Darkness and Dawn (3 page)

"Look!" he exclaimed, pointing. "What this all means we don't know
yet. How long it's been we can't tell. But to judge by the appearance
up here, it's even longer than I thought. See, the very tiles are
cracked and crumbling.

"Tilework is usually considered highly recalcitrant—but
this
is
gone. There's grass growing in the dust that's settled between the
tiles. And—why, here's a young oak that's taken root and forced a
dozen slabs out of place."

"The winds and birds have carried seeds up here, and acorns," she
answered in an awed voice. "Think of the time that must have passed.
Years and years.

"But tell me," and her brow wrinkled with a sudden wonder, "tell me
how we've ever lived so long?
I
can't understand it.

"Not only have we escaped starvation, but we haven't frozen to death
in all these bitter winters. How can
that
have happened?"

"Let it all go as suspended animation till we learn the facts, if we
ever do," he replied, glancing about with wonder.

"You know, of course, how toads have been known to live embedded in
rock for centuries? How fish, hard-frozen, have been brought to life
again? Well—"

"But we are human beings."

"I know. Certain unknown natural forces, however, might have made no
more of us than of non-mammalian and less highly organized creatures.

"Don't bother your head about these problems yet a while. On my word,
we've got enough to do for the present without much caring about how
or why.

"All we definitely know is that some very long, undetermined period of
time has passed, leaving us still alive. The rest can wait."

"How long a time do you judge it?" she anxiously inquired.

"Impossible to say at once. But it must have been something
extraordinary—probably far longer than either of us suspect.

"See, for example, the attrition of everything up here exposed to the
weather." He pointed at the heavy stone railing. "See how
that
is
wrecked, for instance."

A whole segment, indeed, had fallen inward. Its debris lay in
confusion, blocking all the southern side of the platform.

The bronze bars, which Stern well remembered—two at each corner,
slanting downward and bracing a rail—had now wasted to mere
pockmarked shells of metal.

Three had broken entirely and sagged wantonly awry with the
displacement of the stone blocks, between which the vines and grasses
had long been carrying on their destructive work.

"Look out!" Stern cautioned. "Don't lean against any of those stones."
Firmly he held her back as she, eagerly inquisitive, started to
advance toward the railing.

"Don't go anywhere near the edge. It may all be rotten and undermined,
for anything we know. Keep back here, close to the wall."

Sharply he inspected it a moment.

"Facing stones are pretty well gone," said he, "but, so far as I can
see, the steel frame isn't too bad. Putting everything together, I'll
probably be able before long to make some sort of calculation of the
date. But for now we'll have to call it 'X,' and let it go at that."

"The year X!" she whispered under her breath. "Good Heavens, am I as
old as that?"

He made no answer, but only drew her to him protectingly, while all
about them the warm summer wind swept onward to the sea, out over the
sparkling expanses of the bay—alone unchanged in all that universal
wreckage.

In the breeze her heavy masses of hair stirred luringly. He felt its
silken caress on his half-naked shoulder, and in his ears the blood
began to pound with strange insistence.

Quite gone now the daze and drowsiness of the first wakening. Stern
did not even feel weak or shaken. On the contrary, never had life
bounded more warmly, more fully, in his veins.

The presence of the girl set his heart throbbing heavily, but he bit
his lip and restrained every untoward thought.

Only his arm tightened a little about that warmly clinging body.
Beatrice did not shrink from him. She needed his protection as never
since the world began had woman needed man.

To her it seemed that come what might, his strength and comfort could
not fail. And, despite everything, she could not—for the moment—find
unhappiness within her heart.

Quite vanished now, even in those brief minutes since their awakening,
was all consciousness of their former relationship—employer and
employed.

The self-contained, courteous, yet unapproachable engineer had
disappeared.

Now, through all the extraneous disguise of his outer self, there
lived and breathed just a man, a young man, thewed with the vigor of
his plentitude. All else had been swept clean away by this great
change.

The girl was different, too. Was this strong woman, eager-eyed and
brave, the quiet, low-voiced stenographer he remembered, busy only
with her machine, her file-boxes, and her carbon-copies? Stern dared
not realize the transmutation. He ventured hardly fringe it in his
thoughts.

To divert his wonderings and to ease a situation which oppressed him,
he began adjusting the "level" telescope to his eye.

With his back planted firmly against the tower, he studied a wide
section of the dead and buried world so very far below them. With
astonishment he cried:

"It
is
true, Beatrice! Everything's swept clean away. Nothing left,
nothing at all—no signs of life!

"As far as I can reach with these lenses, universal ruin. We're all
alone in this whole world, just you and I—and everything belongs to
us!"

"Everything—all ours?"

"Everything! Even the future—the future of the human race!"

Suddenly he felt her tremble at his side. Down at her he looked, a
great new tenderness possessing him. He saw that tears were forming in
her eyes.

Beatrice pressed both hands to her face and bowed her head. Filled
with strange emotions, the man watched her for a moment.

Then in silence, realizing the uselessness of any words, knowing that
in this monstrous Ragnarok of all humanity no ordinary relations of
life could bear either cogency or meaning, he took her in his arms.

And there alone with her, far above the ruined world, high in the pure
air of mid-heaven, he comforted the girl with words till then
unthought-of and unknown to him.

Presently Beatrice grew calmer. For though grief and terror
still weighed upon her soul, she realized that this was no fit time to
yield to any weakness—now when a thousand things were pressing for
accomplishment, if their own lives, too, were not presently to be
snuffed out in all this universal death.

"Come, come," said Stern reassuringly. "I want you, too, to get a
complete idea of what has happened. From now on you must know all,
share all, with me." And, taking her by the hand he led her along the
crumbling and uncertain platform.

Together, very cautiously, they explored the three sides of the
platform still unchoked by ruins.

Out over the incredible mausoleum of civilization they peered. Now and
again they fortified their vision by recourse to the telescope.

Nowhere, as he had said, was any slightest sign of life to be
discerned. Nowhere a thread of smoke arose; nowhere a sound echoed
upward.

Dead lay the city, between its rivers, whereon now no sail glinted in
the sunlight, no tug puffed vehemently with plumy jets of steam, no
liner idled at anchor or nosed its slow course out to sea.

The Jersey shore, the Palisades, the Bronx and Long Island all lay
buried in dense forests of conifers and oak, with only here and there
some skeleton mockery of a steel structure jutting through.

The islands in the harbor, too, were thickly overgrown. On Ellis, no
sign of the immigrant station remained. Castle William was quite gone.
And with a gasp of dismay and pain, Beatrice pointed out the fact that
no longer Liberty held her bronze torch aloft.

Save for a black, misshapen mass protruding through the tree-tops, the
huge gift of France was no more.

Fringing the water-front, all the way round, the mournful remains of
the docks and piers lay in a mere sodden jumble of decay, with an
occasional hulk sunk alongside.

Even over these wrecks of liners, vegetation was growing rank and
green. All the wooden ships, barges and schooners had utterly
vanished.

The telescope showed only a stray, lolling mast of steel, here or
yonder, thrusting up from the desolation, like a mute appealing hand
raised to a Heaven that responded not.

"See," remarked Stern, "up-town almost all the buildings seem to have
crumbled in upon themselves, or to have fallen outward into the
streets. What an inconceivable tangle of detritus those streets must
be!

"And, do you notice the park hardly shows at all? Everything's so
overgrown with trees you can't tell where it begins or ends. Nature
has her revenge at last, on man!"

"The universal claim, made real," said Beatrice. "Those rather clearer
lines of green, I suppose, must be the larger streets. See how the
avenues stretch away and away, like ribbons of green velvet?"

"Everywhere that roots can hold at all, Mother Nature has set up her
flags again. Hark! What's that?"

A moment they listened intently. Up to them, from very far, rose a
wailing cry, tremulous, long-drawn, formidable.

"Oh! Then there
are
people, after all?" faltered the girl, grasping
Stern's arm.

He laughed.

"No, hardly!" answered he. "I see you don't know the wolf-cry. I
didn't till I heard it in the Hudson Bay country, last winter—that
is, last winter, plus X. Not very pleasant, is it?"

"Wolves! Then—there are—"

"Why not? Probably all sorts of game on the island now. Why shouldn't
there be? All in Mother Nature's stock-in-trade, you know.

"But come, come, don't let that worry you. We're safe, for the
present. Time enough to consider hunting later. Let's creep around
here to the other side of the tower, and see what we can see."

Silently she acquiesced. Together they reached the southern part of
the platform, making their way as far as the jumbled rocks of the
fallen railing would permit.

Very carefully they progressed, fearful every moment lest the support
break beneath them and hurl them down along the sloping side of the
pinnacle to death.

"Look!" bade Stern, pointing. "That very long green line there used to
be Broadway. Quite a respectable Forest of Arden now, isn't it?" He
swept his hand far outward.

"See those steel cages, those tiny, far-off ones with daylight shining
through? You know them—the Park Row, the Singer, the Woolworth and
all the rest. And the bridges, look at those!"

She shivered at the desolate sight. Of the Brooklyn Bridge only the
towers were visible.

The watchers, two isolated castaways on their island in the sea of
uttermost desolation, beheld a dragging mass of wreckage that drooped
from these towers on either shore, down to the sparkling flood.

The other bridges, newer and stronger far, still remained standing.
But even from that distance Stern could quite plainly see, without the
telescope, that the Williamsburg Bridge had "buckled" downward and
that the farther span of the Blackwell's Island Bridge was in ruinous
disrepair.

"How horrible, how ghastly is all this waste and ruin!" thought the
engineer. "Yet, even in their overthrow, how wonderful are the works
of man!"

A vast wonder seized him as he stood there gazing; a fierce desire to
rehabilitate all this wreckage, to set it right, to start the wheels
of the world-machinery running once more.

At the thought of his own powerlessness a bitter smile curled his
lips.

Beatrice seemed to share something of his wonder.

"Can it be possible," whispered she, "that you and—and I—are really
like Macaulay's lone watcher of the world-wreck on London Bridge?"

"That we are actually seeing the thing so often dreamed of by prophets
and poets? That 'All this mighty heart is lying still,' at
last—forever? The heart of the world, never to beat again?"

He made no answer, save to shake his head; but fast his thoughts were
running.

So then, could he and Beatrice, just they two, be in stern reality the
sole survivors of the entire human race? That race for whose material
welfare he had, once on a time, done such tremendous work?

Could they be destined, he and she, to witness the closing chapter in
the long, painful, glorious Book of Evolution? Slightly he shivered
and glanced round.

Till he could adjust his reason to the facts, could learn the truth
and weigh it, he knew he must not analyze too closely; he felt he must
try not to think. For
that
way lay madness!

Far out she gazed.

The sun, declining, shot a broad glory all across the sky. Purple and
gold and crimson lay the light-bands over the breast of the Hudson.

Dark blue the shadows streamed across the ruined city with its
crowding forests, its blank-staring windows and sagging walls, its
thousands of gaping vacancies, where wood and stone and brick had
crumbled down—the city where once the tides of human life had ebbed
and flowed, roaring resistlessly.

High overhead drifted a few rosy clouds, part of that changeless
nature which alone did not repel or mystify these two beleaguered
waifs, these chance survivors, this man, this woman, left alone
together by the hand of fate.

They were dazed, fascinated by the splendor of that sunset over a
world devoid of human life, for the moment giving up all efforts to
judge or understand.

Stern and his mate peered closer, down at the interwoven jungles of
Union Square, the leafy frond-masses that marked the one-time course
of Twenty-Third Street, the forest in Madison Square, and the
truncated column of the tower where no longer Diana turned her
huntress bow to every varying breeze.