Authors: George England
They heard their own hearts beat. The intake of their breath sounded
strangely loud. Above them, on a broken cornice, some resting swallows
twittered.
All at once the girl spoke.
"See the Flatiron Building over there!" said she. "What a hideous
wreck!"
From Stern she took the telescope, adjusted it, and gazed minutely at
the shattered pile of stone and metal.
Blotched as with leprosy stood the walls, whence many hundreds of
blocks had fallen into Broadway forming a vast moraine that for some
distance choked that thoroughfare.
In numberless places the steel frame peered through. The whole roof
had caved in, crushing down the upper stories, of which only a few
sparse upstanding metal beams remained.
The girl's gaze was directed at a certain spot which she knew well.
"Oh, I can even see—into some of the offices on the eighteenth
floor!" cried she. "There,
look?
" And she pointed. "That one near
the front! I—I used to know—"
She broke short off. In her trembling hands the telescope sank. Stern
saw that she was very pale.
"Take me down!" she whispered. "I can't stand it any longer—I can't,
possibly! The sight of that wrecked office! Let's go down where I
can't see
that!
"
Gently, as though she had been a frightened child, Stern led her round
the platform to the doorway, then down the crumbling stairs and so to
the wreckage and dust-strewn confusion of what had been his office.
And there, his hand upon her shoulder, he bade her still be of good
courage.
"Listen now, Beatrice," said he. "Let's try to reason this thing out
together, let's try to solve this problem like two intelligent human
beings.
"Just what's happened, we don't know; we can't know yet a while, till
I investigate. We don't even know what year this is.
"Don't know whether anybody else is still alive, anywhere in the
world. But we can find out—after we've made provision for the
immediate present and formed some rational plan of life.
"If all the rest
are
gone, swept away, wiped out clean like figures
on a slate, then why
we
should have happened to survive whatever it
was that struck the earth, is still a riddle far beyond our
comprehension."
He raised her face to his, noble despite all its grotesque
disfigurements; he looked into her eyes as though to read the very
soul of her, to judge whether she could share this fight, could brave
this coming struggle.
"All these things may yet be answered. Once I get the proper data for
this series of phenomena, I can find the solution, never fear!
"Some vast world-duty may be ours, far greater, infinitely more vital
than anything that either of us has ever dreamed. It's not our place,
now, to mourn or fear! Rather it is to read this mystery, to meet it
and to conquer!"
Through her tears the girl smiled up at him, trustingly, confidingly.
And in the last declining rays of the sun that glinted through the
window-pane, her eyes were very beautiful.
Came now the evening, as they sat and talked together, talked
long and earnestly, there within that ruined place. Too eager for some
knowledge of the truth, they, to feel hunger or to think of their lack
of clothing.
Chairs they had none, nor even so much as a broom to clean the floor
with. But Stern, first-off, had wrenched a marble slab from the
stairway.
And with this plank of stone still strong enough to serve, he had
scraped all one corner of the office floor free of rubbish. This gave
them a preliminary camping-place wherein to take their bearings and
discuss what must be done.
"So then," the engineer was saying as the dusk grew deeper, "so then,
we'll apparently have to make this building our headquarters for a
while.
"As nearly as I can figure, this is about what must have happened.
Some sudden, deadly, numbing plague or cataclysm must have struck the
earth, long, long ago.
"It may have been an almost instantaneous onset of some new and highly
fatal micro-organism, propagating with such marvelous rapidity that it
swept the world clean in a day—doing its work before any resistance
could be organized or thought of.
"Again, some poisonous gas may have developed, either from a fissure
in the earth's crust, or otherwise. Other hypotheses are possible, but
of what practical value are they now?
"We only know that here, in this uppermost office of the Tower, you
and I have somehow escaped with only a long period of completely
suspended animation. How long? God alone knows! That's a query I can't
even guess the answer to as yet."
"Well, to judge by all the changes," Beatrice suggested thoughtfully,
"it can't have been less than a hundred years. Great Heavens!" and she
burst into a little satiric laugh. "Am
I
a hundred and twenty-four
years old? Think of that!"
"You underestimate," Stern answered. "But no matter about the time
question for the present; we can't solve it now.
"Neither can we solve the other problem about Europe and Asia and all
the rest of the world. Whether London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and every
other city, every other land, all have shared this fate, we simply
don't know.
"All we
can
have is a feeling of strong probability that life, human
life I mean, is everywhere extinct—save right here in this room!
"Otherwise, don't you see, men would have made their way back here
again, back to New York, where all these incalculable treasures seem
to have perished, and—"
He broke short off. Again, far off, they heard a faint re-echoing roar.
For a moment they both sat speechless. What could it be? Some distant
wall toppling down? A hungry beast scenting its prey? They could not
tell. But Stern smiled.
"I guess," said he, "guns will be about the first thing I'll look for,
after food. There ought to be good hunting down in the jungles of
Fifth Avenue and Broadway!
"You shoot, of course? No? Well, I'll soon teach you. Lots of things
both of us have got to learn now. No end of them!"
He rose from his place on the floor, went over to the window and stood
for a minute peering out into the gloom. Then suddenly he turned.
"What's the matter with me, anyhow?" he exclaimed with irritation.
"What right have I to be staying here, theorizing, when there's work
to do? I ought to be busy this very minute!
"In some way or other I've got to find food, clothing, tools, arms—a
thousand things. And above all, water! And here I've been speculating
about the past, fool that I am!"
"You—you aren't going to leave me—not to-night?" faltered the girl.
Stern seemed not to have heard her, so strong the imperative of action
lay upon him now. He began to pace the floor, sliding and stumbling
through the rubbish, a singular figure in his tatters and with his
patriarchal hair and beard, a figure dimly seen by the faint light
that still gloomed through the window:
"In all that wreckage down below," said he, as though half to himself,
"in all that vast congeries of ruin which once was called New York,
surely enough must still remain intact for our small needs. Enough
till we can reach the land, the country, and raise food of our own!"
"Don't go
now!
" pleaded Beatrice. She, too, stood up, and out she
stretched her hands to him. "Don't, please! We can get along some way
or other till morning. At least,
I
can!"
"No, no, it isn't right! Down in the shops and stores, who knows but
we might find—"
"But you're unarmed! And in the streets—in the forest, rather—"
"Listen!" he commanded rather abruptly. "This is no time for
hesitating or for weakness. I know you'll stand your share of all that
we must suffer, dare and do together.
"Some way or other I've got to make you comfortable. I've got to
locate food and drink immediately. Got to get my bearings. Why, do you
think I'm going to let you, even for one night, go fasting and
thirsty, sleep on bare cement, and all that sort of thing?
"If so, you're mistaken! No, you must spare me for an hour or two.
Inside of that time I ought to make a beginning!"
"A whole hour?"
"Two would probably be nearer it. I promise to be back inside of that
time."
"But," and her voice quivered just a trifle, "but suppose some wolf or
bear—"
"Oh, I'm not quite so foolhardy as all that!" he retorted. "I'm not
going to venture outside till to-morrow. My idea is that I can find at
least a few essentials right here in this building.
"It's a city in itself—or was. Offices, stores, shops, everything
right here together in a lump. It can't possibly take me very long to
go down and rummage out something for your comfort.
"Now that the first shock and surprise of our awakening are over, we
can't go on in this way, you know—h'm!—dressed in—well, such
exceedingly primitive garb!"
Silently she looked at his dim figure in the dusk. Then she stretched
out her hand.
"I'll go too," said she quite simply.
"You'd better stay. It's safer here."
"No, I'm going."
"But if we run into dangers?"
"Never mind. Take me with you."
Over to her he came. He took her hand. In silence he pressed it. Thus
for a moment they stood. Then, arousing himself to action, he said:
"First of all, a light."
"A light? How can you make a light? Why, there isn't a match left
anywhere in this whole world."
"I know, but there are other things. Probably my chemical flasks and
vials aren't injured. Glass is practically imperishable. And if I'm
not mistaken, the bottles must be lying somewhere in that rubbish heap
over by the window."
He left her wondering, and knelt among the litter. For a while he
silently delved through the triturated bits of punky wood and rust-red
metal that now represented the remains of his chemical cabinet.
All at once he exclaimed: "Here's one! And here's another! This
certainly
is
luck! H-m! I shouldn't wonder if I got almost all of
them back."
One by one he found a score of thick, ground-glass vials. Some were
broken, probably by the shock when they and the cabinet had fallen,
but a good many still remained intact.
Among these were the two essential ones. By the last dim ghost of
light through the window, and by the sense of touch, Stern was able to
make out the engraved symbols "P" and "S" on these bottles.
"Phosphorus and sulphur," he commented. "Well, what more could I
reasonably ask? Here's alcohol, too, hermetically sealed. Not too bad,
eh?"
While the girl watched, with wondering admiration, Stern thought hard
a moment. Then he set to work.
First he took a piece of the corroded metal framework of the cabinet,
a steel strip about eighteen inches long, frail in places, but still
sufficiently strong to serve his purpose.
Tearing off some rags from his coat-sleeve, he wadded them together
into a ball as big as his fist. Around this ball he twisted the metal
strip, so that it formed at once a holder and a handle for the
rag-mass.
With considerable difficulty he worked the glass stopper out of the
alcohol bottle, and with the fluid saturated the rags. Then, on a
clear bit of the floor, he spilled out a small quantity of the
phosphorus and sulphur.
"This beats getting fire by friction all hollow," he cheerfully
remarked. "I've tried that, too, and I guess it's only in books a
white man ever succeeds at it. But this way you see, it's simplicity
itself."
Very moderate friction, with a bit of wood from the wreckage of the
door, sufficed to set the phosphorus ablaze. Stern heaped on a few
tiny lumps of sulphur. Then, coughing as the acrid fumes arose from
the sputter of blue flame, he applied the alcohol-soaked torch.
Instantly a puff of fire shot up, colorless and clear, throwing no
very satisfactory light, yet capable of dispelling the thickest of the
gloom.
The blaze showed Stern's eager face, long-bearded and dusty, as he
bent over this crucial experiment.
The girl, watching closely, felt a strange new thrill of confidence
and solace. Some realization of the engineer's resourcefulness came to
her, and in her heart she had confidence that, though the whole wide
world had crumbled into ruin, yet
he
would find a way to smooth her
path, to be a strength and refuge for her.
But Stern had no time for any but matters of intensest practicality.
From the floor he arose, holding the flambeau in one hand, the bottle
of alcohol in the other.
"Come now," bade he, and raised the torch on high to light her way,
"You're still determined to go?"
For an answer she nodded. Her eyes gleamed by the uncanny light.
And so, together, he leading out of the room and along the wrecked
hall, they started on their trip of exploration out into the unknown.
Never before had either of them realized just what the meaning
of forty-eight stories might be. For all their memories of this height
were associated with smooth-sliding elevators that had whisked them up
as though the tremendous height had been the merest trifle.
This night, however, what with the broken stairs, the debris-cumbered
hallways, the lurking darkness which the torch could hardly hold back
from swallowing them, they came to a clear understanding of the
problem.
Every few minutes the flame burned low and Stern had to drop on more
alcohol, holding the bottle high above the flame to avoid explosion.
Long before they had compassed the distance to the ground floor the
girl lagged with weariness and shrank with nameless fears.
Each black doorway that yawned along their path seemed ominous with
memories of life that had perished there, of death that now reigned
all-supreme.