The Last New Yorkers | Page 2

the window where they should have been,
and were not. Her shapely feet fell soundlessly in that strange and
impalpable dust which thickly coated everything.
"My typewriter? Is--can that be my typewriter? Great Heavens! What's
the matter here, with everything? Am I mad?"
There before her lay a somewhat larger pile of dust mixed with soft and
punky splinters of rotten wood. Amid all this decay she saw some bits
of rust, a corroded type-bar or two--even a few rubber key-caps, still
recognizable, though with the letters quite obliterated.
All about her, veiling her completely in a mantle of wondrous gloss and
beauty, her lustrous hair fell, as she stooped to see this strange,
incomprehensible phenomenon. She tried to pick up one of the rubber
caps. At her merest touch it crumbled to an impalpable white powder.
Back with a shuddering cry the girl sprang, terrified.
"Merciful Heavens!" she supplicated. "What--what does all this mean?"
For a moment she stood there, her every power of thought, of motion,
numbed. Breathing not, she only stared in a wild kind of cringing
amazement, as perhaps you might do if you should see a dead man
move.
Then to the door she ran. Out into the hall she peered, this way and that,
down the dismantled corridor, up the wreckage of the stairs all
cumbered, like the office itself, with dust and webs and vermin.

Aloud she hailed: "Oh! Help, help, help!" No answer. Even the echoes
flung back only dull, vacuous sounds that deepened her sense of awful
and incredible isolation.
What? No noise of human life anywhere to be heard? None! No
familiar hum of the metropolis now rose from what, when she had
fallen asleep, had been swarming streets and miles on miles of
habitations.
Instead, a blank, unbroken leaden silence, that seemed part of the musty,
choking atmosphere--a silence that weighed down on Beatrice like
funeral-palls.
Dumfounded by all this, and by the universal crumbling of every
perishable thing, the girl ran, shuddering, back into the office. There in
the dust her foot struck something hard.
She stooped; she caught it up and stared at it.
"My glass ink-well! What? Only such things remain?"
No dream, then, but reality! She knew at length that some catastrophe,
incredibly vast, some disaster cosmic in the tragedy of its sweep, had
desolated the world.
"Oh, my mother!" cried she. "My mother--dead? Dead, now, how
long?"
She did not weep, but just stood cowering, a chill of anguished horror
racking her. All at once her teeth began to chatter, her body to shake as
with an ague.
Thus for a moment dazed and stunned she remained there, knowing not
which way to turn nor what to do. Then her terror-stricken gaze fell on
the doorway leading from her outer office to the inner one, the one
where Stern had had his laboratory and his consultation-room.
This door now hung, a few worm-eaten planks and splintered bits of

wood, barely supported by the rusty hinges.
Toward it she staggered. About her she drew the sheltering masses of
her hair, like a Godiva of another age; and to her eyes, womanlike, the
hot tears mounted. As she went, she cried in a voice of horror.
"Mr. Stern! Oh--Mr. Stern! Are--are you dead, too? You can't be--it's
too frightful!"
She reached the door. The mere touch of her outstretched hand
disintegrated it. Down in a crumbling mass it fell. Thick dust bellied up
in a cloud, through which a single sun-ray that entered the cobwebbed
pane shot a radiant arrow.
Peering, hesitant, fearful of even greater terrors in that other room,
Beatrice peered through this dust-haze. A sick foreboding of evil
possessed her at thought of what she might find there--yet more afraid
was she of what she knew lay behind her.
An instant she stood within the ruined doorway, her left hand resting on
the moldy jam. Then, with a cry, she started forward--a cry in which
terror had given place to joy, despair to hope.
Forgotten now the fact that, save for the shrouding of her messy hair,
she stood naked. Forgotten the wreck, the desolation everywhere.
"Oh--thank Heaven!" gasped she.
There, in that inner office, half-rising from the wrack of many things
that had been and were now no more, her startled eyes beheld the figure
of a man--of Allan Stern!
He lived!
At her he peered with eyes that saw not, yet; toward her he groped a
vague, unsteady hand.
He lived!

Not quite alone in this world-ruin, not all alone was she!

CHAPTER II
REALIZATION
The joy in Beatrice's eyes gave way to poignant wonder as she gazed
on him. Could this be he?
Yes, well she knew it was. She recognized him even through the
grotesquery of his clinging rags, even behind