_ BOOK I. THE VACANT WORLD
CHAPTER XX. THE CURIOSITY OF EVE
At him the girl peered eagerly, a second, as though to make quite sure he was not hurt in any way, to satisfy herself that he was safe and sound.
Then with a little gasp of relief, she ran to him. Her sandaled feet lightly disturbed the rubbish on the floor; dust rose. Stern checked her with an upraised hand.
"Back! Back! Go back, quick!" he formed the words of command on his trembling lips. The idea of this girl's close proximity to the beast-horde terrified him, for the moment. "Back! What on earth are you
here for?"
"I--I woke up. I found you gone!" she whispered.
"Yes, but didn't you read my letter?
This is no place for you!"
"I had to come! How could I stay up there, alone, when you--were--oh! maybe in danger--maybe in need of me?"
"Come!" he commanded, in his perturbation heedless of the look she gave him. He took her hand. "Come, we must get out of this! It's too--too near the--"
"The
what? What
is it, Allan? Tell me, have you seen them? Do you know?"
Even excited as the engineer was, he realized that for the first time the girl had called him by his Christian name. Not even the perilous situation could stifle the thrill that ran through him at the sound of it. But all he answered was:
"No, I don't know
what to call them. Have no idea, as yet. I've seen them, yes; but what they are, Heaven knows--maybe!"
"Let me see, too!" she pleaded eagerly. "Is it through that crack in the wall? Is that the place to look?"
She moved toward it, her face blanched with excitement, eyes shining, lips parted. But Stern held her back. By the shoulder he took her.
"No, no, little girl!" he whispered. "You--you mustn't! Really must
not, you know. It's too awful!"
Up at him she looked, knowing not what to think or say for a moment. Their eyes met, there in that wrecked and riven place, lighted by the dull, misty, morning gray. Then Stern spoke, for in her gaze abode questions unnumbered.
"I'd much rather you wouldn't look out at them, not just yet," said he, speaking very low, fearful lest the murmur of his voice might penetrate the wall. "Just what they are, frankly, there's no telling."
"You mean--?"
"Come back into the arcade, where we'll be safer from discovery, and we can talk. Not here. Come!"
She obeyed. Together they retreated to the inner court.
"You see," he commented, nodding at the empty water-pail, "I haven't been to the spring yet. Not very likely to get there for a while, either, unless--well, unless something pretty radical happens. I think these chaps have settled down for a good long stay in their happy hunting-ground, after the fight and the big feast. It's sort of a notion I've got, that this place, here, is some ancient, ceremonial ground of theirs."
"You mean, on account of the tower?"
He nodded.
"Yes, if they've got any religious ideas at all, or rather superstitions, such would very likely center round the most conspicuous object in their world. Probably the spring is a regular voodoo hangout. The row, last night, must have been a sort of periodic argument to see who was going to run the show."
"But," exclaimed the girl, in alarm--"but if they
do stay a while, what about us? We simply must have water!"
"True enough. And, inasmuch as we can't drink brine and don't know where there's any other spring, it looks as though we'd either have to make up to these fellows or wade into them, doesn't it? But we'll get water safe enough, never fear. Just now, for the immediate present, I want to get my bearings a little, before going to work.
They seem to be resting up, a bit, after their pleasant little soiree. Now, if they'd only all go to sleep, it'd be a walk-over!"
The girl looked at him, very seriously.
"You mustn't go out there alone, whatever happens!" she exclaimed. "I just won't let you! But tell me," she questioned again, "how much have you really found out about them--whatever they are."
"Not much. They seem to be part of a nomadic race of half-human things, that's about all I can tell as yet. Perhaps all the white and yellow peoples perished utterly in the cataclysm, leaving only a few scattered blacks. You know blacks
are immune to several germ-infections that destroy other races."
"Yes. And you mean--?"
"It's quite possible these fellows are the far-distant and degenerate survivors of that other time."
"So the whole world may have gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti and Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased?"
"Yes, only a million times more so. I see you know your history!
If my hypothesis is correct, and only a few thousand blacks escaped, you can easily imagine what must have happened."
"For a while, maybe fifty or a hundred years, they may have kept some sort of dwindling civilization. Probably the English language for a while continued, in ever more and more corrupt forms. There may have been some pretense of maintaining the school system, railroads, steamship lines, newspapers and churches, banks and all the rest of that wonderfully complex system we once knew. But after a while--"
"Yes? What
then? "
"Why, the whole false shell crumbled, that's all. It must have! History shows it. It didn't take a hundred years after Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off French civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice--to make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods districts, at any rate. And
we--have had a thousand, Beatrice, since the white man died!"
She thought a moment, and shook her head.
"What a story," she murmured, "what an incredible, horribly fascinating story that would make, if it could ever be known, or written! Think of the ebb-tide of everything! Railroads abandoned and falling to pieces, cities crumbling, ships no longer sailing, language and arts and letters forgotten, agriculture shrinking back to a few patches of corn and potatoes, and then to nothing at all, everything changing, dying, stopping--and the ever-increasing yet degenerating people leaving the city ruins, which they could not rebuild--taking to the fields, the forests, the mountains--going down, down, back toward the primeval state, down through barbarism, through savagery, to--what?"
"To what we see!" answered the engineer, bitterly. "To animals, retaining by ghastly mockery some use of fire and of tools. All this, according to
one theory."
"Is there another?" she asked eagerly.
"Yes, and I wish we had the shade of Darwin, of Haeckel or of Clodd here with us to help us work it out!"
"How do you imagine it?"
"Why, like this. Maybe, after all, even the entire black race was swept out along with the others, too. Perhaps you and I were really the only two human beings left alive in the world."
"Yes, but in that case, how--?"
"How came
they here? Listen! May they not be the product of some entirely different process of development? May not some animal stock, under changed environment, have easily evolved them? May not some other semi-human or near-human race be now in process of arising, here on earth, eventually to conquer and subdue it all again?"
For a moment she made no answer. Her breath came a little quickly as she tried to grasp the full significance of this tremendous concept.
"In a million years, or so," the engineer continued, "may not the descendants of these things once more be men, or something very like them? In other words, aren't we possibly witnessing the recreation of the human type? Aren't
these the real pithecanthropi erecti, rather than the brown-skinned, reddish-haired creatures of the biological text-books? There's our problem!"
She made no answer, but a sudden overmastering curiosity leaped into her eyes.
"Let me see them for myself! I must! I will!"
And before he could detain her, the girl had started back into the room whence they had come.
"No, no! No, Beatrice!" he whispered, but she paid no heed to him. Across the littered floor she made her way. And by the time Stern could reach her side, she had set her face to the long, crumbling crack in the wall and with a burning eagerness was peering out into the forest. _