CHAPTER XII
DRAWING TOGETHER
Days passed, busy days, full of hard labor and achievement,rich in experience and learning, in happiness, in dreams of what thefuture might yet bring.
Beatrice made and finished a considerable wardrobe of garments forthem both. These, when the fur had been clipped close with thescissors, were not oppressively warm, and, even though on some days abit uncomfortable, the man and woman tolerated them because they hadno others.
Plenty of bathing and good food put them in splendid physicalcondition, to which their active exercise contributed much. And thus,judging partly by the state of the foliage, partly by the height ofthe sun, which Stern determined with considerable accuracy by means ofa simple, home-made quadrant--they knew mid-May was past and June wasdrawing near.
The housekeeping by no means took up all the girl's time. Often shewent out with him on what he called his "pirating expeditions," thatnow sometimes led them as far afield as the sad ruins of the wharvesand piers, or to the stark desolation and wreckage of lower Broadwayand the onetime busy hives of newspaperdom, or up to Central Park orto the great remains of the two railroad terminals.
These two places, the former tide-gates of the city's life, impressedStern most painfully of anything. The disintegrated tracks, thejumbled remains of locomotives and luxurious Pullmans with weedsgrowing rank upon them, the sunlight beating down through the caved-inroof of the Pennsylvania station "concourse," where millions of humanbeings once had trod in all the haste of men's paltry, futile affairs,filled him with melancholy, and he was glad to get away again leavingthe place to the jungle, the birds and beasts that now laid claim toit.
"Sic transit gloria mundi!" he murmured, as with sad eyes he musedupon the down-tumbled columns along the facade, the overgrownentrance-way, the cracked and falling arches and architraves. "And_this_, they said, was builded for all time!"
It was on one of these expeditions that the engineer found andpocketed--unknown to Beatrice--another disconcerting relic.
This was a bone, broken and splintered, and of no very great age,gnawed with perfectly visible tooth-marks. He picked it up, by chance,near the west side of the ruins of the old City Hall.
Stern recognized the manner in which the bone had been cracked openwith a stone to let the marrow be sucked out. The sight of thisgruesome relic revived all his fears, tenfold more acutely than ever,and filled him with a sense of vague, impending evil, of peril deadlyto them both.
This was the more keen, because the engineer knew at a glance that thebone was the upper end of a human femur--human, or, at the very least,belonging to some highly anthropoid animal. And of apes or gorillas hehad, as yet, found no trace in the forests of Manhattan.
Long he mused over his find. But not a single word did he ever say toBeatrice concerning it or the flint spear-point. Only he kept his eyesand ears well open for other bits of corroborative evidence.
And he never ventured a foot from the building unless his rifle andrevolver were with him, their magazines full of high-power shells.
The girl always went armed, too, and soon grew to be such an expertshot that she could drop a squirrel from the tip of a fir, or wing aheron in full flight.
Once her quick eyes spied a deer in the tangles of the one-timeGramercy Park, now no longer neatly hedged with iron palings, butspread in wild confusion that joined the riot of growth beyond.
On the instant she fired, wounding the creature.
Stern's shot, echoing hers, missed. Already the deer was away, out ofrange through the forest. With some difficulty they pursued down aglen-like strip of woods that must have once been Irving Place.
Two hundred yards south of the park they sighted the animal again. Andthe girl with a single shot sent it crashing to earth.
"Bravo, Diana!" hurrahed Stern, running forward with enthusiasm. The"deer fever" was on him, as strong as in his old days in the HudsonBay country. Hot was the pleasure of the kill when that meant food. Ashe ran he jerked his knife from the skin sheath the girl had made forhim.
Thus they had fresh venison to their heart's content--venison broiledover white-hot coals in the fireplace, juicy and savory--sweet beyondall telling.
A good deal of the meat they smoked and salted down for future use.Stern undertook to tan the hide with strips of hemlock bark laid in awater pit dug near the spring. He added also some oak-bark, nut-gallsand a good quantity of young sumac shoots.
"I guess _that_ ought to hit the mark if anything will," remarked he,as he immersed the skin and weighed it down with rocks.
"It's like the old 'shotgun' prescriptions of our extinct doctors--alittle of everything, bound to do the trick, one way or another."
The great variety of labors now imposed upon him began to try hisingenuity to the full. In spite of all his wealth of practicalknowledge and his scientific skill, he was astounded at the hugedemands of even the simplest human life.
The girl and he now faced these, without the social cooperation whichthey had formerly taken entirely for granted, and the change ofconditions had begun to alter Stern's concepts of almost everything.
He was already beginning to realize how true the old saying was: "Oneman is no man!" and how the world had _been_ the world merely becauseof the interrelations, the interdependencies of human beings in vastnumbers.
He was commencing to get a glimpse of the vanished social problemsthat had enmeshed civilization, in their true light, now that all heconfronted and had to struggle with was the unintelligent andoverbearing dominance of nature.
All this was of huge value to the engineer. And the strongindividualism (essentially anarchistic) on which he had prided himselfa thousand years ago, was now beginning to receive some mortal blows,even during these first days of the new, solitary, unsocialized life.
But neither he nor the girl had very much time for introspectivethought. Each moment brought its immediate task, and every day seemedbusier than the last had been.
At meals, however, or at evening, as they sat together by the light oftheir lamp in the now homelike offices, Stern and Beatrice foundpleasure in a little random speculation. Often they discussed thecatastrophe and their own escape.
Stern brought to mind some of Professor Raoul Pictet's experimentswith animals, in which the Frenchman had suspended animation for longperiods by sudden freezing. This method seemed to answer, in a way,the girl's earlier questions as to how they had escaped death in themany long winters since they had gone to sleep.
Again, they tried to imagine the scenes just following thecatastrophe, the horror of that long-past day, and the slow,irrevocable decay of all the monuments of the human race.
Often they talked till past midnight, by the glow of their stonefireplace, and many were the aspects of the case that they developed.These hours seemed to Stern the happiest of his life.
For the rapprochement between this beautiful woman and himself atsuch times became very close and fascinatingly intimate, and Sternfelt, little by little, that the love which now was growing deepwithin his heart for her was not without its answer in her own.
But for the present the man restrained himself and spoke no overtword. For that, he understood, would immediately have put all thingson a different basis--and there was urgent work still waiting to bedone.
"There's no doubt in my mind," said he one day as they sat talking,"that you and I are absolutely the last human beings--civilized Imean--left alive anywhere in the world.
"If anybody else had been spared, whether in Chicago or San Francisco,in London, Paris or Hong-Kong, they'd have made some determined effortbefore now to get in touch with New York. This, the prime center ofthe financial and industrial world, would have been their firstobjective point."
"But suppose," asked she, "there _were_ others, just a few here orthere, and they'd only recently waked up, like ourselves. Could theyhave succeeded in making themselves known to us so soon?"
He shook a dubious head.
"There may be some one
else, somewhere," he answered slowly, "butthere's nobody else in this part of the world, anyhow. Nobody in thisparticular Eden but just you and me. To all intents and purposes I'mAdam. And you--well, you're Eve! But the tree? We haven't foundthat--yet."
She gave him a quick, startled glance, then let her head fall, so thathe could not see her eyes. But up over her neck, her cheek and even toher temples, where the lustrous masses of hair fell away, he saw atide of color mount.
And for a little space the man forgot to smoke. At her he gazed, astrange gleam in his eyes.
And no word passed between them for a while. But their thoughts--?
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