The Scarlet Plague

“Rabbit is good, very good […] but when it comes to a toothsome delicacy I prefer crab.”

Smith says this to Edwin after the latter catches a rabbit to eat later. Edwin replies by seizing upon Smith’s vocabulary (“toothsome delicacy”) as strange and old-fashioned. Thus, London introduces two recurrent motifs: language and food as indicators of societal change.

“The boys were true savages, possessing only the cruel humor of the savage.”

After the grandchildren play a cruel practical joke on Smith by feeding him mussels that are scalding hot, London’s omniscient narrator issues this pronouncement. The statement definitively establishes the children’s nature and links it to their “savagery”—i.e., their unfamiliarity with modern, industrialized civilization. It also cements the conflict between them and their grandfather, toward whom they are strongly disrespectful.

“When I was a boy, we did not laugh at our elders; we respected them.”

Following on the previous quote, Smith scolds the children for their disrespect toward him. The quote implies that the plague has changed humans’ patterns of behavior and adds to the sense of alienation between Smith and his grandchildren.

“But this time he was more careful, and did not burn his mouth.”

Smith learns from his experience with the scalding mussels and eats more carefully. The statement subtly introduces the theme of The Resilience and Adaptability Required for Survival, suggesting that human beings learn from their mistakes and make adjustments as a biological necessity.

“All man’s toil upon the planet was just so much foam.”

Smith’s statement about the fleeting and ephemeral nature of human life and endeavor is related to the idea of The Cyclical Nature of History and Civilization. The statement is poetically expressed via a metaphor, conveying Smith’s love for literature—an aspect of civilization that is now a vanished part of the past.

“The scarlet of the maples can shake me like the cry of bugles going by.”

Smith quotes from the poem “A Vagabond Song” by the Canadian poet Bliss Carman (1861-1929). This again suggests his interest in literature and relates to the symbolic use of the color scarlet as a portent of death (as in the dying leaves). Smith’s quote leads to another contentious discussion between him and the children about language.

“The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.”

Smith again comments on the cyclical nature of history while conveying a pessimistic view of the slow and violent process of civilizational growth. Although Smith’s depiction of humanity’s current state as “primitive” implies a hierarchy of societies, with pastoralism/hunter-gathering near the bottom, his acknowledgment that the “climb” from this state is “bloody” casts doubt on whether it truly represents progress.

“What a gabble the old geezer makes.”

Hare-Lip says this to the other boys, reacting to Smith scolding them for extracting teeth from a group of skeletons. Throughout the book, the children fail to understand their grandfather, who comes from a completely different world with different assumptions, words, and morals.

“Twenty or thirty years ago my story was in great demand. But in these days nobody seems interested.”

Smith implies that interest in the past has steadily decreased as the plague has receded into the past—another sign of civilizational decline, in his eyes. This triggers his story, an attempt to share the knowledge of the past with the children that illustrates The Role of Storytelling in Preserving Knowledge.

“I sometimes think the most wonderful achievement of our tremendous civilization was food—its inconceivable abundance, its infinite variety, its marvelous delicacy. O my grandsons, life was life in those days, when we had such wonderful things to eat.”

Food is a notable motif, functioning as a symbol of “civilized” living. Smith sees the decline in the abundance and quality of food as emblematic of the fortunes of civilization itself. He says this as he and the grandchildren gather on the seashore for a simple meal of freshly caught seafood, which is abundant but requires greater effort to obtain. However, he later admits that the elite took “almost all” the food from the laboring classes, which suggests that things have not changed dramatically in this respect for most of the plague’s survivors.

“Anything you can’t see, ain’t, that’s what.”

An argument erupts between Smith and Hare-Lip (who speaks this quote) about the existence of germs. Hare-Lip cannot conceive of microscopic bacteria, the cause of the Scarlet Plague. The quote shows how societal collapse has led to ignorance, in this case about basic facts of science, establishing loss of knowledge as a potential effect of a cataclysmic event like the plague.

“It was like seeing the sacred flame die down on some thrice-sacred altar.”

This is Smith’s poetic description of how it felt to him when UC Berkeley, the university at which he taught, shut down. The metaphor frames learning as a sacred duty and calling that the plague destroyed. For Smith, the dissolution of the school is emblematic of the loss of civilization and culture generally, though the slight hyperbole of the passage’s tone implies that nostalgia may be shading Smith’s recollections.

“With the Scarlet Death the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably. Ten thousand years of culture and civilization passed in the twinkling of an eye, ‘lapsed like foam.’”

Smith puts the effects of the plague in a broader perspective: Not merely a local event, it signaled the end of a long-standing civilization. London again drives home the cyclical nature of history and civilization and the fact that societies can fall very quickly.

“My God! […] I’ve got it. Don’t come near me. I am a dead man.”

When Smith’s brother showed up at his home to prepare to evacuate, he suddenly realized that he had the plague. London dramatizes this moment, showing the rapidity and deadliness of the disease.

“The time for such acts had already passed. Civilization was crumbling, and it was each for himself.”

Smith recounts how he saw robbers set fire to a store but refrained from intervening because it seemed pointless. The quote shows the desperate, hopeless situation to which the plague had reduced society. The fact that Smith at least considered the possibility of helping characterizes him as morally superior to those around him, and yet he ultimately suggests that such morality is a relic of human civilization; in the absence of the latter, self-interest is all that matters.

“In the midst of our civilization, down in our slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred a race of barbarians, of savages; and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon us like the wild beasts they were and destroyed us. And they destroyed themselves as well.”

Smith points to the lower classes as the sources of the widespread looting and arson after the plague. Though his description of them as “barbarians” and “savages” certainly indicates class bias, he contextualizes their behavior in terms of their brutalization—a reflection of London’s socialism. Smith thus implies that the seeds of societal dissolution had already been planted by capitalist exploitation and that the plague was merely the catalyst that brought unrest to the surface. The quote foreshadows the rise of Bill.

“And after all, what did it matter? Everybody died anyway, the good and the bad, the efficients and the weaklings, those that loved to live and those that scorned to live. They passed. Everything passed.”

This statement by Smith on the cyclical nature of history also implies a pessimistic view of life in which good and bad alike are condemned to perish. The plague was indiscriminate in its devastation, sparing no one.

“Our progress was painfully slow.”

Smith is describing the survivors’ walk out of the city: The slowest members set the pace for all since the survivors were afraid to separate. In a broader sense, the quote evokes the slow pace of societal recovery, which all humans travel together.

“Where in hell did you come from?”

This was Bill’s immediate reaction upon seeing Smith when he appeared at his camp three years after the plague. The quote points to the difference between Smith’s and Bill’s characters. Smith showed human emotion upon meeting another human being, while Bill showed only cold rudeness—symptomatic of his cruel nature.

“It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the universe.”

Smith’s statement expresses moral pessimism about life in the context of the plague’s effects. Smith sees Bill’s survival as indicative of a lack of ultimate justice in the universe; in evolutionary terms, all that mattered was that Bill was immune to the plague.

“Why should Vesta not have been mine?”

Smith asks himself this rhetorical question in retrospect, looking back at the survival of Bill and Vesta after the plague. Smith feels that as a cultured man, he should, by rights, have had Vesta, a cultured woman, for a wife—an expression of the very classism that the story implies contributed to humanity’s downfall.

“You had your day before the plague […] but this is my day, and a damned good day it is.”

Bill said this to Smith, referring to the dramatic reversal of fortune thanks to which he, a former servant, had come to treat Vesta as a servant. Happy with this role reversal, he intended to enjoy it to the fullest. The quote conveys Bill’s status as a moral menace.

“We’ve got to start all over and replenish the earth and multiply.”

Bill implied that he and Smith had to have children to perpetuate the human race. With its allusion to the biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 9:7), the quote suggests that human history was starting over again after the plague (the Book of Genesis being the story of humanity’s origins). Similarly, Bill made reference a moment later to “a regular Garden-of-Eden proposition” (114).