Lovecraft, H P & Adolphe de Castro - The Last Test

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The Last Test
The Last Test
by H. P. Lovecraft and Adolphe de Castro
Written 1927
Published November 1928 in Weird Tales, Volume 12, No. 5, 625-56.
I.
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 leaked out to a limited circle.
But for that, and for the years which have give 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 honour of harbouring one of the great 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 centre 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
honours, 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 appointments stretched an extended and now 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 protégé, 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
The Last Test
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 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 savoured 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 was also 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
eccentricism, calmed his occasional bouts 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
The Last Test
ecstasy into which he would work himself, became almost ashamed of ever having 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
Thibetan 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 Thibetans 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 symbolise in them the anatomical models of his
college years. Their aspect, in the loose black silk robes of Bonpa 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
archaeological rumour. Surama, a man of great intelligence and seemingly inexhaustible
erudition, was as morbidly lean as the Thibetan servants; with swarthy, parchment-like
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 lustrelessly
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 no 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 towards the sea. His race appeared to be Caucasian, but could not be
classified more clearly than that. Some of Clarendon's friends thought he looked like a
high-caste Hindoo notwithstanding his accentless 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 uphill 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
Thibetans. 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
The Last Test
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 realised 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 explanation 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 protégé's need for political appointment, and sought, true
to his protective role 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 eighth of November, 189-, Dr. Alfred Clarendon became medical director of the
California State Penitentiary at San Quentin.
II.
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 where mere appreciation might well have grown to
devour 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 shewed no surprise, but kept on at the writing before him.
The Last Test
"I know," he said evenly; "I came across that case yesterday. I'm glad you recognised 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 shewn
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, cannot 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 final 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 this 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.
The Last Test
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 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 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 Oakley, 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, theatres and cafÀ)Às, restaurants and saloons, all gradually
closed their doors; and in a single week San Francisco lay prostate 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
The Last Test
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
unsanitary suburban tent colonies. The leaders and editors of the commentary 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 that 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, 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
meagre; 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 Thibetans. 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 tree concealed from the front walk. With quick,
alert brain he took in everything - the rose-arbour, 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
The Last Test
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 a 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 arranged 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 tantalising 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
摘要：

TheLastTestTheLastTestbyH.P.LovecraftandAdolphedeCastroWritten1927PublishedNovember1928inWeirdTales,Volume12,No.5,625-56.I.FewpersonsknowtheinsideoftheClarendonstory,oreventhatthereisaninsidenotreachedbythenewspapers.ItwasaSanFranciscosensationinthedaysbeforethefire,bothbecauseofthepanicandmenacetha...

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