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“Yes,” said Hendron, ignoring his tone. “It is most likely that where they lived, we can. And think of stepping upon that soil up there, finding a road leading to one of their cities—and entering it!”
He recollected himself suddenly and extended his hand. “You have an errand, Tony, to complete between the tides. I gladly lend you Eve to accompany you. She will tell you later what we all have to do.”
He led Tony to Eve’s door but did not linger, thereafter. Tony went in alone.
She was at a tiny table where a blue flame burned below a coffee percolator, and where an oil lamp, following the failure of electricity, augmented the faint gray of approaching dawn.
Was it the light, he wondered, or was Eve this morning really so pale?
He came to her, and whatever the rules for this day, he claimed her with his arms and kissed her.
“Now,” he said with some satisfaction, “you’re not so pale.”
She did not disengage herself at once; and before she did, she clung tightly to him for a moment. Then she said:
“You’ve got to have your coffee now, Tony.”
“I suppose so.… But there’s no stimulant in the world like you, Eve.”
“I’ll be with you all day.”
“Then let’s not think of anything beyond.”
She turned the tiny tap of the silver coffeepot, filled a cup for
him, one for herself. A few minutes later they went down together.
The rushing ebb of the tremendous tide was swirling less than a foot deep over the pavement, and was falling so rapidly that the curb emerged even while they were watching. From upper floors, where many automobiles had been stored against the tide, cars were reaching the street. One drove in the splash before Tony and Eve and stopped. The driver turned it over to them; and Tony took the wheel with Eve beside him.
They went with all possible speed, no longer encountering the tide itself, but lurching through vast puddles left by the retreating water. Débris from offices, shops and tenements swept by the tides bestrewed the street.
A few people appeared; a couple of motorcycle police, not in the least concerned with cars, were making some last inspection of the city.
Bodies lay in the street; and now on the right a haze of smoke drifted from an area that had burned down during the night.
The morning, though the sun had not yet risen, felt sticky. The passage of water over Manhattan had laden the air with moisture so that driving between the forsaken skyscrapers was like journeying in a strange, gaunt jungle.
Tony noticed many things mechanically, with Eve at his side, traversing the reechoing streets; the rows of smashed windows along Fifth Avenue—tipped-over dummies, wrecked displays; piles of useless goods on the sidewalks, the result of looting; the Empire State Building standing proudly against the blue sky, ignorant of its destiny, still lord of man’s creation.
The East River, when they reached it, was a torrent low in its channel being sucked dry toward the sea. Wreckage strewed the strangely exposed bottom. The bridge; a few miles more of flood débris in steaming streets. Then towns and villages which also had been overswept.
Now the country with its higher hills whereon Tony and Eve marked in the first sunlight, the line left by the water at its height. They dipped through empty villages and rose to hamlets whose inhabitants still lingered, staring in a dulled wonderment at the speeding car. The effect of the vast desolation beat into the soul; derelict, helpless people, occasional burning houses, a loose horse or a wandering sheep—emptiness, silence.
They dipped into a hollow which was a pool not drained but which could be traversed; they climbed a slope with a sharp turn which was blocked; and there two men sprang at them.
Tony jerked out his pistol; but to-day—and though he was on his way to his mother who was murdered—he could not pull the trigger on these men. He beat down one with the butt, instead, and with the barrel cowed the other.
He got the car clear and with Eve drove on, realizing they would have killed him and taken Eve with them. Why had he left them alive?
Ah—here was the road home! Home! His home, where he had been born and where he was a little boy. Home, the home that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s and before that for four generations. Down this road from his home, some man named Drake had gone to fight in the Great War, the War of the Rebellion, in 1812, and to join the army of Washington.
Tony recalled how his earliest remembrances were of strangers coming to peer about the house which they called “historic,” and how they raved about the things they called “old.” The house was high on a hillside, and as he drove along the winding road, he rode over the mark where the water had risen the night before, and thought what a mere moment in geologic time the things “old” and “historic” here represented.
He tried not to think about his mother yet.
Eve, beside him, placed her hand over his which held the steering-wheel.
“You’ll let me stay close beside you, Tony,” she appealed.
