CHAPTER VIII
THE REBIRTH OF CIVILIZATION
A month had hardly gone, before order and peace and the promiseof bountiful harvests dwelt in and all about Hope Lodge, as they hadnamed the bungalow.
From the kitchen, where the stove and the aluminum utensils now shonebright and free from rust, to the bedrooms where fir-tips and softskin rugs made wondrous sleeping places, the house was clean and sweetand beautiful again. Rough-hewn chairs and tables, strong, serviceableand eloquent of nature--through which this rebirth of the race all hadto come--adorned the rooms. Fur rugs covered the floors.
In lieu of pictures, masses of flowers and great sprays of foliagestood in clay pots of Stern's own manufacture and firing. And on arustic book-case in their living room, where the big fireplace was,and where the southern sun beat warmest in, stood their chieftreasure--a set of encyclopedias.
Stern had made leather bindings for these, with the deft help ofBeatrice. The original bindings had vanished before the attacks oftime and insects centuries before. But the leaves were still intact.For these were thin sheets of nickel, printed by the electrolysisprocess.
"Just a sheer streak of luck," Stern remarked, as he stood looking atthis huge piece of fortune with the girl. "Just a kindly freak offate, that Van Amburg should have bought one of Edison's first sets ofnickel-sheet books.
"Except for the few sets of these in existence, here and there, not abook remains on the surface of this entire earth. The finest hand-madelinen paper has disintegrated ages ago. And parchment has probablycrinkled and molded past all recognition. Besides, up-to-datescientific books, such as we need, weren't done on parchment. We'replaying into gorgeous luck with these cyclopedias, for everything Ineed and can't remember is in them. But it certainly was one job tosort those scattered sheets out of the rubbish-pile in the library andrearrange them."
"Yes, that _was_ hard work, but it's done now. Come on out into thegarden, Allan, and see if our crops have grown any during the night!"
The grounds about the bungalow were a delight to them. Like twochildren they worked, day by day, to enlarge and beautify theirholdings, their lands won back from nature's greed.
Though wild fruits--some new, others familiar--and fish and theplentiful game all about them offered abundant food, to be had for themere seeking, they both agreed on the necessity of reestablishingagriculture. For they disliked the thought of being driven southward,with the return of each successive winter. They wanted, if advisable,to be able to winter in the bungalow. And this meant some provisionfor the unproductive season.
"It won't always be summer here, you know," Stern told her. "This Edenwill sometime lie wet and dreary under the winter rains that I expectnow take the place of snow. And the eternal curse of Adam--toil--isnot yet lifted even from us two survivors of the fifteen hundredmillion that once ruled the earth. We, and those who shall come after,must have the old-time foods again. And that means work!"
They had cleared a patch of black, virgin soil, in a sunny hollow.Here Stern had transplanted all the wild descendants of the vegetablesand grains of other time which in his still limited explorations hehad come across.
The work of clearing away the thorns and bushes, the tangled lianasand tall trees, was severe; but it strengthened him and hardened hiswhip-cord muscles till they ridged his skin like iron. He burned andpulled the stumps, spaded and harrowed and hoed all by hand, and madeready the earth for the reception of its first crop in a thousandyears.
He recalled enough of his anthropology and botany from university daysto recognize the reverted, twisted and stringy little degeneratewild-potato root which had once served the Aztecs and Pueblo Indiansfor food, and could again, with proper cultivation, be brought back tofull perfection. Likewise with the maize, the squash, the wild turnip,and many other vegetable forms.
"Three years of cultivation," he declared, "and I can win them back toedibility. Five, and they'll be almost where they were before thegreat catastrophe. As for the fruits, the apple, cherry, and pear, allthey need is care and scientific grafting.
"I predict that ten years from to-day, orchards and cornfields andgardens shall surround this bungalow, and the heritage of man shall bebrought back to this old world!"
"Always giving due credit to the encyclopedia," added Beatrice.
"And to _you!_" he laughed happily. "This is all on your account,anyhow. If I were alone in the world, you bet there'd be no gardensmade!"
"No, I don't believe there would," she agreed, a serious look on herface. "But, then," she concluded, smiling again, "you aren't alone,Allan. You've got _me!_"
He tried to catch her in his arms, but she evaded him and ran backtoward the bungalow.
"No, no, you've got to work," she called to him from the porch. "Andso have I. Good-by!" And with a wave of the hand, a strong, brown handnow, slim and very beautiful, she vanished.
Stern stood in thought a moment, then shook his head, and, with asingular expression, picked up his hoe, and once more fell tocultivating his precious little garden-patch, on which so infinitelymuch depended. But something lay upon his mind; he paused, reflecting;then picked up a stone and weighed it in his hand, tried another, anda third.
"I'm damned," he remarked, "if these feel right to met I've beenwondering about it for a week now--there's got to be some answer toit. A stone of this size in the old days would certainly have weighedmore. And that big boulder I rooted out from the middle of thefield--in the other days I couldn't have more than stirred it.
"Am I so very much stronger? So much as all that? Or have things grownlighter? Is that why I can leap farther, walk better, run faster?What's it all about, anyhow?"
He could not work, but sat down on a rock to ponder. Numerousphenomena occurred to him, as they had while he had lain wounded underthe tree by the river during their first few days at the bungalow.
"My observations certainly show a day only twenty-two hours andfifty-seven minutes long; that's certain," he mused. "So the earth isundoubtedly smaller. But what's that got to do with the mass of theearth? With weight? Hanged if I can make it out at all!
"Even though the earth has shrunk, it ought to have the same power ofgravitation. If all the molecules and atoms really were pressedtogether, with no space between, probably the earth wouldn't be muchbigger than a football, but it would weigh just that much, and a bodywould fall toward it from space just as fast as now. Quite a heftyfootball, eh? For the life of me I can't see why the earth's havingshrunk has affected the weight of everything!"
Perplexed, he went back to his work again. And though he tried tobanish the puzzle from his mind it still continued to haunt and toannoy him.
Each day brought new and interesting activities. Now they made anexpedition to gather a certain kind of reeds which Beatrice could platinto cordage and basketry; now they peeled quantities of birch-bark,which on rainy days they occupied themselves in splitting into thinsheets for paper. Stern manufactured a very excellent ink in hisimprovised laboratory on the second floor, and the split and pointedquills of a wild goose served them for pens in taking notes andrecording their experiences.
"Paper will come later, when we've got things a little more settled,"he told her. "But for now this will have to do."
"I guess if you can get along with skin clothing for a while, I can dowith birch-bark for my correspondence," she replied laughing. "Why notcatch some of those wild sheep that seem so plentiful on the hills towestward? If we could domesticate them, that would mean wool and yarnand cloth--and milk, too, wouldn't it? And if milk, why not butter?"
"Not so fast!" he interposed. "Just wait a while--we'll have cattle,goats, and sheep, and the whole business in due time; but how much canone pair of human beings undertake? For the present we'll have to becontent with what mutton-chops and steaks and hams I can get with agun--and we're mighty lucky to have those!"
Singularly enough, and contrary to all beliefs, they felt no need ofsalt. Evidently the natural salts in their meat and in the frui
ts theyate supplied their wants. And this was fortunate, because the quest ofsalt might have been difficult; they might even had had to boilsea-water to obtain it.
They felt no craving for sweets, either; but when one day they cameupon a bee-tree about three-quarters of a mile back in the woods towestward of the river, and when Stern smoked out the bees and gatheredfive pounds of honey in the closely platted rush basket lined withleaves, which they always carried for miscellaneous treasure-trove,they found the flavor delicious. They decided to add honey to theirmenu, and thereafter always kept it in a big pottery jar in theirkitchen.
Stern's hunting, fishing and gardening did not occupy his whole time.Every day he made it a rule to work at least an hour, two if possible,on the thirty-foot yawl that had already begun to take satisfactoryshape on the timber ways which now stood on the river bank.
All through July and part of August he labored on this boat, buildingit stanch and true, calking it thoroughly, fitting a cabin, stepping afir mast, and making all ready for the great migration which he feltmust inevitably be forced upon them by the arrival of cool weather.
He doubted very much, in view of the semitropic character of some ofthe foliage, whether even in January the temperature would now gobelow freezing; but in any event he foresaw that there would be nofruits available, and he objected to a winter on flesh foods. Inpreparation for the trip he had built a little "smoke-house" near thebeach, and here he smoked considerable quantities of meat--deer-meat,beef from a wild steer which he was so fortunate as to shoot duringthe third week of their stay at the bungalow, and a good score of hamsfrom the wild pigs which rooted now and then among the beech growthhalf a mile downstream.
Often the girl and he discussed this coming trip, of an evening,sitting together by the river to watch the stars and moon and thatstrange black wandering blotch that now and then obscured a portion ofthe night sky--or perchance leaning back in their huge, rustic easychairs lined with furs on the broad piazza; or again, if the nightwere cool or rainy, in front of their blazing fire of pine knots anddriftwood, which burned with gorgeous blues and greens and crimsons inthe vast throat of Hope Lodge fireplace.
Other matters, too, they talked of--strange speculations, impossibleto solve, yet filling them with vague uneasiness, with wonder and akind of mighty awe in face of the vast, unknowable mysteriessurrounding them; the forces and phenomena which might, thoughfriendly in their outward aspect, at any time precipitate catastrophe,ruin and death upon them and extinguish in their persons all hopes ofa world reborn.
The haunting thought was never very far away: "Should either one of usbe killed--what then?"
One day Stern voiced his fear.
"Beatrice," he said, "if anything should ever happen to me, and you beleft alone in a world which, without me, would become instantlyhostile and impossible, remember that the most scientific way out is abullet. That's _my_ way if anything happens to _you!_ Understand?"
She nodded, and for a long time that day the silence of a great pactweighed upon their souls.
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