The Scarlet Plague | Page 8

Break it into ten pieces. Take one piece and break it into ten. Break one of
those pieces into ten, and one of those into ten, and one of those into ten, and one of those
into ten, and do it all day, and maybe, by sunset, you will have a piece as small as one of
the germs."
The boys were openly incredulous. Hare-Lip sniffed and sneered and Hoo-Hoo snickered,
until Edwin nudged them to be silent.
"The woodtick sucks the blood of the dog, but the germ, being so very small, goes right
into the blood of the body, and there it has many children. In those days there would be as
many as a billion--a crab-shell, please--as many as that crab-shell in one man's body. We
called germs micro-organisms. When a few million, or a billion, of them were in a man,
in all the blood of a man, he was sick. These germs were a disease. There were many
different kinds of them-more different kinds than there are grains of sand on this beach.
We knew only a few of the kinds. The micro-organic world was an invisible world, a
world we could not see, and we knew very little about it.
Yet we did know something. There was the bacillus anthracis; there was the micrococcus;
there was the Bacterium termo, and the Bacterium lactis--that's what turns the goat milk
sour even to this day, Hare-Lip; and there were Schizomycetes without end. And there
were many others...."
Here the old man launched into a disquisition on germs and their natures, using words
and phrases of such extraordinary length and meaninglessness, that the boys grinned at
one another and looked out over the deserted ocean till they forgot the old man was
babbling on.
"But the Scarlet Death, Granser," Edwin at last suggested.
Granser recollected himself, and with a start tore himself away from the rostrum of the
lecture-hall, where, to another-world audience, he had been expounding the latest theory,
sixty years gone, of germs and germ-diseases.

"Yes, Yes, Edwin; I had forgotten. Sometimes the memory of the past is very strong upon
me, and I forget that I am a dirty old man, clad in goatskin, wandering with my savage
grandsons who are goatherds in the primeval wilderness. 'The fleeting systems lapse like
foam,' and so lapsed our glorious, colossal civilization. I am Granser, a tired old man. I
belong to the tribe of Santa Rosans. I married into that tribe.
My sons and daughters married into the Chauffeurs, the Sacramentos, and the Palo-Altos.
You, Hare-Lip, are of the Chauffeurs. You, Edwin, are of the Sacramentos. And you,
Hoo-Hoo, are of the Palo-Altos. Your tribe takes its name from a town that was near the
seat of another great institution of learning. It was called Stanford University. Yes, I
remember now. It is perfectly clear. I was telling you of the Scarlet Death. Where was I
in my story?"
"You was telling about germs, the things you can't see but which make men sick," Edwin
prompted.
"Yes, that's where I was. A man did not notice at first when only a few of these germs got
into his body. But each germ broke in half and became two germs, and they kept doing
this very rapidly so that in a short time there were many millions of them in the body.
Then the man was sick. He had a disease, and the disease was named after the kind of
germ that was in him. It might be measles, it might be influenza, it might be yellow fever;
it might be any of thousands and thousands of kinds of diseases.
"Now this is the strange thing about these germs. There were always new ones coming to
live in men's bodies. Long and long and long ago, when there were only a few men in the
world, there were few diseases. But as men increased and lived closely together in great
cities and civilizations, new diseases arose, new kinds of germs entered their bodies. Thus
were countless millions and billions of human beings killed. And the more thickly men
packed together, the more terrible were the new diseases that came to be. Long before my
time, in the middle ages, there was the Black Plague that swept across Europe. It swept
across Europe many times. There was tuberculosis, that entered into men wherever they
were thickly packed. A hundred years before my time there was the bubonic plague. And
in Africa was the sleeping sickness. The bacteriologists fought all these sicknesses and
destroyed them, just as you boys fight the wolves away from your goats, or squash the
mosquitoes that light on you. The bacteriologists--"
"But, Granser, what is a what-you-call-it?" Edwin interrupted.
"You, Edwin, are a goatherd. Your