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.