Darkness and Dawn Read online

  "I must know everything. Let me see!"

  Now she was at his side, and, like him, staring out into the clear sunshine, out over the vast expanses of the city.

  A moment's utter silence fell. Quite clearly hummed the protest of an imprisoned fly in a web at the top of the window. The breathing of the man and woman sounded quick and loud.

  "All wrecked!" cried Beatrice. "But—then—"

  "Wrecked? It looks that way," the engineer made answer, with a strong effort holding his emotions in control. "Why not be frank about this? You'd better make up your mind at once to accept the very worst. I see no signs of anything else."

  "The worst? You mean—"

  "I mean just what we see out there. You can interpret it as well as I."

  Again the silence while they looked, with emotions that could find no voicing in words. Instinctively the engineer passed an arm about the frightened girl and drew her close to him.

  "And the last thing I remember," whispered she, "was just—just after you'd finished dictating those Taunton Bridge specifications. I suddenly felt—oh, so sleepy! Only for a minute I thought I'd close my eyes and rest, and then—then—"

  "This?"

  She nodded.

  "Same here," said he. "What the deuce can have struck us? Us and everybody—and everything? Talk about your problems! Lucky I'm sane and sound, and—and—"

  He did not finish, but fell once more to studying the incomprehensible prospect.

  Their view was towards the east, but over the river and the reaches of what had once upon a time been Long Island City and Brooklyn, as familiar a scene in the other days as could be possibly imagined. But now how altered an aspect greeted them!

  "It's surely all wiped out, all gone, gone into ruins," said Stern slowly and carefully, weighing each word. "No hallucination about that." He swept the sky-line with his eyes, that now peered keenly out from beneath those bushy brows. Instinctively he brought his hand up to his breast. He started with surprise.

  "What's this?" he cried. "Why, I—I've got a full yard of whiskers. My good Lord! Whiskers on me? And I used to say—"

  He burst out laughing. At his beard he plucked with merriment that jangled horribly on the girl's tense nerves. Suddenly he grew serious. For the first time he seemed to take clear notice of his companion's plight.

  "Why, what a time it must have been!" cried he. "Here's some calculation all cut out for me, all right. But—you can't go that way, Miss Kendrick. It—it won't do, you know. Got to have something to put on. Great Heavens what a situation!"

  He tried to peel off his remnant of a coat, but at the merest touch it tore to shreds and fell away. The girl restrained him.

  "Never mind," said she, with quiet, modest dignity. "My hair protects me very well for the present. If you and I are all that's left of the people in the world, this is no time for trifles."

  A moment he studied her. Then he nodded, and grew very grave.

  "Forgive me," he whispered, laying a hand on her shoulder. Once more he turned to the window and looked out.

  "So then, it's all gone?" he queried, speaking as to himself. "Only a skyscraper standing here or there? And the bridges and the islands—all changed.

  "Not a sign of life anywhere; not a sound; the forests growing thick among the ruins? A dead world if—if all the world is like this part of it! All dead, save you and me!"

  In silence they stood there, striving to realize the full import of the catastrophe. And Stern, deep down in his heart, caught some glimmering insight of the future and was glad.

  Chapter III - On the Tower Platform

  *

  Suddenly the girl started, rebelling against the evidence of her own senses, striving again to force upon herself the belief that, after all, it could not be so.

  "No, no, no!" she cried. "This can't be true. It mustn't be. There's a mistake somewhere. This simply must be all an illusion, a dream!

  "If the whole world's dead, how does it happen we're alive? How do we know it's dead? Can we see it all from here? Why, all we see is just a little segment of things. Perhaps if we could know the truth, look farther, and know—"

  He shook his head.

  "I guess you'll find it's real enough," he answered, "no matter how far you look. But, just the same, it won't do any harm to extend our radius of observation.

  "Come, let's go on up to the top of the tower, up to the observation-platform. The quicker we know all the available facts the better. Now, if I only had a telescope—!"

  He thought hard a moment, then turned and strode over to a heap of friable disintegration that lay where once his instrument case had stood, containing his surveying tools.

  Down on his ragged knees he fell; his rotten shreds of clothing tore and ripped at every movement, like so much water-soaked paper.

  A strange, hairy, dust-covered figure, he knelt there. Quickly he plunged his hands into the rubbish and began pawing it over and over with eager haste.

  "Ah!" he cried with triumph. "Thank Heaven, brass and lenses haven't crumbled yet!"

  Up he stood again. In his hand the girl saw a peculiar telescope.

  "My 'level,' see?" he exclaimed, holding it up to view. "The wooden tripod's long since gone. The fixtures that held it on won't bother me much.

  "Neither will the spirit-glass on top. The main thing is that the telescope itself seems to be still intact. Now we'll see."

  Speaking, he dusted off the eye-piece and the objective with a bit of rag from his coat-sleeve.

  Beatrice noted that the brass tubes were all eaten and pitted with verdigris, but they still held firmly. And the lenses, when Stern had finished cleaning them, showed as bright and clear as ever.

  "Come, now; come with me," he bade.

  Out through the doorway into the hall he made his way while the girl followed. As she went she gathered her wondrous veil of hair more closely about her.

  In this universal disorganization, this wreck of all the world, how little the conventions counted!

  Together, picking their way up the broken stairs, where now the rust-bitten steel showed through the corroded stone and cement in a thousand places, they cautiously climbed.

  Here, spider-webs thickly shrouded the way, and had to be brushed down. There, still more bats bung and chippered in protest as the intruders passed.

  A fluffy little white owl blinked at them from a dark niche; and, well toward the top of the climb, they flushed up a score of mud-swallows which had ensconced themselves comfortably along a broken balustrade.

  At last, however, despite all unforeseen incidents of this sort, they reached the upper platform, nearly a thousand feet above the earth.

  Out through the relics of the revolving door they crept, he leading, testing each foot of the way before the girl. They reached the narrow platform of red tiling that surrounded the tower.

  Even here they saw with growing amazement that the hand of time and of this maddening mystery had laid its heavy imprint.

  "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.

  Chapter IV - The City of Death

  *

  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.