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 G.o.d!" he exclaimed, "is it possible that here, right where I stand, countless thousands of human beings once pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionate 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 compa.s.s 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 pa.s.sion he knew all that she meant to him--this perfect woman, his love, who sometime soon was now to be his bride.
CHAPTER X
TOWARD THE GREAT CATARACT
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 sh.o.r.es 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 acc.u.mulated 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 gra.s.sy 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!"