Authors: George England
Realizing to begin with, that a home on the forty-eighth story of the
tower was entirely impractical, since it would mean that most of their
time would have to be used in laborious climbing, they quickly changed
their dwelling.
They chose a suite of offices on the fifth floor, looking directly out
over and into the cool green beauty of Madison Forest. In an hour or
so, they cleared out the bats and spiders, the rubbish and the dust,
and made the place very decently presentable.
"Well, that's a good beginning, anyhow," remarked the engineer,
standing back and looking critically at the finished work.
"I don't see why we shouldn't make a fairly comfortable home out of
this, for a while. It's not too high for ease, and it's high enough
for safety—to keep prowling bears and wolves and—and other things
from exploring us in the night."
He laughed, but memories of the spear-head tinged his merriment with
apprehension. "In a day or two I'll make some kind of an outer door,
or barricade. But first, I need that ax and some other things. Can you
spare me for a while, now?"
"I'd
rather
go along, too," she answered wistfully, from the
window-sill where she sat resting.
"No, not this time, please!" he entreated. "First I've got to go 'way
to the top of the tower and bring down my chemicals and all the other
things up there.
"Then I'm going out on a hunt for dishes, a lamp, some oil and no end
of things. You save your strength for a while; stay here and keep
house and be a good girl!"
"All right," she acceded, smiling a little sadly. "But really, I feel
quite able to go."
"This afternoon, perhaps; not now. Good-by!" And he started for the
door. Then a thought struck him. He turned and came back.
"By the way," said he, "if we can fix up some kind of a holster, I'll
take one of those revolvers. With the best of this leather here,"
nodding at the Gladstone bag, "I should imagine we could manufacture
something serviceable."
They planned the holster together, and he cut it out with his knife,
while she slit leather thongs to lash it with. Presently it was done,
and a strap to tie it round his waist with—a crude, rough thing, but
just as useful as though finished with the utmost skill.
"We'll make another for you when I get home this noon," he remarked
picking up the automatic and a handful of cartridges. Quickly he
filled the magazine. The shells were green with verdigris, and many a
rust-spot disfigured the one-time brightness of the arm.
As he stepped over to the window, aimed and pulled the trigger, a
sharp and welcome report burst from the weapon. And a few leaves,
clipped from an oak in the forest, zigzagged down in the bright, warm
sunlight.
"I guess she'll do all right!" he laughed, sliding the ugly weapon
into his new holster. "You see, the powder and fulminate, sealed up in
the cartridges, are practically imperishable. Here, let me load yours,
too.
"If you want something to do, you can practice on that dead limb out
there, see? And don't be afraid of wasting ammunition. There must be
millions of cartridges in this old burg—millions—all ours!"
Again he laughed, and handing her the other pistol, now fully loaded,
took his leave. Before he had climbed a hundred feet up the tower
stair, he heard a slow, uneven pop—pop—popping, and with
satisfaction knew that Beatrice was already perfecting herself in the
use of the revolver.
"And she may need it, too—we both may, badly—before we know it!"
thought he, frowning, as he kept upon his way.
This reflection weighed in so heavily upon him, all due to the flint
assegai-point, that he made still another excuse that afternoon and so
got out of taking the girl into the forest with him on his exploring
trip.
The excuse was all the more plausible inasmuch as he left her enough
work at home to do, making some real clothing and some sandals for
them both. This task, now that the girl had scissors to use, was not
too hard.
Stern brought her great armfuls of the furs from the shop in the
arcade, and left her busily and happily employed.
He spent the afternoon in scouting through the entire neighborhood
from Sixth Avenue as far east as Third and from Twenty-Seventh Street
down through Union Square.
Revolver in his left hand, knife in his right to cut away troublesome
bush or brambles, or to slit impeding vine-masses, he progressed
slowly and observantly.
He kept his eyes open for big game, but—though he found moose-tracks
at the corner of Broadway and Nineteenth—he ran into nothing more
formidable than a lynx which snarled at him from a tree overhanging
the mournful ruins of the Farragut monument.
One shot sent it bounding and screaming with pain, out of view. Stern
noted with satisfaction that blood followed its trail.
"Guess I haven't forgotten how to shoot in all these
x
years!" he
commented, stooping to examine the spoor. "That may come in handy
later!"
Then, still wary and watchful, he continued his exploration.
He found that the city, as such, had entirely ceased to be.
"Nothing but lines and monstrous rubbish-heaps of ruins," he sized up
the situation, "traversed by lanes of forest and overgrown with every
sort of vegetation.
"Every wooden building completely wiped out. Brick and stone ones
practically gone. Steel alone standing, and
that
in rotten shape.
Nothing at all intact but the few concrete structures.
"Ha! ha!" And he laughed satirically. "If the builders of the
twentieth century could have foreseen this they wouldn't have thrown
quite such a chest, eh? And
they
talked of engineering!"
Useless though it was, he felt a certain pride in noting that the
Osterhaut Building, on Seventeenth Street, had lasted rather better
than the average.
"
My
work!" said he, nodding with grim satisfaction, then passed on.
Into the Subway he penetrated at Eighteenth Street, climbing with
difficulty down the choked stairway, through bushes and over masses of
ruin that had fallen from the roof. The great tube, he saw, was choked
with litter.
Slimy and damp it was, with a mephitic smell and ugly pools of water
settled in the ancient road-bed. The rails were wholly gone in places.
In others only rotten fragments of steel remained.
A goggle-eyed toad stared impudently at him from a long tangle of
rubbish that had been a train—stalled there forever by the final
block-signal of death.
Through the broken arches overhead the rain and storms of ages had
beaten down, and lush grasses flourished here and there, where
sunlight could penetrate.
No human dust-heaps here, as in the shelter of the arcade. Long since
every vestige of man had been swept away. Stern shuddered, more
depressed by the sight here than at any other place so far visited.
"And they boasted of a work for all time!" whispered he, awed by the
horror of it. "They boasted—like the financiers, the churchmen, the
merchants, everybody! Boasted of their institutions, their city, their
country. And
now
—"
Out he clambered presently, terribly depressed by what he had
witnessed, and set to work laying in still more supplies from the
wrecked shops. Now for the first time, his wonder and astonishment
having largely abated, he began to feel the horror of this loneliness.
"No life here! Nobody to speak to—except the girl..." he exclaimed
aloud, the sound of his own voice uncanny in that woodland street of
death. "All gone, everything! My Heavens, suppose I didn't have
her?
How long could I go on alone, and keep my mind?"
The thought terrified him. He put it resolutely away and went to work.
Wherever he stumbled upon anything of value he eagerly seized it.
The labor, he found, kept him from the subconscious dread of what
might happen to Beatrice or to himself if either should meet with any
mishap. The consequences of either one dying, he knew, must be
horrible beyond all thinking for the survivor.
Up Broadway he found much to keep—things which he garnered in the
up-caught hem of his bearskin, things of all kinds and uses. He found
a clay pipe—all the wooden ones had vanished from the shop—and a
glass jar of tobacco.
These he took as priceless treasures. More jars of edibles he
discovered, also a stock of rare wines. Coffee and salt he came upon.
In the ruins of the little French brass-ware shop, opposite the
Flatiron, he made a rich haul of cups and plates and a still
serviceable lamp.
Strangely enough, it still had oil in it. The fluid hermetically
sealed in, had not been able to evaporate.
At last, when the lengthening shadows in Madison Forest warned him
that day was ending, he betook himself, heavy laden, once more back
past the spring, and so through the path which already was beginning
to be visible back to the shelter of the Metropolitan.
"Now for a great surprise for the girl!" thought he, laboriously
toiling up the stair with his burden: "What will she say, I wonder,
when she sees all these housekeeping treasures?" Eagerly he hastened.
But before he had reached the third story he heard a cry from above.
Then a spatter of revolver-shots punctured the air.
He stopped, listening in alarm.
"Beatrice! Oh, Beatrice!" he hailed, his voice falling flat and
stifled in those ruinous passages.
Another shot.
"Answer!" panted Stern. "What's the matter
now?
"
Hastily he put down his burden, and, spurred by a great terror,
bounded up the broken stairs.
Into their little shelter, their home, he ran, calling her name.
No reply came!
Stern stopped short, his face a livid gray.
"Merciful Heaven!" stammered he.
The girl was gone!
Sickened with a numbing anguish of fear such as in all his life
he had never known, Stern stood there a moment, motionless and lost.
Then he turned. Out into the hall he ran, and his voice, re-echoing
wildly, rang through those long-deserted aisles.
All at once he heard a laugh behind him—a hail.
He wheeled about, trembling and spent. Out his arms went, in eager
greeting. For the girl, laughing and flushed, and very beautiful, was
coming down the stair at the end of the hall.
Never had the engineer beheld a sight so wonderful to him as this
woman, clad in the Bengal robe; this girl who smiled and ran to meet
him.
"What? Were you frightened?" she asked, growing suddenly serious, as
he stood there speechless and pale. "Why—what could happen to me
here?"
His only answer was to take her in his arms and whisper her name. But
she struggled to be free.
"Don't! you mustn't!" she exclaimed. "I didn't mean to alarm you.
Didn't even know you were here!"
"I heard the shots—I called—you didn't answer. Then—"
"You found me gone? I didn't hear you. It was nothing, after all.
Nothing—much!"
He led her back into the room.
"What happened? Tell me!"
"It was really too absurd!"
"What was it?"
"Only this," and she laughed again. "I was getting supper ready, as
you see," with a nod at their provision laid out upon the
clean-brushed floor. "When—"
"Yes?"
"Why, a blundering great hawk swooped in through the window there,
circled around, pounced on the last of our beef and tried to fly away
with it."
Stern heaved a sigh of relief. "So that was all?" asked he. "But the
shots? And your absence?"
"I struck at him. He showed fight. I blocked the window. He was
determined to get away with the food. I was determined he
shouldn't
.
So I snatched the revolver and opened fire."
"And then?"
"That confused him. He flapped out into the hall. I chased him. Away
up the stairs he circled. I shot again. Then I pursued. Went up two
stories. But he must have got away through some opening or other. Our
beef's all gone!" And Beatrice looked very sober.
"Never mind, I've got a lot more stuff down-stairs. But tell me, did
you wing him?"
"I'm afraid not," she admitted. "There's a feather or two on the
stairs, though."
"Good work!" cried he laughing, his fear all swallowed in the joy of
having found her again, safe and unhurt. "But please don't give me
another such panic, will you? It's all right this time, however.
"And now if you'll just wait here and not get fighting with any more
wild creatures, I'll go down and bring my latest finds. I like your
pluck," he added slowly, gazing earnestly at her.
"But I don't want you chasing things in this old shell of a building.
No telling what crevice you might fall into or what accident might
happen. Au revoir!"
Her smile as he left her was inscrutable, but her eyes, strangely
bright, followed him till he had vanished once more down the stairs.
Broad strokes, a line here, one there, with much left to the
imagining—such will serve best for the painting of a picture like
this—a picture wherein every ordinary bond of human life, the nexus
of man's society, is shattered. Where everything must strive to
reconstruct itself from the dust. Where the future, if any such there
may be, must rise from the ashes of a crumbling past.
Broad strokes, for detailed ones would fill too vast a canvas.
Impossible to describe a tenth of the activities of Beatrice and Stern
the next four days. Even to make a list of their hard-won possessions
would turn this chapter into a mere catalogue.
So let these pass for the most part. Day by day the man, issuing forth
sometimes alone, sometimes with Beatrice, labored like a Titan among
the ruins of New York.
Though more than ninety per cent. of the city's one-time wealth had
long since vanished, and though all standards of worth had wholly
changed, yet much remained to harvest.