Darkness and Dawn (5 page)

Each corner, every niche and crevice, breathed out the spirit of the
past and of the mystic tragedy which in so brief a time had wiped the
human race from earth, "as a mother wipes the milky lips of her
child."

And Stern, though he said little save to guide Beatrice and warn her
of unusual difficulties, felt the somber magic of the place. No poet,
he; only a man of hard and practical details. Yet he realized that,
were he dowered with the faculty, here lay matter for an Epic of Death
such as no Homer ever dreamed, no Virgil ever could have penned.

Now and then, along the corridors and down the stairways, they chanced
on curious little piles of dust, scattered at random in fantastic
shapes.

These for a few minutes puzzled Stern, till stooping, he stirred one
with his hand. Something he saw there made him start back with a
stifled exclamation.

"What is it?" cried the girl, startled. "Tell me!"

But he, realizing the nature of his discovery—for he had seen a human
incisor tooth, gold-filled, there in the odd little heap—straightened
up quickly and assumed to smile.

"It's nothing, nothing at all!" he answered. "Come, we haven't got any
time to waste. If we're going to provide ourselves with even a few
necessaries before the alcohol's all gone, we've got to be at work!"

And onward, downward, ever farther and farther, he led her through the
dark maze of ruin, which did not even echo to their barefoot tread.

Like disheveled wraiths they passed, soundlessly, through eerie
labyrinths and ways which might have served as types of Coleridge's
"caverns measureless to man," so utterly drear they stretched out in
their ghostly desolation.

At length, after an eternal time of weariness and labor, they managed
to make their way down into the ruins of the once famous and beautiful
arcade which had formerly run from Madison Avenue to the square.

"Oh, how horrible!" gasped Beatrice, shrinking, as they clambered down
the stairs and emerged into this scene of chaos, darkness, death.

Where long ago the arcade had stretched its path of light and life and
beauty, of wealth and splendor, like an epitome of civilization all
gathered in that constricted space, the little light disclosed stark
horror.

Feeble as a will-o'-the-wisp in that enshrouding dark, the torch
showed only hints of things—here a fallen pillar, there a shattered
mass of wreckage where a huge section of the ceiling had fallen,
yonder a gaping aperture left by the disintegration of a wall.

Through all this rubbish and confusion, over and through a score of
the little dust-piles which Stern had so carefully avoided explaining
to Beatrice, they climbed and waded, and with infinite pains slowly
advanced.

"What we need is more light!" exclaimed the engineer presently. "We've
got to have a bonfire here!"

And before long he had collected a considerable pile of wood, ripped
from the door-ways and window-casings of the arcade. This he set fire
to, in the middle of the floor.

Soon a dull, wavering glow began to paint itself upon the walls, and
to fling the comrades' shadows, huge and weird, in dancing mockery
across the desolation.

Strangely enough, many of the large plate-glass windows lining the
arcade still stood intact. They glittered with the uncanny reflections
of the fire as the man and woman slowly made way down the passage.

"See," exclaimed Stern, pointing. "See all these ruined shops?
Probably almost everything is worthless. But there must be some things
left that we can use.

"See the post-office, down there on the left? Think of the millions in
real money, gold and silver, in all these safes here and all over the
city—in the banks and vaults! Millions! Billions!

"Jewels, diamonds, wealth simply inconceivable! Yet now a good water
supply, some bread, meat, coffee, salt, and so on, a couple of beds, a
gun or two and some ordinary tools would outweigh them all!"

"Clothes, too," the girl suggested. "Plain cotton cloth is worth ten
million dollars an inch now."

"Right," answered Stern, gazing about him with wonder.

"And I offer a bushel of diamonds for a razor and a pair of scissors."
Grimly he smiled as he stroked his enormous beard.

"But come, this won't do. There'll be plenty of time to look around
and discuss things in the morning. Just now we've got a definite
errand. Let's get busy!"

Thus began their search for a few prime necessities of life, there in
that charnel-house of civilization, by the dull reflections of the
firelight and the pallid torch glow.

Though they forced their way into ten or twelve of the arcade shops,
they found no clothing, no blankets or fabric of any kind that would
serve for coverings or to sleep upon. Everything at all in the nature
of cloth had either sunk back into moldering annihilation or had at
best grown far too fragile to be of the slightest service.

They found, however, a furrier's shop, and this they entered eagerly.

From rusted metal hooks a few warped fragments of skins still hung,
moth-eaten, riddled with holes, ready to crumble at the merest touch.

"There's nothing in any of these to help us," judged Stern. "But maybe
we might find something else in here."

Carefully they searched the littered place, all dust and horrible
disarray, which made sad mockery of the gold-leaf sign still visible
on the window: "Lange, Importer. All the Latest Novelties."

On the floor Stern discovered three more of those little dust-middens
which meant human bodies, pitiful remnants of an extinct race, of
unknown people in the long ago. What had he now in common with them?
The remains did not even inspire repugnance in him. All at once
Beatrice uttered a cry of startled gladness. "Look here! A storage
chest!"

True enough, there stood a cedar box, all seamed and cracked and
bulging, yet still retaining a semblance of its original shape.

The copper bindings and the lock were still quite plainly to be seen,
as the engineer held the torch close, though green and corroded with
incredible age.

One effort of Stern's powerful arms sufficed to tip the chest quite
over. As it fell it burst. Down in a mass of pulverized, worm-eaten
splinters it disintegrated.

Out rolled furs, many and many of them, black, and yellow, and
striped—the pelts of the grizzly, of the leopard, the chetah, the
royal Bengal himself.

"Hurray!" shouted the man, catching up first one, then another, and
still a third. "Almost intact. A little imperfection here and there
doesn't matter. Now we've got clothes and beds.

"What's that? Yes, maybe they are a trifle warm for this season of the
year, but this is no time to be particular. See, now, how do you like
that?
"

Over the girl's shoulders, as he spoke, he flung the tiger-skin.

"Magnificent!" he judged, standing back a pace or two and holding up
the torch to see her better. "When I find you a big gold pin or clasp
to fasten that with at the throat you'll make a picture of another and
more splendid Boadicea!"

He tried to laugh at his own words, but merriment sat ill there in
that place, and with such a subject. For the woman, thus clad, had
suddenly assumed a wild, barbaric beauty.

Bright gleamed her gray eyes by the light of the flambeau; limpid, and
deep, and earnest, they looked at Stern. Her wonderful hair, shaken
out in bewildering masses over the striped, tawny savagery of the
robe, made colorful contrasts, barbarous, seductive.

Half hidden, the woman's perfect body, beautiful as that of a
wood-nymph or a pagan dryad, roused atavistic passions in the
engineer.

He dared speak no other word for the moment, but bent beside the
shattered chest again and fell to looking over the furs.

A polar-bear skin attracted his attention, and this he chose. Then,
with it slung across his shoulder, he stood up.

"Come," said he, steadying his voice with an effort; "come, we must be
going now. Our light won't hold out very much longer. We've got to
find food and drink before the alcohol's all gone; got to look out for
practical affairs, whatever happens. Let's be going."

Fortune favored them.

In the wreck of a small fancy grocer's booth down toward the end of
the arcade, where the post-office had been, they came upon a stock of
goods in glass jars.

All the tinned foods had long since perished, but the impermeable
glass seemed to have preserved fruits and vegetables of the finer
sort, and chipped beef and the like, in a state of perfect soundness.

Best of all, they discovered the remains of a case of mineral water.
The case had crumbled to dust, but fourteen bottles of water were
still intact.

"Pile three or four of these into my fur robe here," directed Stern.
"Now, a few of the other jars—that's right. To-morrow we'll come down
and clean up the whole stock. But we've got enough for now."

"We'd best be getting back up the stairs again," said he. And so they
started.

"Are you going to leave that fire burning?" asked the girl, as they
passed the middle of the arcade.

"Yes. It can't do any harm. Nothing to catch here; only old metal and
cement. Besides, it would take too much time and labor to put it out."

Thus they abandoned the gruesome place and began the long, exhausting
climb.

It must have taken them an hour and a half at least to reach their
eerie. Both found their strength taxed to the utmost.

Before they were much more than halfway up, the ultimate drop of
alcohol had been burned.

The last few hundred feet had to be made by slow, laborious feeling,
aided only by such dim reflections of the gibbous moon as glimmered
through a window, cobweb-hung, or through some break in the walls.

At length, however—for all things have an end—breathless and spent,
they found their refuge. And soon after that, clad in their savage
robes, they supped.

Allan Stern, consulting engineer, and Beatrice Kendrick, stenographer,
now king and queen of the whole wide world domain (as they feared),
sat together by a little blaze of punky wood fragments that flickered
on the eroded floor.

They ate with their fingers and drank out of the bottles,
sans
apology. Strange were their speculations, their wonderings, their
plans—now discussed specifically, now half-voiced by a mere word that
thrilled them both with sudden, poignant emotion.

An so an hour passed, and the night deepened toward the birth of
another day. The fire burned low and died, for they had little to
replenish it with.

Down sank the moon, her pale light dimming as she went, her faint
illumination wanly creeping across the disordered, wrack-strewn floor.

And at length Stern, in the outer office, Beatrice in the other, they
wrapped themselves within their furs and laid them down to sleep.

Despite the age-long trance from which they both had but so recently
emerged, a strange lassitude weighed on them.

Yet long after Beatrice had lost herself in dreams, Stern lay and
thought strange thoughts, yearning and eager thoughts, there in the
impenetrable gloom.

Before daybreak the engineer was up again, and active. Now that
he faced the light of morning, with a thousand difficult problems
closing in on every hand, he put aside his softer moods, his visions
and desires, and—like the scientific man he was—addressed himself to
the urgent matters in hand.

"The girl's safe enough alone, here, for a while," thought he, looking
in upon her where she lay, calm as a child, folded within the clinging
masses of the tiger-skin.

"I must be out and away for two or three hours, at the very least. I
hope she'll sleep till I get back. If not—what then?"

He thought a moment; then, coming over to the charred remnants of last
night's fire, chose a bit of burnt wood. With this he scrawled in
large, rough letters on a fairly smooth stretch of the wall:

"Back soon. All O. K. Don't worry."

Then, turning, he set out on the long, painful descent again to the
earth-level.

Garish now, and doubly terrible, since seen with more than double
clearness by the graying dawn, the world-ruin seemed to him.

Strong of body and of nerve as he was, he could not help but shudder
at the numberless traces of sudden and pitiless death which met his
gaze.

Everywhere lay those dust-heaps, with here or there a tooth, a ring, a
bit of jewelry showing—everywhere he saw them, all the way down the
stairs, in every room and office he peered into, and in the
time-ravished confusion of the arcade.

But this was scarcely the time for reflections of any sort. Life
called, and labor, and duty; not mourning for the dead world, nor even
wonder or pity at the tragedy which had so mysteriously—befallen.

And as the man made his way over and through the universal wreckage,
he took counsel with himself.

"First of all, water!" thought he. "We can't depend on the bottled
supply. Of course, there's the Hudson; but it's brackish, if not
downright salt. I've got to find some fresh and pure supply, close at
hand. That's the prime necessity of life.

"What with the canned stuff, and such game as I can kill, there's
bound to be food enough for a while. But a good water-supply we must
have, and at once!"

Yet, prudent rather for the sake of Beatrice than for his own, he
decided that he ought not to issue out, unarmed, into this new and
savage world, of which he had as yet no very definite knowledge. And
for a while he searched hoping to find some weapon or other.

"I've got to have an ax, first of all," said he. "That's mans first
need, in any wilderness. Where shall I find one?"

He thought a moment.

"Ah! In the basements!" exclaimed he. "Maybe I can locate an
engine-room, a store-room, or something of that sort. There's sure to
be tools in a place like that." And, laying off the bear-skin, he
prepared to explore the regions under the ground-level.