but as they became lost in the fascination of their subject they forgot their fear. And then they looked at one another a little guiltily. "No harm in seeing if the door's locked, anyway," said Blanche. Millie looked over her shoulder and saw no movement in the frozen streets, save the sweep of one exploring swallow. Even the sparrows had deserted the streets. She did not reply in words, but signified her agreement of thought by a movement towards the entrance. The swing doors were not fastened, and they entered stealthily. They began with the touch of appraising fingers, wandering from room to room. But most of the rooms on the ground floor were darkened by the drawn shutters, and no glow of light came in response to the clicking of the electric switches that they experimented with with persistent futility. So they adventured into the clearly lit rooms upstairs and experienced a fallacious sense of security in the knowledge that they were on the floor above the street. Fingering gave place to still closer inspection. They lifted the models from the stands and shook them out. They held up gorgeous robes in front of their own suburban dresses and admired each other and themselves in the numerous cheval glasses. "Oh! bother!" exclaimed Blanche at last, "I'm going to try on." "Oh! B." expostulated the more timid Millie. "Well! why to goodness not?" asked her elder sister. "Who's to be any the wiser?" "Seems wrong, somehow," replied Millie, unable to shake off the conventions which had so long served her as conscience. "Well, I am," said Blanche, and retired into a little side room to divest herself of her own dress. She had always shared a bedroom with her sister, and they observed few modesties before each other, but Blanche was mentally incapable of changing her dress in the broad avenues of that extensive show-room. It is true that the tall casement windows were wide open and the place was completely overlooked by the massive buildings opposite, but even if the windows had been screened she would not have changed her skirt in the publicity of that open place, though every human being in the world were dead. When she emerged from her dressing-room she was transformed indeed. She went over to her still hesitating sister. "Do me up, Mill," she said. Blanche had chosen well; the fine cloth walking dress admirably fitted her well-developed young figure. When she had discarded her hat and touched up her hair before the glass, only her boots and her hands remained to spoil the disguise. Well gloved and well shod, she might have passed down the Bond Street of the old London, and few women and no man would have known that she had not sprung from the ruling classes. She posed. She stepped back from the mirror and half-unconsciously fell to imitating the manners of the revered aristocracy she had respectfully studied from a distance. In a few minutes she was joined by Millie, also arrayed in peacock's feathers and anxious to be "fastened." Their excitement increased. Walking dresses gave place to evening gowns. They lost their sense of fear and ran into other departments searching for long white gloves to hide the disfigurements of household work. They paraded and bowed to each other. The climax came when they discovered a Court dress, immensely trained, and embroidered with gold thread, laid by with evidences of tenderest care in endless wrappings of tissue paper. Surely the dress of some elegant young duchess! For a moment they wrangled, but Blanche triumphed. "You shall have it afterwards," she said, as she ran to her dressing-room. Millie followed in an elaborate gown of Indian silk; a somewhat sulky Millie, inclined to resent her duty of lady's maid. She dragged disrespectfully at the innumerable fastenings. "My!" ejaculated Blanche when she could indulge herself in the glory of full examination before a cheval glass in the open show-room. She struggled with her train and when she had arranged it to her satisfaction, threw back her shoulders and lifted her chin haughtily. "I ought to have some diamonds," she reflected. "It drags round the hips," was Millie's criticism. "You should say 'Your Majesty,'" corrected Blanche. "Oh! a Queen, are you?" asked Millie. "Rather----" "Queen of all the Earth," sneered Millie. Blanche's face suddenly fell. "I wonder if she began like this," she said, and a note of fear had come into her voice. Millie's eyes reflected her sister's alarm. "Oh! let's get out of this, B.," she said, and began to tear at the neck of her Indian silk gown. "I wanted diamonds, too," persisted Blanche. "Oh! B., it isn't right," said Millie. "I said it wasn't right and you would come." Silence descended upon them for a moment, and then both sisters suddenly screamed and ducked, putting up their hands to their heads. "Goodness! What was that?" cried Blanche. A swallow had swept in through the open window, had curved round in one swift movement, and shot out again into the sunlight. "Only a bird of some sort," said Millie, but she was trembling and on the verge of hysterics. "Do let's get out, B." After they had put on their own clothes once more they became aware that they were hungry. "We have wasted a lot of time here," said Blanche as they made their way out. She did not pause to wonder how many women had spent the best part of their lives in a precisely similar manner. "And we ought to have been looking for food," she added. "Come on," replied Millie. "That place has given me the creeps." 4 Growing rather tired and footsore they made their way to Piccadilly Circus, and so on to the Strand. Everywhere they found the same conditions: a few skeletons, a few deserted vehicles, young vegetation taking hold wherever a pinch of soil had found an abiding place, and over all a great silence. But food there was none that they were able to find, though it is probable that a careful investigation of cellars and underground places might have furnished some results. The more salient resources of London had been effectively pillaged so far as the West-end was concerned. They were too late. In Trafalgar Square, Millie sat down and cried. Blanche made no attempt to comfort her, but sat wide eyed and wondering. Her mind was opening to new ideas. She was beginning to understand that London was incapable of supporting even the lives of three women; she was wrestling with the problem of existence. Every one had gone. Many had died; but many more, surely, must have fled into the country. She began to understand that she and her family must also fly into the country. Millie still sobbed convulsively now and again. "Oh! Chuck it, Mill," said Blanche at last. "We'd better be getting home." Millie dabbed her eyes. "I'm starving," she blubbered. "Well, so am I," returned Blanche. "That's why I said we'd better get home. There's nothing to eat here." "Is--is every one dead?" "No, they've gone off into the country, and that's what we've got to do." The younger girl sat up, put her hat straight, and blew her nose. "Isn't it awful, B.?" she said. Blanche pinched her lips together. "What are you putting your hat straight for?" she asked. "There's no one to see you." "Well, you needn't make it any worse," retorted Millie on the verge of a fresh outburst of tears. "Oh! come on!" said Blanche, getting to her feet. "I don't believe I can walk home," complained Millie; "my feet ache so." "You'll have to wait a long time if you're going to find a bus," returned Blanche. Three empty taxicabs stood in the rank a few feet away from them, but it never occurred to either of the two young women to attempt any experiment with these mechanisms. If the thought had crossed their minds they would have deemed it absurd. "Let's go down by Victoria," suggested Blanche. "I believe it's nearer." In Parliament Square they disturbed a flock of rooks, birds which had partly changed their natural habits during the past few months and, owing to the superabundance of one kind of food, were preying on carrion. "Crows," commented Blanche. "Beastly things." "I wonder if we could get some water to drink," was Millie's reply. "Well, there's the river," suggested Blanche, and they turned up towards Westminster Bridge. In one of the tall buildings facing the river Blanche's attention was caught by an open door. "Look here, Mill," she said, "we've only been looking for shops. Let's try one of these houses. We might find something to eat in there." "I'm afraid," said Millie. "What of?" sneered Blanche. "At the worst it's skeletons, and we can come out again." Millie shuddered. "You go," she suggested. "Not by myself, I won't," returned Blanche. "There you are, you see," said Millie. "Well, it's different by yourself." "I hate it," returned Millie with emphasis. "So do I, in a way, only I'm fair starving," said Blanche. "Come on." The building was solidly furnished, and the ground floor, although somewhat disordered, still suggested a complacent luxury. On the floor lay a copy of the Evening Chronicle, dated May 10; possibly one of the last issues of a London journal. Two of the pages were quite blank, and almost the only advertisement was one hastily-set announcement of a patent medicine guaranteed as a sure protection against the plague. The remainder of the paper was filled with reports of the devastation that was being wrought, reports which were nevertheless marked by a faint spirit of simulated confidence. Between the lines could be read the story of desperate men clinging to hope with splendid courage. There were no signs of panic here. Groves had come out well at the last. The two girls hovered over this piece of ancient history for a few minutes. "You see," said Blanche triumphantly, "even then, more'n two months ago, every one was making for the country. We shall have to go, too. I told you we should." "I never said we shouldn't," returned Millie. "Anyhow there's nothing to eat here." "Not in this room, there isn't," said Blanche, "but there might be in the kitchens. Do you know what this place has been?" Millie shook her head. "It's been a man's club," announced Blanche. "First time you've been in one, old dear." "Come on, let's have a look downstairs, then," returned Millie, careless of her achievement. In the first kitchen they found havoc: broken china and glass, empty bottles, empty tins, cooking utensils on the floor, one table upset, everywhere devastation and the marks of struggle; but in none of the empty tins was there the least particle of food. Everything had been completely cleaned out. The rats had been there, and had gone. Exploring deeper, however, they were at last rewarded. On a table stood a whole array of unopened tins and in one of them was plunged a tin-opener, a single stab had been given, and then, possibly, another of these common tragedies had begun. Had he been alone, that plunderer, or had his companions fled from him in terror? Here the two girls made a sufficient meal, and discovered, moreover, a large store of unopened beer-bottles. They shared the contents of one between them, and then, feeling greatly reinvigorated, they sought for and found two baskets, which they filled with tinned foods. They only took away one bottle of beer--a special treat for their mother--on account of the weight. They remembered that they had a long walk before them; and they were not over-elated by their discovery; they were sick to death of tinned meats. In looking for the baskets they came across a single potato that the rats had left. From it had sprung a long, thin, etiolated shoot which had crept under the door of the cupboard and was making its way across the floor to the light of the window. Already that shoot was several feet in length. "Funny how they grow," commented Millie. "Making for the country, I expect," replied Blanche, "same as we shall have to do." It was a relief to them to find their way into the sunlight once more. Those cold, forsaken houses held some suggestion of horror, of old activities so abruptly ended by tragedy. From these interiors Nature was still shut off. That ghostly tendril aching towards the light had no chance for life and reproduction.... 5 The two Gosling girls had yet one more adventure before they toiled home with their load. They were growing bolder, despite the gloom and oppression of those human habitations, and some freakish spirit prompted Blanche to suggest that they should visit the Houses of Parliament. After a brief demur, Millie acceded. That great stronghold was open to them now. They might walk the floor of the House, sit in the Speaker's chair, penetrate into the sacred places of the Upper Chamber. Gone were all the rules and formulas, the intricacies and precedents of an unwritten constitution, the whole cumbrous machinery for the making of new laws. The air was no longer disturbed by the wranglings, evasions and cunning shifts of those who had found here a stage for their personal ambitions. The high talk of progress had died into silence along with the struggle of parties which had played the supreme game, side against side, for the prize of power. Progress had been defined in this place, in terms of human activity, human comfort. The end in sight had been some vague conception of general welfare through accumulated riches. And from the sky had fallen a pestilence to change the meaning of human terms. In three months the old conception of wealth was gone. Money, precious stones, a thousand accepted forms of value had become suddenly worthless, of no more account than the symbol of power which lay coated with dust on the table of the House of law-makers. Even law itself, that slow growth of the centuries, had become meaningless. Who cared if some mad woman plundered every jeweller's shop in the whole City? Who was to forbid theft or avenge murder? The place of traffic was empty. Only one law was left and only one value; the law of self-preservation, the value of food. The sunlight fell in broad coloured shafts upon two half-educated girls come on a plundering expedition, and they might sit in the high places if they would, and make new laws for themselves. Blanche sat for a few moments in the Speaker's chair. "It's a fine big place," she remarked. "Oh! come on, B., do," replied Millie. "I want to get home." As they crossed the Square, Millie looked up at Big Ben. "Quarter-past nine," she said. "It must have stopped." "Well, of course, silly," replied Blanche. "All the clocks have stopped. Who's to wind 'em?" XII--EMIGRANT 1 For some time Mrs Gosling was quite unable to grasp the significance of her daughters' report on the condition of London. During the past two months she had persuaded herself that the traffic of the town was being resumed and that only Putney was still desolate. She had always disapproved of Putney; it was damp and she had never known anyone who had lived there. It is true that the late lamented George Gosling had been born in Putney, but that was more than half a century ago, the place was no doubt quite different then; and he had left Putney and gone to live in the healthy North before he was sixteen. Mrs Gosling was half inclined to blame Putney for all their misfortunes--it was sure to breed infection, being so near the river and all--and she had become hopeful during the past month that all would be well with them if they could once get back to Kilburn. "D'you mean to say you didn't see no one at all?" she repeated in great perplexity. "Those three we've told you about, that's all," said Blanche. "Well, o' course, they're all shut up in the 'ouses, still; afraid o' the plague and 'anging on to what provisions they've got put by, same as us," was the hopeful explanation Mrs Gosling put forward. "They ain't," said Millie, and Blanche agreed. "Well, but 'ow d'you know?" persisted the mother. "Did you go in to the 'ouses?" "One or two," returned Blanche evasively, "but there wasn't no need to go in. You could see." "Are you quite sure there was no shops open? Not in the Strand?" Mrs Gosling laid emphasis on the last sentence. She could not doubt the good faith of the Strand. If that failed her, all was lost. "Oh! can't you understand, mother," broke out Blanche petulantly, "that the whole of London is absolutely deserted? There isn't a soul in the streets. There's no cabs or buses or trams or anything, and grass growing in the middle of the road. And all the shops have been broken into, all those that had food in 'em, and----" words failed her. "Isn't it, Millie?" she concluded lamely. "Awful," agreed Millie. "Well, I can't understand it," said Mrs Gosling, not yet fully convinced. She considered earnestly for a few moments and then asked: "Did you go into Charing Cross Post Office? They'd sure to be open." "Yes!" lied Blanche, "and we could have taken all the money in the place if we'd wanted, and no one any the wiser." Mrs Gosling looked shocked. "I 'ope my gels'll never come to that," she said. Her girls, with a wonderful understanding of their mother's opinions, had omitted to mention their raid on the Knightsbridge emporium. "No one'd ever know," said Millie. "There's One who would," replied Mrs Gosling gravely, and strangely enough, perhaps, the two girls looked uneasy, but they were thinking less of the commandments miraculously given to Moses than of the probable displeasure of the Vicar of St John the Evangelist's Church in Kilburn. "Well, we've got to do something, anyhow," said Blanche, after a pause. "I mean we'll have to get out of this and go into the country." "We might go to your uncle's in Liverpool," suggested Mrs Gosling, tentatively. "It's a long walk," remarked Blanche. Mrs Gosling did not grasp the meaning of this objection. "Well, I think we could afford third-class," she said. "Besides, though we 'aven't corresponded much of late years, I've always been under the impression that your uncle is doin' well in Liverpool; and at such a time as this I'm sure 'e'll do the right thing, though whether it would be better to let 'im know we're comin' or not I'm not quite sure." "Oh! dear!" sighed Blanche, "I do wish you'd try to understand, mother. There aren't any trains. There aren't any posts or telegraphs. Wherever we go we've just got to walk. Haven't we, Millie?" Millie began to snivel. "It's 'orrible," she said. "Well I can't understand it," repeated Mrs Gosling. By degrees, however, the controversy took a new shape. Granting for the moment the main contention that London was uninhabitated, Mrs Gosling urged that it would be a dangerous, even a foolhardy, thing to venture into the country. If there was no Government there would be no law and order, was the substance of her argument; government in her mind being represented by its concrete presentation in the form of the utterly reliable policeman. Furthermore, she pointed out, that they did not know anyone in the country, with the exception of a too-distant uncle in Liverpool, and that there would be nowhere for them to go. "We shall have to work," said Blanche, who was surely inspired by her glimpse of the silent city. "Well, we've got nearly a 'undred pounds left of what your poor father drew out o' the bank before we shut ourselves up," said her mother. "I suppose we could buy things in the country," speculated Blanche. "You seem set on the country for some reason," said Mrs Gosling with a touch of temper. "Well, we've got to get food," returned Blanche, raising her voice. "We can't live on air." "And if food's to be got cheaper in the country than in London," snapped Mrs Gosling, "my experience goes for nothing, but, of course, you know best, if I am your mother." "There isn't any food in London, cheap or dear, I keep telling you," said Blanche, and left the room angrily, slamming the door behind her. Millie sat moodily biting her nails. "Blanche lets 'er temper get the better of 'er," remarked Mrs Gosling addressing the spaces of the kitchen in which they were sitting. "It's right, worse luck," said Millie. "We shall have to go. I 'ate it nearly as much as you do." The argument thus begun was continued with few intermissions for a whole week. A thunderstorm, followed by two days of overcast weather, came to the support of the older woman. One thing was certain among all these terrible perplexities, namely, that you couldn't start off for a trip to the country on a wet day. Meanwhile their stores continued to diminish, and one afternoon Mrs Gosling consented to take a walk with Blanche as far as Hammersmith Broadway. The sight of that blank desert impressed her. Blanche pointed out the house in which she had seen the two women five days before, but no one was looking out of the window on that afternoon. Perhaps they had fled to the country, or were occupied elsewhere in the house, or perhaps they had left London by the easier way which had become so general in the past few months. When she returned to the Putney house, Mrs Gosling wept and wished she, too, was dead, but she consented at last to Blanche's continually urged proposition, in so far as she expressed herself willing to make a move of some sort. She thought they might, at least, go back and have a look at Wisteria Grove. And if Kilburn had, indeed, fallen as low as Hammersmith, then there was apparently no help for it and they must try their luck in the waste and desolation of the country. Perhaps some farmer's wife might take them in for a time, until they had a chance to look about them. They had nearly a hundred pounds in gold. The girls found a builder's trolley in a yard near by, a truck of sturdy build on two wheels with a long handle. It bore marks of having held cement, and there were weeds growing in one end of it, but after it had been brought home and thoroughly scrubbed, it looked quite a presentable means for the transport of the "necessaries" they proposed to take with them. They made too generous an estimate of essentials at first, piling their truck too high for safety and overtaxing their strength; but that problem, like many others, was finally solved for them by the clear-sighted guidance of necessity. They started one morning--a Monday if their calculations were not at fault--about two hours after breakfast. Mrs Gosling and Millie pushed behind, and Blanche, the inspired one, went before, pulled by the handle of the pole and gave the others their direction. It is possible that they were the last women to leave London. By chance they discovered the Queen of all the Earth on a doorstep near Addison Road. She was quite dead, but they did not despoil her of the jewels with which she was still covered. 2 Mrs Gosling was a source of trouble from the outset. She had lived her life indoors. In the Wisteria Grove days, she never spent two hours of the twenty-four out of the house. Some times for a whole week she had not gone out at all. It was a mark of their rise in the world that all the tradesmen called for orders. She had found little necessity to buy in shops during recent years. And so, very surely, she had grown more and more limited in her outlook. Her attention had become concentrated on the duties of the housewife. She had not kept any servant, a charwoman who came for a few hours three times a week had done all that the mistress of the house had not dared, in face of neighbourly criticism--in her position she could not be seen washing down the little tiled path to the gate nor whitening the steps. The effect of this cramped existence on Mrs Gosling would not have been noticeable under the old conditions. She had become a specialized creature, admirably adapted to her place in the old scheme of civilization. No demand was ever made upon her resources other than those familiar demands which she was so perfectly educated to supply. Even when the plague had come, she had not been compelled to alter her mode of life. She had made trouble enough about the lack of many things she had once believed to be necessary--familiar foods, soap and the thousand little conveniences that the twentieth century inventor had patented to assist the domestic economy of the small householder; but the trouble was not too great to be overcome. The adaptability required from her was within the scope of her specialized vision. She could learn to do without flour, butter, lard, milk, sugar and the other things, but she could not learn to think on unfamiliar lines. That was the essence of her trouble. She was divorced from a permanent home. She was asked to walk long miles in the open air. Worst of all, she was called upon for initiative, ingenuity; she was required to exercise her imagination in order to solve a problem with which she was quite unfamiliar. She was expected to develop the potentialities of the wild thing, and to extort food from Nature. The whole problem was beyond her comprehension. The sight of Kilburn was a great blow to her. She had hoped against hope that here, at least, she would find some semblance of the life she had known. It had seemed so impossible to her that Aiken, the butcher's, or Hobb's, the grocer's, would not be open as usual, and the vision of those two desolated and ransacked shops--the latter with but a few murderous spears of plate-glass left in its once magnificent windows--depressed her to tears. So shaken was she by the sight of these horrors that Blanche and Millie raised no objection to sleeping that night in the house in Wisteria Grove. Indeed, the two girls were almost tired out, although it was yet early in the afternoon. The truck had become very heavy in the course of the last two miles; and they had had considerable difficulty in negotiating the hill by Westbourne Park Station. Mrs Gosling was still weeping as she let herself in to her old home, and she wept as she prowled about the familiar rooms and noted the dust which had fallen like snow on every surface which would support it. And for the first time the loss of her husband came home to her. She had been almost glad when he had vanished from the Putney house--in that place she had only seen him in his new character of tyrant. Here, among familiar associations, she recalled the fact that he had been a respectable, complacent, hard-working, successful man who had never given her cause for trouble, a man who did not drink nor run after other women, who held a position in the Church and was looked up to by the neighbourhood. According to her definition he had certainly been an ideal husband. It is true that they had dropped any pretence of being in love with one another after Blanche was born, but that was only natural. Mrs Gosling sat on the bed she had shared with him so long and hoped he was happy. He was; but if she could have seen the nature of his happiness the sight would have given her no comfort. Vaguely she pictured him in some strange Paradise, built upon those conceptions of the mediæval artists, mainly Italians, which have supplied the ideals of the orthodox. She saw an imperfectly transfigured and still fleshly George Gosling, who did unaccustomed things with a harp, was dressed in exotic garments and was on terms with certain hybrids, largely woman but partly bird, who were clearly recognizable as the angelic host. If she had been a Mohammedan, her vision would have accorded far more nearly with the fact. 3 The successful animal is that which is adapted to its circumstances. Herbert Spencer would appear foolish and incapable in the society of the young wits who frequent the private bar; he might be described by them as an old Johnny who knew nothing about life. Mrs Gosling in her own home had been a ruler; she had had authority over her daughters, and, despite the usual evidences of girlish precocity, she had always been mistress of the situation. In the affairs of household management she was facile princeps, and she commanded the respect accorded to the eminent in any form of specialized activity. But even on this second morning of their emigration it became clear to Blanche that her mother had ceased to rule, and must become a subordinate. A certain respect was due to her in her parental relation, but if she could not be coaxed she must be coerced. "She'll be better when we get her right away from here," was Blanche's diagnosis, and Millie, who had also achieved some partial realization of the necessities imposed by the new conditions, nodded in agreement. "She wants to stop here altogether, and, of course, we can't," she said. "We shall starve if we do," said Blanche. From that time Mrs Gosling dropped into the humiliating position of a kind of mental incapable who must be humoured into obedience. The first, and in many ways the most difficult, task was to persuade her away from Kilburn. She clung desperately to that stronghold of her old life. "I'm too old to change at my age," she protested, and when the alternative was clearly put before her, she accepted it with a flaccidity that was as aggravating as it was unfightable. "I'd sooner die 'ere," said Mrs Gosling, "than go trapesing about the fields lookin' for somethin' to eat. I simply couldn't do it. It's different for you two gels, no doubt. You go and leave me 'ere." Millie might have been tempted to take her mother at her word, but Blanche never for a moment entertained the idea of leaving her mother behind. "Very well, mother," she said, desperately, "if you won't come we must all stop here and starve, I suppose. We've got enough food to last a fortnight or so." As she spoke she looked out of the window of that little suburban house, and for the first time in her life a thought came to her of the strangeness of preferring such an inconvenient little box to the adventure of the wider spaces of open country. Outside, the sun was shining brilliantly, but the windows were dim with dust and cobwebs. Yet her mother was comparatively happy in this hovel; she would find delight in cleaning it, although there was no one to appraise the result of her effort. She was a specialized animal with habits precisely analogous to the instincts of other animals and insects. There were insects who could only live in filth and would die miserably if removed from their natural surroundings. Mrs Gosling was a suburban-house insect who would perish in the open air. After all, the chief difference between insects and men is that the insect is born perfectly adapted to its specialized existence, man finds, or is forced into, a place in the scheme after he has come to maturity.... "I can't see why you shouldn't leave me behind," pleaded Mrs Gosling. "Well, we won't," replied Blanche, still looking out of the window. "It's wicked of you to make us stop here and starve," put in Millie. "And even you must see that we shall starve." Mrs Gosling wept feebly. She had wept much during the past twenty-four hours. "Where can we go?" she wailed. "There's country on the other side of Harrow," said Blanche. The thought of Harrow or Timbuctoo was equally repugnant to Mrs Gosling. Then Millie had an idea. "Well, we only brought four bottles of water with us," she said, "where are we going to get any more in Kilburn?" Mrs Gosling racked her brain in the effort to remember some convenient stream in the neighbourhood. "It may rain," she said feebly at last. Blanche turned from the window and pointed to the blurred prospect of sunlit street. "We might be dead before the rain came," she said. They wore her out in the end. 4 With Harrow as an immediate objective, they toiled up Willesden Lane with their hand-cart early the next morning. Blanche took that route because it was familiar to her, and after passing Willesden Green, she followed the tram lines. As they got away from London they came upon evidences of the exodus which had preceded them. Bodies of women, for the most part no longer malodorous, were not infrequent, and pieces of household furniture, parcels of clothing, boxes, trunks and smaller impedimenta lay by the roadside, the superfluities of earlier loads that had been lightened, however reluctantly. Mrs Gosling blenched at the sight of every body--only a few of them could be described as skeletons--and protested that they were all going to their death, but Blanche kept on resolutely with a white, set face, and as Millie followed her example, if with rather less show of temerity, there was no choice but to follow. When the gradients were favourable the girls helped their mother on to the truck and gave her a lift. She was a feeble walker. Not till they reached Sudbury did they see another living being of their own species, or any sign of human habitation in the long rows of dirty houses. The great surge of migration had spread out from the centre and become absorbed in circles of ever-widening amplitude. The great entity of London had eaten its way so far outwards in to arable and pasturage that within a ten-mile radius from Charing Cross not a thousand women could be found who had been able to obtain any promise of security from the products of the soil. And although there were great open spaces of land, such as Wembley Park, which had to be crossed in the journey outwards, the exiles had been unable to wait until such time as seed could be transformed into food by the alchemy of Nature. So the pressure had been continually outwards, forcing the emigrants toward the more distant farms where some fraction of them, at least, might find work and food until the coming of the harvest. In Kent, vegetables were comparatively plentiful. In Northern Middlesex and Buckinghamshire the majority had to depend upon animal food. But in all the Home Counties and in the neighbourhood of every large town, famine was following hard upon the heels of the plague, and 70 per cent of the town-dwelling women and children who had escaped the latter visitation died of starvation and exposure before the middle of August. In the first inner ring, still sparsely populated, were to be found those who had had vegetable gardens and had been vigorous enough to protect themselves against the flood of migration which had swept up against them. It was the first signs of this inner ring that the Goslings discovered at Sudbury. 5 They came upon a little row of cottages, standing back a few yards from the road. All three women had been engaged in pushing their trolly up an ascent, and with heads down, and all their physical energies concentrated upon their task, they did not notice the startling difference between these cottages and other houses they had passed, until they stopped to take breath at the summit of the hill. Mrs Gosling had immediately seated herself upon the sloping pole of the trolly handle. She was breathing heavily and had her hands pressed to her sides. Millie leaned against the side of the trolly, her eyes still on the ground. But Blanche had thrown back her shoulders and opened her lungs, and she saw the banner of smoke that flew from the middle of the three chimney-stacks--smoke, in this wilderness, smoke the sign of human life! To Blanche it seemed the fulfilment of a great hope. She had begun to wonder if all the world were dead. "Oh!" she gasped. "Look!" They looked without eagerness, anticipating some familiar horror. "Ooh!" echoed Millie, when she, too, had recognized the harbinger. But Mrs Gosling did not raise her eyes high enough. "What?" she asked stupidly. "There's some one living in that cottage," said Blanche, and pointed upwards to the soaring pennant. Mrs Gosling's face brightened. "Well, to be sure," she said, "I wonder if they'd let me sit down and rest for a few minutes? And perhaps they might be willing to sell me a glass of milk. I'm sure I'd pay a good price for it." "We can see, anyway," replied Millie, and they roused themselves and pushed on eagerly. The cottage was not more than thirty yards away. Before they reached it, a woman came to the doorway, stared at them for a moment and then came down to the little wooden gate. She was a thick-set woman of fifty or so, with iron grey hair cut close to her head. She wore a tweed skirt which did not reach the tops of her heavily soled, high boots. She looked capable, energetic and muscular. And in her hand she carried about three feet of stout broomstick. She did not speak until the little procession halted before her gate, and then she pointed meaningly up the road with her broomstick and said: "Go on. You can't stop here." She spoke with the voice and inflection of an educated woman. Blanche paused in the act of setting down the trolly handle. Mrs Gosling and Millie stared in amazement; they had been prepared to weep on the neck of this human friend, found at last in the awful desert of Middlesex. "We only wanted to buy a little milk," stammered Blanche, no less astonished than her mother and sister. The big woman looked them over with something of pity and contempt. "I can see you're not dangerous," she sneered and crossed her great bare fore-arms over the top of the gate. "Only three poor feckless idiots going begging." "We're not begging," retorted Blanche. "We've got money and we're willing to pay." "Money!" repeated the woman. She looked up at the sky and nodded her head, as though beseeching pity for these feeble creatures. "My dear girl," she went on, "what do you suppose is the good of money in this world? You can't eat money, nor wear it, nor use it to light a fire. Now, if you'd offered me a box of matches, you should have had all the milk I can spare." "Well, I never," put in Mrs Gosling, who had feebly come to rest again on the handle of the trolly. "No, my good woman, you never did," said the stranger. "You never could and I should say the chances are that you never will." Millie was intimidated and shrinking, even Blanche looked a little nervous, but Mrs Gosling was incapable of feeling fear of a fellow-woman. "You can't mean as you won't sell us a glass of milk?" she said. "Have you got a box of matches you'll exchange for it?" asked the stranger. "I've got a burning glass I stole in Harrow, but you can't depend on the sun." "No, nor 'aven't 'ad, the last three weeks," said Mrs Gosling. "But if you've more money a'ready than you know what to do with, I should 'ave thought as you'd 'a been willing to spare a glass o' milk for charity's sake." The stranger regarded her petitioner with a hard smile. "Charity's sake?" she said. "Do you realize that I've had to defend this place like a fort against thousands of your sort? I've killed three madwomen who fought me for possession and buried 'em in the orchard like cats. I held out through the first rush and I can hold out now easily enough. You three are the first I've seen for a month, and before that they'd begun to get weak and poor. These are your daughters, I suppose, and the three of you had always depended upon some fool of a man to keep you. Yes? Well, you deserve all you've got. Now you can start and do a little healthy, useful work for yourselves. I've no pity for you. I've got a damned fool of a sister and an old fool of a mother to keep in there," she pointed to the cottage with her broomstick. "Parasitic like you, both of 'em, and pretty well all the use they are is to keep the fire alight. No, my good woman, you get no charity from me." When she had finished her speech, which she delivered with a fluency and point that suggested familiarity with the platform, the stranger crossed her arms again over the gate and stared Mrs Gosling out of countenance. "Come along, my dears," said that outraged lady, getting wearily to her feet. "I wouldn't wish your ears soiled by such language from a woman as 'as forgotten the manners of a lady. But, there, poor thing, I've no doubt 'er 'ead's been turned with all this trouble." The stranger smiled grimly and made no reply, but as the Goslings were moving away, she called out to them suddenly: "Hi! You! There's a witless creature along the road who'll probably help you. The house is up a side road. Bear round to the right." "What a beast," muttered Blanche when they had gone on a few yards. "One o' them 'new' women, my dear," panted Mrs Gosling, who remembered the beginning of the movement and still clung to the old terminology. "'Orrible unsexed creatures! I remember how your poor father used to 'ate 'em!" "I'd like to get even with her," said Millie. They bore to the right, and so avoided two turnings which led up repulsive-looking hills, but they missed the side road. "I'm sure we must have passed it," complained Mrs Gosling at last. Her sighs had been increasing in volume and poignancy for the past half-mile, and the prospect of uninhabited country which lay immediately around her she found infinitely dispiriting. "There isn't an 'ouse in sight," she added, "and I really don't believe I can walk much farther." Blanche stopped and looked over the fields on her right towards London. In the distance, blurred by an oily wriggle of heat haze, she could see the last wave of suburban villas which had broken upon this shore of open country. They had left the town behind them at last, but they had not found what they sought. This little arm of land which cut off Harrow and Wealdstone from the mother lake of London had not offered sufficient temptation to delay their forerunners in the search for food. Most of them, with a true instinct for what they sought, had followed the main road into the Chiltern Hills, and those who for some cause or another had wandered into this side track had pushed on, even as Blanche and Millie would have done had they not been dragged back by their mother's complaints. The sun was falling a little towards the west, and bird and animal life, which had seemed to rest during the intenser heat of mid-day, was stirring and calling all about them. A rabbit lolloped into the road, a few yards away, pricked up its ears, stared for an instant, and then scuttled to cover. A blackbird flew out of the hedge and fled chattering up the ditch. The air was murmurous with the hum of innumerable insects, and above Mrs Gosling's head hovered a group of flies which ever and again bobbed down as if following some concerted plan of action, and tried to settle on the poor woman's heated face. "Oh! get away, do!" she panted, and flapped a futile handkerchief. "How quiet it is!" said Blanche; and although the air was full of sound it did indeed appear that a great hush had fallen over the earth. No motor-horn threateningly bellowed its automatic demand for right of way; there was no echo of hoofs nor grind of wheels; no call of children's voices, nor even the bark of a dog. The wild things had the place to themselves again, and the sound of their movements called for no response from civilized minds. The ears of the Goslings heard, but did not note these, to them, useless evidences of life. They were straining and alert for the voice of humanity. "I don't know when I've felt the 'eat so much," said Mrs Gosling suddenly, and Blanche and Millie both started. "Hush!" said Blanche, and held up a warning finger. In the distance they heard a sound like the closing of a gate, and then, very clear and small, a feminine voice. "Chuck! chuck! chuck!" it said. "Chuck! chuck! chuck!!!" "I told you we'd passed it," said Mrs Gosling triumphantly. They turned the trolly and began to retrace their footsteps. Their eager eyes tried to peer through the spinney of trees which shut them off from the south. Once or twice they stopped to listen. The voice was fainter now, but they could hear the squawk of greedily competitive fowls. XIII--DIFFERENCES 1 The only side road they could find proved to be no more than a track through the little wood. They almost passed it a second time, and hesitated at the gate--a sturdy five-barred gate bearing "Private" on a conspicuous label--debating whether this "could be right." They still suffered a spasm of fear at the thought of trespass, and to open this gate and march up an unknown private road pushing a hand-cart seemed to them an act of terrible aggression. "We might leave the cart just inside," suggested Blanche. "And get our food stole," said Mrs Gosling. "There's no one about," urged Blanche. "There's that broomstick woman," said Millie. "She may have followed us." "I'm sure I dunno if it's safe to go foragin' in among them trees, neither," continued Mrs Gosling. "Are you sure this is right, Blanche?" "Well, of course, I'm not sure," replied Blanche, with a touch of temper. They peered through the trees and listened, but no sign of a house was to be seen, and all was now silent save for the long drone of innumerable bees about their afternoon business. "Oh! come on!" said Blanche at last. She was rapidly learning to solve all their problems by this simple formula.... In the wood they found refuge from those attendant flies which had hung over them so persistently. Mrs Gosling gave a final flick with her handkerchief and declared her relief. "It's quite pleasant in 'ere," she said, "after the 'eat." The two girls also seemed to find new vigour in the shade of the trees. "We have got a cheek!" said Millie, with a giggle. "Well! needs must when the devil drives," returned Mrs Gosling, "and our circumstances is quite out of the ordinary. Besides which, there can't be any 'arm in offerin' to buy a glass of milk." Blanche tugged at the trolley handle with a flicker of impatience. Why would her mother be so foolish? Surely she must see that everything was different now? Blanche was beginning to wonder at and admire the marvel of her own intelligence. How much cleverer she was than the others! How much more ready to appreciate and adapt herself to change! They could not understand this new state of things, but she could, and she prided herself on her powers of discrimination. "Everything's different now," she said to herself. "We can go anywhere and do anything, almost. It's like as if we were all starting off level again, in a way." She felt uplifted: she took extraordinary pleasure in her own realization of facts. A strange, new power had come to her, a power to enjoy life, through mastery. "Everything's different now," she repeated. She was conscious of a sense of pity for her mother and sister. 2 The road through the wood curved sharply round to the right, and they came suddenly upon a clearing, and saw the house in front of them. It was a long, low house, smothered in roses and creepers, and it stood in a wild garden surrounded by a breast-high wall of red brick. At the edge of the clearing several cows were lying under the shade of the trees, reflectively chewing the cud with slow, deliberate enjoyment, while one, solitary, stood with its head over the garden gate, motionless, save for an occasional petulant whisp of its ropey tail. "Now, then, what are we going to do?" asked Mrs Gosling. The procession halted, and the three women regarded the guardian cow with every sign of dismay. "Shoo!" said Millie feebly, flapping her hands; and Blanche repeated the intimidation with greater force; but the cow merely acknowledged the salutation by an irritable sweep of its tail. "'Orrid brute!" muttered Mrs Gosling, and flicked her handkerchief in the direction of the brute's quarters. "I know," said Blanche, conceiving a subtle strategy. "We'll drive it away with the cart." She turned the trolly round, and the three of them grasping the pole, they advanced slowly and warily to the charge, pushing their siege ram before them. They made a slight detour to achieve a flank attack and allow the enemy a clear way of retreat. "Oh, dear! what are you doing?" said a voice suddenly, and the three startled Goslings nearly dropped the pole in their alarm--they had been so utterly absorbed in their campaign. A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, very brown, hot and dishevelled, was regarding them from the other side of the garden wall with a stare of amazement that even as they turned was flickering into laughter. "It's that great brute by the gate, my dear," said Mrs Gosling, "and we've just----" "You don't mean Alice?" interrupted the young woman. "Oh! you couldn't go charging poor dear Alice with a great cart like that! Three of you, too!" "Is its name Alice?" asked Blanche stupidly. She did not feel equal to this curious occasion. "Its name!" replied the young woman, with scorn. "Her name's Alice, if that's what you mean." She shook back the hair from her eyes and moved down to the gate. The cow acknowledged her presence by an indolent toss of the head. "Oh! but my sweet Alice!" protested the young woman; "you must move and let these funny people come in. It really isn't good for you, dear, to stand about in the sun like this, and you'd much better go and lie down in the shade for a bit!" She gently pulled the gate from under the cow's chin, and then, laying her hands flat on its side, made as if to push it out of the way. "Well, I never!" declared Mrs Gosling, regarding the performance with much the same awe as she might have vouchsafed to a lion-tamer in a circus. "'Oo'd 'ave thought it'd 'a been that tame?" The cow, after a moment's resistance, moved off with a leisurely walk in the direction of the wood. "Now, you funny people, what do you want?" asked the young woman. Mrs Gosling began to explain, but Blanche quickly interposed. "Oh! do be quiet, mother; you don't understand," she said, and continued, before her mother could remonstrate, "We've come from London." "Goodness!" commented the young woman. "And we want----" Blanche hesitated. She was surprised to find that in the light of her wonderful discovery it was not so easy to define precisely what they ought to want. As the broomstick woman had said, they were "beggars." Fairly confronted with the problem, Blanche saw no alternative but a candid acknowledgment of the fact. "You want feeding, of course," put in the young woman. "They all do. You needn't think you're the first. We've had dozens!" A solution presented itself to Blanche. "We don't really want food," she said. "We've got a lot of tinned things left still, only we're ill with eating tinned things. I thought, perhaps, you might be willing to let us have some milk and eggs and vegetables in exchange?" "That's sensible enough," commented the young woman. "If you only knew the things we have been offered! Money chiefly, of course"--Mrs Gosling opened her mouth, but Blanche frowned and shook her head--"and it does seem as if money's about as useless as buttons. In fact, I'd sooner have buttons--you can use them. But the other funny things--bits of old furniture, warming-pans, jewellery! You should have heard Mrs Isaacson! She was a Jewess who came from Hampstead a couple of months ago, and she had a lot of jewels she kept in a bag tied round her waist under her skirt; and when Aunt May and I simply had to tell her to go she tried to bribe us with an old brooch and rubbish. She was a terror. But, I say"--she looked at the sun--"I've got lots of things to do before sunset." She paused, and looked at the three Goslings. "Look here," she went on, "are you all right? You seem all right." Again Mrs Gosling began to reply, but Blanche was too quick for her. "Tell me what you mean by 'all right'?" she asked, raising her voice to drown her mother's "Well, I never did 'ear such----" "Well, of course, mother'll give you any mortal thing you want," replied the young woman at the gate. "Dear old mater! She simply won't think of what we're going to do in the winter; and I mean, if you come in for to-night, say, and we let you have a few odd things, you won't go and plant yourselves on us like that Mrs Isaacson and one or two others, because if you do, Aunt May and I will have to turn you out, you know." "What we 'ave we'll pay for," said Mrs Gosling with dignity. The young woman smiled. "Oh, I dare say!" she said; "pay us with those pretty little yellow counters that aren't the least good to anyone. You wait here half a jiff. I'll find Aunt May." She ran up the path and entered the house. A moment later they heard her calling "Aunt May! Auntie--Aun-tee!" somewhere out at the back. "Let's 'ope 'er Aunt May'll 'ave more common sense," remarked Mrs Gosling. Blanche turned on her almost fiercely. "For goodness sake, mother," she said, "do try and get it out of your head, if you can, that we can buy things with money. Can't you see that everything's different? Can't you see that money's no good, that you can't eat it, or wear it, or light a fire with it, like that other woman said? Can't you understand, or won't you?" Mrs Gosling gaped in amazement. It was incredible that the mind of Blanche should also have been distorted by this terrible heresy. She turned in sympathy to Millie, who had taken her mother's seat on the pole of the trolly, but Millie frowned and said: "B.'s right. You can't buy things with money; not here, anyway. What'd they do with money if they got it?" Mrs Gosling looked at the trees, at the cows lying at the edge of the wood, at the sunlit fields beyond the house, but she saw nothing which suggested an immediate use for gold coin. "Lemme sit down, my dear," she said. "What with the 'eat and all this walkin'----Oh! what wouldn't I give for a cup o' tea!" Millie got up sulkily and leaned against the wall. "I suppose they'll let us stop here to-night, B.?" she asked. "If we don't make fools of ourselves," replied Blanche, spitefully. Mrs Gosling drooped. No inspiration had come to her as it had come to her daughter. The older woman had become too specialized. She swayed her head, searching--like some great larva dug up from its refuse heap--confused and feeble in this new strange place of light and air. And as Blanche had repeated to herself "Everything's different," so Mrs Gosling seized a phrase and clung to it as to some explanation of this horrible perplexity. "I can't understand it," she said; "I can't understand it!" 3 Aunt May appeared after a long interval--a thin, brown-faced woman of forty or so. She wore a very short skirt, a man's jacket and an old deerstalker hat, and she carried a pitchfork. She must have brought the pitchfork as an emblem of authority, but she did not handle it as the other woman had handled her broomstick. The murderous pitchfork appeared little more deadly in her keeping than does the mace in the House of Commons, but as an emblem the pitchfork was infinitely more effective. Aunt May's questions were pertinent and searching, and after a few brief explanations had been offered to her she drove off the young woman, her niece, whom she addressed as "Allie," to perform the many duties which were her share of the day's work. Allie went, laughing. "You can sleep here to-night," announced Aunt May. "We shall have a meal all together soon after sunset. Till then you can talk to my sister, who's an invalid. She's always eager for news." She took charge of them as if she were the matron of a workhouse receiving new inmates. "You'd better bring your truck into the garden," she said, "or Alice will be turning everything over. Inquisitive brute!" she added, snapping her fingers at the cow, who had returned, and stood within a few feet of them, eyeing the Goslings with a slow, dull wonder--a mournfully sleepy beast whose furiously wakeful tail seemed anxious to rouse its owner out of her torpor. The invalid sister sat by the window of a small room that faced west and overlooked the luxuriance of what was still recognizably a flower-garden. "My sister, Mrs Pollard," said Aunt May sharply, and then addressing the woman who sat huddled in shawls by the window, she added: "Three more strays, Fanny--from London, Allie tells me." She went out quickly, closing the door with a vigour which indicated little tolerance for invalid nerves. Mrs Pollard stretched out a delicate white hand. "Please come and sit near me," she said, "and tell me about London. It is so long since I have had any news from there. Perhaps you might be able----" she broke off, and looked at the three strangers with a certain pathetic eagerness. "I'll take me bonnet off, ma'am, if you'll excuse me," remarked Mrs Gosling. She felt at home once more within the delightful shelter of a house, although slightly overawed by the aspect of the room and its occupant. About both there was an air of that class dignity to which Mrs Gosling knew she could never attain. "I don't know when I've felt the 'eat as I 'ave to-day," she remarked politely. "Has it been hot?" asked Mrs Pollard. "To me the days all seem so much alike. I want you to tell me, were there any young men in London when you left? You haven't seen any young man who at all resembles this photograph, have you?" Mrs Gosling stared at the silver-framed photograph which Mrs Pollard took from the table at her side, stared and shook her head. "We haven't seen a single man of any kind for two months," said Blanche, "not a single one. Have we, Millie?" Millie, sitting rather stiffly on her chair, shook her head. "It's terrible," she said. "I'm sure I don't know where they can have all gone to." Mrs Pollard did not reply for a moment. She looked steadfastly out of the window, and tears, which she made no attempt to restrain, chased each other in little jerks down her smooth pale cheeks. Mrs Gosling pinched her mouth into an expression of suffering sympathy, and shook her head at her daughters to enforce silence. Was she not, also, a widow? After a short pause, Mrs Pollard fumbled in her lap and discovered a black-bordered pocket-handkerchief--a reminiscence, doubtless, of some earlier bereavement. Her expression had been in no way distorted as she wept, and after the tears had been wiped away no trace of them disfigured her delicate face. Her voice was still calm and sweet as she said: "I am very foolish to go on hoping. I loved too much, and this trial has been sent to teach me that all love but One is vain, that I must not set my heart upon things of the earth. And yet I go on hoping that my poor boy was not cut off in Sin." "Dear, dear!" murmured Mrs Gosling. "You musn't take it to 'eart too much, ma'am. Boys will be a little wild and no doubt our 'eavenly Father will make excuses." Mrs Pollard shook her head. "If it had only been a little wildness," she said, "I should have hope. He is, indeed, just and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, but my poor Alfred became tainted with the terrible doctrines of Rome. It has been the greatest grief of my life, and I have known much pain...." And again the tears slowly welled up and fell silently down that smooth, unchanging face. Mrs Gosling sniffed sympathetically. The two girls glanced at one another with slightly raised eyebrows and Blanche almost invisibly shrugged her shoulders. The warm evening light threw the waxen-faced, white-shawled figure of the woman in the window into high relief. Her look of ecstatic resignation was that of some wonderful mediæval saint returned from the age of vision and miracle to a recently purified earth in which the old ideas of saintship had again become possible. Her influence was upon the room in which she sat. The sounds of the world outside, the evening chorus of wild life, the familiar noise of the farm, seemed to blend into a remote music of prayer--"Kyrie Eleison! Christe Eleison!" Within was a great stillness, as of a thin and bloodless purity; the long continuance of a single thought found some echo in every material object. While the silence lasted everything in that room was responsive to this single keynote of anæmic virtue. Mrs Gosling tried desperately to weep without noise, and even the two girls, falling under the spell, ceased to glance covertly at one another with that hint of criticism, but sat subdued and weakened as if some element of life had been taken from them. The lips of the woman in the window moved noiselessly; her hands were clasped in her lap. She was praying. 4 Firm and somewhat clumsy steps were heard in the passage, the door was pushed roughly open, banging back against the black oak chair which was set behind it, and Aunt May entered carrying a large tray. "Here's your dinner, Fanny," she said. "We've done earlier to-night, in spite of interruptions." She bustled over to the little table in the window, pushed back the Bible and photograph with the edge of the tray until she could release one hand, and then, having driven the tray into a position of safety, moved Bible and photograph to the centre table. There was something protestingly vigorous about her movements, as though she endeavoured to combat by noise and energy the impoverished vitality of that emasculate room. "Now, you three!" she went on. "You had better come out into the kitchen and take your things off and wash." As the Goslings rose, Mrs Pollard turned to them and stretched out to each in turn her delicate white hand. "There is only one Comforter." she said. "Put your trust in Him." Mrs Gosling gulped, and Blanche and Millie looked as they used to look when they attended the Bible-classes held by the vicar's wife. Blanche gave a shiver of relief as they came out into the passage. Her mind was suddenly filled by the astounding thought that everything was not different.... Supper was laid on the kitchen table--cold chicken, potatoes and cabbage, stewed plums and cream, and warm, new milk in a jug; no bread, no salt, and no pepper. As the three Goslings washed at the scullery sink they chattered freely. They felt pleasure at release from some cold, draining influence; they felt as if they had come out of church after some long, dull service, into the air and sunlight. "I'm sure she's a very 'oly lady," was Mrs Gosling's final summary. Blanche shivered again. "Oh! freezing!" was her enigmatic reply. Millie said it gave her "the creeps." They were a party of seven at supper--the meal was referred to as "supper," although to Mrs Pollard it had been dignified by the name of "dinner"--including two young women whom the Goslings had not hitherto seen; strong, brown-faced girls, who spoke with a country accent. They had something still of the manner of servants, but they were treated as equals both by Allie and Aunt May. There was little conversation during the meal, however, for all of them were too intent on the business in hand. To the Goslings that meal was, indeed, a banquet. When they had all finished, Aunt May rose at once. "Thank Heaven for daylight," she remarked; "but we must set our brains to work to invent some light for the winter. We haven't a candle or a drop of oil left," she went on, addressing the Goslings, "and for the past five weeks we have had to bustle to get everything done before sunset, I can tell you. Last night we couldn't wash up after supper." "We know," replied Blanche. Aunt May nodded. "We all know," she said. "Now, you three girls, get busy!" And Allie and the two brown-faced young women rose a little wearily. "I'm getting an old woman," remarked Aunt May, "and I'm allowed certain privileges, chief of them that I don't work after supper. She paused and looked keenly at the three Goslings. "Which of you three is in command?" she asked. "Well, it seems as if my eldest, Blanche, that is, 'as sort o' taken the lead the past few days," began Mrs Gosling. "Ah! I thought so," said Aunt May. "Well, now, Blanche, you'd better come out into the garden and have a talk with me, and we'll decide what you had better do. If your mother and sister would like to go to bed, Allie will show them where they can sleep." She moved away in the direction of the garden and Blanche followed her. CHAPTER XIV XIV--AUNT MAY The sun had set, but as yet the daylight was scarcely faded. Under the trees the fowls muttered in subdued cluckings, and occasionally one of them would flutter up into the lower branches with a squawk of effort and then settle herself with a great fluttering and swelling of feathers, and all the suggestion of a fussy matron preparing for the night--preparing only, for these early roosters sat open-eyed and watchful, as if they knew that there was no chance of sleep for them until every member of that careless crowd below had found its appointed place in the dormitory. "We put 'em inside in the winter," remarked Aunt May, as she and Blanche paused, "but they prefer the trees. We haven't any foxes here, but I've noticed that the wild things seem to be coming back." Blanche nodded. She was thinking how much there was to learn concerning those matters which appertained to the production of food. "They're rather a poor lot," Aunt May continued, "but they have to forage for themselves, except for the few bits of vegetable and such things we can spare them. We've no corn or flour or meal of any kind for ourselves yet. But a farmer's wife about a mile from here has got a few acres of wheat and barley coming on, and we shall help her to harvest and take our share later. We shall be rich then," she added, with a smile. "I'm town-bred, you know," said Blanche. "We've got an awful lot to learn, Millie and me." "You'll learn quickly enough," was the answer. "You'll have to." "I suppose," returned Blanche. At the end of the orchard through which they had been passing they came to a knoll, crowned by a great elm. Round the trunk of the elm a rough seat had been fixed, and here Aunt May sat down with a sigh of relief. "It's a blessed thing to earn your own bread day by day," she said. "It's a beautiful thing to live near the earth and feel physically tired at night. It's delightful to be primitive and agricultural, and I love it. But I have a civilized vice, Blanche. I have a store of cigarettes I stole from a shop in Harrow, and every night when it's fine I come out here after supper and smoke three; and when it's wet I smoke 'em in my own bedroom, and--I dream. But to-night I'm going to talk to you, because you want help." She produced a cigarette case and matches from a side pocket of her jacket, lit a cigarette, inhaled the smoke with a long gasp of intensest enjoyment, and then said: "Men weren't fools, my dear; they had pockets in their coats." "Yes?" said Blanche. She felt puzzled and a little awkward. She knew that this woman was a friend, but the girl's town-bred, objective mind was critical and embarrassed. "Do you smoke?" asked Aunt May. "I can spare you a cigarette, though I know the time must come when there won't be any more. Still, it's a long way off yet. Bless the clever man who invented air-tight tins!" "No, I don't smoke, thanks," replied Blanche, conventionally; and, try as she would, she could not keep some hint of stiffness out of her voice. Modern manners take a long time to influence suburban homes of the Wisteria Grove type. "Ah! well, you miss a lot!" said Aunt May; "but you're better without it, especially now, when tobacco isn't easy to get, and will soon be impossible." "But do you think," asked Blanche, drawing her eyebrows together, "that this sort of thing is going on always?" "I dare say. Don't ask me, my dear; the problem's beyond me. What we poor women have got to do is to keep ourselves alive in the meantime. And that's what we've come out here to talk about. What about your mother and you two girls? Where are you going? And what are you proposing to do?" "I don't know," said Blanche. "I--I've been trying to think." "Good!" remarked Aunt May. "I believe you'll do. I'm doubtful about your sister." "We'll have to work on a farm, I suppose." "It's the only way to live." "Only where?" "That's what I've been trying to worry out," said Aunt May. "We do get news here, of a sort. Our girls work in Mrs Jordan's fields, and meet girls and women who come from Pinner, and the Pinner people hear news from Northwood, and the Northwood people from somewhere else; and so we get into touch with half a county. But, coming to your affairs; you see, we here are just the innermost circle. Most of the women who came from London missed this place and passed us by, thanks be!... Now, that poor unfortunate Miss Grant, down the road, had to defend herself with weapons. Fortunately she's strong." "Is Miss Grant the awful woman with the broomstick?" asked Blanche. "She's not really awful, my dear," said Aunt May, smiling; "she's a very good sort. A little rough in her manners, perhaps, and quite mad about the uselessness of the creatures we used to know as men, but a fine, generous, unselfish woman, if she does boast of her three murders. Did she tell you that, by the way?" Blanche nodded. "She would, of course; and I believe it's true; but her theory was to defend her own people. She said they'd all have died if she hadn't. I'm not sure about the ethic, but I know dear old Sally Grant meant well. However, I'm wandering--I often do when I talk like this. The point was that just this little circle here, close to London, is very thickly populated, and there's precious little food ready to be got any way; but you'll have to pass through the country beyond Pinner before you'll find a place where they'll give you work and keep you. There's a surplus in the next ring, I gather, too much labour and too little to grow. You'll have to push out into the Chilterns, out to Amersham at the nearest. It's all on the main road, of course, which is bad in a general way, because that's the road they all took. But I think if you'll cut across towards Wycombe you might, perhaps, find a place of some sort, though whether they'll feed your mother free gratis I can't say. Women are of all sorts, but this plague hasn't made 'em more friendly to one another, or perhaps it is we notice it more, and the worst of the lot are the farmers' wives and daughters who've got the land. They get turned out, though, sometimes. We hear about it. The London women have made raids; only, you see, the poor dears don't know what to do with the land when they get it, so they have to keep the few who do know to teach 'em--when they're sensible enough--the raiders, I mean. They aren't always." "It'll be an adventure," remarked Blanche. Aunt May threw away the very short end of her second cigarette and lighted her third. "Adventure will do you good," she said. It was nearly dark under the elm. The things of the night were coming out. Occasionally a cockchafer would go humming past them, the bats were flitting swiftly and silently about the orchard, and presently an owl swept by in one great stride of soundless flight. "How they are all coming back!" murmured Aunt May. "All the wild things. I never saw an owl here before this year." "I should be frightened if you weren't here," said Blanche. "Nothing to be frightened of, yet." "Yet?" "In a few years' time, perhaps. I don't know. We killed a wild cat who came after the chickens a few days ago. The cats have gone back already, and the dogs aren't so respectful as they used to be. The dogs'll interbreed, I suppose, and evolve a common form--strike some kind of average in a beast which will be somewhere near the ancestral type, smaller, probably, I don't know. It's a wonderful world, and very interesting. I could almost wish man wouldn't return for twenty years or so--just to see how much of his handiwork Nature could undo in the interval. I often think about it out here in the evenings." "I wish I knew more about it," said Blanche timidly. "Are there any books, do you know, that----" "You won't want books, my dear. Keep your eyes open and think." They lapsed into silence again. The third cigarette was finished, but Aunt May gave no indication of a desire to get back to the house, and Blanche's mind was so excited with all the new ideas which were pouring in upon her that she had forgotten her tiredness. "It's awfully interesting," she said at last. "It's all so different. Mother and Millie hate it, and they'd like all the old things back; but I don't think I would." "You're all right. You'll do," replied her companion. "You're one of the new sort, though you might never have found it out if it hadn't been for the plague. Now, your sister will do one of two things, in my opinion; either she'll stop in some place where there's a man--there's one at Wycombe, by the way--and have children, or she'll turn religious." Blanche was about to ask a question, but Aunt May stopped her. "Never mind about the man, my dear," she said. "You'll learn quickly enough. It's like Heaven now, you see--no marrying or giving in marriage. With one man to every thousand women or so, what can you expect? It's no good kicking against it. It's got to be. That's where Fanny----" She broke off suddenly, with a little snort of impatience. "I think to-night's an exception," she went on. "I like talking to you, and one simply can't talk to Allie yet, so just to-night I'll have one more." She took out her cigarette case with a touch of impatience. It was dark under the elm now, and she had to hold up her cigarette case close to her face in order to see the contents. "Two more," she announced. "It's a festival, and for once I can speak my mind to some one. An imprudence, perhaps, like this habit of smoking, but I shall probably never see you again, and I'm sure you won't tell." "Oh, no!" interposed Blanche eagerly. "You're not tired? You don't want to go to bed?" "Not a bit. I love being out here." "I can't see you, but I know you're speaking the truth," said Aunt May, after a pause. "In the darkness and silence of the night I will make a confession. I look weather-worn and fifty, I know, but I feel absurdly romantic, only there's no man in this case. I used to write novels, my dear--an absurd thing for any spinster to do, but they paid, and I've got the itch for self-expression. That's the one outlet I miss in this new world of ours. Sally Grant and I can't agree, and, in any case, she wants to do all the talking. And sometimes I'm idiot enough to go on writing little bits even now when I have become a capable, practical woman with at least four lives dependent upon me. Well, it shows, anyhow, that we writing women weren't all fools...." She hung on that for a moment or two, and then continued. "Are you religious?" "I don't know--I suppose so. We always went to Church at home," said Blanche. "I thought every one was, almost. Not quite like Mrs Pollard, of course." "Oh, well!" said Aunt May. "There's no harm and a lot of good in being religious, if you go about it in the right way. I don't want to change your opinions, my dear. It's just a question to me of the right way. And I can't see that Fanny's way is right. Here we are, and we've got to make the best of it; and to my mind that means facing life, and not shutting yourself into one room with a Bible and spending half your time on your knees. Fanny never was good for much. She brought up Alfred--my nephew, you know--with only one idea, and she stuffed him so full of holiness that the English Church couldn't hold him, and he had to work some of it off by going over to Rome. He thought he'd have better chances of saintship there. He was a poor, pale thing, anyway. Of course, that was anathema to Fanny. She might have forgiven him for committing a murder, but to become a Roman Catholic----! Oh, Lord! She's been praying for him ever since. And, my dear, what difference can it make? Alfred's apostasy, I mean. Do you think it matters what particular form of worship or pettifogging details of belief you adopt? Why can't the Churches take each other for granted, and be generous enough to suppose that all roads lead to Heaven, which is, according to all accounts, a much better place than Rome? But, oh! above all, if you have a religion, do be practical! Come out and do your work, instead of sighing and psalm-singing, and wearying dumb Heaven with fulsome praise and lamentations of your unworthiness, as if you were trying to propitiate a rich customer! "There, my dear, I won't say any more. My last cigarette's done, and wasted, because I was too excited to enjoy it. I know I've been disloyal; but it's my temperament. I could slap Fanny sometimes. And she shan't have Allie.... It's the night that has affected me. To-morrow I shall be just as practical as ever, and you'll forget that you've seen this side of me. Come along. We must go to bed." "This is the greatest night of my life," thought Blanche as they walked back in silence to the house. Even when she was in bed, she did not go to sleep at once. She lay and listened to the heavy breathing of her mother and Millie, and she wondered. Everything, indeed, was different, but everybody was just the same, only, in some curious way, individualities seemed more pronounced. Could it be that everybody was more natural, that there was less restraint? Blanche was not introspective. She did not test the theory on herself. She thought of the women she had met that day, and of her mother and Millie. She fell asleep, determined to be more like Aunt May. XV--FROM SUDBURY TO WYCOMBE 1 Allie knocked on the Goslings' door at sunrise the next morning, and Blanche, who had come to bed two hours after her mother and sister, was the only one to respond. She woke with the feeling that she had something important to do, and that the affair was in some way pleasant and inspiring. Millie was not easily roused. She had slept heavily, and did not approve the suggestion that she should get up and dress herself. "All right, B., all right!" she mumbled, and cuddled down under the bedclothes like a dormouse into its straw. "Oh! do get up!" urged Blanche, impatiently, and at last resorted to physical force. "What is the matter?" snapped Millie, struggling to maintain her hold of the blankets. "Why can't you leave me alone?" "Because it's time to get up, lazy!" said Blanche, continuing the struggle. "Well, I said I'd get up in a minute." "Well, get up then." "In a minute." "No--now!" "Oh, bother!" said Millie. Blanche succeeded at last in obtaining possession of the blankets. "You'll wake mother!" was Millie's last, desperate shaft. "I'm going to try," replied Blanche. Millie sat up in the bed and wondered vaguely where she was. These scenes had often been enacted at Wisteria Grove, and her mind had gone back to those delightful days of peace and security. When full consciousness returned to her, she was half inclined to cry, and more than half inclined to go to sleep again. Mrs Gosling was quite as difficult. "What's the time?" was her first question. "I don't know," said Blanche. "I'm sure it's not seven," murmured Mrs Gosling. Millie, still sitting on the bed, wondered whether Blanche would let her get to the blankets which were tumbled on the floor a few feet away. "No, you don't!" exclaimed Blanche, anticipating the attempt. Finally she lost her temper and shook her mother vigorously. At that, Mrs Gosling sat up suddenly and stared at her. "What in 'eaven's name's wrong, gel?" she asked. Her instinct told her with absolute certainty that it was still the middle of the night by Wisteria Grove standards. "Oh! my goodness! I'm going to have my hands full with you two!" broke out Blanche impatiently. Her imagination pictured for her in that instant how great the trouble would be. She would never be able to wake them up.... They took the road before eight o'clock. Aunt May was generous in the matter of eggs and fruit, and she left her many urgent duties to point the way for the inexperienced explorers. "Get right out as far as you can," was her parting word of advice. They did not see Mrs Pollard again. She was still in bed when they set out. 2 Despite the promise of another cloudless day, none of the three travellers set out in high spirits. To all of them, even to Blanche, it seemed a return to weariness and pain to start out once more pushing that abominable truck. That truck represented all their troubles. It had become associated with all the discomforts they had endured since they left the Putney house. It indicated the paucity of their possessions, and yet it was intolerably heavy to push. After their brief return to the comfort and stability of a home and natural food, this adventuring out into the inhospitable country appeared more hopeless than ever. If they could have gone without the truck, they might, at least, have avoided that feeling of horrible certainty. They might have cheated themselves into the belief that they would return. The truck was the brand of their vagabondage. Mrs Gosling did not spare her lamentations concerning the hopelessness of their endeavour, and gave it as her opinion that they had been most heartlessly treated by Aunt May. "Turning out a woman of my age into the roads," she grumbled. "She might 'ave kept us a day or two, I should 'ave thought. It ain't as if we were beggars. We could 'ave paid for what we 'ad." She had, indeed, made the suggestion and been repulsed. Aunt May had firmly put the offer on one side without explanation. She understood that explanations would be wasted on Mrs Gosling. Millie was inclined to agree with her mother. Blanche, at the handle, did not interrupt the statement of their grievances. She was occupied with the problem of the future, trying to think out some plan in her own confused inconsecutive way. Their progress was tediously slow. Against the combined brake of the truck and Mrs Gosling, they did not average two miles an hour; and even before they came to Pinner it was becoming obvious to the two girls that they might as well let their mother ride on the trolly as allow her to lean her weight upon it as she walked. They took the road through Wealdstone to avoid the hill and found that they were still in the track of one wing of the foraging army which had preceded them. That first rush of emigrants had ravaged the stores and houses as locusts will ravage a stretch of country. The suburb of regular villas and prim shops had been completely looted. Doors stood open and windows were smashed; the spread of ugly houses lay among the fields like an unwholesome eruption, awaiting the healing process of Nature. Wealdstone also was deserted by humanity. The flood had swept on towards the open country. But as they approached Pinner the signs of devastation and desertion began to give way. Here and there women could be seen working in the fields; one or two children scuttled away before the approach of the Goslings and hid in the hedges, children who had evidently grown furtive and suspicious, intimidated by the experiences of the past two months; and when the outlying houses were reached--detached suburban villas, once occupied by relatively wealthy middle-class employers--it was evident that efforts were being made to restore the wreckage of kitchen gardens. The Goslings had reached the point at which the wave had broken after its great initial energy was spent. Somewhere about this fifteen-mile limit, varying somewhat according to local conditions, the real disintegration of the crowd had begun. As the numerous tokens of the road had shown, a great number of women and children--possibly one-fifth of the whole crowd--had died of starvation and disease before any harbour was reached. From this fifteen-mile circle outwards, an increasing number had been stayed in their flight by the opportunities of obtaining food. Work was urgently demanded for the future, but the determining factor was the present supply of food, and the constriction of immediate supply had decided the question of how great a proportion of the women and children should remain. Here, about Pinner, was more land than the limited number of workers could till, but little of it was arable, and this year there would be almost no harvest of grain. Vaguely, Blanche realized this. She remembered Aunt May's advice to keep her eyes open, and looking about her as she walked she found little promise of security in the grass fields and the rare signs of human activity. Mrs Gosling, eager to find some home at any price, expressed her usual optimistic opinion with regard to the value of money. She saw signs of life again, at last, conditions familiar to her. She thought that they were returning once more to some kind of recognizable civilization, and began, with some renewal of her old vigour, to advise that they should find an hotel or inn and take "a good look round" before going any further. Millie, heartened by her mother's belief, was of much the same opinion, and Blanche was summoned from the pole to listen to the proposition. She shook her head stubbornly. "I'm not going to argue it out all over again," she said. "You can just look round and see for yourselves that there's no food to be got here. We must get further out." Mrs Gosling refused to be convinced, and advanced her superior knowledge of the world to support her judgment of the case. "Oh! very well," said Blanche, at last. "Come on to the inn and see for yourselves." The inn, however, was deserted. All its available supply of food, solid and liquid, had long been exhausted, and the gardenless house had offered no particular attractions as a residence. Houses were cheap in that place, the whole population of Pinner, including children, did not exceed three hundred persons. They found a woman working in a garden near by, and she, with perhaps unnecessary harshness, warned them that they could not stay in the village. "There's not enough food for us as it is," she said, and made some reference to "silly Londoners." That was an expression with which the Goslings were to become very familiar in the near future. The appeal for pity fell on deaf ears. Mrs Gosling learned that she was only one of many thousands who had made the same appeal. The sun was high in the sky as they trudged out of Pinner on the road towards Northwood. It was then Blanche suggested that her mother should always ride on the trolly, except when they were facing a hill; and after a few weak protestations the suggestion was accepted. The trolly was lightened of various useless articles of furniture--a grudging sacrifice on the part of Mrs Gosling--and the party pushed on at a slightly improved pace. After her disappointment in Pinner, Mrs Gosling's interest in life began rapidly to decline. Seated in her truck, she fell into long fits of brooding on the past. She was too old and too stereotyped to change, the future held no hope for her, and as the meaning and purpose of her existence faded, the life forces within her surely and ever more rapidly ebbed. Reality to her became the discomfort of the sun's heat, the dust of the road, the creak and scream of the trolly wheels. She was incapable of relating herself to the great scheme of life, her consciousness was limited, as it had always been limited, to her immediate surroundings. She saw herself as a woman outrageously used by fate, but to fate she gave no name; the very idea, indeed, was too abstract to be appreciated by her. Blanche, Millie and that horrible truck were all that was left of her world, and in spirit she still moved in the beloved, familiar places of her suburban home. 3 As the Goslings trudged out into the Chilterns they came into new conditions. Soon they found over-crowding in place of desolation. The harvest was ripening and in a month's time the demand for labour would almost equal the supply, for the labour offered was quite absurdly unskilled and ten women would be required to perform the work of one man equipped with machines. But at the end of July the surplus of women, almost exclusively Londoners, had no employment and little food, and many were living on grass, nettles, leaves, any green stuff they could boil and eat, together with such scraps of meat and vegetables as they could steal or beg. Their experiments with wild green stuffs often resulted in some form of poisoning, and dysentery and starvation were rapidly increasing the mortality among them. Nevertheless, in Rickmansworth houses were still at a premium, and many of those who camped perforce in fields or by the roadside were too enfeebled by town-life to stand the exposure of the occasional cold, wet nights. The majority of the women in this ring were those who had been too weak to struggle on. They represented the class least fitted to adapt themselves to the new conditions. The stronger and more capable had persisted, and left these congested areas behind them; and it was evident that in a very few months a balance between labour and supply would be struck by the relentless extermination of the weakest by starvation and disease. Blanche, if she was unable to grasp the problem which was being so inevitably solved by the forces of natural law, was at least able to recognize clearly enough that she and her two dependents must not linger in the district to which they had now come. Aunt May had warned her that she must push out as far as Amersham at the nearest, but Millie was too tired and footsore to go much further than Rickmansworth that night, and after a fruitless search for shelter they camped out half a mile from the town in the direction of Chorley Wood. They made some kind of a shield from the weather by emptying and tilting the trolly, and they hid their supply of food behind them at the lowest point of this species of lean-to roof. The two girls had realized that that supply would soon be raided if the fact of its existence were to become known. They had been the object of much scrutiny as they passed, and their appearance of well-being had prompted endless demands for food, from that pitiful crowd of emaciated women and children. It had been a demand quickly put on one side by lying. Their applicants found it only too easy to believe that the Goslings had no food hidden in the truck. "I hated to refuse some of 'em," Blanche said as they carefully hid what food was left to them, before turning in for the night, "but what good would our little bit have done among all that lot? It would have been gone in half a jiff." "Well, of course," agreed Millie. Mrs Gosling had taken little notice of the starving crowd. "We've got nothin' to give you," was her one form of reply. She might have been dealing with hawkers in Wisteria Grove. She was curiously apathetic all that afternoon and evening, and raised only the feeblest protestation against the necessity for sleeping in the open air. But she was very restless during the night, her limbs twitched and she moved continually, muttering and sometimes crying out. And as the three women were all huddled together, partly to make the most of their somewhat insufficient lean-to, and partly because they were afraid of the terrors of the open air, both Blanche and Millie were constantly aroused by their mother's movements. Once they heard her calling urgently for "George." "Mother's odd, isn't she?" whispered Blanche after one such disturbance. "Do you think she's going to be ill?" "Shouldn't wonder," muttered Millie. "Who wouldn't be?" In the morning Blanche was very careful with their food. For breakfast they ate only part of a tin of condensed beef between them--Mrs Gosling indeed ate hardly anything. The eggs which they had brought from Sudbury they reserved, chiefly because they had neither water nor fire. They drank from a stream, later, and at midday Blanche and Millie each ate one of the eggs raw. Mrs Gosling refused all food on this occasion. She had been very quiet all the morning, and had made little complaint when she had been forced to walk the many hills which they were now encountering. Blanche was uneasy and tried to induce her mother to talk. "Do you feel bad, mother?" she asked continually. "I wish I could get 'ome," was all the reply she received. "She'll be all right when we can get settled somewhere," grumbled Millie. "If such a time ever comes." 4 They came to Amersham in the afternoon. The signs of misery and starvation were here less marked. They were approaching the outer edge of this ring of compression, having passed through the node at Rickmansworth. The faint relief of pressure was evidenced to some extent in the attitude of the people they addressed. It is true that no immediate hope of food and employment were held out to them, but on the one hand Blanche's inquiries were answered with less acerbity and on the other they were less besieged by importunate demands for charity. Blanche gave an egg to one precocious girl of thirteen or so, who insisted on helping them to push the truck uphill, and she and Millie watched the deft way in which the child broke the shell at one end and sucked out the contents. Their own methods had been both unclean and wasteful. They turned off the Aylesbury Road, towards High Wycombe late in the afternoon and about a mile from Amersham came to a farm where they made their last inquiry that day. Blanche saw signs of life in the outbuildings and went to investigate, leaving Millie and her mother to guard the truck. She found three women and a girl of fourteen or so milking. For some minutes she stood watching them, the women, after one glance at her, proceeding with their work without paying her any further attention. But, at last, the eldest of the three rose from her stool with a sigh of relief, picked up her wooden bucket of milk, gave the cow a resounding slap on the side, and then, turning to Blanche, said, "Well, my gal, what's for you?" "Will you change two pints of milk for a small tin of tongue?" asked Blanche. It was the first time she had offered any of their precious tinned meats in exchange for other food, but she wanted milk for her mother, who had hardly eaten anything that day. The two other women and the girl looked round and regarded Blanche with the first signs of interest they had shown. "Tongue, eh?" said the older woman. "Where from did you get tongue, my gal?" "London," replied Blanche tersely. "When did you leave there?" asked the woman, and then Blanche was engaged in a series of searching questions respecting the country she had passed through. "You can have the milk if you've anything to put it in," said the woman at last, and Blanche went to fetch the tongue and the two bottles that they had had from Aunt May. The bottles had to be scalded, a precaution that had not occurred to Blanche, and one of the other women was sent to carry out the operation. "Well, your tale don't tell us much," said the woman of the farm, "but we always pass the news here, now. Where are you going to sleep to-night?" Blanche shrugged her shoulders. "You can sleep here in the outhouses, if you've a mind to," said the woman, "but I warn you we get a crowd. Silly Londoners like yourself for the most part, but we find a use for 'em somehow, though I'd give the lot for three labourers." She paused and twisted her mouth on one side reflectively. "Ah! well," she went on with a sigh, "no use grieving over them that's gone; all I was goin' to say was, if you sleep here you'd better keep an eye on what food you've got with you. My lot'll have it before you can say knife, if they get half a chance." "It isn't us girls, me and my sister," explained Blanche. "It's my mother. She's bad, I'm afraid. If she could sleep in your kitchen...? She wouldn't steal anything." After a short hesitation the woman consented. Yet neither the glory of being once more within the four walls of a house, nor the refreshment of the milk which she drank readily enough, seemed appreciably to rouse Mrs Gosling's spirits. The woman of the farm, a kindly enough creature, plied the old lady with questions, but received few and confused answers in reply. Mrs Gosling seemed dazed and stupid. "A touch of the sun," the farmer's widow thought. "The sun's been cruel strong the past week," she said, "but she'll be all right in a day or two, get her to shelter." "Ah! that's the trouble," said Blanche. That night the farmer's widow said no more on that subject. She allowed the three Goslings to sleep in an upstair room, in which there was one small bed for the mother, and the two girls slept on the floor. Exchanging confidence for confidence, they brought their truck into the kitchen; and then the farmer's widow proceeded to lock up for the night, an elaborate business, which included the fastening of all ground-floor windows and shutters. "It's a thievin' crowd we've got about here," she explained, "and you can't blame them or anyone when there ain't enough food to go round. But we have to be careful for 'em. Let 'em go their own way and they'd eat up everything in a week and then starve. It looks like you're being hard on 'em, but it's for their own good. There's some, of course," she went on, "as you have got to get shut of. Only yesterday I had to send one of 'em packing. A Jew woman she was, called 'erself Mrs Isaacson or something. She was a caution." Blanche wondered idly if this were the same Mrs Isaacson who had stayed too long with Aunt May. The woman of the farm roused the Goslings at sunrise, and she, like Aunt May, had a brisk, practical, morning manner. She gave the travellers no more food, but when they were nearly ready to take the road again she gave them one valuable piece of information. "If I was you," she said, "I'd make through Wycombe straight along the road here, and go up over the hill to Marlow. Mind you, they won't let every one stop there. But you look two healthy gals enough and it's getting on towards harvest when there'll be work as you can do." "Marlow?" repeated Blanche, fixing the name in her memory. The farmer's widow nodded. "There's a man there," she said. "A queer sort, by all accounts. Not like Sam Evans, the butcher at Wycombe, he ain't. Seems as this Marlow chap don't have no truck with gals, except setting 'em to work. However, time'll show. He may change his mind yet." They had some difficulty with Mrs Gosling. She refused feebly to leave the house. "I ain't fit to go out," she complained, and when they insisted she asked if they were going home. "Best say 'yes,'" whispered the woman of the farm. "The sun's got to her head a bit. She'll be all right when you get her to Marlow." Blanche accepted the suggestion, and by this subterfuge Mrs Gosling was persuaded into the truck. The girl found the ruins of an umbrella, which they rigged up to protect her from the sun. Blanche and Millie were quite convinced now that their mother was suffering from a slight attack of sunstroke. Both the girls were still footsore, and one of Millie's boots had worn into a hole, but they had a definite objective at last, and only some ten or twelve miles to travel before reaching it. "We shall be there by midday," said Blanche, hopefully. Unconsciously, every one was using a new measure of time. XVI--THE YOUNG BUTCHER OF HIGH WYCOMBE 1 Near Wycombe a woman rose from under the hedge as the Goslings approached, and came out into the middle of the road. She was a stout, florid woman, whose age might have been anything between forty and fifty. Her gait and the droop of her shoulders, rather than the flaccidity of her rather loose skin, gave her the appearance of being past middle age. "Goot morning," she said as the Goslings came up. "If it iss no inconvenience I would like to come with you." She spoke with a foreign accent, thickening her final consonants and giving a different value to some of her vowels. "Where to?" asked Blanche curtly. "Ah! that! what does it matter?" returned the woman. "I have been living with a farmer's wife further back along the road there. But she was not company for me. She was common. Now I see that you and your mother are not common. And I do not care to live with farmers' wives. But where we go? Does it matter? We all go to find work in the fields--aristocrat as much as peasant. But iss it not better that we who are not peasants should go together?" Millie giggled surreptitiously, and Mrs Gosling appeared conscious of the fact that some one was addressing them. "We're goin' 'ome," she remarked, and Millie gently prodded her in the back. "Goin' 'ome," repeated Mrs Gosling firmly. "Ach! You are lucky. There are few that have homes now," replied the strange woman. "I had a home, once, how long ago. Now, during two months, I have no home." She was evidently on the verge of tears. "Mother's got a touch of the sun," Blanche said in a low voice, "and we have to pretend we're going home. You needn't tell her we're not." "Have no fear," replied the stranger. "I am all that is most discreet, yes." Blanche hardened her heart. This woman took too much for granted. "I don't see it's any use your coming with us," she said. "Ach! we others, we should cling together," said the stranger, with a large gesture. "We're nobody," replied Blanche, curtly. "It iss well to say that. I know. There iss good reason. I, too, must tell the common people that I am a nobody, I call myself, even, Mrs Isaacson. But between us there iss no need to say what iss not true. I can see what you are. Although I am not English, I have lived many years already in England, and I can see. It iss well that we cling together? Yes?" "Oh!" burst out Blanche. "You're Mrs Isaacson, are you? I've heard of you." For one moment Mrs Isaacson's fine eyes seemed to look inwards in an instantaneous review of her past. "Ach! so! Then we are friends already," she said cautiously. "I heard of you from Aunt May," said Blanche, and the faint air of respect with which she pronounced the name did not escape the notice of the alert Jewess. "Ach! the so dear and so clever Auntie May," she said. "But she iss too kind, and work so hard while her sister do always nothing. See, I will help you to draw your poor mother who has a touch of the sun. You and I at the handle and your beautiful sister to push, while we talk a little of the clever Auntie May. Yes?" Blanche had been forewarned. She could only put one construction on the little she had heard of Mrs Isaacson. But the Jewess's manner no less than her conversation was subtly flattering. Moreover, she had made no appeal for help; finally there was a certain urgency about her, a force of will which Blanche found it difficult to resist. And as the girl still hesitated Mrs Isaacson bravely seized her side of the trolly handle and the procession moved on. The Goslings found a use for her when they came to the drop of Amersham Hill, going down into High Wycombe. Blanche proposed that Mrs Gosling should walk down, but the old lady did not seem to understand her. She looked perplexed and kept saying, "I don't remember this road. Are you sure we're goin' right, Blanche?" "Ah! she must not walk in this heat," put in Mrs Isaacson. "We three can manage very well." And, indeed, although she manifestly suffered greatly from the exertion, the Jewess was of very great assistance in retarding the speed of the trolly as they made the perilous descent. After that there could be no question of calmly telling her to go her own way. By the time they had crossed the almost deserted town--at that hour nearly all the women were either in their houses or working in gardens and fields--and had found their way to the Marlow road, Mrs Isaacson had quite become one of the party, and by no means the least energetic. "We'll have something to eat and some milk, when we get through the town," said Blanche as they faced the long hill up to Handy Cross. "Presently, presently," replied the heaving Mrs Isaacson, as though food were of little importance to her, but accepting the admission that she had earned the right to share equally with the others. Their first burst of energy after they had faced the ascent brought them to the gates of Wycombe Abbey, and there they decided to rest and lunch, blissfully ignorant of the long climb which lay before them. "It will be nice and quiet here in the shade," suggested Mrs Isaacson. 2 The old conventions would not have suffered them to sit and eat thus under the walls, at the very gates of Wycombe Abbey. Their clothes and their boots were wearing badly, and Mrs Isaacson, at least, was not too clean. It was noticeable, however, that, despite the dryness of the weather, little dust clung to them. The surface of the roads had not been pounded and crushed into powder during the past six weeks by the constant passage of wheeled traffic, and even in the tracks frequented by farm carts the roads were stained with green. Indeed, everything was greener than in the old days, everything was more vigorous. Whether because the year had been favourable, or because it was relieved from the burden of choking dust which it had had to endure in other years from May onwards, the vegetation in hedges and by the wayside appeared to grow more strongly and with a greater self-assertion. And by contrast with this vigour and cleanness of plant life, the four women in their tumbled clothes and untidy hats, feeble and unsightly remnants of forgotten fashion, were as much out of place as if they had been set down in ancient Greece. The dowdy foolishness of their apparel marked them out from every other living thing about them, they were intruders, despoilers of beauty. Some dim consciousness of this came to Blanche. They had spoken little as they ate--Mrs Gosling would touch nothing but milk, and Mrs Isaacson strove desperately and with some success to control the greed that showed in the concentrated eagerness of her eyes and the grasping crook of her fingers--and when they had finished, lingering in the relief of the shade, they were still silent. It seemed as if the first word spoken must necessarily hasten the continuation of their journey. "Oh! bother this old hat," said Blanche at last. "I'm going to take mine off," and she drew out the solitary pin which remained to her and cast the hat into the ditch. "That won't do it any good," remarked Millie but she, too, took off her hat with a sigh of relief. "I'm going to chuck hats," said Blanche. "What's the good of 'em?" Mrs Isaacson looked doubtful. "They are a protection from the sun," she said. "Allie never wore a hat, and she didn't come to any harm," returned Blanche. "No?" said Mrs Isaacson, and looked thoughtful. Millie was running her fingers through the masses of her red-brown hair, loosening it and lifting it from her head. "It is a relief," she remarked. "My head gets so hot." "Ah!" said Mrs Isaacson, "and what beautiful hair! It does not seem right to hide it. I haf a comb in my bag. It is almost all I haf left. Let me now comb your beautiful hair for you." "Oh! don't you bother," said Millie sheepishly, but she allowed herself to be persuaded. "Don't lose the hair-pins," she warned her newly-found lady's maid. "It seems so funny out here in the open road," giggled Millie. Mrs Isaacson's praise was fulsome. Blanche watched without comment. Mrs Gosling was plunged in meditation. She was involved in an immense problem relating to the housekeeping at Wisteria Grove. She was debating whether the lace curtains at the front windows could be washed at home when they went back. Suddenly the attention of the three younger women was caught by unnatural sounds that came from the further side of the wall against which they were leaning--sounds of voices, laughing and singing, the crunch of wheels and the stamping of horses. The two girls jumped to their feet. Mrs Isaacson rose more deliberately, with a grunt of expostulation. Mrs Gosling was in a world far removed and continued to debate her problem. Millie's hands were fumbling at her hair, and Blanche was first at the gate. "Oh! my!" she exclaimed. "Why, whatever...." "Goody!" squealed Millie, still struggling with her loose mane. 3 The centre and object of the curious crowd which moved slowly down the drive was a landau and pair. The horses were decorated as if for a May-day fête, grotesquely, foolishly decorated with roses, syringa and buttercups made into shapeless bunches and tied to the harness. Three or four women walked at the horses' heads, leading them with absurdly beflowered ropes. Round the landau a dozen girls and young women were dancing, chattering, singing, laughing; constantly turning to the occupant of the carriage, for whose benefit the whole performance was being conducted. Some of them had their necks and breasts bare, and all appeared to be frankly shameless. They twisted and danced with clumsy eagerness, threw themselves about, screamed and shrieked, unaware of any observer but the one whose notice they were seeking to attract. They were graceless, civilized savages; Bacchantes who had never known the beauty of unconscious abandonment. There was the ugliness of conscious purpose in their every attitude, and no trace of the freedom that comes from careless rapture. In the carriage a man and a woman were sitting side by side. The man was young, with strong claims to physical beauty--tall, broad-shouldered, swarthy, with boldly modelled features and heavily lidded eyes. But his skin was coarse; the bulk of his body was too gross for clean, muscular strength; his curly, well-oiled hair was thinning at the temples; his loose mouth leered and gaped. He was dressed in a suit of broadly-patterned tweed, his great red fingers were covered with rings, he wore a heavy gold bangle on each thick, round wrist, and a sweet, frail rose was thrust into his black and greasy hair. The woman beside him was the typical courtesan of the ages, low-browed and full-lipped. Her eyes were eloquent with the subtleties of love, with invitation, retreat, fear and desire. Had she been dressed becomingly she would have been beautiful; but she was English and modern, and her great meaningless hat and senseless garments were of the fashion that had been in vogue just before the plague. This reigning sultana and her lover were more incongruous in that setting than the two dishevelled, travel-worn girls, who retreated timidly to let the landau pass out between the great iron gates. The Bacchantes eyed the Goslings with obvious disfavour, but the beauty in the landau seemed unaware of their presence until her lord's attention was attracted by the sight of Millie's hair--it was all down again, rippling and spreading to her waist. The young butcher had been lolling back in a corner of his carriage, magnificently indolent, sure of worship; but his satiety was pierced by the sight of that flaming mane. He sat up and looked at Millie with the experienced eyes which had served him so well in his judgment of cattle. "'Ere, 'alf a jiff," he commanded the nymphs at his horses' bridles, and the carriage was stopped. Millie, covered with shame, shrank back, and cowered behind Blanche, who threw up her chin and met the butcher's eyes with all the contempt of which she was capable--little enough, perhaps, for she, too, was weak with unreasoning terror. Behind their backs the Jewess grimaced her scorn of them. "You needn't be afraid of me--I ain't goin' to 'urt yer----" began the butcher, but his lady interrupted him. Her fine eyes grew bright with anger. "If you stop here, I shall get out," she said, and her inflexion was not that of the people. The butcher visibly hesitated. It may be that this chain had held him too long and was beginning to gall him, but he looked at her and wavered. "No 'arm in stoppin'," he muttered. "Pass the news an' that." "Are you going on?" demanded the beauty fiercely. "All right, all right," he returned sullenly. "You needen' get so blasted 'uffy about it, old gal. Oh, gow on, you!" he added to the nymphs. "Wot the 'ell are yer starin' at?" As the landau moved on, he looked back once at Millie. 4 "What a brute," said Blanche when the procession had passed on down the hill towards Wycombe. "How he stared at my hair," said Millie, with a giggle. "I did try to get it up, but it's that stubborn with the heat or something." "Lucky for us he had that creature with him," commented Blanche. Millie assented without fervour. She was bold enough now the danger had passed. Mrs Isaacson looked from one to the other and attempted no criticism of the adventure. "You must let me do up your beautiful hair," she said to the simpering Millie. Millie was grateful. "It is kind of you, Mrs Isaacson, I'm sure," she said. "My hair is a trouble. I sometimes think I'll cut it all off and be done with it...." She appeared excited and chatted incessantly while the hair-dressing continued, and Blanche restored the remains of their meal to the trolly. With some difficulty they succeeded in getting Mrs Gosling back into her carriage. She had taken no notice of the procession, but as they were starting again she awoke from her abstraction to ask: "When d'you expect we'll be 'ome, Blanche? I've been thinkin' about them curtains in the drawin'-room...." "We'll be home in an hour or two, now," Blanche said, reassuringly. She did not know what a struggle awaited them before they should top the hill at Handy Cross. Mrs Isaacson had forsaken her place at the pole. "I shall be able to push more strongly behind," she had said, but despite the theoretical gain in mechanical advantage obtained by the new arrangement, the hill seemed never-ending. They had to rest continually, and always they looked with increasing irritation at the quiet figure in the trolly, chief cause of their distress. "I believe she could walk all right," Millie broke out at last. "If it was for a little way, it would help," commented Mrs Isaacson. But when Blanche put the proposition to her mother, Mrs Gosling seemed unable to comprehend it, and pity influenced them to renew the struggle. So they toiled on with growing impatience until they reached level ground again; and presently, looking down over the long slope of the valley, saw, two miles and a half away, the spire of Marlow Church. They rested under a hedge for a time, and when they started again Millie followed her sister's example and discarded her hat. Blanche, with a certain courage of opinion, had left hers under the walls of Wycombe Abbey, but Millie's hat found a place in the trolly. The ease of the long descent permitted a renewal of conversation, and Mrs Isaacson and Millie talked in undertones as they made their way down towards Marlow. Blanche took little notice of them; she was struggling perplexedly with the problems of life. Mrs Gosling's presence was negligible. "That was a very handsome fellow in the carriage," remarked Mrs Isaacson suddenly, "I think you do well not to go near that place again." Her fine eyes fixedly regarded the broad, rusty back of Mrs Gosling and the broken ribs of her umbrella. Millie simpered. "Oh! I should be safe enough. His wife'd see to that." "She was not his wife," returned Mrs Isaacson. "Men would not marry now that they are so few." "Well! there's a thing to say!" exclaimed Millie on a note of expostulation, interested nevertheless. "It iss true," continued Mrs Isaacson. "I haf heard of this handsome young fellow. He iss a butcher, and he goes every day to kill the sheep and cows, because the women do not like that work. And he iss very strong, and clever also. He teach a few of the women how to cut up the sheep and the cows. And he iss much admired, it iss of course, by all the young women; but he does not marry because he is one man among so many women, and it would not be right that he should love only one, for so there would be so few children and the world would die. Yes! But he has for a time one who iss favourite, for another time another favourite. And that iss why I warn you not to return. Because I see that he admire your so beautiful hair. And I see that if you had not been so modest and so good, and hide behind your sister, he would have come down from his carriage and put you up there beside him. And he would have said to that bold ugly woman. 'Go, I tire of you, I will haf beside me this one who iss young and beautiful and has hair of gold.' It iss not safe for you, there." "Oh! I say," commented Millie. "It iss true," nodded Mrs Isaacson, with intensest conviction. "Oh! well, thank goodness, I'm not one of that sort," said Millie, warm in the knowledge of her virtue. "Truly not," assented Mrs Isaacson. "You must not be displeased that I warn you. It iss not your goodness that I doubt. It iss that this man iss so powerful. He iss able to do what he wishes. He iss a king." "Goody!" was the mark of surprise with which Millie punctuated this remarkable piece of information, and for several yards they trudged on in silence. But Millie soon revived this fascinating subject by saying thoughtfully, "Well, you don't catch me over there again." "Truly not. It iss not wise," agreed Mrs Isaacson, and proceeded to enlarge upon Millie's dangerous beauty. It was a topic entirely new to Millie. She simpered and giggled, disclaimed her attractions, protested that Mrs Isaacson was "getting at" her, and became so absorbed in the fascination of her disavowal that she forgot her weariness, her tender feet--naked to the road in two places--and all her discouragements. She walked with a more conscious air, straightening her back and lifting her head. The blood moved more freely in her veins, and she presently became so vivacious in her replies that Blanche was aroused to a sense of something unfamiliar. She checked the trolly and looked back at her sister, past the quiet brooding figure of Mrs Gosling. "What is it, Mill?" she asked. "Oh! nothing!" replied Millie. "We were just talking." "Seem to be enjoying yourselves," said Blanche. "We were saying that we shall soon now arrive at some place where we can rest. Yes?" put in Mrs Isaacson, and thus established a ground of confidence between herself and Millie. "P'raps. I dunno!" returned Blanche. She sighed and looked round her. In the fields between them and Marlow they could see here and there little figures stooping and straightening. "Ooh!" exclaimed Millie, suddenly. "What?" asked Blanche. "There's another man," said Millie, pointing. "We'd better scoot!" But they made no attempt to put such an impossible plan into action. The man had evidently seen them. He was coming towards them across one of the fields, shouting to attract their attention. "Hi! wait a minute!" they thought he was saying. "Mill!" exclaimed Blanche, with extraordinary emphasis. "What?" asked Millie, nervously. She was flushed and trembling. "Do you see who it is?" "It isn't the one out of the carriage...." hesitated Millie. "No! Silly. It's that young fellow who used to live with us, our Mr Fastidious. What was his name? Thrale! You remember." "Goody!" said Millie. She was conscious of a quite inexplicable feeling of disappointment. "He iss a friend? Yes?" asked Mrs Isaacson. BOOK III WOMANKIND IN THE MAKING XVII--LONDON TO MARLOW 1 The history of mankind is the history of human law. The larger ordinances of the universe are commonly referred to some superior lawgiver, under such names as God and physico-chemical action; names which appear mutually subversive only to the bigot, whether theologian or biologist. These larger ordinances sometimes appear inflexible, as in the domain of physics and chemistry, sometimes empirical as in the development of species, but we may believe that if they change at all, the period of change is so great as to be outside any possibility of observation by a few thousand generations of mankind. Human law, on the other hand, is tentative, without sound precedent and in its very nature mutable. In our miserably limited record of history, that paltry ten thousand years which is but a single tick of the cosmic watch, we have been unable to formulate any overruling law to which other laws are subject. Climate, race and condition impose certain limitations, and within that enceinte civilizations have developed a system of rules, increasing always in complexity, and have then failed to maintain their place in the competitive struggle. It has been rashly suggested that the overriding law of laws is that rigidity is fatal to the nation. An analogy has been found in the growth of the child. Here and there some bold spirit has ventured the daring hypothesis that if a young child be confined within a perfectly fitting iron shell he will not grow. Such speculations, however, do not appeal to mankind as a whole. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that nothing appals us so much as the idea that man is capable of growth. Is it not inconceivable that any race of men could be wiser, more perfect than ourselves? Nevertheless, out of all vague speculation one deliciously certain axiom presents itself, namely that mankind cannot live without law of some kind. The most primitive savage has his ordinances. The least primary concussion of individuals develops a rule of practice, whether it takes such diverse forms as "hit first," or "present the other cheek"; although the latter rule has not yet been developed beyond the stage of theory. In the unprecedented year of the new plague, the old rules were thrown into the melting pot, but within three months humanity was evolving precedents for a new statute book. The concussions of these three months were fierce and destructive. Women, in the face of death, killed and stole in the old primitive ways, unhampered now by the necessity to kill and steal according to the tedious rules of twentieth-century civilization, rules that women had never been foolish enough to reverence in the letter. All those complex and incomprehensible laws had been made by men for men, and after the plague there was none to administer them, for no women and few men had ever had the least idea what the law was. Even the lawgivers themselves had had to wait for the pronouncement of some prejudiced or unprejudiced judge. Women had long known what our Bumbles can only learn by bitter experience, inspired to vision in some moment of fury or desolation. But within three months of the first great exodus of women from the town, one dominant law was being brought to birth. It was not written on tables of stone, nor incorporated in any swollen, dyspeptic book of statutes; it was not formulated by logic, nor was it the outcome of serious thought by any individual or by a solemn committee. The law rose into recognition because it was a necessity for the life of the majority, and although that majority was not compact, had no common deliberate purpose, and had never formulated their demand in precise language, the new law came into being before harvest and was accepted by all but a small resentful minority of aristocrats and landowners, as a supreme ordinance, indisputably just. This law was that every woman had a right to her share in the bounty of Nature, and the corollary was that she earned her right by labour. In those days the justice of the principle was perfectly obvious; so obvious, indeed, that the law came to birth without the obstetric skill of any parliament whatever. 2 It is now impossible to say why such different types of male humanity as Jasper Thrale, George Gosling or the Bacchus of Wycombe Abbey escaped the plague. The bacillus (surely a strangely individual type, it must have been) was never isolated, nor the pathology of the disease investigated. The germ was some new unprecedented growth which ran through a fierce cycle of development within a few months, changed its nature as it swarmed into every corner of the earth, and finally expired more quickly than it had come into being. If the male survivors in Europe and the East had been of one type, some theory might be formulated to account for their immunity; but so far as science can pronounce an opinion, the living male residue can only be explained by the doctrine of chances. A few escaped, by accident. In the British Isles there may have been 1,500 men who thus survived. In the whole of Europe, besides, there were less than a thousand. It seems probable that even before Scotland was attacked the climax had been reached; by the time the plague reached England the first faint evidences of a decline in virulence may be marked.... From the first, Jasper Thrale ventured his life without an afterthought. He was fearless by nature. He did not lack those powers of imagination which are commonly supposed to add so greatly to the terror of death, he simply lacked the feeling of fear. In all his life he had never experienced that sickness of apprehension which dissolves our fibre into a quivering jelly--as though the spirit had already withdrawn from the trembling inertia of the flesh. Perhaps Thrale's spirit was too dominant for such retreat, was more completely master of its material than is the spirit of the common man. For the spirit cannot know bodily fear, it is the apprehensive flesh that wilts and curdles at the approach of danger. And it is worthy of notice that in the old days, up to the early twentieth century, these rare cases of fearlessness in individuals were more often found among women than among men. Thrale, with his perfectly careless courage, found plenty of work for himself in London during May and early June. He acted as a scavenger, and still went far afield with his burial cart long after every trace of living male humanity had disappeared from the streets of London. Then one day, at the end of June, he realized that his task was futile, and it came to him that there was work awaiting him of more importance than this purification of streets which might never again echo to the traffic of humanity. So he chose the best bicycle he could find in Holborn Viaduct, stripped a relay of four tyres from other machines, and with these and a reserve of food made into a somewhat cumbrous parcel, he set out to explore the new world. He took the Bath Road, intending to make exploration of the fertile West Country. He had Cornish blood in his veins, and his ultimate goal was the county which had almost escaped urbanization. As he then visualized the problem, it appeared that life would offer greater possibilities in such places. But before he reached Colnbrook, he had recognized that work was required of him nearer home. The exodus was then in progress. He came through armies of helpless women and children flying from starvation; women who had no object in view save that of escape to the country; "Silly Londoners" with no knowledge of how food was to be obtained when their goal was reached. He did not stay there, however. He was beginning to see the outline of his plan, and at the same time the limitation of his own powers. He saw that enough food could not be raised near London to support the multitude, that the death of the many was demanded by the needs of the few if any were to survive, and that communities must be formed with the common purpose of tilling the land and excluding those who could not earn their right to support. In such a catastrophe as this, charity became a crime. He intended even then to push on beyond Reading, but in Maidenhead he met a woman who influenced him to a nearer goal. 3 She stepped into the road and held up her hand. Thrale stopped; he thought she was about to make the familiar demand either for food or a direction. "Well?" he said curtly. "Where are you going?" she asked. He shrugged his shoulders. "To find room," he said. "There is room for you near here," said the woman, "if you'll work." "At what?" he asked. "Machinery, harvesting machinery, agricultural machinery of all sorts." "Where?" asked Thrale. She dropped her voice and looked about her. "Marlow," she said. "It--it's an eddy. Off the main roads and by the river. There are less than a thousand women there at present, and we are keeping the others out; at least until after harvest. There is plenty of land about, and we're keeping ourselves at present. Only we do want a man for the machines. Will you come and help us?" "I'll come and see what I can do," said Thrale "I won't promise to stay." "Aren't there any other men, there?" he added after a moment's hesitation. "One at Wycombe," said the women. "He's a butcher, but----" "I understand," said Thrale. "And meanwhile you might help me," said the woman. "I come over here with a horse and cart to raid the seedsmen's shops. If we leave them the women would eat all the beans and peas and things, you know; enough to feed us for the winter gone in a week, and no one any the better. Isn't it awful how careless we are?" 4 She was a fair, clear-eyed girl, with the figure and complexion of one who had devoted considerable attention to outdoor sports. She was wearing a man's Norfolk jacket (men's clothing was so plentiful), and a skirt that barely reached her knees, and did not entirely hide cloth knickerbockers which might also have been adapted from a man's garment. Below the knickerbockers she displayed thick stockings and sandals. Her splendid fair hair furnished sufficient protection for her head, and she had dressed a pillow of it into the nape of her neck as a shield for the sun. Thrale looked at her with a frank curiosity as they made their way up the town to a seedsman's shop. She had left the horse and cart there, she explained, while she explored other streets of the town. "Who are you?" he asked. "Eileen, of Marlow," she said. "There doesn't seem to be another Eileen there, so one name's enough." "Is that how your community feel about it?" he asked. She smiled. "We're beginning," she said. He pondered that for a time, and then asked, "Who were you?" "Does it matter?" was the answer. "Not in the least," said Thrale. "Never did much so far as I was concerned, but I have a memory of having seen your photographs in the illustrated papers. I was wondering whether you had been actress, peeress, scandal; or perhaps all three." She laughed. "I'm the eldest daughter of the late Duke of Hertford," she said, "the ci-devant Lady Eileen Ferrar, citizen." "Oh, was that it?" replied Thrale carelessly. "Where's this shop of yours?" The loot was heavier than Eileen had anticipated. The shop had been ransacked, but they found an untouched store, containing such valuables as beans, potatoes and a few small sacks of turnip seed at the bottom of a yard. When these had been placed in the cart, they decided that the load was sufficient for one horse. They took the longer road to Marlow, through Bourne End, to avoid the hill. Eileen walked at the horse's head, with Thrale beside her wheeling his bicycle, and during those two hours he learnt much of the little community which he proposed to serve for a time. It seemed that in Marlow--and the same thing must have happened in a hundred other small towns throughout the country--a few women had taken control of the community. These women were of all classes and the committee included an Earl's widow, a national schoolmistress, a small green-grocer, and an unmarried woman of property living half a mile out of the town. These women had worked together in an eminently practical way; at first to relieve distress, and then to plan the future. They had wasted little time in discussions among themselves--none of them had the parliamentary sense of the uses of debate. When they had disagreed, they had had plenty of scope to carry out varying methods within their own spheres of influence. Their first and most difficult task had been to teach the members of their community to work for the common good, and that task was by no means perfected as yet. Co-operation was agreeable enough to those who had nothing to lose, but the women in temporary possession of the sources of food supply were not so easily convinced. In many instances the committee's arguments had been suddenly clenched by an exposition of force majeure, and property owners had discovered to their amazement that they had no remedy. But the head and leader of Marlow was a farmer's daughter of nineteen, a certain Carrie Oliver. Her father had had a small farm in the Chilterns not far from Fingest. He had been a lazy, drunken creature, and from the time Carrie had left the national school she had practically carried on the work of the farm single handed. She liked the work; the interest of it absorbed her. The Marlow schoolmistress had remembered her when the committee had first faced the daunting task of providing for the future. They had been more or less capable of organizing a majority of the women, but no member of the committee knew the secrets of agriculture and stock-breeding, and in all Marlow and the neighbourhood no woman had been found who was capable of instructing them in all that was necessary. A deputation of three had been sent to Fingest, and had discovered Miss Oliver in the midst of plenty, cultivating her farm in comfort now that she had been relieved of her father's unwelcome presence. She had been covered with confusion when requested to leave her retreat and take command of a town and the surrounding twenty thousand acres or so within reach of the new community. "Oh! I can't," she had said, blushing and ducking her head. "It's easy enough; I'll tell you if there's anything you want to know." The deputation had then put the case very clearly before her, pointing out that in Miss Oliver's hands lay the future of a thousand lives. "Oh, dear. I dunno. What can I do?" Carrie had said, and when the deputation had urged that she should return with them and take charge forthwith, she had replied that that was quite impossible, that there were the cows to milk, the calves, pigs and chickens to feed, and goodness knew how many other necessary things to be done before sunset. The deputation had said that cows, calves, horses, sheep, pigs and chickens might and should be transferred forthwith to the neighbourhood of Marlow. It had taken three days to convince her, Eileen said, and added, "But she's splendid, now. It's wonderful what a lot she knows; and she rides about on a horse everywhere and sees to everything. The difficulty is to stop her getting down and doing the work herself." Thrale understood that, exceptional male as he was, his position in Marlow would be subordinate to that of Miss Oliver. "Does she understand agricultural machinery?" he asked. "Oh, yes," returned Eileen. "But she hasn't time, you see, to attend to all that, and it's so jolly difficult to learn. I've been doing a bit. I'm better at it than most of 'em. But when I saw you it struck me how ripping it would be if you'd come and take over that side. Men are so jolly good at machinery. We shouldn't miss them much if it weren't for that." 5 After a marked preliminary hesitation the committee appointed Jasper Thrale chief mechanic of Marlow. The hesitation was understandable. Their only experience of the ways of men in this altered civilization had been drawn from observations of Mr Evans at Wycombe. His manner of life appeared representative of what they might expect. Nevertheless they did not openly condemn him, although he proved an immediate source of trouble, even to these organizers in Marlow. The youth of the place was apt to wander over the hill in the evenings; "just for fun," they said. They went in twos and threes, and occasionally one of them stayed behind. These evening walks interfered with work. "Later on I shouldn't mind so much," Lady Durham had said, commenting on the loss of a young and active worker, "but there is so much to do just now." Her comment showed that even then the situation was being accepted, and that many women were prepared to adapt their old opinions to new conditions. It also showed why the committee hesitated to accept Thrale's services. Thrale understood their difficulty, and went straight to the point. "You are afraid that the young women will be wasting time, running after me," he said. "Set your minds at rest. That won't last. And if you give me pupils for my machinery I should prefer women over forty in any case. I believe I shall find them more capable." He was right in one way. When the excitement of his coming had subsided, he was not the cause of much wasted time. He adopted a manner with the younger women which did not encourage advances. He was, in fact, quite brutally frank. When the young women devised all kinds of impossible excuses to linger in his vicinity he sent them away with hot indignant faces. Among those who sought their sterile amusements in Wycombe it became the fashion openly to express hatred and contempt for "that engine fellow." It was agreed that he "wasn't a proper man." Another section, however, talked scandal, and hinted that assistant-engineer Eileen was the cause of Thrale's pretended misogyny. The committee found their work more complicated in some respects after Thrale's coming. Thrale, himself, was supremely indifferent to any scandal or expression of hatred. He had his hands full, his hours of work were only limited by daylight, and six hours sleep was all he asked for or desired. After a very brief introduction to the intricacies of reaper and rake at the hands of Miss Oliver--her father had never been able to afford a binder, but the days of corn-harvest were still far ahead--he set himself to learn the mysteries of all the agricultural machinery in the neighbourhood; traction engines, steam ploughs and thrashing machines, and to pass on the knowledge he gained to his pupils. He found them stupid at first, but they were patient and willing for the most part. Then, handicapped by the lack of coal, he rode over to Bourne End and discovered two locomotives. One of them was standing on the line a mile out of the station with a full complement of coaches attached, the other was an unencumbered goods engine in a siding. He chose the latter for his first experiment, and succeeded in driving it back to Marlow. It groaned and screamed in a way that indicated serious organic trouble, but after he had overhauled it, it proved capable of taking him to Maidenhead, where he found a sound engine in a shed. After that he devoted three days to getting a clear line to Paddington, a tedious process which involved endless descents from the cab, and mountings into signal boxes, experiments with levers and the occasional necessity for pushing whole trains out of his path into some siding. But at last he returned with magnificent loot of coal from the almost untouched London yards beyond Ealing. London was still the storehouse of certain valuable commodities. His passage through the surrounding country was hailed with cries of amazement and jubilant acclamation. The first railway surely excited less astonishment than did Thrale on his solitary engine. Doubtless the unfortunate women who saw him pass believed that the gods of machinery had returned once more to bring relief from all the burden of misery and unfamiliar work. And once the points were set and the way open to London by rail he could go and return with tools and many other necessaries that had offered no temptation to the starving multitude who had fled from the town. Marlow was greatly blessed among the communities in those days. 6 The harvest was early that year, and Miss Oliver decided to cut certain fields of barley at the end of July. Thrale's energies were then diverted to the superintendence of the reapers and binders, and he rode from field to field, overlooking the work of his pupils or spending furious hours in struggle with some refractory mechanism. One Saturday, an hour or two after midday, he was returning from some such struggle, when he saw a strange procession coming down that long hill from Handy Cross, which some pious women regarded as the road to hell. Casual immigration had almost ceased by that time, but the sight indicated the necessity for immediate action. The immigration laws of Marlow, though not coded as yet, were strict; and only bona fide workers were admitted, and even those were critically examined. Thrale shouted to attract attention and the procession stopped. When he came through the gate on to the road, he was accosted by name. "Oh, Mr Thrale, fancy finding you," said the young woman at the pole of the truck. The meeting of Livingstone and Stanley was far less amazing. An old woman perched on the truck and partly sheltered by the remains of an umbrella, regarded his appearance with some show of displeasure. "By rights 'e should 'ave written to me in the first place," she muttered. "Mother's got a touch of the sun," explained Blanche hurriedly. Thrale had not yet spoken. He was considering the problem of whether he owed any duty to these wanderers, which could override his duty to Marlow. "Where have you come from?" he asked. Blanche and Millie explained volubly, by turns and together. "You see, we don't let anyone stay here," said Thrale. Blanche's eyebrows went up and she waved her too exuberant sister aside. "We're willing to work," she said. "And your mother?" queried Thrale. "And this other woman?" "Ach! I work too," put in Mrs Isaacson. "I have learnt all that is necessary for the farm. I milk and feed chickens and everything." "You'll have to come before the committee," said Thrale. "Anywhere out of the sun," replied Blanche, "and somewhere where we can put mother. She's very bad, I'm afraid." "You can stay to-night, anyway," returned Thrale. Millie made a face at him behind his back, and whispered to Mrs Isaacson, who pursed her mouth. "Well, you do seem more civilized here," remarked Blanche as the procession restarted towards Marlow. Thrale, with something of the air of a policeman, was walking by the side of the pole. "You've come at a good time," was his only comment. Millie had another shock before they reached the town. She saw what she thought was a second man, on horseback this time, coming towards them. Marlow, she thought, was evidently a place to live in. But the figure was only that of Miss Oliver in corduroy trousers, riding astride. 7 Fate had dropped the Goslings into Buckinghamshire to fulfil their destiny. They had been led to Marlow by a casual direction, here and there, after the first propulsion of Blanche's instinct had sent them into the country beyond Harrow. And fate, doubtless with some incomprehensible purpose of its own in view, had quietly decided that in Marlow they were to stay. They had been dropped at a season when, for the first time in the long three months' history of the community, there was a shortage of labour; and Blanche and Millie, browned by exposure and generally improved by their first six days of healthy life, were quite acceptable additions to the population at that moment. As for Mrs Isaacson, a lady of sufficient initiative and force of character to require no kindly interposition of Providence on her behalf, she arranged her own future as an expert of farm management, and incidentally as the Goslings' housemate. Mrs Isaacson was a burr that would stick anywhere for a time. She displayed an unexpected and highly specialized knowledge of the management of farms, when confronted with the expert Miss Oliver who was far too embarrassed to press her questions home. The casual remarks of Aunt May and her helpers had been retained in Mrs Isaacson's brilliant memory and she displayed her knowledge to the best possible advantage, filling the gaps with irrelevant volubility, gesture and histrionic struggles with the English language, which proved suddenly inadequate to the expression of these recondities that the German would have so aptly expressed. It was inferred that in her native Bavaria, Mrs Isaacson had farmed in the grand style. Only Mrs Gosling, useless and ineligible, remained for consideration, and she for once took a firm line of her own, and defied the committee, Marlow generally, and the negligible remainder of the cosmos, to alter her determination. The home at which they had finally arrived did not suit her. The tiny cottage of three rooms in the little street that runs down to the town landing stage had no lace curtains in the front window, no suites of furniture, no hall to save the discreet caller from stepping through the front door straight into the single living-room, no accumulation of dustable ornaments, not even a strip of carpet or linoleum to cover the nakedness of a bricked floor. It was not civilized; it was not decent according to the refined standards of Wisteria Grove; it was an impossible place for any respectable woman to live in, and Mrs Gosling, with unexpected force of character, chose the obvious alternative. She did not, however, make any announcement of her determination; she was wrapped in a speculative depression that found no relief in words. She had been so ordered, hoisted, dragged and bumped through the detested country during the past six days that all show of authority had been taken from her. It may be that deep in her own mind she cherished a sullen and enduring resentment against her daughters, and had vowed to take the last and unanswerable revenge of which humanity is capable. But outwardly she preserved that air of incomprehension which had marked her during the last stages of their journey, and committed herself to no statement of the enormous plan which must have been forming in her mind. When they took her into the small, brick-paved room and deposited her temporarily on a wooden-seated chair, while they unpacked what remained to them in the accursed trolly, Mrs Gosling took one brief but comprehensive survey of her naked surroundings. "She's a bit touched, isn't she?" whispered Millie to her sister. "Do you think she understands where we are or what we're doing?" Blanche shook her head. "I expect she'll be all right in a day or two," she ventured, "It's the sun." The two girls, stirred to a new outlook on life by the extraordinary experiences of the past months, were on the threshold of diverse adventures. After the toil and anxiety of their tramp through inhospitable country, and the hazard of the open air, this reception into a community and settlement into a permanent shelter afforded a relief which was too unexpected to be qualified as yet by criticism, or any comparison with past glories. They were young and plastic, and to each of them the future seemed to hold some promise; to them the silence and immobility of their mother could only be evidence of impaired faculties. "We must get her to bed," said Blanche. Even when Mrs Gosling asked with perfect relevance, "Are we going to stop 'ere, Blanche?" they humoured her with evasive replies. "Well, for a day or two, perhaps," and "Look here, don't you worry about that. We're going to put you to bed." Her head dropped again and she fell back into her moody silence. Doubtless she meditated on the many wrongs her daughters had done her, and wondered why she should have been brought out to die in this wilderness? During the nine days that elapsed before her plan matured, she made no further comment on her surroundings. She lay in the upstairs room, sleeping little, with no desire ever again to face the terror of a world which demanded a new mode of thought. Unconsciously she had adopted Blanche's phrase, "Everything's different," but to her the message was one of doom, she could not live in a different world. And Blanche on her side was puzzled at her mother's apathy and said, "I can't understand it." Yet both the changed conditions and Mrs Gosling's unchangeable habit were fundamental things. XVIII--MODES OF EXPRESSION 1 In Marlow that year harvesting and thrashing were carried on simultaneously. August was very dry, and the greater part of the corn was never stacked at all. Thrale took his engines into the fields, and the shocks were loaded on to carts and fed directly into the thrasher. This method entailed some disadvantages, chief among them the retarding of the actual harvest-work, but on the whole it probably economized labour. The scheme would doubtless have been impracticable in the days of small private ownership, but it worked well in this instance, favoured as it was by the drought. The saving of labour during those six weeks of furious toil was a matter of the first importance. The work, indeed, was too heavy for many of the women who were unable to stand the physical strain of hoisting sheaves from the waggons into the thrasher; and the sacks of grain proved so unmanageable that Thrale had to devise a makeshift hoist for loading them into the carts. In Marlow, at least, machinery was still triumphant, and the committee sighed their relief in the sentence: "I don't know what we should have done without Jasper Thrale." Nevertheless it is quite certain that they would have done without him if it had not been for that fortuitous meeting in Maidenhead. For Thrale there was no rest possible, even when the last field had been cleared and the last clumsily-built stack of straw or unthrashed corn erected. Besides the necessity for some form of thatching--or, failing efficiency in that direction, for completing the thrashing operations--he had to turn his attention to the immensely difficult problem of turning the grain into flour. He knew vaguely that the grain ought to be cleaned and conditioned before grinding, and that the actual separation of the constituents of the berry was a matter of importance; but he had no practical knowledge of the various operations, and in this matter Miss Oliver was quite unable to help him. The mill beside the lock presented itself as an intricate and enormously detailed problem which must be solved by a concentrated effort of induction. The only person who appeared to be of real assistance to him was Eileen, and she was apt to tire and fall into despair when the detail of involved and often concealed machinery baffled them for hour after hour. Nevertheless Thrale solved this problem also. His first concern was for a head of water. The weirs had not been touched since the beginning of May, and the river was very low, but by mid-September there was enough water to work for a few hours every day, and, despite endless mistakes and setbacks, the mill was turning out a sufficient supply of fairly respectable looking flour. Thrale had that wonderful masculine faculty for thus applying himself to a mechanical problem, and, like his predecessors in mechanical invention, it was the problem and not any promise of future reward which interested him. He became absorbed for the time in that problem of grinding corn, grudging the hours he was obliged to devote to other activities; and when he felt the throb of life running through the mill, saw the women he had taught attending each to their own appointed task in the economy, and felt the touch of the fine, smooth flour between his fingers, he needed no thanks from the committee nor promise of independence to reward him for his labour. The sight of this thing he had created was sufficient recompense. He loved this beautiful efficient toy that changed wheat into flour, and oats into meal, it was his to father and to fight for; the perfect child of his ingenuity and toil. But if Thrale's time was tremendously occupied the women found that they had more opportunities for leisure after harvest. They were still employed in field and garden, and there was still much to be done, but their hours were shorter and the work seemed light in contrast with the heroic labour that had been necessary at the harvest. And with this first coming of comparative ease, this first opportunity for reflection since the terrible plague had thrust upon them the necessity for fierce and unremitting effort to produce the essentials of life, women began to express themselves in their various ways. Aspirations and emotions that had been crushed by the fatigues of physical labour began to revive; personal inclinations, jealousies and resentments became manifest in the detail of intercourse; old prejudices, religious and social, once more assumed an aspect of importance in the interactions of individuals. There was a faint stir in the community, the first sign of a trouble which was steadily to increase as winter laid its bond upon the storehouses of earth. 2 The two Goslings, working only six or seven hours a day in the mill during the latter part of September, found plenty of time for chatter and speculation. They, and more especially Blanche, had shown themselves capable workers in the harvest field, but when hands had been required in his mill Thrale had chosen the Goslings and those whom he considered less adapted to field work; and among them Mrs Isaacson and a member of the committee, Miss Jenkyn, the schoolmistress. (The education problem was in abeyance for the time being. The children had run wild for three months, and been subject only to the discipline of their mothers, but it was understood that the children were to receive attention when the winter brought opportunity.) Blanche soon distinguished herself as a picked worker in this sphere. Her intelligence was of a somewhat more masculine quality in some respects than that of the average woman; she was slower, more detailed, more logical in her methods. And now that those male characteristics--so often deplored by women in the days before the plague--had been withdrawn from the flux of life, it had become evident that they had been an essential part of the whole, if only a part. Masculine characteristics were at a premium in Marlow that autumn, and as a natural consequence were being rated at an ever higher value. There was a tendency among some women to become more male.... Millie, however, was not among the progressives. She was not gifted intellectually; she had no swift intuitions--such as Eileen had--which enabled her to comprehend her work; she was naturally indolent, and all her emotions came to her through sensation. When she was put to work in the mill she was secretly elated. She did not believe the stories told of Jasper Thrale's insensibility to feminine attractions, and if she believed those other stories which coupled his name with that of Lady Eileen, Millie was of opinion that such an entanglement was not necessarily final. The first week of her association with Thrale in the work of the mill brought disillusionment. When she looked up from her work and caught his eye as he passed her, he either stared coldly or stopped and asked in a businesslike, austere voice whether she wanted assistance. Such intimations should have been sufficient, but in this thing, at least, Millie was persistent. She thought that he did not understand--men were proverbially stupid in these matters. So she waited for an opportunity and within ten days one was presented. A hesitation in some of the machinery she overlooked provided sufficient excuse for calling the head engineer. She looked down the step-ladder which communicated with the floor below and called hesitatingly, "Oh! Please. Mr Thrale." He heard her and looked up, "What is it?" he asked. "Something gone wrong," she said blushing, "I've stopped the rollers, but I don't know----" "All right, I'm coming," he returned, and presently joined her. "By the way," he remarked as he began to examine the machine, "we don't say 'Mister,' now. I thought you'd learnt that." Millie simpered. "It sounds so familiar not to," she said. "Rubbish," grunted Thrale. "You can call me 'engineer,' I suppose?" "Now, look here," he continued, "do you see this hopper in here?" She came close to him and peered into the machine. "It gets clogged, do you see?" said Thrale, "and when the meal stutters you've just got to put your hand in and clear it. Understand?" "I think so," hesitated Millie. She was leaning against him and her body was trembling with delicious excitement. Almost unconsciously she pressed a little closer. Thrale suddenly drew back. "Do you understand?" he said harshly. "Ye-yes, I think so," returned Millie; and she straightened herself, looked up at him for a moment and then dropped her eyes, blushing. "Very well," said Thrale, "and here's another piece of advice for you. If you want to stay in the mill keep your attention on your work. You're a man now, for all intents and purposes; you've got a man's work to do, and you must keep your mind on it. If there's any foolishness you go out into the turnip fields. You won't have another warning," he concluded as he turned and left her. "Beast," muttered Millie when she was alone. She was shaken with furious anger. "I hate you, you silly stuck up thing," she whispered fiercely shaking with passion. "Oh, I wish you only knew how I hate you. I won't touch your beastly machines again. I'd sooner a million times be out in the turnip field than in the same mill with you, you stuck up beast. I won't work, I won't do a thing, I'll--I'll----" For a time she was hysterical. Blanche coming down from the floor above found her sister tearing at her hair. "Good heavens, Mill, what's up?" she asked. Millie had passed through the worst stages of her seizure by then, and she dropped her hands. "I dunno," she said. "It's this beastly mill, I suppose." "I like it," returned Blanche. "Oh, you," said Millie, full of scorn for Blanche's frigidity. "You ought to have been a man, you ought." "I dunno what's come to you," was Blanche's comment. 3 It was maturity that had come to Millie. Her new life of air and physical exercise had set the blood running in her veins. In the Wisteria Grove days she had had an anæmic tendency; the limited routine of her existence and all the suppressions of her narrow life had retarded her development. Now she was suddenly ripe. Two months of sun and air had brought superabundant vitality, and the surplus had become the most important factor in her existence. She found no outlet for her new vigour in the work of the mill. Something within her was crying out for joy. She wanted to find expression. There were many other young women in Marlow that autumn in similar case, and a rumour was current among them that this was a favourable time for crossing the hill. It was said that the lord of Wycombe was seeking new favourites. Millie heard the rumour and tossed her head superciliously. "Let him come here. I'd give him a piece of my mind," she said. "He doesn't come 'ere," returned the gossip. "'E's afeard of our Mr Thrale." "Oh! Jasper Thrale!" said Millie. "That fellow from Wycombe could knock his head off in no time." The gossip was doubtful. Millie was incapable of formulating a plan in this connexion, but she was seized with a desire for spending the still September evenings in the open air, and always something drew her towards the hill at Handy Cross. That way lay interest and excitement. There was a wonderful fascination in going as far as the top of the descent into Wycombe. Usually she joined one or two other young women in these excursions. It was understood between them that they went "for fun," and they would laugh and scream when they reached the dip past the farm, pretend to push each other down the slope, and cry out suddenly: "He's coming! Run!" But one afternoon, some ten days after Jasper Thrale had threatened her with the turnip field, Millie went alone. She had left work early. The rain had not come yet, and Thrale was becoming anxious with regard to the shortage of water. He had the sluices of Marlow and Hedsor weirs closed, and had opened the sluices of the weirs above as far as Hambledon, but so little water was coming down that he decided to work shorter hours for the present. Blanche had stayed on at the mill to help with repairs. She was rapidly developing into a capable engineer. So Millie, whose only service was that of machine minder, found herself alone and unoccupied. Every one else seemed to be working. Her friends of the evening excursions were mostly in the fields on the Henley side of the town. Millie decided she would lie down on the bed and go to sleep for a bit; but even before she came to the cottage she changed her mind. It was a deliciously warm, still afternoon. Almost automatically she took the road towards Little Marlow; a desire for adventure had overtaken her. Why, she argued, shouldn't she go into Wycombe? There were plenty of other women there. She would be quite safe. She only wanted to see what the place was like. Her consciousness of perfect rectitude lasted until she reached the dip beyond Handy Cross. Farther than this she had not ventured before. Some mystery lay beyond the turn of the road. She sat down in the grass by the wayside and called herself a fool, but she was afraid to go further. She and those friends of hers had made this place the entrance to a terrible and fascinating beyond. She remembered how they had feared to stay there in the failing light, daring each other to remain there alone after sunset. There was nothing to be afraid of, she said to herself; and yet she was afraid. She was hot with her long climb, and the place was quite deserted. She decided to take down her hair to cool herself. Curiously, she looked upon this simple act as deliciously daring and in some way wicked. She cast half-fearful glances at the green girt shadows of the descending road, as she shook out the masses of her hair. "If anyone should come!" she thought. "If he should come...!" She giggled nervously, and shivered. But as time passed, and no one came, she began to lose her fear, and presently she lay full length on the grass, and stared up into the pale blue dome of the sky until her eyes ached and she had to close them. The deep hush of the still afternoon enveloped her in a great calm. For a time she slept peacefully, and then she dreamed that she was rushing through the air, and that some one chased her. She wanted desperately to be captured, but it was ordained that she must fly, and she flew incredibly fast. She flew through the sunlight into darkness, and awoke to find that some one was standing between her and the sun. She lay still, paralysed with terror. She bitterly regretted her coming. She would have given ten years of life to be safe home in Marlow. "Now, where've I seen you before?" asked Sam Evans.... It was nearly dark when Blanche accosted a knot of women in the High Street with a question as to whether they had seen anything of her sister. One of the women laughed sneeringly. "Ah! She went over the hill this afternoon," she said. "We were in the fields that side, and saw her go." Blanche's face burned. "She hasn't! I know she hasn't!" she blurted out. "She isn't one of that sort." The woman laughed again. "She's one of the lucky ones," another woman remarked. "You can expect her back in a week or two's time." 4 On the same evening that Millie crossed the hill, Lady Eileen Ferrar encountered the spirit of passion in another shape. The thought of a lonely bathe tempted her, and she crossed the river, made her way through deserted Bisham, and back to the stream along a narrow, overhung lane beyond Bisham Abbey. The sun had set, but when she came out from the trees there was light in the sky and on the water. Overhead a few wisps of cirrus, sailing in the far heights of air, still caught the direct rays of the sun. Eileen paused on the bank, rejoicing in the glow of colour about her; but as she gazed, the little fleet of salmon-tinted clouds were engulfed in the great earth-shadow, and the delicate crisp rose-leaves were transfigured into flat stipples of steel grey. A slight chill had come into the air, but the water was deliciously soft and warm. Eileen swam a couple of hundred yards up-stream, towards the gloom of shadows that obscured the course of the river. The after-glow was fading now, and though the surface of the water seemed to catch some reflection of light from an unknown source, the near distance loomed dark and mysterious. She trod water for a few moments, but could not decide whether the river turned to right or left. To all appearances, it terminated abruptly fifty yards ahead.... A new sound was forcing itself upon her attention--a low, steady booming. She stopped swimming, and, keeping herself afloat by slow, silent movements of hands and feet under water, she listened attentively. The dull boom seemed changed into a low, ceaseless moan. She remembered then the recently opened sluices of Temple Weir, but quite suddenly she was aware of fear. She thought she saw a movement among the reeds by the bank. She thought she heard laughter and the thin pipe of a flute. Were the old gods coming back to witness the death of man, as they had witnessed his birth? Now that machinery and civilization were being re-absorbed into the nature-spirit from which they had been wrung by the force of man's devilish and alien intelligence, were the old things returning for one mad revel before the creatures of their sport disappeared for ever, these representatives of a species which had failed to hold its own in the struggle for existence? Night was coming up like a shadow, and in the east a red, enormous moon was rising, coming not to dissipate, but to enhance the mysteries of the dark, coming to countenance the wild and blind the eyes of man. Eileen, almost motionless, was floating down with the drift of the sluggish stream. She was afraid to intrude upon the natural sounds of the night, the stealthy trickle of the river, and the furtive rustle of secret movement whose origin she could not guess. And again she thought that she heard the trembling reed of a distant flute. She touched bottom near her landing-place, and waded out of the river, crouching, afraid even in the black shadow of the trees to exhibit the white column of her slim body. She dried and dressed hastily, and when she felt again the touch of her familiar clothes about her, she knew that she was safe from the wiles of nymph or satyr. She had come out of the half-world that interposes between man and Nature; her clothes made her invisible to the earth-gods, and hid them from her knowledge. But she was still trembling and afraid. The flesh had terrors great as those of the spirit. A little uncertain wind was coming out of the south-west, and the trees were stirred now and again into hushed whisperings. A dead leaf brushed her face in falling, and she started back, thrusting at an imaginary enemy with nervously agitated hands. The thought of her remoteness from life terrified her. She was alone, face to face with implacable, brutal Nature. Man, the boastful, full of foolish pride, was vanishing from the earth. He had been an alien, ever out of place, defiling and corrupting the order of growth. Now he was beaten and a fugitive. All around her, the representative of this vile destructive species, was the slow, persistent hatred of the earth, which longed to be at peace again. There was no god favourable to man, now that he was dying; the gods of man's creation would perish with him. Only a few women were left to realize that they were strangers in the world of Nature which hated them. The world was not theirs, had never been theirs; they were only some horrible, unnatural fungus that had disfigured the Earth for a time.... She moved cautiously and slowly under the darkness of the trees, and even when she came back to the road she could not shake off her fear. On her right she could see the black cliff of the woods transfigured by the light of the moon. In the day she knew them for woods; now they were strange and threatening; they menaced her with invasion. She knew that they would march down from the hills and swarm across the valley. In a hundred, two hundred years, Marlow would be a few heaps of brick and stone lost in the heart of the forest. Ashamed of her race, she hurried on stealthily towards the bridge. But before she reached it, she heard the sound of a firm, defiant step coming towards her. She paused and listened, and her fear fell from her. In the old days she would have feared man more than Nature, feared robbery or assault, but now, man was united in a common cause; the sound of humanity was the sound of a friend. "Hullo!" she called, and the voice of Jasper Thrale answered. "Hullo! Who's that?" he said. "Me--Eileen," she replied. "I've been for a bathe." He paused opposite her, and they looked at one another. "Jolly night," he remarked. "I've seen the great god Pan," said Eileen. "Those sailors in the Ionian Sea were misinformed. He's not dead." "Why should Pan die and Dionysus live?" returned Thrale. "I hear that Dionysus has claimed one of our hands, by the way." "Millie?" "Yes." "Are you angry?" "Yes. Not with Millie. If you saw Pan, why shouldn't she see Dionysus? No, I'm angry with the Jenkyn woman. She's saying that we ought not to have Millie back if she wants to come." "How silly!" commented Eileen. "Oh! if that were all!" replied Thrale. "The real trouble is that the Jenkyn woman is proselytizing. She wants to revive Church services and Sunday observances. We're going to have a split before the winter's over, and all the old misunderstandings and antagonisms back again." "Why, of course we are," returned Eileen, after a pause. "We are going to divide into those that are afraid and those that aren't. It's fear that's got hold of us, now we've time to think. It's all about us to-night; I've seen it, and Millie has seen it; and Clara Jenkyn and all those who are going with her have seen it; and we've all got to find our own way out." She hesitated for a moment, and then said: "And what about you? Have you seen it?" "Yes, for the first time. Within the last ten minutes," said Thrale. The moon was above the trees now, and she could see his face clearly. "Have you?" she asked. "I can't picture it. It can't be Pan or Dionysus, or fear of the Earth or of humanity. No; and it can't be the most terrible of all, the fear of an idea. What are you afraid of?" "I'm afraid of you," said Thrale, and he turned away quickly and hurried on in the direction of the river. "I did see Pan," affirmed Eileen, as she returned, happy and unafraid, towards Marlow. 5 That mood of the night had suggested to Eileen the idea of a single cause which seemed sufficient to account for the revivalist tendencies of Miss Jenkyn and certain other women in Marlow. Fear was presented as a simple explanation, and Eileen, like many other philosophers who had preceded her, was too eager for the simple and inclusive explanation. At first the revivalist tendency was feeble and circumscribed. Twenty or thirty women met in the schoolroom and talked and prayed by the light of a single, tenderly nursed oil-lamp. The absence of any minister kept them back at first; the less earnest needed some concrete embodiment of religion in the form of a black coat and white tie. But when the rain came in early October, came and persisted; when the beeches, instead of flaring into scarlet, grew sodden and dead; when the threat of flood grew even more imminent, and the distraction of physical toil almost ceased, this little nucleus of women was joined by many new recruits, and their comparatively harmless prostrations, lamentations and worshippings of the abstract, developed into an attempt to enforce a moral law upon the community. Millie Gosling, returning to Marlow in mid-October, gave the religionists splendid opportunity for a first demonstration. Millie returned with a bold face and a shrinking heart. She had fled from Wycombe because she could not meet the taunts of the women who had so lately envied her as she rode, prime favourite for a time, in the Dionysian landau. A great loneliness had come over her after she was dethroned; she needed sympathy, and she hoped that Blanche might be made to understand. Millie came back from over the hill prepared with a long tale of excuses. She found her sister perfectly complacent. Blanche was a fervent disciple of Jasper Thrale and machinery, and Thrale had anticipated Millie's return and in some ways prepared for it. At odd moments he had preached the new gospel, the tenets of which Blanche had begun to formulate for herself. "It's no good going back to the old morality for a precedent," had been the essential argument used by Thrale; "we have to face new conditions. If a man is only to have one wife now, the race will decline, probably perish. It is a woman's duty to bear children." Eileen, Blanche and a few other young women had wondered that he made no application of the argument to his own case, but his opinion carried more weight by reason of his continence. Even Miss Jenkyn could not urge that his opinion was framed to defend his own mode of life, and, failing that casuistical support, she had to fall back on the second alternative of her kind, namely, to assert that this preacher of antagonistic opinions was either the devil in person or possessed by him--a line of defence which took longer to establish than the simple accusation of expediency. So Millie, returning one wet October afternoon, found that no excuses were required of her. Blanche welcomed her and asked no questions, and Jasper Thrale and Eileen came to the little cottage in St Peter's Street at sunset and treated the prodigal Millie with a new and altogether delightful friendliness. It was understood that she would return at once to her work in the Mill. But in the school-house opposite another reception was being prepared for her. The more advanced of the Jenkynites were for taking immediate action. Prayer, worship, and the acknowledgment of personal sin fell into the background that evening, Millie appeared not as a brand to be saved from the burning, but as an abandoned and evil creature who must be thrust out of the community if any member of it was to save her soul alive. Every one of these furious religionists could stand up and declare that she was innocent of the commission of this particular sin of Millie's, and every one was willing and anxious to cast the first stone. The meeting simmered, and at last boiled over into St Peter's Street. A band of more than a dozen rigidly virtuous and ecstatically Christian women beat at the door of the Goslings' cottage. They had come to denounce sin and thrust the sinner out of the community with physical violence. Each of them in her own heart thought of herself as the bride of Christ. The door was opened to them by Jasper Thrale. "We have come to cast out the evil one!" cried Miss Jenkyn in a high emotional voice. "What are you talking about?" asked Thrale. "She shall be cast forth from our midst!" shrilled Miss Jenkyn; and her supporters raised a horrible screaming cry of agreement. "Cast her forth!" they cried, finding full justification for their high pitch of emotion in the use of Biblical phrase. "Cast forth your grandmother!" replied Thrale calmly. "Get back to your homes, and don't be foolish." "He is possessed of the devil!" chanted Miss Jenkyn. "The Lord has called upon us to vindicate his honour and glory. This man, too, must not be suffered to dwell in the congregation." "Down with him! down with him!" assented the little crowd, now so exalted with the glory of their common purpose that they were ready for martyrdom. Miss Jenkyn was an undersized, withered little spinster of forty-five, and physically impotent; but, drunk with the fervour of her emotion, and encouraged by the sympathy of her followers and the fury of her own voice, she flung herself fiercely upon the calm figure of Jasper Thrale. Her thwarted self-expression had found an outlet. She desired the blood of Millie Gosling and Jasper Thrale with the same intensity that women had once desired a useless vote. Jasper Thrale put out a careless hand and pushed her back into the arms of the women behind her; but she was up again instantly, and, backed by the crowd, who, encouraging themselves by shrill screams of "Cast them forth!" were now thrusting forward into the narrow doorway, she renewed the assault with all the fierce energy of a struggling kitten. "I shall lose my temper in a minute," said Thrale, as he took a step forward and, bracing himself against the door frame, drove the women back with vigorous thrusts of his powerful arms. To lose his temper, indeed, seemed the only way of escape; to give way to berserk rage, and so to injure these muscularly feeble creatures that they would be unable to continue the struggle. But the babble of screaming voices was bringing other helpers to his aid, chief among them Lady Durham, and her cold, clear voice fell on the hysterical Jenkynites like a douche of cold water. "Clara Jenkyn, what are you doing?" asked Elsie Durham. "Millie Gosling must be cast forth," wavered the little dishevelled woman; but this time there was no reponse from her disciples. "That is a question for the committee," replied Elsie Durham. "Now, please go to your homes, all of you." Miss Jenkyn tried to explain. Elsie Durham walked into the cottage and shut the door. Inside, Eileen and Blanche were trying to reassure the trembling Millie. Outside, the Jenkynites were suffering a more brutal martyrdom than that they had sought. The tongues of the new arrivals, the fuller-blooded, more physically vigorous members of the community, were making sport of these brides of Christ. 6 But the women of Marlow were to learn afresh the old lesson that religious enthusiasm is not to be killed by ridicule or oppression. Jasper Thrale understood and appreciated that fact, but the policy he suggested could not be approved by the committee. "This emotion is a fundamental thing," he said to Lady Durham, "and history will show you that persecution will intensify it to the point of martyrdom. There is only one way to combat it. Give it room. Let them do as they will. The heat of the fire is too fierce for you to damp it down; you only supply more fuel. Fan it, throw it open to the air, and it will burn itself harmlessly out." Elsie Durham shrugged her shoulders. "That's all very well," she said. "I believe it's perfectly true. But they make you the bone of contention. If it were only Millie Gosling--well--she might go. We could find a place for her--at Fingest, perhaps. But we can't spare you." "I don't know why not," returned Thrale. "I never intended to stay indefinitely. You can carry on now without me, and I can fulfil my original intention and push on into the West." "My dear man! we can't, and we won't!" said Elsie Durham. "You are indispensable." "No one is indispensable," replied Thrale. "Bother your metaphysics, Jasper!" was the answer. "We are not going to let you go. 'We' is the majority of Marlow, not only the committee. We'll fight the fanatics somehow." The majority referred to by Elsie Durham was fairly compact in relation to this issue of retaining Jasper Thrale, and included the two greater of the three recognizable parties in the community. Of these three, the greatest was the moderate party, made up of Episcopalians, Nonconformists and a few Roman Catholics, who found relief for their emotion one day in seven either in the Town Hall or Marlow Church, in which places services and meetings were held--the former by certain approved individuals, notably Elsie Durham and the widow of the late Rector of Marlow. The second party in order of size included all those who either denied the Divine revelation or were careless of all religious matters. The third party--the Jenkynites, as they were dubbed by their opponents--had drawn their numbers from every old denomination. The Jenkynites were differentiated from the other two parties by certain physical differences. For instance, the Jenkynites numbered few members under the age of thirty-five; very few of them were fat, and very few of them were capable field workers; they were hungry-eyed, and had a certain air of disappointed eagerness about them; they looked as though they had for ever sought something, and, finding it, had remained unsatisfied. In all, there were some seventeen women who might have been regarded as quite true to type, and about this vivid nucleus were clustered nearly a hundred other women, many of whom exhibited some characteristic mark of the same type, while the remainder, perhaps 40 per cent of the whole body, had joined the party out of bravado, to seek excitement, or for some purpose of expediency. Among the last was Mrs Isaacson, who was the ultimate cause of the Jenkynite defeat. Ever since she had passed her examination in farm supervision, Mrs Isaacson had exhibited an increasing tendency to rest on her laurels. She had grown very stout again during her stay in Marlow, and complained of severe heart trouble. The least exertion brought on violent palpitation accompanied by the most alarming symptoms. The poor lady would gasp for breath, press her hands convulsively to a spot just below her left breast, and roll up her eyes till they presented only a terrifying repulsive rim of blood-streaked white, if the least exertion were demanded from her, and yet she would persist in the effort until absolutely on the verge of collapse. "No, no! I must work!" she would insist. "It iss not fair to the others that I do no work. I will try once more. It iss only fair." At times they had to insist that she should return home and rest. And as the winter closed in, Mrs Isaacson's rests became more and more protracted. Jasper Thrale grinned and said: "I suppose we've got to keep her"; but there was a feeling among the other members of the committee that they were creating an undesirable precedent. Mrs Isaacson's example was being followed by other women who preferred rest to work. Heart weakness was becoming endemic in Marlow. Then came the news that Mrs Isaacson had joined the Jenkynites. The seventeen received her somewhat doubtfully at first, but the body of the sect were in favour of her reception. Possibly they were rather proud of counting one more fat woman among them; the average member was so noticeably thin. Even the seventeen were satisfied within a fortnight of Mrs Isaacson's conversion. She had a wonderful fluency, and she said the right and proper things in her own peculiar English--a form of speech which had a certain piquancy and interest and afforded relief and variety after the somewhat stereotyped formulas of the seventeen. But early in December, before the floods came, Mrs Isaacson was convicted of a serious offence against the community. One of the committee's first works had been to store certain priceless valuables. Tea, coffee, sugar, soap, candles, salt, baking powder, wine and other irreplaceable commodities had been locked up in one of the bank premises. In all, they had a fairly large store, upon which they had hardly drawn as yet. It was not intended to hoard these luxuries indefinitely. After harvest a dole had been made to all the workers as acknowledgment of their services, and it had been decided to hold another festival on Christmas Day. Mrs Isaacson, with unsuspected energy, had burglariously entered this storehouse of wealth. She had found an accessible window at the rear, which she had succeeded in forcing, and, despite her bulk and the delicate state of her heart, she had effected an entrance and stolen tea, sugar, candles and whisky. She was, indeed, finally caught in the act; but her thefts would probably have escaped notice--she worked after dark, and with a cunning and caution that would have placed her high in the profession before the plague--had it not been for Blanche. 7 It seems that Mrs Isaacson had formed the habit of staying up in the evening. She pleaded that she could not sleep during the early hours of the night, which was not surprising in view of the fact that she slept much during the day; and as she was diligent in picking up or begging sufficient wood to maintain the fire, there was no reason why Blanche and Millie should offer any objection. Thrale had rigged up a dynamo at the mill now to provide artificial light, and the girls' hours of work were so prolonged that they were glad to get to bed at half-past seven. By eight o'clock Mrs Isaacson evidently counted herself safe from all interruption. She might have continued her enjoyment of luxury undiscovered throughout the winter if Blanche had not suffered from toothache. She had been in bed and asleep nearly two hours when her dreams of discomfort merged into a consciousness of actual pain. She sighed and pressed her cheek into the pillows, made agonizing exploration with her tongue, and tried to go to sleep again. Possibly she might have succeeded had not that unaccountable smell of whisky obtruded itself upon her senses. At first she thought the house was on fire. That had always been her one fear in leaving Mrs Isaacson alone; and she sat up in bed and sniffed vigorously. "Funny," she murmured; "it smells like--like plum pudding." The analogy was probably suggested to her by the odour of burning brandy. She got up and opened the door of the bedroom. Mrs Isaacson slept on a sort of glorified landing, and when Blanche stepped outside her own door she could see at once by the light of a watery full moon that her lodger had not yet come to bed. The smell of the spirit was stronger on the landing, and Blanche, forgetting her toothache in the excitement of the moment, stole quietly down the short flight of crooked stairs. The door giving on to the living-room was latched, but there were two convenient knot-holes, and through one of them she saw Mrs Isaacson seated by the fire drinking hot tea. On the table stood an open whisky bottle and two lighted wax candles. Blanche was thunderstruck. Tea, whisky and candles were inexplicable things. The thought of witchcraft obtruded itself, and so fascinated her that she stood on the stairs gazing through the knothole until a sudden rigour reminded her that she was deadly cold. She did not interrupt the orgy. She crept back to bed, and after much difficulty awakened Millie. The sound of their voices must have alarmed Mrs Isaacson, for the girls presently heard her stumbling upstairs. They stopped their discussion then, and Blanche's toothache being mysteriously cured by her excitement, they were soon asleep again. Neither of the girls spoke of their discovery to anyone the next day, but Blanche returned to the cottage at half-past four, when Mrs Isaacson was at a meeting over the way, and explored her bedroom. She found a small store of tea, sugar and candles under the mattress--the whisky bottle had disappeared--and so came to an understanding of Mrs Isaacson's self-sacrificing insistence that she should perform all work connected with her own sleeping-place--it could hardly be called a room. After consultation with Millie, Blanche decided that she must inform Jasper Thrale of the contraband. "She's been stealing, of course," he said. "I suppose we shall have to bring it home to her." But he laughed at Blanche's indignation. "She's stealing from us!" said Blanche, who had developed a fine sense of her duty towards and interest in the community. "Oh, yes! you're quite right," said Thrale. "I'll inform the committee--at least, the non-Jenkynites." The five non-Jenkynites were furious. "We must make an example," Elsie Durham said. "It isn't that we shall miss what the Isaacson woman has taken--or will take. It's the question of precedent. This is where we are facing the beginning of law--isn't it? Somebody has to protect the members of the community against themselves. If one steals and goes unpunished, another will steal. We shall have the women divided into stealers and workers." "What are you going to do with her?" asked Thrale. "Turn her out," replied Elsie Durham. "The Jenkynites won't let her go," said Thrale raising the larger question. "We shall see," said Elsie Durham, "But that reminds me that we must catch the woman flagrante delicto; we must have no quibbles about the facts." Thrale agreed with the wisdom of this policy, but refused to take any part in either the detection or the prosecution of Mrs Isaacson. "They'll say its a put-up job if I have anything to do with it," he argued. 8 The Jenkynites blazed when Rebecca Isaacson was finally caught and denounced. The culprit, when caught in the act of entering the bank premises had made a slight error of judgment, and pleaded the excuse that she was a sleepwalker and quite unconscious of what she was doing; but she afterwards adopted a sounder line of defence. She made full confession to the seventeen, pleaded extravagant penitence with all the necessary references to the blood of the Lamb, and displayed all the well-known signs that she would become fervent in well-doing after the ensanguined ablutions had been metaphorically performed. The Jenkynites were enraptured with so real a case of sin. They had been compelled to content themselves with so many minor failures from grace that the performances were becoming slightly monotonous. The "Sister Rebecca" case was refreshingly real and genuine, and they meant to make the most of it. Also, this case gave them occasion to assert themselves once more against the opinions of the community. It must not be supposed that the seventeen deliberately adopted a practical and apparently promising policy. They were not consciously seeking to obtain civil power as were the priests of the old days before the plague. The seventeen had no sense of the State as represented by the community; they were without question perfectly sincere in their beliefs and actions. Their fault, if it can be so described, was their inability to adapt themselves to their conditions. They were as unchangeable as the old lady who had died sooner than be permanently separated from the glories of a house in Wisteria Grove. She and the seventeen and many other women in Marlow were demonstrating that rigidity of opinion is detrimental to the interests of the growing State. The same proposition had been clearly demonstrated by a few exceptional individuals in the old days, but progress was so slow, the property owners so content, and the average of mankind so intensely conservative, that their arguments received no attention. For every man who believed in the broad principle of maintaining an open mind, there were ten thousand who were quite incapable of putting the principle into practice. With these women in Marlow the conditions were completely changed. Moreover, women are by nature more broad-minded than men in practical affairs. Where intuition rather than the hard-and-fast methods of an intellectual logic is being brought into play, new and wonderful possibilities of adaptation may enter the domain of politics. The Jenkynites and such individuals as the late Mrs Gosling became suddenly conspicuous in the new conditions. The type that they represent cannot persist. They are the bonds on a vigorous and increasing growth; the tree will grow and burst away all inflexible restraints. In Marlow the new and vigorous growth was the sense of the community. The majority of the women were realizing, consciously or unconsciously, that they must work with and for each other. The Jenkynite affair served the committee as a valuable object-lesson. Mrs Isaacson was free to do as she would while the discussion raged. Imprisonment would have been utterly futile. The committee did not wish to punish her for her offence against common property, they merely wished to rid themselves of an undesirable member and to make public announcement that they would in like manner exclude any other member who proved herself a burden to the community. The Jenkynites were characteristically unable to comprehend this argument. They had their own definitions of heinous and venial sins, definitions based on ancient precedent, and they counted the fault of Millie Gosling in the former and that of Rebecca Isaacson in the latter category. They were not susceptible to argument. As they saw the problem, no argument was admissible. They had the old law and the old prophets on their side, and maintained that what was true once was true for all time. In their opinion, changed conditions did not affect morality. If the need for labour had been great, the affair might have been shelved for a time as of less importance than the dominant economic demand which takes precedence of all other problems. But although the floods had not yet come, there was not enough work for all the members of the community, and this comparative idleness reacted upon the importance of the Isaacson case in another and probably more influential direction than the abstract consideration of justice and humanity. The women had time to talk, and a new and fascinating subject was given them to discuss. And they talked; and their talk ripened into action. The affair Isaacson, which included also the affair Jenkyns, was brought to a climax at a mass meeting in the Town Hall. It was decided, noisily, but with considerable emphasis, that for the good of the community the Jenkynites must go. The seventeen were specifically indicated, but it was understood that certain of their more advanced adherents would go with them. The Jenkynites accepted the decision in the spirit of their belief. They were martyrs in a great cause. They would leave this accursed city (their terminology was always Biblical) and cast off its dust from their feet--although the roads were deep in mud at the time. They would go forth to regenerate the world, upheld by their love of truth and their zeal for the Word. Only Mrs Isaacson dissented, but she was compelled to go with them. They went forth in the rain, thirty-nine of them in all, exalted with conscious righteousness and faint with enthusiasm. The women of Marlow were kind to them. They turned out and jeered the little procession as it marched out of the town by the Henley Road. "'Oo stole the tea?" was the most popular taunt, and no doubt the exiles would have preferred that the taunts should have been cast at their faith rather than at the social misdemeanour of an obscure convert. But any form of martyrdom was better than none, and they held their heads high and sang "Glory! glory!" with magnificent fervour. "I'm sure we've done right," commented Elsie Durham. "But we should never have had all the women with us if there had been no offence against property. That touched them--communal property. I'm not sure that it isn't become almost dearer than personal property." XIX--ON THE FLOOD 1 From the middle of November onwards, the river had been running nearly bank-high, and so much power was available that Thrale had been considering the possibility of lighting some of the nearer houses by electricity. He had made three journeys to London, and with half a dozen assistants he had rifled two dynamos from the power station just outside Paddington, and had brought back twenty truck-loads of coal. The dynamos, however, were still in the truck, covered by tarpaulin. Thrale had decided that the luxury of artificial lighting could not be provided until all the grain had been thrashed and milled. The end of that work was now in sight, and the accumulated wealth of flour in Marlow was calculated to be sufficient to last the community for at least twelve months. But before the lighting scheme could be put in hand, a new trouble had threatened. During the first week of December there was almost continuous rain, and the river began to top its banks, spreading itself over the meadowland below the lock and creeping up the end of St Peter's Street. No serious matter as yet, and a short spell of frost and clear skies followed; but before Christmas heavy rains came again, and Thrale began to grow anxious. "The weirs down-stream ought to be opened," he explained to Eileen. "They are probably all up; we need never be afraid of shortage here; if we close our own weir we can always hold up all the water we want." "Is it serious?" she asked. "Not yet, but it may be," he said, looking up at the sky. "All Marlow might be flooded." And still the rain fell, and soon the girls had to wade through a foot of water to reach the mill. "I must go down-stream and open all the weirs," Thrale announced on Christmas Eve. "I've been looking at a steam launch over at the boat-house; it's in quite good condition. I shall bring it up to the town landing-stage to-morrow and get enough coal and food aboard to last a week." "You're not going alone?" said Eileen. "No! I must take some one to work the engine and the locks," returned Thrale. "I'll come!" announced Eileen, with glee. Thrale shook his head. "You'll have to run this place," he said. Since that night in September no reference had been made by either of them to his strange revelation of fear. They had worked together as two men might have worked. Neither of them had exhibited the least consciousness of sex. Thrale believed that he had put the fear away from him, and Eileen was content to wait. She was barely twenty. "Blanche could run the mill," she suggested. "There isn't much to do now." Thrale turned away from her with a touch of impatience. "Blanche had better come with me," he said. "I want to come," pleaded Eileen. "Why?" he asked. "It'll be sport." "I don't care to trust Blanche with the mill," he persisted. "She's every bit as good as I am," was her reply. He shook his head. "Oh, look here," said Eileen, "you might let me come, or are you--are you afraid of--of what the women will say?" She was standing by one of the flour-encrusted mill windows and she began to scratch a clean place on it with her nail. Thrale did not answer for a moment and then he came and stood near her. "What is it?" he asked. "Are you sick of your work here?" "I shouldn't mind a change," she said, intent on enlarging her peep-hole. "One forgets that you are women," said Thrale. "I suppose women are never content with work for work's sake." "If you like," returned Eileen inconsequently. "I can see out now. Why don't we have these windows cleaned sometimes?" "You can have them done while I'm away," he suggested. "I'm coming with you," said Eileen. "Oh! you can come if you like," he said. He thought he was perfectly safe, despite this unusual display of femininity. "You'll have to run the engine," he concluded. "Oh! I'll run the engine," she agreed and looked down at her capable, frankly dirty little hands. 2 The weirs at Marlow and Hedsor had been roaring open-mouthed for ten days before Thrale and Eileen began their journey; but the water had been piling up from below and the floods were working back up river. The fact that none of the weirs above Henley was closed had served to protect Marlow in some degree. There were great floods above Sonning, and from Goring to Culham the country was a vast sheet of water. This water, however, only came down comparatively slowly owing to the dammed condition of the main channel, and a greater proportion of it was absorbed. If the upper weirs had been open, Marlow would have been under water by the middle of December. Not until the launch had been manoeuvred with some difficulty through Boulter's Lock did Thrale begin to realize the full significance of the situation. He had had very great difficulty first in reaching and second in raising the paddles of the Taplow weir. In one place the force of the flood had broken away the structure, but even with the relief this passage had afforded the pressure of water on the paddles was so great that he had been working for more than two hours before the last valve was opened. Eileen had been waiting for him with the launch warped up just below the lock where the force of the stream was not so great. "I don't know whether we shall be able to carry out this job," remarked Thrale when he rejoined her. "Oh, but we must," she expostulated. "Do you see what has happened?" he explained. "All the water is piled up below us. We shall probably find the next locks flood-high, which means that we sha'n't be able to open them." "We must navigate," said Eileen. "Steam round them; shoot the weirs." "Oh, well," said Thrale, "I'm wondering how far our responsibility goes. If we don't open the river right down to Richmond, we shall only be increasing the flood in the lower reaches, and there may be women living there. After all, Marlow isn't the only place on the river. And there is another thing; we may never get back. It's a risky thing we are proposing to do. No one could swim against this current. If we were upset and carried into a weir, we should be smashed to pieces in no time. Do you think the community can spare us?" "Bother the community!" replied Eileen. The community and its activities were already in the background of her mind. Marlow had receded into a little distant place with which she was no longer connected. The world of adventure and romance lay open before her. She wanted only to explore this turbulent river, widened now into a miniature Amazon, from which arose the islands of half-submerged houses and trees that composed the strange archipelago of Maidenhead. "Oh, well," said Thrale again. "We'll try. It's no use waiting for the stream to go down. We'd better go on now." "Shall I cast off?" asked Eileen. "Steady, steady," Thrale warned her. "The next quarter of a mile is simply a rapid. You must be ready to get the engines going full ahead the moment we start, or I sha'n't be able to steer her. And, now, we must both cast off together or we shall be across the stream in two ticks. Just loosen the rope round the cleats and let go, and then start the engine. Let the loose end of the rope drag till we've time to pick it up. Are you ready? All right--cast off!" The little launch swept out into the current with a bound the instant she was released from her moorings, and almost before the engines began to revolve she was caught in the rapids that surged down from the newly-opened weir. She was only a light draught pleasure-boat, designed to navigate the placid surface of the summer Thames, and when she entered the curling broken water below the island she threw up her nose and plunged like a nervous mare. "Full steam ahead," shouted Thrale at the toy wheel. Eileen nodded, crouching over her little engine; the roar of the stream had drowned Thrale's voice, but she guessed his order. Her eyes were bright with excitement. She had no sense of fear. She was exhilarated by the sense of rapid movement. The launch, indeed, was travelling at a remarkable pace. In the narrow channel between the islands and the town, the river must have been running at nearly ten miles an hour, and the engines were probably adding another eight. In the wide spaces of the ocean eighteen miles an hour may appear a safe and controllable speed, but this little launch was running down hill, she could not be stopped at command, and the restricted course was beset with many and dangerous obstacles. Thrale, handling the little brass wheel forward, was conscious of uneasiness. The launch steered after a fashion, but he had little control of her. The trees on the banks appeared to be flying upstream at the pace of an express train, and ahead of him was the town bridge. He decided instantly that they could not pass under it, and put the wheel over, intending to shoot out of the stream into the calm of the flood water over the new open bank. But as the launch turned and came across, the current took her stern and turned her half round. For a moment her lee rail was under water, and she trembled and rocked on the verge of capsize. Then her engines drove her out of the stream and she righted herself again and began to cut through the almost still, shallow flood water. "Stop her!" roared Thrale. "I say, what's up?" replied Eileen, coolly, as she obeyed the order. "No room to pass under the bridge," said Thrale. "I suppose we'll have to navigate, as you call it. Go dead slow, and be prepared to stop her at a moment's notice." They spent over an hour in finding a passage round the approach to the bridge. They had laboriously to pole the launch through the tops of hedges, and in one place they were aground for ten minutes. But after they had returned to the stream once more they had a rapid and easy passage down to Bray. They shot the great arch of the Maidenhead railway bridge triumphantly. Eileen said it was "glorious." The weir at Bray proved even more difficult to negotiate than the one above, and by the time it was fully opened the dull December afternoon was closing in. They spent that night moored to two of the elms that ring the isolated little church in the meadows by Boveney. "At this rate," remarked Thrale as they settled themselves for the night, "it'll take us a week to get to Richmond. We've done two weirs out of thirteen, so far." 3 Thrale's estimate proved excessive. They reached Richmond on the fourth day out from Marlow, having opened another nine weirs--the one at Old Windsor had been swept away, and the one below Richmond Bridge Thrale opened that afternoon. During those four days they had seen few signs of life. They had moved, keeping to the main stream for the most part, in the midst of a wide expanse of water; exploring a desolate and wasted country. Once they had been hailed by three women, who looked out at them from a house in Windsor, and shouted something they did not catch; and a woman had been standing on Staines Bridge as they careered intrepidly through the centre arch--they had no time even to distinguish her dress. But with these exceptions they might have come through the land of an extinct civilization, devoid of life; a land in which deserted houses and church towers stood up from the silver sheet of a vast lake, that was threaded by this one impetuous torrent of swelling river. Richmond, also, was deserted. The emigrants had passed on over the river or southwards to Petersham and so into Surrey. "Well!" said Eileen, wiping her oil-blackened hands on a bunch of cotton waste, "that job's done. We've fairly drawn the plug of the cistern now. And how are we going to get back?" "We'll find a couple of bicycles somewhere here," said Thrale. It had been a clear day, and there was a suggestion of frost in the air. The sun was setting very red and full behind the bare trees across the river. Save for the gurgle and hiss of the eddying flood, everything was very still. The little launch which had served them so well, and bore the marks of its great adventure in broken rails and bruised sides, was run aground by the side of the bridge. Thrale was standing in the road, but Eileen still sat by her engine. "I hate to leave the launch," she said, after a long pause. "We can come back and fetch her up when the flood goes down," returned Thrale. "We've done pretty well, the three of us." "Yes, the three of us," he echoed. "It has been great fun," sighed Eileen. Thrale did not reply. He was thinking himself back into the past. He saw a street in Melbourne on a burning December evening, and the figure of a gaily-clad little brunette who spoke purest cockney and asked him why he looked so glum. "We ain't goin' to a funeral," she had said. Yet afterwards he had believed that something had been buried that night. He had faced his own passion and the sight of it had disgusted him. He had seen the shadow of a demon who might master him, and he had grappled with it; he believed that he had slain and buried lust in Melbourne ten years ago. It had not risen up to confront him when the plague had put a world of women at his command. He had not been forced to fight, he was not tempted--surely the thing was dead and buried. Only once, on that warm September night, had he felt a sudden furious desire to take this girl into his arms and fly with her into the woods. The desire had come and gone, he was master of it, and in any case it bore no resemblance to the brutal thing he had faced in Melbourne. Nor, as he stood now by Richmond Bridge watching the vault of the sky deepen to an intenser blue, did the feeling that possessed him in any way resemble that old cruel passion which had flared up and died--surely it had died. He could not analyse his feeling for this brave, clear-eyed companion, who had faced with him all the dangers of the past four days without a sign of fear. She had made no advances to him, they were friends, she might have been some delightfully clean, wholesome boy. And then his thought was pierced and broken by a horrible suggestion. A picture of the hill to Handy Cross flashed before him, and he saw a little lonely figure creeping furtively away from Marlow. He drove his nails into his palms and suddenly cried out. "What's up?" said Eileen, turning round and looking up at him. "Have you forgotten anything?" He stepped into the boat and sat down beside her. "I want to know--I must know," he said. She looked at him and smiled. "All right, old man," she said. "Fire away." "I told you once that I was frightened of you," said Thrale. "I want to know if you have ever been frightened of yourself--or of me?" "I could never be frightened of you," she replied, and looked away towards the rising darkness of the shadows across the hurrying river, "and I haven't been afraid of myself--yet. I don't think----" "Wouldn't you be frightened of me if I picked you up and ran shouting into the woods?" he asked, fiercely. Her eyes met his without reserve. "Dear old man," she said. "I should love it. I'm so glad you understand. That was the one thing that prevented our being real friends. I've wanted so much to be frank and open with you. It's all these silly reserves that make love abominable. Now we can be two jolly, clean human beings who understand each other, can't we? And we shall be such ripping good friends always; quite open and honest with each other." He drew a deep, sighing breath and put his arms round her, drew her close to him and laid his face against hers. "I've been such an awful ass," he said. "I've always thought that love was unclean. I've been like that Jenkyn woman. I've been prurient and suspicious and evil-minded. I've been like the people who cover up statues. But there was an excuse for me--and for them, too. I didn't know, because there was no woman like you to teach me. All the women I've known have been secretive and sly. They've fouled love for me by making it seem a hidden, disreputable thing. Oh! we shall be ripping good friends, little Eileen--magnificent friends." "This is a jolly old boat, isn't it?" replied Eileen, inconsequently. "Don't smother me, old man. And, I say, do you think we'll be able to raid some soap from somewhere? Do look at my hands! You couldn't be friends with a chap who had hands like that!" ... "There's one thing I'd like to remark," said Eileen the next morning. There had been a frost in the night, and there was every promise of an easy ride back to Marlow. "Yes?" said Thrale, examining the deflated tyres of two bicycles they had chosen from a shop in the High Street. "We'd never have understood each other so well if we hadn't worked together on the same job," said Eileen. "Well, of course not," returned Thrale. His tone seemed to imply that she had stated a truth that must always have been obvious to sensible people. "That and there being no footle about marriage," concluded Eileen. 4 A third factor that had contributed to the perfection of that complete understanding was not realized by either until they were descending the hill into Bisham. "I rather wish we weren't going back," said Eileen. "Let's stop a moment. I want to talk. We've never thought of what we're going to do." "Do?" said Jasper, as he dismounted. "Well, we've just got to make an announcement and that's the end of it. The Jenkyns lot have all gone." "It isn't the end, it's the beginning," replied Eileen. "Don't you see that we can't even explain?" "We sha'n't try." "We shall. We shall have to--in a way. It'll take years and years to do it. But the point is that they won't understand, now, none of them, not even Elsie Durham. We aren't free any longer." "We aren't alone," she added, bringing the hitherto unacknowledged factor into prominence. Thrale frowned and looked up into the thin brightness of the frosty sky. "Yes, I understand," he said. "It's public opinion that compels one to regard love as shameful and secret. Alone together, free from every suspicion, we hadn't a doubt. But now, we have to explain and we can't explain, and we are forced against our wills to wonder whether we can be right and all the rest of the world wrong." "We are right," put in Eileen. "Only we can't prove it to anyone but ourselves." "And we shouldn't want to, if we hadn't got to live with them." For a moment they looked at one another thoughtfully. "No, we mustn't run away," Jasper said, with determination, after a pause. "Look, the flood has begun to go down already. That's our work. There's other work for us to do yet." For a time they were silent, looking down on to Marlow and out over the valley. "We didn't go over that hill," said Eileen, at last, pointing to the distant rise of Handy Cross. "No," replied Jasper, and then, "we won't hide behind hills. Damn public opinion." "Oh, yes, damn public opinion," agreed Eileen. "But we won't stay in Marlow always." XX--THE TERRORS OF SPRING 1 The frost gave way on the third night, and for ten days there was a spell of mild weather with some rain. Carrie Oliver began to contemplate the possibility of getting forward with such ploughing as still remained to be done. She proposed to have an increased acreage of arable that year, and less pasture, less hay and less turnips; the arable was to include potatoes, beans and peas. For the community was rapidly tending towards vegetarianism. They had no butcher in Marlow, and the women revolted against the slaughter of cattle and sheep. They were hesitating and clumsy in the attack, and so inflicted wounds which were not fatal, they turned sick at the sight of the brute's agonies and at the appalling spurts of blood, and finally when the animal was at last mercifully dead, they bungled the dissection of the carcase. "I'd sooner starve than do it again," was the invariable decision pronounced by any new volunteer who had heroically offered to provide Marlow with meat, and even Carrie Oliver admitted that it was a "beastly dirty job." "Only," she added "we'll 'ave to go on breeding calves or we won't get no milk, an' what are we goin' to do with the bullocks?" The committee wondered if some form of barter might not be introduced. Wycombe and Henley might have something to offer in exchange, or, failing that, might be urged to accept these superfluous beasts as a present, returning the skins and horns, for which there might be a use in the near future. Sheep must be reared for their wool--the clothes of the community would not last for ever. The subjects of tanning and weaving were being studied by certain members of the now enlarged committee. Neither operation presented insuperable difficulties. Now that a certain supply of food was provided for, the community was already turning its energy towards the industries. Many schemes were being planned and debated. Marlow was well situated, with such abundance of water and wood at its gates; and the question of attracting desirable immigrants had been raised. Time was afforded for the consideration of all these schemes by the great frost which began on New Year's Day and lasted until the end of February. The frost came first from the south-west, and for three days the country was changed into a fairy world built of sharp white crystals, a world that was seen dimly through a magic veil of mist. Then followed a black and bitter wind from the north-east, that bought a thin and driving snow, and when the wind fell the country was locked in an iron shell that was not relaxed for six weeks. The flood had nearly subsided before the first frost came, but the river was still high, and presently the water came down laden with ice-floes, that jammed against the weir and the mill, and formed a sheet of ice that gradually crept back towards the bridge. All field and mill work was stopped, and Thrale and Eileen spent two or three days a week making excursions to London, bringing back coal and other forms of riches. 2 Their fear of being misunderstood had proved to have been an exaggeration. In that exalted mood of theirs, which had risen to such heights, after four days of adventurous solitude, they had come a little too near the stars. In finding themselves they had lost touch with the world. Elsie Durham had smiled at their defensive announcement. "My dear children," she had said, "don't be touchy about it. I am so glad; and, of course, I've known for months that you would come to an understanding. And there's no need to tell me that your--agreement, did you say?--was entirely different to any other. I know. But be human about it. Don't apologize for it by being superior to all of us." "Oh, you're a dear," Eileen had said enthusiastically. Nevertheless there were many women still left in Marlow who were less spiritually-minded than Elsie Durham. Comparative idleness induced gossip, and there was more than one party in the community which regarded Thrale and Eileen with disfavour. The old ruts had been worn too deep to be smoothed out in a few months, however heavy had been the great roller of necessity. And, strangely enough, the life of Sam Evans at High Wycombe was regarded by many of the more bigoted with less displeasure than this perfectly wholesome and desirable union of Thrale and Eileen. The prostitution of Sam Evans was a new thing outside the experience of these women, and it was accepted as an outcome of the new conditions. The other affair was familiar in its associations, and was condemned on both the old and the new precedents. The mass of the women were quite unable to think out a new morality for themselves.... 3 Relief from all these foolish criticisms, gossipings and false emotions came when the frost broke. A warm rain in the first week of March released the soil from its bonds, and as the retarded spring began to move impatiently into life there was a great call for labour. But as the year ripened the temperament of the community exhibited a new and alarming symptom. There was a terrible spirit of depression abroad. All Nature was warm with the movement of reproduction. Nature was growing and propagating, thrusting out and taking a larger hold upon life. Nature was coming to the fight with new reserves and allies, a fruitful and increasing army, eager for the struggle against this little decreasing band of sterile humanity. Nature was prolific and these women were barren. And in some inexplicable way the consciousness of futility had spread through the Marlow community. Some posthumous children had been born since the plague, a few young girls--Millie among them--were pregnant, but death had been busier than life during the winter, and from outside came stray reports that in other communities death had been busier still. What hope was there for that generation? They were too few to cope with their task. Grass was growing in their streets, their houses were in need of repair, and after their day's labour in the fields to provide themselves with food, they had neither strength nor inclination to take up the battle anew. Moreover, the spice was gone from life. Some inherent need for emulation was gone. They were ceasing to take any pride in their persons, and in their clothes. They wore knickerbockers or trousers for convenience in working, and suffered a strange loss of self-esteem in consequence. Many of the younger women still returned in the evenings to what skirts and ribbons they still possessed, but the habit was declining. The uselessness of it was growing even more apparent. There were no sex distinctions or class distinctions among them. Of what account was it that one girl was prettier or better dressed than her neighbour? What mattered was whether she was a stronger or more intelligent worker. Above all, the woman's need for love and admiration could find no outlet. They realized that they were becoming hardened and unsexed, and revolted against the coming change. Something within them rose up and cried for expression, and when it was thwarted it turned to a thing of evil.... The mind of the community was becoming distorted. Hysteria, sexual perversions, and various forms of religious mania were rife. Young women broke into futile and unsatisfying orgies of foolish dancing, and middle-aged women became absorbed in the contemplation of a male and human god. Even the committee did not escape the influence of the growing despair. They looked forward to a future when such machines and tools as they possessed would be worn out, and they had no means of replacing them. Thrale had reported that the line to London was becoming unsafe for the passage of his trucks. Rust was at work upon the rails; rain and floods had weakened embankments; young growths were springing up on the permanent way, and it was hopeless to contemplate any work of repair. In the old days an army of men had been needed for that work alone. The country roads needed re-metalling, and the houses restoration; they had not the means or the labour to undertake half the necessary work. There were breaches in the river bank and a large and apparently permanent lake was forming in the low meadows towards Bourne End. All about them Nature was so intensely busy in her own regardless way, and they were helpless, now, to oppose her. The age of iron and machinery was falling into a swift decline. All that the community could look for in the future was a return to primitive conditions and the fight for bare life. Every year their tools and machines would grow less efficient, every year Nature would return more powerful to the attack. In ten years they would be fighting her with rude and tedious weapons of wood, grinding their scanty corn between two stones, and living from hand to mouth. In the bountiful South such a life might have its rewards, but how could they endure it in this uncertain and cruel North? So while the sun rose higher in the sky and the earth was wonderfully reclothed, the women of Marlow fell deeper and deeper into the horrors of mental depression. What had they to work for, and to hope for, save this miserable possession of unsatisfied life? XXI--SMOKE 1 One bright morning, at the end of April, Jasper and Eileen sat on the cliffs at the Land's End and talked of the future. Ten days before, they had left Marlow on bicycles to make exploration. They intended to return; they had explained they would be away for a month at the outside, but in view of the growing depression and the loss of spirit shown by the community, they considered it necessary to go out and discover what conditions obtained in other parts of England. It might be, they urged, that the plague had been less deadly in other districts. "We should not know, here," Jasper had argued. "There may be many men left elsewhere; but they might not have been able to communicate with us yet. Their attention, like ours, would have been concentrated upon local conditions for a time. Eileen and I will find out. Perhaps we may be able to open up communication again. In any case we'll come back within a month and report." His natural instinct had taken him into the West Country. They had left Elsie Durham slightly more cheerful. They had given her a gleam of hope, given her something, at last, to which she might look forward. Their own hopes had quickly faded and died as they rode on into the West. By the time they reached Plymouth they were thinking of Marlow as a place peculiarly favoured by Providence. At first they had passed through communities conducted on lines resembling their own, greater or smaller groups of women working more or less in co-operation. In many of these communities a single man was living--in some cases two men--who viewed their duty towards society in the same light as the Adonis of Wycombe. But the unit grew steadily smaller as they progressed. It was no longer the town or village community but the farm which was the centre of activity, and the occupied farms grew more scattered. For it appeared that here in the West the plague had attacked women as well as men. Another curious fact they learned was that the men had taken longer to die. One woman spoke of having nursed her husband for two months before the paralysis proved fatal.... And if the depression in Marlow had been great, the travellers soon learned that elsewhere it was greater still. The women worked mechanically, drudgingly. They spoke in low, melancholy voices when they were questioned, and save for a faint accession of interest in Thrale's presence there, and the signs of some feeble flicker of hope as they asked of conditions further north and east, they appeared to have no thought beyond the instant necessity of sustaining the life to which they clung so feebly. Thrale and Eileen rode on into Cornwall, not because they still hoped, but because they both felt a vivid desire to reach the Land's End and gaze out over the Atlantic. They wanted to leave this desolate land behind them for a few hours, and rest their minds in the presence of the unchangeable sea. "Let us go on and forget for a few days," Eileen had said, and so they had at last reached the furthest limit of land. Cornwall had proved to be a land of the dead. Save for a few women in the neighbourhood of St Austell, they had not seen a living human being in the whole county. And so, on this clear April morning, they sat upon this ultimate cliff and talked of the future. 2 The water below them was delicately flecked with white. No long rollers were riding in from the Atlantic, but the fresh April breeze was flicking the crests of little waves into foam; and, above, an ever-renewed drift of scattered white clouds threw coursing shadows upon the blues and purples of the curdling sea. Eileen and Thrale had walked southwards as far as Carn Voel to avoid the obstruction to vision of the Longships, and on three sides they looked out to an unbroken horizon of water, which on that bright morning was clearly differentiated from the impending sky. "One might forget--here," remarked Eileen, after a long silence. "If it were better to forget," said Jasper. Eileen drew up her knees until she could rest her chin upon them, embracing them with her arms. "What can one do?" she asked. "What good is it all, if there is no future?" "Just to live out one's own life in the best way," was the answer. She frowned over that for a time. "Do you really believe, dear," she said, when she had considered Jasper's suggestion, "do you really believe that this is the end of humanity?" "I don't know," he said. "I have changed my mind half a dozen times in the last few days. There may be a race untouched somewhere--in the archipelagos of the South Seas, perhaps--which will gradually develop and repeople the world again." "Or in Australia, or New Zealand," she prompted. "We should have heard from them before this," he said. "We must have heard before this." "And is there no hope for us, here in England, in Marlow? There are a few boys--infants born since the plague, you know--and there will be more children in the future--Evans's children and those others. There were two men in some places, you remember." "Can they ever grow up? It seems to me that the women are dying. They've nothing to live for. It's only a year since the plague first came, and look at them now. What will they be like in five years' time? They'll die of hopelessness, or commit suicide, or simply starve from the lack of any purpose in living, because work isn't worth while. And the others, the mothers, that have some object in living, will fall back into savagery. They'll be so occupied in the necessity for work, for forcing a living out of the ground somehow, that they'll have neither time nor wish to teach their children. I don't know, but it seems to me that we are faced with decrease, gradually leading on to extinction. "And I doubt," he continued, after a little hesitation, "I doubt whether these sons of the new conditions will have much vitality. They are the children of lust on the father's side, worse still, of tired lust. It does make a difference. Perhaps if we were a young and vigorous people like the old Jews the seed would be strong enough to override any inherent weakness. But we are not, we are an old civilization. Before the plague, we had come to a consideration of eugenics. It had been forced upon us. A vital and growing people does not spend its time on such a question as that. Eugenics was a proposition that grew out of the necessity of the time. It was easy enough to deny decadence, and to prove our fitness by apparently sound argument, but, to me, it always seemed that this growing demand for some form of artificial selection of parents, by restriction of the palpably unfit, afforded the surest evidence. Things like that are only produced if there is a need for them. Eugenics was a symptom." Eileen sighed. "And what about us?" she asked. "We're happy," replied Jasper. "Probably the happiest people in the world at the present time. And we must try to give some of our happiness to others. We must go back to Marlow and work for the community. And I think we'll try in our limited way to do something for the younger generation. Perhaps, it might be possible for us to go north and try our hands at making steel, there are probably women there who would help us. But I don't think it's worth while, unless to preserve our knowledge and hand it on. We can only lessen the difficulty in one little district for a time. As the pressure of necessity grows, as it must grow, we shall be forced to abandon manufacture. The need for food will outrun us. We are too few, and it will be simpler and perhaps quicker to plough with a wooden plough than to wait for our faulty and slowly-produced steel. The adult population, small as it is, must decrease, and I'm afraid it will decrease more rapidly than we anticipate, owing to these causes of depression and lack of stimulus...." "Oh, well," said Eileen at last, getting to her feet, "we're happy, as you say, and our job seems pretty plain before us. To-morrow, I suppose, we ought to be getting back, though I hate taking the news to Elsie." Jasper came and stood beside her, and put his arm across her shoulders. "We, at any rate, must keep our spirits up," he said. "That, before everything." "I'm all right," said Eileen, brightly. "I've got you and, for the moment, the sea. We'll come back here sometimes, if the roads don't get too bad." "Yes, if the roads don't get too bad." "And, already, the briars are creeping across the road from hedge to hedge. The forest is coming back." "The forest and the wild." He drew her a little closer and they stood looking out towards the horizon. 3 In the south-west the clear line had been wiped out and what looked like mist was sweeping towards them. "There's a shower coming," said Thrale. They stood quietly and let the sharp spatter of rain beat in their faces, and then the shadow of the storm moved on and the horizon line was clear again. "That's a queer cloud out there," said Eileen. "Is it another shower?" She pointed to a tiny blur on the far rim of the sea. "It is queer," said Thrale. "It's so precisely like the smoke of a steamer." For a few seconds they gazed in intent silence. "It's getting bigger," broke out Eileen, suddenly excited. "What is it, Jasper?" "I don't know. I can't make it out," he said. He moved away from her and shaded his eyes from the glare of the momentarily cloudless sky. "I can't make it out," he repeated mechanically. The blur was widening into a grey-black smudge, into a vaguely diffused smear with a darker centre. "With the wind blowing towards us----" said Jasper, and broke off. "Yes, yes--what?" asked Eileen, and then as he did not answer, she gripped his arm and repeated importunately. "What? Jasper, what? With the wind blowing towards us?" "By God it is," he said in a low voice, disregarding her question. "By God it is," he repeated, and then a third time, "It is." "Oh! what, what? Do answer me! I can't see!" pleaded Eileen. But still he did not answer. He stood like a rock and stared without wavering at the growing cloud on the horizon. And then the cloud began to grow more diffused, to die away, and Eileen could see tiny indentations on the sky line, indentations which pushed up and presently revealed themselves as attached to a little black speck in the remotest distance. "Oh, Jasper!" she cried, and her eyes filled with inexplicable tears, so that she could see only a misty field of troubled blue. "It's a liner," said Jasper at last, turning to her. He looked puzzled and his eyes stared through her. "And its coming from America. Do you suppose the American women----" The boat was revealed now. They could see the shape of her, the high deck, the two tall funnels and the three masts. She was passing across, fifteen miles or so to the south of them, making up Channel. For a moment they felt like shipwrecked sailors on a lonely island, who see a vessel pass beyond hail. "Oh, Jasper, what can it be?" Eileen besought him. "It's a White Star boat," he said, and he still spoke as if his mind was far away. "Is it possible, is it anyway possible that America has survived? Is it possible that there is traffic between America and Europe, and that they pass us by for fear of infection? How do we know that vessels haven't been passing up the Channel for months past? Why should we think that this is the first?" "It is the first," proclaimed Eileen. "I feel it. Oh, let us hurry. Let us ride and ride as fast as we can to Plymouth or Southampton. I know they'll be coming to Plymouth or Southampton. Men, Jasper, men! No women would dare to run a boat at that pace. See how fast she is going. Oh hurry, hurry!" He caught fire then. They ran back to find their bicycles. They ran, and presently they rode in silence, with fierce intensity. They rode at first as if they had but ten miles to go, and the lives of all the women in England depended upon their speed. And though they slackened after the first few miles they still rode on with such eager determination that they reached Plymouth at sunset. But they could see no sign of the liner in the waters about Plymouth. They saw only the deserted hulks of a hundred vessels that had ridden there untouched for twelve months, futile battleships and destroyers among them; great, venomous, useless things that had become void of all meaning in the struggle of humanity. "It's not here. Let's go on!" said Eileen. Jasper shrugged his shoulders. "It's well over a hundred miles to Southampton," he said. "Nearer a hundred and fifty, I should say." "But we must go on, we must," urged Eileen. It was evident that Jasper, too, felt a compelling desire to go on. He stood still with a look of intense concentration on his face. Eileen had seen him look thus, when he had been momentarily frustrated by some problem of mill machinery. She waited expectant for the solution she was sure would presently emerge. "A motor," he said, speaking in short disconnected sentences. "If we can find paraffin and petrol and candles--light of some sort. The engines wouldn't rust, but they'd clog. It must be paraffin. We daren't clean with petrol by artificial light. It's possible. Let's try...." That night Jasper did not sleep, but Eileen, as she sat beside him in the softly moving motor, soon lost consciousness of the dim streak of road and black river of hedge. The moon, in her third quarter, had risen before midnight, and when they started was riding deep in the sky, half veiled by a vast wing of dappled cirrus. And that, too, merged into her dream. She thought she was driving out into the open sea in a ship which became miraculously winged and soared up towards an ever-approaching but unincreasing moon. She woke with a start to find that it was broad daylight and that a thin misty rain was coming up from the sea. "The Solent," said Jasper, pointing to a distant gleam below them. On the common they stopped and stood up in the car, watching a distant smear of smoke that stained the thin mist. "She'll be coming up Southampton Water with the lead going," said Jasper, trying desperately to be calm. EPILOGUE THE GREAT PLAN On the evening of that day Jasper and Eileen dined on board the "Bombastic," that latest development of the old trans-Atlantic competition in shipbuilding, the boat that had made her first journey to New York carrying fugitives from England in the days when the threat of the plague grew hourly more imminent. The "Bombastic" had not justified her name, she had fled from Southampton without ceremony, and she had not returned for over a year. The "Apologetic" would have been more apt. And on this evening of her return, the demeanour of that crowd of quiet serious men in the huge over-decorated saloon, gave no hint of bombast. As they listened intently to the rapid story of their two travel-stained and somewhat ragged guests, there was no hint of brag or boast among them all. They came not as conquerors but as friends. "But oh, it's your story we want to hear," broke in Eileen at last. She had been strangely quiet so far, she had become suddenly conscious of the defects of her dress. The old associations were swarming about her. Eighteen months ago she had sat in just such another saloon as this, courted and flattered, the daughter of a great aristocrat, a creature on a remote and gorgeous pedestal. Now it seemed that she was neither greater nor less than any man present. She was one of them, not set apart. She looked down at her hands, still oil-stained by her struggles with the motor on the previous night. Jasper had been more patient. He was not less eager than Eileen to hear the explanation of this wonderful visit, of the resurrection of these twelve hundred men from a dead and silent world. But he had restrained his impatience and told his story first. He knew that so he would be more quickly satisfied. He would be able to listen to men who were not tense with an anxiety to ask questions. They were sitting now at one end of a long table in the saloon, after eating a meal that had provided once more the longed-for satisfaction of salt. "Well," said an American at the head of the table, turning to Eileen in answer to her protest, "we've maybe been selfish in putting all these questions but we're looking ahead. We aren't forgetting that we've a big work to do." "But how did you get here?" asked Eileen impetuously. "How is it that you're all alive?" "Well, as to that, you'd better ask the doctor, there," replied the American. "He's a countryman of yours, and he's been in the thick of it and knows the life story of that plague microbe like the history of England." The doctor, a bearded, grave-eyed man, looked up and smiled. "Hardly that," he said. "We shall never know now, I hope, the history of the plague organism. It was never studied under the microscope--we were too busy--and now we trust that the bacillus--if it were a bacillus--has encompassed its own destruction. What interests you, however, is that this sudden, miraculously sudden, development of its deadly power as regards humanity ran through a determinable cycle of evolution. From what you've told us, already, it seems clear, I think, that even in England the bacillus was losing what I may call its effectiveness. The men in the West Country you've described, probably died from starvation and neglect." He paused for a moment and then continued: "Now in America both men and women were attacked. There was certainly a greater percentage of male cases, but I suppose something like half the female population was infected as well. As far as one can judge the bacillus was simply losing power. But for all we know it may have developed, it may be entering on a new stage of evolution, and in some apparently haphazard way now be beneficial to man instead of deadly. Such things may be happening every day below the reach of our knowledge. The little world is hidden from us, even as the great world is hidden.... "However," he went on more briskly, "the thing we do know is that the symptoms of the new plague in America differed materially from our expectation of them, gathered from the accounts that had reached us from the Old World. In England the paralysis lasted, I believe, some forty-eight hours and ended in death. In America the paralysis rarely ended fatally, but it lasted in some cases for six months. 'Paresis,' we called it. The patient was perfectly conscious but practically unable to move hand or foot." "That paresis gave us time to do some very clear and consecutive thinking, I may remark," put in an American. "I had four months to study my ideas of life." The doctor nodded thoughtfully. "America is no less changed than England," he said, "but it is another change. Well, you understand that we did not all get the plague over there; the thing was less deadly in attack and about ten per cent of us were left to look after the patients." "And find food," interpolated one of the listeners. "That was a time we won't ever forget," agreed another. "Sure thing," said some one, and a general murmur of assent ran round the table. "And all the machines were idle, of course," continued the doctor, "and even when the tide of recovery began to flow we had to turn our attention first to the getting of food." "If it hadn't been for that we'd have been here before this," said a young man. "I feel we owe England and Europe some kind of an apology, but we just had to get busy on food growing right away. We couldn't spare a ship's crew till three weeks ago." "And the others are hard at it over there still," put in another. "This is just a pioneer party." "It's all so comprehensible now," said Thrale after a silence, "but we had no idea, we never thought there could be any one living in America. We thought that somehow we must have heard. One forgets...." "We tried to get on to you," said one of the party, "by cable and wireless. We kept on tapping away for months, but we got no reply. We thought you must be all dead too." "Well, we guessed you were having a real bad time anyway," amended another. "You see we knew the way that plague had taken Europe but we kept hoping and trying to get on to you all the same." "We've got a message for Elsie, after all," Eileen said to Jasper the next day. "There's hope for us yet." "Yes, there's hope," said Jasper. They had been up at the town railway station assisting a party of Americans to investigate the condition of the rolling stock and the permanent way. Neither could be pronounced satisfactory. A few women had come in from the neighbouring country that morning attracted by the sight of an inexplicable pillar of smoke, and their report of local conditions had been equally uninspiring. They had spoken of famine and failure, but their faces had been lit by a new brightness at the sight of this miraculous little army of men. There had been hope in the faces and bearing of these toil-worn women, faith in the promise of support and succour. Now Jasper and Eileen stood looking down towards the harbour. The tide was creeping in to efface the repulsive ugliness of the mud flats, and the sluggish water rippled faintly against the foul sloping sides of small boats that had lain anchored there for more than twelve months. Behind them, across the line, was a row of unsightly houses, hung with weather-slating. "Oh, there's hope," repeated Jasper. He was thinking of all the work that lay before them, and yet he had faith that a new and better civilization would arise. "We must get things going again," had been the Americans' phrase, and they apparently faced the future without a qualm. But Jasper's mind was perplexed with the detail of the mechanical work that must be faced, detail so intricate and confused that he was bewildered by its complexity. It appeared to him that the crux of the whole problem lay in the North, in the counties of coal and iron. Coal and steel were the first essentials, he thought. They must begin there in however small a way, and America must send out more men, continually more men. To-morrow he was going back in the motor, with two experts, to the cable hut in Sennen Cove. They were going to test the cable and hoped to re-establish communication with America, and then more ships would come and more men, ever more men. And, even so, they could do little at first, and beyond lay the whole of Europe and still further the whole of Asia. Were women there, also, maintaining the terrible fight against Nature in the awful struggle to find food? Steel and coal we must have, was the burden of his thought, and in his imagination he pictured the waking of factories and mines, he had a vision of little engines running.... Eileen's thought had flown ahead. With one magnificent leap she had passed from the contemplation of present necessity to a realization of the dim future. And her thought found words. "Hope, lots of hope," she said. "Hope of a new clean world. We've got such a chance to begin all over again, and do it better. No more sweated labour, Jasper, and no more living on the work of others. We've just got to pull together and work for each other. If we can get enough food, and we can now with all these dear men come to help us, we can do such wonderful things afterwards. There'll be lots of children growing up in a few years' time, and we shall teach them the things we've had to learn by the force of necessity. They'll begin so differently because, although we have had the experience of all history, we sha'n't be bound by all the foolish conventions that grew out of it. Such a silly incongruous growth, wasn't it? But I suppose it couldn't be helped in one way. We were so penned in. We all had our rotten little places to keep and that took all our time. We never had a chance to consider the broad issues, the real fundamental things. But you've got to consider the fundamental things when you start clean away from a new beginning. "And, oh! Jasper, surely we have all learnt certain things to avoid, haven't we? I mean class distinctions and sex distinctions, and things like that. Women won't trouble any more about titles and all that rot now, and anyway there aren't any left to trouble about. And social conditions will be so different now that there won't be any more marriage. Marriage was a man's prerogative; he wanted to keep his woman to himself, and keep his property for his children. It never really protected women, and anyway they were capable of protecting themselves if they'd been given a chance. I know the children were a difficulty in the old days, but they won't be now. It'll be everybody's business to see that the children get looked after, and a woman won't starve just because she hasn't got a husband to keep her. She'll get better wages than that. The women who have children will be the most precious things we shall have. They'll live healthier lives, too, and they won't be incapacitated as they used to be. They'll work and be strong instead of spending all their time either in doing nothing or pottering about the house in an eternal round of cleaning the stupid, ugly things we used. We shall have to have all new houses, Jasper, when we get things going again. "Oh, it will be splendid," she broke out in a great burst of enthusiasm, "and we begin to-day. We have begun." Jasper nodded. "It's a wonderful opportunity," he said. "Wonderful, wonderful," repeated Eileen. "We all, men and women, start level again. Equality, Jasper, It's a beautiful word--Equality. Of course I know how unequal we all are from one point of view, and there must come a sort of aristocracy of intellect and efficiency. But underneath there will be a true equality for all that, and we shall see to it that no man or woman can abuse their powers by making slaves again. What a world of slaves it used to be, and we weren't even slaves to intellect and efficiency, only to wealth and to money, and to some foolish idea of position and power." "Well, we've got our work to do, here and now," said Jasper after a long pause. "Work? Of course, and I love it," returned Eileen, "and while we work we've got to think and teach." The tide was coming in steadily, and near them an old boat that had been lying on the mud was now afloat once more and had taken on some of its old dignity. Eileen pointed to it. "We're afloat again," she remarked. "Embarked on the greatest plan the world has ever known," added Jasper. "Oh, it's all part of the great plan," concluded Eileen. THE END 
20519	----	HIGHWAYS IN HIDING GEORGE O. SMITH A LANCER BOOK 1967 Copyright 1956 by George O. Smith _Highways in Hiding_ is based upon material originally copyrighted by Greenleaf Publishing Co., 1955. All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 56-10457 Printed in the U.S.A. _Cover painting by Roy G. Krenkel_ LANCER BOOKS, INC., 185 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10016 [Transcriber's note: This is a rule 6 clearance. PG has not been able to find a U.S. copyright renewal.] _For my drinking uncle DON and, of course MARIAN_ _Historical Note_ In the founding days of Rhine Institute the need arose for a new punctuation mark which would indicate on the printed page that the passage was of mental origin, just as the familiar quotation marks indicate that the words between them were of verbal origin. Accordingly, the symbol # was chosen, primarily because it appears on every typewriter. Up to the present time, the use of the symbol # to indicate directed mental communication has been restricted to technical papers, term theses, and scholarly treatises by professors, scholars, and students of telepathy. Here, for the first time in any popular work, the symbol # is used to signify that the passage between the marks was mental communication. Steve Cornell, _M. Ing._ STALEMATE Macklin said, "Please put that weapon down, Mr. Cornell. Let's not add attempted murder to your other crimes." "Don't force me to it, then," I told him. But I knew I couldn't do it. I hated them all. I wanted the whole Highways in Hiding rolled up like an old discarded carpet, with every Mekstrom on Earth rolled up in it. But I couldn't pull the trigger. The survivors would have enough savvy to clean up the mess before our bodies got cold, and the Highways crowd would be doing business at the same old stand. Without, I might add, the minor nuisance that people call Steve Cornell. What I really wanted was to find Catherine. And then it came to me that what I really wanted second of all was to possess a body of Mekstrom Flesh, to be a physical superman.... I I came up out of the blackness just enough to know that I was no longer pinned down by a couple of tons of wrecked automobile. I floated on soft sheets with only a light blanket over me. I hurt all over like a hundred and sixty pounds of boil. My right arm was numb and my left thigh was aching. Breathing felt like being stabbed with rapiers and the skin of my face felt stretched tight. There was a bandage over my eyes and the place was as quiet as the grave. But I knew that I was not in any grave because my nose was working just barely well enough to register the unmistakable pungent odor that only goes with hospitals. I tried my sense of perception, but like any delicate and critical sense, perception was one of the first to go. I could not dig out beyond a few inches. I could sense the bed and the white sheets and that was all. Some brave soul had hauled me out of that crack-up before the fuel tank went up in the fire. I hope that whoever he was, he'd had enough sense to haul Catherine out of the mess first. The thought of living without Catherine was too dark to bear, and so I just let the blackness close down over me again because it cut out all pain, both physical and mental. The next time I awoke there was light and a pleasant male voice saying, "Steve Cornell. Steve, can you hear me?" I tried to answer but no sound came out. Not even a hoarse croak. The voice went on, "Don't try to talk, Steve. Just think it." #Catherine?# I thought sharply, because most medicos are telepath, not perceptive. "Catherine is all right," he replied. #Can I see her?# "Lord no!" he said quickly. "You'd scare her half to death the way you look right now." #How bad off am I?# "You're a mess, Steve. Broken ribs, compound fracture of the left tibia, broken humerus. Scars, mars, abrasions, some flashburn and post-accident shock. And if you're interested, not a trace of Mekstrom's Disease." #Mekstrom's Disease--?# was my thought of horror. "Forget it, Steve. I always check for it because it's been my specialty. Don't worry." #Okay. So how long have I been here?# "Eight days." #Eight days? Couldn't you do the usual job?# "You were pretty badly ground up, Steve. That's what took the time. Now, suppose you tell me what happened?" #Catherine and I were eloping. Just like most other couples do since Rhine Institute made it difficult to find personal privacy. Then we cracked up.# "What did it?" asked the doctor. "Perceptives like you usually sense danger before you can see it." #Catherine called my attention to a peculiar road sign, and I sent my perception back to take another dig. We hit the fallen limb of a tree and went over and over. You know the rest.# "Bad," said the doctor. "But what kind of a sign would call your interest so deep that you didn't at least see the limb, even if you were perceiving the sign?" #Peculiar sign,# I thought. Ornamental wrought iron gizmo with curlicues and a little decorative circle that sort of looks like the Boy Scout tenderfoot badge suspended on three spokes. One of the spokes were broken away; I got involved because I was trying to guess whether it had been shot away by some vandal who missed the central design. Then--blooie!# "It's really too bad, Steve. But you'll be all right in a while." #Thanks, doctor. Doctor? Doctor--?# "Sorry, Steve. I forget that everybody is not telepath like I am. I'm James Thorndyke." Much later I began to wake up again, and with better clarity of mind, I found that I could extend my esper as far as the wall and through the door by a few inches. It was strictly hospital all right; sere white and stainless steel as far as my esper could reach. In my room was a nurse, rustling in starched white. I tried to speak, croaked once, and then paused to form my voice. "Can--I see--How is--? Where is?" I stopped again, because the nurse was probably as esper as I was and required a full sentence to get the thought behind it. Only a telepath like the doctor could have followed my jumbled ideas. But the nurse was good. She tried: "Mr. Cornell? You're awake!" "Look--nurse--" "Take it easy. I'm Miss Farrow. I'll get the doctor." "No--wait. I've been here eight days--?" "But you were badly hurt, you know." "But the doctor. He said that she was here, too." "Don't worry about it, Mr. Cornell." "But he said that she was not badly hurt." "She wasn't." "Then why was--is--she here so long?" Miss Farrow laughed cheerfully. "Your Christine is in fine shape. She is still here because she wouldn't leave until you were well out of danger. Now stop fretting. You'll see her soon enough." Her laugh was light but strained. It sounded off-key because it was as off-key as a ten-yard-strip of baldfaced perjury. She left in a hurry and I was able to esper as far as outside the door, where she leaned back against the wood and began to cry. She was hating herself because she had blown her lines and she knew that I knew it. And Catherine had never been in this hospital, because if she had been brought in with me, the nurse would have known the right name. Not that it mattered to me now, but Miss Farrow was no esper or she'd have dug my belongings and found Catherine's name on the license. Miss Farrow was a telepath; I'd not called my girl by name, only by an affectionate mental image. II I was fighting my body upright when Doctor Thorndyke came running. "Easy, Steve," he said with a quiet gesture. He pushed me gently back down in the bed with hands that were as soft as a mother's, but as firm as the kind that tie bow knots in half-inch bars. "Easy," he repeated soothingly. "Catherine?" I croaked pleadingly. Thorndyke fingered the call button in some code or other before he answered me. "Steve," he said honestly, "you can't be kept in ignorance forever. We hoped it would be a little longer, when you were stronger--" "Stop beating around!" I yelled. At least it felt like I was yelling, but maybe it was only my mind welling. "Easy, Steve. You've had a rough time. Shock--" The door opened and a nurse came in with a hypo all loaded, its needle buried in a fluff of cotton. Thorndyke eyed it professionally and took it; the nurse faded quietly from the room. "Take it easy, Steve. This will--" "No! Not until I know--" "Easy," he repeated. He held the needle up before my eyes. "Steve," he said, "I don't know whether you have enough esper training to dig the contents of this needle, but if you haven't, will you please trust me? This contains a neurohypnotic. It won't put you under. It will leave you as wide awake as you are now, but it will disconnect your running gear and keep you from blowing a fuse." Then with swift deftness that amazed me, the doctor slid the needle into my arm and let me have the full load. I was feeling the excitement rise in me because something was wrong, but I could also feel the stuff going to work. Within half a minute I was in a chilled-off frame of mind that was capable of recognizing the facts but not caring much one way or the other. When he saw the stuff taking hold, Thorndyke asked, "Steve, just who is Catherine?" The shock almost cut through the drug. My mind whirled with all the things that Catherine was to me, and the doctor followed it every bit of the way. "Steve, you've been under an accident shock. There was no Catherine with you. There was no one with you at all. Understand that and accept it. No one. You were alone. Do you understand?" I shook my head. I sounded to myself like an actor reading the script of a play for the first time. I wanted to pound on the table and add the vigor of physical violence to my hoarse voice, but all I could do was to reply in a calm voice: "Catherine was with me. We were--" I let it trail off because Thorndyke knew very well what we were doing. We were eloping in the new definition of the word. Rhine Institute and its associated studies had changed a lot of customs; a couple intending to commit matrimony today were inclined to take off quietly and disappear from their usual haunts until they'd managed to get intimately acquainted with one another. Elopement was a means of finding some personal privacy. We should have stayed at home and faced the crude jokes that haven't changed since Pithecanthropus first discovered that sex was funny. But our mutual desire to find some privacy in this modern fish-bowl had put me in the hospital and Catherine--where--? "Steve, listen to me!" "Yeah?" "I know you espers. You're sensitive, maybe more so than telepaths. More imagination--" This was for the birds in my estimation. Among the customs that Rhine has changed was the old argument as to whether women or men were smarter. Now the big argument was whether espers or telepaths could get along better with the rest of the world. Thorndyke laughed at my objections and went on: "You're in accident shock. You piled up your car. You begin to imagine how terrible it would have been if your Catherine had been with you. Next you carefully build up in your subconscious mind a whole and complete story, so well put together that to you it seems to be fact." But, #--how could anyone have taken a look at the scene of the accident and not seen traces of woman? My woman.# "We looked," he said in answer to my unspoken question. "There was not a trace, Steve." #Fingerprints?# "You'd been dating her." #Naturally!# Thorndyke nodded quietly. "There were a lot of her prints on the remains of your car. But no one could begin to put a date on them, or tell how recent was the latest, due to the fire. Then we made a door to door canvas of the neighborhood to be sure she hadn't wandered off in a daze and shock. Not even a footprint. Nary a trace." He shook his head unhappily. "I suppose you're going to ask about that travelling bag you claim to have put in the trunk beside your own. There was no trace of any travelling bag." "Doctor," I asked pointedly, "if we weren't together, suppose you tell me first why I had a marriage license in my pocket; second, how come I made a date with the Reverend Towle in Midtown; and third, why did I bother to reserve the bridal suite in the Reignoir Hotel in Westlake? Or was I nuts a long time before this accident. Maybe," I added, "after making reservations, I had to go out and pile myself up as an excuse for not turning up with a bride." "I--all I can say is that there was not a trace of woman in that accident." "You've been digging in my mind. Did you dig her telephone number?" He looked at me blankly. "And you found what, when you tried to call her?" "I--er--" "Her landlady told you that Miss Lewis was not in her apartment because Miss Lewis was on her honeymoon, operating under the name of Mrs. Steve Cornell. That about it?" "All right. So now you know." "Then where the hell is she, Doc?" The drug was not as all-powerful as it had been and I was beginning to feel excitement again. "We don't know, Steve." "How about the guy that hauled me out of that wreck? What does he say?" "He was there when we arrived. The car had been hauled off you by block and tackle. By the time we got there the tackle had been burned and the car was back down again in a crumpled mass. He is a farmer by the name of Harrison. He had one of his older sons with him, a man about twenty-four, named Phillip. They both swore later that there was no woman in that car nor a trace of one." "Oh, he did, did he?" Dr. Thorndyke shook his head slowly and then said very gently. "Steve, there's no predicting what a man's mind will do in a case of shock. I've seen 'em come up with a completely false identity, all the way back to childhood. Now, let's take your case once more. Among the other incredible items--" "Incredible?" I roared. "Easy. Hear me out. After all, am I to believe your unsubstantiated story or the evidence of a whole raft of witnesses, the police detail, the accident squad, and the guys who hauled you out of a burning car before it blew up? As I was saying, how can we credit much of your tale when you raved about one man lifting the car and the other hauling you out from underneath?" I shrugged. "That's obviously a mistaken impression. No one could--" "So when you admit that one hunk of your story is mistaken--" "That doesn't prove the rest is false!" "The police have been tracking this affair hard," said the doctor slowly. "They've gotten nowhere. Tell me, did anyone see you leave that apartment with Miss Lewis?" "No," I said slowly. "No one that knew us." Thorndyke shook his head unhappily. "That's why we have to assume that you are in post-accident shock." I snorted angrily. "Then explain the license, the date with the reverend, the hotel reservation?" Thorndyke said quietly, "Hear me out, Steve. This is not my own idea alone, but the combined ideas of a number of people who have studied the human mind--" "In other words, I'm nuts?" "No. Shock." "Shock?" He nodded very slowly. "Let's put it this way. Let's assume that you wanted this marriage with Miss Lewis. You made preparations, furnished an apartment, got a license, made a date with a preacher, reserved a honeymoon suite, and bought flowers for the bride. You take off from work, arrive at her door, only to find that Miss Lewis has taken off for parts unknown. Maybe she left you a letter--" "Letter!" "Hear me out, Steve. You arrive at her apartment and find her gone. You read a letter from her saying that she cannot marry you. This is a rather deep shock to you and you can't face it. Know what happens?" "I blow my brains out along a country road at ninety miles per hour." "Please, this is serious." "It sounds incredibly stupid to me." "You're rejecting it in the same way you rejected the fact that Miss Lewis ran away rather than marry you." "Do go on, Doctor." "You drive along the same road you'd planned to take, but the frustration and shock pile up to put you in an accident-prone frame of mind. You then pile up, not consciously, but as soon as you come upon something like that tree limb which can be used to make an accident authentic." "Oh, sure." Thorndyke eyed me soberly. "Steve," he asked me in a brittle voice, "you won't try to convince me that any esper will let physical danger of that sort get close enough to--" "I've told you how it happened. My attention was on that busted sign!" "Fine. More evidence to the fact that Miss Lewis was with you? Now listen to me. In accident-shock you'd not remember anything that your mind didn't want you to recall. Failure is a hard thing to take. So now you can blame your misfortune on that accident." "So now you tell me how you justify the fact that Catherine told landladies, friends, bosses, and all the rest that she was going to marry me a good long time before I was ready to be verbal about my plans?" "I--" "Suppose I've succeeded in bribing everybody to perjure themselves. Maybe we all had it in for Catherine, and did her in?" Thorndyke shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "I really don't know, Steve. I wish I did." "That makes two of us," I grunted. "Hasn't anybody thought of arresting me for kidnapping, suspicion of murder, reckless driving and cluttering up the highway with junk?" "Yes," he said quietly. "The police were most thorough. They had two of their top men look into you." "What did they find?" I asked angrily. No man likes to have his mind turned inside out and laid out flat so that all the little wheels, cables and levers are open to the public gaze. On the other hand, since I was not only innocent of any crime but as baffled as the rest of them, I'd have gone to them willingly to let them dig, to see if they could dig past my conscious mind into the real truth. "They found that your story was substantially an honest one." "Then why all this balderdash about shock, rejection, and so on?" He shook his head. "None of us are supermen," he said simply. "Your story was honest, you weren't lying. You believe every word of it. You saw it, you went through it. That doesn't prove your story true." "Now see here--" "It does prove one thing; that you, Steve Cornell, did not have any malicious, premeditated plans against Catherine Lewis. They've checked everything from hell to breakfast, and so far all we can do is make long-distance guesses as to what happened." I snorted in my disgust. "That's a telepath for you. Everything so neatly laid out in rows of slats like a snow fence. Me--I'm going to consult a scholar and have him really dig me deep." Thorndyke shook his head. "They had their top men, Steve. Scholar Redfern and Scholar Berks. Both of them Rhine Scholars, _magna cum laude_." I blinked as I always do when I am flabbergasted. I've known a lot of doctors of this and that, from medicine to languages. I've even known a scholar or two, but none of them intimately. But when a doctor of psi is invited to take his scholarte at Rhine, that's it, brother; I pass. Thorndyke smiled. "You weren't too bad yourself, Steve. Ran twelfth in your class at Illinois, didn't you?" I nodded glumly. "I forgot to cover the facts. They'd called all the bright boys out and collected them under one special-study roof. I majored in mechanical ingenuity not psi. Hoped to get a D. Ing. out of it, at least, but had to stop. Partly because I'm not ingenious enough and partly because I ran out of cash." Doctor Thorndyke nodded. "I know how it is," he said. I realized that he was leading me away from the main subject gently, but I couldn't see how to lead him back without starting another verbal hassle. He had me cold. He could dig my mind and get the best way to lead me away, while I couldn't read his. I gave up. It felt better, too, getting my mind off this completely baffling puzzle even for a moment. He caught my thoughts but his face didn't twitch a bit as he picked up his narrative smoothly: "I didn't make it either," he said unhappily. "I'm psi and good. But I'm telepath and not esper. I weasled my way through pre-med and medical by main force and awkwardness, so to speak." He grinned at me sheepishly. "I'm not much different than you or any other psi. The espers all think that perception is superior to the ability to read minds, and vice versa. I was going to show 'em that a telepath can make Scholar of Medicine. So I 'pathed my way through med by reading the minds of my fellows, who were all good espers. I got so good that I could read the mind of an esper watching me do a delicate dissecting job, and move my hands according to his perception. I could diagnose the deep ills with the best of them--so long as there was an esper in the place." "So what tripped you up?" "Telepaths make out best dealing with people. Espers do better with things." "Isn't medicine a field that deals with people?" He shook his head. "Not when a headache means spinal tumor, or indigestion, or a bad cold. 'Doctor,' says the patient, 'I've a bad ache along my left side just below the ribs,' and after you diagnose, it turns out to be acute appendicitis. You see, Steve, the patient doesn't know what's wrong with him. Only the symptoms. A telepath can follow the patient's symptoms perfectly, but it takes an esper to dig in his guts and perceive the tumor that's pressing on the spine or the striae on his liver." "Yeah." "So I flopped on a couple of tests that the rest of the class sailed through, just because I was not fast enough to read their minds and put my own ability to work. It made 'em suspicious and so here I am, a mere doctor instead of a scholar." "There are fields for you, I'm sure." He nodded. "Two. Psychiatry and psychology, neither of which I have any love for. And medical research, where the ability to grasp another doctor or scholar's plan, ideas and theories is slightly more important than the ability to dig esper into the experiments." "Don't see that," I said with a shake of my head. "Well, Steve, let's take Mekstrom's Disease, for instance." "Let's take something simple. What I know about Mekstrom's Disease could be carved on the head of a pin with a blunt butter knife." "Let's take Mekstrom's. That's my chance to make Scholar of Medicine, Steve, if I can come up with an answer to one of the minor questions. I'll be in the clinical laboratory where the only cases present are those rare cases of Mekstrom's. The other doctors, espers every one of them, and the scholars over them, will dig the man's body right down to the last cell, looking and combing--you know some of the better espers can actually dig into the constituency of a cell?--but I'll be the doctor who can collect all their information, correlate it, and maybe come up with an answer." "You picked a dilly," I told him. It was a real one, all right. Otto Mekstrom had been a mechanic-tech at White Sands Space Station during the first flight to Venus, Mars and Moon round-trip with landings. About two weeks after the ship came home, Otto Mekstrom's left fingertips began to grow hard. The hardening crawled up slowly until his hand was like a rock. They studied him and worked over him and took all sorts of samples and made all sorts of tests until Otto's forearm was as hard as his hand. Then they amputated at the shoulder. But by that time, Otto Mekstrom's toes on both feet were getting solid and his other hand was beginning to show signs of the same. On one side of the creepline the flesh was soft and normal, but on the other it was all you could do to poke a sharp needle into the skin. Poor Otto ended up a basket case, just in time to have the damned stuff start all over again at the stumps of his arms and legs. He died when hardening reached his vitals. Since that day, some twenty-odd years ago, there had been about thirty cases a year turn up. All fatal, despite amputations and everything else known to modern medical science. God alone knew how many unfortunate human beings took to suicide without contacting the big Medical Research Center at Marion, Indiana. Well, if Thorndyke could uncover something, no one could claim that a telepath had no place in medicine. I wished him luck. I did not see Thorndyke again in that hospital. They released me the next day and then I had nothing to do but to chew my fingernails and wonder what had happened to Catherine. III I'd rather not go into the next week and a half in detail. I became known as the bridegroom who lost his bride, and between the veiled accusations and the half-covered snickers, life was pretty miserable. I talked to the police a couple-three times, first as a citizen asking for information and ending up as a complainant against party or parties unknown. The latter got me nowhere. Apparently the police had more lines out than the Grand Bank fishing fleet and were getting no more nibbles than they'd get in the Dead Sea. They admitted it; the day had gone when the police gave out news reports that an arrest was expected hourly, meaning that they were baffled. The police, with their fine collection of psi boys, were willing to admit when they were really baffled. I talked to telepaths who could tell me what I'd had for breakfast on the day I'd entered pre-school classes, and espers who could sense the color of the clothing I wore yesterday. I've a poor color-esper, primitive so to speak. These guys were good, but no matter how good they were, Catherine Lewis had vanished as neatly as Ambrose Bierce. I even read Charles Fort, although I have no belief in the supernatural, and rather faint faith in the Hereafter. And people who enter the Hereafter leave their remains behind for evidence. Having to face Catherine's mother and father, who came East to see me, made me a complete mental wreck. It is harder than you think to face the parents of a woman you loved, and find that all you can tell them is that somehow you fouled your drive, cracked up, and lost their daughter. Not even dead-for-sure. Death, I think, we all could have faced. But this uncertainty was something that gnawed at the soul's roots and left it rotting. To stand there and watch the tears in the eyes of a woman as she asks you, "But can't you remember, son?" is a little too much, and I don't care to go into details. The upshot of it was, after about ten days of lying awake nights and wondering where she was and why. Watching her eyes peer out of a metal casting at me from a position sidewise of my head. Nightmares, either the one about us turning over and over and over, or Mrs. Lewis pleading with me only to tell her the truth. Then having the police inform me that they were marking this case down as "unexplained." I gave up. I finally swore that I was going to find her and return with her, or I was going to join her in whatever strange, unknown world she had entered. * * * * * The first thing I did was to go back to the hospital in the hope that Dr. Thorndyke might be able to add something. In my unconscious ramblings there might be something that fell into a pattern if it could be pieced together. But this was a failure, too. The hospital super was sorry, but Dr. Thorndyke had left for the Medical Research Center a couple of days before. Nor could I get in touch with him because he had a six-week interim vacation and planned a long, slow jaunt through Yellowstone, with neither schedule nor forwarding addresses. I was standing there on the steps hoping to wave down a cruising coptercab when the door opened and a woman came out. I turned to look and she recognized me. It was Miss Farrow, my former nurse. "Why, Mr. Cornell, what are you doing back here?" "Mostly looking for Thorndyke. He's not here." "I know. Isn't it wonderful, though? He'll get his chance to study for his scholarte now." I nodded glumly. "Yeah," I said. It probably sounded resentful, but it is hard to show cheer over the good fortune of someone else when your own world has come unglued. "Still hoping," she said. It was a statement and not a question. I nodded slowly. "I'm hoping," I said. "Someone has the answer to this puzzle. I'll have to find it myself. Everyone else has given up." "I wish you luck," said Miss Farrow with a smile. "You certainly have the determination." I grunted. "It's about all I have. What I need is training. Here I am, a mechanical engineer, about to tackle the job of a professional detective and tracer of missing persons. About all I know about the job is what I have read. One gets the idea that these writers must know something of the job, the way they write about it. But once you're faced with it yourself, you realize that the writer has planted his own clues." Miss Farrow nodded. "One thing," she suggested, "have you talked to the people who got you out from under your car yet?" "No, I haven't. The police talked to them and claimed they knew nothing. I doubt that I can ask them anything that the police have not satisfied themselves about." Miss Farrow looked up at me sidewise. "You won't find anything by asking people who have never heard of you." "I suppose not." A coptercab came along at that moment, and probably sensing my intention, he gave his horn a tap. I'd have liked to talk longer with Miss Farrow, but a cab was what I wanted, so with a wave I took it and she went on down the steps to her own business. I had to pause long enough to buy a new car, but a few hours afterward I was rolling along that same highway with my esper extended as far as I could in all directions. I was driving slowly, this time both alert and ready. I went past the scene of the accident slowly and shut my mind off as I saw the black-burned patch. The block was still hanging from an overhead branch, and the rope that had burned off was still dangling, about two feet of it, looped through the pulleys and ending in a tapered, burned end. I turned left into a driveway toward the home of the Harrisons and went along a winding dirt road, growing more and more conscious of a dead area ahead of me. It was not a real dead zone, because I could still penetrate some of the region. But as far as really digging any of the details of the rambling Harrison house, I could get more from my eyesight than from any sense of perception. But even if they couldn't find a really dead area, the Harrisons had done very well in finding one that made my sense of perception ineffective. It was sort of like looking through a light fog, and the closer I got to the house the thicker it became. Just about the point where the dead area was first beginning to make its effect tell, I came upon a tall, browned man of about twenty-four who had been probing into the interior of a tractor up to the time he heard my car. He waved, and I stopped. "Mr. Harrison?" "I'm Phillip. And you are Mr. Cornell." "Call me Steve like everybody else," I said. "How'd you guess?" "Recognized you," he said with a grin. "I'm the guy that pulled you out." "Thanks," I said, offering a hand. He chuckled. "Steve, consider the hand taken and shook, because I've enough grime to muss up a regiment." "It won't bother me," I said. "Thanks, but it's still a gesture, and I appreciate it, but let's be sensible. I know you can wash, but let's shake later. What can I do for you?" "I'd like a first-hand account, Phil." "Not much to tell. Dad and I were pulling stumps over about a thousand feet from the wreck. We heard the racket. I am esper enough to dig that distance with clarity, so we knew we'd better bring along the block and tackle. The tractor wouldn't go through. So we came on the double, Dad rigged the tackle and hoisted and I took a running dive, grabbed and hauled you out before the whole thing went _Whoosh!_ We were both lucky, Steve." I grunted a bit but managed to nod with a smile. "I suppose you know that I'm still trying to find my fiancée?" "I'd heard tell," he said. He looked at me sharply. I'm a total blank as a telepath, like all espers, but I could tell what he was thinking. "Everybody is convinced that Catherine was not with me," I admitted. "But I'm not. I know she was." He shook his head slowly. "As soon as we heard the screech of brakes and rubber we esped the place," he said quietly. "We dug you, of course. But no one else. Even if she'd jumped as soon as that tree limb came into view, she could not have run far enough to be out of range. As for removing a bag, she'd have had to wait until the slam-bang was over to get it out, and by the time your car was finished rolling, Dad and I were on the way with help. She was not there, Steve." #You're a goddam liar!# Phillip Harrison did not move a muscle. He was blank telepathically. I was esping the muscles in his stomach, under his loose clothing, for that first tensing sign of anger, but nothing showed. He had not been reading my mind. I smiled thinly at Phil Harrison and shrugged. He smiled back sympathetically, but behind it I could see that he was wishing that I'd stop harping on a dead subject. "I sincerely wish I could be of help," he said. In that he was sincere. But somewhere, someone was not, and I wanted to find out who it was. The impasse looked as though it might go on forever unless I turned away and left. I had no desire to leave. Not that Phil could help me, but even though this was a dead end, I was loath to leave the place because it was the last place where I had been close to Catherine. The silence between us must have been a bit strained at this point, but luckily we had an interruption. I perceived motion, turned and caught sight of a woman coming along the road toward us. "My sister," said Phil. "Marian." Marian Harrison was quite a girl; if I'd not been emotionally tied to Catherine Lewis, I'd have been happy to invite myself in. Marian was almost as tall as I am, a dark, brown-haired woman with eyes of a startling, electricity colored blue. She was about twenty-two, young and healthy. Her skin was tanned toast brown so that the bright blue eyes fairly sparked out at you. Her red mouth made a pleasing blend with the tan of her skin and her teeth gleamed white against the dark when she smiled. Insultingly, I made some complimentary but impolite mental observations about her figure, but Marion did not appear to notice. She was no telepath. "You're Mr. Cornell," she said, "I remembered you," she said quietly. "Please believe us, Mr. Cornell, when we extend our sympathy." "Thanks," I said glumly. "Please understand me, Miss Harrison. I appreciate your sympathy, but what I need is action and information and answers. Once I get those, the sympathy won't be needed." "Of course I understand," she replied instantly. "We are all aware that sympathy is a poor substitute. All the world grieving with you doesn't turn a stitch to help you out of your trouble. All we can do is to wish, with you, that it hadn't happened." "That's the point," I said helplessly. "I don't even know what happened." "That makes it even worse," she said softly. Marian had a pleasant voice, throaty and low, that sounded intimate even when talking about something pragmatic. "I wish we could help you, Steve." "I wish someone could." She nodded. "They asked me about it, too, even though I was not present until afterward. They asked me," she said thoughtfully, "about the mental attitude of a woman running off to get married. I told them that I couldn't speak for your woman, but that I might be able to speak for me, putting myself in the same circumstances." She paused a moment, and her brother turned idly back to his tractor and fitted a small end wrench to a bolt-head and gave it a twist. He seemed to think that as long as Marian and I were talking, he could well afford to get along with his work. I agreed with him. I wanted information, but I did not expect the entire world to stop progress to help me. He spun the bolt and started on another, lost in his job while Marian went on: "I told them that your story was authentic--the one about the bridal nightgown." A very slight color came under the deep tan. "I told them that I have one, too, still in its wrapper, and that someday I'd be planning marriage and packing a go-away bag with the gown shaken out and then packed neatly. I told them that I'd be doing the same thing no matter whether we were having a formal church wedding with a four-alarm reception and all the trimmings or a quiet elopement such as you were. I told them that it was the essentials that count, not the trimmings and the tinsel. My questioner's remark was to the effect that either you were telling the truth, or that you had esped a woman about to marry and identified her actions with your own wishes." "I know which," I said with a sour smile. "It was both." Marian nodded. "Then they asked me if it were probable that a woman would take this step completely unprepared and I laughed at them. I told them that long before Rhine, women were putting their nuptial affairs in order about the time the gentleman was beginning to view marriage with an attitude slightly less than loathing, and that by the time he popped the question, she'd been practicing writing her name as 'Mrs.' and picking out the china-ware and prospective names for the children, and that if any woman had ever been so stunned by a proposal of marriage that she'd take off without so much as a toothbrush, no one in history had ever heard of her." "Then you begin to agree with me?" She shrugged. "Please," she said in that low voice, "don't ask me my opinion of your veracity. You believe it, but all the evidence lies against you. There was not a shred of woman-trace anywhere along your course, from the point along the road where you first caught sight of the limb that threw you to the place where you piled up. Nor was there a trace anywhere in a vast circle--almost a half mile they searched--from the crack-up. They had doctors of psi digging for footprints, shreds of clothing, everything. Not a trace." "But where did she go?" I cried, and when I say 'cried' I mean just that. Marian shook her head very slowly. "Steve," she said in a voice so low that I could hardly hear her over the faint shrill of bolts being unscrewed by her brother, "so far as we know, she was never here. Why don't you forget her--" I looked at her. She stood there, poised and a bit tensed as though she were trying to force some feeling of affectionate kinhood across the gap that separated us, as though she wanted to give me both physical and mental comfort despite the fact that we were strangers on a ten-minute first-meeting. There was distress in her face. "Forget her--?" I ground out. "I'd rather die!" "Oh Steve--no!" One hand went to her throat and the other came out to fasten around my forearm. Her grip was hard. I stood there wondering what to do next. Marian's grip on my arm relaxed and she stepped back. I pulled myself together. "I'm sorry," I told her honestly. "I'm putting you through a set of emotional hurdles by bringing my problems here. I'd better take them away." She nodded very slowly. "Please go. But please come back once you get yourself squared away, no matter how. We'd all like to see you when you aren't all tied up inside." Phil looked up from the guts of the tractor. "Take it easy, Steve," he said. "And remember that you do have friends here." Blindly I turned from them and stumbled back to my car. They were a pair of very fine people, firm, upright. Marian's grip on my arm had been no weaker than her sympathy, and Phil's less-emotional approach to my trouble was no less deep, actually. It was as strong as his good right arm, loosening the head bolts of a tractor engine with a small adjustable wrench. I'd be back. I wanted to see them again. I wanted to go back there with Catherine and introduce them to her. But I was definitely going to go back. I was quite a way toward home before I realized that I had not met the old man. I bet myself that Father Harrison was quite the firm, active patriarch. IV The days dragged slowly. I faced each morning hopefully at first, but as the days dragged on and on, I began to feel that each morning was opening another day of futility, to be barely borne until it was time to flop down in weariness. I faced the night in loneliness and in anger at my own inability to do something productive. I pestered the police until they escorted me to the door and told me that if I came again, they'd take me to another kind of door and loose thereafter the key. I shrugged and left disconsolately, because by that time I had been able to esp, page by page, the entire file that dealt with the case of "Missing Person: Lewis, Catherine," stamped "Inactive, but not Closed." I hated the words. But as the days dragged out, one after another, with no respite and no hope, my raw nervous system began to heal. It was probably a case of numbness; you maul your thumb with a hammer and it will hurt just so long before it stops. I was numb for a long time. I remember night after night, lying awake and staring into the darkness at the wall I knew was beside me, and I hated my esper because I wanted to project my mind out across some unknown space to reach for Catherine's mind. If we'd both been telepaths we could cross the universe to touch each other with that affectionate tenderness that mated telepaths always claim they have. Instead I found myself more aware of a clouded-veil perception of Marian Harrison as she took my arm and looked into my face on that day when I admitted that I found little worth living for. I knew what that meant--nothing. It was a case of my subconscious mind pointing out that the available present was more desirable than the unavailable not-present. At first I resented my apparent inconstancy in forming an esper projection of Marian Harrison when I was trying to project my blank telepathic inadequacy to Catherine. But as the weeks faded into the past, the shock and the frustration began to pale and I found Marian's projective image less and less an unwanted intrusion and more and more pleasant. I had two deeply depressed spells in those six weeks. At the end of the fourth week I received a small carton containing some of my personal junk that had been in Catherine's apartment. A man can't date his girl for weeks without dropping a few things like a cigarette lighter, a tie clip, one odd cuff-link, some papers, a few letters, some books, and stuff both valuable and worthless that had turned up as gifts for one reason or another. It was a shock to get this box and its arrival bounced me deep into a doldrum-period of three or four days. Then at the end of the sixth week I received a card from Dr. Thorndyke. It contained a lithograph in stereo of some scene in Yellowstone other than Old Faithful blowing its stack. On the message side was a cryptic note: _Steve: I just drove along that road in the right side of the picture. It reminded me of yours, so I'm writing because I want to know how you are making out. I'll be at the Med-Center in a couple of weeks, you can write me there. Jim Thorndyke._ I turned the postcard over and eyed it critically. Then I got it. Along the roadside was a tall ornamental standard of wrought iron. The same design as the road signs along that fatal highway of mine. I sat there with a magnifying glass on the roadsign; its stereo image standing up alongside the road in full color and solidity. It took me back to that moment when Catherine had wriggled against my side, thrilling me with her warmth and eagerness. That put me down a few days, too. * * * * * Another month passed. I'd come out of my shell quite a bit in the meantime. I now felt that I could walk in a bar and have a drink without wondering whether all the other people in the place were pointing at me. I'd cut myself off from all my previous friends, and I'd made no new friends in the weeks gone by. But I was getting more and more lonely and consequently more and more inclined to speak to people and want friends. The accident had paled from its original horror; the vital scene returned only infrequently. Catherine was assuming the position of a lost love rather than a sweetheart expected to return soon. I remembered the warmth of her arms and the eagerness of her kiss in a nostalgic way and my mind, especially when in a doze, would play me tricks. I would recall Catherine, but when she came into my arms, I'd be holding Marian, brown and tawny, with her electric blue eyes and her vibrant nature. But I did nothing about it. I knew that once I had asked Marian Harrison for a date I would be emotionally involved. And then if--no, when--Catherine turned up I would be torn between desires. I would wake up and call myself all sorts of a fool. I had seen Marian for a total of perhaps fifteen minutes--in the company of her brother. But eventually dreaming loses its sting just as futile waiting and searching does, and I awoke one morning in a long and involved debate between my id and my conscience. I decided at that moment that I would take that highway out and pay a visit to the Harrison farm. I was salving my slightly rusty conscience by telling myself that it was because I had never paid my respects to Father Harrison, but not too deep inside I knew that if Father were missing and Daughter were present I'd enjoy my visit to the farm with more relish. But my id took a licking because the doorbell rang about nine o'clock that morning and when I dug the doorstep I came up with two gentlemen wearing gold badges in leather folders in their jacket pockets. I opened the door because I couldn't have played absent to a team consisting of one esper and one telepath. They both knew I was home. "Mr. Cornell, we'll waste no time. We want to know how well you know Doctor James Thorndyke." I didn't blink at the bluntness of it. It is standard technique when an esper-telepath team go investigating. The telepath knew all about me, including the fact that I'd dug their wallets and identification cards, badges and the serial numbers of the nasty little automatics they carried. The idea was to drive the important question hard and first; it being impossible to not-think the several quick answers that pop through your mind. What I knew about Thorndyke was sketchy enough but they got it all because I didn't have any reason for covering up. I let them know that, too. Finally, #That's about all,# I thought. #Now--why?# The telepath half of the team answered. "Normally we wouldn't answer, Mr. Cornell, unless you said it aloud. But we don't mind letting you know which of us is the telepath this time. To answer, you are the last person to have received any message from Thorndyke." "I--what?" "That postcard. It was the last contact Thorndyke made with anyone. He has disappeared." "But--" "Thorndyke was due to arrive at The Medical Research Center in Marion, Indiana, three weeks ago. We've been tracking him ever since he failed to turn up. We've been able to retrace his meanderings very well up to a certain point in Yellowstone. There the trail stops. He had a telephoned reservation to a small hotel; there he dropped out of sight. Now, Mr. Cornell, may I see that postcard?" "Certainly." I got it for them. The esper took it over to the window and eyed it in the light, and as he did that I went over to stand beside him and together we espered that postcard until I thought the edges would start to curl. But if there were any codes, concealed writings or any other form of hidden meaning or message in or on that card, I didn't dig any. I gave up. I'm no trained investigator. But I knew that Thorndyke was fairly well acquainted with the depth of my perceptive sense, and he would not have concealed anything too deep for me. Then the esper shook his head. He handed me the card. "Not a trace." The telepath nodded. He looked at me and smiled sort of thin and strained. "We're naturally interested in you, Mr. Cornell. This seems to be the second disappearance. And you know nothing about either." "I know," I said slowly. The puzzle began to go around and around in my head again, all the way back to that gleaming road and the crack-up. "We'll probably be back, Mr. Cornell. You don't mind?" "Look," I told them rather firmly, "if this puzzle can be unwound, I'll be one of the happiest men on the planet. If I can do anything to help, just say the word." They left after that and so did I. I was still going to pay my visit to the Harrison farm. Another wild goose chase, but somewhere along this cockeyed row there was an angle. Honest people who are healthy and fairly happy with good prospects ahead of them do not just drop out of sight without a trace. * * * * * A couple of hours later I was making a good pace along the highway again. It was getting familiar to me. I could not avoid letting my perceptive sense rest on the sign as I drove past. Not long enough to put me in danger, but long enough to discover to my surprise that someone had taken the trouble to repair the broken spoke. Someone must have been a perfectionist. The break was so slight that it seemed like calling in a mechanic because the ashtray in the car is full. Then I noticed other changes that time had caused. The burned scar was fading in a growth of tall weeds. The limb of the tree that hung out over the scene, from which block and tackle had hung, was beginning to lose its smoke-blackened appearance. The block was gone from the limb. _Give us a year_, I thought, _and the only remaining scar will be the one on my mind, and even that will be fading_. I turned into the drive, wound around the homestead road, and pulled up in front of the big, rambling house. It looked bleak. The front lawn was a bit shaggy and there were some wisps of paper on the front porch. The venetian blinds were down and slatted shut behind closed windows. Since it was summer by now, the closed windows and the tight door, neither of which had flyscreens installed, quickly gave the fact away. The Harrisons were gone. Another disappearance? I turned quickly and drove to the nearest town and went to the post office. "I'm looking for the Harrison family," I told the man behind the wicket. "Why, they moved several weeks ago." "Moved?" I asked with a blank-sounding voice. The clerk nodded. Then he leaned forward and said in a confidential whisper, "Heard a rumor that the girl got a touch of that spacemen's disease." "Mekstrom's?" I blurted. The clerk looked at me as if I'd shouted a dirty word. "She was a fine girl," he said softly. "It's a shame." I nodded and he went into the back files. I tried to dig alone behind him, but the files were in a small dead area in the rear of the building. I swore under my breath although I'd expected to find files in dead areas. Just as Rhine Institute was opened, the Government combed the countryside for dead or cloudy areas for their secret and confidential files. There had been one mad claim-staking rush with the Government about six feet ahead of the rest of the general public, business and the underworld. He came back with a sorrowful look. "They left a concealed address," he said. I felt like flashing a twenty at him like a private eye did in the old tough-books, but I knew it wouldn't work. Rhine also made it impossible for a public official to take a bribe. So instead, I tried to look distressed. "This is extremely important. I'd say it was a matter of life and death." "I'm sorry. A concealed forwarding address is still concealed. If you must get in touch with them, you might drop them a letter to be forwarded. Then if they care to answer, they'll reply to your home." "Later," I told him. "I'll probably be back to mail it direct from here." He waved at the writing desk. I nodded and left. I drove back to the ex-Harrison Farm slowly, thinking it over. Wondering. People did not just go around catching Mekstrom's Disease, from what little I knew of it. And somehow the idea of Marian Harrison withering away or becoming a basket case, or maybe taking the painless way out was a thought that my mind kept avoiding except for occasional flashes of horror. I drove in toward the farmhouse again and parked in front of the verandah. I was not sure of why I was there except that I wanted to wander through it to see what I could find before I went back to the post-office to write that card or letter. The back of the house was locked with an old-fashioned slide bolt that was turned with what they used to call an "E" key. I shrugged, oiled my conscience and found a bit of bent wire. Probing a lock like that would have been easy for a total blank; with esper I lifted the simple keepers and slid back the bolt almost as swiftly as if I had used a proper key. This was no case of disappearance. In every one of the fourteen rooms were the unmistakable signs of a deliberate removal. Discarded stuff was mixed with the odds and ends of packing case materials, a scattered collection of temporary nails, a half-finished but never used box filled with old clothing. I pawed through this but found nothing, even though I separated it from the rest to help my esper dig it without interference. I roamed the house slowly letting my perception wander from point to point. I tried to time-dig the place but that was futile. I didn't have enough perception. I caught only one response. It was in one of the upper bedrooms. But then as I stopped in the room where Marian had slept, I began again to doubt my senses. It could have been esper, but it was more likely that I'd caught the dying traces of perfume. Then I suddenly realized that the entire premises were clear to me! An esper map of the world looked sort of like a mottled sky, with bright places and cloudy patches strewn in disorder across it. A mottled sky, except that the psi-pattern usually does not change. But this house had been in a murky area, if not dead. Now it was clear. I left the house and went to the big combination barn and garage. It was as unsatisfying as the house had been. Phillip Harrison, or someone, had had a workshop out there. I found the bench and a small table where bolt-holes, oil marks, and other traces said that there had been one of those big combination woodworking machines there, the kind that combines circular saw, drill, lathe, planer, router, dado, and does everything. There had been some metal-working stuff there, too, but nothing as elaborate as the woodshop. Mostly things like hacksaws and an electric drill, and a circular scar where a blowtorch had been sitting. I don't know why I kept on standing there esping the abandoned set-up. Maybe it was because my esper dug the fact that there was something there that I should know about, but which was so minute or remote that the impression did not come through. I stood there puzzled at my own reluctance to leave until something satisfied that almost imperceptible impression. Idly I leaned down and picked up a bit of metal from the floor and fumbled it in my hand nervously. I looked around the place with my eyes and saw nothing. I gave the whole garage a thorough scanning with my esper and got zero for my trouble. Finally I snarled at myself for being an imbecile, and left. Everyone has done what I did, time and time again. I do not recall anything of my walk back to the car, lost in a whirl of thoughts, ideas, plans and questions. I would probably have driven all the way back to my apartment with my mind in that whirligig, driving by habit and training, but I was shaken out of it because I could not start my car by poking that bit of metal in the lock. It did not fit. I laughed, a bit ashamed of my preoccupation, and flung the bit of metal into the grass, poked my key in the lock-- And then I was out pawing the grass for that piece of metal. For the small piece of metal I had found on the floor of the abandoned workshop was the spoke of that road sign that had been missing when Catherine and I cracked up! I drove out along the highway and stopped near one of the standards. I esped the sign, compared my impression against my eyesight. I made sure. That bit of metal, a half inch long and a bit under a quarter inch in diameter, with both ends faintly broken-ragged, was identical in size and shape to the unbroken spokes in the sign! Then I noticed something else. The trefoil ornament in the middle did not look the same as I recalled them. I took Thorndyke's card out of my pocket and looked at the stereo. I compared the picture against the real thing before me and I knew that I was right. The trefoil gizmo was a take-off on the fleur-de-lis or the Boy Scout Tenderfoot badge, or the design they use to signify North on a compass. But the lower flare of the leaves was wider than any of the more familiar emblems; almost as wide as the top. It took a comparison to tell the difference between one of them right-side-up and another one upside-down. One assumes for this design that the larger foils are supposed to be up. If that were so, then the ones along that road out there in or near Yellowstone were right-side-up, while the ones along my familiar highway were upside-down. I goaded myself. #Memory, have these things been turned or were they always upside-down?# The last thing I did as I turned off the highway was to stop and let my esper dig that design once more. I covered the design itself, let my perception roam along the spokes, and then around the circlet that supported the spokes that held the trefoil emblem. Oh, it was not obvious. It was designed in, so to speak. If I were asked even today for my professional opinion I would have to admit that the way the circlet snapped into the rest of the ornamental scrollwork was a matter of good assembly design, and not a design deliberately created so that the emblem could be turned upside down. In fact, if it had not been for that tiny, broken spoke I found on the floor of the Harrison garage, never in a million years would I have considered these road signs significant. * * * * * At the post office I wrote a letter to Phillip Harrison: _Dear Phil:_ _I was by your old place today and was sorry to find that you had moved. I'd like to get in touch with you again. If I may ask, please send me your forwarding address. I'll keep it concealed if you like, or I'll reply through the post office, concealed forward._ _As an item of interest, did you know that your house has lost its deadness? A medium-equipped esper can dig it with ease. Have you ever heard of the psi-pattern changing before?_ _Ah, and another item, that road sign with the busted spoke has been replaced. You must be a bum shot, not to hit that curlicue in the middle. I found the spoke you hit on the floor of your garage, if you'd like it for a souvenir of one close miss._ _Please write and let me know how things are going. Rumor has it that Marian contracted Mekstrom's and if you will pardon my mentioning a delicate subject, I am doing so because I really want to help if I am able. After all, no matter how lightly you hold it, I still owe you my life. This is a debt I do not intend to forget._ _Sincerely,_ _Steve Cornell._ V I did not go to the police. They were sick of my face and already considering me a candidate for the paranoid ward. All I would have to do is go roaring into the station to tell them that I had uncovered some deep plot where the underground was using ornamental road signs to conceal their own network of roads and directions, and that the disappearance of Catherine Lewis, Dr. Thorndyke and the removal of the Harrisons were all tied together. Instead, I closed my apartment and told everyone that I was going to take a long, rambling tourist jaunt to settle my nerves; that I thought getting away from the scene might finish the job that time and rest had started. Then I started to drive. I drove for several days, not attempting to pace off miles, but covering a lot of aimless-direction territory. I was just as likely to spend four hours going North on one highway, and then take the next four coming back South on a parallel highway, and sometimes I even came back to the original starting place. After a week I had come no farther West than across that sliver of West Virginia into Eastern Ohio. And in Eastern Ohio I saw some more of the now familiar and suspicious road signs. The emblem was right side up, and the signs looked as though they had not been up long. I followed that road for seventy-five miles, and as I went the signs kept getting newer and newer until I finally came to a truck loaded with pipe, hardware, and ornamental ironwork. Leading the truck was one of those iron mole things. I watched the automatic gear hoist one of the old pipe and white and black enamel roadsigns up by its roots, and place it on a truck full of discards. I watched the mole drive a corkscrew blade into the ground with a roaring of engine and bucking of the truck. It paused, pulled upward to bring out the screw and its load of dirt, stones and gravel. The crew placed one of the new signs in the cradle and I watched the machine set the sign upright, pour the concrete, tamp down the earth, and then move along down the road. There was little point in asking questions of the crew, so I just took off and drove to Columbus as hard as I could make it. * * * * * Shined, cleaned, polished, and very conservatively dressed, I presented myself to the State Commissioner of Roads and Highways. I toyed briefly with the idea of representing myself as a minor official from some distant state like Alaska or the Virgin Islands, inquiring about these signs for official reasons. But then I knew that if I bumped into a hot telepath I'd be in the soup. On the other hand, mere curiosity on the part of a citizen, well oiled with compliments, would get me at the very least a polite answer. The Commissioner's fifth-under-secretary bucked me down the hall; another office bucked me upstairs. A third buck-around brought me to the Department of Highways Marking and Road Maps. A sub-secretary finally admitted that he might be able to help me. His name was Houghton. But whether he was telepath or esper did not matter because the Commission building was constructed right in the middle of a dead area. I still played it straight. I told him I was a citizen of New York, interested in the new road signs, Ohio was to be commended, et cetera. "I'm glad you feel that way," he said beaming. "I presume these signs cost quite a bit more than the stark, black and white enamel jobs?" "On the contrary," he said with pride. "They might, but mass-production methods brought the cost down. You see, the enamel jobs, while we buy several thousand of the plates for any highway, must be set up, stamped out, enamelled, and so on. The new signs are all made in one plant as they are needed; I don't suppose you know, but the highway number and any other information is put on the plate from loose, snap-in letters. That means we can buy so many thousand of this or that letter or number, and the necessary base plates and put them together as needed. They admitted that they were still running at a loss, but if they could get enough states interested, they'd eventually come out even, and maybe they could reduce the cost. Why, they even have a contingent-clause in the contract stating that if the cost were lowered, they would make a rebate to cover it. That's so the first users will not bide their time instead of buying now." He went on and on and on like any bureaucrat. I was glad we were in a dead area because he'd have thrown me out of his office for what I was thinking. Eventually Mr. Houghton ran down and I left. I toyed around with the idea of barging in on the main office of the company but I figured that might be too much like poking my head into a hornet's nest. I pocketed the card he gave me from the company, and I studied the ink-fresh road map, which he had proudly supplied. It pointed out in a replica panel of the fancy signs, that the State of Ohio was beautifying their highways with these new signs at no increased cost to the taxpayer, and that the dates in green on the various highways here and there gave the dates when the new signs would be installed. The bottom of the panel gave the Road Commissioner's name in boldface with Houghton's name below in slightly smaller print. I smiled. Usually I get mad at signs that proclaim that such and such a tunnel is being created by Mayor So-and-so, as if the good mayor were out there with a shovel and hoe digging the tunnel. But this sort of thing would have been a worthy cause if it hadn't been for the sinister side. I selected a highway that had been completed toward Cincinnati and made my way there with no waste of time. * * * * * The road was new and it was another beaut. The signs led me on, mile after mile and sign after sign. I did not know what I was following, and I was not sure I knew what I was looking for. But I was on the trail of something and a bit of activity, both mental and physical, after weeks of blank-wall frustration made my spirits rise and my mental equipment sharper. The radio in the car was yangling with hillbilly songs, the only thing you can pick up in Ohio, but I didn't care. I was looking for something significant. I found it late in the afternoon about half-way between Dayton and Cincinnati. One of the spokes was missing. Fifty yards ahead was a crossroad. I hauled in with a whine of rubber and brakes, and sat there trying to reason out my next move by logic. Do I turn with the missing spoke, or do I turn with the one that is not missing? Memory came to my aid. The "ten o'clock" spoke had been missing back there near the Harrison farm. The Harrisons had lived on the left side of the highway. One follows the missing spoke. Here the "two o'clock" spoke was missing, so I turned to the right along the crossroad until I came to another sign that was complete. Then, wondering, I U-turned and drove back across the main highway and drove for about five miles watching the signs as I went. The ones on my right had that trefoil emblem upside down. The ones on my left were right side up. The difference was so small that only someone who knew the significance would distinguish one from the other. So far as I could reason out, it meant that what I sought was in the other direction. When the emblem was upside down I was going away from, and when right side up, I was going toward. Away from or toward what? I U-turned again and started following the signs. Twenty miles beyond the main highway where I'd seen the sign that announced the turn, I came upon another missing spoke. This indicated a turn to the left, and so I slowed down until I came upon a homestead road leading off toward a farmhouse. I turned, determined to make like a man lost and hoping that I'd not bump into a telepath. A few hundred yards in from the main road I came upon a girl who was walking briskly toward me. I stopped. She looked at me with a quizzical smile and asked me if she could be of any help. Brashly, I nodded. "I'm looking for some old friends of mine," I said. "Haven't seen them for years. Named Harrison." She smiled up at me. "I don't know of any Harrison around here." Her voice had the Ohio twang. "No?" "Just where do they live?" I eyed her carefully, hoping my glance did not look like a wolf eyeing a lamb. "Well, they gave me some crude directions. Said I was to turn at the main highway onto this road and come about twenty miles and stop on the left side when I came upon one of those new road signs where someone had shot one of the spokes out." "Spokes? Left side--" She mumbled the words and was apparently mulling the idea around in her mind. She was not more than about seventeen, sun-tanned and animal-alive from living in the open. I wondered about her. As far as I was concerned, she was part and parcel of this whole mysterious affair. No matter what she said or did, it was an obvious fact that the hidden road sign directions pointed to this farm. And since no one at seventeen can be kept in complete ignorance of the business of the parents, she must be aware of some of the ramifications. After some thought she said, "No, I don't know of any Harrisons." I grunted. I was really making the least of this, now that I'd arrived. "Your folks at home?" I asked. "Yes," she replied. "I think I'll drop in and ask them, too." She shrugged. "Go ahead," she said with the noncommittal attitude of youth. "You didn't happen to notice whether the mailbox flag was up, did you?" I hadn't, but I espied back quickly and said, "No, it isn't." "Then the mailman hasn't been to deliver," she said. "Mind if I ride back to the house with you, mister?" "Hop in." She smiled brightly and got in quickly. I took off down the road toward the house at an easy pace. She seemed interested in the car, and finally said, "I've never been in a car like this before. New?" "Few weeks," I responded. "Fast?" "If you want to make it go fast. She'll take this rocky road at fifty, if anyone wants to be so foolish." "Let's see." I laughed. "Nobody but an idiot would tackle a road like this at fifty." "I like to go fast. My brother takes it at sixty." That, so far as I was concerned, was youthful exaggeration. I was busy telling her all the perils of fast driving when a rabbit came barrelling out of the bushes along one side and streaked across in front of me. I twitched the wheel. The car went out of the narrow road and up on the shoulder, tilting quite a bit. Beyond the rabbit I swung back into the road, but not before the youngster had grabbed my arm to keep from being tossed all over the front seat. Her grip was like a hydraulic vise. My arm went numb and my fingers went limp on the wheel. I struggled with my left hand to spin the wheel to keep on the narrow, winding road and my foot hit the brake to bring the car down, but fast. Taking a deep breath as we stopped, I shook my right hand by holding it in my left at the wrist. I was a mass of tingling pins and needles because she had grabbed me just above the elbow. It felt as though it would have taken only a trifle more to pinch my arm off and leave me with a bloody stump. "Sorry, mister," she said breathlessly, her eyes wide open. Her face was white around the corners of the mouth and at the edges of her nose. The whiteness of the flesh under the deep tan gave her a completely frightened look, far more than the shake-up could have produced. I reached over and took her hand. "That's a mighty powerful grip you--" The flesh of her hand was hard and solid. Not the meaty solidity of good tone, fine training and excellent health. It was the solidity of a--all I could think of at the time was a green cucumber. I squeezed a bit and the flesh gave way only a trifle. I rubbed my thumb over her palm and found it solid-hard instead of soft and yielding. I wondered. I had never seen a case of Mekstrom's Disease--before. I looked down at the hand and said, "Young lady, do you realize that you have an advanced case of Mekstrom's Disease?" She eyed me coldly. "Now," she said in a hard voice. "I know you'll come in." Something in my make-up objects violently to being ordered around by a slip of a girl. I balance off at about one-sixty. I guessed her at about two-thirds of that, say one-ten or thereabouts-- "One-eight," she said levelly. #A telepath!# "Yes," she replied calmly. "And I don't mind letting you know it, so you'll not try anything stupid." #I'm getting the heck out of here!# "No, you're not. You are coming in with me." "Like heck!" I exploded. "Don't be silly. You'll come in. Or shall I lay one along your jaw and carry you?" I had to try something, anything, to get free. Yet-- "Now you're being un-bright," she told me insolently. "You should know that you can't plan any surprise move with a telepath. And if you try a frontal attack I'll belt you so cold they'll have to put you in the oven for a week." I just let her ramble for a few seconds because when she was rattling this way she couldn't put her entire mental attention on my thoughts. So while she was yaking it off, I had an idea that felt as though it might work. She shut up like a clam when she realized that her mouthing had given me a chance to think, and I went into high gear with my perception: #Not bad--for a kid. Growing up fast. Been playing hookey from momma, leaving off your panties like the big girls do. I can tell by the elastic cord marks you had 'em on not long ago.# Seventeeners have a lot more modesty than they like to admit. She was stunned by my cold-blooded catalog of her body just long enough for me to make a quick lunge across her lap to the door handle on her side. I flipped it over and gave her a shove at the same time. She went bottom over appetite in a sprawl that would have jarred the teeth loose in a normal body and might have cracked a few bones. But she landed on the back of her neck, rolled and came to her feet like a cat. I didn't wait to close the door. I just tromped on the go-pedal and the car leaped forward with a jerk that slammed the door for me. I roared forward and left her just as she was making another grab. How I hoped to get out of there I did not know. All I wanted was momentary freedom to think. I turned this way and that to follow the road until I came to the house. I left the road, circled the house with the turbine screaming like a banshee and the car taking the corners on the outside wheels. I skidded into a turn like a racing driver and ironed my wheels out flat on the takeaway, rounded another corner and turned back into the road again going the other way. She was standing there waiting for me as I pelted past at a good sixty, and she reached out one girder-strong arm, latched onto the frame of the open window on my side, and swung onto the half-inch trim along the bottom of the car-body like a switchman hooking a freight car. She reached for the steering wheel with her free hand. I knew what was to happen next. She'd casually haul and I'd go off the road into a tree or pile up in a ditch, and while the smoke was clearing out of my mind, she'd be untangling me from the wreck and carting me over her shoulder, without a scratch to show for her adventure. I yanked the wheel--whip! whap!--cutting an arc. I slammed past a tree, missing it by half an inch. I wiped her off the side of the car like a mailbag is clipped from the fast express by the catch-hook. I heard a cry of "Whoof!" as her body hit the trunk of the tree. But as I regained the road and went racing on to safety, I saw in the rear view mirror that she had bounced off the tree, sprawled a bit, caught her balance, and was standing in the middle of the road, shaking her small but very dangerous fist at my tail license plate. I didn't stop driving at one-ten until I was above Dayton again. Then I paused along the road to take stock. Stock? What the hell did I know, really? I'd uncovered and confirmed the fact that there was some secret organization that had a program that included their own highway system, concealed within the confines of the United States. I was almost certain by this time that they had been the prime movers in the disappearance of Catherine and Dr. Thorndyke. They-- I suddenly re-lived the big crack-up. Willingly now, no longer rejecting the memory, I followed my recollection as Catherine and I went along that highway at a happy pace. With care I recalled every detail of Catherine, watching the road through my mind and eyes, how she'd mentioned the case of the missing spoke, and how I'd projected back to perceive that which I had not been conscious of. Reminding myself that it was past, I went through it again, deliberately. The fallen limb that blocked the road, my own horror as the wheels hit it. The struggle to regain control of the careening car. As a man watching a motion picture, I watched the sky and the earth turn over and over, and I heard my voice mouthing wordless shouts of fear. Catherine's cry of pain and fright came, and I listened as my mind reconstructed it this time without wincing. Then the final crash, the horrid wave of pain and the sear of the flash-fire. I went through my own horror and self condemnation, and my concern over Catherine. I didn't shut if off. I waded through it. Now I remembered something else. Something that any normal, sensible mind would reject as an hallucination. Beyond any shadow of a doubt there had been no time for a man to rig a block and tackle on a tree above a burning automobile in time to get the trapped victims out alive. And even more certain it was that no normal man of fifty would have had enough strength to lift a car by its front bumper while his son made a rush into the flames. That tackle had been rigged and burned afterward. But who would reject a block and tackle in favor of an impossibly strong man? No, with the tackle in sight, the recollection of a man lifting that overturned automobile like a weight lifter pressing up a bar bell would be buried in any mind as a rank hallucination. Then one more item came driving home hard. So hard that I almost jumped when the idea crossed my mind. Both Catherine and Dr. Thorndyke had been telepaths. A telepath close to any member of his underground outfit would divine their purpose, come to know their organization, and begin to grasp the fundamentals of their program. Such a person would be dangerous. On the other hand, an esper such as myself could be turned aside with bland remarks and a convincing attitude. I knew that I had no way of telling lie from truth and that made my problem a lot more difficult. From the facts that I did have, something smelled of overripe seafood. Government and charities were pouring scads of dough into a joint called the Medical Research Center. To hear the scholars of medicine tell it, Mekstrom's Disease was about the last human frailty that hadn't been licked to a standstill. They boasted that if a victim of practically anything had enough life left in him to crawl to a telephone and use it, his life could be saved. They grafted well. I'd heard tales of things like fingers, and I know they were experimenting on hands, arms and legs with some success. But when it came to Mekstrom's they were stopped cold. Therefore the Medical Research Center received a walloping batch of money for that alone; all the money that used to go to the various heart, lung, spine and cancer funds. It added up well. But the Medical Research Center seemed unaware that some group had solved their basic problem. From the books I've read I am well aware of one of the fundamental principles of running an underground: _Keep it underground!_ The Commie menace in these United States might have won out in the middle of the century if they'd been able to stay a secret organization. So the Highways in Hiding could stay underground and be an efficient organization only until someone smoked them out. That one was going to be me. But I needed an aide-de-camp. Especially and specifically I needed a trained telepath, one who would listen to my tale and not instantly howl for the nut-hatch attendants. The F.B.I. were all trained investigators and they used esper-telepath teams all the time. One dug the joint while the other dug the inhabitant, which covered the situation to a faretheewell. It would take time to come up with a possible helper. So I spent the next hour driving toward Chicago, and by the time I'd crossed the Ohio-Indiana line and hit Richmond, I had a plan laid out. I placed a call to New York and within a few minutes I was talking to Nurse Farrow. I'll not go into detail because there was a lot of mish-mash that is not particularly interesting and a lot more that covered my tracks since I'd parted company with her on the steps of the hospital. I did not, of course, mention my real purpose over the telephone and Miss Farrow could not read my mind from New York. The upshot of the deal was that I felt that I needed a nurse for a while, not that I was ill, but that I felt a bit woozy now and then because I hadn't learned to slow down. I worked too fast and too long and my condition was not up to it yet. This Miss Farrow allowed as being quite possible. I repeated my offer to pay her at the going prices for registered nurses with a one-month guarantee, paid in advance. That softened her quite a bit. Then I added that I'd videograph her a check large enough to cover the works plus a round trip ticket. She should come out and have a look, and if she weren't satisfied, she could return without digging into her own pocket. All she'd lose was one day, and it might be a bit of a vacation if she enjoyed flying in a jetliner at sixty thousand feet. The accumulation of offers finally sold her and she agreed to arrange a leave of absence. She'd meet me in the morning of the day-after-tomorrow, at Central Airport in Chicago. I videographed the check and then took off again, confident that I'd be able to sell her on the idea of being the telepath half of my amateur investigation team. Then because I needed some direct information, I turned West and crossed the line into Indiana, heading toward Marion. So far I had a lot of well-placed suspicions, but until I was certain, I could do no more than postulate ideas. I had to know definitely how to identify Mekstrom's Disease, or at least the infected flesh. I have a fairly good recall; all I needed now was to have someone point to a Case and say flatly that this was a case of Mekstrom's Disease. Then I'd know whether what I'd seen in Ohio was actually one hundred percent Mekstrom. VI I walked into the front office with a lot of self-assurance. The Medical Center was a big, rambling place with a lot of spread-out one- and two-story buildings that looked so much like "Hospital" that no one in the world would have mistaken them for anything else. The main building was by the road, the rest spread out behind as far as I could see; beyond my esper range even though the whole business was set in one of the clearest psi areas that I'd even been in. I was only mildly worried about telepaths. In the first place, the only thing I had to hide was my conviction about a secret organization and how part of it functioned. In the second place, the chances were good that few, if any, telepaths were working there, if the case of Dr. Thorndyke carried any weight. That there were some telepaths, I did not doubt, but these would not be among the high-powered help. So I sailed in and faced the receptionist, who was a good-looking chemical-type blonde with a pale skin, lovely complexion and figure to match. She greeted me with a glacial calm and asked my business. Brazenly I lied. "I'm a freelance writer and I'm looking for material." "Have you an assignment?" she asked without a trace of interest in the answer. "Not this time. I'm strictly freelance. I like it better this way because I can write whatever I like." Her glacial air melted a bit at the inference that my writing had not been in vain. "Where have you been published?" she asked. I made a fast stab in the dark, aiming in a direction that looked safe. "Last article was one on the latest archeological findings in Assyria. Got my source material direct from the Oriental Institute in Chicago." "Too bad I missed it," she said, looking regretful. I had to grin, I'd carefully avoided giving the name of the publication and the supposed date. She went on, "I suppose you would not be happy with the usual press release?" "Handouts contain material, all right, but they're so confounded trite and impersonal. People prefer to read anecdotes about the people rather than a listing of facts and figures." She nodded at that. "Just a moment," she said. Then she addressed her telephone in a voice that I couldn't hear. When she finished, she smiled in a warmish-type manner as if to indicate that she'd gone all out in my behalf and that I'd be a heel to forget it. I nodded back and tried to match the tooth-paste-ad smile. Then the door opened and a man came in briskly. He was a tall man, as straight as a ramrod, with a firm jaw and a close-clipped moustache. He had an air like a thin-man's Captain Bligh. When he spoke, his voice was as clipped and precise as his moustache; in fact it was so precise that it seemed almost mechanical. "I am Dr. Lyon Sprague," he clipped. "What may I do for you?" "I'm Steve Cornell," I said. "I'm here after source material for a magazine article about Mekstrom's Disease. I'd prefer not to take my material from a handout." "Do you hope to get more?" he demanded. "I usually do. I've seen your handouts; I could get as much by taking last year's medical encyclopedia. Far too dry, too uninteresting, too impersonal." "Just exactly what do you have in mind?" I eyed him with speculation. Here was not a man who would take kindly to imaginative conjecture. So Dr. Lyon Sprague was not the man I'd like to talk to. With an inward smile, I said, "I have a rather new idea about Mekstrom's that I'd like to discuss with the right party." He looked down at me, although our eyes were on the same level. "I doubt that any layman could possibly come up with an idea that has not been most thoroughly discussed here among the research staff." "In cold words you feel that no untrained lunk has a right to have an idea." He froze. "I did not say that." "You implied, at least, that suggestions from outsiders were not welcome. I begin to understand why the Medical Center has failed to get anywhere with Mekstrom's in the past twenty years." "What do you mean?" he snapped. "Merely that it is the duty of all scientists to listen to every suggestion and to discard it only after it has been shown wrong." "Such as--?" he said coldly, with a curl of his eyebrows. "Well, just for instance, suppose some way were found to keep a victim alive during the vital period, so that he would end up a complete Mekstrom Human." "The idea is utterly fantastic. We have no time for such idle speculation. There is too much foggy thinking in the world already. Why, only last week we had a Velikovsky Adherent tell us that Mekstrom's had been predicted in the Bible. There are still people reporting flying saucers, you know. We have no time for foolish notions or utter nonsense." "May I quote you?" "Of course not," he snapped stiffly. "I'm merely pointing out that non-medical persons cannot have the grasp--" The door opened again and a second man entered. The new arrival had pleasant blue eyes, a van dyke beard, and a good-natured air of self-confidence and competence. "May I cut in?" he said to Dr. Sprague. "Certainly. Mr. Cornell, this is Scholar Phelps, Director of the Center. Scholar Phelps, this is Mr. Steve Cornell, a gentleman of the press," he added in a tone of voice that made the identification a sort of nasty name. "Mr. Cornell has an odd theory about Mekstrom's Disease that he intends to publish unless we can convince him that it is not possible." "Odd theory?" asked Scholar Phelps with some interest. "Well, if Mr. Cornell can come up with something new, I'll be most happy to hear him out." Dr. Lyon Sprague decamped with alacrity. Scholar Phelps smiled after him, then turned to me and said, "Dr. Sprague is a diligent worker, businesslike and well-informed, but he lacks the imagination and the sense of humor that makes a man brilliant in research. Unfortunately, Dr. Sprague cannot abide anything that is not laid out as neat as an interlocking tile floor. Now, Mr. Cornell, how about this theory of yours?" "First," I replied, "I'd like to know how come you turn up in the nick of time." He laughed good-naturedly. "We always send Dr. Sprague out to interview visitors. If the visitor can be turned away easily, all is well and quiet. Dr. Sprague can do the job with ease. But if the visitor, like yourself, Mr. Cornell, proposes something that distresses the good Dr. Sprague and will not be loftily dismissed, Dr. Sprague's blood pressure goes up. We all keep a bit of esper on his nervous system and when the fuse begins to blow, we come out and effect a double rescue." I laughed with him. Apparently the Medical Center staff enjoyed needling Dr. Sprague. "Scholar Phelps, before I get into my theory, I'd like to know more about Mekstrom's Disease. I may not be able to use it in my article, but any background material works well with writers of fact articles." "You're quite right. What would you like to know?" "I've heard, too many times, that no one knows anything at all about Mekstrom's. This is unbelievable, considering that you folks have been working on it for some twenty years." He nodded. "We have some, but it's precious little." "It seems to me that you could analyze the flesh--" He smiled. "We have. The state of analytical chemistry is well advanced. We could, I think, take a dry scraping out of the cauldron used by MacBeth's witches, and determine whether Shakespeare had reported the formula correctly. Now, young man, if you think that something is added to the human flesh to make it Mekstrom's Flesh, you are wrong. Standard analysis shows that the flesh is composed of exactly the same chemicals that normal flesh contains, in the same proportion. Nothing is added, as, for instance, in the case of calcification." "Then what is the difference?" "The difference lies in the structure. By X-ray crystallographic method, we have determined that Mekstrom's Flesh is a micro-crystalline formation, interlocked tightly." Scholar Phelps looked at me thoughtfully. "Do you know much about crystallography?" As a mechanical engineer I did, but as a writer of magazine articles I felt I should profess some ignorance, so I merely said that I knew a little about the subject. "Well, Mr. Cornell, you may know that in the field of solid geometry there are only five possible regular polyhedrons. Like the laws of topology that state that no more than four colors need be used to print a map on a flat surface, or that no more than seven colors are required to print separate patches on a toroid, the laws of solid geometry prove that no more than five regular polyhedrons are possible. Now in crystallography there are only thirty-two possible classes of crystal lattice construction. Of these only thirty have ever been discovered in nature. Yet we know how the other two would appear if they did emerge in natural formation." I knew it all right but I made scribblings in my notebooks as if the idea were of interest. Scholar Phelps waited patiently until I'd made the notation. "Now, Mr. Cornell, here comes the shock. Mekstrom's Flesh is one of the other two classes." This was news to me and I blinked. Then his face faded into a solemn expression. "Unfortunately," he said in a low voice, "knowing how a crystal should form does not help us much in forming one to that class. We have no real control over the arrangement of atoms in a crystal lattice. We can prevent the crystal formation, we can control the size of the crystal as it forms. But we cannot change the crystal into some other class." "I suppose it's sort of like baking a cake. Once the ingredients are mixed, the cake can be big or small or shaped to fit the pan, or you can spoil it complete. But if you mix devil's food, it either comes out devil's food or nothing." "An amusing analogy and rather correct. However I prefer the one used years ago by Dr. Willy Ley, who observed that analysis is fine, but you can't learn how a locomotive is built by melting it down and analyzing the mess." Then he went on again. "To get back to Mekstrom's Disease and what we know about it. We know that the crawl goes at about a sixty-fourth of an inch per hour. If, for instance, you turned up here with a trace on your right middle finger, the entire first joint would be Mekstrom's Flesh in approximately three days. Within two weeks your entire middle finger would be solid. Without anesthesia we could take a saw and cut off a bit for our research." "No feeling?" "None whatever. The joints knit together, the arteries become as hard as steel tubing and the heart cannot function properly--not that the heart cares about minor conditions such as the arteries in the extremities, but as the Mekstrom infection crawls up the arm toward the shoulder the larger arteries become solid and then the heart cannot drive the blood through them in its accustomed fashion. It gets like an advanced case of arteriosclerosis. Eventually the infection reaches and immobilizes the shoulder; this takes about ninety days. By this time, the other extremities have also become infected and the crawl is coming up all four limbs." He looked at me very solemnly at that. "The rest is not pretty. Death comes shortly after that. I can almost say that he is blessed who catches Mekstrom's in the left hand for them the infection reaches the heart before it reaches other parts. Those whose initial infection is in the toes are particularly cursed, because the infection reaches the lower parts of the body. I believe you can imagine the result, elimination is prevented because of the stoppage of peristalsis. Death comes of autointoxication, which is slow and painful." I shuddered at the idea. The thought of death has always bothered me. The idea of looking at a hand and knowing that I was going to die by the calendar seemed particularly horrible. Taking the bit between my teeth, I said, "Scholar Phelps, I've been wondering whether you and your Center have ever considered treating Mekstrom's by helping it?" "Helping it?" he asked. "Sure. Consider what a man might be if he were Mekstrom's all the way through." He nodded. "You would have a physical superman," he said. "Steel-strong muscles driving steel-hard flesh covered by a near impenetrable skin. Perhaps such a man would be free of all minor pains and ills. Imagine a normal bacterium trying to bore into flesh as hard as concrete. Mekstrom Flesh tends to be acid-resistant as well as tough physically. It is not beyond the imagination to believe that your Mekstrom Superman might live three times our frail four-score and ten. But--" Here he paused. "Not to pull down your house of cards, this idea is not a new one. Some years ago we invited a brilliant young doctor here to study for his scholarate. The unfortunate fellow arrived with the first traces of Mekstrom's in his right middle toe. We placed about a hundred of our most brilliant researchers under his guidance, and he decided to take this particular angle of study. He failed; for all his efforts, he did not stay his death by a single hour. From that time to the present we have maintained one group on this part of the problem." It occurred to me at that moment that if I turned up with a trace of Mekstrom's I'd be seeking out the Highways in Hiding rather than the Medical Center. That fast thought brought a second: Suppose that Dr. Thorndyke learned that he had a trace, or rather, the Highways found it out. What better way to augment their medical staff than to approach the victim with a proposition: You help us, work with us, and we will save your life. That, of course, led to the next idea: That if the Highways in Hiding had any honest motive, they'd not be hidden in the first place and they'd have taken their cure to the Medical Center in the second. Well, I had a bit of something listed against them, so I decided to let my bombshell drop. "Scholar Phelps," I said quietly, "one of the reasons I am here is that I have fairly good evidence that the cure for Mekstrom's Disease does exist, and that it produces people of ultrahard bodies and superhuman strength." He smiled at me with the same tolerant air that father uses on the offspring who comes up with one of the standard juvenile plans for perpetual motion. "What do you consider good evidence?" "Suppose I claimed to have seen it myself." "Then I would say that you had misinterpreted your evidence," he replied calmly. "The flying saucer enthusiasts still insist that the things they see are piloted by little green men from Venus, even though we have been there and found Venus to be absolutely uninhabited by anything higher than slugs, grubs, and little globby animals like Tellurian leeches." "But--" "This, too, is an old story," he told me with a whimsical smile. "It goes with the standard routine about a secret organization that is intending to take over the Earth. The outline has been popular ever since Charles Fort. Now--er--just tell me what you saw." I concocted a tale that was about thirty-three percent true and the rest partly distorted. It covered my hitting a girl in Ohio with my car, hard enough to clobber her. But when I stopped to help her, she got up and ran away unhurt. She hadn't left a trace of blood although the front fender of the car was badly smashed. He nodded solemnly. "Such things happen," he said. "The human body is really quite durable; now and then comes the lucky happenstance when the fearful accident does no more than raise a slight bruise. I've read the story of the man whose parachute did not open and who lived to return it to the factory in person, according to the old joke. But now, Mr. Cornell, have you ever considered the utter impossibility of running any sort of secret organization in this world of today. Even before Rhine it was difficult. You'll be adding to your tale next--some sort of secret sign, maybe a form of fraternity grip, or perhaps even a world-wide system of local clubs and hangouts, all aimed at some dire purpose." I squirmed nervously for a bit. Scholar Phelps was too close to the truth to make me like it, because he was scoffing. He went right on making me nervous. "Now before we get too deep, I only want to ask about the probable motives of such an organization. You grant them superhuman strength, perhaps extreme longevity. If they wanted to take over the Earth, couldn't they do it by a show of force? Or are they mild-mannered supermen, only quietly interested in overrunning the human race and waiting out the inevitable decline of normal homo sapiens? You're not endowing them with extraterrestrial origin, are you?" I shook my head unhappily. "Good. That shows some logic, Mr. Cornell. After all, we know now that while we could live on Mars or Venus with a lot of home-sent aid, we'd be most uncomfortable there. We could not live a minute on any planet of our solar system without artificial help." "I might point out that our hypothetical superman might be able to stand a lot of rough treatment," I blurted. "Oh, this I'll grant if your tale held any water at all. But let's forget this fruitless conjecture and take a look at the utter impossibility of running such an organization. Even planting all of their secret hangouts in dead areas and never going into urban centers, they'd still find some telepath or esper on their trail. Perhaps a team. Let's go back a step and consider, even without psi training, how long such an outfit could function. It would run until the first specimen had an automobile accident on, say Times Square; or until one of them walked--or ran--out of the fire following a jetliner crash." He then spared me with a cold eye. "Write it as fiction, Mr. Cornell. But leave my name out of it. I thought you were after facts." "I am. But the better fact articles always use a bit of speculation to liven it up." "Well," he grunted, "one such fanciful suggestion is the possibility of such an underground outfit being able to develop a 'cure' while we cannot. We, who have had the best of brains and money for twenty years." I nodded, and while I did not agree with Phelps, I knew that to insist was to insult him to his face, and get myself tossed out. "You do seem to have quite a set-up here," I said, off-hand. At this point Phelps offered to show me around the place, and I accepted. Medical Center was far larger than I had believed at first; it spread beyond my esper range into the hills beyond the main plant. The buildings were arranged in a haphazard-looking pattern out in the back section; I say "looking" because only a psi-trained person can dig a pattern. The wide-open psi area did not extend for miles. Behind the main buildings it closed down into the usual mottled pattern and the medical buildings had been placed in the open areas. Dwellings and dormitories were in the dark places. A nice set-up. I did not meet any of the patients, but Phelps let me stand in the corridor outside a couple of rooms and use my esper on the flesh. It was both distressing and instructive. He explained, "The usual thing after someone visits this way, is that the visitor goes out itching. In medical circles this is a form of what we call 'Sophomore's Syndrome.' Ever heard of it?" I nodded. "That's during the first years at pre-med. Knowing all too little of medicine, every disease they study produces the same symptoms that the student finds in himself. Until tomorrow, when they study the next. Then the symptoms in the student change." "Right. So in order to prevent 'Sophomore's Syndrome' among visitors we usually let them study the real thing. Also," he added seriously, "we'd like to have as many people as possible recognize the real thing as early as possible. Even though we can't do anything for them at the present time, someday we will." He stopped before a closed door. "In here is a girl of eighteen, doomed to die in a month." His voice trailed off as he tapped on the door of the room. I froze. A few beads of cold sweat ran down my spine, and I fought myself into a state of nervous calmness. I put the observation away, buried it as deep as I could, tried to think around it, and so far as I knew, succeeded. The tap of Scholar Phelps' finger against the door panel was the rap-rap-rap sound characteristic of hard-tanned leather tapping wood. Scholar Phelps was a Mekstrom! * * * * * I paid only surface attention to the rest of my visit. I thanked my personal gods that esper training had also given me the ability to dissemble. It was impossible to not think of something but it is possible to keep the mind so busy with surface thoughts that the underlying idea does not come through the interference. Eventually I managed to leave the Medical Center without exciting anyone, and when I left I took off like a skyrocket for Chicago. VII Nurse Gloria Farrow waved at me from the ramp of the jetliner, and I ran forward to collect her baggage. She eyed me curiously but said no more than the usual greetings and indication of which bag was hers. I knew that she was reading my mind like a psychologist all the time, and I let her know that I wanted her to. I let my mind merely ramble on with the usual pile of irrelevancies that the mind uses to fill in blank spaces. It came up with a couple of notions here and there but nothing definite. Miss Farrow followed me to my car without saying a word, and let me install her luggage in the trunk. Then, for the first time, she spoke: "Steve Cornell, you're as healthy as I am." "I admit it." "Then what is this all about? You don't need a nurse!" "I need a competent witness, Miss Farrow." "For what?" She looked puzzled. "Suppose you stay right here and start explaining." "You'll listen to the bitter end?" "I've two hours before the next plane goes back. You'll have that time to convince me--or else. Okay?" "That's a deal." I fumbled around for a beginning, and then I decided to start right at the beginning, whether it sounded cockeyed or not. Giving information to a telepath is the easiest thing in the world. While I started at the beginning, I fumbled and finally ended up by going back and forth in a haphazard manner, but Miss Farrow managed to insert the trivia in the right chronological order so that when I finished, she nodded with interest. I posed the question: #Am I nuts?# "No, Steve," she replied solemnly. "I don't think so. You've managed to accept data which is obviously mingled truth and falsehood, and you've managed to question the validity of all of it." I grunted. "How about the crazy man who questions his own sanity, using this personal question as proof of his sanity since real nuts _know_ they're sane?" "No nut can think that deep into complication. What I mean is that they cannot even question their own sanity in the first premise of postulated argument. But forget that, what I wanted to know is where you intend to go from here." I shook my head unhappily. "When I called you I had it all laid out like a roadmap. I was going to show you proof and use you as an impartial observer to convince someone else. Then we'd go to the Medical Center and hand it to them on a platter. Since then I've had a shock that I can't get over, or plan beyond. Scholar Phelps is a Mekstrom. That means that the guy knows what gives with Mekstrom's Disease and yet he is running an outfit that professes to be helpless in the face of this disease. For all we know Phelps may be the head of the Highways in Hiding, an organization strictly for profit of some sort at the expense of the public welfare." "You're certain that Phelps is a Mekstrom?" "Not absolutely positive. I had to close my mind because there might be a telepath on tap. But I can tell you that nobody with normal flesh-type fingers ever made that solid rap." "A fingernail?" I shook my head at her. "That's a click. With an ear at all you'd note the difference." "I'll accept it for the moment. But lacking your original plan, what are you going to do now?" "I'm not sure beyond showing you the facts. Maybe I should call up that F.B.I. team that called on me after Thorndyke's disappearance and put it in their laps." "Good idea. But why would Scholar Phelps be lying? And beyond your basic suspicions, what can you prove?" "Very little. I admit that my evidence is extremely thin. I saw Phillip Harrison turning head bolts on a tractor engine with a small end wrench. It should require a crossbar socket and a lot of muscle. Next is the girl in Ohio who should be a bloody mess from the way she was treated. Instead she got up and tried to chase me. Then answer me a puzzler: Did the Harrisons move because Marian caught Mekstrom's, or did they move because they felt that I was too close to discovering their secret? The Highway was relocated after that, you'll recall." "It sounds frightfully complicated, Steve." "You bet it does," I grunted. "So next I meet a guy who is supposed to know all the answers; a man dedicated to the public welfare, medicine, and the ideal of Service. A man sworn to the Hippocratic Oath. Or," I went on bitterly, "is it the Hypocritic Oath?" "Steve, please--" "Please, Hell!" I stormed. "Why is he quietly sitting there in Mekstrom hide while he is overtly grieving over the painful death of his fellow man?" "I wouldn't know." "Well, I'm tired of being pushed around," I growled. "Pushed around?" she asked quietly. With a trace of scorn, I said, "Miss Farrow, I can see two possible answers. Either I am being pushed around for some deliberate reason, or I'm too smart, too cagey and too dangerous for them to handle directly. It takes only about eight weeks for me to reluctantly abandon the second in favor of the first." "But what makes you think you are being pushed?" she wanted to know. "You can't tell me that I am so important that they couldn't erase me as easily as they did Catherine and Dr. Thorndyke. And now that his name comes up, let's ask why any doctor who once met a casual patient would go to the bother of sending a postcard with a message on it that is certain to cause me unhappiness. He's also the guy who nudged me by calling my attention to my so-called 'shock hallucination' about Father Harrison lifting my car while Phillip Harrison raced into the fire to make the rescue. Add it up," I told her sharply. "Next he is invited to Medical Center to study Mekstrom's. Only instead of landing there, he sends me a postcard with one of the Highways in the picture, after which he disappears." Miss Farrow nodded thoughtfully. "It is all tied up with your Highways and your Mekstrom People." "That isn't all," I said. "How come the Harrisons moved so abruptly?" "You're posing questions that I can't answer," complained Miss Farrow. "And I'm not one hundred percent convinced that you are right." "You are here, and if you take a look at what I'll show you, you'll be convinced. We'll put it this way, to start: Something cockeyed is going on. Now, one more thing I can add, and this is the part that confuses me: Everything that has been done seems to point to me. So far as I can see they are operating just as though they want me to start a big hassle that will end up by getting the Highways out of their Hiding." "Why on earth would they be doing that?" she wanted to know. "I don't have the foggiest notion. But I do have that feeling and there is evidence pointing that way. They've let me in on things that normally they'd be able to conceal from a highly trained telepath. So I intend to go along with them, because somewhere at the bottom of it all we'll find the answer." She nodded agreement. Now I started up the car, saying, "I'm going to find us one of the Highways in Hiding, and we'll follow it to one of the way stations. Then you'll see for yourself that there is something definitely fishy going on." "This I'd like to see," she replied quietly. Almost too quietly. I took a dig at her as I turned the car out through a tight corner of the lot onto the road. She was sitting there with a noncommittal expression on her face and I wondered why. She replied to my thought: "Steve, you must face one thing. Anything you firmly believe will necessarily pass across your mind as fact. So forgive me if I hold a few small doubts until I have a chance to survey some of the evidence at first hand." "Sure," I told her. "The first bit won't be hard." I drove eagerly across Illinois into Iowa watching for road signs. I knew that once I convinced someone else, it would be easier to convince a third, and a fourth, and a fiftieth until the entire world was out on the warpath. We drove all day, stopping for chow now and then, behaving like a couple out on a vacation tour. We stopped in a small town along about midnight and found a hotel without having come upon any of the hidden highways. We met at breakfast, talked our ideas over mildly, and took off again. We crossed into Nebraska about noon and continued to meander until late in the afternoon when we came upon our first giveaway road sign. "There," I told her triumphantly. She nodded. "I see the sign, Steve. That much I knew. Now all you have to do is to show me the trial-blazes up in that emblem." "Unless they've changed their method," I told her, "this one leads West, slightly south of." I stopped the car not many yards from the sign and went over it with my sense of perception. #You'll note the ease with which the emblem could be turned upside down,# I interjected. #Note the similar width of the top and bottom trefoil, so that only a trained and interested observer can tell the difference.# I drove along until we saw one on the other side of the road and we stopped again, giving the sign a thorough going over. #Note that the signs leading away from the direction are upside down,# I went on. I didn't say a word, I was using every ounce of energy in running my perception over the sign and commenting on its various odds and ends. #Now,# I finished, #we'll drive along this Highway in Hiding until we come to some intersection or hideout. Then you'll be convinced.# She was silent. We took off along that road rather fast and we followed it for miles, passing sign after sign with its emblem turned up along the right side of the road and turned upside-down when the sign was on the left. Eventually we came to a crossing highway, and at that I pointed triumphantly. "Note the missing spoke!" I said with considerable enthusiasm. "Now, Miss Farrow, we shall first turn against it for a few miles and then we shall U-turn and come back along the cross highway with it." "I'm beginning to be convinced, Steve." We turned North against the sign and went forty or fifty miles, just to be sure. The signs were all against us. Eventually I turned into a gas station and filled the carte up to the scuppers. As we turned back South, I asked her, "Any more comment?" She shook her head. "Not yet." I nodded. "If you want, we'll take a jaunt along our original course." "By all means." "In other words you are more than willing to be convinced?" "Yes," she said simply. She went silent then and I wondered what she was thinking about, but she didn't bother to tell me. Eventually we came back to the crossroad, and with a feeling of having been successful, I continued South with a confidence that I had not felt before. We stopped for dinner in a small town, ate hastily but well, and then had a very mild debate. "Shall we have a drink and relax for a moment?" "I'd like it," she replied honestly. "But somehow I doubt that I could relax." "I know. But it does seem like a good idea to take it easy for a half hour. It might even be better if we stopped over and took off again in the morning." "Steve," she told me, "the only way I could relax or go to sleep would be to take on a roaring load so that I'd pass out cold. I'd rather not because I'd get up tomorrow with a most colossal hangover. Frankly, I'm excited and I'd prefer to follow this thing to a finish." "It's a deal," I said. "We'll go until we have to stop." It was about eight o'clock when we hit the road again. * * * * * By nine-forty-five we'd covered something better than two hundred miles, followed another intersection turn according to the missing spoke, and were heading well toward the upper right-hand corner of Colorado on the road map. At ten o'clock plus a few minutes we came upon the roadsign that pointed the way to a ranch-type house set prettily on the top of a small knoll several hundred yards back from the main road. I stopped briefly a few hundred feet from the lead-in road and asked Miss Farrow: "What's your telepath range? You've never told me." She replied instantly, "Intense concentration directed at me is about a half mile. Superficial thinking that might include me or my personality as a by-thought about five hundred yards. To pick up a thought that has nothing to do with me or my interests, not much more than a couple of hundred feet. Things that are definitely none of my business close down to forty or fifty feet." That was about the average for a person with a bit of psi training either in telepathy or in esper; it matched mine fairly well, excepting that part about things that were none of my business. She meant _thoughts_ and not _things_. I had always had a hard time differentiating between things that were none of my damned business, although I do find it more difficult to dig the contents of a letter between two unknown parties at a given distance than it is to dig a letter written or addressed to a person I know. _Things_ are, by and large, a lot less personal than thoughts, if I'm saying anything new. "Well," I told her, "this is it. We're going to go in close enough for you to take a 'pathic look-around. Keep your mind sensitive. If you dig any danger, yell out. I'm going to extend my esper as far as I can and if I suddenly take off like a startled spacecraft, it's because I have uncovered something disagreeable. But keep your mind on them and not me, because I'm relying on you to keep posted on their mental angle." Miss Farrow nodded. "It's hard to remember that other people haven't the ability to make contact mentally. It's like a normal man talking to a blind man and referring constantly to visible things because he doesn't understand. I'll try to remember." "I'm going to back in," I said. "Then if trouble turns up, I'll have an advantage. As soon as they feel our minds coming in at them, they'll know that we're not in there for their health. So here we go!" "I'm a good actor," she said. "No matter what I say, I'm with you all the way!" I yanked the car forward, and angled back. I hit the road easily and started backing along the driveway at a rather fast speed with my eyes half-closed to give my esper sense the full benefit of my concentration along the road. When I was not concentrating on how I was going to turn the wheel at the next curve I thought, #I hope these folks know the best way to get to Colorado Springs from here. Dammit, we're lost!# Miss Farrow squeezed my arm gently, letting me know that she was thinking the same general thoughts. Suddenly she said, "It's a dead area, Steve." It was a dead area, all right. My perception came to a barrier that made it fade from full perception to not being able to perceive anything in a matter of yards. It always gives me an eerie feeling when I approach a dead area and find that I can see a building clearly and not be able to cast my perception beyond a few feet. I kept on backing up into the fringe of that dead area until I was deep within the edge and it took all my concentration to perceive the road a few feet ahead of my rear wheels so that I could steer. I was inching now, coming back like a blind man feeling his way. We were within about forty feet of the ranch house when Miss Farrow yelped: "They're surrounding us, Steve!" My hands whipped into action and my heavy right foot came down on the gas-pedal. The car shuddered, howled like a wounded banshee, and then leaped forward with a roar. A man sprang out of the bushes and stood in front of the car like a statue with his hand held up. Miss Farrow screamed something unintelligible and clutched at my arm frantically. I threw her hand off with a snarl, kept my foot rammed down hard and hit the man dead center. The car bucked and I heard metal crumple angrily. We lurched, bounced viciously twice as my wheels passed over his floundering body, and then we were racing like complete idiots along a road that should not have been covered at more than twenty. The main road came into sight and I sliced the car around with a screech of the rear tires, controlled the deliberate skid with some fancy wheel-work and some fast digging of the surrounding dangers. Then we were tearing along the broad and beautifully clear concrete with the speedometer needle running into the one-fifteen region. "Steve," said Miss Farrow breathlessly, "That man you hit--" In a hard voice I said, "He was getting to his feet when I drove out of range." "I know," she said in a whimper. "I was in his mind. He was not hurt! God! Steve--what are we up against?" Her voice rose to a wail. "I don't know, exactly," I said. "But I know what we're going to do." "But Steve--what can we do?" "Alone or together, very little. But we can bring one person more out along these Highways and then convince a fourth and a fifth and a fiftieth and a thousandth. By then we'll be shoved back off the stage while the big wheels grind painfully slow but exceedingly meticulous." "That'll take time." "Certainly. But we've got a start. Look how long it took getting a start in the first place." "But what is their purpose?" she asked. "That I can't say. I can't say a lot of things, like how, and why and wherefore. But I know that now we have a front tooth in this affair we're not going to let go." I thought for a moment. "I could use Thorndyke; he'd be the next guy to convince if we could find him. Or maybe Catherine, if we could find her. The next best thing is to get hold of that F.B.I. Team that called on me. There's a pair of cold-blooded characters that seem willing to sift through a million tons of ash to find one valuable cinder. They'll listen. I--" Miss Farrow looked at her watch; I dug it as she made the gesture. #Eleven o'clock.# "Going to call?" she asked. "No," I said. "It's too late. It's one in New York now and the F.B.I. Team wouldn't be ready for a fast job at this hour." "So?" "I have no intention of placing a 'When you are ready' call to a number identified with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Not when a full eight hours must elapse between the call and a reply. Too much can happen to us in the meantime. But if I call in the morning, we can probably take care of ourselves well enough until they arrive if we stay in some place that is positively teeming with citizens. Sensible?" "Sounds reasonable, Steve." I let the matter drop at that; I put the go-pedal down to the floor and fractured a lot of speed laws until we came to Denver. We made Denver just before midnight and drove around until we located a hotel that filled our needs. It was large, which would prevent overt operations on the part of the 'enemy' and it was a dead area, which would prevent one of them from reading our minds while we slept, and so enable them to lay counterplans against us. The bellhop gave us a knowing leer as we registered separately, but I was content to let him think what he wanted. Better that he get the wrong idea about us than the right one. He fiddled around in Miss Farrow's room on the ninth, bucking for a big tip--not for good service, but for leaving us alone, which he did by demonstrating how big a nuisance he could be if not properly rewarded. But finally he got tired of his drawer-opening and lamp-testing and towel-stacking, and escorted me up to the twelfth. I led him out with a five spot clutched in his fist and the leer even stronger. If he expected me to race downstairs as soon as he was out of ear-shot, he was mistaken, for I hit the sack like the proverbial ton of crushed mortar. It had been literally weeks since I'd had a pleasant, restful sleep that was not broken by fitful dreams and worry-insomnia. Now that we had something solid to work on, I could look forward to some concrete action instead of merely feeling pushed around. VIII I'd put in for an eight o'clock call, but my sleep had been so sound and perfect that I was all slept out by seven-thirty. I was anxious to get going so I dressed and shaved in a hurry and cancelled the eight o'clock call. Then I asked the operator to connect me with 913. A gruff, angry male voice snarled out of the earpiece at me. I began to apologize profusely but the other guy slammed the phone down on the hook hard enough to make my ear ring. I jiggled my hook angrily and when the operator answered I told her that she'd miscued. She listened to my complaint and then replied in a pettish tone, "But I did ring 913, sir. I'll try again." I wanted to tell her to just try, that there was no 'again' about it, but I didn't. I tried to dig through the murk to her switchboard but I couldn't dig a foot through this area. I waited impatiently until she re-made the connections at her switchboard and I heard the burring of the phone as the other end rang. Then the same mad-bull-rage voice delivered a number of pointed comments about people who ring up honest citizens in the middle of the night; and he hung up again in the middle of my apology. I got irked again and demanded that the operator connect me with the registration clerk. To him I told my troubles. "One moment, sir," he said. A half minute later he returned with, "Sorry, sir. There is no Farrow registered. Could I have mis-heard you?" "No, goddammit," I snarled. "It's Farrow. F as in Frank; A as in Arthur; Double R as in Robert Robert; O as in Oliver; and W as in Washington. I saw her register, I went with her and the bellhop to her room, Number 913, and saw her installed. Then the same 'hop took me up to my room in 1224 on the Twelfth." There was another moment of silence. Then he said, "You're Mr. Cornell. Registered in Room 1224 last night approximately four minutes after midnight." "I know all about me. I was there and did it myself. And if I registered at four after midnight, Miss Farrow must have registered about two after midnight because the ink was still wet on her card when I wrote my name. We came in together, we were travelling together. Now, what gives?" "I wouldn't know, sir. We have no guest named Farrow." "See here," I snapped, "did you ever have a guest named Farrow?" "Not in the records I have available at this desk. Perhaps in the past there may have been--" "Forget the past. What about the character in 913?" The registration clerk returned and informed me coldly, "Room 913 has been occupied by a Mr. Horace Westfield for over three months, Mr. Cornell. There is no mistake." His voice sounded professionally sympathetic, and I knew that he would forget my troubles as soon as his telephone was put back on its hook. "Forget it," I snapped and hung up angrily. Then I went towards the elevators, walking in a sort of dream-like daze. There was a cold lump of something concrete hard beginning to form in the pit of my stomach. Wetness ran down my spine and a drop of sweat dropped from my armpit and hit my body a few inches above my belt like a pellet of icy hail. My face felt cold but when I wiped it with the palm of a shaking hand I found it beaded with an oily sweat. Everything seemed unreally horrifying. "Nine," I told the elevator operator in a voice that sounded far away and hoarse. I wondered whether this might not be a very vivid dream, and maybe if I went all the way back to my room, took a short nap, and got up to start all over again, I would awaken to honest reality. The elevator stopped at Nine and I walked the corridor that was familiar from last night. I rapped on the door of Room 913. The door opened and a big stubble-faced gorilla gazed out and snarled at me: "Are you the persistent character?" "Look," I said patiently, "last night a woman friend of mine registered at this hotel and I accompanied her to this door. Number 913. Now--" A long apelike arm came out and caught me by the coat lapels. He hauled and I went in fast. His breath was sour and his eyes were bloodshot and he was angry all the way through. His other hand caught me by the seat of the pants and he danced me into the room like a jumping jack. "Friend," he ground out, "Take a look. There ain't no woman in this room, see?" He whirled, carrying me off my feet. He took a lunging step forward and hurled me onto the bed, where I carried the springs deep down, to bounce up and off and forward to come up flat against the far wall. I landed sort of spread-eagle flat and seemed to hang there before I slid down the wall to the floor with a meaty-sounding Whump! Then before I could collect my wits or myself, he came over the bed in one long leap and had me hauled upright by the coat lapels again. The other hand was cocked back level with his shoulder it looked the size of a twenty-five pound sack of flour and was probably as hard as set cement. _Steve_, I told myself, _this time you're in for it!_ "All right," I said as apologetically as I knew how, "so I've made a bad mistake. I apologize. I'll also admit that you could wipe up the hotel with me. But do you have to prove it?" Mr. Horace Westfield's mental processes were not slow, cumbersome, and crude. He was as fast and hard on his mental feet as he was on his physical feet. He made some remarks about my intelligence, my upbringing, my parentage and its legal status, and my unwillingness to face a superior enemy. During this catalog of my virtueless existence, he gandy-walked me to the door and opened it. He concluded his lecture by suggesting that in the future I accept anything that any registration clerk said as God-Stated Truth, and if I then held any doubts I should take them to the police. Then he hurled me out of the room by just sort of shoving me away. I sailed across the hall on my toes, backward, and slapped my frame flat again, and once more I hung against the wall until the kinetic energy had spent itself. Then I landed on wobbly ankles as the door to Room 913 came closed with a violent slam. I cursed the habit of building hotels in dead areas, although I admitted that I'd steer clear of any hotel in a clear area myself. But I didn't need a clear area nor a sense of perception to inform me that Room 913 was absolutely and totally devoid of any remote sign of female habitation. In fact, I gathered the impression that for all of his brute strength and virile masculinity, Mr. Horace Westfield hadn't entertained a woman in that room since he'd been there. There was one other certainty: It was impossible for any agency short of sheer fairyland magic to have produced overnight a room that displayed its long-term occupancy by a not-too-immaculate character. That distinctive sour smell takes a long time to permeate the furnishings of any decent hotel; I wondered why a joint as well kept as this one would put up with a bird as careless of his person as Mr. Horace Westfield. So I came to the reluctant conclusion that Room 913 was not occupied by Nurse Farrow, but I was not yet convinced that she was totally missing from the premises. Instead of taking the elevator, I took to the stairs and tried the eighth. My perception was not too good for much in this murk, but I was mentally sensitive to Nurse Farrow and if I could get close enough to her, I might be able to perceive some trace of her even through the deadness. I put my forehead against the door of Room 813 and drew a blank. I could dig no farther than the inside of the door. If Farrow were in 813, I couldn't dig a trace of her. So I went to 713 and tried there. I was determined to try every -13th room on every floor, but as I was standing with my forehead against the door to Room 413, someone came up behind me quietly and asked in a rough voice: "Just what do you think you're doing, Mister?" His dress indicated housedick, but of course I couldn't dig the license in his wallet any more than he could read my mental, #None of your business, flatfoot!# I said, "I'm looking for a friend." "You'd better come with me," he said flatly. "There's been complaints." "Yeah?" I growled. "Maybe I made one of them myself." "Want to start something?" he snapped. I shrugged and he smiled. It was a stony smile, humorless as a crevasse in a rock-face. He kept that professional-type smile on his face until we reached the manager's office. The manager was out, but one of the assistant managers was in his desk. The little sign on the desk said "Henry Walton. Assistant Manager." Mr. Walton said, coldly, "What seems to be the trouble, Mr. Cornell?" I decided to play it just as though I were back at the beginning again. "Last night," I explained very carefully, "I checked into this hotel. I was accompanied by a woman companion. A registered nurse. Miss Gloria Farrow. She registered first, and we were taken by one of your bellboys to Rooms 913 and 1224 respectively. I went with Miss Farrow to 913 and saw her enter. Then the bellhop escorted me to 1224 and left me for the night. This morning I can find no trace of Miss Farrow anywhere in this fleabag." He bristled at the derogatory title but he covered it quickly. "Please be assured that no one connected with this hotel has any intention of confusing you, Mr. Cornell." "I'm tired of playing games," I snapped. "I'll accept your statement so far as the management goes, but someone is guilty of fouling up your registration lists." "That's rather harsh," he replied coldly. "Falsifying or tampering with hotel registration lists is illegal. What you've just said amounts to libel or slander, you know." "Not if it's true." I half expected Henry Walton to backwater fast, but instead, he merely eyed me with the same expression of distaste that he might have used upon finding half of a fuzzy caterpillar in his green salad. As cold as a cake of carbon dioxide snow, he said, "Can you prove this, Mr. Cornell?" "Your night crew--" "You've given us a bit of trouble this morning," he informed me. "So I've taken the liberty of calling in the night crew for you." He pressed a button and a bunch came in and lined up as if for formal inspection. "Boys," said Walton quietly, "suppose you tell us what you know about Mr. Cornell's arrival here last night." They nodded their heads in unison. "Wait a minute," I snapped. "I want a reliable witness to listen to this. In fact, if I could, I'd like to have their stories made under oath." "You'd like to register a formal charge? Perhaps of kidnapping, or maybe illegal restraint?" "Just get me an impartial witness," I told him sourly. "Very well." He picked up his telephone and spoke into it. We waited a few minutes, and finally a very prim young woman came in. She was followed by a uniformed policeman. She was carrying one of those sub-miniature silent typewriters which she set up on its little stand with a few efficient motions. "Miss Mason is our certified public stenographer," he said. "Officer, I'll want your signature on her copy when we're finished. This is a simple routine matter, but it must be legal to the satisfaction of Mr. Cornell. Now, boys, go ahead and explain. Give your name and position first for Miss Mason's record." It was then that I noticed that the night crew had arranged themselves in chronological order. The elderly gent spoke first. He'd been the night doorman but now he was stripped of his admiral's gold braid and he looked just like any other sleepy man of middle age. "George Comstock," he announced. "Doorman. As soon as I saw the car angling out of traffic, I pressed the call-button for a bell boy. Peter Wright came out and was standing in readiness by the time Mr. Cornell's car came to a stop by the curb. Johnny Olson was out next, and after Peter had taken Mr. Cornell's bag, Johnny got into Mr. Cornell's car and took off for the hotel garage--" Walton interrupted. "Let each man tell what he did himself. No prompting, please." "Well, then, you've heard my part in it. Johnny Olson took off in Mr. Cornell's car and Peter Wright took off with Mr. Cornell's bag, and Mr. Cornell followed Peter." The next man in line, at a nod from the assistant manager, stepped forward about a half a pace and said, "I'm Johnny Olson. I followed Peter Wright out of the door and after Peter had collected Mr. Cornell's bag, I got in Mr. Cornell's car and took it to the hotel garage." The third was Peter Wright, the bellhop. "I carried his bag to the desk and waited until he registered. Then we went up to Room 1224. I opened the door, lit the lights, opened the window, and stuff. Mr. Cornell tipped me five bucks and I left him there. Alone." "I'm Thomas Boothe, the elevator operator. I took Mr. Cornell and Peter Wright to the Twelfth. Peter said I should wait because he wouldn't be long, and so I waited on the Twelfth until Peter got back. That's all." "I'm Doris Caspary, the night telephone operator. Mr. Cornell called me about fifteen minutes after twelve and asked me to put him down for a call at eight o'clock this morning. Then he called at about seven thirty and said that he was already awake and not to bother." Henry Walton said, "That's about it, Mr. Cornell." "But--" The policeman looked puzzled. "What is the meaning of all this? If I'm to witness any statements like these, I'll have to know what for." Walton looked at me. I couldn't afford not to answer. Wearily I said, "Last night I came in here with a woman companion and we registered in separate rooms. She went into 913 and I waited until she was installed and then went to my own room on the Twelfth. This morning there is no trace of her." I went on to tell him a few more details, but the more I told him the more he lifted his eyebrows. "Done any drinking?" he asked me curtly. "No." "Certain?" "Absolutely." Walton looked at his crew. They burst into a chorus of, "Well, he _was_ steady on his feet," and "He didn't _seem_ under the influence," and a lot of other statements, all generally indicating that for all they knew I could have been gassed to the ears, but one of those rare guys who don't show it. The policeman smiled thinly. "Just why was this registered nurse travelling with you?" I gave them the excuse-type statement; the one about the accident and that I felt that I was still a bit on the rocky side and so forth. About all I did for that was to convince the policeman that I was not a stable character. His attitude seemed to indicate that any man travelling with a nurse must either be physically sick or maybe mentally out of tune. Then with a sudden thought, I whirled on Johnny Olson. "Will you get my car?" I asked him. He nodded after a nod from Walton. I said, "There's plenty of evidence in my car. In the meantime, let's face one thing, officer. I've been accused of spinning a yarn. I'd hardly be demanding witnesses if I weren't telling the truth. I was standing beside Miss Farrow when she signed the register, complete with the R.N. title. It's too bad that hotels have taken to using card files instead of the old registration book. Cards are so easy to misplace--" Walton cut in angrily. "If that's an accusation, I'm inclined to see that you make it in a court of law." The policeman looked calm. "I'd take it easy, Mr. Cornell. Your story is not corroborated. But the employees of the hotel bear one another out. And from the record, it would appear that you were under the eyes of at least two of them from the moment your car slowed down in front of the main entrance up to the time that you were escorted to your room." "I object to being accused of complicity in a kidnapping," put in the assistant manager. "I object to being accused of mental incompetence," I snapped. "Why do we stand around accusing people back and forth when there's evidence if you'll only uncover it." We stood there glaring at one another. The air grew tense. The only ones in the place who did not have chips on their shoulders were the policeman and the certified stenographer, who was clicking her silent keys in lightning manner, taking down every comment as it was uttered. Eventually Olson returned, to put an end to the thick silence. "Y'car's outside," he told me angrily. "Fine," I said. "Now we'll go outside and take a look. You'll find plenty of traces of Miss Farrow's having been there. Officer--are you telepath or perceptive?" "Perceptive," he said. "But not in here." "How far out does this damned dead area extend?" I asked Walton. "About half way across the sidewalk." "Okay. So let's all go." We traipsed out to the curb. Miss Mason brought her little silent along, slipping the stand high up so that she could type from an erect position. We lined up along the curb and I looked into my car with a triumphant feeling. And then that cold chill congealed my spine again. My car was clean and shining. It had been washed and buffed and polished until it looked as new as the day I picked it out on the salesroom floor. Walton looked blank, and I whipped a thought at him: #Damned telepath!# He nodded perceptibly and said smoothly, "I'm rather sorry we couldn't find any fingerprints. Because now, you see," and here he turned to the policeman and went on, "Mr. Cornell will now accuse us of having washed his car to destroy the evidence. However, you'll find that as a general policy of the hotel, the car-washing is performed as a standard service. In fact, if any guest parks his car in our garage and his car is not rendered spick and span, someone is going to get fired for negligence." So that was that. I took a fast look around, because I knew that I had to get out of there fast. If I remained to carry on any more argument, I'd be tapped for being a nuisance and jugged. I had no doubt at all that the whole hotel staff were all involved in Nurse Farrow's disappearance. But they'd done their job in such a way that if the question were pushed hard, I would end up answering formal charges, the topmost of which might be murder and concealment of the body. I could do nothing by sitting in jail. This was the time to get out first and worry about Farrow later. So I opened the car door and slipped in. I fiddled with the so-called glove compartment and opened it; the maps were all neatly stacked and all the flub had been cleaned out. I fumbled inside and dropped a couple of road maps to the floor, and while I was down picking them up I turned the ignition key which Olson had left plugged in the lock. I took off with a jerk and howl of tires. There was the sudden shrill of a police whistle but it was stopped after one brief blast. As I turned the corner, I caught a fast backwards dig at them. They were filing back into the hotel. I did not believe that the policeman was part of the conspiracy, but I was willing to bet that Walton was going to slip the policeman a box of fine cigars as a reward for having helped them to get rid of a very embarrassing screwball. IX I put a lot of miles between me and my recent adventure before I stopped to take stock. The answer to the mess was still obscure, but the elimination of Nurse Farrow fell into the pattern very neatly. Alone, I was no problem. So long as my actions were restricted to meandering up and down the highways and byways, peering into nooks and crannies and crying, "Catherine," in a plaintive voice, no one cared. But when I teamed up with a telepath, they moved in with the efficiency of a well-run machine and extracted the disturbing element. In fact, their machinations had been so smooth that I was beginning to believe that my 'Discoveries' were really an assortment of unimportant facts shown to me deliberately for some reason of their own. The only snag in the latter theory was the fact of our accident. Assuming that I had to get involved in the mess, there were easier ways to introduce me than by planning a bad crack-up that could have been fatal, even granting the close proximity of the Harrison tribe to come to the rescue. The accident had to be an accident in the dictionary definition of the word itself. Under the circumstances, a planned accident could only be accepted under an entirely different set of conditions. For instance, let's assume that Catherine was a Mekstrom and I was about to disclose the fact. Then she or they could plan such an accident, knowing that she could walk out of the wreck with her hair barely mussed, leaving me dead for sure. But Catherine was not a Mekstrom. I'd been close enough to that satin skin to know that the body beneath it was soft and yielding. Yet the facts as they stood did not throw out my theory. It merely had to be revised. Catherine was no Mekstrom, but if the Harrisons had detected the faintest traces of an incipient Mekstrom infection, they could very well have taken her in. I fumed at the idea. I could almost visualize them pointing out her infection and then informing her bluntly that she could either swear in with them and be cured or she could die alone and miserably. This could easily explain her disappearance. Naturally, being what they were, they cared nothing for me or any other non-Mekstrom. I was no menace. Not until I teamed up with a telepath, and they knew what to do about that. Completely angry, I decided that it was time that I made a noise like an erupting volcano. With plans forming, I took off again towards Yellowstone, pausing only long enough at Fort Collins to buy some armament. Colorado is still a part of the United States where a man can go into a store and buy a gun over the counter just like any other tool. I picked out a Bonanza .375 because it is small enough to fit the hip pocket, light because of the new alloys so it wouldn't unballast me, and mostly because it packs enough wallop to stop a charging hippo. I did not know whether it would drill all the way through a Mekstrom hide, but the impact would at least set any target back on the seat of his pants. Then I drove into Wyoming and made my way to Yellowstone, and one day I was driving along the same road that had been pictured in Dr. Thorndyke's postcard. I drove along it boldly, loaded for bear, and watching the Highway signs that led me nicely toward my goal. Eventually I came to the inevitable missing spoke. It pointed to a ranch-type establishment that lay sprawled out in a billow of dead area. I eyed it warily and kept on driving because my plans did not include marching up to the front door like a rug peddler. Instead, I went on to the next town, some twenty miles away, which I reached about dark. I stopped for a leisurely dinner, saw a moving picture at the drive-in, killed a few at the bar, and started back to the way station about midnight. The name, dug from the mailbox, was Macklin. Again I did not turn in. I parked the car down the highway by about three miles, figuring that only a psi of doctor's degree would be able to dig anything at that distance. I counted on there being no such mental giant in this out of the way place. I made my way back toward the ranch house across the fields and among the rolling rock. I extended my perception as far as I could; I made myself sensitive to danger and covered the ground foot by foot, digging for traps, alarm lines, photocell trips, and parties who might be lying in wait for me. I encountered no sign of any trip or trap all the way to the fringe of the dead zone. The possibility that they knew of my presence and were comfortably awaiting me deep within the zone occurred to me, and so I was very cautious as I cased the layout and decided to make my entry at the point where the irregular boundary of the dead area was closest to the house itself. I entered and became completely psi-blind. Starlight cast just enough light so that I could see to walk without falling into a chuck hole or stumbling over something, but beyond a few yards everything lost shape and became a murky blob. The night was dead silent except for an occasional hiss of wind through the brush. Esperwise I was not covering much more than my eyes could see. I stepped deeper into the zone and lost another yard of perception. I kept probing at the murk, sort of like poking a finger at a hanging blanket. It moved if I dug hard enough in any direction, but as soon as I released the pressure, the murk moved right back where it was before. I crouched and took a few more steps into the zone, got to a place where I could begin to see the outlines of the house itself. Dark, silent, it looked uninhabited. I wished that there had been a college course in housebreaking, prowling and second-story operations. I went at it very slowly. I took my sweet time crossing the boards of the back verandah, even though the short hair on the back of my neck was beginning to prickle from nervousness. I was also scared. At any given moment, they had the legal right to open a window, poke out a field-piece, and blow me into bloody ribbons where I stood. The zone was really a dead one. My esper range was no more than about six inches from my forehead; a motion picture of Steve Cornell sounding out the border of a window with his forehead would have looked funny, it was not funny at the time. But I found that the sash was not locked and that the flyscreen could be unshipped from the outside. I entered a dining room. Inside, it was blacker than pitch. I crossed the dining room by sheer feel and instinct and managed to get to the hallway without making any racket. At this point I stopped and asked myself what the heck I thought I was trying to do. I had to admit that I had no plan in definite form. I was just prowling the joint to see what information I might be able to pick up. Down the hall I found a library. I'd been told that you tell what kind of people folks are by inspecting their library, and so I conned the book titles by running my head along a row of books. The books in the library indicated to me that this was a family of some size with rather broad tastes. There was everything from science fiction to Shakespeare, everything from philosophy to adventure. A short row of kid's books. A bible. Encyclopedia Brittanica (Published in Chicago), in fifty-four volumes, but there were no places that were worn that might give me an idea as to any special interest. The living room was also blank of any evidence of anything out or the ordinary. I turned away and stood in the hallway, blocked by indecision. I was a fool, I kept telling myself, because I did not have any experience in casing a joint, and what I knew had been studied out of old-time detective tales. Even if the inhabitants of the place were to let me go at it in broad daylight, I'm not too sure that I'd do a good job of finding something of interest except for sheer luck. But on the other hand, I'd gotten nowhere by dodging and ducking. I was in no mood to run quivering in fear. I was more inclined to emit a bellow just to see what would happen next. So instead of sneaking quietly away, I found the stairs and started to go up very slowly. It occurred to me at about the third step that I must be right. Anybody with any sense wouldn't keep anything dangerous in their downstairs library. It would be too much like a safe-cracker storing his nitro in the liquor cabinet or the murderer who hangs his weapon over the mantelpiece. Yet everybody kept some sort of records, or had things in their homes that were not shown to visiting firemen. And if it weren't on the second floor, then it might be in the cellar. If I weren't caught first, I'd prowl the whole damned place, inch by inch--avoiding if possible those rooms in which people slept. The fifth step squeaked ever so faintly, but it sounded like someone pulling a spike out of a packing case made of green wood. I froze, half aching for some perceptive range so that I could dig any sign of danger, and half remembering that if it weren't for the dead area, I'd not be this far. I'd have been frightened to try it in a clear zone. Eventually I went on up, and as my head came above the level of the floor, everything became psi-clear once more. Here was as neat a bit of home planning as I have ever seen. Just below the level of the second floor, their dead area faded out, so that the top floor was clean, bright, and clear as day. I paused, startled at it, and spent a few moments digging outside. The dead area billowed above the rooftop out of my range; from what little I could survey of the dark psi area, it must have been shaped sort of like an angel-food cake, except that the central hole did not go all the way down. Only to the first-floor level. It was a wonderful set-up for a home; privacy was granted on the first floor and from the road and all the surrounding territory, but on the second floor there was plenty of pleasant esperclear space for the close-knit family and friends. Their dead area was shaped in the ideal form for any ideal home. Then I stopped complimenting the architect and went on about my business, because there, directly in front of my nose, I could dig the familiar impression of a medical office. I went the rest of the way up the stairs and into the medical office. There was no mistake. The usual cabinets full of instruments, a laboratory examination table, shelves of little bottles, and along one wall was a library of medical books. All it needed was a sign on the door: 'S. P. Macklin, MSch' to make it standard. At the end of the library was a set of looseleaf notebooks, and I pulled the more recent of them out and held it up to my face. I did not dare snap on a light, so I had to go it esper. Even in the clear area, this told me very little. Esper is not like eyesight, any more than you can hear printed words or perhaps carry on a conversation by watching the wiggly green line on an oscilloscope. I wished it was. Instead, esper gives you a grasp of materials and shapes and things in position with regard to other things. It is sort of like seeing something simultaneously from all sides, if you can imagine such a sensation. So instead of being able to esper-read the journal, I had to take it letter by letter by digging the shape of the ink on the page with respect to the paper and the other letters, and since the guy's handwriting was atrocious, I could get no more than if the thing were written in Latin. If it had been typewritten, or with a stylized hand, it would have been far less difficult; or if it had been any of my damned business I could have dug it easily. But as it was---- "Looking for something, Mr. Cornell?" asked a cool voice that dripped with acid sarcasm. At the same instant, the lights went on. I whirled, clutched at my hip pocket, and dropped to my knees at the same time. The sights of my .375 centered in the middle of a silk-covered midriff. She stood there indolently, disdainful of the cannon that was aimed at her. She was not armed; I'd have caught the esper warning of danger if she'd come at me with a weapon of some sort, even though I was preoccupied with the bookful of evidence. I stood up and faced her and let my esper run lightly over her body. She was another Mekstrom, which did not surprise me a bit. "I seem to have found what I was looking for," I said. Her laugh was scornful but not loud. "You're welcome, Mr. Cornell." #Telepath?# "Yes, and a good one." #Who else is awake?# "Just me, so far," she replied quietly. "But I'll be glad to call out--" #Keep it quiet, Sister Macklin.# "Stop thinking like an idiot, Mr. Cornell. Quiet or not, you'll not leave this house until I permit you to go." I let my esper roam quickly through the house. An elderly couple slept in the front bedroom. A man slept alone in the room beside them; a pair of young boys slept in an over-and-under bunk in the room across the hall. The next room must have been hers, the bed was tumbled but empty. The room next to the medical office contained a man trussed in traction splints, white bandages, and literally festooned with those little hanging bottles that contain everything from blood plasma to food and water, right on down to lubrication for the joints. I tried to dig his face under the swath of bandage but I couldn't make out much more than the fact that it was a face and that the face was half Mekstrom Flesh. "He is a Mekstrom Patient," said Miss Macklin quietly. "At this stage, he is unconscious." I sort of sneered at her. "Good friend of yours, no doubt." "Not particularly," she said. "Let's say that he is a poor victim that would die if we hadn't found his infection early." The tone and expression of her voice made me seethe; she sounded as though she felt herself to be a real benefactor to the human race, and that she and her outfit would do the same for any other poor guy that caught Mekstrom's--providing they learned about this unfortunate occurrence in time. "We would, Mr. Cornell." "Bah-loney," I grunted. "Why dispute my word?" she asked in the same tone of innocent honesty. I eyed her angrily and I felt my hand tighten on the revolver. "I've a reason to become suspicious," I told her in a voice that I hoped was as mild-mannered as her own. "Because three people have disappeared in the past half-year without a trace, but under circumstances that put me in the middle. All of them, somehow, seem to be involved with your hidden road sign system and Mekstrom's Disease." "That's unfortunate," she said quietly. I had to grab myself to keep from yelling, "Unfortunate?" and managed to muffle it down to a mere voice-volume sound. "People dying of Mekstrom's because you're keeping this cure a secret and I'm batted from pillar to post because--" I gave up on that because I really did not know why. "It's unfortunate that you had to become involved," she said firmly. "Because you--" "It's unfortunate for everybody," I snapped, "because I'm going to bust you all wide open!" "I'm afraid not. You see, in order to do that you'll have to get out of here and that I will not permit." I grunted. "Miss Macklin, you Mekstroms have hard bodies, but do you think your hide will stop a slug from this?" "You'll never know. You see, Mr. Cornell, you do not have the cold, brittle, determined guts that you'd need to pull that trigger." "No?" "Pull it," she said. "Or do you agree, now that you're of age, that you can't bluff a telepath." I eyed her sourly because she was right. She held that strength that lies in weakness; I could not pull that trigger and fire a .375 inch slug into that slender, silk-covered midriff. And opposite that, Miss Macklin also had a strength that was strength itself. She could hold me aloft with one hand kicking and squirming while she was twisting my arms and legs off with her other hand. She held all the big cards of her sex, too. I couldn't slug her with my fist, even though I knew that I'd only break my hand without even bruising her. I was in an awkward situation and I knew it. If she'd been a normal woman I could have shrugged my way past her and left, but she was determined not to let me leave without a lot of physical violence. Violence committed on a woman gets the man in dutch no matter how justified he is. Yet in my own weakness there was a strength; there was another way out and I took it. Abruptly and without forethought. X Shifting my aim slightly, I pulled the trigger. The .375 Bonanza went off with a sound like an atom bomb in a telephone booth, and the slug whiffed between her arm and her body and drilled a crater in the plaster behind her. The roar stunned her stiff. The color drained from her face and she swayed uncertainly. I found time enough to observe that while her body was as hard as chromium, her nervous system was still human and sensitive enough to make her faint from a sudden shock. She caught herself, and stood there stiff and white with one delicate (but steel-hard) hand up against her throat. Then I dug the household. They were piling out of the hay like a bunch of trained firemen answering a still alarm. They arrived in all stages of nightdress in the following order: The man, about twenty-two or three, who skidded into the room on dead gallop and put on brakes with a screech as he caught sight of the .375 with its thin wisp of blue vapor still trailing out of the muzzle. The twins, aged about fourteen, who might have turned to run if they'd not been frightened stiff at the sight of the cannon in my fist. Father and then Mother Macklin, who came in briskly but without panic. Mr. Macklin said, crisply, "May I have an explanation, Mr. Cornell?" "I'm a cornered rat," I said thickly. "And so I'm scared. I want out of here in one piece. I'm so scared that if I'm intercepted, I may get panicky, and if I do someone is likely to get hurt. Understand?" "Perfectly," said Mr. Macklin calmly. "Are you going to let him get away with this?" snapped the eldest son. "Fred, a nervous man with a revolver is very dangerous. Especially one who lacks the rudimentary training in the simpler forms of burglary." I couldn't help but admire the older gentleman's bland self-confidence. "Young man," he said to me, "You've made a bad mistake." "No I haven't," I snapped. "I've been on the trail of something concrete for a long time, and now that I've found it I'm not going to let it go easily." I waved the .375 and they all cringed but Mr. Macklin. He said, "Please put that weapon down, Mr. Cornell. Let's not add attempted murder to your other crimes." "Don't force me to it, then. Get out of my way and let me go." He smiled. "I don't have to be telepath to tell you that you won't pull that trigger until you're sorely driven," he replied calmly. He was so right that it made me mad. He added, "also, you've got four shells left since you carry the firearm on an empty chamber. Not used to guns, are you, Mr. Cornell?" Well, I wasn't used to wearing a gun. Now that he mentioned it, I remembered that it was impossible to fire the shell under the hammer by any means except by pulling the trigger. What he was telling me meant that even if I made a careful but bloody sweep of it with my four shells, there would be two of them left, and even the twins were more than capable of taking me apart inch by inch once my revolver was empty. "Seems to be an impasse, Mr. Cornell," he said with an amused smile. "You bland-mannered bunch of--" "Ah now, please," he said abruptly. "My wife is not accustomed to such language, nor is my daughter, although my son and the twins probably know enough definitions to make them angry. This is an impasse, Mr. Cornell, and it behooves all of us to be extremely polite to one another. For one wrong move and you'll fire; this will mean complete chaos for all of us. One wrong word from you and someone of us will take offense, which will be equally fatal. Now, let's all stand quietly and talk this over." "What's to talk over?" I demanded. "A truce. Or call it an armistice." "Do go on." He looked at his family, and I followed his gaze. Miss Macklin was leaning against the wall with a look of concentrated interest. Her elder brother Fred was standing alert and ready but not quite poised for a leap. Mrs. Macklin had a motherly-looking smile on her face which for some unknown reason she was aiming at me in a disarming manner. The twins were standing close together, both of them puzzled-looking. I wondered whether they were esper or telepath (twins are always the same when they're identical, and opposite when fraternal). The thing that really bothered me was their attitude They all seemed to look at me as though I were a poor misguided individual who had unwittingly tromped on their toes after having fallen in among bad company. They reminded me of the Harrisons, who looked and sounded so sympathetic when I'd gone out there seeking Catherine. A fine bunch to trust! First they swipe my girl and erase all traces of her; then when I go looking they offer me help and sympathy for my distress. The right hand giveth and the left hand taketh away, yeah! I hated them all, yet I am not a hero-type. I wanted the whole Highways in Hiding rolled up like an old discarded corridor carpet, with every Mekstrom on Earth rolled up in it. But even if I'd been filled to the scuppers with self-abnegation in favor of my fellow man, I could not have pulled the trigger and started the shambles. For instead of blowing the whole thing wide open because of a batch of bodies, the survivors would have enough savvy to clean up the mess before our bodies got cold, and the old Highways crowd would be doing business at the same old stand. Without, I might add, without the minor nuisance that people call Steve Cornell. What I really wanted was to find Catherine. And then it came to me that what I really wanted second of all was to possess a body of Mekstrom Flesh, to be a physical superman. "Suppose," said Miss Macklin unexpectedly, "that it is impossible?" "Impossible?" I roared. "What have you got that I haven't got?" "Mekstrom's Disease," replied Miss Macklin quietly. "Fine," I sneered. "So how do I go out and get it?" "You'll get it naturally--or not at all," she said. "Now see here--" I started off, but Mr. Macklin stopped me with an upraised hand. "Mr. Cornell," he said, "we are in the very awkward position of trying to convince a man that his preconceived notion is incorrect. We can produce no direct evidence to support our statement. All we can do is to tell you that so far as we know, and as much as we know about Mekstrom's Disease, no one has ever contracted the infection artificially." "And how can I believe you?" "That's our awkward position. We cannot show you anything that will support our statement. We can profess the attitudes of honesty, truth, honor, good-will, altruism, and every other word that means the same thing. We can talk until doomsday and nothing will be said." "So where is all this getting us?" I asked. "I hope it is beginning to cause your mind to doubt the preconceived notion," he said. "Ask yourself why any outfit such as ours would deliberately show you evidence." "I have it and it does not make sense." He smiled. "Precisely. It does not." Fred Macklin interrupted, "Look, Dad, why are we bothering with all this guff?" "Because I have hopes that Mr. Cornell can be made to see our point, to join, as it were, our side." "Fat chance," I snapped. "Please, I'm your elder and not at all inclined to waste my time. You came here seeking information and you shall have it. You will not believe it, but it will, I hope, fill in some blank spots after you have had a chance to compare, sort, and use your own logic on the problem. As a mechanical engineer, you are familiar with the line of reasoning that we non-engineering people call Occam's Razor?" "The law of least reaction," I said automatically. "The what?" asked Mrs. Macklin. Miss Macklin said, "I'll read it from Mr. Cornell's mind, mother. The law of least reaction can be demonstrated by the following: If a bucket of mixed wood-shavings and gasoline are heated, there is a calculable probability that the gasoline will catch fire first because the gasoline is easier--least reaction--to set on fire." "Right," I said. "But how does this apply to me?" Mr. Macklin took up the podium again: "For one thing, your assumption regarding Catherine is correct. At the time of the accident she was found to have Mekstrom's Disease in its earliest form. The Harrisons did take her in to save her life. Now, dropping that side of the long story, we must follow your troubles. The accident, to a certain group of persons, was a fortunate one. It placed under their medical care a man--you--in whose mind could be planted a certain mild curiosity about a peculiar road sign and other evidences. The upshot of this was that you took off on a tour of investigation." That sounded logical, but there were a lot of questions that had open, ragged ends flying loose. Mr. Macklin went on: "Let's diverge for the moment. Mr. Cornell, what is your reaction to Mekstrom's Disease at this point?" That was easy. It was a curse to the human race, excepting that some outfit knew how to cure it. Once cured, it made a physical superman of the so-called victim. What stuck in my craw was the number of unfortunate people who caught it and died painfully--or by their own hand in horror--without the sign of aid or assistance. He nodded when I'd gone about half-way through my conclusions and before I got mentally violent about them. "Mr. Cornell, you've expressed your own doom at certain hands. You feel that the human race could benefit by exploitation of Mekstrom's Disease." "It could, if everybody helped out and worked together." "Everybody?" he asked with a sly look. I yearned again for the ability of a telepath, and I knew that the reason why I was running around loose was because I was only an esper and therefore incapable of learning the truth directly. I stood there like a totem pole and tried to think. Eventually it occurred to me. Just as there are people who cannot stand dictatorships, there are others who cannot abide democracy; in any aggregation like the human race there will be the warped souls who feel superior to the rest of humanity. They welcome dictatorships providing they can be among the dictators and if they are not included, they fight until the other dictatorship is deposed so that they can take over. "True," said Mr. Macklin, "And yet, if they declared their intentions, how long would they last?" "Not very long. Not until they had enough power to make it stick," I said. "And above all, not until they have the power to grant this blessing to those whose minds agree with theirs. So now, Mr. Cornell, I'll make a statement that you can accept as a mere collection of words, to be used in your arguments with yourself: We'll assume two groups, one working to set up a hierarchy of Mekstroms in which the rest of the human race will become hewers of wood and drawers of water. Contrasting that group is another group who feels that no man or even a congress of men are capable of picking and choosing the individual who is to be granted the body of the physical superman. We cannot hope to watch the watchers, Mr. Cornell, and we will not have on our conscience the weight of having to select A over B as being more desirable. Enough of this! You'll have to argue it out by yourself later." "Later?" grunted Fred Macklin. "You're not going to--" "I certainly am," said his father firmly. "Mr. Cornell may yet be the agency whereby we succeed in winning out." He spoke to me again. "Neither group dares to come into the open, Mr. Cornell. We cannot accuse the other group of anything nefarious, any more than they dare to accuse us. Their mode of attack is to coerce you into exposing us for a group of undercover operators who are making supermen." "Look," I asked him, "why not admit it? You've got nothing sinister in mind." "Think of all the millions of people who have not had schooling beyond the preparatory grades," he said. "People of latent psi ability instead of trained practice, or those poor souls who have no psi ability worth mentioning. Do you know the history of the Rhine Institute, Mr. Cornell?" "Only vaguely." "In the early days of Rhine's work at Duke University, there were many scoffers. The scoffers and detractors, naturally enough, were those people who had the least amount of psi ability. Admitting that at the time all psi ability was latent, they still had less of it. But after Rhine's death, his associates managed to prove his theories and eventually worked out a system of training that would develop the psi ability. Then, Mr. Cornell, those who are blessed with a high ability in telepathy or perception--the common term of esper is a misnomer, you know, because there's nothing extra-sensory about perception--found themselves being suspected and hated by those who had not this delicate sense. It took forty of fifty years before common public acceptance got around to looking at telepathy and perception in the same light as they saw a musician with a trained ear or an artist with a trained eye. Psi is a talent that everybody has to some degree, and today this is accepted with very little angry jealousy. "But now," he went on thoughtfully, "consider what would happen if we made a public announcement that we could cure Mekstrom's Disease by making a physical superman out of the poor victim. Our main enemy would then stand up righteously and howl that we are concealing the secret; he would be believed. We would be tracked down and persecuted, eventually wiped out, while he sat behind his position and went on picking and choosing victims whose attitude parallel his own." "And who is the character?" I demanded. I knew. But I wanted him to say it aloud. He shook his head. "I'll not say it," he said. "Because I will not accuse him aloud, any more than he dares to tell you flatly that we are an underground organization that must be rooted out. He knows about our highways and our way stations and our cure, because he uses the same cure. He can hide behind his position so long as he makes no direct accusation. You know the law, Mr. Cornell." Yes, I knew the law. So long as the accuser came into court with a completely clean mind, he was safe. But Scholar Phelps could hardly make the accusation, nor could he supply the tiniest smidgin of direct evidence to me. For in my accusation I'd implicate him as an accessory-accuser and then he would be called upon to supply not only evidence but a clear, clean, and open mind. In shorter words, the old stunt of pointing loudly to someone else as a dodge for covering up your own crime was a lost art in this present-day world of telepathic competence. The law, of course, insisted that no man could be convicted for what he was thinking, but only upon direct evidence of action. But a crooked-thinking witness found himself in deep trouble anyway, even though crooked thinking was in itself no crime. "Now for one more time," said Mr. Macklin. "Consider a medical person who cannot qualify because he is a telepath and not a perceptive. His very soul was devoted to being a scholar of medicine like his father and his grandfather, but his telepath ability does not allow him to be the full scholar. A doctor he can be. But he can never achieve the final training, again the ultimate degree. Such a man overcompensates and becomes the frustrate; a ripe disciple for the superman theory." "Dr. Thorndyke!" I blurted. His face was as blank, as noncommittal as a bronze bust; I could neither detect affirmation nor negation in it. He was playing it flat; I'd never get any evidence from him, either. "So now, Mr. Cornell, I have given you food for thought. I've made no direct statements; nothing that you could point to. I've defended myself as any man will do, but only by protestations of innocence. Therefore I suggest that you take your artillery and vacate the premises." I remembered the Bonanza .375 that was hanging in my hand. Shamefacedly I slipped it back in my hip pocket. "But look, sir--" "Please leave, Mr. Cornell. Any more I cannot say without laying us wide open for trouble. I am sorry for you, it is no joy being a pawn. But I hope that your pawn-ship will work for our side, and I hope that you will come through it safely. Now, please leave us quietly." I shrugged. I left. And as I was leaving, Miss Macklin touched my arm and said in a soft voice: "I hope you find your Catherine, Steve. And I hope that someday you'll be able to join her." I nodded dumbly. It was not until I was all the way back to my car that I remembered that her last statement was something similar to wishing me a case of measles so that I'd be afterward immune from them. XI As the miles separated me from the Macklins, my mind kept whirling around in a tight circle. I had a lot of the bits, but none of them seemed to lock together very tight. And unhappily, too many of the bits that fit together were hunks that I did not like. I knew the futility of being non-telepath. Had Mr. Macklin given me the truth or was I being sold another shoddy bill of goods? Or had he spun me a yarn just to get me out of his house without a riot? Of course, there had been a riot, and he'd been expecting it. If nothing else, it proved that I was a valuable bit of material, for some undisclosed reason. I had to grin. I didn't know the reason, but whatever reason they had, it must gripe the devil out of them to be unable to erase me. Then the grin faded. No one had told me about Catherine. They'd neatly avoided the subject. Well, since I'd taken off on this still hunt to find Catherine, I'd continue looking, even though every corner I looked into turned out to be the hiding place for another bunch of mad spooks. My mind took another tack: Admitting that neither side could rub me out without losing, why in heck didn't they just collect me and put me in a cage? Dammit, if I had an organization as well oiled as either of them, I could collect the President right out of the New White House and put him in a cage along with the King of England, the Shah of Persia, and the Dali Lama to make a fourth for bridge. This was one of those questions that cannot be answered by the application of logic, reasoning, or by applying either experience or knowledge. I did not know, nor understand. And the only way I would ever find out was to locate someone who was willing to tell. Then it occurred to me that--aside from my one experience in housebreaking--that I'd been playing according to the rules. I'm pretty much a law-abiding citizen. Yet it did seem to me that I learned more during those times when the rules, if not broken, at least were bent rather sharply. So I decided to try my hand at busting a couple of rather high-level rules. There was a way to track down Catherine. So I gassed up the buggy, turned the nose East, and took off like a man with a purpose in mind. En route, I laid out my course. Along that course there turned out to be seven Way Stations, according to the Highway signs. Three of them were along U.S. 12 on the way from Yellowstone to Chicago. One of them was between Chicago and Hammond, Indiana. There was another to the south of Sandusky, Ohio, one was somewhere south of Erie, Pa., and the last was in the vicinity of Newark. There were a lot of the Highways themselves, leading into and out of my main route--as well as along it. But I ignored them all, and nobody gave me a rough time. Eventually I walked into my apartment. It was musty, dusty, and lonesome. Some of Catherine's things were still on the table where I'd dropped them; they looked up at me mutely until I covered them with the walloping pile of mail that had arrived in my long absence. I got a bottle of beer and began to go through the mail, wastebasketing the advertisements, piling the magazines neatly, and filing some offers of jobs (Which reminded me that I was still an engineer and that my funds wouldn't last indefinitely) and went on through the mail until I came to a letter--The Letter. _Dear Mr. Cornell:_ _We're glad to hear from you. We moved, not because Marian caught Mekstrom's, but because the dead area shifted and left us sort of living in a fish-bowl, psi-wise._ _Everybody is hale and hearty here and we all wish you the best._ _Please do not think for a moment that you owe us anything. We'd rather be free of your so-called debt. We regret that Catherine was not with you, maybe the accident might not have happened. But we do all think that we stand as an association with a very unhappy period in your life, and that it will be better for you if you try to forget that we exist. This is a hard thing to say, Steve, but really, all we can do for you is to remind you of your troubles._ _Therefore with love from all of us, we'd like to make this a sincerely sympathetic and final--_ _Farewell, Philip Harrison._ I grunted unhappily. It was a nice-sounding letter, but it did not ring true, somehow. I sat there digging it for hidden meanings, but none came. I didn't care. In fact, I didn't really expect any more than this. If they'd not written me at all, I'd still have done what I did. I sat down and wrote Phillip Harrison another letter: _Dear Philip:_ _I received your letter today, as I returned from an extended trip through the west. I'm glad to hear that Marian is not suffering from Mekstrom's Disease. I am told that it is fatal to the--uninitiated._ _However, I hope to see you soon._ _Regards, Steve Cornell._ _That_, I thought, _should do it!_ Then to help me and my esper, I located a tiny silk handkerchief of Catherine's, one she'd left after one of her visits. I slipped it into the envelope and slapped a stamp and a notation on the envelope that this letter was to be forwarded to Phillip Harrison. I dropped it in the box about eleven that night, but I didn't bother trying to follow it until the morning. Ultimately it was picked up and taken to the local post office, and from there it went to the clearing station at Pennsylvania Station at 34th St., where I hung around the mail-baggage section until I attracted the attention of a policeman. "Looking for something, Mr. Cornell?" "Not particularly," I told the telepath cop. "Why?" "You've been digging every mailbag that comes out of there." "Am I?" I asked ingeniously. "Can it Buster, or we'll let you dig your way out of a jail." "You can't arrest a man for thinking." "I'll be happy to make it loitering," he said sharply. "I've a train ticket." "Use it, then." "Sure. At train time I'll use it." "Which train?" he asked me sourly. "You've missed three already." "I'm waiting for a special train, officer." "Then please go and wait in the bar, Mr. Cornell." "Okay. I'm sorry I caused you any trouble, but I've a bit of a personal problem. It isn't illegal." "Anything that involves taking a perceptive dig at the U.S. Mail is illegal," said the policeman. "Personal or not, it's out. So either you stop digging or else." I left. There was no sense in arguing with the cop. I'd just end up short. So I went to the bar and I found out why he'd recommended it. It was in a faintly-dead area, hazy enough to prevent me from taking a squint at the baggage section. I had a couple of fast ones, but I couldn't stand the suspense of not knowing when my letter might take off without me. Since I'd also pushed my loitering-luck I gave up. The only thing I could hope for was that the sealed forwarding address had been made out at that little town near the Harrisons and hadn't been moved. So I went and took a train that carried no mail. It made my life hard. I had to wander around that tank town for hours, keeping a blanket-watch on the post office for either the income or the outgo of my precious hunk of mail. I caught some hard eyes from the local yokels but eventually I discovered that my luck was with me. A fast train whiffled through the town and they baggage-hooked a mailbag off the car at about a hundred and fifty per. I found out that the next stop of that train was Albany. I'd have been out of luck if I'd hoped to ride with the bag. Then came another period of haunting that dinky post office (I've mentioned before that it was in a dead area, so I couldn't watch the insides, only the exits) until at long last I perceived my favorite bit of mail emerging in another bag. It was carted to the railroad station and hung up on another pick-up hook. I bought a ticket back to New York and sat on a bench near the hook, probing into the bag as hard as my sense of perception could dig. I cursed the whole world. The bag was merely labelled "Forwarding Mail" in letters that could be seen at ninety feet. My own letter, of course, I could read very well, to every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' and the stitching in Catherine's little kerchief. But I could not make out the address printed on the form that was pasted across the front of the letter itself. As I sat there trying to probe that sealed address, a fast train came along and scooped the bag off the hook. I caught the next train. I swore and I squirmed and I groaned because that train stopped at every wide spot in the road, paused to take on milk, swap cars, and generally tried to see how long it could take to make a run of some forty miles. This was Fate. Naturally, any train that stopped at my rattle burg would also stop at every other point along the road where some pioneer had stopped to toss a beer bottle off of his covered wagon. At long last I returned to Pennsylvania Station just in time to perceive my letter being loaded on a conveyor for LaGuardia. Then the same damned policeman collared me. "This is it," he said. "Now see here, officer. I--" "Will you come quietly, Mr. Cornell? Or shall I put the big arm on you?" "For what?" "You've been violating the 'Disclosure' section of the Federal Communications Act, and I know it." "Now look, officer, I said this was not illegal." "I'm not an idiot, Cornell!" I noted uncomfortably that he had dropped the formal address. "You have been trailing a specific piece of mail with the express purpose of finding out where it is going. Since its destination is a sealed forwarding address, your attempt to determine this destination is a violation of the act." He eyed me coldly as if to dare me to deny it. "Now," he finished, "Shall I read you chapter and verse?" He had me cold. The 'Disclosure' Act was an old ruling that any transmission must not be used for the benefit of any handler. When Rhine came along, 'Disclosure' Act was extended to everything. "Look officer, it's my girl," hoping that would make a difference. "I know that," he told me flatly. "Which is why I'm not running you in. I'm just telling you to lay off. Your girl went away and left you a sealed forwarding address. Maybe she doesn't want to see you again." "She's sick," I said. "Maybe her family thinks you made her sick. Now stop it and go away. And if I ever find you trying to dig the mail again, you'll dig iron bars. Now scat!" He urged me towards the outside of the station like a sheep-dog hazing his flock. I took a cab to LaGuardia, even though it was not as fast as the subway. I was glad to be out of his presence. I connected with my letter again at LaGuardia. It was being loaded aboard a DC-16 headed for Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Hawaii, and Manila. I didn't know how far it was going so I bought a ticket for the route with my travel card and I got aboard just ahead of the closing door. My bit of mail was in the compartment below me, and in the hour travel time to Chicago, I found out that Chicago was the destination for the mailbag, although the superscript on the letter was still hazy. I followed the bag off the plane at Chicago and stopped long enough to cancel the rest of my ticket. There was no use wasting the money for the unused fare from Chicago to Manila. I rode into the city in a combination bus-truck less than six feet from my little point-of-interest. During the ride I managed to dig the superscript. It forwarded the letter to Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and from there to a rural route that I couldn't understand although I got the number. Then I went back to Midway Airport and found to my disgust that the Chicago Airport did not have a bar. I dug into this oddity for a moment until I found out that the Chicago Airport was built on Public School Property and that according to law, they couldn't sell anything harder than soda pop within three hundred feet of public school property, no matter who rented it. So I dawdled in the bar across Cicero Avenue until plane time, and took an old propeller-driven Convair to Eau Claire on a daisy-clipping ride that stopped at every wide spot on the course. From Eau Claire the mail bag took off in the antediluvian Convair but I took off by train because the bag was scheduled to be dropped by guided glider into Ladysmith. At Ladysmith I rented a car, checked the rural routes, and took off about the same time as my significant hunk of mail. Nine miles from Ladysmith is a flagstop called Bruce, and not far from Bruce there is a body of water slightly larger than a duck pond called Caley Lake. A backroad, decorated with ornamental metal signs, led me from Bruce, Wisconsin, to Caley Lake, where the road signs showed a missing spoke. I turned in, feeling like Ferdinand Magellan must have felt when he finally made his passage through the Strait to discover the open sea that lay beyond the New World. I had done a fine job of tailing and I wanted someone to pin a leather medal on me. The side road wound in and out for a few hundred yards, and then I saw Phillip Harrison. He was poking a long tool into the guts of an automatic pump, built to lift water from a deep well into a water tower about forty feet tall. He did not notice my arrival until I stopped my rented car beside him and said: "Being a mechanical engineer and an esper, Phil, I can tell you that you have a--" "A worn gasket seal," he said. "It doesn't take an esper engineer to figure it out. How the heck did you find us?" "Out in your mailbox there is a letter," I told him. "I came with it." He eyed me humorously. "How much postage did you cost? Or did you come second class mail?" I was not sure that I cared for the inference, but Phillip was kidding me by the half-smile on his face. I asked, "Phil, please tell me--what is going on?" His half-smile faded. He shook his head unhappily as he said, "Why can't you leave well-enough alone?" My feelings welled up and I blew my scalp. "Let well enough alone?" I roared. "I'm pushed from pillar to post by everybody. You steal my girl. I'm in hokus with the cops, and then you tell me that I'm to stay--" "Up the proverbial estuary lacking the customary means of locomotion," he finished with a smile. I couldn't see the humor in it. "Yeah," I drawled humorlessly. "You realize that you're probably as big a liability with us as you were trying to find us?" I grunted. "I could always blow my brains out." "That's no solution and you know it." "Then give me an alternative." Phillip shrugged. "Now that you're here, you're here. It's obvious that you know too much, Steve. You should have left well enough alone." "I didn't know well enough. Besides, I couldn't have been pushed better if someone had slipped me--" I stopped, stunned at the idea and then I went on in a falter, "--a post-hypnotic suggestion." "Steve, you'd better come in and meet Marian. Maybe that's what happened." "Marian?" I said hollowly. "She's a high-grade telepath. Master of psi, no less." My mind went red as I remembered how I'd catalogued her physical charms on our first meeting in an effort to find out whether she were esper or telepath. Marian had fine control; her mind must have positively seethed at my invasion of her privacy. I did not want to meet Marian face to face right now, but there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Phillip left his pump and waved for me to follow. He took off in his jeep and I trailed him to the farmhouse. We went through a dim area that was almost the ideal shape for a home. The ring was not complete, but the open part faced the fields behind the house so that good privacy was ensured for all practical purposes. On the steps of the verandah stood Marian. Sight of her was enough to make me forget my self-accusation of a few moments ago. She stood tall and lissome, the picture of slender, robust health. "Come in, Steve," she said, holding out her hand. I took it. Her grip was firm and hard, but it was gentle. I knew that she could have pulped my hand if she squeezed hard. "I'm very happy to see that rumor is wrong and that you're not--suffering--from Mekstrom's Disease," I told her. "So now you know, Steve. Too bad." "Why?" "Because it adds a load to all of us. Even you." She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then said, "Well, come on in and relax, Steve. We'll talk it out." We all went inside. On a divan in the living room, covered by a light blanket, resting in a very light snooze, was a woman. Her face was turned away from me, but the hair and the line of the figure and the-- #Catherine!# She turned and sat up at once, alive and shocked awake. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes with swift knuckles and then looked over her hands at me. "Steve!" she cried, and all the world and the soul of her was in the throb of her voice. XII Catherine took one unsteady step towards me and then came forward with a rush. She hurled herself into my arms, pressed herself against me, held me tight. It was like being attacked by a bulldozer. Phillip stayed my back against her headlong rush or I would have been thrown back out through the door, across the verandah, and into the middle of the yard. The strength of her crushed my chest and wrenched my spine. Her lips crushed mine. I began to black out from the physical hunger of a woman who did not know the extent of her new-found body. All that Catherine remembered was that once she held me to the end of her strength and yearned for more. To hold me that way now meant--death. Her body was the same slenderness, but the warm softness was gone. It was a flesh-warm waist of flexible steel. I was being held by a statue of bronze, animated by some monster servo-mechanism. This was no woman. Phillip and Marian pried her away from me before she broke my back. Phillip led her away, whispering softly in her ear. Marian carried me to the divan and let me down on my face gently. Her hands were gentle as she pressed the air back into my lungs and soothed away the awful wrench in my spine. Gradually I came alive again, but there was pain left that made me gasp at every breath. Then the physical hurt went away, leaving only the mental pain; the horror of knowing that the girl that I loved could never hold me in her arms. I shuddered. All that I wanted out of this life was marriage with Catherine, and now that I had found her again, I had to face the fact that the first embrace would kill me. I cursed my fate just as any invalid has cursed the malady that makes him a responsibility and a burden to his partner instead of a joy and helpmeet. Like the helpless, I didn't want it; I hadn't asked for it; nor had I earned it. Yet all I could do was to rail against the unfairness of the unwarranted punishment. Without knowing that I was asking, I cried out, "But why?" in a plaintive voice. In a gentle tone, Marian replied: "Steve, you cannot blame yourself. Catherine was lost to you before you met her at her apartment that evening. What she thought to be a callous on her small toe was really the initial infection of Mekstrom's Disease. We're all psi-sensitive to Mekstrom's Disease, Steve. So when you cracked up and Dad and Phil went on the dead run to help, they caught a perception of it. Naturally we had to help her." I must have looked bitter. "Look, Steve," said Phillip slowly. "You wouldn't have wanted us not to help? After all, would you want Catherine to stay with you? So that you could watch her die at the rate of a sixty-fourth of an inch each hour?" "Hell," I snarled, "Someone might have let me know." Phillip shook his head. "We couldn't Steve. You've got to understand our viewpoint." "To heck with your viewpoint!" I roared angrily. "Has anybody ever stopped to consider mine?" I did not give a hoot that they could wind me around a doorknob and tuck my feet in the keyhole. Sure, I was grateful for their aid to Catherine. But why didn't someone stop to think of the poor benighted case who was in the accident ward? The bird that had been traipsing all over hell's footstool trying to get a line on his lost sweetheart. I'd been through the grinder; questioned by the F.B.I., suspected by the police; and I'd been the guy who'd been asked by a grieving, elderly couple, "But can't you remember, son?" Them and their stinking point of view! "Easy, Steve," warned Phillip Harrison. "Easy nothing! What possible justification have you for putting me through my jumps?" "Look, Steve. We're in a precarious position. We're fighting a battle against an unscrupulous enemy, an undercover battle, Steve. If we could get something on Phelps, we'd expose him and his Medical Center like that. Conversely, if we slip a millimeter, Phelps will clip us so hard that the sky will ring. He--damn him--has the Government on his side. We can't afford to look suspicious." "Couldn't you have taken me in too?" He shook his head sadly. "No," he said. "There was a bad accident, you know. The authorities have every right to insist that each and every automobile on the highway be occupied by a minimum of one driver. They also believe that for every accident there must be a victim, even though the damage is no more than a bad case of fright." I could hardly argue with that. Changing the subject, I asked, "but what about the others who just drop out of sight?" "We see to it that plausible letters of explanation are written." "So who wrote me?" I demanded hotly. He looked at me pointedly. "If we'd known about Catherine before, she'd have--disappeared--leaving you a trite letter. But no one could think of a letter to explain her disappearance from an accident, Steve." "Oh fine." "Well, you'd still prefer to find her alive, wouldn't you?" "Couldn't someone tell me?" "And have you radiating the fact like a broadcasting station?" "Why couldn't I have joined her--you--?" He shook his head in the same way that a man shakes it when he is trying to explain _why_ two plus two are four and not maybe five or three and a half. "Steve," he said, "You haven't got Mekstroms' Disease." "How do I get it?" I demanded hotly. "Nobody knows," he said unhappily. "If we did, we'd be providing the rest of the human race with indestructible bodies as fast as we could spread it and take care of them." "But couldn't I have been told _something_?" I pleaded. I must have sounded like a hurt kitten. Marian put her hand on my arm. "Steve," she said, "You'd have been smoothed over, maybe brought in to work for us in some dead area. But then you turned up acting dangerously for all of us." "Who--me?" "By the time you came out for your visit, you were dangerous to us." "What do you mean?" "Let me find out. Relax, will you Steve? I'd like to read you deep. Catherine, you come in with me." "What are we looking for?" "Traces of post-hypnotic suggestion. It'll be hard to find because there will be only traces of a plan, all put in so that it looks like natural, logical reasoning." Catherine looked doubtful. "When would they have the chance?" she asked. "Thorndyke. In the hospital." Catherine nodded and I relaxed. At the beginning I was very reluctant. I didn't mind Catherine digging into the dark and dusty corners of my mind, but Marian Harrison bothered me. "Think of the accident, Steve," she said. Then I managed to lull my reluctant mind by remembering that she was trying to help me. I relaxed mentally and physically and regressed back to the day of the accident. I found it hard even then to go through the love-play and sweet seriousness that went on between Catherine and me, knowing that Marian Harrison was a sort of mental spectator. But I fought down my reticence and went on with it. I practically re-lived the accident. It was easier now that I'd found Catherine again. It was like a cleansing bath. I began to enjoy it. So I went on with my life and adventures right up to the present. Having come to the end, I stopped. Marian looked at Catherine. "Did you get it?" Silence. More silence. Then, "It seems dim. Almost incredulous--that it could be--" with a trail-off into thought again. Phillip snorted. "Make with the chin-music, you two. The rest of us aren't telepaths, you know." "Sorry," said Marian. "It's sort of complicated and hard to figure, you know. What seems to be the case is sort of like this," she went on in an uncertain tone, "We can't find any direct evidence of anything like hypnotic suggestion. The urge to follow what you call the Highways in Hiding is rather high for a mere bump of curiosity, but nothing definite. I think you were probably urged very gently. Catherine objects, saying that it would take a brilliant psycho-telepath to do a job delicate enough to produce the urge without showing the traces of the operation." "Someone of scholar grade in both psychology and telepathy," said Catherine. I thought it over for a moment. "It seems to me that whoever did it--if it was done--was well aware that a good part of this urge would be generated by Catherine's total and unexplicable disappearance. You'd have saved yourselves a lot of trouble--and saved me a lot of heartache if you'd let me know something. God! Haven't you any feelings?" Catherine looked at me from hurt eyes. "Steve," she said quietly, "A billion girls have sworn that they'd rather die than live without their one and only. I swore it too. But when your life's end is shown to you on a microscope slide, love becomes less important. What should I do? Just die? Painfully?" That was handing it to me on a platter. It hurt but I am not chuckleheaded enough to insist that she come with me to die instead of leaving me and living. What really hurt was not knowing. "Steve," said Marian. "You know that we couldn't have told you the truth." "Yeah," I agreed disconsolately. "Let's suppose that Catherine wrote you a letter telling you that she was alive and safe, but that she'd reconsidered the marriage. You were to forget her and all that. What happens next?" Unhappily I told him. "I'd not have believed it." Phillip nodded. "Next would have been a telepath-esper team. Maybe a perceptive with a temporal sense who could retrace that letter back to the point of origin, teamed up with a telepath strong enough to drill a hole through the dead area that surrounds New Washington. Why, even before Rhine Institute, it was sheer folly for a runaway to write a letter. What would it be now?" I nodded. What he said was true, but it did not ease the hurt. "Then on the other hand," he went on in a more cheerful vein, "Let's take another look at us and you, Steve. Tell me, fellow, where are you now?" I looked up at him. Phillip was smiling in a knowing-superior sort of manner. I looked at Marian. She was half-smiling. Catherine looked satisfied. I got it. "Yeah. I'm here." "You're here without having any letters, without leaving any broad trail of suspicion upon yourself. You've not disappeared, Steve. You've been a-running up and down the country all on your own decision. Where you go and what you do is your own business and nobody is going to set up a hue and cry after you. Sure, it took a lot longer this way. But it was a lot safer." He grinned wide then as he went on, "And if you'd like to take some comfort out of it, just remember that you've shown yourself to be quite capable, filled with dogged determination, and ultimately successful." He was right. In fact, if I'd tried the letter-following stunt long earlier, I'd have been here a lot sooner. "All right," I said. "So what do we do now?" "We go on and on and on, Steve, until we're successful." "Successful?" He nodded soberly. "Until we can make every man, woman, and child on the face of this Earth as much physical superman as we are, our job is not finished." I nodded. "I learned a few of the answers at the Macklin Place." "Then this does not come as a complete shock." "No. Not a complete shock. But there are a lot of loose ends still. So the basic theme I'll buy. Scholar Phelps and his Medical Center are busy using their public position to create the nucleus of a totalitarian state, or a physical hierarchy. You and the Highways in Hiding are busy tearing Phelps down because you don't want to see any more rule by the Divine Right of Kings, Dictators, or Family Lines." "Go on, Steve." "Well, why in the devil don't you announce yourselves?" "No good, old man. Look, you yourself want to be a Mekstrom. Even with your grasp of the situation, you resent the fact that you cannot." "You're right." Phillip nodded slowly. "Let's hypothesize for a moment, taking a subject that has nothing to do with Mekstrom's Disease. Let's take one of the old standby science-fiction plots. Some cataclysm is threatening the solar system. The future of the Earth is threatened, and we have only one spacecraft capable of carrying a hundred people to safety--somewhere else. How would you select them?" I shrugged. "Since we're hypothecating, I suppose that I'd select the more healthy, the more intelligent, the more virile, the more--" I struggled for another category and then let it stand right there because I couldn't think of another at that instant. Phillip agreed. "Health and intelligence and all the rest being pretty much a matter of birth and upbringing, how can you explain to Wilbur Zilch that Oscar Hossenpfeiffer has shown himself smarter and healthier and therefore better stock for survival? Maybe you can, but the end-result is that Wilbur Zilch slaughters Oscar Hossenpfeiffer. This either provides an opening for Zilch, or if he is caught at it, it provides Zilch with the satisfaction of knowing that he's stopped the other guy from getting what he could not come by honestly." "So what has this to do with Mekstrom's Disease and supermen?" "The day that we--and I mean either of us--announces that we can 'cure' Mekstrom's Disease and make physical supermen of the former victims, there will be a large scream from everybody to give them the same treatment. No, we'll tell them, we can't cure anybody who hasn't caught it. Then some pedagogue will stand up and declare that we are suppressing information. This will be believed by enough people to do us more harm than good. Darn it, we're not absolutely indestructible, Steve. We can be killed. We could be wiped out by a mob of angry citizens who saw in us a threat to their security. Neither we of the Highways nor Phelps of The Medical Center have enough manpower to be safe." "So that I'll accept. The next awkward question comes up: What are we going to do with me?" "You've agreed that we cannot move until we know how to inoculate healthy flesh. We need normal humans, to be our guinea pigs. Will you help bring to the Earth's People the blessing that is now denied them?" "If you are successful, Steve," said Marian, "You'll go down in History along with Otto Mekstrom. You could be the turning point of the human race, you know." "And if I fail?" Phillip Harrison's face took on a hard and determined look. "Steve, there can be no failure. We shall go on and on until we have success." That was a fine prospect. Old guinea-pig Cornell, celebrating his seventieth birthday as the medical experimentation went on and on. Catherine was leaning forward, her eyes bright. "Steve," she cried, "You've just _got_ to!" "Just call me the unwilling hero," I said in a drab voice. "And put it down that the condemned specimen drank a hearty dinner. I trust that there is a drink in the house." There was enough whiskey in the place to provide the new specimen with a near-total anesthesia. The evening was spent in forced badinage, shallow laughter, and a pointed avoidance of the main subject. The whiskey was good; I took it undiluted and succeeded in getting boiled to the eyebrows before they carted me off to bed. I did not sleep well despite my anesthesia. There was too much on my mind and very little of it was the fault of the Harrisons. One of the things that I had to face was the cold fact that part of Catherine's lack of communication with me was caused by logic and good sense. Both History and Fiction are filled with cases where love was set aside because consummation was impossible for any number of good reasons. So I slept fitfully, and my dreams were as unhappy as the thoughts I had during my waking moments. Somehow I realized that I'd have been far better off if I'd been able to forget Catherine after the accident, if I'd been able to resist the urge to follow the Highways in Hiding, if I'd never known that those ornamental road signs were something more than the desire of some road commissioner to beautify the countryside. But no, I had to go and poke my big bump of curiosity into the problem. So here I was, resentful as all hell because I was denied the pleasure of living in the strong body of a Mekstrom. It was not fair. Although Life itself is seldom fair, it seemed to me that Life was less fair to me than to others. And then to compound my feelings of persecution, I woke up once about three in the morning with a strong urge to take a perceptive dig down below. I should have resisted it, but of course, no one has ever been able to resist the urge of his sense of perception. Down in the living room, Catherine was crying on Phillip Harrison's shoulder. He held her gently with one arm around her slender waist and he was stroking her hair softly with his other hand. I couldn't begin to dig what was being said, but the tableau was unmistakable. She leaned back and looked at him as he said something. Her head moved in a 'No' motion as she took a deep breath for another bawl. She buried her face in his neck and sobbed. Phillip held her close for a moment and then loosed one hand to find a handkerchief for her. He wiped her eyes gently and talked to her until she shook her head in a visible effort to shake away both the tears and the unhappy thoughts. Eventually he lit two cigarettes and handed one to her. Side by side they walked to the divan and sat down close together. Catherine leaned against him gently and he put his arm over her shoulders and hugged her to him. She relaxed, looking unhappy, but obviously taking comfort in the strength and physical presence of him. It was a hell of a thing to dig in my mental condition. I drifted off to a sleep filled with unhappy dreams while they were still downstairs. Frankly, I forced myself into fitful sleep because I did not want to stay awake to follow them. As bad as the nightmare quality of my dreams were, they were better for me than the probable reality. * * * * * Oh, I'd been infernally brilliant when I uncovered the first secret of the Highways in Hiding. I found out that I did not know one-tenth of the truth. They had a network of Highways that would make the Department of Roads and Highways look like a backwood, second-rate, political organization. I'd believed, for instance, that the Highways were spotted only along main arteries to and from their Way Stations. The truth was that they had a complete system from one end of the country to the other. Lanes led from Maine and from Florida into a central main Highway that laid across the breadth of the United States. Then from Washington and from Southern California another branching network met this main Highway. Lesser lines served Canada and Mexico. The big Main Trunk ran from New York to San Francisco with only one large major division: A heavy line that led down to a place in Texas called _Homestead_. Homestead, Texas, was a big center that made Scholar Phelps' Medical Center look like a Teeny Weeny Village by comparison. We drove in Marian's car. My rented car, of course, was returned to the agency and my own bus would be ferried out as soon as it could be arranged so that I'd not be without personal transportation in Texas. Catherine remained in Wisconsin because she was too new at being a Mekstrom to know how to conduct herself so that the fact of her super-powerful body did not cause a lot of slack jaws and high suspicion. We drove along the Highways to Homestead, carrying a bag of the Mekstrom Mail. The trip was uneventful. XIII Since this account of my life and adventures is not being written without some plan, it is no mere coincidence that this particular section comes under Chapter Thirteen. Old Unlucky Thirteen covers ninety days which I consider the most dismal ninety days of my life. Things, which had been going along smoothly had, suddenly got worse. We started with enthusiasm. They cut and they dug and they poked needles into me and trimmed out bits of my hide for slides. I helped them by digging my own flesh and letting their better telepaths read my results for their records. They were nice to me. I got the best of everything. But being nice to me was not enough; it sort of made me feel like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. They were so over-strong that they did not know their own strength. This was especially true of the youngsters of Mekstrom parents. I tried to re-diaper a baby one night and got my ring finger gummed for my efforts. It was like wrestling Bad Cyril in a one-fall match, winner take all. As the days added up into weeks, their hope and enthusiasm began to fade. The long list of proposed experiments dwindled and it became obvious that they were starting to work on brand new ideas. But brand new ideas are neither fast in arriving nor high in quantity, and time began to hang dismally heavy. They began to avoid my eyes. They stopped discussing their attempts on me; I no longer found out what they were doing and how they hoped to accomplish the act. They showed the helplessness that comes of failure, and this feeling of utter futility was transmitted to me. At first I was mentally frantic at the idea of failure, but as the futile days wore on and the fact was practically shoved down my throat, I was forced to admit that there was no future for Steve Cornell. I began at that time to look forward to my visit to reorientation. Reorientation is a form of mental suicide. Once reoriented, the problems that make life intolerable are forgotten, your personality is changed, your grasp of everything is revised, your appreciation of all things comes from an entirely new angle. You are a new person. Then one morning I faced my image in the mirror and came to the conclusion that if I couldn't be Me, I didn't want to be Somebody Else. It is no good to be alive if I am not me, I told my image, who obediently agreed with me. I didn't even wait to argue with Me. I just went out and got into my car and sloped. It was not hard; everybody in Homestead trusted me. XIV I left homestead with a half-formed idea that I was going to visit Bruce, Wisconsin, long enough to say goodbye to Catherine and to release her from any matrimonial involvement she may have felt binding. I did not relish this idea, but I felt that getting it out, done, and agreed was only a duty. But as I hit the road and had time to think, I knew that my half-formed intention was a sort of martyrdom; I was going to renounce myself in a fine welter of tears and then go staggering off into the setting sun to die of my mental wounds. I took careful stock of myself and faced the fact that my half-baked idea was a sort of suicide-wish; walking into any Mekstrom way station now was just asking for capture and a fast trip to their reorientation rooms. The facts of my failure and my taking-of-leave would be indication enough for Catherine that I was bowing out. It would be better for Catherine, too, to avoid a fine, high-strung, emotional scene. I remembered the little bawling session in the Harrison living room that night; Catherine would not die for want of a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. In fact, as she'd said pragmatically, well balanced people never die of broken hearts. Having finally convinced myself of the validity of this piece of obvious logic, I suddenly felt a lot better. My morose feeling faded away; my conviction of utter uselessness died; and my half-formed desire to investigate a highly hypothetical Hereafter took an abrupt about-face. And in place of this collection of undesirable self-pities came a much nicer emotion. It was a fine feeling, that royal anger that boiled up inside of me. I couldn't lick 'em and I couldn't join 'em, so I was going out to pull something down, even if it all came down around my own ears. I stopped long enough to check the Bonanza .375 both visually and perceptively and then loaded it full. I consulted a road map to chart a course. Then I took off with the coal wide open and the damper rods all the way out and made the wheels roll towards the East. I especially gave all the Highways a very wide berth. I went down several, but always in the wrong direction. And in the meantime, I kept my sense of perception on the alert for any pursuit. I drove with my eyes alone. I could have made it across the Mississippi by nightfall if I'd not taken the time to duck Highway signs. But when I got good, and sick, and tired of driving, I was not very far from the River. I found a motel in a rather untravelled spot and sacked in for the night. I awoke at the crack of dawn with a feeling of impending _something_. It was not doom, because any close-danger would have nudged me on the bump of perception. Nor was it good, because I'd have awakened looking forward to it. Something odd was up and doing. I dressed hastily, and as I pulled my clothing on I took a slow dig at the other cabins in the motel. Number One contained a salesman type, I decided, after digging through his baggage. Number Two was occupied by an elderly couple who were loaded with tourist-type junk and four or five cameras. Number Three harbored a stopover truck driver and Number Four was almost overflowing with a gang of schoolgirls packed sardine-wise in the single bed. Number Five was mine. Number Six was vacant. Number Seven was also vacant but the bed was tumbled and the water in the washbowl was still running out, and the door was still slamming, and the little front steps were still clicking to the fast clip of high heels, and---- I hauled myself out of my cabin on a dead gallop and made a fast line for my car. I hit the car, clawed myself inside, wound up the turbine and let the old heap in gear in one unbroken series of motions. The wheels spun and sent back a hail of gravel, then they took a bite out of the parking lot and the take-off snapped my head back. Both esper and eyesight were very busy cross-stitching a crooked course through the parking lot between the parked cars and the trees that were intended to lend the outfit a rustic atmosphere. So I was too busy to take more than a vague notice of a hand that clamped onto the doorframe until the door opened and closed again. By then I was out on the highway and I could relax a bit. "Steve," she said, "why do you do these things?" Yeah, it was Marian Harrison. "I didn't ask to get shoved into this mess," I growled. "You didn't ask to be born, either," she said. I didn't think the argument was very logical, and I said so. "Life wasn't too hard to bear until I met you people," I told her sourly. "Life would be very pleasant if you'd go away. On the other hand, life is all I've got and it's far better than the alternative. So if I'm making your life miserable, that goes double for me." "Why not give it up?" she asked me. I stopped the car. I eyed her dead center, eye to eye until she couldn't take it any more. "What would you like me to just give up, Marian? Shall I please everybody by taking a bite of my hip-pocket artillery sights whilst testing the trigger pull with one forefinger? Will it make anybody happy if I walk into the nearest reorientation museum blowing smoke out of my nose and claiming that I am a teakettle that's gotta be taken off the stove before I blow my lid?" Marian's eyes dropped. "Do you yourself really expect me to seek blessed oblivion?" She shook her head slowly. "Then for the love of God, what do you expect of me?" I roared. "As I am, I'm neither flesh nor fish; just foul. I'm not likely to give up, Marian. If I'm a menace to you and to your kind, it's just too tough. But if you want me out of your hair, you'll have to wrap me up in something suitable for framing and haul me kicking and screaming to your mind-refurbishing department. Because I'm not having any on my own. Understand?" "I understand, Steve," she said softly. "I know you; we all know you and your type. You can't give up. You're unable to." "Not when I've been hypnoed into it," I said. Marian's head tossed disdainfully. "Thorndyke's hypnotic suggestion was very weak," she explained. "He had to plant the idea in such a way as to remain unidentified afterwards. No, Steve, your urge has always been your own personal drive. All that Thorndyke did was to point you slightly in our direction and give you a nudge. You did the rest." "Well, you're a telepath. Maybe you're also capable of planting a post-hypnotic suggestion that I forget the whole idea." "I'm not," she said with a sudden flare. I looked at her. Not being a telepath I couldn't read a single thought, but it was certain that she was telling the truth, and telling it in such a manner as to be convincing. Finally I said, "Marian, if you know that I'm not to be changed by logic or argument, why do you bother?" For a full minute she was silent, then her eyes came up and gave it back to me with their electric blue. "For the same reason that Scholar Phelps hoped to use you against us," she said. "Your fate and your future is tied up with ours whether you turn out to be friend or enemy." I grunted. "Sounds like a soap opera, Marian," I told her bitterly. "Will Catherine find solace in Phillip's arms? Will Steve catch Mekstrom's Disease? Will the dastardly Scholar Phelps--" "Stop it!" she cried. "All right. I'll stop as soon as you tell me what you intend to do with me now that you've caught up with me again." She smiled. "Steve, I'm going along with you. Partly to play the telepath-half of your team. If you'll trust me to deliver the truth. And partly to see that you don't get into trouble that you can't get out of again." My mind curled its lip. Pappy had tanned my landing gear until I was out of the habit of using mother for protection against the slings and arrows of outrageous schoolchums. I'd not taken sanctuary behind a woman's skirts since I was eight. So the idea of running under the protection of a woman went against the grain, even though I knew that she was my physical superior by no sensible proportion. Being cared for physically by a dame of a hundred-ten-- "Eighteen." --didn't sit well on me. "Do you believe me, Steve?" "I've got to. You're here to stay. I'm a sucker for a good-looking woman anyway, it seems. They tell me anything and I'm not hardhearted enough to even indicate that I don't believe them." She took my arm impulsively; then she let me go before she pinched it off at the elbow. "Steve," she said earnestly, "Believe me and let me be your--" #Better half?# I finished sourly. "Please don't," she said plaintively. "Steve, you've simply _got_ to trust _somebody_!" I looked into her face coldly. "The hardest job in the world for a non-telepath is to locate someone he can trust. The next hardest is to explain that to a telepath; because telepaths can't see any difficulty in weeding out the non-trustworthy. Now--" "You still haven't faced the facts." "Neither have you, Marian. You intend to go along with me, ostensibly to help me in whatever I intend to do. That's fine. I'll accept it. But you know good and well that I intend to carry on and on until something cracks. Now, tell me honestly, are you going along to help me crack something wide open, or just to steer me into channels that will not result in a crack-up for your side?" Marian Harrison looked down for a moment; I didn't need telepathy to know that I'd touched the sore spot. Then she looked up and said, "Steve, more than anything, I intend to keep you out of trouble. You should know by now that there is very little you can really do to harm either side of our own private little war." #And if I can't harm either side, I can hardly do either side any good.# She nodded. #Yet I must be of some importance.# She nodded again. At that point I almost gave up. I'd been around this circle so many times in the past half-year that I knew how the back of my head looked. Always, the same old question. #_Cherchez le angle_,# I thought in bum French. Something I had was important enough to both sides to make them keep me on the loose instead of erasing me and my nuisance value. So far as I could see, I was as useless to either side as a coat of protective paint laid on stainless steel. I was immune to Mekstrom's Disease; the immunity of one who has had everything tried on him that scholars of the disease could devise. About the only thing that ever took place was the sudden disappearance of everybody that I came in contact with. Marian touched my arm gently. "You mustn't think like that, Steve," she said gently. "You've done enough useless self-condemnation. Can't you stop accusing yourself of some evil factor? Something that really is not so?" "Not until I know the truth," I replied. "I certainly can't dig it; I'm no telepath. Perhaps if I were, I'd not be in this awkward position." Again her silence proved to me that I'd hit a touchy spot. "What am I?" I demanded sourly. "Am I a great big curse? What have I done, other than to be present just before several people turn up missing? Makes me sort of a male Typhoid Mary, doesn't it?" "Now, Steve--" "Well, maybe that's the way I feel. Everything I put my great big clutching hands on turns dark green and starts to rot. Regardless of which side they're on, it goes one, two, three, four; Catherine, Thorndyke, You, Nurse Farrow." "Steve, what on Earth are you talking about?" I smiled down at her in a crooked sort of quirk. "You, of course, have not the faintest idea of what I'm thinking." "Oh, Steve--" "And then again maybe you're doing your best to lead my puzzled little mind away from what you consider a dangerous subject?" "I'd hardly do that--" "Sure you would. I'd do it if our positions were reversed. I don't think it un-admirable to defend one's own personal stand, Marian. But you'll not divert me this time. I have a hunch that I am a sort of male Typhoid Mary. Let's call me old Mekstrom Steve. The carrier of Mekstrom's Disease, who can innocently or maliciously go around handing it out to anybody that I contact. Is that it, Marian?" "It's probably excellent logic, Steve. But it isn't true." I eyed her coldly. "How can I possibly believe you?" "That's the trouble," she said with a plaintive cry. "You can't. You've got to believe me on faith, Steve." I smiled crookedly. "Marian," I said, "That's just the right angle to take. Since I cannot read your mind, I must accept the old appeal to the emotions. I must tell myself that Marian Harrison just simply could not lie to me for many reasons, among which is that people do not lie to blind men nor cause the cripple any hurt. Well, phooey. Whatever kind of gambit is being played here, it is bigger than any of its parts or pieces. I'm something between a queen and a pawn, Marian; a piece that can be sacrificed at any time to further the progress of the game. Slipping me a lie or two to cause me to move in some desired direction should come as a natural." "But why would we lie to you?" she asked, and then she bit her lip; I think that she slipped, that she hadn't intended to urge me into deeper consideration of the problem lest I succeed in making a sharp analysis. After all, the way to keep people from figuring things out is to stop them from thinking about the subject. That's the first rule. Next comes the process of feeding them false information if the First Law cannot be invoked. "Why would you lie to me?" I replied in a sort of sneer. I didn't really want to sneer but it came naturally. "In an earlier age it might not be necessary." "What?" she asked in surprise. "Might not be necessary," I said. "Let's assume that we are living in the mid-Fifties, before Rhine. Steve Cornell turns up being a carrier of a disease that is really a blessing instead of a curse. In such a time, Marian, either side could sign me up openly as a sort of missionary; I could go around the country inoculating the right people, those citizens who have the right kind of mind, attitude, or whatever-factor. Following me could be a clean-up corps to collect the wights who'd been inoculated by my contact. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?" Without waiting for either protest or that downcast look of agreement, I went on: "But now we have perception and telepathy all over the place. So Steve Cornell, the carrier, must be pushed around from pillar to post, meeting people and inoculating them without ever knowing what he is doing. Because once he knows what he is doing, his usefulness is ended in this world of Rhine Institute." "Steve--" she started, but I interrupted again. "About all I have to do now is to walk down any main street radiating my suspicions," I said bitterly. "And it's off to Medical Center for Steve--unless the Highways catch me first." Very quietly, Marian said, "We really dislike to use reorientation on people. It changes them so--" "But that's what I'm headed for, isn't it?" I demanded flatly. "I'm sorry, Steve." Angrily I went on, not caring that I'd finally caught on and by doing so had sealed my own package. "So after I have my mind ironed out smoothly, I'll still go on and on from pillar to post providing newly inoculated Mekstroms for your follow-up squad." She looked up at me and there were tears in her eyes. "We were all hoping--" she started. "Were you?" I asked roughly. "Were you all working to innoculate me at Homestead, or were you really studying me to find out what made me a carrier instead of a victim?" "Both, Steve," she said, and there was a ring of honesty in her tone. I had to believe her, it made sense. "Dismal prospect, isn't it?" I asked. "For a guy that's done nothing wrong." "We're all sorry." "Look," I said with a sudden thought, "Why can't I still go on? I could start a way station of some sort, on some pretext, and go on innoculating the public as they come past. Then I could go on working for you and still keep my right mind." She shook her head. "Scholar Phelps knows," she said. "Above all things we must keep you out of his hands. He'd use you for his own purpose." I grunted sourly. "He has already and he will again," I told her. "Not only that, but Phelps has had plenty of chance to collect me on or off the hook. So what you fear does not make sense." "It does now," she told me seriously. "So long as you did not suspect your own part in the picture, you could do more good for Phelps by running free. Now you know and Phelps' careful herding of your motions won't work." "Don't get it." "Watch," she said with a shrug. "They'll try. I don't dare experiment, Steve, or I'd leave you right now. You'd find out very shortly that you're with me because I got here first." "And knowing the score makes me also dangerous to your Highways? Likely to bring 'em out of Hiding?" "Yes." "So now that I've dumped over the old apple cart, I can assume that you're here to take me in." "What else can I do, Steve?" she said unhappily. I couldn't answer that. I just sat there looking at her and trying to remember that her shapely one hundred and eighteen pounds were steel hard and monster strong and that she could probably carry me under one arm all the way to Homestead without breathing hard. I couldn't cut and run; she could outrun me. I couldn't slug her on the jaw and get away; I'd break my hand. The Bonanza .375 would probably stun her, but I have not the cold blooded viciousness to pull a gun on a woman and drill her. I grunted sourly, that weapon had been about as useful to me as a stuffed bear or an authentic Egyptian Obelisk. "Well, I'm not going," I said stubbornly. She looked at me in surprise. "What are you going to do?" she asked me. I felt a glow of self-confidence. If I could not run loose with guilty knowledge of my being a Mekstrom Carrier, it was equally impossible for anybody to kidnap me and carry me across the country. I'd radiate like mad; I'd complain about the situation at every crossroad, at every filling station, before every farmer. I'd complain mentally and bitterly, and sooner or later someone would get suspicious. "Don't think like an idiot," she told me sharply. "You drove across the country before, remember? How many people did you convince?" "I wasn't trying, then--" "How about the people in the hotel in Denver?" she asked me pointedly. "What good did you do there?" #Very little, but--# "One of the advantages of a telepath is that we can't be taken by surprise," she informed me. "Because no one can possibly work without plans of some kind." "One of the troubles of a telepath," I told her right back, "is that they get so confounded used to knowing what is going to happen next that it takes all the pleasant element of surprise out of their lives. That makes 'em dull and--" The element of surprise came in through the back window, passed between us and went _Splat!_ against the wind-shield. There was the sound like someone chipping ice with a spike followed by the distant bark of a rifle. A second slug came through the back window about the time that the first one landed on the floor of the car. The second slug, not slowed by the shatter-proof glass in the rear, went through the shatter-proof glass in the front. A third slug passed through the same tunnel. These were warning shots. He'd missed us intentionally. He'd proved it by firing three times through the same hole, from beyond my esper range. I wound up the machinery and we took off. Marian cried something about not being foolish, but her words were swept out through the hole in the rear window, just above the marks on the pavement caused by my tires as we spun the wheels. XV "Steve, stop it!" cried Marian as soon as she could get her breath. "Nuts," I growled. I took a long curve on the outside wheels and ironed out again. "He isn't after our corpse, honey. He's after our hide. I don't care for any." The fourth shot went singing off the pavement to one side. It whined into the distance making that noise that sets the teeth on edge and makes one want to duck. I lowered the boom on the go pedal and tried to make the meter read off the far end of the scale; I had a notion that the guy behind might shoot the tires out if we were going slow enough so that a blowout wouldn't cause a bad wreck; but he probably wouldn't do it once I got the speed up. He was not after Marian. Marian could walk out of any crack-up without a bruise, but I couldn't. We went roaring around a curve. I fought the wheel into a nasty double 's' curve to swing out and around a truck, then back on my own side of the road again to avoid an oncoming car. I could almost count the front teeth of the guy driving the car as we straightened out with a coat of varnish to spare. I scared everybody in all three vehicles, including me. Then I passed a couple of guys standing beside the road; one of them waved me on, the other stood there peering past me down the road. As we roared by, another group on the other side of the highway came running out hauling a big old hay wagon. They set the wagon across the road and then sloped into the ditch on either side of it. I managed to dig the bare glimmer of firearms before I had to yank my perception away from them and slam it back on the road in front. I was none too soon, because dead ahead by a thousand feet or so, they were hauling a second road block out. Marian, not possessed of esper, cried out as soon as she read this new menace in my mind. I rode the brakes easily and came to a stop long before we hit it. In back sounded a crackle of rifle fire; in front, three men came out waving their rifles at us. I whipped the car back, spun it in a seesaw, and took off back towards the first road block. Half way back I whirled my car into a rough sideroad just as the left hand rear tire went out with a roar. The car sagged and dragged me to a stop with my nose in a little ditch. The heap hadn't stopped rocking yet before I was out and on the run. "Steve!" cried Marian. "Come back!" #To heck with it.# I kept right on running. Before me by a couple of hundred yards was a thicket of trees; I headed that way fast. I managed to sling a dig back; Marian was joining the others; pointing in my direction. One of them raised the rifle but she knocked it down. I went on running. It looked as though I'd be all right so long as I didn't get in the way of an accidental shot. My life was once more charmed with the fact that no one wanted me dead. The thicket of woods was not as thick as I'd have liked. From a distance they'd seemed almost impenetrable, but when I was running through them towards the center, they looked pitifully thin. I could see light from any direction and the floor of the woods was trimmed, the underbrush cleaned out, and a lot of it was tramped down. Ahead of me I perceived a few of them coming towards the woods warily, behind me there was another gang closing in. I began to feel like the caterpillar on the blade of grass in front of the lawn mower. I tried to hide under a deadfall, knowing that it was poor protection against rifle fire. I hauled out the Bonanza and checked the cylinder. I didn't know which side I was going to shoot at, but that didn't bother me. I was going to shoot at the first side that got close. A couple of shots whipped by over my head, making noises like someone snapping a bullwhip. I couldn't tell which direction they came from; I was too busy trying to stuff my feet into a gopher hole under my deadfall. I cast around the thicket with my sense of perception and caught the layout. Both sides were spread out, stalking forward like infantry advancing through disputed ground. Now and then one of them would raise his rifle and fire at some unexpected motion. This, I gathered, was more nervousness than fighting skill because no group of telepaths and/or perceptives would be so jittery on the trigger if they weren't basically nervous. They should, as I did, have the absolute position of both the enemy and their own side. With a growing nervous sweat I dug their advances. They were avoiding my position, trying to encircle me by making long semicircular marches, hoping to get between me and the other side. This was a rough maneuver, sort of like two telepaths playing chess. Both sides knew to a minute exactly what the other had in mind, where he was, and what he was going to do about his position. But they kept shifting, feinting and counter-advancing, trying to gain the advantage of number or position so that the other would be forced to retreat. It became a war of nerves; a game of seeing who had the most guts; who could walk closer to the muzzle of an enemy rifle without getting hit. Their rifles were mixed; there were a couple of deer guns, a nice 35-70 Express that fired a slug slightly smaller than a panetella cigar, a few shotguns, a carbine sports rifle that looked like it might have been a Garand with the barrel shortened by a couple of inches, some revolvers, one nasty-looking Colt .45 Automatic, and so on. I shivered down in my little hideout; as soon as the shooting started in earnest, they were going to clean out this woods but good. It was going to be a fine barrage, with guns going off in all directions, because it is hard to keep your head in a melee. Esper and telepathy go by the board when shooting starts. I still didn't know which side was which. The gang behind me were friends of Marian Harrison; but that did not endear them to me any more than knowing that the gang in front were from Scholar Phelps Medical Center or some group affiliated with him. In the midst of it, I managed to bet myself a new hat that old Scholar Phelps didn't really know what was going on. He would be cagey enough to stay ignorant of any overt strife or any other skullduggery that could be laid at his door. Then on one edge of the woodsy section, two guys of equal damfool-factor advanced, came up standing, and faced one another across fifty feet of open woods. Their rifles came up and yelled at one another like a string of firecrackers; they wasted a lot of powder and lead by not taking careful aim. One of them emptied his rifle and started to fade back to reload, the other let him have it in the shoulder. It spun the guy around and dumped him on his spine. His outflung hand slammed his rifle against a tree, which broke it. He gave a painful moan and started to crawl back, his arm hanging limp-like but not broken. From behind me came a roar and a peltering of shotgun pellets through the trees; it was answered by the heavy bark of the 35-70 Express. I'm sure that in the entire artillery present, the only rifle heavy enough to really damage those Mekstroms was that Express, which would stop a charging rhino. When you get down to facts, my Bonanza .375 packed a terrific wallop but it did not have the shocking power of the heavy big-game rifle. Motion caught my perception to one side; two of them had let go shotgun blasts from single-shot guns. They were standing face to face swinging their guns like a pair of axemen; swing, chop! swing, chop! and with each swing their guns were losing shape, splinters from the butts, and bits of machinery. Their clothing was in ribbons from the shotgun blasts. But neither of them seemed willing to give up. There was not a sign of blood; only a few places on each belly that looked shiny-like. On the other side of me, one guy let go with a rifle that slugged the other bird in the middle. He folded over the shot and his middle went back and down, which whipped his head over, back, and down where it hit the ground with an audible thump. The first guy leaped forward just as the victim of his attack sat up, rubbed his belly ruefully, and drew a hunting knife with his other hand. The first guy took a running dive at the supine one, who swung the hunting knife in a vicious arc. The point hit the chest of the man coming through the air but it stopped as though the man had been wearing plate armor. You could dig the return shock that stunned the knife-wielder's arm when the point turned. All it did was rip the clothing. Then the pair of them were at it in a free-for-all that made the woods ring. This deadly combat did not last long. One of them took aim with a fist and let the other have it. The rifle shot hadn't stopped him but the hard fist of another Mekstrom laid him out colder than a mackerel iced for shipment. The deadly 35-70 Express roared again, and there started a concentration of troops heading towards the point of origin. I had a hunch that the other side did not like anybody to be playing quite as rough as a big-game gun. Someone might really get hurt. By now they were all in close and swinging; now and then someone would stand off and gain a few moments of breathing space by letting go with a shotgun or knocking someone off of his feet with a carbine. There was some bloodshed, too; not all these shots bounced. But from what I could perceive, none of them were fatal. Just painful. The guy who'd been stopped first with the rifle slug and then the other Mekstrom's fist was still out cold and bleeding lightly from the place in his stomach. A bit horrified, I perceived that the pellet was embedded about a half-inch in. The two birds who'd been hacking at one another with the remains of their shotguns had settled it barehanded, too. The loser was groaning and trying to pull himself together. The shiny spots on his chest were shotgun pellets stuck in the skin. It was one heck of a fight. Mekstroms could play with guns and knives and go around taking swings at one another with hunks of tree or clubbed rifles, or they could stand off and hurl boulders. Such a battlefield was no place for a guy named Steve Cornell. By now all good sense and fine management was gone. If I'd been spotted, they'd have taken a swing at me, forgetting that I am no Mekstrom. So I decided that it was time for Steve to leave. I cast about me with my perception; the gang that Marian had joined had advanced until they were almost even with my central position; there were a couple of swinging matches to either side and one in front of me. I wondered about Marian; somehow I still don't like seeing a woman tangled up in a free-for-all. Marian was out of esper range, which was all right with me. I crawled out of my hideout cautiously, stood up in a low crouch and began to run. A couple of them caught sight of me and put up a howl, but they were too busy with their personal foe to take off after me. One of them was free; I doubled him up and dropped him on his back with a slug from my Bonanza .375. Somehow it did not seem rough or vicious to shoot since there was nothing lethal in it. It was more like a game of cowboy and Indian than deadly earnest warfare. Then I was out and free of them all, out of the woods and running like a deer. I cursed the car with its blown out tire; the old crate had been a fine bus, nicely broken in and conveniently fast. But it was as useful to me now as a pair of skids. A couple of them behind me caught on and gave chase. I heard cries for me to stop, which I ignored like any sensible man. Someone cut loose with a roar; the big slug from the Express whipped past and went _Sprang!_ off a rock somewhere ahead. It only added a few more feet per second to my flight. If they were going to play that rough, I didn't care to stay. I fired an unaimed shot over my shoulder, which did no good at all except for lifting my morale. I hoped that it would slow them a bit, but if it did I couldn't tell. Then I leaped over a ditch and came upon a cluster of cars. I dug at them as I approached and selected one of the faster models that still had its key dangling from the lock. I was in and off and away as fast as a scared man can move. They were still yelling and fighting in the woods when I raced out of my range. * * * * * The heap I'd jumped was a Clinton Special with rock-like springs and a low slung frame that hugged the ground like a clam. I was intent upon putting as many miles as I could between me and the late engagement in as short a time as possible, and the Clinton seemed especially apt until I remembered that the figure 300 on the dial meant kilometers instead of miles per hour. Then I let her out a bit more and tried for the end of the dial. The Clinton tried with me, and I had to keep my esper carefully aimed at the road ahead because I was definitely overdriving my eyesight and reaction-time. I was so intent upon making feet that I did not notice the jetcopter that came swooping down over my head until the howl of its vane-jets raised hell with my eardrums. Then I slowed the car and lifted my perception at the same time for a quick dig. The jetcopter was painted Policeman Blue and it sported a large gold-leaf on its side, and inside the cabin were two hard-faced gentlemen wearing uniforms with brass buttons and that Old Bailey look in their eye. The one on the left was jingling a pair of handcuffs. They passed over my head at about fifteen feet, swooped on past by a thousand, and dropped a road-block bomb. It flared briefly and let out with a billow of thick red smoke. I leaned on the brakes hard enough to stand the Clinton up on its nose, because if I shoved my front bumper through that cloud of red smoke it was a signal for them to let me have it. I came to a stop about a foot this side of the bomb, and the jetcopter came down hovering. Its vanes blew the smoke away and the 'copter landed in front of my swiped Clinton Special. The policeman was both curt and angry. "Driver's ticket, registration, and maybe your pilot's license," he snapped. Well, that was _it_. I had a driver's ticket all right, _but_ it did not permit me to drive a car that I'd selected out of a group willy nilly. The car registration was in the glove compartment where it was supposed to be, but what it said did not match what the driver's license claimed. No matter what I said, there would be the Devil to pay. "I'll go quietly, officer," I told him. "Darn' white of you, pilot," he said cynically. He was scribbling on a book of tickets and it was piling up deep. Speeding, reckless driving, violation of ordinance something-or-other by number. Driving a car without proper registration in the absence of the rightful owner (Check for stolen car records) and so on and on and on until it looked like a life term in the local jug. "Move over, Cornell," he said curtly. "I'm taking you in." I moved politely. The only time it pays to be arrogant with the police is long after you've proved them wrong, and then only when you're facing your mirror at home telling yourself what you should have said. I was driven to court; escorted in by the pair of them and seated with one on each side. The sign on the judge's table said: Magistrate Hollister. Magistrate Hollister was an elderly gentleman with a cast iron jaw and a glance as cold as a bucket of snow. He dealt justice with a sharp-edged shovel and his attitude seemed to be that everybody was either guilty as charged or was contemplating some form of evil to be committed as soon as he was out of the sight of Justice. I sat there squirming while he piled the top on a couple whose only crime was parking overtime; I itched from top to bottom while he slapped one miscreant in gaol for turning left in violation of City Ordinance. His next attempt gave a ten dollar fine for failing to come to a full and grinding halt at the sign of the big red light, despite the fact that the criminal was esper to a fine degree and dug the fact that there was no cross-traffic for a half mile. Then His Honor licked his chops and called my name. He speared me with an icicle-eye and asked sarcastically: "Well, Mr. Cornell, with what form of sophistry are you going to explain your recent violations?" I blinked. He aimed a cold glance at the bailiff, who arose and read off the charges against me in a deep, hollow intonation. "Speak up!" he snapped. "Are you guilty or not guilty?" "Guilty," I admitted. He beamed a sort of self-righteous evil. It was easy to see that never in his tenure of office had he ever encountered a criminal as hardened and as vicious as I. Nor one who admitted to his turpitude so blandly. I felt it coming, and it made me itch, and I knew that if I tried to scratch His Honor would take the act as a personal affront. I fought down the crazy desire to scratch everything I could reach and it was hard; about the time His Honor added a charge of endangering human life on the highway to the rest of my assorted crimes, the itch had localized into the ring finger of my left hand. That I could scratch by rubbing it against the seam of my trousers. Then His Honor went on, delivering Lecture Number Seven on Crime, Delinquency, and Grand Larceny. I was going to be an example, he vowed. I was assumed to be esper since no normal--that's the word he used, which indicated that the old bird was a blank and hated everybody who wasn't--human being would be able to drive as though he had eyes mounted a half mile in front of him. Not that my useless life was in danger, or that I was actually not-in-control of my car, but that my actions made for panic among normal--again he used it!--people who were not blessed with either telepathy or perception by a mere accident of birth. The last one proved it; it was not an accident of birth so much as it was proper training, to my way of thinking. Magistrate Hollister hated psi-trained people and was out to make examples of them. He polished off his lecture by pronouncing sentence: "--and the Law provides punishment by a fine not to exceed one thousand dollars, or a sentence of ninety days in jail--_or both_." He rolled the latter off as though he relished the sound of the words. I waited impatiently. The itch on my finger increased; I flung a fast dig at it but there was nothing there but Sophomore's Syndrome. Good old nervous association. It was the finger that little Snoodles, the three-month baby supergirl had munched to a faretheewell. Darned good thing the kid didn't have teeth! But I was old Steve, the immune, the carrier, the-- "Well, Mr. Cornell?" I blinked. "Yes, your honor?" "Which will it be? I am granting you the leniency of selecting which penalty you prefer." I could probably rake up a thousand by selling some stock, personal possessions, and draining my already-weakened bank account. The most valuable of my possessions was parked in a ditch with a blowout and probably a bent frame and even so, I only owned about six monthly payments worth of it. "Your Honor, I will prefer to pay the fine--if you'll grant me time in which to go and collect--" He rapped his desk with his gavel. "Mr. Cornell," he boomed angrily. "A thief cannot be trusted. Within a matter of minutes you could remove yourself from the jurisdiction of this court unless a binding penalty is placed against your person. You may go on your search for money, but only after posting bond--to the same amount as your fine!" _Lenient--?_ "However, unless you are able to pay, I have no recourse but to exact the prison sentence of ninety days. Bailiff--!" I gave up. It even felt sort of good to give up, especially when the turn is called by someone too big to be argued with. No matter what, I was going to take ninety days off, during which I could sit and think and plan and wonder and chew my fingernails. The itch in my finger burned again, deep this time, and not at all easy to satisfy by rubbing it against my trousers. I picked at it with the thumbnail and the nail caught something hard. I looked down at the itching finger and sent my perception into it with as much concentration as I could. My thumbnail had lifted a tiny circle no larger than the head of a pin. Blood was oozing from beneath the lifted rim, and I nervously picked off the tiny patch of hard, hard flesh and watched the surface blood well out into a tiny droplet. My perception told me the truth: It was Mekstrom's Disease and not a doubt. The Immune had caught it! The bailiff tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Come along, Cornell!" And I was going to have ninety days to watch that patch grow at the inexorable rate of one sixty-fourth of an inch per hour! XVI The bailiff repeated, "Come along, Cornell." Then he added sourly, "Or I'll have to slip the cuffs on you." I turned with a helpless shrug. I'd tried to lick 'em and I'd tried to join 'em and I'd failed both. Then, as of this instant when I might have been able to go join 'em, I was headed for the wrong side as soon as I opened my big yap. And if I didn't yelp, I was a dead one anyway. Sooner or later someone in the local jug would latch on to my condition and pack me off to Scholar Phelps' Medical Center. Once more I was in a situation where all I could do was to play it by ear, wait for a break, and see if I could make something out of it. But before I could take more than a step or two toward the big door, someone in the back of the courtroom called out: "Your Honor, I have some vital information in this case." His Honor looked up across the court with a great amount of irritation showing in his face. His voice rasped, "Indeed?" I whirled, shocked. Suavely, Dr. Thorndyke strode down the aisle. He faced the judge and explained who he was and why, then he backed it up with a wallet full of credentials, cards, identification, and so forth. The judge looked the shebang over sourly but finally nodded agreement. Thorndyke smiled self-confidently and then went on, facing me: "It would be against my duty to permit you to incarcerate this miscreant," he said smoothly. "Because Mr. Cornell has Mekstrom's Disease!" Everybody faded back and away from me as though he'd announced me to be the carrier of plague. They looked at me with horror and disgust on their faces, a couple of them began to wipe their hands with handkerchiefs; one guy who'd been standing where I'd dropped my little patch of Mekstrom Flesh backed out of that uncharmed circle. Some of the spectators left hurriedly. His Honor paled. "You're certain?" he demanded of Dr. Thorndyke. "I'm certain. You'll note the blood on his finger; Cornell recently picked off a patch of Mekstrom Flesh no larger than the head of a pin. It was his first sign." The doctor went on explaining, "Normally this early seizure would be difficult to detect, except from a clinical examination. But since I am telepath and Cornell has perception, his own mind told me he was aware of his sorry condition. One only need read his mind, or to dig at the tiny bit of Mekstrom Flesh that he dropped to your floor." The judge eyed me nastily. "Maybe I should add a charge of contaminating a courtroom," he muttered. He was running his eyes across the floor from me to wherever I'd been, trying to locate the little patch. I helped him by not looking at it. The rest of the court faded back from me still farther. I could hardly have been less admired if I'd been made of pure cyanide gas. The judge rapped his gavel sharply. "I parole this prisoner in the custody of Dr. Thorndyke, who as a representative of the Medical Center will remove the prisoner to that place where the proper treatment awaits him." "Now see here--" I started. But His Honor cut me off. "You'll go as I say," he snapped. "Unfortunately, the Law does not permit me to enjoy any cruel or unusual punishments, or I'd insist upon your ninety-day sentence and watch you die painfully. I--Bailiff! Remove this menace before I forget my position here and find myself in contempt of the law I have sworn to uphold. I cannot be impartial before a man who contaminates my Court with the world's most dangerous disease!" I turned to Thorndyke. "All right," I grunted. "You win." He smiled again; I wanted to wipe that smile away with a set of knuckles but I knew that all I'd get would be a broken hand against Thorndyke's stone-hard flesh. "Now, Mr. Cornell," he said with that clinical smoothness, "let's not get the old standard attitude." "Nearly everybody who contracts Mekstrom's Disease," he said to the judge, "takes on a persecution complex as soon as he finds out that he has it. Some of them have even accused me of fomenting some big fantastic plot against them. Please, Mr. Cornell," he went on facing me, "we'll give you the best of treatment that Medical Science knows." "Yeah," I grunted. His Honor rapped on the gavel once more. "Officer Gruenwald," he snapped, "you will accompany the prisoner and Dr. Thorndyke to the Medical Center and having done that you will return to report to me that you have accomplished your mission." Then the judge glared around, rapped once more, and cried, "Case Finished. Next Case!" I felt almost as sorry for the next guy coming in as I felt for myself. His Honor was going to be one tough baby for some days to come. As they escorted me out, a janitor came in and began to swab the floor where I'd been standing. He was using something nicely corrosive that made the icy, judicial eyes water, all of which discomfort was likely to be added to the next law-breaker's sorry lot. * * * * * I was in fine company. Thorndyke was a telepath and Officer Gruenwald was perceptive. They went as a team and gave me about as much chance to escape as if I'd been a horned toad sealed in a cornerstone. Gruenwald, of course, treated me as though my breath was deadly, my touch foul, and my presence evil. In Gruenwald's eyes, the only difference between me and Medusa the Gorgon was that looking at me did not turn him to stone. He kept at least one eye on me almost constantly. I could almost perceive Thorndyke's amusement. With the best of social amenities, he could hardly have spent a full waking day in the company of either a telepath or a perceptive without giving away the fact that he was Mekstrom. But with me to watch over, Officer Gruenwald's mental attention was not to be turned aside to take an impolite dig at his companion. Even if he had, Thorndyke would have been there quickly to turn his attention aside. I've read the early books that contain predictions of how we are supposed to operate. The old boys seemed to have the quaint notion that a telepath should be able at once to know everything that goes on everywhere, and a perceptive should be aware of everything material about him. There should be no privacy. There was to be no defense against the mental peeping Tom. It ain't necessarily so. If Gruenwald had taken a dig at Thorndyke's hide, the doctor would have speared the policeman with a cold, indignant eye and called him for it. Of course, there was no good reason for Gruenwald to take a dig at Thorndyke and so he didn't. So I went along with the status quo and tried to think of some way to break it up. An hour later I was still thinking, and the bleeding on my finger had stopped. Mekstrom Flesh had covered the raw spot with a thin, stone-hard plate that could not be separated visually from the rest of my skin. "As a perceptive," observed Dr. Thorndyke in a professional tone, "you'll notice the patch of infection growing on Mr. Cornell's finger. The rate of growth seems normal; I'll have to check it accurately once I get him to the clinic. In fifty or sixty hours, Mr. Cornell's finger will be solid to the first joint. In ninety days his arm will have become as solid as the arm of a marble statue." I interjected, "And what do we do about it?" He moved his head a bit and eyed me in the rear view mirror. "I hope we can help you, Cornell," he said in a tone of sympathy that was definitely intended to impress Officer Gruenwald with his medical appreciation of the doctor's debt to humanity. "I sincerely hope so. For in doing so, we will serve the human race. And," he admitted with an entirely human-sounding selfishness, "I may be able to deliver a thesis on the cure that will qualify me for my scholarate." I took a fast stab: "Doctor, how does my flesh differ from yours?" Thorndyke parried this attention-getting question: "Mine is of no consequence. Dig your own above and below the line of infection, Cornell. If your sense of perception has been trained fine enough, dig the actual line of infection and watch the molecular structure rearrange. Can you dig that fine, Officer? Cornell, I hate to dwell at length upon your misfortune, but perhaps I can help you face it by bringing the facts to light." #Like the devil you hate to dwell, Doctor Mekstrom!# In the rear view mirror, his lips parted in a bland smile and one eyelid dropped in a knowing wink. I opened my mouth to make another stab in the open but Thorndyke got there first. "Officer Gruenwald," he suggested, "you can help by putting out your perception along the road ahead and seeing how it goes. I'd like to make tracks with this crate." Gruenwald nodded. Thorndyke put the goose-pedal down and the car took off with a howl of passing wind. He said with a grin, "It isn't very often that I get a chance to drive like this, but as long as I've an officer with me--" He was above one forty by the time he let his voice trail off. I watched the back of their heads for a moment. At this speed, Thorndyke would have both his mind and his hands full and the cop would be digging at the road as far ahead as his perception could dig a clear appreciation of the road and its hazards. Thorndyke's telepathy would be occupied in taking this perception and using it. That left me free to think. I cast a dig behind me, as far behind me as my perception would reach. Nothing. I thought furiously. It resulted in nothing. I needed either a parachute or a full set of Mekstrom Hide to get out of this car now. With either I might have taken a chance and jumped. But as it was, the only guy who could scramble out of this car was Dr. James Thorndyke. I caught his dropping eyelid in the rear view mirror again and swore at him under my breath. Time, and miles, went past. One after the other, very fast. We hissed through towns where the streets had been opened for us and along broad stretches of highway and between cars and trucks running at normal speeds. One thing I must say for Thorndyke: He was almost as good a driver as I. * * * * * My second arrival at the Medical Center was rather quiet. I went in the service entrance, so to speak, and didn't get a look at the enamelled blonde at the front portal. They whiffed me in at a broad gate that was opened by a flunky and we drove for another mile through the grounds far from the main road. We ended up in front of a small brick building and as we went through the front office into a private place, Thorndyke told a secretary that she should prepare a legal receipt for my person. I did not like being bandied about like a hunk of merchandise, but nobody seemed to care what I thought. It was all very fast and efficient. I'd barely seated myself and lit a cigarette when the nurse came in with the document which Thorndyke signed, she witnessed, and was subsequently handed to Officer Gruenwald. "Is there any danger of me--er--contracting--" he faltered uncertainly to Dr. Thorndyke. "You'll notice that--" I started to call attention to Thorndyke's calmness at being in my presence and was going to invite Gruenwald to take a dig at the doctor's hide, but once more the doctor blocked me. "None of us have ever found any factor of contagion," he said. "And we live among Mekstrom Cases. You'll notice Miss Clifton's lack of concern." Miss Clifton, the nurse, turned a calm face to the policeman and gave him her hand. Miss Clifton had a face and a figure that was enough to make a man forget anything. She knew her part very well; together, the nurse and the policeman left the office together and I wondered just why a non-Mekstrom would have anything to do with an outfit like this. Thorndyke smiled and said, "I won't tell you, Steve. What you don't know won't hurt anybody." "Mind telling me what I'm slated for? The high jump? Going to watch me writhing in pain as my infection climbs toward my vitals? Going to amputate? Or are you going to cut it off inch by inch and watch me suffer?" "Steve, some things you know already. One, that you are a carrier. There have been no other carriers. We'd like to know what makes you a carrier." #The laboratory again?# I thought. He nodded. "Also whether your final contraction of Mekstrom's Disease removes the carrier-factor." I said hopefully, "I suppose as a Mekstrom I'll eventually be qualified to join you?" Thorndyke looked blank. "Perhaps," he said flatly. To my mind, that flat _perhaps_ was the same sort of reply that Mother used to hand me when I wanted something that she did not want to give. I'd been eleven before I got walloped across the bazoo by pointing out to her that _we'll see_ really meant _no_, because nothing that she said it to ever came to pass. "Look, Thorndyke, let's take off our shoes and stop dancing," I told him. "I have a pretty good idea of what's been going on. I'd like an honest answer to what's likely to go on from here." "I can't give you that." "Who can?" He said nothing, but he began to look at me as though I weren't quite bright. That made two of us, I was looking at him in the same manner. My finger itched a bit, saving the situation. I'd been about to forget that Thorndyke was a Mekstrom and take a swing at him. He laughed at me cynically. "You're in a very poor position to dictate terms," he said sharply. "All right," I agreed reluctantly. "So I'm a prisoner. I'm also under a sentence of death. Don't think me unreasonable if I object to it." "The trouble with your thinking is that you expect all things to be black or white and so defined. You ask me, 'am I going to live or die?' and expect me to answer without qualification. I can only tell you that I don't know which. That it all depends." "Depends upon exactly what?" He eyed me with a cold stare. "Whether you're worthy of living." "Who's to decide?" "We will." I grunted, wishing that I knew more Latin. I wanted to quote that Latin platitude about who watches the watchers. He watched me narrowly, and I expected him to quote me the phrase after having read my mind. But apparently the implication of the phrase did not appeal to him, and so he remained silent. I broke the silence by saying, "What right has any man or collection of men to decide whether I, or anyone else, has the right to live or die?" "It's done all the time," he replied succinctly. "Yeah?" "Criminals are--" "I'm not a criminal; I've violated no man-made law. I've not even violated very many of the Ten Commandments. At least, not the one that is punishable by death." He was silent for a moment again, then he said, "Steve, you're the victim of loose propaganda." "Who isn't?" I granted. "The entire human race is lambasted by one form of propaganda or another from the time the infant learns to sit up until the elderly lays down and dies. We're all guilty of loose thinking. My own father, for instance, had to quit school before he could take any advanced schooling, had to fight his way up, had to collect his advanced education by study, application, and hard practice. He always swore that this long period of hardship strengthened his will and his character and gave him the guts to go out and do things that he'd never have thought of if he'd had an easy life. Then the old duck turns right around and swears that he'll never see any son of his take the bumps as he took them." "That's beside the point, Steve. I know what sort of propaganda you've been listening to. It's the old do-good line; the everything for anybody line; the no man must die alone line." "Is it bad?" Dr. Thorndyke shrugged. "You've talked about loose propaganda," he said. "Well, in this welter of loose propaganda, every man had at least the opportunity of choosing which line of guff he intends to adhere to. I'm even willing to admit that there is both right and wrong on both sides. Are you?" I stifled a sour grin. "I shouldn't, because it is a mistake in any political argument to even let on that the other guy is slightly more than an idiot. But as an engineer, I'll admit it." "Now that's a help," he said more cheerfully. "You're objecting, of course, to the fact that we are taking the right to pick, choose, and select those people that we think are more likely to be of good advantage to the human race. You've listened to that old line about the hypothetical cataclysm that threatens the human race, and how would you choose the hundred people who are supposed to carry on. Well, have you ever eyed the human race in slightly another manner?" "I wouldn't know," I told him. "Maybe." "Have you ever watched the proceedings of one of those big trials where some conkpot has blown the brains out of a half-dozen citizens by pointing a gun and emptying it at a crowd? If you have, you've been appalled by the sob sisters and do-gooders who show that the vicious character was momentarily off his toggle. We mustn't execute a nut, no matter how vicious he is. We've got to protect him, feed him, and house him for the next fifty years. Now, not only is he doing Society absolutely no damned good while he's locked up for fifty years, he's also eating up his share of the standard of living. Then to top this off, so long as this nut is alive, there is the danger that some soft-hearted fathead will succeed in getting him turned loose once more." "Agreed," I said. "But you're again talking about criminals, which I don't think applies in my case." "No, of course not," he said quickly. "I used it to prove to you that this is one way of looking at a less concrete case. Carry this soft headed thinking a couple of steps higher. Medical science has made it possible for the human race to dilute its strength. Epileptics are saved to breed epileptics; haemophiliacs are preserved, neurotics are ironed out, weaknesses of all kinds are kept alive to breed their strain of weakness." "Just what has this to do with me and my future?" I asked. "Quite a lot. I'm trying to make you agree that there are quite a lot of undeserving characters here on Earth." "Did I ever deny it?" I asked him pointedly, but he took it as not including present company. But I could see where Thorndyke was heading. First eliminate the lice on the body politic. Okay, so I am blind and cannot see the sense of incarcerating a murderer that has to be fed, clothed, and housed at my expense for the rest of his natural life. Then for the second step we get rid of weaklings, both physical and mental. I'll call Step Two passably okay, but--? Number Three includes grifters, beggars, bums, and guys out for the soft touch and here I begin to wonder. I've known some entertaining grifters, beggars, and bums; a few of them chose their way of life for their own, just as I became a mechanical engineer. The trouble with this sort of philosophy is that it starts off with an appeal to justice and logic (I'm quoting myself), but it quickly gets dangerous. Start knocking off the bilge-scum. Then when the lowest strata of society is gone, start on the next. Carry this line of reasoning out to straight Aristotelian Logic and you come up with parties like you and me, who may have been quite acceptable when compared to the whole cross-section of humanity, but who now have no one but his betters to compete with. I had never reasoned this out before, but as I did right there and then, I decided that Society cannot draw lines nor assume a static pose. Society must move constantly, either in one direction or the other. And while I object to paying taxes to support some rattlehead for the rest of his natural life, I'd rather have it that way than to have someone start a trend of bopping off everybody who has not the ability to absorb the educational level of the scholar. Because, if the trend turned upward instead of downward, that's where the dividing line would end. Anarchy at one end, is as bad as tyranny at the other-- "I'm sorry you cannot come to a reasonable conclusion," said Dr. Thorndyke. "If you cannot see the logic of--" I cut him off short. "Look, Doc," I snapped, "If you can't see where your line of thinking ends, you're in bad shape." He looked superior. "You're sour because you know you haven't got what it takes." I almost nipped. "You're so damned dumb that you can't see that in any society of supermen, you'd not be qualified to clean out ash trays," I tossed back at him. He smiled self-confidently. "By the time they start looking at my level--if they ever do--you'll have been gone long ago. Sorry, Cornell. You don't add up." Well, that was nothing I didn't know already. In his society, I was a nonentity. Yet, somehow, if that's what the human race was coming to under the Thorndyke's and the Phelps', I didn't care to stay around. "All right," I snapped. "Which way do I go from here? The laboratory, or will you dispense with the preliminaries and let me take the high slide right now before this--" I held up my infected finger, "gets to the painful stages." With the air and tone of a man inspecting an interesting specimen impaled on a mounting pin, Thorndyke replied: "Oh--we have use for the likes of you." XVII It would please me no end to report here that the gang at the Medical Center were crude, rough, vicious, and that they didn't give a damn about human suffering. Unfortunately for my sense of moral balance, I can't. They didn't cut huge slices out of my hide without benefit of anaesthesia. They didn't shove pipe-sized needles into me, or strap me on a board and open me up with dull knives. Instead, they treated me as if I'd been going to pay for my treatment and ultimately emerge from the Center to go forth and extol its virtues. I ate good food, slept in a clean and comfortable bed, smoked free cigarettes, read the best magazines--and also some of the worst, if I must report the whole truth--and was permitted to mingle with the rest of the patients, guests, victims, personnel, and so forth that were attached to my ward. I was not at any time treated as though I were anything but a willing and happy member of their team. It was known that I was not, but if any emotion was shown, it was sympathy at my plight in not being one of them. This was viewed in the same way as any other accident of birth or upbringing. In my room was another man about my age. He'd arrived a day before me, with an early infection at the tip of his middle toe. He was, if I've got to produce a time-table, about three-eights of an inch ahead of me. He had no worries. He was one of their kind of thinkers. "How'd you connect?" I asked him. "I didn't," he said, scratching his infected toe vigorously. "They connected with me." "Oh?" "Yeah. I was sleeping tight and not even dreaming. Someone rapped on my apartment door and I growled myself out of bed and sort of felt my way. It was three in the morning. Guy stood there looking apologetic. 'Got a message for you,' he tells me. 'Can't it wait until morning?' I snarl back. 'No,' he says. 'It's important!' So I invite him in. He doesn't waste any time at all; his first act is to point at an iron floor lamp in the corner and ask me how much I'd paid for it. I tell him. Then this bird drops twice the amount on the coffee table, strides over to the corner, picks up the lamp, and ties the iron pipe into a fancy-looking bowknot. He didn't even grunt. 'Mr. Mullaney,' he asks me, 'How would you like to be that strong?' I didn't have to think it over. I told him right then and there. Then we spent from three ayem to five thirty going through a fast question and answer routine, sort of like a complicated word-association test. At six o'clock I've packed and I'm on my way here with my case of Mekstrom's Disease." "Just like that?" I asked Mr. Mullaney. "Just like that," he repeated. "So now what happens?" "Oh, about tomorrow I'll go in for treatment," he said. "Seems as how they've got to start treatment before the infection creeps to the first joint or I'll lose the joint." He contemplated me a bit; he was a perceptive and I knew it. "You've got another day or more. That's because your ring finger is longer than my toe." "What's the treatment like?" I asked him. "That I don't know. I've tried to dig the treatment, but it's too far away from here. This is just a sort of preliminary ward; I gather that they know when to start and so on." He veiled his eyes for a moment. He was undoubtedly thinking of my fate. "Chess?" he asked, changing the subject abruptly. "Why not?" I grinned. My mind wasn't in it. He beat me three out of four. I bedded down about eleven, and to my surprise I slept well. They must have been shoving something into me to make me sleep; I know me very well and I'm sure that I couldn't have closed an eye if they hadn't been slipping me the old closeout powder. For three nights, now, I'd corked off solid until seven ack emma and I'd come alive in the morning fine, fit, and fresh. But on the following morning, Mr. Mullaney was missing. I never saw him again. At noon, or thereabouts, the end of the ring finger on my left hand was as solid as a rock. I could squeeze it in a door or burn it with a cigarette; I got into a little habit of scratching kitchen matches on it as I tried to dig into the solid flesh with my perception. I growled a bit at my fate, but not much. It was about this time, too, that the slight itch began to change. You know how a deep-felt itch is. It can sometimes be pleasant. Like the itch that comes after a fast swim in the salty sea and a dry-out in the bright sun, when the drying salt water makes your skin itch with the vibrant pleasure of just being alive. This is not like the bite of any bug, but the kind that makes you want to take another dive into the ocean instead of trying to scratch it with your claws. Well, the itch in my finger had been one of the pleasant kinds. I could sort of scratch it away by taking the steel-hard part of my finger in my other hand and wiggle, briskly. But now the itch turned into a deep burning pain. My perception, never good enough to dig the finer structure clearly, was good enough to tell me that my crawling horror had come to the boundary line of the first joint. It was this pause that was causing the burning pain. According to what I'd been told, if someone didn't do something about me right now, I'd lose the end joint of my finger. Nobody came to ease my pain, nor to ease my mind. They left me strictly alone. I spent the time from noon until three o'clock examining my fingertip as I'd not examined it before. It was rock hard, but strangely flexible if I could exert enough pressure on the flesh. It still moved with the flexing of my hands. The fingernail itself was like a chip of chilled steel. I could flex the nail neither with my other hand nor by biting it; between my teeth it had the uncomfortable solidity of a sheet of metal that conveyed to my brain that the old teeth should not try to bite too hard. I tried prying on a bit of metal with the fingernail; inserting the nail in the crack where a metal cylinder had been formed to make a table leg. I might have been able to pry the crack wider, but the rest of my body did not have the power nor the rigidity necessary to drive the tiny lever that was my fingertip. I wondered what kind of tool-grinder they used for a manicure. At three-thirty, the door to my room opened and in came Scholar Phelps, complete with his benign smile and his hearty air. "Well," he boomed over-cheerfully, "we meet again, Mr. Cornell." "Under trying circumstances," I said. "Unfortunately so," he nodded. "However, we can't all be fortunate." "I dislike being a vital statistic." "So does everybody. Yet, from a philosophical point of view, you have no more right to live at the expense of someone else than someone else has a right to live at your expense. It all comes out even in the final accounting. And, of course, if every man were granted a guaranteed immortality, we'd have one cluttered-up world." I had to admit that he was right, but I still could not accept his statistical attitude. Not while I'm the statistic. He followed my thought even though he was esper; it wasn't hard to follow anyway. "All right, I admit that this is no time to sit around discussing philosophy or metaphysics or anything of that nature. What you are interested in is you." "How absolutely correct." "You know, of course, that you are a carrier." "So I've come to believe. At least, everybody I seem to have any contact with either turns up missing or comes down with Mekstrom's--or both." Scholar Phelps nodded. "You might have gone on for quite some time if it hadn't been so obvious." I eyed him. "Just what went on?" I asked casually. "Did you have a clean-up squad following me all the time, picking up the debris? Or did you just pick up the ones you wanted? Or did the Highways make you indulge in a running competition?" "Too many questions at once. Most of which answers would be best that you did not know. Best for us, that is. Maybe even for you." I shrugged. "We seem to be bordering on philosophy again when the important point is what you intend to do to me." He looked unhappy. "Mr. Cornell, it is hard to remain unphilosophical in a case like this. So many avenues of thought have been opened, so many ideas and angles come to mind. We'll readily admit what you've probably concluded; that you as a carrier have become the one basic factor that we have been seeking for some twenty years and more. You are the dirigible force, the last brick in the building, the final answer. Or, and I hate to say it, were." "Were?" "For all of our knowledge of Mekstrom's we know so very little," he said. "In certain maladies the carrier is himself immune. In some we observe that the carrier results from a low-level, incomplete infection with the disease which immunizes him but does not kill the bugs. In others, we've seen the carrier become normal after he has finally contracted the disease. What we must know now is: Is Steve Cornell, the Mekstrom Carrier, now a non-carrier because he has contracted the disease?" "How are you going to find out?" I asked him. "That's a problem," he said thoughtfully. "One school feels that we should not treat you, since the treatment itself may destroy whatever unknown factor makes you a carrier. The other claims that if we don't treat you, you'll hardly live long enough to permit comprehensive research anyway. A third school believes that there is time to find out whether you are still a carrier, make some tests, and then treat you, after which these tests are to be repeated." Rather bitterly, I said, "I suppose I have absolutely no vote." "Hardly," his face was pragmatic. "And to which school do you belong?" I asked sourly. "Do you want me to get the cure? Or am I to die miserably while you take tabs on my blood pressure, or do I merely lose an arm while you're sitting with folded hands waiting for the laboratory report?" "In any case, we'll learn a lot about Mekstrom's from you," he said. "Even if you die." As caustically as I could, I said, "It's nice to know that I am not going to die in vain." He eyed me with contempt. "You're not afraid to die, are you, Mr. Cornell?" That's a dirty question to ask any man. Sure, I'm afraid to die. I just don't like the idea of being not-alive. As bad as life is, it's better than nothing. But the way he put the question he was implying that I should be happy to die for the benefit of Humanity in general, and that's a question that is unfairly loaded. After all, everybody is slated to kick off. There is no other way of resigning from the universe. So if I have to die, it might as well be for the Benefit of Something, and if it happens to be Humanity, so much the better. But when the case is proffered on a silver tray, I feel, "Somebody else, not me!" The next argument Phelps would be tossing out would be the one that goes, "Two thousand years ago, a Man died for Humanity--" which always makes me sick. No matter how you look at us, there is no resemblance between Him and me. I cut him short before he could say it: "Whether or not I'm afraid to die, and for good or evil, now or later, is beside the point. I have, obviously, nothing to say about the time, place, and the reasons." We sat there and glared at one another; he didn't know whether to laugh or snarl and I didn't care which he did. It seemed to me that he was leading up to something that looked like the end. Then I'd get the standard funeral and statements would be given out that I'd died because medical research had not been able to save me and blah blah blah complete with lack of funds and The Medical Center charity drive. The result would mean more moola for Phelps and higher efficiency for his operations, and to the devil with the rest of the world. "Let's get along with it," I snapped. "I've no opinion, no vote, no right of appeal. Why bother to ask me how I feel?" Calmly he replied, "Because I am not a rough-shod, unhuman monster, Mr. Cornell. I would prefer that you see my point of view--or at least enough of it to admit that there is a bit of right on my side." "Seems to me I went through that with Thorndyke." "This is another angle. I'm speaking of my right of discovery." "You're speaking of what?" "My right of discovery. You as an engineer should be familiar with the idea. If I were a poet I could write an ode to my love and no one would forbid me my right to give it to her and to nobody else. If I were a cook with a special recipe no one could demand that I hand it over unless I had a special friend. He who discovers something new should be granted the right to control it. If this Mekstrom business were some sort of physical patent or some new process, I could apply for a patent and have it for my exclusive use for a period of seventeen years. Am I not right?" "Yes, but--" "Except that my patent would be infringed upon and I'd have no control--" I stood up suddenly and faced him angrily. He did not cower; after all he was a Mekstrom. But he did shut up for a moment. "Seems to me," I snarled, "that any process that can be used to save human life should not be held secret, patentable, or under the control of any one man or group." "This is an argument that always comes up. You may, of course, be correct. But happily for me, Mr. Cornell, I have the process and you have not, and it is my own conviction that I have the right to use it on those people who seem, in my opinion, to hold the most for the future advancement of the human race. However, I do not care to go over this argument again, it is tiresome and it never ends. As one of the ancient Greek Philosophers observed, you cannot change a man's mind by arguing with him. The other fact remains, however, that you do have something to offer us, despite your contrary mental processes." "Do go on? What do I have to do to gain this benefit? Who do I have to kill?" I eyed him cynically and then added, "Or is it 'Whom shall I kill?' I like these things to be proper, you know." "Don't be sarcastic. I'm serious," he told me. "Then stop pussyfooting and come to the point," I snapped. "You know what the story is. I don't. So if you think I'll be interested, why not tell me instead of letting me find out the hard way." "You, of course, were a carrier. Maybe you still are. We can find out. In fact, we'll have to find out, before we--" "For God's Sake stop it!" I yelled. "You're meandering." "Sorry," he said in a tone of apology that surprised me all the way down to my feet. He shook himself visibly and went on from there: "You, if still a carrier, can be of use to The Medical Center. Now do you understand?" Sure I understand, but good. As a normal human type, they held nothing over me and just shoved me here and there and picked up the victims after me. But now that I was a victim myself, they could offer me their "cure" only if I would swear to go around the country deliberately infecting the people they wanted among them. It was that--or lie there and die miserably. This had not come to Scholar Phelps as a sudden flash of genius. He'd been planning this all along; had been waiting to pop this delicate question after I'd been pushed around, had a chance to torture myself mentally, and was undoubtedly soft for anything that looked like salvation. "There is one awkward point," said Scholar Phelps suavely. "Once we have cured you, we would have no hold on you other than your loyalty and your personal honor to fulfill a promise given. Neither of us are naive, Mr. Cornell. We both know that any honorable promise is only as valid as the basic honor involved. Since your personal opinion is that this medical treatment should be used indiscriminately, and that our program to better the human race by competitive selection is foreign to your feelings, you would feel honor-bound to betray us. Am I not correct?" What could I say to that? First I'm out, then I'm in, now I'm out again. What was Phelps getting at? "If our positions were reversed, Mr. Cornell, I'm sure that you'd seek some additional binding force against me. I shall continue to seek some such lever against you for the same reason. In the meantime, Mr. Cornell, we shall make a test to see whether we have any real basis for any agreement at all. You may have ceased to be a carrier, you know." "Yeah," I admitted darkly. "In the meantime," he said cheerfully, "the least we can do is to treat your finger. I'd hate to have you hedge a deal because we did not deliver your cured body in the whole." He put his head out of the door and summoned a nurse who came with a black bag. From the bag, Scholar Phelps took a skin-blast hypo and a small metal box, the top of which held a small slender, jointed platform and some tiny straps. He strapped my finger to this platform and then plugged in a length of line cord to the nearest wall socket. The little platforms moved; the one nearest my wrist vibrated rapidly across a very small excursion that tickled like the devil. The end platform moved in an arc, flexing the finger tip from straight to about seventy degrees. This moved fairly slow but regularly up and down. "I'll not fool you," he said drily. "This is going to hurt." He set the skin-blast hypo on top of the joint and let it go. For a moment the finger felt cold, numb, pleasant. Then the shock wore away and the tip of my finger, my whole finger and part of my hand shocked me with the most excruciating agony that the hide of man ever felt. Flashes and waves of pain darted up my arm to the elbow and the muscles in my forearm jumped. The sensitive nerve in my elbow sang and sent darting waves of zigzag needles up to my shoulder. My hand was a source of searing heat and freezing cold and the pain of being crushed and twisted and wrenched out of joint all at the same time. Phelps wiped my wet face with a towel, loaded another hypo and let me have it in the shoulder. Gradually the stuff took hold and the awful pain began to subside. Not all the way, it just diminished from absolutely unbearable to merely terrible. I knew at that moment why a trapped animal will bite off its own foreleg to get free of the trap. From the depths of his bag he found a bottle and poured a half-tumbler for me; it went down like a whiskey-flavored soft drink. It had about as much kick as when you pour a drink of water into a highball glass that still holds a dreg of melted ice and diluted liquor. But it burned like fury once it hit my stomach and my mind began to wobble. He'd given me a slug of the pure quill, one hundred proof. As some sort of counter-irritant, it worked. Very gradually the awful pain in my hand began to subside. "You can take that manipulator off in an hour or so," he told me. "And in the meantime we'll get along with our testing." I gathered that they could stop this treatment anywhere along the process if I did not measure up. XVIII Midnight. The manipulator had been off my hand for several hours, and it was obvious that my Mekstrom's was past the first joint and creeping up towards the next. I eyed it with some distaste; as much as I wanted to have a fine hard body, I was not too pleased at having agony for a companion every time the infection crossed a joint. I began to wonder about the wrist; this is a nice complicated joint and should, if possible, exceed the pain of the first joint in the ring finger. I'd heard tell, of course, that once you've reached the top, additional torture does not hurt any greater. I'd accepted this statement as it was printed. But now I was not too sure that what I'd just been through was not one of those exceptions that take place every now and then to the best of rules. I was still in a dark and disconsolate mood. But I'd managed to eat, and I'd shaved and showered, and I'd hit the hay because it was as good a place to be as anywhere else. I could lie there and dig the premises with my esper. There were very few patients in this building, and none were done up like the character in the Macklin place. They moved the patients to some other part of the grounds when the cure started. There weren't very many nurses, doctors, scholars, or other personnel around, either. Outside along one side of a road was a small lighted house that was obviously a sort of guard, but it was casual instead of being formal and military in appearance. The ground, instead of being patrolled by human guards (which might have caused some comment) was carefully laid off into checkerboard squares by a complicated system of photobeams and induction bridges. You've probably read about how the job of casing a joint should be done. I did it the same way. I dug back and forth, collecting the layout from the back door of my building towards the nearest puff of dead area. This coign of safety billowed outward from the pattern towards the building like an arm of cumulus cloud and the top of it rose like a column to a height above my range. It sort of leaned forward but it did not lean far enough to be directly above the building. The far side of the column was just like the rear side; even though I'm well trained, it always startles me when I perceive the far side of a smallish dead area. I'm inclined like everybody else to consider perception on a line-of-sight basis instead of on a sort of all-around grasp. I let my thinker run free. If I could direct a breakout from this joint with a lot of outside help, I'd have a hot jetcopter pilot come down the dead-area column with a dead engine. The Medical Center did not have any radar, probably on the proposition that too high a degree of security indicated a high degree of top-secret material to hide. So I'd come down dead engine, land, and wait it out. Timing would have to be perfect, because I, the prisoner, would have to make a fast gallop across a couple of hundred yards of wide open psi area, scale a tall fence topped with barbed wire, cross another fifty yards into the murk, and then find my rescuer. The take off would be fast once I'd located the 'copter in the murk, and everything would depend upon a hot pilot who felt confident enough in his engine and his rotorjets to let 'em go with a roar and a lift without warmup. During which time, unfortunately for all plans, the people at The Medical Center would have been reading my mind and would probably have that dead patch well patrolled with big, rough gentlemen armed with stuff heavy enough to stop a tank. Lacking any sort of device or doodad that would conceal my mind from prying telepaths, about the only thing I could do was to lay here in my soft bed and daydream of making my escape. Eventually I went to sleep and dreamed that I was hunting Mallards with a fly-rod baited with a stale doughnut. The only thing that bothered me was a couple of odd-looking guys who thought that the way to hunt Mallards was with shotguns, and their dress was just as out of taste as their equipment. Who ever hunted ducks from a canoe, dressed in windbreakers and hightopped boots? Eventually they bought some ducks from me and went home, leaving me to my slumbers. * * * * * About eight in the morning, there was a tentative tap on my door. While I was growling about why they should bother tapping, the door opened and a woman came in with my breakfast tray. She was not my nurse; she was the enamelled blonde receptionist. She had lost some of her enamelled sophistication. It was not evident in her make-up, her dress, or her hair-do. These were perfection. In fact, she bore that store-window look that made me think of an automaton, triggered to make the right noises and to present the proper expression at the correct time. As though she had never had a thought of her own or an emotion that was above the level of very mild interest. As if the perfection of her dress and the characterless beauty of her face were more important than anything else in her life. But the loss of absolute plate-glass impersonality was gone, and it took me some several moments to dig it out of her appearance. Then I saw it. Her eyes. They no longer looked glassily out of that clear oval face at a point about three inches above my left shoulder, but they were centered on me from no matter what point in the room she'd be as she went about the business of running open the blinds, checking the this and that and the other like any nurses' helper. Finally she placed my tray on the bed-table and stood looking down at me. From my first meeting with her I knew she was no telepath, so I bluntly said, "Where's the regular girl? Where's my nurse?" "I'm taking over for the time," she told me. Her voice was strained; she'd been trying to use that too-deeply cultured tone she used as the professional receptionist but the voice had cracked through the training enough to let some of her natural tone come through. "Why?" Then she relaxed completely, or maybe it was a matter of coming unglued. Her face allowed itself to take on some character and her body ceased being that rigid window-dummy type. "What's your trouble--?" I asked her softly. She had something on her mind that was a bit too big for her, but her training was not broad enough to allow her to get it out. I hoped to help, if I could. I also wanted to know what she was doing here. If Scholar Phelps was thinking about putting a lever on me of the female type, he'd guessed wrong. She was looking at me and I could see a fragment of fright in her face. "Is it terrible?" she asked me in a whisper. "Is what terrible?" "Me--Me--Mekstrom's D--Disease--" The last word came out with a couple of big tears oozing from closed lids. "Why?" I asked. "Do I look all shot to bits?" She opened the eyes and looked at me. "Does it hurt?" I remembered the agony of my finger and tried to lie. "A little," I told her. "But I'm told that it was because I'd waited too long for my first treatment." I hoped that I was correct; maybe it was wishful thinking, but I claim that right. I didn't want to go through the same agony every time we crossed a joint. I reached over to the bedside table and found my cigarettes. I slipped two up and offered one of them to her. She put a tentative hand forward, slowly, a scared-to-touch reluctance in her motion. This changed as her hand came forward. It was the same sort of reluctance that you feel when you start out to visit the dentist for a roaring tooth. The closer you get to the dentist's office the less inclined you are to finish the job. Then at some indeterminate point you cross the place of no return and from that moment you go forward with increased determination. She finally made the cigarette package but she was very careful not to touch my hand as she took out the weed. Then, as if she'd reached that point of no return, her hand slipped around the package and caught me by the wrist. We were statue-still for three heartbeats. Then I lifted my other hand, took out the cigarette she'd missed, and held it forward for her. She took it. I dropped the pack and let my hand slip back until we were holding hands, practically. She shuddered. I flipped my lighter and let her inhale a big puff before I put the next question: "Why are you here and what goes on?" In a flat, dry voice she said, "I'm--supposed--to--" and let it trail away without finishing it. "Guinea pig?" I blurted bluntly. She collapsed like a deflated balloon. Next, she had her face buried in my shoulder, bawling like a hurt baby. I stroked her shoulder gently, but she shuddered away from my hand as though it were poison. I shoved her upright and shook her a bit. "Don't blubber like an idiot. Sit there and talk like a human being!" It took her a minute of visible effort before she said, "You're supposed to be a--carrier. I'm supposed to find out--whether you are--a carrier." Well, I'd suspected something of that sort. Shakily she asked me, "How do I get it, Mr. Cornell?" I eyed her sympathetically. Then I held up my left hand and looked at the infection. This was the finger that had been gummed to bits by the Mekstrom infant back in Homestead. With a shrug of uncertainty, I lifted her hand to my mouth. I felt with my tongue and dug with my perception until I had a tiny fold of her skin between my front teeth. Then sharply, I bit down, drawing blood. She jerked, stiffened, closed her eyes and took a deep breath but she did not cry out. "That, if anything, should do it," I said flatly. "Now go out and get some iodine for the cut. Human-bite is likely to become infected with something bad. And I don't think antiseptic will hurt the Mekstrom Infection if it's taken place." They'd given me the antiseptic works in Homestead, I recalled. "Now, Miss Nameless, you sit over there and tell me how come this distressing tableau?" "Oh--I can't," she cried. Then she left in a hurry sucking on her bleeding finger. I didn't need any explanation; I'd just wanted my suspicions confirmed. Someone had a lever on her. Maybe someone she loved was a Mekstrom and her loyalty was extracted because of it. The chances were also high that she'd been given to understand that they'd accept her as a member if she ever caught Mekstrom's; and they'd taken my arrival as a fine chance to check me and get her at the same time. I wondered about her; she was no big-brain. I couldn't quite see the stratified society outlined by Scholar Phelps as holding a position open for her in the top echelon. Except she was a woman, attractive if you like your women beautiful and dull-minded, and she probably would be happy to live in a little vacuum-type world bounded on all sides with women's magazines, lace curtains, TV soap opera, and a corral full of little Mekstrom kids. I grinned. Funny how the proponents of the stratified society always have their comeuppance by the need of women whose minds are bent on mundane things like homes and families. Well, I hoped she caught it, if that's what she wanted. I was willing to bet my life that she cared a lot more for being with her man than she did for the cockeyed society he was supporting. I finished my breakfast and went out to watch a couple of telepaths playing chess until lunch time and then gave up. Telepathic chess was too much like playing perceptive poker. Then after lunch came the afternoon full of laboratory tests, inspections, experiments, and so forth; they didn't do much that hadn't been tried at Homestead, and I surprised them again by being able to help in their never-ending blood counts and stuff of that sort. They did not provide me with a new room mate, so I wandered around after dinner hoping that I could avoid both Thorndyke and Phelps. I didn't want to get into another fool social-structure argument with them and the affair of the little scared receptionist was more than likely to make me say a few words that might well get me cast into the Outer Darkness for their mere semantic content. Once more I hit the sack early. And, once more, there came a tap on my door about eight o'clock. It was not a tentative little frightened tap this time, it was more jovial and eager sounding. My reaction was about the same. Since it was their show and their property, I couldn't see any reason why they made this odd lip-service to politeness. It was the receptionist again. She came in with a big wistful smile and dropped my tray on the bed table. "Look," she cried. She held up her hand. The bleeding had stopped and there was a thin film over the cut. I dug at it and nodded; it was the first show of Mekstrom Flesh without a doubt. "That's it, kid." "I know," she said happily. "Golly, I could kiss you." Then before I could think of all the various ways in which the word "Golly" sounded out of character for her, she launched herself into my arms and was busily erasing every attempt at logical thought with one of the warmest, no-holds-barred smoocheroo that I'd enjoyed for what seemed like years. Since I'd held Catherine in my arms in her apartment just before we'd eloped, I'd spent my time in the company of Nurse Farrow who held no emotional appeal to me, and the rest of my female company had been Mekstroms whose handholding might twist off a wrist if they got a thrill out of it. About the time I began to respond with enthusiasm and vigor, she extricated herself from my clutch and slid back to the foot of the bed out of reach. A little breathlessly she said, "Harry will thank you for this." _This_ meant the infection in her finger. Then she was gone and I was thinking, _Harry should drop dead_! Then I grinned at myself like the Cheshire Cat because I realized that I was so valuable a property that they couldn't afford to let me die. No matter what, I'd be kept alive. And after having things go so sour for so long a time, things were about to take a fast turn and go my way. I discounted the baby-bite affair. Even if the baby were another carrier, it would take a long time before the kid was old enough to be trusted in his aim. I discounted it even more because I hadn't been roaring around the countryside biting innocent citizens. Mere contact was enough; if the bite did anything, it may have hastened the process. So here I was, a nice valuable property, with a will of my own. I could either throw in with Phelps and bite only Phelps' Chosen Aristocrats, or I could go back to the Highways and bite everybody in sight. I laughed at my image in the mirror. I am a democratic sort of soul, but when it comes to biting, there's some I'd rather bite than others. I bared my teeth at my image, but it was more of a leering smile of the tooth-paste ad than a fierce snarl. My image looked pensive. It was thinking, _Steve, old carnivore, ere you go biting anybody, you've first got to bite your way out of the Medical Center._ XIX One hour later they pulled my fangs without benefit of anaesthesia. Thorndyke came in to inspect the progress of my infection and allowed as how I'd be about ready for the full treatment in a few days. "We like to delay the full treatment as long as possible," he told me, "because it immobilizes the patient too long as it is." He pressed a call bell, waited, and soon the door opened to admit a nurses' helper pushing a trundle cart loaded with medical junk. I still don't know what was on the cart because I was too flabbergasted to notice it. I was paying all my attention to Catherine, cheerful in her Gray Lady uniform, being utterly helpful, bright, gay, and relaxed. I was tongue tied, geflummoxed, beaten down, and--well, just speechless. Catherine was quite professional about her help. She loaded the skin-blast hypo and slapped it into Thorndyke's open hand. Her eyes looked into mine and they smiled reassuringly. Her hand was firm as she took my arm; she locked her strength on my hand and held it immobile while Thorndyke shot me in the second joint. There was a personal touch to her only briefly when she breathed, "Steve, I'm so glad!" and then went on about her work. The irony of it escaped me; but later I did recall the oddity of congratulating someone who's just contracted a disease. Then that wave of agony hit me, and the only thing I can remember through it was Catherine folding a towel so that the hem would be on the inside when she wiped the beads of sweat from my face. She cradled my head between her hands and crooned lightly to me until the depths of the pain was past. Then she got efficient again and waved Thorndyke aside to see to the little straps on the manipulator herself. She adjusted them delicately. Then she poured me a glass of ice water and put it where I could reach it with my other hand. She left after one long searching look into my eyes, and I knew that she would be back later to talk to me alone. This seemed all right with Dr. Thorndyke, the wily telepath who would be able to dig a reconstruction of our private talk with a little urging on his part. After Catherine was gone, Thorndyke smiled down at me with cynical self-confidence. "There's your lever, Steve," he said. The dope helped to kill all but the worst waves of searing pain; between them I managed to grind out, "How did you sell her that bill of goods, Thorndyke?" His reply was scornful. "Maybe she likes your hide all in one piece," he grunted. He left me with my mind a-whirl with thoughts and pain. The little manipulator was working my second finger joint up and down rhythmically, and with each move came pain. It also exercised the old joint, which had grown so rigid that my muscles hadn't been able to move it for several hours. That added agony, too. The dope helped, but it also dimmed my ability to concentrate. Up to a certain point everything was quite logical and easy to understand. Catherine was here because they had contacted her through some channel and said, "Throw in with us and we'll see that your lover does not die miserably." So much was reasonable, but after that point the whole thing began to take on a mad puzzle-like quality. Given normal circumstances, Catherine would have come to me as swiftly as I'd have gone to her if I'd known how. Not only that, but I'd probably have sworn eternal fealty to them for their service even though I could not stand their way of thinking. But Catherine was smart enough to realize that I, as the only known carrier of Mekstrom's Disease, was more valuable live than dead. Why, then, had Catherine come here to place herself in their hands? Alone, she might have gone off half-cocked in an emotional tizzy. But the Highways had good advisers who should have pointed out that Steve Cornell was one man alive who could walk with impunity among friend or foe. Why, they hadn't even tried to collect me until it became evident that I was in line for the Old Treatment. Then they had to take me in, because the Medical Center wanted any information they could get above and beyond the fact that I was a carrier. If someone from Homestead had been in that courtroom, I'd now be among friends. Then the ugly thought hit me and my mind couldn't face it for some time. _Reorientation._ Catherine's cheerful willingness to help them must be reorientation and nothing else. Now, although I've mentioned reorientation before, what I actually know about it is meager. It makes Dr. Jekylls out of former Mr. Hydes and the transformation is complete. It can be done swiftly; the rapidity depends upon the strength of the mind of the operator compared to the mind of the subject. It is slightly harder to reorient a defiant mind than a willing one. It sticks unless someone else begins to tinker again. It is easier to make a good man out of a bad one than the reverse, although the latter is eminently possible. This is too difficult a problem to discuss to the satisfaction of everybody, but it seems to go along with the old theory that "Good" does benefit the tribe of mankind in the long run, while "Bad" things cause trouble. I'll say no more than to point out that no culture based upon theft, murder, piracy, and pillage, has ever survived. The thought of Catherine's mind being tampered with made me seethe with anger. I forgot my pain and began to probe around wildly, and as I probed I began to know the real feeling of helpless futility. For here I was, practically immobilized and certainly dependent upon them for help. This was no time to attempt a rescue of my sweetheart--who would only be taken away kicking and screaming all the way from here to the first place where I could find a haven and have her re-reoriented. The latter would not be hard; among the other things I knew about reorientation was that it could be negated by some strong emotional ties and a personal background that included worthy objection to the new personality. For my perceptive digging I came up with nothing but those things that any hospital held. Patients, nurses, interns, orderlies; a couple of doctors, a scholar presiding over a sheaf of files. And finally Catherine puttering over an autoclave. She was setting out a string of instruments under the tutelage of a superintendent of nurses who was explaining how the job should be done. I took a deep, thankful breath. Her mind was occupied enough to keep her from reading the dark thoughts that were going through mine. I did not even want a loved one to know how utterly helpless and angry I felt. And then, because I was preoccupied with Catherine and my own thoughts, the door opened without my having taken a dig at the opener beforehand. The arrival was all I needed to crack wide open in a howling fit of hysteria. It was so pat. I couldn't help but let myself go: "Well! This looks like Old Home Week!" Miss Gloria Farrow, Registered Nurse, did not respond to my awkward joviality. Her face, if anything, was darker than my thoughts. I doubted that she had her telepathy working; people who get that wound up find it hard to even see and hear straight, let alone think right. And telepathy or perception goes out of kilter first because the psi is a very delicate factor. She eyed me coldly. "You utter imbecile," she snarled. "You--" "Whoa, baby!" I roared. "Slow down. I'm a bit less than bright, but what have I done now?" I'd have slapped her across the face as an anodyne if she hadn't been Mekstrom. Farrow cooled visibly, then her face sort of came apart and she sort of flopped forward onto the bed and buried her face in my shoulder. I couldn't help but make comparisons; she was like a hunk of marble, warm and vibrant. Like having a statue crying on my shoulder. She sagged against me like a loose bag of cement and her hands clutched at my shoulder blades like a pair of C-clamps. A big juicy tear dropped from her cheek to land on my chest, and I was actually surprised to find that a teardrop from a Mekstrom did not land like a drop of mercury. It just splashed like any other drop of water, spread out, and made my chest wet. Eventually I held her up from me, tried to shake her gently, and said, "Now what's the shooting all about, Farrow?" She shook her head as if to clear her thinking gear. "Steve," she said in a quietly serious tone, "I've been such an utter fool." "You're not unique, Farrow," I told her. "People have been doing damfool stunts since--" "I know," she broke in. Then with an effort at light-heartedness, she added, "There must be a different version of that Garden of Eden story. Eve is always blamed as having tempted Adam. Somewhere, Old Adam must have been slightly to blame--?" I didn't know what she was driving toward, but I stroked her hair and waited. She was probably right. It still takes two of a kind to make one pair. "Steve--get out of here! While you're safe!" "Huh?" I blurted. "What cooks, Farrow?" "I was a nice patsy," she said. She sat up and wiped her eyes. "I was a fool. Steve, if James Thorndyke had asked me to jump off the roof, I'd have asked him 'what direction?' That's how fat-headed I am." "Yes?" Something was beginning to form, now. "I--led you on, Steve." That blinkoed me. The phrase didn't jell. The half a minute she'd spent bawling on my shoulder with my arms around her had been the first physical contact I'd ever had with Nurse Farrow. It didn't seem-- "No, Steve. Not that way. I couldn't see you for Thorndyke any more than you could see me for Catherine." Her telepathy had returned, obviously; she was in better control of herself. "Steve," she said, "I led you on; did everything that Thorndyke told me to. You fell into it like a rock. Oh--it was going to be a big thing. All I had to do was to haul you deeper into this mess, then I'd disappear strangely. Then we'd be--tog--ether--we'd be--" She started to come unglued again but stopped the dissolving process just before the wet and gooey stage set in. She seemed to put a set in her shoulders, and then she looked down at me with pity. "Poor esper," she said softly, "you couldn't really know--" "Know what?" I asked harshly. "He fooled me--too," she said, in what sounded like a complete irrelevancy. "Look, Farrow, try and make a bit of sense to a poor perceptive who can't read a mind. Keep it running in one direction, please?" Again, as apparently irrelevant, she said, "He's a top grade telepath; he knows control--" "Control--?" I asked blankly. "You don't know," she said. "But a good telepath can think in patterns that prevent lesser telepaths from really digging deep. Thorndyke is brilliant, of scholar grade, really. He--" "Let's get back to it, Farrow. What's cooking?" Sternly she tossed her head. It was an angry motion, one that showed her disdain for her own tears and her own weakness. "Your own sweet Catherine." I eyed her, not coldly but with a growing puzzlement. I tried to formulate my own idea but she went on, briskly, "That accident of yours was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to you, Steve." "How long have I been known to be a Mekstrom Carrier?" I asked bluntly. "No more than three weeks before you met Catherine Lewis," she told me as bluntly. "It took the Medical Center that long to work her into a position to meet you, Steve." That put the icing on the cake. If nothing else, it explained why Catherine was here willingly. I didn't really believe it because no one can turn one hundred and eighty degrees without effort, but I couldn't deny the fact that the evidence fits the claim. If what Farrow said were true, my marriage to Catherine would have provided them with the same lever as the little blonde receptionist. The pile-up must have really fouled up their plans. "It did, Steve," said Farrow, who had been following my mental ramblings. "The Highways had to step in and help. This fouled things up for both sides." "Both sides?" I asked, completely baffled. She nodded. "Until the accident, the Medical Center did not know that the Highways existed. But when Catherine dropped completely out of sight, Thorndyke did a fine job of probing you. That's when he came upon the scant evidence of the Highway Sign and the mental impression of the elder Harrison lifting the car so that Phillip could get you out. Then he knew, and--" "Farrow," I snapped, "there are a lot of holes in your story. For instance--" She held up a hand to stop me. "Steve," she said quietly, "you know how difficult it is for a non-telepath to find someone he can trust. But I'm trying to convince you that--" I stopped Farrow this time. "How can I believe you now?" I asked her pointedly. "You seem to have a part in this side of the quiet warfare." Nurse Farrow made a wry face as though she'd just discovered that the stuff she had in her mouth was a ball of wooly centipedes. "I'm a woman," she said simply. "I'm soft and gullible and easily talked into complacency. But I've just learned that their willingness to accept women is based upon the fact that no culture can thrive without women to propagate the race. I find that I am--" She paused, swallowed, and her voice became strained with bitterness, "--useful as a breeding animal. Just one of the peasants whose glory lies in carrying their heirs. But I tell you, Steve--" and here she became strong and her voice rang out with a vigorous rejection of her future, "I'll be forever damned if I will let my child be raised with the cockeyed notion that he has some God-Granted Right to Rule." My vigilant sense of perception had detected a change in the human-pattern in the building. People were moving--no, it was one person who was moving. Down in the laboratory below, and at the other end of the building, Catherine was still working over the autoclave and instruments. The waspish-looking superintendent had taken off for somewhere else, and while Catherine was alone now, she was about to be joined by Dr. Thorndyke. Half afraid that my perception of them would touch off their own telepathic sense of danger, I watched deliberately. The door opened and Thorndyke came in; Catherine turned from her work and said something, which of course I could not possibly catch. #What are they saying, Farrow?# I snapped mentally. "I don't know. They're too far for my range." I swore, but I didn't really have to have a dialog script. Nor did they do the obvious; what they did was far more telling. Catherine turned and patted his cheek. They laughed at one another, and then Catherine began handing Thorndyke the instruments out of the autoclave, which he proceeded to mix in an unholy mess in the surgical tray. Catherine saw what he was doing and made some remark; then threatened him with a pair of haemostats big enough to clamp off a three-inch fire hose. It was pleasant enough looking horseplay; the sort of intimacy that people have when they've been together for a long time. Thorndyke did not look at all frightened of the haemostats, and Catherine did not really look as though she'd follow through with her threat. They finally tangled in a wrestle for the instrument, and Thorndyke took it away from her. They leaned against a cabinet side by side, their elbows touching, and went on talking as if they had something important to discuss in the midst of their fun. It could have been reorientation or it could have been Catherine's real self. I still couldn't quite believe that she had played me false. My mind spinned from one side to the other until I came up with a blunt question that came to my lips without any mental planning. I snapped, "Farrow, what grade of telepath is Catherine?" "Doctor grade," she replied flatly. "Might have taken some pre-scholar training if economics hadn't interfered. I'd not really call her Rhine Scholar material, but I'm prejudiced against her." If what Farrow said was true, Catherine was telepath enough to control and marshall her mind to a faretheewell. She could think and plan to herself in the presence of another telepath without giving her plots away. She was certainly smart enough to lead one half-trained perceptive around by a ring in my nose. Me? I was as big a fool as Farrow. XX Nurse Farrow caught my hand. "Steve," she snapped out in a rapid, flat voice, "Think only one thought. Think of how Catherine is here; that she came here to protect your life and your future!" "Huh?" "Think it!" she almost cried. "She's coming!" I nearly fumbled it. Then I caught on. Catherine was coming; to remove the little finger manipulator and to have a chit-chat with me. I didn't want to see her, and I was beginning to wish--then I remembered that one glimmer out of me that I knew the truth and everything would be higher than Orbital Station One. I shoved my mind into low gear and started to think idle thoughts, letting myself sort of daydream. I was convincing to myself; it's hard to explain exactly, but I was play-thinking like a dramatist. I fell into it; it seemed almost truth to me as I roamed on and on. I'd been trapped and Catherine had come here to hand herself over as a hostage against my good behavior. She'd escaped the Highways bunch or maybe she just left them quietly. Somehow Phelps had seen to it that Catherine got word--I didn't know how, but that was not important. The important thing was Catherine being here as a means of keeping me alive and well. I went on thinking the lie. Catherine came in shortly and saw what Nurse Farrow was doing. "I was supposed to do that," said Catherine. Nurse Farrow straightened up from her work of loosening the straps on the manipulator. "Sorry," she said in a cool, crisp voice. "I didn't know that. This is usually my job. It's a rather delicate proposition, you know." There was a chill of professional rebuff in Farrow's voice. It was the pert white hat and the gold pin looking down upon the gray uniform with no adornment. Catherine looked a bit uncomfortable but she apparently had to take it. Catherine tried lamely, "You see, Mr. Cornell is my fiancée." Farrow jumped on that one hard. "I'm aware of that. So let's not forget that scholars of medicine do not treat their own loved ones for ethical reasons." Catherine took it like a slap across the face with an iced towel. "I'm sure that Dr. Thorndyke would not have let me take care of him if I'd not been capable," she replied. "Perhaps Dr. Thorndyke did not realize at the time that Mr. Cornell would be ready for the Treatment Department. Or," she added slyly, "have you been trained to prepare a patient for the full treatment?" "The full treatment--? Dr. Thorndyke did not seem to think--" "Please," said Farrow with that cold crispness coming out hard, "As a nurse I must keep my own opinion to myself, as well as keeping the opinions of doctors to myself. I take orders only and I perform them." That was a sharp shot; practically telling Catherine that she, as a nurses' helper, had even less right to go shooting off her mouth. Catherine started to reply but gave it up. Instead she came over and looked down at me. She cooed and stroked my forehead. "Ah, Steve," she breathed, "So you're going for the treatment. Think of me, Steve. Don't let it hurt too much." I smiled thinly and looked up into her eyes. They were soft and warm, a bit moist. Her lips were full and red and they were parted slightly; the lower lip glistened slightly in the light. These were lips I'd kissed and found sweet; a face I'd held between my hands. Her hair fluffed forward a trifle; threatened to cascade down over her shoulders. No, it was not at all hard to lie there and go on thinking all the soft-sweet thoughts I'd once hoped might come true-- She recoiled, her face changing swiftly from its mask of sweet concern to one of hard calculation. I'd slipped with that last hunk of thinking and given the whole affair away. Catherine straightened up and turned to head for the door. She took one step and caved in like a wet towel. Over her still-falling body I saw Nurse Farrow calmly reloading the skin-blast hypo, which she used to fire a second load into the base of Catherine's neck, just below the shoulder blades. "That," said Farrow succinctly, "should keep her cold for a week. I just wish I'd been born with enough guts to commit murder." "What--?" "Get dressed," she snapped. "It's cold outside, remember?" I started to dress as Farrow hurled my clothing out of the closet at me. She went on in the meantime: "I knew you couldn't keep it entirely concealed from her. She's too good a telepath. So while you were holding her attention, I let her have a shot in the neck. One of the rather bad things about being a Mekstrom is that minor items like the hypo don't register too well." I stopped. "Isn't that bad? Seems to me that I've heard that pain is a necessary factor for the preservation of the--" "Stop yapping and dress," snapped Farrow. "Pain is useful when it's needed. It isn't needed in the case of a pin pricking the hide of a Mekstrom. When a Mekstrom gets in the way of something big enough to damage him physically, then it hurts him." "Sort of when a locomotive falls on their head?" I grunted. "Keep on dressing. We're not out of this jungle yet." "So have you any plans?" She nodded soberly. "Yes, Steve. Once you asked me to be your telepath, to complete your team. I let you down. Now I've picked you up again, and from here on--out--I--" I nodded. "Sold," I told her. "Good. Now, Steve, dig the hallway." I did. There was no one there. I opened my mouth to tell her so, and then closed it foolishly. "Dig the hallway down to the left. Farther. To the door down there--three beyond the one you're perceiving now--is there a wheelchair there?" "Wheelchair?" I blurted. "Steve, this is a hospital. They don't even let a man with an aching tooth walk to the toothache ward. He rides. Now, you keep a good esper watch on the hall and if anybody looks out while I'm gone, just cast a deep dig at their face. It's possible that at this close range I can identify them from the perceived image in your mind. Although, God knows, no two people ever _see_ anything alike, let alone perceive it." She slipped out, leaving me with the recumbent form of my former sweetheart. Her face had fallen into the relaxed expression of sleep, sort of slack and unbuttoned. #Tough, baby,# I thought as I closed my eyes so that all my energy could be aimed at the use of my perception. Farrow was going down the hall like a professional heading for the wheelchair on a strict order. No one bothered to look out; she reached the locker room and dusted the wheelchair just as if she'd been getting it for a real patient. (The throb in my finger returned for a parthian shot and I remembered that I _was_ a real patient!) She trundled the chair back and into my room. "In," she said. "And keep that perception aimed on the hallway, the elevator, and the center corridor stairs." She packed me with a blanket, tucking it so that my shoes and overclothing would not show, doing the job briskly. Then she scooped Catherine up from the floor and dropped her into my bed, and then rolled Catherine into one of those hospital doodads that hospitals use for male and female alike as bedclothing. "Anyone taking a fast dig in here will think she's a patient--unless the digger knows that this room is supposed to be occupied by one Steve Cornell, obviously male. Now, Steve, ready to steer?" "Steer?" "Steer by esper. I'll drive. Oh--I know the way," she told me with a chuckle. "You just keep your perception peeled for characters who might be over-nosy. I'll handle the rest." We went along the hallway. I took fast digs at the rooms and hall ahead of us; the whole coast seemed clear. Waiting for the two-bit elevator was nerve wracking; hospitals always have such poky elevators. But eventually it came and we trundled aboard. The pilot was no big-dome. He smiled at Nurse Farrow and nodded genially at me. He was probably a blank, jockeying an elevator is about the top job for a non-psi these days. But as the elevator started down, a doctor came out of one of the rooms on the floor below. He took a fast look at the indicator above the elevator door and made a dash to thumb the button. The elevator came to a grinding halt and he got on. This bothered me, but Farrow merely simpered at the guy and melted him down to size. She made some remark to him that I couldn't hear, but from the sudden increase of his pulse rate, I gathered that she'd really put him off guard. He replied in the same unintelligible tone and reached for her hand. She held his hand, and if the guy was thinking of me, my name is Sing Hoy Low and I am a Chinese Policeman. He held her hand until we hit the first floor, and he debarked with a calf-like glance at Nurse Farrow. We went on to the ground floor and down the lower corridor to the end, where Farrow spent another lifetime and a half filling out a white cardboard form. The superintendent eyed me with a sniff. "I'll call the car," she said. I half-expected Farrow to make some objection, but she quietly nodded and we waited for another lifetime until a big car whined to a stop outside. Two big guys in white coats came in, tripped the lever on back of the wheelchair and stretched me out flat and low-slung on the same wheels. It was a neat conversion from wheelchair to wheeled stretcher, but as Farrow trundled me out feet first into the cold, I felt a sort of nervous chill somewhere south of my navel. She swung me around at the last minute and I was shoved head first into the back of the car. Car? This was a full-fledged ambulance, about as long as a city block and as heavy as a battleship. It was completely fitted for everything that anybody could think of, including a great big muscular turbo-electric power plant capable of putting many miles per behind the tail-pipe. The door closed on my feet, and we took off with Farrow sitting right behind the two big hospital attendants, one of whom was driving and the other of whom was ogling Farrow in a calculating manner. She invited the ogle. Heck, she did it in such a way that I couldn't help ogling a bit myself. If I haven't said that Farrow was an attractive woman, it was because I hadn't really paid attention to her looks. But now I went along and ogled, realizing in the dimmer and more obscure recesses of my mind that if I ogled in a loudly lewd perceptive manner, I'd not be thinking of what she was doing. So while I was pleasantly occupied in ogling, Farrow slipped two more hypos out from under her clothing. She slipped her hands out sidewise on the backs of their seats, put her face between them and said, "Anybody got a cigarette, fellows?" The next that took place happened, in order of occurrence, as follows: The driver grunted and turned his head to look at her. The other guy fumbled for a cigarette. Driver poked at the lighter on the dash, still dividing his attention between the road and Nurse Farrow. The man beside him reached for the lighter when it popped out and he held it for her while she puffed it into action. Farrow fingered the triggers on the skin-blast hypos. The man beside the driver replaced the lighter in its socket on the dash. The driver slid aside and to the floor, a second before the other hospital orderly flopped down like a deflated balloon. The ambulance took a swoop to the right, nosed down into a shallow ditch and leaped like a shot deer out on the other side. Farrow went over the back of the seat in a flurry and I rolled off of my stretcher into the angle of the floor and the sidewall. There was a rumble and then a series of crashes before we came to a shuddering halt. I came up from beneath a pile of assorted medical supplies, braced myself against the canted deck, and looked out the wind-shield. The trunk of a tree split the field of view as close to dead center as it could be. "Out, Steve," said Farrow, untangling herself from the steering wheel and the two attendants. "Out!" "What next?" I asked her. "We've made enough racket to wake the statue of Lincoln. Out and run for it." "Which way?" "Follow me!" she snapped, and took off. Even in nurse's shoes with those semi-heels, Farrow made time in a phenomenal way. I lost ground steadily. Luckily it was still early in the afternoon, so I used my perception to keep track of her once she got out of sight. She was following the gently rolling ground, keeping to the lower hollows and gradually heading toward a group of buildings off in the near-distance. I caught up with her just as we hit a tiny patch of dead area; just inside the area she stopped and we flopped on the ground and panted our lungs full of nice biting cold air. Then she pointed at the collection of buildings and said, "Steve, take a few steps out of this deadness and take a fast dig. Look for cars." I nodded; in a few steps I could send my esper forward to dig the fact that there were several cars parked in a row near one of the buildings. I wasted no time in digging any deeper, I just retreated into the dead area and told her what I'd seen. "Take another dig, Steve. Take a dig for ignition keys. We've got to steal." "I don't mind stealing." I took another trip into the open section and gandered at ignition locks. I tried to memorize the ones with keys hanging in the locks but failed to remember all of them. "Okay, Steve. This is where we walk in boldly and walk up to a couple of cars and get in and drive off." "Yeah, but why--" "That's the only way we'll ever get out of here," she told me firmly. I shrugged. Farrow knew more about the Medical Center than I did. If that's the way she figured it, that's the way it had to be. We broke out of the dead area, and as we came into the open, Farrow linked her arm in mine and hugged it. "Make like a couple of fatuous mushbirds," she chuckled. "We've been out walking and communing with nature and getting acquainted." "Isn't the fact that you're Mekstrom and I'm human likely to cause some rather pointed comment?" "It would if we were to stick around to hear it," she said. "And if they try to read our minds, all we have to do is to think nice mushy thoughts. Face it," she said quietly, "it won't be hard." "Huh?" "You're a rather nice guy, Steve. You're fast on the uptake, you're generally pleasant. You've got an awful lot of grit, guts and determination, Steve. You're no pinup boy, Steve, but--and this may come as a shock to you--women don't put one-tenth the stock in pulchritude that men do? You--" "Hey. Whoa," I bubbled. "Slow down, before you--" She hugged my arm again. "Steve," she said seriously, "I'm not in love with you. It's not possible for a woman to be in love with a man who does not return that love. You don't love me. But you can't help but admit that I am an attractive woman, Steve, and perhaps under other circumstances you'd take on a large load of that old feeling. I'll admit that the reverse could easily take place. Now, let's forget all the odd angles and start thinking like a pair of people for whom the time, the place, and the opposite sex all turned up opportunely." I couldn't help thinking of Nurse Farrow as--Nurse Farrow. The name Gloria did not quite come out. I tried to submerge this mental attitude, and so I looked down at her with what I hoped to resemble the expression of a love-struck male. I think it was closer to the expression of a would-be little-theatre actor expressing lust, and not quite making the grade. Farrow giggled. But as I sort of leered down at her, I had to admit upon proper examination of her charm that Nurse Farrow could very easily become Gloria, if as she said, we had the time to let the change occur. Another idea formed in my mind: If Farrow had been kicked in the emotions by Thorndyke, I'd equally been pushed in the face by Catherine. That made us sort of kindred souls, as they used to call it in the early books of the Twentieth Century. Gloria Farrow chuckled. "Unlike the old torch-carriers of that day," she said, "we rebound a bit too fast." Then she let my arm go and took my hand. We went swinging across the field in a sort of happy comradeship; it must have looked as though we were long-term friends. She was a good egg, hurt and beaten down and shoved off by Thorndyke, but she had a lot of the good old bounce. Of a sudden impulse I wanted to kiss her. "Go ahead, Steve," she said. "But it'll be for the probable onlookers. I'm Mekstrom, you know." So I didn't try. I just put an arm around her briefly and realized that any attempt at affection would be like trying to strike sparks off flint with a hunk of flannel. We walked hand in hand towards the buildings, strolled up saucily towards two of the parked cars, made the sort of wave that lovers give one another in goodbye when they don't really want to demonstrate their affection before ten thousand people and stepped into two cars and took off. Gloria Farrow was in the lead. We went howling down the road, Farrow in the lead car by a hundred feet and me behind her. We went roaring around a curve, over a hill, and I had my perception out to its range, which was far ahead of her car. The main gate came into range, and we bore down upon that wire and steel portal like a pair of madmen. Gloria Farrow plowed into the gate without letting up. The gate went whirling in pieces, glass flew and tires howled and bits of metal and plastic sang through the air. Her car weaved aside; I forgot the road ahead and put my perception into her car. Farrow was fighting the wheel like a racing driver in a spin. Her hands wrenched the wheel with the swift strength of the Mekstrom Flesh she wore, and the wheel bent under her hands. Over and around she went, with a tire blown and the lower rail of the big gate hanging onto the fender like a dry-land sea-anchor. She juggled the wheel and made a snaky path off to one side of the road. Out of the guardhouse came a uniformed man with a riot gun. He did not have time to raise it. Farrow ironed out her course and aimed the careening car dead center. She mowed the guard down and a half-thousandth of a second later she plowed into the guardhouse. The structure erupted like a box of stove-matches hit with a heavy-caliber soft-nosed slug, like a house of cards and an air-jet. There was a roar and a small gout of flame and then out of the flying wreckage on the far side came Farrow and her stolen car. Out of the mess of brimstone and shingles she came, turning end for end in a crazy, metal-crushing twist and spin. She ground to a broken halt before the last of the debris landed, and then everything was silent. And then for the first and only time in my life I felt the penetrant, forceful impact of an incoming thought; a mental contact from another mind: #Steve!# it screamed in my mind, #Get out! Get going! It's your move now----# I put my foot on the faucet and poured on the oil. XXI My car leaped forward and I headed along the outside road towards the nearby highway. Through the busted gate I roared, past the downed guard and the smashed guardhouse, past the wreck of Farrow's car. But Nurse Farrow was not finished with this gambit yet. As I drew even with her, she pried herself out of the messy tangle and came across the field in a dead run--and how that girl could run! As fast as I was going, she caught up; as fast as it all happened I had too little time to slow me down before Nurse Farrow closed the intervening distance from her wreck to my car and had hooked her arm in through one open window. My car lurched with the impact, but I fought the wheel straight again and Farrow snapped, "Keep going, Steve!" I kept going; Farrow snaked herself inside and flopped into the seat beside me. "Now," she said, patting the dashboard of our car, "It's up to the both of us now! Don't talk, Steve. Just drive like crazy!" "Where--?" She laughed a weak little chuckle. "Anywhere--so long as it's a long, long way from here." I nodded and settled down to some fancy mile-getting. Farrow relaxed in the seat, opened the glove compartment and took out a first aid kit. It was only then I noticed that she was banged up quite a bit for a Mekstrom. I'd not been too surprised when she emerged from the wreck; I'd become used to the idea of the indestructibility of the Mekstrom. I was a bit surprised at her being banged up; I'd become so used to their damage-proof hide that the idea of minor cuts, scars, mars, and abrasions hadn't occurred to me. Yes, that wreck would have mangled a normal man into an unrecognizable mess of hamburger. Yet I'd expected a Mekstrom to come through it unscathed. On the other hand, the damage to Farrow's body was really minor. She bled from a long gash on her thigh, from a wound on her right arm, and from a myriad of little cuts on her face, neck, and shoulders. So as I drove crazy-fast away from the Medical Center Nurse Farrow relaxed in the seat and applied adhesive tape, compresses, and closed the gashes with a batch of little skin clips in lieu of sutures. Then she lit two cigarettes and handed one of them to me. "Okay now, Steve," she said easily. "Let's drive a little less crazily." I pulled the car down to a flat hundred and felt the strain go out of me. "As I remember, there's one of the Highways not far from here--" She shook her head. "No, Steve. We don't want the Highways in Hiding, either." At a mere hundred per I could let my esper do the road-sighting, so I looked over at her. She was half-smiling, but beneath the little smile was a firm look of self-confidence. "No," she said quietly, "We don't want the Highways. If we go there, Phelps and his outfit will turn heaven and earth to break it up, now that you've become so important. You forget that the Medical Center is still being run to look legal and aboveboard; while the Highways are still in Hiding. Phelps could make quite a bitter case out of their reluctance to come out into the open." "Well, where do we go?" I asked. "West," she said simply. "West, into New Mexico. To my home." This sort of startled me. Somehow I'd not connected Farrow with any permanent home; as a nurse and later as one of the Medical Center, I'd come to think of her as having no permanent home of her own. Yet like the rest of us, Nurse Farrow had been brought up in a home with a mother and a father and probably some sisters and brothers. Mine were dead and the original home disbanded, but there was no reason why I should think of everybody else in the same terms. After all, Catherine had had a mother and a father who'd come to see me after her disappearance. So we went West, across Southern Illinois and over the big bridge at St. Louis into Missouri and across Missouri and West, West, West. We parked nights in small motels and took turns sleeping with one of us always awake and alert with esper and telepath senses geared high for the first sight of any threat. We gave the Highways we came upon a wide berth; at no time did we come close to any of their way stations. It made our path crooked and much longer than it might have been if we'd strung a line and gone. But eventually we ended up in a small town in New Mexico and at a small ranch house on the edge of the town. It is nice to have parents; I missed my own deeply when I was reminded of the sweet wonder of having people just plain glad to see their children again, no matter what they'd done under any circumstances. Even bringing a semi-invalid into their homes for an extended course of treatment. John Farrow was a tall man with gray at the temples and a pair of sharp blue eyes that missed nothing. He was a fair perceptive who might have been quite proficient if he had taken the full psi course at some university. Mrs. Farrow was the kind of elderly woman that any man would like to have for a mother. She was sweet and gentle but there was neither foolish softness or fatuous nonsense about her. She was a telepath and she knew her way around and let people know that she knew what the score was. Farrow had a brother, James, who was not at home; he lived in town with his wife but came out to the old homestead about once every week on some errand or other. They took me in as though I'd come home with their daughter for sentimental reasons; Gloria sat with us in their living room and went through the whole story, interrupted now and then by a remark aimed at me. They inspected my hand and agreed that something must be done. They were extremely interested in the Mekstrom problem and were amazed at their daughter's feats of strength and endurance. My hand, by this time, was beginning to throb again. The infection was heading on a fine start down the pinky and middle fingers; the ring finger was approaching the second joint to that point where the advance stopped long enough for the infection to become complete before it crossed the joint. The first waves of that particular pain were coming at intervals and I knew that within a few hours the pain would become waves of agony so deep that I would not be able to stand it. Ultimately, Farrow got her brother James to come out from town with his tools, and between us all we rigged up a small manipulator for my hand. Farrow performed the medical operations from the kit in the back of her car we'd stolen from the Medical Center. Then after they'd put my hand through the next phase, Nurse Farrow looked me over and gave the opinion that it was now approaching the time for me to get the rest of the full treatment. One evening I went to bed, to be in bed for four solid months. * * * * * I'd like to be able to give a blow by blow description of those four solid months. Unfortunately, I was under dope so much of the time that I know little about it. It was not pleasant. My arm laid like a log from the Petrified Forest, strapped into the machine that moved the joints with regular motion, and with each motion starting a dart of fire and mangling pain up to the shoulder. Needles entered the veins at the elbow and the armpit, and from bottles suspended almost to the ceiling to provide a pressurehead, plasma and blood-sustenance was trickled in to keep the arm alive. Dimly I recall having the other arm strapped down and the waves of pain that blasted at me from both sides. The only way I kept from going out of my mind with the pain was living from hypo to hypo and waiting for the blessed blackness that wiped out the agony; only to come out of it hours later with my infection advanced to another point of pain. When the infection reached my right shoulder, it stopped for a long time; the infection rose up my left arm and also stopped at the shoulder. I came out of the dope to find James and his father fitting one of the manipulators to my right leg and through that I could feel the darting pains in my calf and thigh. At those few times when my mind was clear enough to let me use my perception, I dug the room and found that I was lying in a veritable forest of bottles and rubber tubes and a swathe of bandages. Utterly helpless, I vaguely knew that I was being cared for in every way. The periods of clarity were fewer, now, and shorter when they came. I awoke once to find my throat paralyzed, and again to find that my jaw, tongue, and lower face was a solid pincushion of darting needles of fire. Later, my ears reported not a sound, and even later still I awoke to find myself strapped into a portable resuscitator that moved my chest up and down with an inexorable force. That's about all I know of it. When the smoke cleared away completely and the veil across my eyes was gone, it was Spring outside and I was a Mekstrom. * * * * * I sat up in bed. It was morning, the sun was streaming in the window brightly and the fresh morning air of Spring stirred the curtains gently. It was quite warm and the smell that came in from the outside was alive with newborn greenery. It felt good just to be alive. The hanging bottles and festoons of rubber hose were gone. The crude manipulators had been stowed somewhere and the bottles of medicine and stuff were missing from the bureau. There wasn't even a thermometer in a glass anywhere within the range of my vision, and frankly I was so glad to be alive again that I did not see any point to digging through the joint with my perception to find the location of the medical junk. Instead, I just wanted to get up and run. I did take a swing at the clothes closet and found my stuff. Then I took a mild pass at the house, located the bathroom and also assured myself that no one was likely to interrupt me. I was going to shave and shower and dress and go downstairs. I was just shrugging myself up and out of bed when Nurse Farrow came bustling up the stairs and into the room with no preamble. "Hi!" I greeted her. "I was going to--" "Surprise us," she said quickly. "I know. So I came up to see that you don't get into trouble." "Trouble?" I asked, pausing on the edge of the bed. "You're a Mekstrom, Steve," she told me unnecessarily. Then she caught my thought and went on: "It's necessary to remind you. You have to learn how to control your strength, Steve." I flexed my arms. They didn't feel any different. I pinched my muscle with my other hand and it pinched just as it always had. I took a deep breath and the air went in pleasantly and come out again. "I don't feel any different," I told her. She smiled and handed me a common wooden lead pencil. "Write your name," she directed. "Think I'll have to learn all over?" I grinned. I took the pencil, put my fist down on the top of the bureau above a pad of paper and chuckled at Farrow. "Now, let's see, my first initial is the letter 'S' made by starting at the top and coming around in a sweeping, graceful curve like this--" It didn't come around in any curve. As the lead point hit the paper it bore down in, flicked off the tip, and then crunched down, breaking off the point and splintering the thin, whittled wood for about an eighth of an inch. The fact that I could not control it bothered me inside and I instinctively clutched at the shaft of the pencil. It cracked in three places in my hand; the top end with the eraser fell down over my wrist to the bureau top and rolled in a rapid rattle to the edge where it fell to the floor. "See?" asked Farrow softly. "But--?" I blundered uncertainly. "Steve, your muscles and your nervous system have been stepped up proportionately. You've got to re-learn the coordination between the muscle-stimulus and the feedback information from the work you are doing." I began to see what she meant. I remembered long years ago at school, when we'd been studying some of the new alloys and there had been a sample of a magnesium-lithium-something alloy that was machined into a smooth cylinder about four inches in diameter and a foot long. It looked like hard steel. People who picked it up for the first time invariably braced their muscles and set both hands on it. But it was so light that their initial effort almost tossed the bar through the ceiling, and even long after we all knew, it was hard not to attack the bar without using the experience of our mind and sense that told us that any bar of metal _that_ big had to be _that_ heavy. I went to a chair. Farrow said, "Be careful," and I was. But it was no trick at all to take the chair by one leg at the bottom and lift it chin high. "Now, go take your shower," she told me. "But Steve, please be careful of the plumbing. You can twist off the faucet handles, you know." I nodded and turned to her, holding out a hand. "Farrow, you're a brick!" She took my hand. It was not steel hard. It was warm and firm and pleasant. It was--holding hands with a woman. Farrow stepped back. "One thing you'll have to remember," she said cheerfully, "is only to mix with your own kind from now on. Now go get that shower and shave. I'll be getting breakfast." Showering was not hard and I remembered not to twist off the water-tap handles. Shaving was easy although I had to change razor blades three times in the process. I broke all the teeth out of the comb because it was never intended to be pulled through a thicket of piano wire. Getting dressed was something else. I caught my heel in one trouser leg and shredded the cloth. I broke the buckle on my belt. My shoelaces went like parting a length of wet spaghetti. The button on the top of my shirt pinched off and when I gave that final jerk to my necktie it pulled the knot down into something about the size of a pea. Breakfast was very pleasant, although I bent the fork tines spearing a rasher of bacon and removed the handle of my coffee cup without half trying. After breakfast I discovered that I could not remove a cigarette from the package without pinching the end down flat, and after I succeeded in getting one into my mouth by treating both smoke and match as if they were made of tissue paper, my first drag on the smoke lit a howling furnace-fire on the end that consumed half of the cigarette in the first puff. "You're going to take some school before you are fit to walk among normal people, Steve," said Gloria with amused interest. "You're informing me?" I asked with some dismay, eyeing the wreckage left in my wake. Compared to the New Steve Cornell, the famous bull in the china shop was Gentle Ferdinand. I picked up the cigarette package again; it squoze down even though I tried to treat it gentle; I felt like Lenny, pinching the head off of the mouse. I also felt about as much of a bumbling idiot as Lenny, too. My re-education went on before, through, and after breakfast. I manhandled old books from the attic. I shredded newspapers. I ruined some more lead pencils and finally broke the pencil sharpener to boot. I put an elbow through the middle panel of the kitchen door without even feeling it and then managed to twist off the door knob. Generally operating like a one-man army of vandals, I laid waste to the Farrow home. Having thus ruined a nice house, Gloria decided to try my strength on her car. I was much too fast and too hard on the brakes, which of course was not too bad because my foot was also too insensitive on the go-pedal. We took off like a rocket being launched and then I tromped on the brakes (Bending the pedal) which brought us down sharp like hitting a haystack. This allowed our heads to catch up with the rest of us; I'm sure that if we'd been normal-bodied human beings we'd have had our spines snapped. Eventually I learned that everything had to be handled as if it were tissue paper, and gradually re-adjusted my reflexes to take proper cognizance of the feedback data according to my new body. We returned home after a hectic twenty miles of roadwork and I broke the glass as I slammed the car door. "It's going to take time," I admitted with some reluctance. "It always does," smiled Farrow as cheerfully as if I hadn't ruined their possessions. "I don't know how I'm going to face your folks." Farrow's smile became cryptic. "Maybe they won't notice." "Now look, Farrow----" "Steve, don't forget for the moment that you're the only known Mekstrom Carrier." "In other words your parents are due for the treatment next?" "Oh, I was most thorough. Both of them are in the final stages right now. I'm sure that anything you did to the joint will only be added to by the time they get to the walking stage. And also anything you did they'll feel well repaid." "I didn't do anything for them." "You provided them with Mekstrom bodies," she said simply. "They took to it willingly?" "Yes. As soon as they were convinced by watching me and my strength. They knew what it would be like, but they were all for it." "You've been a very busy girl," I told her. She just nodded. Then she looked up at me with troubled eyes and asked, "What are you going to do now, Steve?" "I'm going to haul the whole shebang down like Samson in the Temple." "A lot of innocent people are going to get hurt if you do that." "I can't very well find a cave in Antarctica and hide," I replied glumly. "Think a bit, Steve. Could either side afford to let you walk into New Washington with the living proof of your Mekstrom Body?" #Didn't stop 'em before,# I thought angrily. #And it seems to me that both sides were sort of urging me to go and do something that would uncover the other side.# "Not deep enough," said Farrow. "That was only during the early phases. Go back to the day when you didn't know what was going on." I grunted sourly, "Look, Farrow, tell me. Why must I fumble my way through this as I've fumbled through everything else?" "Because only by coming to the conclusion in your own way will you be convinced that someone isn't lying to you. Now, think it over, Steve." It made sense. Even if I came to the wrong conclusion, I'd believe it more than if someone had told me. Farrow nodded, following my thoughts. Then I plunged in: #First we have a man who is found to be a carrier of Mekstrom's Disease. He doesn't know anything about the disease. Right?# (Farrow nodded slowly.) #So now the Medical Center puts an anchor onto their carrier by sicking an attractive dame on his trail. Um--# At this point I went into a bit of a mental whirly-around trying to find an answer to one of the puzzlers. Farrow just looked at me with a non-leading expression, waiting. I came out of the merry-go-round after six times around the circuit and went on: #I don't know all the factors. Obviously, Catherine had to lead me fast because we had to marry before she contracted the disease from me. But there's a discrepancy, Farrow. The little blonde receptionist caught it in twenty-four hours--?# "Steve," said Farrow, "this is one I'll have to explain, since you're not a medical person. The period of incubation depends upon the type of contact. You actually bit the receptionist. That put blood contact into it. You didn't draw any blood from Catherine." "We were pretty close," I said with a slight reddening of the ears. "From a medical standpoint, you were not much closer to Catherine than you have been to me, or Dr. Thorndyke. You were closer to Thorndyke and me, say, than you've been to many of the incidental parties along the path of our travels." "Well, let that angle go for the moment. Anyway, Catherine and I had to marry before the initial traces were evident. Then I'd be in the position of a man whose wife had contracted Mekstrom's Disease on our honeymoon, whereupon the Medical Center would step in and cure her, and I'd be in the position of being forever grateful and willing to do anything that the Medical Center wanted me to do. And as a poor non-telepath, I'd probably never learn the truth. Right?" "So far," she said, still in a noncommittal tone. "So now we crack up along the Highway near the Harrison place. The Highways take her in because they take any victim in no matter what. I also presume from what's gone on that Catherine is a high enough telepath to conceal her thinking and so to become an undercover agent in the midst of the Highways organization. And at this point the long long trail takes a fork, doesn't it? The Medical Center gang did not know about the Highways in Hiding until Catherine and I barrelled into it end over end." Farrow's face softened, and although she said nothing I knew I was on the right track. #So at this point,# I went on silently, #Medical Center found themselves in a mild quandary. They could hardly put another woman on my trail because I was already emotionally involved with the missing Catherine--and so they decided to use me in another way. I was shown enough to keep me busy, I was more or less urged to go track down the Highways in Hiding for the Medical Center. After all, as soon as I'd made the initial discovery, Phelps and his outfit shouldn't have needed any more help.# "A bit more thinking, Steve. You've come up with that answer before." #Sure. Phelps wanted me to take my tale to the Government. About this secret Highway outfit. But if neither side can afford to have the secret come out, how come--?# I pondered this for a long time and admitted that it made no sense to me. Finally Farrow shook her head and said, "Steve, I've got to prompt you now and then. But remember that I'm trying to make you think it out yourself. Now consider: You are running an organization that must be kept secret. Then someone learns the secret and starts heading for the Authorities. What is your next move?" "Okay," I replied. "So I'm stupid. Naturally, I pull in my horns, hide my signs, and make like nothing was going on." "So stopping the advance of your organization, which is all that Phelps really can expect." I thought some more. #And the fact that I was carrying a story that would get me popped into the nearest hatch for the incipient paranoid made it all right?# She nodded. "And now?" she asked me. "And now I'm living proof of my story. Is that right?" "Right. And Steve, do not forget for one moment that the only reason that you're still alive is because you are valuable to both sides alive. Dead, you're only good for a small quantity of Mekstrom Inoculation." "Don't follow," I grunted. "As you say, I'm no medical person." "Alive, your hair grows and must be cut. You shave and trim off beard. Your fingernails are pared. Now and then you lose a small bit of hide or a few milliliters of blood. These are things that, when injected under the skin of a normal human, makes them Mekstrom. Dead, your ground up body would not provide much substance." "Pleasant prospect," I growled. "So what do I do to avert this future?" "Steve, I don't know. I've done what I can for you. I've effected the cure and I've done it in safety; you're still Steve Cornell." XXII "Look," I blurted with a sudden rush of brain to the head, "If I'm so all-fired important to both sides, how come you managed to sequester me for four months?" "We do have the laws of privacy," said Farrow simply. "Which neither side can afford to flout overtly. Furthermore, since neither side really knew where you were, they've been busily prowling one another's camps and locking up the prowlers from one another's camps, and playing spy and counterspy and counter-counterspy, and generally piling it up pyramid-wise," she finished with a chuckle. "You got away with following that letter to Catherine because uppermost in your mind was the brain of a lover hunting down his missing sweetheart. No one could go looking for Steve Cornell, Mekstrom Carrier, for reasons not intrinsically private." "For four months?" I asked, still incredulous. "Well, one of the angles is that both sides knew you were immobilized somewhere, going through this cure. Having you a full Mekstrom is something that both sides want. So they've been willing to have you cured." "So long as someone does the work, huh?" "Right," she said seriously. "Well, then," I said with a grim smile, "the obvious thing for me to do is to slink quietly into New Washington and to seek out some high official in secrecy. I'll put my story and facts into his hands, make him a Mekstrom, have him cured, and then we'll set up an agency to provide the general public with--" "Steve, you're an engineer. I presume you've studied mathematics. So let's assume that you can--er--bite one person every ten seconds." "That's six persons per minute; three-sixty per hour; and, ah, eighty-six-forty per day. With one hundred and sixty million Americans at the last census--um. Sixty years without sleep. I see what you mean." "Not only that, Steve, but it would create a panic, if not a global war. Make an announcement like that, and certain of our not-too-friendly neighbors would demand their shares or else. So now add up your time to take care of about three billion human souls on this Earth, Steve." "All right. So I'll forget that cockeyed notion. But still, the Government should know--" "If we could be absolutely certain that every elected official is a sensible, honest man, we could," said Farrow. "The trouble is that we've got enough demagogues, publicity hounds, and rabble-rousers to make the secret impossible to keep." I couldn't argue against that. Farrow was right. Not only that, but Government found it hard enough to function in this world of Rhine Institute with honest secrets. "Okay, then," I said. "The only thing to do is to go back to Homestead, Texas, throw my aid to the Highways in Hiding, and see what we can do to provide the Earth with some more sensible method of inoculation. I obviously cannot go around biting people for the rest of my life." "I guess that's it, Steve." I looked at her. "I'll have to borrow your car." "It's yours." "You'll be all right?" She nodded. "Eventually I'll be a way station on the Highways, I suppose. Can you make it alone, Steve? Or would you rather wait until my parents are cured? You could still use a telepath, you know." "Think it's safe for me to wait?" "It's been four months. Another week or two--?" "All right. And in the meantime I'll practice getting along with this new body of mine." We left it there. I roamed the house with Farrow, helping her with her parents. I gradually learned how to control the power of my new muscles; learned how to walk among normal people without causing their attention; and one day succeeded in shaking hands with a storekeeper without giving away my secret. Eventually Nurse Farrow's parents came out of their treatment and we spent another couple of days with them. We left them too soon, I'm sure, but they seemed willing that we take off. They'd set up a telephone system for getting supplies so that they'd not have to go into town until they learned how to handle their bodies properly, and Farrow admitted that there was little more that we could do. So we took off because we all knew that time was running out. Even though both sides had left us alone while I was immobilized, both sides must have a time-table good enough to predict my eventual cure. In fact, as I think about it now, both sides must have been waiting along the outer edges of some theoretical area waiting for me to emerge, since they couldn't come plowing in without giving away their purpose. So we left in Farrow's car and once more hit the big broad road. We drove towards Texas until we came upon a Highway, and then turned along it looking for a way station. I wanted to get in touch with the Highways. I wanted close communication with the Harrisons and the rest of them, no matter what. Eventually we came upon a Sign with a missing spoke and turned in. The side road wound in and out, leading us back from the Highway towards the conventional dead area. The house was a white structure among a light thicket of trees, and as we came close to it, we met a man busily tilling the soil with a tractor plow. Farrow stopped her car. I leaned out and started to call, but something stopped me. "He is no Mekstrom, Steve," said Farrow in a whisper. "But this is a way station, according to the road sign." "I know. But it isn't, according to him. He doesn't know any more about Mekstrom's Disease than you did before you met Catherine." "Then what the devil is wrong?" "I don't know. He's perceptive, but not too well trained. Name's William Carroll. Let me do the talking, I'll drop leading remarks for you to pick up." The man came over amiably. "Looking for someone?" he asked cheerfully. "Why, yes," said Gloria. "We're sort of mildly acquainted with the--Mannheims who used to live here. Sort of friends of friends of theirs, just dropped by to say hello, sort of," she went on, covering up the fact that she'd picked the name of the former occupant out of his mind. "The Mannheims moved about two months ago," he said. "Sold the place to us--we got a bargain. Don't really know, of course, but the story is that one of them had to move for his health." "Too bad. Know where they went?" "No," said Carroll regretfully. "They seem to have a lot of friends. Always stopping by, but I can't help 'em any." #So they moved so fast that they couldn't even change their Highway Sign?# I thought worriedly. Farrow nodded at me almost imperceptibly. Then she said to Carroll, "Well, we won't keep you. Too bad the Mannheims moved, without leaving an address." "Yeah," he said with obvious semi-interest. He eyed his half-plowed field and Farrow started her car. We started off and he turned to go back to his work. "Anything?" I asked. "No," she said, but it was a very puzzled voice. "Nothing that I can put a finger on." "But what?" "I don't know much about real estate deals," she said. "I suppose that one family could move out and another family move in just in this short a time." "Usually they don't let farmlands lie fallow," I pointed out. "If there's anything off color here, it's the fact that they changed their residence without changing the Highway sign." "Unless," I suggested brightly, "this is the coincidence. Maybe this sign is really one that got busted." Farrow turned her car into the main highway and we went along it. I could have been right about the spoke actually being broken instead of removed for its directing purpose. I hoped so. In fact I hoped so hard that I was almost willing to forget the other bits of evidence. But then I had to face the truth because we passed another Highway Sign and, of course, its directional information pointed to that farm. The signs on our side of the highway were upside down; indicating that we were leaving the way station. The ones that were posted on the left hand side were rightside up, indicating that the drive was approaching a way station. That cinched it. #Well,# as I told both Farrow and me, #one error doesn't create a trend. Let's take another look!# One thing and another, we would either hit another way station before we got to Homestead, or we wouldn't. Either one could put us wise. So we took off again with determination and finally left that side of erroneous Highway Signs when we turned onto Route 66. We weren't on Route 66 very long because the famous U.S. Highway sort of trends to the Northeast and Homestead was in a Southern portion of Texas. We left Route 66 at Amarillo and picked up U.S. 87, which leads due South. Not many miles out of Amarillo we came up another set of Highway Signs that pointed us on to the South. I tried to remember whether this section led to Homestead by a long route, but I hadn't paid too much attention to the maps when I'd had the chance and therefore the facts eluded me. We'd find out, Farrow and I agreed, and then before we could think much more about it, we came upon a way station sign that pointed in to another farmhouse. "Easy," I said. "You bet," she replied, pointing to the rural-type mailbox alongside the road. I nodded. The box was not new but the lettering on the side was. "Still wet," I said with a grunt. Farrow slowed her car as we approached the house and I leaned out and gave a cheerful hail. A woman came out of the front door and waved at us. "I'm trying to locate a family named Harrison," I called. "Lived around here somewhere." The woman looked thoughtful. She was maybe thirty-five or so, clean but not company-dressed. There was a smudge of flour on her cheek and a smile on her face and she looked wholesome and honest. "Why, I don't really know," she said. "That name sounds familiar, but it is not an uncommon name." "I know," I said uselessly. Farrow nudged me on the ankle with her toe and then made a swift sign for "P" in the hand-sign code. "Why don't you come on in?" invited the woman. "We've got an area telephone directory here. Maybe--?" Farrow nudged me once more and made the sign of "M" with her swift fingers. We had hit it this time; here was a woman perceptive and a Mekstrom residing in a way station. I took a mild dig at her hands and there was no doubt of her. A man's head appeared in the doorway above the woman; he had a hard face and he was tall and broad shouldered but there was a smile on his face that spread around the pipe he was biting on. He called, "Come on in and take a look." Farrow made the sign of "T" and "M" and that told me that he was a telepath. She hadn't needed the "M" sign because I'd taken a fast glimpse of his hide as soon as he appeared. Parrying for time and something evidential, I merely said, "No, we'd hate to intrude. We were just asking." The man said, "Oh, shucks, Mister. Come on in and have a cup of coffee, anyway." His invitation was swift enough to set me on edge. I turned my perception away from him and took a fast cast at the surrounding territory. There was a mildly dead area along the lead-in road to the left; it curved around in a large arc and the other horn of this horseshoe shape came up behind the house and stopped abruptly just inside of their front door. The density of this area varied, the end in which the house was built was so total that I couldn't penetrate, while the other end that curved around to end by the road tapered off in deadness until it was hard to define the boundary. If someone were pulling a flanking movement around through that horseshoe to cut off our retreat, it would become evident very soon. A swift thought went through my mind: #Farrow, they're Mekstroms and he's a telepath and she's a perceptive, and they know we're friendly if they're Highways. If they're connected with Scholar Phelps and his--# The man repeated, "Come on in. We've some mail to go to Homestead that you can take if you will." Farrow made no sound. She just seesawed her car with three rapid back-and-forth jerks that sent showers of stones from her spinning wheels. We whined around in a curve that careened the car up on its outside wheels. Then we ironed out and showered the face of the man with stones from the wheels as we took off. The shower of dust and stones blinded him, and kept him from latching onto the tail of the car and climbing in. We left him behind, swearing and rubbing dirt from his eyes. We whipped past the other end of the horseshoe area just as a jeepster came roaring down out of the thickened part into the region where my perception could make out the important things (Like three burly gents wearing hunting rifles, for instance.) They jounced over the rough ground and onto the lead-in road just behind us; another few seconds of gab with our friends and they'd have been able to cut us off. "Pour it on, Farrow!" I knew I was a bit of a cowboy, but Farrow made me look like a tenderfoot. We rocketed down the winding road with our wheels riding up on either side like the course in a toboggan run and Farrow rode that car like a test pilot in a sudden thunderstorm. I was worried about the hunting rifles, but I need not have been concerned. We were going too fast to make good aim, and their jeepster was not a vehicle known for its smooth riding qualities. They lost one character over a rough bounce and he went tail over scalp into the grass along the way. He scared me by leaping to his feet, grabbing the rifle and throwing it up to aim. But before he could squeeze off a round we were out of the lead-in road and on the broad highway. Once on the main road again, Farrow put the car hard down by the nose and we outran them. The jeepster was a workhorse and could have either pulled over the house or climbed the wall and run along the roof, but it was not made for chase. "That," I said, "seems to be that." "Something is bad," agreed Farrow. "Well, I doubt that they'll be able to clean out a place as big as Homestead. So let's take our careful route to Homestead and find out precisely what the devil is cooking." "Know the route?" "No, but I know where it is on the map and we can figure it out from--" "Steve, stop. Take a very careful and delicate view over to the right." "Digging for what?" "Another car pacing us along a road on the other side of that field." I tried and failed. Then I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes and tried again. On this second try I got a very hazy perception of a large moving mass that could only have been a car. In the car I received a stronger impression of weapons. It was the latter that cinched it. I hauled out my roadmap and turned it to Texas. I thumbed the sectional maps of Texas until I located the sub-district through which we were passing and then I identified this section of U.S. 87 precisely. There was another road parallel and a half mile to the right, a dirt road according to the map-legend. It intersected our road a few miles ahead. My next was a thorough covering of the road behind; as I expected another car was pacing us just beyond the range of my perception for anything but a rifle aimed at my hide. Pacing isn't quite the word, I use it in the sense of their keeping up with us. Fact is that all of us were going about as fast as we could go, with safety of tertiary importance. Anyway, they were pacing us and closing down from that parallel road on the right. I took a fast and very careful scanning of the landscape to our left but couldn't find anything. I spent some time at it then, but still came up with a blank. #Turn left at that feeder road a mile ahead,# I thought at Farrow and she nodded. There was one possibility that I did not like to face. We had definitely detected pursuit to our right and behind, but not to our left. This did not mean that the left-side was not covered. It was quite likely that the gang to the rear were in telepathic touch with a network of other telepaths, the end of which mental relay link was far beyond range, but as close in touch with our position and action as if we'd been in sight. The police make stake-out nets that way, but the idea is not exclusive. I recall hazing an eloping couple that way once. But there was nothing to do but to take the feeder road to the left, because the devil we could see was more dangerous than the devil we couldn't. Farrow whipped into the side road and we tore along with only a slight slowing of our headlong speed. I ranged ahead, worried, suspicious of everything, scanning very carefully and strictly on the watch for any evidence of attempted interception. I caught a touch of danger converging up from the South on a series of small roads. This I did not consider dangerous after a fast look at my roadmap because this series of roads did not meet our side road for a long time and only after a lot of turning and twisting. So long as we went Easterly, we were okay from that angle. The gang behind, of course, followed us, staying at the very edge of my range. "You'll have to fly, Farrow," I told her. "If that gang to our South stays there, we'll not be able to turn down Homestead way." "Steve, I'm holding this crate on the road by main force and awkwardness as it is." But she did step it up a bit, at that. I kept a cautious and suspicious watchout, worrying in the back of my mind that someone among them might turn up with a jetcopter. So long as the sky remained clear-- As time went on, I perceived that the converging car to the South was losing ground because of the convolutions of their road. Accordingly we turned to the South, making our way around their nose, sort of, and crossing their anticipated course to lead South. We hit U.S. 180 to the West of Breckenridge, Texas and then Farrow really poured on the coal. The idea was to hit Fort Worth and lose them in the city where fun, games, and telepath-perceptive hare-and-hounds would be viewed dimly by the peaceloving citizens. Then we'd slope to the South on U.S. 81, cut over to U.S. 75 somewhere to the South and take 75 like a cannonball until we turned off on the familiar road to Homestead. Fort Worth was a haven and a detriment to both sides. Neither of us could afford to run afoul of the law. So we both cut down to sensible speeds and snaked our way through the town, with Farrow and me probing the roads to the South in hope of finding a clear lane. There were three cars pacing us, cutting off our retreat Southward. They hazed us forward to the East like a dog nosing a bunch of sheep towards pappy's barn. Then we were out of Forth Worth and on U.S. 180. We whipped into Dallas and tried the same circumfusion as before and we were as neatly barred. So we went out of Dallas on U.S. 67 and as we left the city limits, we poured on the oil again, hoping to get around them so that we could turn back South towards Homestead. "Boxed," I said. "Looks like it," said Farrow unhappily. I looked at her. She was showing signs of weariness and I realized that she'd been riding this road for hours. "Let me take it," I said. "We need your perception," she objected. "You can't drive and keep a ranging perception, Steve." "A lot of good a ranging perception will do once you drop for lack of sleep and we tie us up in a ditch." "But--" "We're boxed," I told her. "We're being hazed. Let's face it, Farrow. They could have surrounded us and glommed us any time in the past six hours." "Why didn't they?" she asked. "You ask that because you're tired," I said with a grim smile. "Any bunch that has enough cars to throw a barrier along the streets of cities like Forth Worth and Dallas have enough manpower to catch us if they want to. So long as we drive where they want us to go, they won't cramp us down." "I hate to admit it." "So do I. But let's swap, Farrow. Then you can use your telepathy on them maybe and find out what their game is." She nodded, pulled the car down to a mere ramble and we swapped seats quickly. As I let the crate out again, I took one last, fast dig of the landscape and located the cars that were blocking out the passageways to the South, West, and North, leaving a nice inviting hole to the Easterly-North way. Then I had to haul in my perception and slap it along the road ahead, because I was going to ramble far and fast and see if I could speed out of the trailing horseshoe and cut out around the South horn with enough leeway to double back towards Homestead. "Catch any plans from them?" I asked Farrow. There was no answer. I looked at her. Gloria Farrow was semi-collapsed in her seat, her eyes closed gently and her breath coming in long, pleasant swells. I'd known she was tired, but I hadn't expected this absolute ungluing. A damned good kid, Farrow. At that last thought, Farrow moved slightly in her sleep and a wisp of a smile crossed her lips briefly. Then she turned a bit and snuggled down in the seat and really hit the slumber-path. A car came roaring at me with flashing headlamps and I realized that dusk was coming. I didn't need the lights, but oncoming drivers did, so I snapped them on. The beams made bright tunnels in the light and we went along and on and on and on, hour after hour. Now and then I caught a perceptive impression the crescent of cars that were corralling us along U.S. 67 and not letting us off the route. I hauled out my roadmap and eyed the pages as I drove by perception. U.S. 67 led to St. Louis and from there due North. I had a hunch that by the time we played hide and seek through St. Louis and got ourselves hazed out to their satisfaction, I'd be able to give a strong guess as to our ultimate destination. I settled down in my seat and just drove, still hoping to cut fast and far around them on my way to Homestead. XXIII Three times during the night I tried to flip around and cut my way through their cordon, and each time I faced interception. It was evident that we were being driven and so long as we went to their satisfaction they weren't going to clobber us. Nurse Farrow woke up along about dawn, stretched, and remarked that she could use a toothbrush and a tub of hot water and amusedly berated herself for not filling the back seat before we took off. Then she became serious again and asked for the details of the night, which I slipped her as fast as I could. We stopped long enough to swap seats, and I stretched out but I couldn't sleep. Finally I said, "Stop at the next dog wagon, Farrow. We're going to eat, comes anything." "Won't that be dangerous?" "Shucks," I grunted angrily. "They'll probably thank us. They're probably hungry too." "We'll find out." The smell of a roadside diner is usually a bit on the thick and greasy side, but I was so hungry that morning that it smelled like mother's kitchen. We went in, ordered coffee and orange juice, and then disappeared into the rest rooms long enough to clean up. That felt so good we ordered the works and watched the guy behind the fryplate handle the bacon, eggs, and home-fries with a deft efficient manner. We pitched in fast, hoping to beat the flies to our breakfast. We were so intent that we paid no attention to the car that came into the lot until a man came in, ordered coffee and a roll, and then carried it over to our table. "Fine day for a ride, isn't it?" I eyed him; Farrow bristled and got very tense. I said, "I doubt that I know you, friend." "Quite likely. But I know you, Cornell." I took a fast dig; there was no sign of anything lethal except the usual collection of tire irons, screwdrivers, and other tools which, oddly enough, seldom come through as being dangerous because they're not weapons-by-design. "I'm not heeled, Cornell. I'm just here to save us all some trouble." #Telepath?# He nodded imperceptibly. Then he said, "We'll all save time, gasoline, and maybe getting into grief with the cops if you take Route 40 out of St. Louis." "Suppose I don't like U.S. 40?" "Get used to it," he said with a crooked smile. "Because you'll take U.S. 40 out of St. Louis whether you like it or not." I returned his crooked smile. I also dug his hide and he was a Mekstrom, of course. "Friend," I replied, "Nothing would convince me, after what you've said, that U.S. 40 is anything but a cowpath; slippery when wet; and impassible in the Early Spring, Late Summer, and the third Thursday after Michelmas." He stood up. "Cornell, I can see your point. You don't like U.S. 40. So I'll help you good people. If you don't want to drive along such a lousy slab of concrete, just say the word and we'll arrange for you to take it in style, luxury, and without a trace of pain or strain. I'll be seein' you. And a very pleasant trip to you, Miss Farrow." Then the character got up, went to the cashier and paid for our breakfast as well as his own. He took off in his car and I have never seen him since. Farrow looked at me, her face white and her whole attitude one of fright. "U.S. 40," she said in a shaky voice, "runs like a stretched string from St. Louis to Indianapolis." She didn't have to tell me any more. About sixty miles North of Indianapolis on Indiana State Highway 37 lies the thriving metropolis of Marion, Indiana, the most important facet of which (to Farrow and me) is an establishment called the Medical Research Center. Nothing was going to make me drive out of St. Louis along U.S. 40. Period; End of message; No answer required. Nothing, because I was very well aware of their need to collect me alive and kicking. If I could not roar out of St. Louis in the direction I selected, I was going to turn my car end for end and have at them. Not in any mild manner, but with deadly intent to do deadly damage. If I'd make a mild pass, they'd undoubtedly corral me by main force and carry me off kicking and screaming. But if I went at them to kill or get killed, they'd have to move aside just to prevent me from killing myself. I didn't think I'd get to the last final blow of that self-destruction. I'd win through. So we left the diner after a breakfast on our enemy's expense account and took off again. I was counting on St. Louis. The center of the old city is one big shapeless blob of a dead area; so nice and cold that St. Louis has reversed the usual city-type blight area growth. Ever since Rhine, the slum sections have been moving out and the new buildings have been moving in. So with the dead area and the brand-new, wide streets and fancy traffic control, St. Louis was the place to go in along one road, get lost in traffic, and come out, roaring along any road desirable. I could not believe that any outfit, hoping to work under cover, could collect enough manpower and cars to block every road, lane, highway and duckrunway that led out of a city as big as St. Louis. Again they hazed us by pacing along parallel roads and behind us with the open end of their crescent aimed along U.S. 67. We went like hell; without slowing a bit we sort of swooped up to St. Louis and took a fast dive into that big blob-shaped dead area. We wound up in traffic and tied Boy Scout knots in our course. I was concerned about overhead coverage from a 'copter even though I've been told that the St. Louis dead area extends upward in some places as high as thirteen thousand feet. The only thing missing was some device or doodad that would let us use our perception or telepathy in this deadness while they couldn't. As it was, we were as psi-blind as they were, so we had to go along the streets with our eyes carefully peeled for cars of questionable ownership. We saw some passenger cars with out-of-state licenses and gave them wide clearances. One of them hung on our tail until I committed a very neat coup by running through a stoplight and sandwiching my car between two whopping big fourteen-wheel moving vans. I'd have enjoyed the expression on the driver's face if I could have seen it. But then we were gone and he was probably cussing. I stayed between the vans as we wound ourselves along the road and turned into a side street. I stayed between them too long. Because the guy in front slammed on his air-brakes and the big van came to a stop with a howl of tires on concrete. The guy behind did not even slow down. He closed in on us like an avalanche. I took a fast look around and fought the wheel of my car to turn aside, but he whaled into my tail and we went sliding forward. I was riding my brakes but the mass of that moving van was so great that my tires just wore flats on the pavement-side. We were bearing down on that stopped van and it looked as though we were going to be driving a very tall car with a very short wheelbase in a very short time. Then the whole back panel of the front van came tumbling towards me from the top, pivoting on a hinge at the bottom, making a fine ramp. The van behind me nudged us up the ramp and we hurtled forward against a thick, resilient pad that stopped my car without any damage either to the car or to the inhabitants. Then the back panel closed up and the van took off. Two big birds on each side opened the doors of our car simultaneously and said "Out!" The tall guy on my side gave me a cocksure smile and the short guy said, "We're about to leave St. Louis on U.S. 40, Cornell. I hope you won't find this journey too rough." I started to take a swing, but the tall one caught my elbow and threw me off balance. The short one reached down and picked up a baseball bat. "Use this, Cornell," he told me. "Then no one will get hurt." I looked at the pair of them, and then gave up. There are odd characters in this world who actually enjoy physical combat and don't mind getting hurt if they can hurt the other guy more. These were the type. Taking that baseball bat and busting it over the head of either one would be the same sort of act as kids use when they square off in an alley and exchange light blows which they call a "cardy" just to make the fight legal. All it would get me was a sore jaw and a few cracked ribs. So after my determination to take after them with murderous intent, they'd pulled my teeth by scooping me up in this van and disarming me. I relaxed. The short one nodded, although he looked disappointed that I hadn't allowed him the fun of a shindy. "You'll find U.S. 40 less rough than you expected," he said. "After all, it's like life; only rough if you make it rough." "Go to hell and stay there," I snapped. That was about as weak a rejoinder as I've ever emitted, but it was all I could get out. The tall one said, "Take it easy, Cornell. You can't win 'em all." I looked across the nose of our trapped car to Farrow. She was leaning against the hood, facing her pair. They were just standing there at ease. One of them was offering a cigarette and the other held a lighter ready. "Relax," said the one with the smokes. The other one said, "Might as well, Miss Farrow. Fighting won't get nobody nowhere but where you're going anyway. Might as well go on your own feet." Scornfully, Farrow shrugged. "Why should I smoke my own?" she asked nobody in particular. Mentally I agreed: #Take 'em for all they're worth, Farrow!# And then I reached for one, too. Along the side of the van were benches. I sat down, stretched out on my back and let the smoke trickle up. I finished my cigarette and then found that the excitement of this chase, having died so abruptly, left me with only a desire to catch up on sleep. I dozed off thinking that it wasn't everybody who started off to go to Homestead, Texas, and ended up in Marion, Indiana. * * * * * Scholar Phelps did not have the green carpet out for our arrival, but he was present when our mobile prison cell opened deep inside of the Medical Center grounds. So was Thorndyke. Thorndyke and three nurses of Amazon build escorted Farrow off with the air of captors collecting a traitor. Phelps smiled superciliously at me and said, "Well, young sir, you've given us quite a chase." "Give me another chance and we'll have another chase," I told him grumpily. "Not if we can help it," he boomed cheerfully. "We've big plans for you." "Have I got a vote? It's 'Nay!' if I do." "You're too precipitous," he told me. "It is always an error, Mr. Cornell, to be opinionated. Have an open mind." "To what?" "To everything," he said with an expansive gesture. "The error of all thinking, these days, is that people do not think. They merely follow someone else's thinking." "And I'm to follow yours?" "I'd prefer that, of course. It would indicate that you were possessed of a mind of your own; that you weren't merely taking the lazy man's attitude and following in the footsteps of your father." "Skip it," I snapped. "Your way isn't--" "Now," he warned with a wave of a forefinger like a prohibitionist warning someone not to touch that quart, "One must never form an opinion on such short notice. Remember, all ideas are not to be rejected just because they do not happen to agree with your own preconceived notions." "Look, Phelps," I snapped, deliberately omitting his title which I knew would bite a little, "I don't like your personal politics and I deplore your methods. You can't go on playing this way--" "Young man, you err," he said quietly. He did not even look nettled that I'd addressed him in impolite (if not rough) terms. "May I point out that I am far ahead of your game? Thoroughly outnumbered, and in ignorance of the counter-movement against me until you so vigorously brought it to my attention; within a year I have fought the counter-movement to a standstill, caused the dispersement of their main forces, ruined their far-flung lines of communication, and have so consolidated my position that I have now made open capture of the main roving factor. The latter is you, young man. A very disturbing influence and so very necessary to the conduct of this private war. You prate of my attitude, Mr. Cornell. You claim that such an attitude must be defeated. Yet as you stand there mouthing platitudes, we are preparing to make a frontal assault upon their main base at Homestead. We've waged our war of attrition; a mere spearhead will break them and scatter them to the far winds." "Nice lecture," I grunted. "Who are your writers?" "Let's not attempt sarcasm," he said crisply. "It sits ill upon you, Mr. Cornell." "I'd like to sit on you," I snapped. "Your humor is less tolerable than your sarcasm." "Can it!" I snapped. "So you've collected me. I'll still--" "You'll do very little, Mr. Cornell," he told me. "Your determination to attack us tooth and nail was an excellent program, and with another type of person it might have worked. But I happen to know that your will to live is very great, young man, and that in the final blow, you'd not have the will to die great enough to carry your assault to its completion." "Know a lot, don't you." "Yes, indeed I do. So now if you're through trying to fence at words, we'll go to your quarters." "Lead on," I said in a hollow voice. With an air of stage-type politeness, he indicated a door. He showed me out and followed me. He steered me to a big limousine with a chauffeur and offered me cigarettes from a box on the arm rest as the driver started the turbine. The car purred with that muted sound of well-leashed power. "You could be of inestimable value to us," he said in a conversational tone. "I am talking this way to you because you can be of much more value as a willing ally than you would be if unwilling." "No doubt," I replied dryly. "I suggest you set aside your preconceived notions and employ a modicum of practical logic," suggested Scholar Phelps. "Observe your position from a slightly different reign of vantage. Be convinced that no matter what you do or say, we intend to make use of you to the best of our ability. You are not entertaining any doubts of that fact, I'm sure." I shrugged. Phelps was not asking me these things, the inquisitor was actually telling me. He went right on telling me: "Since you will be used no matter what, you might consider the advisability of being sensible, Mr. Cornell. In blunt words, we are prepared to meet cooperation with certain benefits which will not be proffered otherwise." "In blunter words you are offering to hire me." Scholar Phelps smiled in a superior manner. "Not that blunt, Mr. Cornell, not that crude. The term 'hire' implies the performance of certain tasks in return for stipulated remuneration. No, my intention is to give you a position in this organization the exact terms of which are not clearly definable. Look, young man, I've indicated that your willing cooperation is more valuable to us than otherwise. Join us and you will enjoy the freedom of our most valued and trusted members; you will take part in upper level planning; you will enjoy the income and advantages of top executive personnel." He stopped short and eyed me with a peculiar expression. "Mr. Cornell, you have the most disconcerting way. You've actually caused me to talk as if this organization were some sort of big business instead of a cultural unit." I eyed him with the first bit of humor I'd found in many days. "You seem to talk just as though a cultural unit were set above, beyond, and spiritually divorced from anything so sordid as money, position, and the human equivalent of the barnyard pecking order," I told him. "So now let's stop goofing off, and put it into simple terms. You want me to join you willingly, to do your job for you, to advance your program. In return for which I shall be permitted to ride in the solid gold cadillac, quaff rare champagne, and select my own office furniture. Isn't that about it?" Scholar Phelps smiled, using a benign expression that indicated that he was pleased with himself, but which had absolutely nothing to do with his attitude towards me or any of the rest of the human race. "Mr. Cornell, I am well aware of the time it may take for a man to effect a change in his attitude. In fact, I would be very suspicious if you were to make an abrupt reversal. However, I have outlined my position and you may have time to think it over. Consider, at the very least, the fact that while cooperation will bring you pleasure and non-cooperation will bring you pain, the ultimate result will be that we will make use of your ability in either case. Now--I will say no more for the present." The limousine had stopped in front of a four story brick building that was only slightly different in general architecture than others in the Medical Center. I could sense some slight difference, but when I took a dig at the interior I found to my amazement that this building had been built deliberately in a dead zone. The dead area stood up in the clarity like a little blob of black ink at the bottom of a crystal clear swimming pool, seen just before the ink began to diffuse. Scholar Phelps saw my look of puzzlement and said, suavely, "We've reversed the usual method of keeping unwilling guests. Here we know their frame of mind and attitude; therefore to build the place in a dead area keeps them from plotting among themselves. I trust that your residence herein will be only temporary, Mr. Cornell." I nodded glumly. I was facing those last and final words: _Or Else!_ Phelps signed a register at a guard's station in the lobby. We took a very fast and efficient elevator to the third floor and Phelps escorted me along a hallway that was lined with doors, dormitory style. In the eye-level center of each door was a bull's eye that looked like one-way glass and undoubtedly was. I itched to take a look, but Phelps was not having any; he stopped my single step with a hand on my arm. "This way," he said smoothly. I went this way and was finally shown into one of the rooms. My nice clean cell away from home. XXIV As soon as Phelps was gone, I took a careful look at my new living quarters. The room itself was about fourteen by eighteen, but the end in which I was confined was only fourteen by ten, the other eight feet of end being barred off by a very efficient-looking set of heavy metal rods and equally strong cross-girdering. There was a sliding door that fit in place as nicely as the door to a bank vault; it was locked by heavy keeper-bars that slid up from the floor and down from the ceiling and they were actuated by hidden motors. In the barrier was a flat horizontal slot wide enough to take a tray and high enough to pass a teacup. The bottom of this slot was flush with a small table that extended through the barrier by a couple of feet on both sides so that a tray could be set down on the outside and slipped in. I tested the bars with my hands, but even my new set of muscles wouldn't flex them more than a few thousandths of an inch. The walls were steel. All I got as I tried them was a set of paint-clogged fingernails. The floor was also steel. The ceiling was a bit too high for me to tackle, but I assumed that it, too, was steel. The window was barred from the inside, undoubtedly so that any visitor from the outside could not catch on to the fact that this building was a private calaboose. The--er--furnishings of this cold storage bin were meager of minimum requirements. A washstand and toilet. A bunk made of metal girders welded to the floor. The bedding rested on wide resilient straps fixed to the cross-bars at top and bottom of the bed. A foam-rubber mattress, sheets, and one blanket finished off the bed. It was a cell designed by Mekstroms to contain Mekstroms and by wiseacres to contain other wiseacres. The non-metallic parts of the room were, of course, fireproof. Anything I could get hold of was totally useless as a weapon or lever or tool; anything that might have been useful to a prisoner was welded down. Having given up in the escape department, I sat on my bunk and lit a cigarette. I looked for tell-tales, and found a television lens set above the door of the room eight feet outside of my steel barrier. Beside the lens was a speaker grille and a smaller opening that looked like a microphone dust cover. With a grunt, I flipped my cigarette at the television lens. I hit just above the hole, missing it by about an inch. Immediately a tinny-sounding voice said, "That is not permitted, Mr. Cornell. You are expected to maintain some degree of personal cleanliness. Since you cannot pick up that cigarette butt, you have placed an unwelcome task upon our personnel. One more infraction of this nature and you will not be permitted the luxury of smoking." "Go to the devil!" I snapped. There was no reply. Not even a haughty chuckle. The silence was worse than any reply because it pointed out the absolute superiority of their position. Eventually I dozed off, there being nothing else to do. When I awoke they'd shoved a tray of food in on my table. I ate unenthusiastically. I dozed again, during which time someone removed the tray. When I woke up the second time it was night and time to go to bed, so I went. I woke up in the morning to see a burly guy enter with a tray of breakfast. I attempted to engage him in light conversation but he did not even let on that I was in the cell. Later he removed the tray as silently as he'd brought it, and I was left with another four hours of utter boredom until the same bird returned with a light lunch. Six hours after lunch came a slightly more substantial dinner, but no talk. By bedtime the second night I was getting stir-crazy. I hit the sack at about nine thirty, and tossed and turned, unable to drop off because I was not actually tired. I was also wondering when they'd come around with their brain-washing crew, or maybe someone who'd enter with an ultimatum. On the following morning, the tray-bearer was Dr. Thorndyke, who sat on the chair on the outside of my bars and looked at me silently. I tried giving him stare for stare, but eventually I gave up and said, "So now where do we go?" "Cornell, you're in a bad spot of your own making." "Could be," I admitted. "And yet, really, you're more of a victim of circumstances." "Forgetting all the sideplay, I'm a prisoner," I told him curtly. "Let's face a few facts, Thorndyke, and stop tossing this guff." "All right," he said shortly, "The facts are these: We would prefer that you help us willingly. We'd further prefer to have you as you are. That is, un-reoriented mentally." "You couldn't afford to trust me," I grunted. "Maybe we can. It's no secret that we've latched on to quite a number of your friends. Let's assume that they will all be well-treated if you agree to join us willingly." "I'm sure that the attitude of any of my friends is such that they'd prefer me to stand my ground rather than betray their notions of right and wrong." I told him. "That's a foolish premise," he replied. "You could no more prevail against us than you could single-handedly overthrow the Government. Having faced that fact, it becomes sound and sensible to accept the premise and then see what sort of niche you can carve out of the new order." "I don't like your new order," I grunted. "Many people will not," he admitted. "But then, people do not really know what's good for them." I almost laughed at him. "Look," I said, "I'd rather make my own ignorant mistakes than to have some Great Father supervise my life. And speaking of fathers, we've both got to admit that God Himself permits us the complete freedom of our wills." Thorndyke sneered at me. "If we're to quote the Scripture," he said sourly, "I'll point out that 'The Lord Thy God is a jealous God, visiting His wrath even upon seven generations of those who hate Him.'" "Granted," I replied calmly, "But whether we love Him or hate Him is entirely up to our own particular notion. Now--" "Cornell, stop talking like an idiot. Here, too, you can take your choice. I'm not ordering you. I'm just trying to point out that whether you go on suffering or enjoying life is entirely up to your own decision. And also your decision will help or hinder others." "You're entirely too Godlike," I told him. "Well," he said, "think it over." "Go to the devil!" "Now, that's a very weak response," he said loftily, "Doing nobody any good or harm. Just talk. So stop gabbing and think." Thorndyke left me with my thoughts. Sure, I had bargaining power, but it was no good. I'd be useful only until they discovered some method of inoculating normal flesh with Mekstrom's Disease, and once that was taken care of, Steve Cornell would be a burden upon their resources. So that was the morning of my third day of incarceration and nothing more took place all day. They didn't even give me anything to read, and I almost went nuts. You have no idea of how long fourteen hours can be until you've been sitting in a cell with absolutely nothing to do. I exercised by chinning myself on the bars and playing gymnastics. I wanted to run but there was not enough room. The physical thrill I got out of being able to chin myself with one hand wore off after a half hundred pull-ups because it was no great feat for a Mekstrom. I did push-ups and bridges and other stunts until I was bored again. And all the while, my thinking section was going around and around. The one main point that I kept coming back to was a very unpleasant future to face: It was certain that no matter what I did, nor how I argued, I was going to help them out. Either I would do it willingly or they'd grow tired of the lecture routine and take me in for a mental re-evaluation, after which (Being not-Steve Cornell any more) I'd join their ranks and do their bidding. About the only thing I could look at with self-confidence was my determination to hold out. If I was going to join them, it would be after I were no longer the man I am, but reoriented into whatever design they wanted. And that resolve was weakened by the normal human will to live. You can't make a horse drink water, but you can lead a human being to a well and he will drink it dry if you keep a shotgun pointed in his direction. And so it ended up with my always wondering if, when the cards were all dealt out face up, whether I would have the guts to keep on saying 'No' right up to the point where I walked into their department of brain-washing. In fact, I was rather afraid that in the last moment I'd weaken, just to stay being me. That uncertainty of mine was, of course, just the idea they wanted to nourish in my mind. They were doing it by leaving me alone with my mental merry-go-round. Again I hit the sack out of sheer boredom and I turned and tossed for what seemed like hours before I dropped off to sleep, wondering and dreaming about who was to be the next visitor with a bill of goods to sell. The next visitor came in about midnight, or thereabouts. I woke up with the realization that someone had come in through the outer door and was standing there in the semi-dark caused by a bright moon shining in through my barred window. "Steve," she said, in a near whisper. "Go away," I told her. "Haven't you done enough already?" "Oh, please, Steve. I've got to talk to you." I sat on the edge of my bunk and looked at her. She was fully dressed; her light printed silk was of the same general pattern and fit that she preferred. In fact, Catherine looked as I'd always seen her, and as I'd pictured her during the long hopeless weeks of our separation. "You've got something to add?" I asked her coldly. "I've got to make you understand, Steve," she pleaded. "Understand what?" I snapped. "I know already. You deliberately set out to marry, or else-how tie some emotional cable onto me. God knows that you succeeded. If it hadn't been for that accident, I'd have been nailed down tight." "That part is true," she whispered. "Naturally, you've got justification." "Well, I have." "So has any burglar." She shook her head at me. "Steve, you don't really understand. If only you could read my mind and know the truth--" She let this trail off in a helpless awkwardness. It was one of those statements that are meaningless because it can be said by either friend or foe and cannot be checked. I just looked at her and suddenly remembered something: This was the first time in my life that I was in a position to do some verbal fencing with a telepath on even terms. I could say 'Yes' and think 'No' with absolute impunity. In fact, I might even have had an edge, since as a poor non-telepath I did have some training in subterfuge, falsehood, and diplomatic maneuver that the telepath couldn't have. Catherine and I, at long last, were in the position of the so-called good old days when boys and girls couldn't really know the truth about one another's real thoughts. "So what's this truth?" I demanded. "Steve, answer me truly. Have you ever been put on an odious job, only to find that the job is really pleasant?" "Yes." "Then hear me out. I--in fact, no woman--takes kindly to being directed to do what I did. I was told to meet you, to marry--" Her face looked flustered and it might have been a bit flushed for all I knew. I couldn't see color enough in the dim light to be sure. "--And then I met you, Steve, and I found out that you were really a very nice sort of guy." "Well, thanks." "Don't be bitter. Hear the truth. If Otto Mekstrom had not existed, if there were no such thing as Mekstrom's Disease, and I had met you freely and openly as men and women meet, I'd have come to feel the same, Steve. I must make you understand that my emotional attachment to you was not increased nor decreased by the fact that my physical actions were directed at you. If anything, my job was just rendered pleasantly easier." I grunted. "And so you were made happy." "Yes," she whispered. "And I was going to marry you and live honestly with you--" "Heck of a marriage with the wife in the Medical Center for Mekstrom's Disease and our first child--" "Steve, you poor fool, don't you understand? If our child came as predicted, the first thing I'd do would be to have the child inoculate the father? Then we'd be--" "Um," I grunted. "I hadn't thought of that." This was a flat lie. I'd considered it a-plenty since my jailing here. Present the Medical Center with a child, a Mekstrom, and a Carrier, and good old pappy would be no longer needed. "Well, after I found out all about you, Steve, that's what I had in mind. But now--" "Now what?" I urged her gently. I had a hunch that she was leading up to something, but ducking shy about it until she managed to find out how I thought. It would have been all zero if we'd been in a clear area, but as it was I led her gently on. "But now I've failed," she said with a slight wail. "What do they do with failures?" I asked harshly. "Siberia? Or a gunny sack weighted down with an anvil? Or do they drum you out of the corps?" "I don't know." I eyed her closely. I was forced to admit that no matter how Catherine thought, she was a mighty attractive dish from the physical standpoint. And regardless of the trouble she'd put me through, I could not overlook the fact that I had been deep enough in love to plan elopement and marriage. I'd held her slender body close, and either her response had been honestly warm or Catherine was an actress of very rare physical ability. Scholar Phelps could hardly have picked a warmer temptress in the first place; putting her onto me now was a stroke of near-genius. I got up from the edge of my bunk and faced her through my bars. She came close, too, and we looked into each other's faces over a cross-rail of the heavy fence. I managed a wistful grin at her. "You're not really a failure yet, are you, kid?" "I don't quite know how to--to--" she replied. I looked around my little cell with a gruesome gesture. "This isn't my idea of a pleasant home. And yet it will be my home until someone decides that I'm too expensive to keep." "I know," she breathed. Taking the bit in my teeth, I said, "Catherine even though--well, heck. I'd like to help you." "You mean that?" she asked in almost an eager voice. "It's not impossible to forget that we were eloping when all this started." "It all seems so long ago," she said with a thick voice. "And I wish we were back there--no, Steve, I wish Mekstrom's Disease had never happened--I wish--" "Stop wishing and think," I told her half-humorously. "If there were no Mekstrom's Disease, the chances are that we'd never have met in the first place." "That's the cruel part of it all," she cried. And I mean _cried_. I rapped on the metal bars with a fist. "So here we are," I said unhappily. "I can't help you now, Catherine." She put her hands through the bars and held my face between them. She looked searching into my eyes, as if straining to force her blocked telepath sense through the deadness of the area. She leaned against the steel but the barrier was very effective; our lips met through the cold metal. It was a very unsatisfactory kiss because we had to purse our lips like a pair of piccolo players to make them meet. It was like making love through a keyhole. This unsatisfactory lovemaking did not last long. Unsteadily, Catherine said, "I want you, Steve." Inwardly I grinned, and then with the same feeling as if I'd laughed out loud at a funeral, I said, "Through these steel bars?" She brought out a little cylindrical key. Then went to a brass wall plate beside the outer door, inserted the key, and turned. The sliding door to my cell opened on noiseless machined slides. Then with a careful look at me, Catherine slipped a little shutter over the glass bull's eye in the door. Her hand reached up to a hidden toggle above the door and as she snapped it, a thick cover surged out above the speaker, television lens, and microphone grille, curved down and shut off the tell-tales with a cushioned sound. Apparently the top management of the joint used these cells for other things than mere containment of unruly prisoners. I almost grinned; the society that Scholar Phelps proposed was not the kind that flourished in an atmosphere of trust, or privacy--except for the top brass. Catherine turned from her switch plate and came across the floor with her face lifted and her lips parted. "Hold me, Steve." My hand came forward in a short jab that caught her dead center in the plexus below the ribs. Her breath caught in one strangled gasp and her eyes went glassy. She swayed stiffly in half-paralysis. My other hand came up, closing as it rose, until it became a fist that connected in a shoulder-jarring wallop on the side of her jaw. Her head snapped up and her knees caved in. She folded from the hips and went down bonelessly. From her throat came the bubbly sound of air being forced painfully through a flaccid wet tube. I jumped outside of the cell barrier because I was certain that they had some means of closing the cell from a master control center. I don't know much about penology, but that's the way I'd do it. I was half-surprised that I'd been able to get away with this much. Catherine stirred and moaned, and I stopped long enough to take the key out of the wall plate. The cell door closed on its silent slides. I had hardly been able to more than run the zipper up my shirt when the door opened and I had to dance like a fool to get behind it. The door admitted a flood of bright light from the corridor, and Dr. James Thorndyke. The cell door must have been bugged. Thorndyke came in behind a large automatic clutched in one nervous fist. He strained his eyes at the gloom that was not cut by the ribbon of light. And then I cut him down with a solid slice of my right hand to the base of his neck. I remembered to jump off the ground as the blow went home; there was a sickening crunch of bone and muscle as Thorndyke caved forward to the floor. He dropped the gun, luckily, as his body began to twitch and kick spasmodically as the life drained out of him. I re-swallowed a mouthful of bitter bile as I reached down to pick up his gun. Then the room got hot and unbearably small and I felt a frantic urge to leave, to close the door upon that sight. XXV I was yards away from my door before my panic left me. Then I remembered where and who I was and took a fast look around. There was no one else in the corridor, of course, or I would not have been able to cut and run as I had. But I looked around anyway until my reasoning power told me that I had done little to help my position. Like the canary, my plans for escape ended once I was outside of my cage. I literally did not know what to do with my new-found freedom. One thing was becoming painfully obvious: I'd be pinned down tight once I put a foot outside of the dead area in which this building was constructed. What I needed was friends, arms, ammunition, and a good, solid plan of escape. I had neither; unless you call my jailed friends such help. And there I could not go; the tell-tales would give me away to the master control center before I could raise my small--and unarmed--army. So I stood there in the brightly lighted corridor and tried to think. I got nowhere, but I was driven to action again by the unmistakable sound of the elevator at the end of the corridor. I eyed the various cell doors with suspicion; opening any but an empty room would cause some comment from the occupant, which again would give me away. Nor did I have time to canvass the joint by peeking into the one-way bull's eyes, peering into a semi-gloom to see which room was empty. So instead of hiding in the corridor, I sloped towards the elevator and the stairwell that surrounded it, hoping that I could make it before the elevator rose to my floor. I know that my passage must have sounded like a turbojet in full flight, but I made the stairway and took a headlong leap down the first short flight of stairs just as the elevator door rolled open. I hit the wall with a bumping crash that jarred my senses, but I kept my feet and looked back up the stairs. I caught a flash of motion; a guard sauntering past the top of the well, a cigarette in one hand and a lazy-looking air about him. He was expecting no trouble, and so I gave him none. I crept up the stairs and poked my head out just at the floor level. The guard, obviously confident that nothing, but nothing, could ever happen in this welded metal crib, jauntily peered into a couple of the rooms at random, took a long squint at the room I'd recently vacated, and then went on to the end of the hall where he stuck a key in a signal-box. On his way back he paused again to peer into my room, straining to see if he could peer past the little shutter over the bull's eye. Then he shrugged unhappily, and started to return. I loped down the stairs to the second floor and waited. The elevator came down, stopped, and the guard repeated his desultory search, not stopping to pry into any darkened rooms. Just above the final, first-floor flight, I stopped and sprawled on the floor with only my head and the nose of my gun over the top step. Below was the guard's desk and standing beside the desk with anger in every line of his ugly face was Scholar Phelps! The elevator came down, stopped, and the guard walked out, to be nailed by Phelps. "Your job," snapped the good Scholar coldly, "says you are to walk." "Well, er--sir--it's--" "Walk!" stormed Phelps angrily. "You can't cover that stairway in the elevator, you fumbling idiot." "But, sir--" "Someone could easily come down while you go up." "I know that, sir, but--" "Then why do you disobey?" roared Phelps. "Well, you see, sir, I know how this place is built and no one has ever made it yet. Who could?" The guard looked mystified. Phelps had to face that fact. He did not accept it gracefully. "My orders are orders," he said stiffly. "You'll follow them. To the last letter." "Yes sir. I will." "See that you do. Now, I'm going up. I'll ride and you walk. Meet me on the fourth and bring the elevator down with you." "Yessir." I sloped upstairs like a scared rabbit. Up to the third again where I moved down the corridor and slipped into the much-too-thin niche made by a door. Stolidly the guard came up the stairs, crossed in front of the elevator with his back to me, turned the far corner and went on up to the fourth. As his feet started up the stairs, I was behind him; by the time he reached the top, I was half way up. Phelps said, "Now, from this moment on, Waldron, you'll follow every order to the absolute letter. And when I ring, don't make the error of bringing the elevator. Send it. It'll come up and stop without a pilot." "Yes sir. I'm sorry sir. But you understand, sir, there isn't really much to guard, sir." "Then guard nothing. But guard it well, because a man in your position is gauged in success by the amount of boredom he creates for himself." The guard started down and I darted up to poke my head out to see where Phelps was going. As I neared the floor level, I had a shock like someone hurling twenty gallons of ice water in my face. The top floor was the end of the dead area, and I-- --pulled my head down into the murk like a diver taking a plunge. So I stood there making like a guppy with my head, sounding out the boundary of that deadness, ducking down as soon as the mental murk gave me a faint perception of the wall and ceiling above me. Then I'd move aside and sound it again. Eventually I found a little billowing furrow that rose above the floor level and I crawled out along the floor, still sounding and moving cautiously with my body hidden in the deadness that rose and fell like a cloud of murky mental smoke to my sense of perception. I would have looked silly to any witness; wallowing along the floor like a porpoise acting furtive in the bright lights. But then I couldn't go any farther; the deadness sank below the floor level and left me looking along a bare floor that was also bare to my sense of perception. I shoved my head out of the dead zone and took a fast dig, then dropped back in again and lay there re-constructing what I'd perceived mentally. I did it the second time and the third, each time making a rapid scan of some portion of that fourth floor. In three fast swings, I collected a couple of empty offices, a very complete hospital set-up operating room, and a place that looked like a consultation theatre. On my fourth scan, I whipped past Scholar Phelps, who was apparently deep in some personal interest. I rose at once and strode down the hall and snapped the door open just as Phelps' completely unexpecting mind grasped the perceptive fact that someone was coming down his hallway wearing a great big forty five automatic. "Freeze!" I snapped. "Put that weapon down, Mr. Cornell. It, nor its use, will get your freedom." "Maybe all I want out of life is to see you leave it," I told him. "You'd not be that foolish, I'm sure," he said. "I might." He laughed, with all the self-confidence in the world. "Mr. Cornell, you have too much will to live. You're not the martyr type." "I might turn out to be the cornered-rat type," I told him seriously. "So play it cagey, Phelps." "Scholar Phelps, please." "I wouldn't disgrace the medical profession," I told him. "So--" "So what do you propose to do about this?" "I'm getting out." "Don't be ridiculous. One step out of this building and you'll return within a half minute. How did you get out?" "I was seduced out. Now--" "I'd advise you to surrender; to stop this hopeless attempt; to put that weapon down. You cannot escape. There are, in this building, your mental and intellectual superiors whose incarceration bear me witness." I eyed him coldly and quietly. "I'm not convinced. I'm out. And if you could take a dig below you'd see a dead man and an unconscious woman to bear me witness. I broke your Dr. Thorndyke's neck with a chop of my bare hand, Phelps; I knocked Catherine cold with a fist. This thing might not kill you, but I'm a Mekstrom, too, and so help me I can cool you down but good." "Violence will get you nothing." "Try my patience. I'll bet my worthless hide on it." Then I grinned at him. "Oh, it isn't so worthless, is it?" "One cry from me, Mr. Cornell, and--" "And you'll not live to see what happens. I've killed once tonight. I didn't like it. But the idea is not as new now as it was then. I'll kill you, Phelps, if for no other reason than merely to keep my word." With a sneer, Phelps turned to his desk and I stabbed my perception behind the papers and stuff to the call button; then I launched myself across the room like a rocket, swinging my gun hand as I soared. The steel caught him on the side of the head and drove him back from his call button before his finger could press it. Then I let him have a fist in the belly because the pistol swat hadn't much more than dazed him. The fist did it. He crumpled in a heap and fought for breath unconsciously. I turned to the wall he'd been eyeing with so much attention. There was row upon row of small kine tubes, each showing the dark interior of a cell. Below each was a row of pilot lights, all dark. On his desk was a large bank of push buttons, a speaker, and a microphone. And beside the push button set-up was a ledger containing a list of names with their cell numbers. I found Marian Harrison; pushed her button, and heard her ladylike snore from the speaker. A green lamp winked under one of the kine tubes and I walked over and looked into the darkened cell to see her familiar hair sprawled over a thick pillow. I went to the desk and snapped on the microphone. "Marian," I said. "MARIAN! HEY! MARIAN HARRISON!" In the picture tube there was a stir, then she sat up and looked around in a sort of daze. "Marian, this is Steve Cornell, but don't--" "Steve!" "--cry out," I finished uselessly. "Where are you?" she asked in a whisper. "I'm in the con room." "But how on Earth--?" "No time to gab. I'll be down in a rush with the key. Get dressed!" "Yes, Steve." I took off in a headlong rush with the 'Hotel Register' in one hand. I made the third floor and Marian's cell in slightly more than nothing flat, but she was ready when I came barging into her room. She was out of the cell before it hit the backstop and following me down the hall towards her brother's room. "What happened?" she asked breathlessly. "Later," I told her. I opened Phillip Harrison's cell. "You go wake up Fred Macklin and tell him to come here. Then get the Macklin girl--Alice, it says here--and the pair of you wake up others and start sending 'em up stairs. I'll call you on the telltale as soon as I can." Marian took off with the key and the register and I started to shake Phillip Harrison's shoulder. "Wake up!" I cried. "Wake up, Phillip!" Phillip made a noise like a baby seal. "Wake up!" "Wha--?" "It's Steve Cornell. Wake up!" With a rough shake of his head, Phillip groaned and unwound himself out of a tangle of bedclothing. He looked at me through half-closed glassy eyes. Then he straightened and made a perilous course to the washstand where he sopped a towel in cold water and applied it to his face, neck, and shoulders. When he dropped the towel in the sink, his expression was fresher and his eyes were mingled curiosity and amazement. "What gives?" he asked, starting to dress in a hurry. "I busted out, slugged Scholar Phelps, and took over the master control room. I need help. We can't keep it long unless we move fast." "Yeah man. Any moving will be fast," he said sourly. "Got any plans?" "We've--" The door opened to let Fred Macklin enter. He carried his shirt and had been dressing on the run. "What goes on?" he asked. "Look," I said quickly. "If I have to stop and give anybody a rundown, we'll have no time to do what has to be done. There are a couple of sources of danger. One is the guard down at the bottom of the stairway. The other is the possible visitor. You get a couple of other young, ambitious fellows and push that guard post over, but quick." "Right. And you?" "I've got to keep our hostage cold," I snapped. "And I'm running the show by virtue of being the guy that managed to bust loose." In the hallway there was movement, but I left it to head back to Scholar Phelps. I got there in time to hear him groan and make scratching noises on the carpet. I took no chances; I cooled him down with a short jab to the pit of the stomach and doubled him over again. He was sleeping painfully but soundlessly when Marian came in. I turned to her. "You're supposed to be waking up--" "I gave the key and the register to Jo Anne Tweedy," she said. "Jo Anne's the brash young teenager you took a bump with in Ohio. She's competent, Steve. And she's got the Macklin twins to help her. Waking up the camp is a job for the junior division." She eyed the recumbent Phelps distastefully. "What have you in mind for him?" "He's valuable," I said. "We'll use him to buy our freedom." The door opened again, interrupting Marian. It was Jonas Harrison. He stood there in the frame of the door and looked at us with a sort of grim smile. I had never met the old patriarch of the Harrison Family before, but he lived up to my every expectation. He stood tall and straight; topped by a wealth of snow white hair, white eyebrows, and the touch of a white moustache. His eyes contrasted with the white; a rich and startling brown. This was a man to whom I could hand the basic problem of engineering our final escape; Jonas Harrison was capable of plotting an airtight getaway. His voice was rich and resonant; it had a lift in its tone that sounded as though his self-confidence had never been in danger of a set-back: "Well, son, you seem to have accomplished quite a job this night. What shall we do next?" "Get the devil out of here," I replied-- --wondering just exactly how I'd known so instantly that this was Jonas Harrison. The rich and resonant voice had flicked a subsurface recollection on a faint, raw spot and now something important was swimming around in the mire of my mind trying to break loose and come clear. I turned from the sword-sharp brown eyes and looked at Marian. She was almost as I had first seen her: Not much make-up if any at all, her hair free of fancy dressing but neat, her legs were bare and healthy-tanned. I looked at her, and for a half dozen heartbeats her image faded from my sight, replaced by the well remembered figure of Catherine as I had known her first. It was a dizzy-making montage because my perception senses the real figure of Marian, superimposed on the visual memory-image of Catherine. Then the false sight faded and both perception and eyesight focused upon the true person of Marian Harrison. Marian stood there, her face softly proud. Her eyes were looking straight into mine, as if she were mentally urging me to fight that hidden memory into full recollection. Then I both saw and perceived something that I had never noticed before. A fine golden chain hung around her throat, its pendant hidden from sight beneath the edge of her bodice. But my sense of perception dug a modest diamond, and I could even dig the tiny initials engraved in the metal circlet: SC-MH To dig anything that fine, I knew that it must be of importance to me. And then I knew that it had once been so very personally my own business, for the submerged recollection came bursting up to the top of my mind. Marian Henderson had been mine once long ago! Boldly I stepped forward and took the chain between my fingers. I snapped it, and held the ring. "Will you wear it again, my dear?" She held up her left hand for me to slip it on. "Steve," she breathed, "I've never stopped wearing it, not really." "But I didn't see it until now--" Jonas Harrison said, "No, Steve, you couldn't see it until you remembered." "But look--" "Blame me," he said in his firm determined voice. "The story begins and ends with you, Steve. When Marian contracted Mekstrom's Disease, she herself insisted that you be spared the emotional pain that the rest of us could not avoid. So I erased her from your mind, Steve, and submerged any former association. Then when the Highways in Hiding came to take us in, I left it that way because Marian was still as unattainable to you as if she were dead. If an apology is needed, I'll only ask that you forgive my tampering with your mind and personality." "Apologize?" I exploded. "I'm here, we're here, and you've just provided me with a way out of this mousetrap!" "A way out?" he murmured, in that absent way that telepaths have when they're concentrating on another mind. Fast comprehension dawned in the sharp brown eyes and he looked even more self-confident and determined. Marian leaned back in my arms to look into my eyes. "Steve," she cried, "it's simply got to work!" Gloria Farrow merely said, "He'll have to have medication, of course," and went briskly to a wall cabinet and began to fiddle with medical tools. Howard Macklin and Jonas Harrison went into a deep telepathic conference that was interrupted only when Jonas Harrison turned to Phillip to say, "You'll have to provide us with uninterrupted time, somehow." Marian disengaged herself reluctantly and started to propel me out of the room. "Go help him, Steve. What we are going to do is not for any non-telepath to watch." Outside, Phillip threatened me with the guard's signal-box key. "Mind telling a non-telepath what the devil you cooked up?" I smiled. "If your father has the mental power to erase Marian from my mind, he also has the power to do a fine reorientation job on Scholar Phelps. Once we get the spiderwebs cleaned out of the top dog, we start down the pyramid, line by line and echelon by echelon, with each reoriented recruit adding to our force. Once we get this joint operating on the level, we can all go to work for the rest of the human race!" * * * * * There is little left to tell. The Medical Center and the Highways in Hiding are one agency dedicated to the conquest of the last and most puzzling of the diseases and maladies that beset Mankind. We are no closer to a solution than we ever were, and so I am still a very busy man. I have written this account and disclosed our secret because we want no more victims of Mekstrom's Disease to suffer. So I will write finish with one earnest plea and one ray of hope: Please do not follow one of our Highways unless you are already infected. Since I cannot hope to inoculate the entire human race, and will not pick or choose certain worthy types for special attention, I will deal only with those folks who find Mekstrom's Disease among their immediate family. Such people need never be parted from their loved ones. The rest of you will have to wait your turn. But we'll get to it sooner or later. Thirty days ago, Steve, Junior, was born. He's a healthy little Mekstrom, and like his pappy, Steve Junior is a carrier, too. * * * * * [Transcriber's note: Back cover] QUEST IMPOSSIBLE Someone had stolen an important part of Steve Cornell's life. It was bad enough when his fiancée vanished. It was infinitely worse when everyone in the world insisted it couldn't have happened the way he knew it had. In a world where ESP and telepathy were normal, it was difficult to keep secrets. But Steve's search for his missing sweetheart brought him to the threshold of one of the greatest secrets of all time. And it was obvious that somebody would stop at nothing to keep him from uncovering it. What were the oddly sinister symbols along otherwise ordinary roads? What was behind the spreading plague called Mekstrom's Disease? Why were there "blank" spots where telepathy didn't work? Who was the elusive enemy with powers even beyond those ESP had bestowed on mankind? And, most important of all ... could Steve find that enemy before they made him vanish too? A Lancer Book · Never Before Complete In Paperback