The Scarlet Plague E-Book

Jack London

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 115

Beschreibung

It was the summer of 2013 that the Plague came... The heart began to beat faster and the heat of the body to increase. Then came the scarlet rash, spreading like wildfire... An old man walks along deserted railway tracks, long since unused and overgrown; beside him a young, feral boy helps him along. It has been sixty years since the great Red Death wiped out mankind, and the handful of survivors, from all walks of life, have established their own civilisation, their own hierarchy in a savage world. Art, science, all learning's been lost, and the young descendants of the healthy few know nothing of the world that was, nothing but myths and make-believe. The old man is the only one who can convey the wonders of that bygone age, and the horrors of the plague that brought about its end. What future lies in store for the remnants of mankind can only be surmised - their ignorance, barbarity and ruthlessness the only hope they have. Jack London's dystopian vision of the future was first published in 1912, a century before the Scarlet Plague he envisioned destroying the human population. The deadly virus, which kills in a matter of minutes in some instances, remains a terrifying prophecy of the perils of globalisation, which are all too pertinent today.

Leseprobe

The Scarlet Plague

Jack London

Contents

Title PageForeword123456Biographical noteAlso by Jack LondonSELECTED TITLES FROM HESPERUS PRESS Copyright

Foreword

When I was in my late twenties I lived in a commune in Bristol, and we used to bulk-buy our food from a market stall in the centre of the city. The stallholder’s name was Jack. He was short and wiry with cropped ginger hair, wore blue jeans and a checked lumberjack shirt, and his eyes blazed with a withering certainty like those of an Old Testament prophet.

Whenever we met we argued non-stop, me sitting on the little bench in front of his stall rolling countless cigarettes, him shovelling his dried fruit and pulses out of big wooden vats into austere brown paper bags. Our views were diametrically opposed. I was an international revolutionary and wore the badges to prove it; he believed that social transformation would only come about through the example of wise, disciplined individuals like himself. I was a long-haired carnivore with a motorbike. He was a vegetarian, loathed the internal combustion engine and never wore socks. He was more of a pessimist than me. I thought world harmony would be achieved very soon, probably in the next decade or so, as soon as capitalism had been smashed and the creative force of ordinary people had been unleashed; he believed mankind was hell-bent on destroying the planet, and that within a hundred years our entire species would be wiped out, with the possible exception of a few hundred shivering refugees, forced to eke out a living trudging through the snowy wastes of Antarctica. Mine was the more fashionable intellectual position, and most people considered Jack a nutter.

Yet thirty-five years later, it’s his bleak prognosis that seems more likely to have been accurate. Many of us who cut our political teeth in the 1960s still cling to the illusive notion of progress and a fair, well-ordered society, but we cannot deny that any such utopian future is likely to be scuppered by the terrifying transformation our planet is currently undergoing.

The evidence is all around us. A decade and a half after I first met Jack, I achieved sufficient minor celebrity status to be able to afford to jet off to warmer climes at least once a year. I learned to scuba-dive in the Seychelles, swam off the coast of Mauritius and Indonesia, and discovered the breathtaking underwater environment of the Indian Ocean. The coral was multicoloured, exotically shaped, and omnipresent. Today when I go back to those same submarine haunts, it lies in deathly grey piles on the ocean floor like mounds of slag shovelled from some vast underwater furnace. According to an ecological survey conducted in 2005, more than nine-tenths of the Seychelles’ coral is now lost. Were this destruction simply an aesthetic issue, the defacing of yet another small part of our planet’s beauty, we might be able to dismiss it with little more than a wistful shake of the head. But if we are to prevent the global catastrophe that Jack predicted, we have to ensure that the great swathes of carbon currently flowing round our planet are dramatically reduced. Coral and its microscopic allies lock vast quantities of the stuff away. All the efforts of the rainforests pale into insignificance compared with the rescue work our coral reefs do on our behalf. And in return we dynamite them for easier access to fishing grounds and poison them with hotel sewage, thus further polluting our planet and making our survival as a species less likely.

Or am I being too dramatic? Will humankind really be brought to its knees because we’re too stupid to see how quickly we’re destroying our habitat, or are the oil executives and their allies right? Are we simply in the grip of an irresponsible moral panic, as unjustified as that of the medieval peasants who danced and flagellated their way round Europe in order to ward off impending doom? I’m sure there’s a bit of truth in such allegations. Throughout history human beings have believed the end of the world is at hand. Even Jesus and his disciples were convinced the last trump was about to blow its final riff. So it’s hardly surprising that the dark fantasies that lurk away inside us sometimes explode into glorious Technicolor when we hear the next set of depressing figures about carbon emissions or the unrelenting march of HIV and AIDS. But my personal experiences, reinforced by the work done by thousands of scientists worldwide, not to mention the inordinate amount of flooding that now bedevils my county each year, have convinced me Jack wasn’t deluded, and that this time there’s more going on in the world than a spot of Endtime paranoia.

It was he who introduced me to the work of Jack London. At the time virtually all I read was the Socialist Worker and New Musical Express. But he decided my wild insurrectionism should be tempered by a little environmental understanding. First he persuaded me to flick through The Iron Heel, which had the kind of title that attracted me in those days, then he weaned me on to The Call of the Wild and White Fang. I grew to have a deep affection for London’s work. I loved his terrifying visions of the collapse of society, beautifully epitomised in the opening paragraphs of The Scarlet Plague, and the dramatic way he demonstrated how frail mankind is when exposed to the awesome power of nature. Not that he was a consistently good writer. There is a host of revealing contradictions in his work. He was a socialist and yet a bigot, an egalitarian fascinated by the power of elites, an idealist who saw our future only as a repeated cycle of hopelessness. His writing was also very uneven. But that was part of its attraction. It seemed to exude a gauche but powerful moral authority which was made all the more authentic by its lack of sophistication. In fact in my mind I tended to get Jack London and my Jack confused. I wasn’t sure if I really liked either of them, they both seemed a bit bossy and assertive, with an obsessive energy that could be intensely irritating. But deep down I knew they were both better than me, and that I had a lot to learn from them.

I wonder what happened to my Jack. He must be well into his seventies. I doubt that he’s dead. Maybe he’s bought a shack in the mountains of Kentucky and is living the life of a solitary survivalist, with a rifle and plenty of food and liquor stashed away. As for Jack London, he died nearly a hundred years ago and most of his work is out of print, but I suspect he’ll soon be back in fashion. In a way he already is. Last week I saw a post-apocalyptic blockbuster in which, following a worldwide plague, our gaunt hero strides through the empty streets of New York. Central Park has become savannah, wild deer bound across the streets, the only other survivors are disease-ridden mutants. The spirit of Jack London is still alive!

– Tony Robinson, 2008

The Scarlet Plague

1

The way led along upon what had once been the embankment of a railroad. But no train had run upon it for many years. The forest on either side swelled up the slopes of the embankment and crested across it in a green wave of trees and bushes. The trail was as narrow as a man’s body, and was no more than a wild animal runway. Occasionally, a piece of rusty iron, showing through the forest mould, advertised that the rail and the ties still remained. In one place, a ten-inch tree, bursting through at a connection, had lifted the end of a rail clearly into view. The tie had evidently followed the rail, held to it by the spike long enough for its bed to be filled with gravel and rotten leaves, so that now the crumbling, rotten timber thrust itself up at a curious slant. Old as the road was, it was manifest that it had been of the monorail type.

An old man and a boy travelled along this runway. They moved slowly, for the old man was very old, a touch of palsy made his movements tremulous, and he leaned heavily upon his staff. A rude skullcap of goatskin protected his head from the sun. From beneath this fell a scant fringe of stained and dirty-white hair. A visor, ingeniously made from a large leaf, shielded his eyes, and from under this he peered at the way of his feet on the trail. His beard, which should have been snow white but which showed the same weather wear and camp stain as his hair, fell nearly to his waist in a great tangled mass. About his chest and shoulders hung a single, mangy garment of goatskin. His arms and legs, withered and skinny, betokened extreme age, as well as did their sunburn and scars and scratches betoken long years of exposure to the elements.

The boy, who led the way, checking the eagerness of his muscles to the slow progress of the elder, likewise wore a single garment – a ragged-edged piece of bearskin, with a hole in the middle through which he had thrust his head. He could not have been more than twelve years old. Tucked coquettishly over one ear was the freshly severed tail of a pig. In one hand he carried a medium-sized bow and an arrow. On his back was a quiverful of arrows. From a sheath hanging about his neck on a thong, projected the battered handle of a hunting knife. He was as brown as a berry, and walked softly, with almost a catlike tread. In marked contrast with his sunburned skin were his eyes – blue, deep blue, but keen and sharp as a pair of gimlets. They seemed to bore into all about him in a way that was habitual. As he went along he smelled things, as well, his distended, quivering nostrils carrying to his brain an endless series of messages from the outside world. Also, his hearing was acute, and had been so trained that it operated automatically. Without conscious effort, he heard all the slight sounds in the apparent quiet – heard, and differentiated, and classified these sounds – whether they were of the wind rustling the leaves, of the humming of bees and gnats, of the distant rumble of the sea that drifted to him only in lulls, or of the gopher, just under his foot, shoving a pouchful of earth into the entrance of his hole.

Suddenly he became alertly tense. Sound, sight, and odor had given him a simultaneous warning. His hand went back to the old man, touching him, and the pair stood still. Ahead, at one side of the top of the embankment, arose a crackling sound, and the boy’s gaze was fixed on the tops of the agitated bushes. Then a large bear, a grizzly, crashed into view, and likewise stopped abruptly, at sight of the humans. He did not like them, and growled querulously. Slowly the boy fitted the arrow to the bow, and slowly he pulled the bowstring taut. But he never removed his eyes from the bear.

The old man peered from under his green leaf at the danger, and stood as quietly as the boy. For a few seconds this mutual scrutinizing went on; then, the bear betraying a growing irritability, the boy, with a movement of his head, indicated that the old man must step aside from the trail and go down the embankment. The boy followed, going backwards, still holding the bow taut and ready. They waited till a crashing among the bushes from the opposite side of the embankment told them the bear had gone on. The boy grinned as he led back to the trail.

‘A big un, Granser,’ he chuckled.

The old man shook his head.

‘They get thicker every day,’ he complained in a thin, undependable falsetto. ‘Who’d have thought I’d live to see the time when a man would be afraid of his life on the way to the Cliff House? When I was a boy, Edwin, men and women and little babies used to come out here from San Francisco by tens of thousands on a nice day. And there weren’t any bears then. No, sir. They used to pay money to look at them in cages, they were that rare.’

‘What is money, Granser?’

Before the old man could answer, the boy recollected and triumphantly shoved his hand into a pouch under his bearskin and pulled forth a battered and tarnished silver dollar. The old man’s eyes glistened, as he held the coin close to them.

‘I can’t see,’ he muttered. ‘You look and see if you can make out the date, Edwin.’

The boy laughed.

‘You’re a great Granser,’ he cried delightedly, ‘always making believe them little marks mean something.’

The old man manifested an accustomed chagrin as he brought the coin back again close to his own eyes.

‘2012,’ he shrilled, and then fell to cackling grotesquely. ‘That was the year Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States by the Board of Magnates. It must have been one of the last coins minted, for the Scarlet Death came in 2013. Lord! Lord! – think of it! Sixty years ago, and I am the only person alive today that lived in those times. Where did you find it, Edwin?’

The boy, who had been regarding him with the tolerant curiousness one accords to the prattlings of the feeble-minded, answered promptly.

‘I got it off of Hoo-Hoo. He found it when we was herdin’ goats down near San Jose last spring. Hoo-Hoo said it was money. Ain’t you hungry, Granser?’