Chapter 1

EDITOR'S NOTE--Dr. de Castro was author with Ambrose
Bierce of _The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter_.
(At that time he used his full name, Gustaf Adolf de
Castro Danziger, which he has since shortened to his
ancestral Spanish form, Adolphe de Castro.) We commend
_The Last Test_ to those who appreciate a truly
artistic story, with its suggestions of unthinkable
horrors from the elder world, which sweep through
the story like a cold breeze from the tomb.

Few persons know the inside of the Clarendon story, or even that there
is an inside not reached by the newspapers. It was a San Francisco
sensation in the days before the fire, both because of the panic and
menace that kept it company, and because of its close linkage with
the governor of the state. Governor Dalton, it will be recalled, was
Clarendon's best friend, and later married his sister. Neither Dalton
nor Mrs. Dalton would ever discuss the painful affair, but somehow the
facts have leaked out to a limited circle. But for that, and for the
years which have given a sort of vagueness and impersonality to the
actors, one would still pause before probing into secrets so strictly
guarded at the time.

The appointment of Dr. Alfred Clarendon as medical director of San
Quentin Penitentiary in 189- was greeted with the keenest enthusiasm
throughout California. San Francisco had at last the honor of harboring
one of the greatest biologists and physicians of the period, and solid
pathological leaders from all over the world might be expected to flock
thither to study his methods, profit by his advice and researches, and
learn how to cope with their own local problems. California, almost
over night, would become a center of medical scholarship with earthwide
influence and reputation.

Governor Dalton, anxious to spread the news in its fullest
significance, saw to it that the press carried ample and dignified
accounts of his new appointee. Pictures of Dr. Clarendon and his new
home near old Goat Hill, sketches of his career and manifold honors,
and popular accounts of his salient scientific discoveries were all
presented in the principal California dailies, till the public soon
felt a sort of reflected pride in the man whose studies of pyemia in
India, of the pest in China, and of every sort of kindred disorder
elsewhere would soon enrich the world of medicine with an antitoxin of
revolutionary importance--a basic antitoxin combating the whole febrile
principle at its very source, and ensuring the ultimate conquest and
extirpation of fever in all its diverse forms.

Back of the appointment stretched an extended and not wholly unromantic
history of early friendship, long separation, and dramatically renewed
acquaintance. James Dalton and the Clarendon family had been friends
in New York ten years before--friends and more than friends, since the
doctor's only sister, Georgina, was the sweetheart of Dalton's youth,
while the doctor himself had been his closest associate and almost his
protegé in the days of school and college. The father of Alfred and
Georgina, a Wall Street pirate of the ruthless elder breed, had known
Dalton's father well; so well, indeed, that he had finally stripped
him of all he possessed in a memorable afternoon's fight on the stock
exchange. Dalton Senior, hopeless of recuperation and wishing to give
his one adored child the benefit of his insurance, had promptly blown
out his brains; but James had not sought to retaliate. It was, as he
viewed it, all in the game; and he wished no harm to the father of the
girl he meant to marry and of the budding young scientist whose admirer
and protector he had been throughout their years of fellowship and
study. Instead, he turned to the law, established himself in a small
way, and in due course of time asked "Old Clarendon" for Georgina's
hand.

Old Clarendon had refused very firmly and loudly, vowing that no
pauper and upstart lawyer was fit to be his son-in-law; and a scene
of considerable violence had occurred. James, telling the wrinkled
freebooter at last what he ought to have been told long before,
had left the house and the city in a high temper; and was embarked
within a month upon the California life which was to lead him to
the governorship through many a fight with ring and politician. His
farewells to Alfred and Georgina had been brief, and he had never
known the aftermath of that scene in the Clarendon library. Only by a
day did he miss the news of Old Clarendon's death from apoplexy, and
by so missing it, changed the course of his whole career. He had not
written Georgina in the decade that followed; knowing her loyalty to
her father, and waiting till his own fortune and position might remove
all obstacles to the match. Nor had he sent any word to Alfred, whose
calm indifference in the face of affection and hero-worship had always
savored of conscious destiny and the self-sufficiency of genius. Secure
in the ties of a constancy rare even then, he had worked and risen
with thoughts only of the future; still a bachelor, and with a perfect
intuitive faith that Georgina also was waiting.

In this faith Dalton was not deceived. Wondering perhaps why no
message ever came, Georgina found no romance save in her dreams and
expectations; and in the course of time became busy with the new
responsibilities brought by her brother's rise to greatness. Alfred's
growth had not belied the promise of his youth, and the slim boy had
darted quietly up the steps of science with a speed and permanence
almost dizzying to contemplate. Lean and ascetic, with steel-rimmed
pince-nez and pointed brown beard, Dr. Alfred Clarendon was an
authority at twenty-five and an international figure at thirty.
Careless of worldly affairs with the negligence of genius, he depended
vastly on the care and management of his sister, and was secretly
thankful that her memories of James had kept her from other and more
tangible alliances.

* * * * *

Georgina conducted the business and household of the great
bacteriologist, and was proud of his strides toward the conquest
of fever. She bore patiently with his eccentricities, calmed his
occasional bursts of fanaticism, and healed those breaches with his
friends which now and then resulted from his unconcealed scorn of
anything less than a single-minded devotion to pure truth and its
progress. Clarendon was undeniably irritating at times to ordinary
folk; for he never tired of depreciating the service of the individual
as contrasted with the service of mankind as a whole, and in censuring
men of learning who mingled domestic life or outside interests with
their pursuit of abstract science. His enemies called him a bore; but
his admirers, pausing before the white heat of ecstasy into which
he would work himself, became almost ashamed of ever having had any
standards or aspirations outside the one divine sphere of unalloyed
knowledge.

The doctor's travels were extensive and Georgina generally accompanied
him on the shorter ones. Three times, however, he had taken long,
lone jaunts to strange and distant places in his studies of exotic
fevers and half-fabulous plagues; for he knew that it is out of the
unknown lands of cryptic and immemorial Asia that most of the earth's
diseases spring. On each of these occasions he had brought back curious
mementoes which added to the eccentricity of his home, not least among
which was the needlessly large staff of eight Tibetan servants picked
up somewhere in U-tsang during an epidemic of which the world never
heard, but amidst which Clarendon had discovered and isolated the
germ of black fever. These men, taller than most Tibetans and clearly
belonging to a stock but little investigated in the outside world, were
of a skeletonic leanness which made one wonder whether the doctor had
sought to symbolize in them the anatomical models of his college years.
Their aspect, in the loose black silk robes of Boupa priests which he
chose to give them, was grotesque in the highest degree; and there was
an unsmiling silence and stiffness in their motions which enhanced
their air of fantasy and gave Georgina a queer, awed feeling of having
stumbled into the pages of _Vathek_ or the _Arabian Nights_.

But queerest of all was the general factotum or clinic-man, whom
Clarendon addressed as Surama, and whom he had brought back with him
after a long stay in Northern Africa, during which he had studied
certain odd intermittent fevers among the mysterious Saharan Tuaregs,
whose descent from the primal race of lost Atlantis is an old
archeological rumor. Surama, a man of great intelligence and seemingly
inexhaustible erudition, was as morbidly lean as the Tibetan servants;
with swarthy, parchmentlike skin drawn so tightly over his bald pate
and hairless face that every line of the skull stood out in ghastly
prominence--this death's-head effect being heightened by lusterlessly
burning black eyes set with a depth which left to common visibility
only a pair of dark, vacant sockets. Unlike the ideal subordinate, he
seemed despite his impassive features to spend an effort in concealing
such emotions as he possessed. Instead, he carried about an insidious
atmosphere of irony or amusement, accompanied at certain moments by
a deep, guttural chuckle like that of a giant turtle which has just
torn to pieces some furry animal and is ambling away toward the sea.
His race appeared to be Caucasian, but could not be classified more
closely than that. Some of Clarendon's friends thought he looked like
a high-caste Hindoo notwithstanding his accent-less speech, while many
agreed with Georgina--who disliked him--when she gave her opinion that
a Pharaoh's mummy, if miraculously brought to life, would form a very
apt twin for this sardonic skeleton.

Dalton, absorbed in his up-hill political battles and isolated from
Eastern interests through the peculiar self-sufficiency of the old
West, had not followed the meteoric rise of his former comrade;
Clarendon had actually heard nothing of one so far outside his chosen
world of science as the governor. Being of independent and even of
abundant means, the Clarendons had for many years stuck to their old
Manhattan mansion in East Nineteenth Street; whose ghosts must have
looked sorely askance at the bizarrerie of Surama and the Tibetans.
Then, through the doctor's wish to transfer his base of medical
observation, the great change had suddenly come, and they had crossed
the continent to take up a secluded life in San Francisco; buying the
gloomy old Bannister place near Goat Hill, overlooking the bay, and
establishing their strange household in a rambling, French-roofed relic
of mid-Victorian design and gold-rush parvenu display, set amidst
high-walled grounds in a region still half suburban.

Dr. Clarendon, though better satisfied than in New York, still felt
cramped for lack of opportunities to apply and test his pathological
theories. Unworldly as he was, he had never thought of using his
reputation as an influence to gain public appointment; though more and
more he realized that only the medical directorship of a government or
a charitable institution--a prison, almshouse, or hospital--would give
him a field of sufficient width to complete his researches and make his
discoveries of the greatest use to humanity and science at large.

Then he had run into James Dalton by sheer accident one afternoon in
Market Street as the governor was swinging out of the Royal Hotel.
Georgina had been with him, and an almost instant recognition had
heightened the drama of the reunion. Mutual ignorance of one another's
progress had bred long explanations and histories, and Clarendon was
pleased to find that he had so important an official for a friend.
Dalton and Georgina, exchanging many a glance, felt more than a trace
of their youthful tenderness; and a friendship was then and there
revived which led to frequent calls and a fuller and fuller exchange of
confidences.

James Dalton learned of his old protegé's need for political
appointment, and sought, true to his protective rôle of school and
college days, to devise some means of giving "Little Alf" the needed
position and scope. He had, it is true, wide appointive powers; but the
legislature's constant attacks and encroachments forced him to exercise
these with the utmost discretion. At length, however, scarcely three
months after the sudden reunion, the foremost institutional medical
office in the state fell vacant. Weighing all the elements with care,
and conscious that his friend's achievements and reputation would
justify the most substantial rewards, the governor felt at last able
to act. Formalities were few, and on the 8th of November, 189--, Dr.
Alfred Schuyler Clarendon became medical director of the California
State Penitentiary at San Quentin.

2

In scarcely more than a month the hopes of Dr. Clarendon's admirers
were amply fulfilled. Sweeping changes in methods brought to the
prison's medical routine an efficiency never before dreamed of; and
though the subordinates were naturally not without jealousy, they
were obliged to admit the magical results of a really great man's
superintendence. Then came a time when mere appreciation might well
have grown to devout thankfulness at a providential conjunction of
time, place, and man; for one morning Dr. Jones came to his new chief
with a grave face to announce his discovery of a case which he could
not but identify as that selfsame black fever whose germ Clarendon had
found and classified.

Dr. Clarendon showed no surprize, but kept on at the writing before him.

"I know," he said evenly; "I came across that case yesterday. I'm glad
you recognized it. Put the man in a separate ward, though I don't
believe this fever is contagious."

Dr. Jones, with his own opinion of the malady's contagiousness, was
glad of this deference to caution; and hastened to execute the order.
Upon his return Clarendon rose to leave, declaring that he would
himself take charge of the case alone. Disappointed in his wish to
study the great man's methods and technique, the junior physician
watched his chief stride away toward the lone ward where he had placed
the patient, more critical of the new regime than at any time since
admiration had displaced his first jealous pangs.

Reaching the ward, Clarendon entered hastily, glancing at the bed and
stepping back to see how far Dr. Jones's obvious curiosity might have
led him. Then, finding the corridor still vacant, he shut the door and
turned to examine the sufferer. The man was a convict of a peculiarly
repulsive type, and seemed to be racked by the keenest throes of
agony. His features were frightfully contracted, and his knees drawn
sharply up in the mute desperation of the stricken. Clarendon studied
him closely, raising his tightly shut eyelids, took his pulse and
temperature, and finally dissolving a tablet in water, forced the
solution between the sufferer's lips. Before long the height of the
attack abated, as shown by the relaxing body and returning normality of
expression, and the patient began to breathe more easily. Then, by a
soft rubbing of the ears, the doctor caused the man to open his eyes.
There was life in them, for they moved from side to side, though they
lacked the fine fire which we are wont to deem the image of the soul.
Clarendon smiled as he surveyed the peace his help had brought, feeling
behind him the power of an all-capable science. He had long known of
this case, and had snatched the victim from death with the work of a
moment. Another hour and this man would have gone--yet Jones had seen
the symptoms for days before discovering them, and having discovered
them, did not know what to do.

Man's conquest of disease, however, can not be perfect. Clarendon,
assuring the dubious trusty-nurses that the fever was not contagious,
had had the patient bathed, sponged in alcohol, and put to bed; but
was told the next morning that the case was lost. The man had died
after midnight in the most intense agony, and with such cries and
distortions of face that the nurses were driven almost to panic. The
doctor took this news with his usual calm, whatever his scientific
feelings may have been, and ordered the burial of the patient in
quicklime. Then, with a philosophic shrug of the shoulders, he made the
usual rounds of the penitentiary.

Two days later the prison was hit again. Three men came down at once
this time, and there was no concealing the fact that a black fever
epidemic was under way. Clarendon, having adhered so firmly to his
theory of non-contagiousness, suffered a distinct loss of prestige,
and was handicapped by the refusal of the trusty-nurses to attend the
patients. Theirs was not the soul-free devotion of those who sacrifice
themselves to science and humanity. They were convicts, serving only
because of the privileges they could not otherwise buy, and when the
price became too great they preferred to resign the privileges.

But the doctor was still master of the situation. Consulting with the
warden and sending urgent messages to his friend the governor, he saw
to it that special rewards in cash and in reduced terms were offered
to the convicts for the dangerous nursing service; and by this method
succeeded in getting a very fair quota of volunteers. He was steeled
for action now, and nothing could shake his poise and determination.
Additional cases brought only a curt nod, and he seemed a stranger
to fatigue as he hastened from bedside to bedside all over the vast
stone home of sadness and evil. More than forty cases developed within
another week, and nurses had to be brought from the city. Clarendon
went home very seldom at this stage, often sleeping on a cot in the
warden's quarters, and always giving himself up with typical abandon to
the service of medicine and of mankind.

* * * * *

Then came the first mutterings of that storm which was soon to convulse
San Francisco. News will out, and the menace of black fever spread over
the town like a fog from the bay. Reporters trained in the doctrine of
"sensation first" used their imagination without restraint, and gloried
when at last they were able to produce a case in the Mexican quarter
which a local physician--fonder perhaps of money than of truth or civic
welfare--pronounced black fever.

That was the last straw. Frantic at the thought of the crawling death
so close upon them, the people of San Francisco went mad en masse, and
embarked upon that historic exodus of which all the country was soon
to hear over busy wires. Ferries and rowboats, excursion steamers and
launches, railways and cable cars, bicycles and carriages, moving-vans
and work carts, all were pressed into instant and frenzied service.
Sausalito and Tamalpais, as lying in the direction of San Quentin,
shared in the flight; while housing space in Oakland, Berkeley,
and Alameda rose to fabulous prices. Tent colonies sprang up, and
improvised villages lined the crowded southward highways from Millbrae
to San Jose. Many sought refuge with friends in Sacramento, while the
fright-shaken residue forced by various causes to stay behind could do
little more than maintain the basic necessities of a nearly dead city.

Business, save for quack doctors with "sure cures" and "preventives"
for use against the fever, fell rapidly to the vanishing-point. At
first the saloons offered "medicated drinks," but soon found that the
populace preferred to be duped by charlatans of more professional
aspect. In strangely noiseless streets persons peered into one
another's faces to glimpse possible plague symptoms, and shopkeepers
began more and more to refuse admission to their clientele, each
customer seeming to them a fresh fever menace. Legal and judicial
machinery began to disintegrate as attorneys and county clerks
succumbed one by one to the urge for flight. Even the doctors deserted
in large numbers, many of them pleading the need of vacations among the
mountains and the lakes in the northern part of the state. Schools and
colleges, theaters and cafés, restaurants and saloons, all gradually
closed their doors; and in a single week San Francisco lay prostrate
and inert with only its light, power, and water service even half
normal, with newspapers in skeletonic form, and with a crippled parody
on transportation maintained by the horse and cable cars.

This was the lowest ebb. It could not last long, for courage and
observation are not altogether dead in mankind; and sooner or later
the non-existence of any widespread black fever epidemic outside San
Quentin became too obvious a fact to deny, notwithstanding several
actual cases and the undeniable spread of typhoid in the insanitary
suburban tent colonies. The leaders and editors of the community
conferred and took action, enlisting in their service the very
reporters whose energies had done so much to bring on the trouble, but
now turning their "sensation first" avidity into more constructive
channels. Editorials and fictitious interviews appeared, telling of
Dr. Clarendon's complete control of the disease, and of the absolute
impossibility of its diffusion beyond the prison walls. Reiteration
and circulation slowly did their work, and gradually a slim backward
trickle of urbanites swelled into a vigorous refluent stream. One of
the first healthy symptoms was the start of a newspaper controversy of
the approved acrimonious kind, attempting to fix blame for the panic
wherever the various participants thought it belonged. The returning
doctors, jealously strengthened by their timely vacations, began
striking at Clarendon, assuring the public that they as well as he
would keep the fever in leash, and censuring him for not doing even
more to check its spread within San Quentin.

Clarendon had, they averred, permitted far more deaths than were
necessary. The veriest tyro in medicine knew how to check fever
contagion; and if this renowned savant did not do it, it was clearly
because he chose for scientific reasons to study the final effects of
the disease, rather than to prescribe properly and save the victims.
This policy, they insinuated, might be proper enough among convicted
murderers in a penal institution, but it would not do in San Francisco,
where life was still a precious and sacred thing. Thus they went on,
and the papers were glad to publish all they wrote, since the sharpness
of the campaign, in which Dr. Clarendon would doubtless join, would
help to obliterate confusion and restore confidence among the people.

But Clarendon did not reply. He only smiled, while his singular
clinic-man Surama indulged in many a deep, testudinous chuckle. He
was at home more nowadays, so that reporters began besieging the gate
of the great wall the doctor had built around his house, instead of
pestering the warden's office at San Quentin. Results, though, were
equally meager; for Surama formed an impassable barrier between the
doctor and the outer world--even after the reporters had got into
the grounds. The newspaper men getting access to the front hall had
glimpses of Clarendon's singular entourage and made the best they
could in a "write-up" of Surama and the queer skeletonic Tibetans.
Exaggeration, of course, occurred in every fresh article, and the net
effect of the publicity was distinctly adverse to the great physician.
Most persons hate the unusual, and hundreds who could have excused
heartlessness or incompetence stood ready to condemn the grotesque
taste manifested in the chuckling attendant and the eight black-robed
Orientals.

* * * * *

Early in January an especially persistent young man from the _Observer_
climbed the moated eight-foot brick wall in the rear of the Clarendon
grounds and began a survey of the varied outdoor appearances which
trees concealed from the front walk. With quick, alert brain he took in
everything--the rose-arbor, the aviaries, the animal cages where all
sorts of mammalia from monkeys to guinea-pigs might be seen and heard,
the stout wooden clinic building with barred windows in the northwest
corner of the yard--and bent searching glances throughout the thousand
square feet of intramural privacy. A great article was brewing, and
he would have escaped unscathed but for the barking of Dick, Georgina
Clarendon's gigantic and beloved St. Bernard. Surama, instant in
his response, had the youth by the collar before a protest could be
uttered, and was presently shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, and
dragging him through the trees to the front yard and the gate.

Breathless explanations and quavering demands to see Dr. Clarendon
were useless. Surama only chuckled and dragged his victim on. Suddenly
a positive fright crept over the dapper scribe, and he began to wish
desperately that this unearthly creature would speak, if only to prove
that he really was a being of honest flesh and blood belonging to this
planet. He became deathly sick, and strove not to glimpse the eyes
which he knew must lie at the base of those gaping black sockets. Soon
he heard the gate open and felt himself propelled violently through;
in another moment waking rudely to the things of earth as he landed
wetly and muddily in the ditch which Clarendon had had dug around the
entire length of the wall. Fright gave place to rage as he heard the
massive gate slam shut, and he rose dripping to shake his fist at the
forbidding portal. Then, as he turned to go, a soft sound grated behind
him, and through a small wicket in the gate he felt the sunken eyes of
Surama and heard the echoes of a deep-voiced, blood-freezing chuckle.

This young man, feeling perhaps justly that his handling had been
rougher than he deserved, resolved to revenge himself upon the
household responsible for his treatment. Accordingly he prepared a
fictitious interview with Dr. Clarendon, supposed to be held in the
clinic building, during which he was careful to describe the agonies
of a dozen black fever patients whom his imagination ranged on orderly
rows of couches. His master-stroke was the picture of one especially
pathetic sufferer gasping for water, while the doctor held a glass of
the sparkling fluid just out of his reach, in a scientific attempt to
determine the effect of a tantalizing emotion on the course of the
disease. This invention was followed by paragraphs of insinuating
comment so outwardly respectful that it bore a double venom. Dr.
Clarendon was, the article ran, undoubtedly the greatest and most
single-minded scientist in the world; but science is no friend to
individual welfare, and one would not like to have one's gravest ills
drawn out and aggravated merely to satisfy an investigator on some
point of abstract truth. Life is too short for that.

Altogether, the article was diabolically skilful, and succeeded in
horrifying nine readers out of ten against Dr. Clarendon and his
supposed methods. Other papers were quick to copy and enlarge upon
its substance, taking the cue it offered, and commencing a series of
"faked" interviews which fairly ran the gamut of derogatory fantasy. In
no case, however, did the doctor condescend to offer a contradiction.
He had no time to waste on fools and liars, and cared little for
the esteem of a thoughtless rabble he despised. When James Dalton
telegraphed his regrets and offered aid, Clarendon replied with an
almost boorish curtness. He did not heed the barking of dogs, and could
not bother to muzzle them. Nor would he thank anyone for messing with a
matter wholly beneath notice. Silent and contemptuous, he continued his
duties with tranquil evenness.

But the young reporter's spark had done its work. San Francisco was
insane again, and this time as much with rage as with fear. Sober
judgment became a lost art; and though no second exodus occurred,
there ensued a reign of vice and recklessness born of desperation, and
suggesting parallel phenomena in mediæval times of pestilence. Hatred
ran riot against the man who had found the disease and was struggling
to restrain it, and a light-headed public forgot his great services
to knowledge in their efforts to fan the flames of resentment. They
seemed, in their blindness, to hate him in person, rather than the
plague which had come to their breeze-cleaned and usually healthy city.

Then the young reporter, playing in the Neronic fire he had kindled,
added a crowning personal touch of his own. Remembering the indignities
he had suffered at the hands of the cadaverous clinic-man, he prepared
a masterly article on the home and environment of Dr. Clarendon, giving
especial prominence to Surama, whose very aspect he declared sufficient
to scare the healthiest person into any sort of fever. He tried to
make the gaunt chuckler appear equally ridiculous and terrible,
succeeding best, perhaps, in the latter half of his intention, since
a tide of horror always welled up whenever he thought of his brief
proximity to the creature. He collected all the rumors current about
the man, elaborated on the unholy depth of his reputed scholarship,
and hinted darkly that it could have been no godly realm of secret and
eon-weighted Africa wherein Dr. Clarendon had found him.

Georgina, who followed the papers closely, felt crushed and hurt by
these attacks upon her brother, but James Dalton, who called often
at the house, did his best to comfort her. In this he was warm and
sincere; for he wished not only to console the woman he loved, but
to utter some measure of the reverence he had always felt for the
starward-bound genius who had been his youth's closest comrade. He told
Georgina how greatness can never be exempted from the shafts of envy,
and cited the long, sad list of splendid brains crushed beneath vulgar
heels. The attacks, he pointed out, formed the truest of all proofs of
Alfred's solid eminence.

"But they hurt just the same," she rejoined, "and all the more because
I know that Al really suffers from them, no matter how indifferent he
tries to be."

Dalton kissed her hand in a manner not then obsolete among well-born
persons.

"And it hurts me a thousand times more, knowing that it hurts you and
Alf.