BOOK II: BEYOND THE GREAT OBLIVION
CHAPTER I
BEGINNINGS
A thousand years of darkness and decay! A thousand years of blight, brutality, and atavism; of Nature overwhelming all man’s work, of crumbling cities and of forgotten civilization, of stupefaction, of death! A thousand years of night!
Two human beings, all alone in that vast wilderness—a woman and a man.
The past, irrevocable; the present, fraught with problems, perils, and alarms; the future—what?
A thousand years!
Yet, though this thousand years had seemingly smeared away all semblance of the world of men from the cosmic canvas, Allan Stern and Beatrice Kendrick thrilled with as vital a passion as though that vast, oblivious age lay not between them and the time that was.
And their long kiss, there in sight of their new home-to-be—alone there in that desolated world—was as natural as the summer breeze, the liquid melody of the red-breast on the blossomy apple-bough above their heads, the white and purple spikes of odorous lilacs along the vine-grown stone wall, the gold and purple dawn now breaking over the distant reaches of the river.
Thus were these two betrothed, this sole surviving pair of human beings.
Thus, as the new day burned to living flame up the inverted bowl of sky, this woman and this man pledged each other their love and loyalty and trust.
Thus they stood together, his left arm about her warm, lithe body, clad as she was only in her tiger-skin. Their eyes met and held true, there in the golden glory of the dawn. Unafraid, she read the message in the depths of his, the invitation, the command; and they both foreknew the future.
Beatrice spoke first, flushing a little as she drew toward him.
“Allan,” she said with infinite tenderness, even as a mother might speak to a well-loved son, “Allan, come now and let me dress your wound. That’s the first thing to do. Come, let me see your arm.”
He smiled a little, and with his broad, brown hand stroked back the spun silk of her hair, its mass transfixed by the raw gold pins he had found for her among the ruins of New York.
“No, no!” he objected. “It’s nothing—it’s not worth bothering about. I’ll be all right in a day or two. My flesh heals almost at once, without any care. You don’t realize how healthy I am.”
“I know, dear, but it must hurt you terribly!”
“Hurt? How could I feel any pain with your kiss on my mouth?”
“Come!” she again repeated with insistence, and pointed toward the beach where their banca lay on the sand.
“Come, I’ll dress your wound first. And after I find out just how badly you’re injured—”
He tried to stop her mouth with kisses, but she evaded him.
“No, no!” she cried. “Not now—not now!”
Allan had to cede. And now presently there he knelt on the fine white sand, his bearskin robe opened and flung back, his well-knit shoulder and sinewed arm bare and brown.
“Well, is it fatal?” he jested. “How long do you give me to survive it?” as with her hand and the cold limpid water of the Hudson she started to lave the caked blood away from his gashed triceps.
At sight of the wound she looked grave, but made no comment. She had no bandages; but with the woodland skill she had developed in the past weeks of life in close touch with nature, she bound the cleansed wound with cooling leaves and fastened them securely in place with lashings of leather thongs from the banca.
Presently the task was done. Stern slipped his bearskin back in place. Beatrice, still solicitous, tried to clasp the silver buckle that held it; but he, unable to restrain himself, caught her hand in both of his and crushed it to his lips.
Then he took her perfect face between his palms, and for a long moment studied it. He looked at her waving hair, luxuriant and glinting rich brown gleams in the sunlight; her thick, arched brows and hazel eyes, liquid and full of mystery as woodland pools; her skin, sun-browned and satiny, with abundant tides of life-blood coursing vigorously in its warm flush; her ripe lips. He studied her, and loved and yearned toward her; and in him the passion leaped up like living flames.
His mouth met hers again.
“My beloved!” breathed he.
Her rounded arm, bare to the shoulder, circled his neck; she hid her face in his breast.
“Not yet—not yet!” she whispered.
On the white and pink flowered bough above, the robin, unafraid, gushed into a very madness of golden song. And now the sun, higher risen, had struck the river into a broad sheet of spun metal, over which the swallows—even as in the olden days—darted and spiraled, with now and then a flick and dash of spray.
Far off, wool-white winding-sheets of mist were lifting, lagging along the purple hills, clothed with inviolate forest.
Again the man tried to raise her head, to burn his kisses on her mouth. But she, instilled with the eternal spirit of woman, denied him.
“No, not now—not yet!” she said; and in her eyes he read her meaning. “You must let me go now, Allan. There’s so much to do; we’ve got to be practical, you know.”
“Practical! When I—I love—”
“Yes, I know, dear. But there’s so much to be done first.” Her womanly homemaking instinct would not be gainsaid. “There’s so much work! We’ve got the place to explore, and the house to put in order, and—oh, thousands of things! And we must be very sensible and very wise, you and I, boy. We’re not children, you know. Now that we’ve lost our home in the Metropolitan Tower, everything’s got to be done over again.”
“Except to learn to love you!” answered Stern, letting her go with reluctance.
She laughed back at him over her fur-clad shoulder as her sandaled feet followed the dim remnants of what must once have been a broad driveway from the river road along the beach, leading up to the bungalow.
Through the encroaching forest and the tangle of the degenerate apple-trees they could see the concrete walls, with here or there a bit of white still gleaming through the enlacements of ancient vines that had enveloped the whole structure—woodbine, ivy, wisterias, and the maddest jungle of climbing roses, red and yellow, that ever made a nest for love.
“Wait, I’ll go first and clear the way for you,” he said cheerily. His big bulk crashed down the undergrowth. His hands held back the thorns and briers and the whipping hardbacks. Together they slowly made way toward the house.
The orchard had lost all semblance of regularity, for in the thousand years since the hand of man had pruned or cared for it Mother Nature had planted and replanted it times beyond counting. Small and gnarled and crooked the trees were, as the spine-tree souls in Dante’s dolorosa selva.
Here or there a pine had rooted and grown tall, killing the lesser tribe of green things underneath.
Warm lay the sun there. A pleasant carpet of last year’s leaves and pine-spills covered the earth.
“It’s all ready and waiting for us, all embowered and carpeted for love,” said Allan musingly. “I wonder what old Van Amburg would think of his estate if he could see it now? And what would he say to our having it? You know, Van was pretty ugly to me at one time about my political opinion—but that’s all past and forgotten now. Only this is certainly an odd turn of fate.”
He helped the girl over a fallen log, rotted with moss and lichens. “It’s one awful mess, sure as you’re born. But as quick as my arm gets back into shape, we’ll have order out of chaos before you know it. Some fine day you and I will drive our sixty horse-power car up an asphalt road here, and—”
“A car? Why, what do you mean? There’s not such a thing left in the whole world as a car!”
The engineer tapped his forehead with his finger.
“Oh, yes, there is. I’ve got several models right here. You just wait till you see the workshop I’m going to install on the bank of the river with current-power, and with an electric light plant for the whole place, and with—”
Beatrice laughed.
&n
bsp; “You dear, big, dreaming boy!” she interrupted. Then with a kiss she took his hand.
“Come,” said she. “We’re home now. And there’s work to do.”
CHAPTER II
SETTLING DOWN
Together, in the comradeship of love and trust and mutual understanding, they reached the somewhat open space before the bungalow, where once the road had ended in a stone-paved drive. Allan’s wounded arm, had he but sensed it, was beginning to pain more than a little. But he was oblivious. His love, the fire of spring that burned in his blood, the lure of this great adventuring, banished all consciousness of ill.
Parting a thicket, they reached the steps. And for a while they stood there, hand in hand, silent and thrilled with vast, strange thoughts, dreaming of what must be. In their eyes lay mirrored the future of the human race. The light that glowed in them evoked the glories of the dawn of life again, after ten centuries of black oblivion.
“Our home now!” he told her, very gently, and again he kissed her, but this time on the forehead. “Ours when we shall have reclaimed it and made it ours. See the yellow roses, dear? They symbolize our golden future. The red, red roses? Our passion and our pain!”
The girl made no answer, but tears gathered in her eyes—tears from the deepest wells of the soul. She brought his hand to her lips.
“Ours!” she whispered tremblingly.
They stood there together for a little space, silent and glad. From an oak that shaded the porch a squirrel chippered at them. A sparrow—larger now than the sparrows they remembered in the time that was—peered out at them, wondering but unafraid, from its nest under the eaves; at them, the first humans it had ever seen.
“We’ve got a tenant already, haven’t we?” smiled Allan. “Well, I guess we sha’n’t have to disturb her, unless perhaps for a while, when I cut away this poison ivy here.” He pointed at the glossy triple leaf. “No poisonous thing, whether plant, snake, spider, or insect, is going to stay in this Eden!” he concluded, with a laugh.
Together, with a strange sense of violating the spirit of the past, they went up the concrete steps, untrodden now by human feet for ten centuries.
The massive blocks were still intact for the most part, for old Van Amburg had builded with endless care and with no remotest regard for cost. Here a vine, there a sapling had managed to insinuate a tap-root in some crack made by the frost, but the damage was trifling. Except for the falling of a part of a cornice, the building was complete. But it was hidden in vines and mold. Moss, lichens and weeds grew on the steps, flourishing in the detritus that had accumulated.
Allan dug the toe of his sandal into the loose drift of dead leaves and pine-spills that littered the broad piazza.
“It’ll need more than a vacuum cleaner to put this in shape!” said he. “Well, the sooner we get at it, the better. We’d do well to take a look at the inside.”
The front door, one-time built of oaken planks studded with hand-worked nails and banded with huge wrought-iron hinges, now hung there a mere shell of itself, worm-eaten, crumbling, disintegrated.
With no tools but his naked hands Stern tore and battered it away. A thick, pungent haze of dust arose, yellow in the morning sunlight that presently, for the first time in a thousand years, fell warm and bright across the cob-webbed front hallway, through the aperture.
Room by room Allan and Beatrice explored. The bungalow was practically stripped bare by time.
“Only moth and rust,” sighed the girl. “The same story everywhere we go. But—well, never mind. We’ll soon have it looking homelike. Make me a broom, dear, and I’ll sweep out the worst of it at once.”
Talking now in terms of practical detail, with romance for the hour displaced by harsh reality, they examined the entire house.
Of the once magnificent furnishings, only dust-piles, splinters and punky rubbish remained. Through the rotted plank shutters, that hung drunkenly awry from rust-eaten hinges, long spears of sunlight wanly illuminated the wreck of all that had once been the lavish home of a billionaire.
Rugs, paintings, furniture, bibelots, treasures of all kinds now lay commingled in mournful decay. In what had evidently been the music room, overlooking the grounds to southward, the grand piano now was only a mass of rusted frame, twisted and broken fragments of wire and a considerable heap of wood-detritus, with a couple of corroded pedals buried in the pile.
“And this was the famous hundred-thousand-dollar harp of Sara, his daughter, that the papers used to talk so much about, you remember?” asked the girl, stirring with her foot a few mournful bits of rubbish that lay near the piano.
“Sic transit gloria mundi!” growled Stern, shaking his head. “You and she were the same age, almost. And now—”
Silent and full of strange thoughts they went on into what had been the kitchen. The stove, though heavily bedded in rust, retained its form, for the solid steel had resisted even the fearful lapse of vanished time.
“After I scour that with sand and water,” said Stern, “and polish up these aluminum utensils and reset that broken pane with a piece of glass from up-stairs where it isn’t needed, you won’t know this place. Yes, and I’ll have running water in here, too—and electricity from the power-plant, and—”
“Oh, Allan,” interrupted the girl, delightedly, “this must have been the dining room.” She beckoned from a doorway. “No end of dishes left for us! Isn’t it jolly? This is luxury compared to the way we had to start in the tower!”
In the dining-room a good number of the more solid cut-glass and china pieces had resisted the shock of having fallen, centuries ago, to the floor, when the shelves and cupboards of teak and mahogany had rotted and gone to pieces. Corroded silverware lay scattered all about; and there was gold plate, too, intact save for the patina of extreme age—platters, dishes, beakers. But of the table and the chairs, nothing remained save dust.
Like curious children they poked and pried.
“Dishes enough!” exclaimed she. “Gold, till you can’t rest. But how about something to put on the dishes? We haven’t had a bite since yesterday noon, and I’m about starved. Now that the fighting’s all over, I begin to remember my healthy appetite!”
Stern smiled.
“You’ll have some breakfast, girlie,” promised he. “There’ll be the wherewithal to garnish our 18-k, never fear. Just let’s have a look up-stairs, and then I’ll go after something for the larder.”
They left the down-stairs rooms, silent save for a fly buzzing in a spider’s web, and together ascended the dusty stairs. The railing was entirely gone; but the concrete steps remained.
Stern helped the girl, in spite of the twinge of pain it caused his wounded arm. His heart beat faster—so, too, did hers—as they gained the upper story. The touch of her was, to him, like a lighted match flung into a powder magazine; but he bit his lip, and though his face paled, then flushed, he held his voice steady as he said:
“So then, bats up here? Well, how the deuce do they get in and out? Ah! That broken window, where the elm-branch has knocked out the glass—I see! That’s got to be fixed at once!”
He brushed webs and dust from the remaining panes, and together they peered out over the orchard, out across the river, now a broad sheet of molten gold. His arm went about her; he drew her head against his heart, fast-beating; and silence fell.
“Come, Allan,” said the girl at length, calmer than he. “Let’s see what we’ve got here to do with. Oh, I tell you to begin with,” and she smiled up frankly at him, “I’m a tremendously practical sort of woman. You may be an engineer, and know how to build wireless telegraphs and bridges and—and things; but when it comes to home—building—”
“I admit it. Well, lead on,” he answered; and together they explored the upper rooms. The sense of intimacy now lay strong upon them, of unity and of indissoluble love and comradeship. This was quite another venture than the exploration of the tower, for now they were choosing a home, their home, and in them the mating instinct had
begun to thrill, to burn.
Each room, despite its ruin and decay, took on a special charm, a dignity, the foreshadowing of what must be. Yet intrinsically the place was mournful, even after Stern had let the sunshine in.
For all was dark desolation. The rosewood and mahogany furniture, pictures, rugs, brass beds, all alike lay reduced to dust and ashes. A gold clock, the porcelain fittings of the bath-room, and some fine clay and meerschaum pipes in what had evidently been Van Amburg’s den—these constituted all that had escaped the tooth of time.
In a front room that probably had been Sara’s, a mud-swallow had built its nest in the far corner. It flew out, frightened, when Stern thrust his hand into the aperture to see if the nest were tenanted, fluttered about with scared cries, then vanished up the broad fireplace.
“Eggs—warm!” announced Stern. “Well, this room will have to be shut up and left. We’ve got more than enough, anyhow. Less work for you, dear,” he added, with a smile. “We might use only the lower floor, if you like. I don’t want you killing yourself with housework, you understand.”
She laughed cheerily.
“You make me a broom and get all the dishes and things together,” she answered, “and then leave the rest to me. In a week from now you won’t know this place. Once we clear out a little foothold here we can go back to the tower and fetch up a few loads of tools and supplies—”
“Come on, come on!” he interrupted, taking her by the hand and leading her away. “All such planning will do after breakfast, but I’m starving! How about a five-pound bass on the coals, eh? Come on, let’s go fishing.”
CHAPTER III
THE MASKALONGE
With characteristic resourcefulness Stein soon manufactured adequate tackle with a well-trimmed alder pole, a line of leather thongs and a hook of stout piano wire, properly bent to make a barb and rubbed to a fine point on a stone. He caught a dozen young frogs among the sedges in the marshy stretch at the north end of the landing-beach, and confined them in the only available receptacle, the holster of his automatic.
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