“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.
