“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.
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.
CHAPTER V. EXPLORATION
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 fed 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!