He did not glimpse the glory in her eyes, but stood looking outward toward the sea and sending rocket after rocket into the unanswering darkness. Dark-purple clouds lay banked and billowed in the west. Behind them and all around, the heavens glowed in dim, weird radiance that suffused the darkening world and made almost a minor music. Suddenly, as though gathered back in some vast hand, the great cloud-curtain fell away. Low on the horizon lay a long, white star—mystic, wonderful! And from it fled upward to the pole, like some wan bridal veil, a pale, wide sheet of flame that lighted all the world and dimmed the stars.
In fascinated silence the man gazed at the heavens and dropped his rockets to the floor. Memories of memories stirred to life in the dead recesses of his mind. The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his soul. Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leaped the lone majesty of kings long dead. He arose within the shadows, tall, straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly scepters hovering to his grasp. It was as though some mighty Pharaoh lived again, or curled Assyrian lord. He turned and looked upon the lady, and found her gazing straight at him.
Silently, immovably, they saw each other face to face—eye to eye. Their souls lay naked to the night. It was not lust; it was not love—it was some vaster, mightier thing that needed neither touch of body nor thrill of soul. It was a thought divine, splendid.
Slowly, noiselessly, they moved toward each other—the heavens above, the seas around, the city grim and dead below. He loomed from out the velvet shadows vast and dark. Pearl-white and slender, she shone beneath the stars. She stretched her jeweled hands abroad. He lifted up his mighty arms, and they cried each to the other, almost with one voice, “The world is dead.”
“Long live the—”
“Honk! Honk!” Hoarse and sharp the cry of a motor drifted clearly up from the silence below. They started backward with a cry and gazed upon each other with eyes that faltered and fell, with blood that boiled.
“Honk! Honk! Honk! Honk!” came the mad cry again, and almost from their feet a rocket blazed into the air and scattered its stars upon them. She covered her eyes with her hands, and her shoulders heaved. He dropped and bowed, groped blindly on his knees about the floor. A blue flame spluttered lazily after an age, and she heard the scream of an answering rocket as it flew.
Then they stood still as death, looking to opposite ends of the earth.
“Clang—crash—clang!”
The roar and ring of swift elevators shooting upward from below made the great tower tremble. A murmur and babel of voices swept in upon the night. All over the once dead city the lights blinked, flickered, and flamed; and then with a sudden clanging of doors the entrance to the platform was filled with men, and one with white and flying hair rushed to the girl and lifted her to his breast. “My daughter!” he sobbed.
Behind him hurried a younger, comelier man, carefully clad in motor costume, who bent above the girl with passionate solicitude and gazed into her staring eyes until they narrowed and dropped and her face flushed deeper and deeper crimson.
“Julia,” he whispered; “my darling, I thought you were gone forever.”
She looked up at him with strange, searching eyes.
“Fred,” she murmured, almost vaguely, “is the world—gone?”
“Only New York,” he answered; “it is terrible—awful! You know—but you, how did you escape—how have you endured this horror? Are you well? Unharmed?”
“Unharmed!” she said.
“And this man here?” he asked, encircling her drooping form with one arm and turning toward the Negro. Suddenly he stiffened and his hand flew to his hip. “Why!” he snarled. “It’s—a—nigger—Julia! Has he—has he dared—”
She lifted her head and looked at her late companion curiously and then dropped her eyes with a sigh.
“He has dared—all, to rescue me,” she said quietly, “and I—thank him—much.” But she did not look at him again. As the couple turned away, the father drew a roll of bills from his pockets.
“Here, my good fellow,” he said, thrusting the money into the man’s hands, “take that—what’s your name?”
“Jim Davis,” came the answer, hollow-voiced.
“Well, Jim, I thank you. I’ve always liked your people. If you ever want a job, call on me.” And they were gone.
The crowd poured up and out of the elevators, talking and whispering.
“Who was it?”
“Are they alive?”
“How many?”
“Two!”
“Who was saved?”
“A white girl and a nigger—there she goes.”
“A nigger? Where is he? Let’s lynch the damned—”
“Shut up—he’s all right-he saved her.”
“Saved hell! He had no business—”
“Here he comes.”
Into the glare of the electric lights the colored man moved slowly, with the eyes of those that walk and sleep.
“Well, what do you think of that?” cried a bystander; “of all New York, just a white girl and a nigger!”
The colored man heard nothing. He stood silently beneath the glare of the light, gazing at the money in his hand and shrinking as he gazed; slowly he put his other hand into his pocket and brought out a baby’s filmy cap, and gazed again. A woman mounted to the platform and looked about, shading her eyes. She was brown, small, and toil-worn, and in one arm lay the corpse of a dark baby. The crowd parted and her eyes fell on the colored man; with a cry she tottered toward him.
“Jim!”
He whirled and, with a sob of joy, caught her in his arms.
A Hymn to the Peoples
O Truce of God!
And primal meeting of the Sons of Man,
Foreshadowing the union of the World!
From all the ends of earth we come!
Old Night, the elder sister of the Day,
Mother of Dawn in the golden East,
Meets in the misty twilight with her brood,
Pale and black, tawny, red and brown,
The mighty human rainbow of the world,
Spanning its wilderness
