Darkness and Dawn (6 page)

He used more than half an hour, through devious ways and hard labor,
to make his way to the desired spot. The ancient stair-way, leading
down, he could not find.

But by clambering down one of the elevator-shafts, digging toes and
fingers into the crevices in the metal framework and the cracks in the
concrete, he managed at last to reach a vaulted sub-cellar, festooned
with webs, damp, noisome and obscure.

Considerable light glimmered in from a broken sidewalk-grating above,
and through a gaping, jagged hole near one end of the cellar, beneath
which lay a badly-broken stone.

The engineer figured that this block had fallen from the tower and
come to rest only here; and this awoke him to a new sense of
ever-present peril. At any moment of the night or day, he realized,
some such mishap was imminent.

"Eternal vigilance!" he whispered to himself. Then, dismissing useless
fears, he set about the task in hand.

By the dim illumination from above, he was able to take cognizance of
the musty-smelling place, which, on the whole, was in a better state
of repair than the arcade. The first cellar yielded nothing of value
to him, but, making his way through a low vaulted door, he chanced
into what must have been one of the smaller, auxiliary engine-rooms.

This, he found, contained a battery of four dynamos, a small
seepage-pump, and a crumbling marble switch-board with part of the
wiring still comparatively intact.

At sight of all this valuable machinery scaled and pitted with rust,
Stern's brows contracted with a feeling akin to pain. The engineer
loved mechanism of all sorts; its care and use had been his life.

And now these mournful relics, strange as that may seem, affected him
more strongly than the little heaps of dust which marked the spots
where human beings had fallen in sudden, inescapable death.

Yet even so, he had no time for musing.

"Tools!" cried he, peering about the dimwit vault. "Tools—I must have
some. Till I find tools, I'm helpless!"

Search as he might, he discovered no ax in the place, but in place of
it he unearthed a sledge-hammer. Though corroded, it was still quite
serviceable. Oddly enough, the oak handle was almost intact.

"Kyanized wood, probably," reflected he, as he laid the sledge to one
side and began delving into a bed of dust that had evidently been a
work-bench. "Ah! And here's a chisel! A spanner, too! A heap of rusty
old wire nails!"

Delightedly he examined these treasures.

"They're worth more to me," he exulted; "than all the gold between
here and what's left of San Francisco!"

He found nothing more of value in the litter. Everything else was
rusted beyond use. So, having convinced himself that nothing more
remained, he gathered up his finds and started back whence he had
come.

After some quarter-hour of hard labor, he managed to transport
everything up into the arcade.

"Now for a glimpse of the outer world!" quoth he.

Gripping the sledge well in hand, he made his way through the confused
nexus of ruin. Disguised as everything now was, fallen and disjointed,
murdering, blighted by age incalculable, still the man recognized many
familiar features.

Here, he recalled, the telephone-booths had been; there the
information desk. Yonder, again, he remembered the little curved
counter where once upon a time a man in uniform had sold tickets to
such as had wanted to visit the tower.

Counter now was dust; ticket-man only a crumble of fine, grayish
powder. Stern shivered slightly, and pressed on.

As he approached the outer air, he noticed that many a grassy tuft and
creeping vine had rooted in the pavement of the arcade, up-prying the
marble slabs and cracking the once magnificent floor.

The doorway itself was almost choked by a tremendous Norway pine which
had struck root close to the building, and now insolently blocked that
way where, other-time many thousand men and women every day had come
and gone.

But Stern clambered out past this obstacle, testing the floor with his
sledge, as he went, lest he fall through an unseen weak spots into the
depths of coal-cellars below. And presently he reached the outer air,
unharmed.

"But—but, the sidewalk?" cried he, amazed. "The street—the Square?
Where are they?" And in astonishment he stopped, staring.

The view from the tower, though it had told him something of the
changes wrought, had given him no adequate conception of their
magnitude.

He had expected some remains of human life to show upon the earth,
some semblance of the metropolis to remain in the street. But no,
nothing was there; nothing at all on the ground to show that he was in
the heart of a city.

He could, indeed, catch glimpses of a building here or there. Through
the tangled thickets that grew close up to the age-worn walls of the
Metropolitan, he could make out a few bits of tottering construction
on the south side of what had been Twenty-Third Street.

But of the street itself, no trace remained—no pavement, no sidewalk,
no curb. And even so near and so conspicuous an object as the wreck of
the Flatiron was now entirely concealed by the dense forest.

Soil had formed thickly over all the surface. Huge oaks and pines
flourished there as confidently as though in the heart of the Maine
forest, crowding ash and beech for room.

Under the man's feet, even as he stood close by the building—which
was thickly overgrown with ivy and with ferns and bushes rooted in the
crannies—the pine-needles bent in deep, pungent beds.

Birch, maple, poplar and all the natives of the American woods
shouldered each other lustily. By the state of the fresh young leaves,
just bursting their sheaths, Stern knew the season was mid-May.

Through the wind-swayed branches, little flickering patches of morning
sunlight met his gaze, as they played and quivered on the forest moss
or over the sere pine-spills.

Even upon the huge, squared stones which here and there lay in
disorder, and which Stern knew must have fallen from the tower, the
moss grew very thick; and more than one such block had been rent by
frost and growing things.

"How long has it been, great Heavens! How long?" cried the engineer, a
sudden fear creeping into his heart. For this, the reasserted
dominance of nature, bore in on him with more appalling force than
anything he had yet seen.

About him he looked, trying to get his bearings in that strange
milieu.

"Why," said he, quite slowly, "it's—it's just as though some cosmic
jester, all-powerful, had scooped up the fragments of a ruined city
and tossed them pell-mell into the core of the Adirondacks! It's
horrible—ghastly—incredible!"

Dazed and awed, he stood as in a dream, a strange figure with his mane
of hair, his flaming, trailing beard, his rags (for he had left the
bear-skin in the arcade), his muscular arm, knotted as he held the
sledge over his shoulder.

Well might he have been a savage of old times; one of the early
barbarians of Britain, perhaps, peering in wonder at the ruins of some
deserted Roman camp.

The chatter of a squirrel high up somewhere in the branches of an oak,
recalled him to his wits. Down came spiralling a few bits of bark and
acorn-shell, quite in the old familiar way.

Farther off among the woods, a robin's throaty morning notes drifted
to him on the odorous breeze. A wren, surprisingly tame, chippered
busily. It hopped about, not ten feet from him, entirely fearless.

Stern realized that it was now seeing a man for the first time in its
life, and that it had no fear. His bushy brows contracted as he
watched the little brown body jumping from twig to twig in the pine
above him.

A deep, full breath he drew. Higher, still higher he raised his head.
Far through the leafy screen he saw the overbending arch of sky in
tiny patches of turquoise.

"The same old world, after all—the same, in spite of
everything—thank God!" he whispered, his very tone a prayer of
thanks.

And suddenly, though why he could not have told, the grim engineer's
eyes grew wet with tears that ran, unheeded, down his heavy-bearded
cheeks.

Stern's weakness—as he judged it—lasted but a minute. Then,
realizing even more fully than ever the necessity for immediate labor
and exploration, he tightened his grip upon the sledge and set forth
into the forest of Madison Square.

Away from him scurried a cotton-tail. A snake slid, hissing, out of
sight under a jungle of fern. A butterfly, dull brown and ocher,
settled upon a branch in the sunlight, where it began slowly opening
and shutting its wings.

"Hem! That's a
Danaus plexippus
, right enough," commented the man.
"But there are some odd changes in it. Yes, indeed, certainly some
evolutionary variants. Must be a tremendous time since we went to
sleep, for sure; probably very much longer than I dare guess. That's a
problem I've got to go to work on, before many days!"

But now for the present he dismissed it again; he pushed it aside in
the press of urgent matters. And, parting the undergrowth, he broke
his crackling way through the deep wood.

He had gone but a few hundred yards when an exclamation of surprised
delight burst from his lips.

"Water! Water!" he cried. "What? A spring, so close? A pool, right
here at hand? Good luck, by Jove, the very first thing!"

And, stopping where he stood, he gazed at it with keen, unalloyed
pleasure.

There, so near to the massive bulk of the tower that the vast shadow
lay broadly across it, Stern had suddenly come upon as beautiful a
little watercourse as ever bubbled forth under the yews of Arden or
lapped the willows of Hesperides.

He beheld a roughly circular depression in the woods, fern-banked and
fringed with purple blooms; at the bottom sparkled a spring,
leaf-bowered, cool, Elysian.

From this, down through a channel which the water must have worn for
itself by slow erosion, a small brook trickled, widening out into a
pool some fifteen feet across; whence, brimming over, it purled away
through the young sweet-flags and rushes with tempting little woodland
notes.

"What a find!" cried the engineer. Forward he strode. "So, then?
Deer-tracks?" he exclaimed, noting a few dainty hoof-prints in the
sandy margin. "Great!" And, filled with exultation, he dropped beside
the spring.

Over it he bent. Setting his bearded lips to the sweet water, he drank
enormous, satisfying drafts.

Sated at last, he stood up again and peered about him. All at once he
burst out into joyous laughter.

"Why, this is certainly an old friend of mine, or I'm a liar!" he
cried out. "This spring is nothing more or less than the lineal
descendant of Madison Square fountain, what? But good Lord, what a
change!

"It would make a splendid subject for an article in the 'Annals of
Applied Geology.' Only—well, there aren't any annals, now, and what's
more, no readers!"

Down to the wider pool he walked.

"Stern, my boy," said he, "here's where you get an A-1, first-class
dip!"

A minute later, stripped to the buff, the man lay splashing vigorously
in the water. From top to toe he scrubbed himself vigorously with the
fine, white sand. And when, some minutes later, he rose up again, the
tingle and joy of life filled him in every nerve.

For a minute he looked contemptuously at his rags, lying there on the
edge of the pool. Then with a grunt he kicked them aside.

"I guess we'll dispense with those," judged he. "The bear-skin, back
in the building, there, will be enough." He picked up his sledge, and,
heaving a mighty breath of comfort, set out for the tower again.

"Ah, but that was certainly fine!" he exclaimed. "I feel ten years
younger, already. Ten, from what? X minus ten, equals—?"

Thoughtfully, as he walked across the elastic moss and over the
pine-needles, he stroked his beard.

"Now, if I could only get a hair-cut and shave!" said he. "Well, why
not? Wouldn't that surprise
her
, though?"

The idea strong upon him, he hastened his steps, and soon was back at
the door close to the huge Norway pine. But here he did not enter.
Instead, he turned to the right.

Plowing through the woods, climbing over fallen columns and shattered
building-stones, flushing a covey of loud-winged partridges, parting
the bushes that grew thickly along the base of the wall, he now found
himself in what had long ago been Twenty-Third Street.

No sign, now of paving or car-tracks—nothing save, on the other side
of the way, crumbling lines of ruin. As he worked his way among the
detritus of the Metropolitan, he kept sharp watch for the wreckage of
a hardware store.

Not until he had crossed the ancient line of Madison Avenue and
penetrated some hundred yards still further along Twenty-Third Street,
did he find what he sought. "Ah!" he suddenly cried. "Here's something
now!"

And, scrambling over a pile of grass-grown rubbish with a couple of
time-bitten iron wheels peering out—evidently the wreckage of an
electric car—he made his way around a gaping hole where a side-walk
had caved in and so reached the interior of a shop.

"Yes, prospects here, certainly prospects!" he decided carefully
inspecting the place. "If this didn't use to be Currier & Brown's
place, I'm away off my bearings. There ought to be
something
left."

"Ah! Would you?" and he flung a hastily-snatched rock at a rattlesnake
that had begun its dry, chirring defiance on top of what once had been
a counter.

The snake vanished, while the rock rebounding, crashed through glass.

Stern wheeled about with a cry of joy. For there, he saw, still stood
near the back of the shop a showcase from within which he caught a
sheen of tarnished metal.