Darkness and Dawn (27 page)

He flung one arm toward the vast night, beyond the panes where the
mist and storm were beating cheerlessly.

"No, we can't camp down here indefinitely. Now's the time to start. As
I say, we've got all of sixty days' of downright civilized food on
hand, for a good cruise in the Adventure. The chance of finding other
people somewhere is too precious not to make any risk worth while."

Silence fell between them for a few minutes. Each saw visions in the
flames. The man's thoughts dwelt, in particular, on this main factor
of a possible rediscovery of other human beings somewhere.

More than the girl, he realized the prime importance of this
possibility. Though he and she loved each other very dearly, though
they were all in all each to the other, yet he comprehended the
loneliness she felt rather than analyzed—the infinite need of man for
man, of woman for woman—the old social, group-instinct of the race
beginning to reassert itself even in their Eden.

Each of them longed, with a longing they hardly realized as yet, to
hear some other human voice, to see another face, clasp another hand
and again feel the comradeship of man.

During the past week or so, Stern had more than once caught himself
listening for some other sound of human life and activity. Once he had
found the girl standing on a wooded point among the pines, shading her
eyes with her hand and watching down-stream with an attitude of hope
which spoke more fluently than words. He had stolen quietly away,
saying nothing, careful not to break her mood. For he had understood
it; it had been his very own.

The mood expressed itself, at times, in long talks together of the
seeming dream-age when there had been so many millions of men and
women in the world. Beatrice and Stern found themselves dwelling with
a peculiar pleasure on memories and descriptions of throngs.

They would read the population statistics in Van's encyclopedia, and
wonder greatly at them, for now these figures seemed the unreal
chimeras of wild imaginings.

They would talk of the crowded streets, the "L" crushes and the jams
at the Bridge entrance; of packed cars and trains and overflowing
theaters; of great concourses they had seen; of every kind and
condition of affairs where thousands of their kind had once rubbed
elbows, all strangers to each other, yet all one vast kin and family
ready in case of need to succor one another, to use the collective
intelligence for the benefit of each.

Sometimes they indulged in fanciful comparisons, trying to make their
present state seem wholly blest.

"This is a pretty fine way to live, after all," Stern said one day,
"even if it is a bit lonesome at times. There's no getting up in the
morning and rushing to an office. It's a perpetual vacation! There are
no appointments to keeps no angry clients kicking because I can't make
water run up-hill or make cast-iron do the work of tool-steel. No
saloons or free-lunches, no subways to stifle the breath out of us, no
bills to pay and no bill collectors to dodge; no laws except the laws
of nature, and such as we make ourselves; no bores and no bad shows;
no politics, no yellow journals, no styles—"

"Oh, dear, how I'd like to see a milliner's window again!" cried
Beatrice, rudely shattering his thin-spun tissue of optimism. "These
skin-clothes, all the time, and no hats, and no chiffons and no—no
nothing, at all—! Oh, I never half appreciated things till they were
all taken away!"

Stern, feeling that he had tapped the wrong vein, discreetly withdrew;
and the sound of his calking-hammer from the beach, told that he was
expending a certain irritation on the hull of the Adventure.

One day he found a relic that seemed to stab him to the heart with a
sudden realization of the tremendous gap between his own life and that
which he had left.

Hunting in the forest, to westward of the bungalow, he came upon what
at first glance seemed a very long, straight, level Indian mound or
earthwork; but in a moment his trained eye told him it was a railway
embankment.

With an almost childish eagerness he hunted for some trace of the
track; and when, buried under earth-mold and rubbish, he found some
rotten splinters of metal, they filled him with mingled pleasure and
depression.

"My God!" he exclaimed, "is it possible that here, right where I
stand, countless thousands of human beings once passed at tremendous
velocity, bent on business and on pleasure, now ages long vanished and
meaningless and void? That mighty engines whirled along this bank,
where now the forest has been crowding for centuries? That all, all
has perished—forever?

"It shall not be!" he cried hotly, and flung his hands out in
passionate denial. "All shall be thus again! All shall return—only
far better! The world's death shall not, cannot be!"

Experiences such as these, leaving both of them increasingly irritated
and depressed as time went on, convinced Stern of the imperative
necessity for exploration. If human beings still existed anywhere in
the world, he and she must find them, even at the risk of losing life
itself. Years of migration, he felt, would not be too high a price to
pay for the reward of coming once again in contact with his own
species. The innate gregariousness of man was torturing them both.

Now that the hour of departure was drawing nigh, a strange exultation
filled them both—the spirit of conquest and of victory.

Together they planned the last details of the trip.

"Is the sail coming along all right, Beta?" asked Stern, the night
when they decided to visit Cambridge. "You expect to have it done in a
day or two?"

"I can finish it to-morrow. It's all woven now. Just as soon as I
finish binding one edge with leather strips, it'll be ready for you."

"All right; then we can get a good, early start, on Monday morning.
Now for the details of the freight."

They worked out everything to its last minutiae. Nothing was
forgotten, from ammunition to the soap which Stern had made out of
moose-fat and wood-ashes and had pressed into cakes; from
fishing-tackle and canned goods to toothbrushes made of stiff
vegetable fibers set in bone; from provisions even to a plentiful
supply of birch-bark leaves for taking notes.

"Monday morning we're off," Stern concluded, "and it will be the
grandest lark two people ever had since time began! Built and stocked
as the Adventure is, she's safe enough for anything from here to
Europe.

"Name the place you want to see, and it's yours. Florida? Bermuda?
Mediterranean? With the compass I've made and adjusted to the new
magnetic variations, and with the maps out of Van's set of books, I
reckon we're good for anything, including a trip around the world.

"The survivors will be surprised to see a fully stocked yawl putting
in to rescue them from savagery, eh? Imagine doing the Captain Cook
stunt, with white people for subjects!"

"Yes, but I'm not counting on their treating us the way Captain Cook
was; are you? And what if we shouldn't find anybody, dear? What then?"

"How can we help finding people? Could a billion and a half human
beings die, all at once, without leaving a single isolated group
somewhere or other?"

"But you never succeeded in reaching them with the wireless from the
Metropolitan, Allan."

"Never mind—they weren't in a condition to pick up my messages;
that's all. We surely must find somebody in all the big cities we can
reach by water, either along He coast or by running up the Mississippi
or along the St. Lawrence and through the lakes. There's Boston, of
course, and Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, St. Louis,
Chicago—dozens of others—no end of places!"

"Oh, if they're only not all like New York!"

"That remains to be seen. There's all of Europe, too, and Africa and
Asia—why, the whole wide world is ours! We're so rich, girl, that it
staggers the imagination—we're the richest people that have ever
lived, you and I. The 'pluses' in the old days owned their millions;
but we own—we own the whole earth!"

"Not if there's anybody else alive, dear."

"That's so. Well, I'll be glad to share it with 'em, for the sake of a
handshake and a 'howdy,' and a chance to start things going again. Do
you know, I rather count on finding a few scattered remnants of folk
in London, or Paris, or Berlin?

"Just the same as in our day, a handful of ragged shepherds descended
from the Mesopotamian peoples extinct save for them—were tending
their sheep at Kunyunjik, on those Babylonian ruins where once a
mighty metropolis stood, and where five million people lived and
moved, trafficked, loved, hated, fought, conquered, died—so now
to-day, perhaps, we may run across a handful of white savages
crouching in caves or rude huts among the debris of the Place de
l'Opera, or Unter den Linden, or—"

"And civilize them, Allan? And bring them back and start a colony and
make the world again? Oh, Allan, do you think we could?" she
exclaimed, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

"My plans include nothing less," he answered. "It's mighty well worth
trying for, at any rate. Monday morning we start, then, little girl."

"Sunday, if you say so."

"Impatient, now?" he laughed. "No, Monday will be time enough. Lots of
things yet to put in shape before we leave. And we'll have to trust
our precious crops to luck, at that. Here's hoping the winter will
bring nothing worse than rain. There's no help for it, whatever
happens. The larger venture calls us."

They sat there discussing many many other factors of the case, for a
long time. The fire burned low, fell together and dwindled to glowing
embers on the hearth.

In the red gloom Allan felt her vague, warm, beautiful presence.
Strong was she; vigorous, rosy as an Amazon, with the spirit and the
beauty of the great outdoors; the life lived as a part of nature's own
self. He realized that never had a woman lived like her.

Dimly he saw her face, so sweet, so gentle in its wistful strength,
shadowed with the hope and dreams of a whole race—the type, the
symbol, of the eternal motherhood.

And from his hair he drew her hand down to his mouth and kissed it;
and with a thrill of sudden tenderness blent with passion he knew all
that she meant to him—this perfect woman, his love, who sometime soon
was now to be his bride.

Pleasant and warm shone the sun that Monday morning, the 2d of
September, warm through the greenery of oak and pine and fern-tree.
Golden it lay upon the brakes and mosses by the river-bank; silver
upon the sands.

Save for the chippering of the busy squirrels, a hush brooded over
nature. The birds were silent. A far blue haze veiled the distant
reaches of the stream. Over the world a vague, premonitory something
had fallen; it was summer still, but the first touch of dissolution,
of decay, had laid the shadow of a pall upon it.

And the two lovers felt their hearts gladden at thought of the long
migration out into the unknown, the migration that might lead them to
southern shores and to perpetual plenty, perhaps to the great boon of
contact once again with humankind.

From room to room they went, making all tight and fast for the long
absence, taking farewell of all the treasures that during their long
weeks of occupancy had accumulated there about them.

Though Stern was no sentimentalist, yet he, too, felt the tears well
in his eyes, even as Beta did, when they locked the door and slowly
went down the broad steps to the walk he had cleared to the river.

"Good-by," said the girl simply, and kissed her hand to the bungalow.
Then he drew his arm about her and together they went on down the
path. Very sweet the thickets of bright blossoms were; very warm and
safe the little garden looked, cut out there from the forest that
stood guard about it on all sides.

They lingered one last moment by the sun-dial he had carved on a flat
boulder, set in a little grassy lawn. The shadow of the gnomon fell
athwart the IX and touched the inscription he had graved about the
edge:

I MARK NO HOURS BUT BRIGHT ONES.

Beatrice pondered.

"We've never had any other kind, together—not one," said she, looking
up quickly at the man as though with a new sort of self-realization.
"Do you know that, dear? In all this time, never one hour, never one
single moment of unhappiness or disagreement. Never a harsh word, an
unkind look or thought. 'No hours but bright ones!' Why, Allan, that's
the motto of our lives!"

"Yes, of our lives," he repeated gravely. "Our lives, forever, as long
as we live. But come, come—time's slipping on. See, the shadow's
moving ahead already. Come, say good-by to everything, dear, until
next spring. Now let's be off and away!"

They went aboard the yawl, which, fully laden, now lay at a little
stone wharf by the edge of the sweet wild wood, its mast overhung by
arching branches of a Gothic elm.

Allan cast off the painter of braided leather, and with his boat-hook
pushed away. He poled out into the current, then raised the sail of
woven rushes like that of a Chinese junk.

The brisk north wind caught it, the sail crackled, filled and bellied
hugely. He hauled it tight. A pleasant ripple began to murmur at the
stern as the yawl gathered speed.

"Boston and way-stations!" cried he. But through his jest a certain
sadness seemed to vibrate. As the wooded point swallowed up their
bungalow and blotted out all sight of their garden in the wilderness,
then as the little wharf vanished, and nothing now remained but
memories, he, too, felt the solemnity of a leave-taking which might
well be eternal.

Beatrice pressed a spray of golden-rod to her lips.

"From our garden," said she. "I'm going to keep it, wherever we go."

"I understand," he answered. "But this is no time, now, for
retrospection. Everything's sunshine, life, hope—we've got a world to
win!"