The Last New Yorkers | Page 7

had utterly
vanished.
The telescope showed only a stray, lolling mast of steel, here or yonder,
thrusting up from the desolation, like a mute appealing hand raised to a
Heaven that responded not.
"See," remarked Stern, "up-town almost all the buildings seem to have
crumbled in upon themselves, or to have fallen outward into the streets.
What an inconceivable tangle of detritus those streets must be!
"And, do you notice the park hardly shows at all? Everything's so
overgrown with trees you can't tell where it begins or ends. Nature has
her revenge at last, on man!"
"The universal claim, made real," said Beatrice. "Those rather clearer
lines of green, I suppose, must be the larger streets. See how the
avenues stretch away and away, like ribbons of green velvet?"
"Everywhere that roots can hold at all, Mother Nature has set up her
flags again. Hark! What's that?"
A moment they listened intently. Up to them, from very far, rose a
wailing cry, tremulous, long-drawn, formidable.
"Oh! Then there are people, after all?" faltered the girl, grasping Stern's

arm.
He laughed.
"No, hardly!" answered he. "I see you don't know the wolf-cry. I didn't
till I heard it in the Hudson Bay country, last winter--that is, last winter,
plus X. Not very pleasant, is it?"
"Wolves! Then--there are--"
"Why not? Probably all sorts of game on the island now. Why shouldn't
there be? All in Mother Nature's stock-in-trade, you know.
"But come, come, don't let that worry you. We're safe, for the present.
Time enough to consider hunting later. Let's creep around here to the
other side of the tower, and see what we can see."
Silently she acquiesced. Together they reached the southern part of the
platform, making their way as far as the jumbled rocks of the fallen
railing would permit.
Very carefully they progressed, fearful every moment lest the support
break beneath them and hurl them down along the sloping side of the
pinnacle to death.
"Look!" bade Stern, pointing. "That very long green line there used to
be Broadway. Quite a respectable Forest of Arden now, isn't it?" He
swept his hand far outward.
"See those steel cages, those tiny, far-off ones with daylight shining
through? You know them--the Park Row, the Singer, the Woolworth
and all the rest. And the bridges, look at those!"
She shivered at the desolate sight. Of the Brooklyn Bridge only the
towers were visible.
The watchers, two isolated castaways on their island in the sea of
uttermost desolation, beheld a dragging mass of wreckage that drooped
from these towers on either shore, down to the sparkling flood.

The other bridges, newer and stronger far, still remained standing. But
even from that distance Stern could quite plainly see, without the
telescope, that the Williamsburg Bridge had "buckled" downward and
that the farther span of the Blackwell's Island Bridge was in ruinous
disrepair.
"How horrible, how ghastly is all this waste and ruin!" thought the
engineer. "Yet, even in their overthrow, how wonderful are the works
of man!"
A vast wonder seized him as he stood there gazing; a fierce desire to
rehabilitate all this wreckage, to set it right, to start the wheels of the
world-machinery running once more.
At the thought of his own powerlessness a bitter smile curled his lips.
Beatrice seemed to share something of his wonder.
"Can it be possible," whispered she, "that you and--and I--are really
like Macaulay's lone watcher of the world-wreck on London Bridge?"
"That we are actually seeing the thing so often dreamed of by prophets
and poets? That 'All this mighty heart is lying still,' at last--forever?
The heart of the world, never to beat again?"
He made no answer, save to shake his head; but fast his thoughts were
running.
So then, could he and Beatrice, just they two, be in stern reality the sole
survivors of the entire human race? That race for whose material
welfare he had, once on a time, done such tremendous work?
Could they be destined, he and she, to witness the closing chapter in the
long, painful, glorious Book of Evolution? Slightly he shivered and
glanced round.
Till he could adjust his reason to the facts, could learn the truth and
weigh it, he knew he must not analyze too closely; he felt he must try

not to think. For that way lay madness!
Far out she gazed.
The sun, declining, shot a broad glory all across the sky. Purple and
gold and crimson lay the light-bands over the breast of the Hudson.
Dark blue the shadows streamed across the ruined city with its
crowding forests, its blank-staring windows and sagging walls, its
thousands of gaping vacancies, where wood and stone and brick had
crumbled down--the city where once the tides of human life had ebbed
and flowed,