THE REBIRTH OF CIVILIZATION
A month had hardly gone, before order and peace and the promise
of bountiful harvests dwelt in and all about Hope Lodge, as they had
named the bungalow.
From the kitchen, where the stove and the aluminum utensils now shone
bright and free from rust, to the bedrooms where fir-tips and soft
skin rugs made wondrous sleeping places, the house was clean and sweet
and beautiful again. Rough-hewn chairs and tables, strong, serviceable
and eloquent of nature--through which this rebirth of the race all had
to come--adorned the rooms. Fur rugs covered the floors.
In lieu of pictures, masses of flowers and great sprays of foliage
stood in clay pots of Stern's own manufacture and firing. And on a
rustic book-case in their living room, where the big fireplace was,
and where the southern sun beat warmest in, stood their chief
treasure--a set of encyclopedias.
Stern had made leather bindings for these, with the deft help of
Beatrice. The original bindings had vanished before the attacks of
time and insects centuries before. But the leaves were still intact.
For these were thin sheets of nickel, printed by the electrolysis
process.
"Just a sheer streak of luck," Stern remarked, as he stood looking at
this huge piece of fortune with the girl. "Just a kindly freak of
fate, that Van Amburg should have bought one of Edison's first sets of
nickel-sheet books.
"Except for the few sets of these in existence, here and there, not a
book remains on the surface of this entire earth. The finest hand-made
linen paper has disintegrated ages ago. And parchment has probably
crinkled and molded past all recognition. Besides, up-to-date
scientific books, such as we need, weren't done on parchment. We're
playing into gorgeous luck with these cyclopedias, for everything I
need and can't remember is in them. But it certainly was one job to
sort those scattered sheets out of the rubbish-pile in the library and
rearrange them."
"Yes, that _was_ hard work, but it's done now. Come on out into the
garden, Allan, and see if our crops have grown any during the night!"
The grounds about the bungalow were a delight to them. Like two
children they worked, day by day, to enlarge and beautify their
holdings, their lands won back from nature's greed.
Though wild fruits--some new, others familiar--and fish and the
plentiful game all about them offered abundant food, to be had for the
mere seeking, they both agreed on the necessity of reestablishing
agriculture. For they disliked the thought of being driven southward,
with the return of each successive winter. They wanted, if advisable,
to be able to winter in the bungalow. And this meant some provision
for the unproductive season.
"It won't always be summer here, you know," Stern told her. "This Eden
will sometime lie wet and dreary under the winter rains that I expect
now take the place of snow. And the eternal curse of Adam--toil--is
not yet lifted even from us two survivors of the fifteen hundred
million that once ruled the earth. We, and those who shall come after,
must have the old-time foods again. And that means work!"
They had cleared a patch of black, virgin soil, in a sunny hollow.
Here Stern had transplanted all the wild descendants of the vegetables
and grains of other time which in his still limited explorations he
had come across.
The work of clearing away the thorns and bushes, the tangled lianas
and tall trees, was severe; but it strengthened him and hardened his
whip-cord muscles till they ridged his skin like iron. He burned and
pulled the stumps, spaded and harrowed and hoed all by hand, and made
ready the earth for the reception of its first crop in a thousand
years.
He recalled enough of his anthropology and botany from university days
to recognize the reverted, twisted and stringy little degenerate
wild-potato root which had once served the Aztecs and Pueblo Indians
for food, and could again, with proper cultivation, be brought back to
full perfection. Likewise with the maize, the squash, the wild turnip,
and many other vegetable forms.
"Three years of cultivation," he declared, "and I can win them back to
edibility. Five, and they'll be almost where they were before the
great catastrophe. As for the fruits, the apple, cherry, and pear, all
they need is care and scientific grafting.
"I predict that ten years from to-day, orchards and cornfields and
gardens shall surround this bungalow, and the heritage of man shall be
brought back to this old world!"
"Always giving due credit to the encyclopedia," added Beatrice.
"And to _you!_" he laughed happily. "This is all on your account,
anyhow. If I were alone in the world, you bet there'd be no gardens
made!"
"No, I don't believe there would," she agreed, a serious look on her
face. "But, then," she concluded, smiling again, "you aren't alone,
Allan. You've got _me!_"
He tried to catch her in his arms, but she evaded him and ran back
toward the bungalow.
"No, no, you've got to work," she called to him from the porch. "And
so have I. Good-by!" And with a wave of the hand, a strong, brown hand
now, slim and very beautiful, she vanished.
Stern stood in thought a moment, then shook his head, and, with a
singular expression, picked up his hoe, and once more fell to
cultivating his precious little garden-patch, on which so infinitely
much depended. But something lay upon his mind; he paused, reflecting;
then picked up a stone and weighed it in his hand, tried another, and
a third.
"I'm damned," he remarked, "if these feel right to met I've been
wondering about it for a week now--there's got to be some answer to
it. A stone of this size in the old days would certainly have weighed
more. And that big boulder I rooted out from the middle of the
field--in the other days I couldn't have more than stirred it.
"Am I so very much stronger? So much as all that? Or have things grown
lighter? Is that why I can leap farther, walk better, run faster?
What's it all about, anyhow?"
He could not work, but sat down on a rock to ponder. Numerous
phenomena occurred to him, as they had while he had lain wounded under
the tree by the river during their first few days at the bungalow.
"My observations certainly show a day only twenty-two hours and
fifty-seven minutes long; that's certain," he mused. "So the earth is
undoubtedly smaller. But what's that got to do with the mass of the
earth? With weight? Hanged if I can make it out at all!
"Even though the earth has shrunk, it ought to have the same power of
gravitation. If all the molecules and atoms really were pressed
together, with no space between, probably the earth wouldn't be much
bigger than a football, but it would weigh just that much, and a body
would fall toward it from space just as fast as now. Quite a hefty
football, eh? For the life of me I can't see why the earth's having
shrunk has affected the weight of everything!"
Perplexed, he went back to his work again. And though he tried to
banish the puzzle from his mind it still continued to haunt and to
annoy him.
Each day brought new and interesting activities. Now they made an
expedition to gather a certain kind of reeds which Beatrice could plat
into cordage and basketry; now they peeled quantities of birch-bark,
which on rainy days they occupied themselves in splitting into thin
sheets for paper. Stern manufactured a very excellent ink in his
improvised laboratory on the second floor, and the split and pointed
quills of a wild goose served them for pens in taking notes and
recording their experiences.
"Paper will come later, when we've got things a little more settled,"
he told her. "But for now this will have to do."
"I guess if you can get along with skin clothing for a while, I can do
with birch-bark for my correspondence," she replied laughing. "Why not
catch some of those wild sheep that seem so plentiful on the hills to
westward? If we could domesticate them, that would mean wool and yarn
and cloth--and milk, too, wouldn't it? And if milk, why not butter?"
"Not so fast!" he interposed. "Just wait a while--we'll have cattle,
goats, and sheep, and the whole business in due time; but how much can
one pair of human beings undertake? For the present we'll have to be
content with what mutton-chops and steaks and hams I can get with a
gun--and we're mighty lucky to have those!"
Singularly enough, and contrary to all beliefs, they felt no need of
salt. Evidently the natural salts in their meat and in the fruits they
ate supplied their wants. And this was fortunate, because the quest of
salt might have been difficult; they might even had had to boil
sea-water to obtain it.
They felt no craving for sweets, either; but when one day they came
upon a bee-tree about three-quarters of a mile back in the woods to
westward of the river, and when Stern smoked out the bees and gathered
five pounds of honey in the closely platted rush basket lined with
leaves, which they always carried for miscellaneous treasure-trove,
they found the flavor delicious. They decided to add honey to their
menu, and thereafter always kept it in a big pottery jar in their
kitchen.
Stern's hunting, fishing and gardening did not occupy his whole time.
Every day he made it a rule to work at least an hour, two if possible,
on the thirty-foot yawl that had already begun to take satisfactory
shape on the timber ways which now stood on the river bank.
All through July and part of August he labored on this boat, building
it stanch and true, calking it thoroughly, fitting a cabin, stepping a
fir mast, and making all ready for the great migration which he felt
must inevitably be forced upon them by the arrival of cool weather.
He doubted very much, in view of the semitropic character of some of
the foliage, whether even in January the temperature would now go
below freezing; but in any event he foresaw that there would be no
fruits available, and he objected to a winter on flesh foods. In
preparation for the trip he had built a little "smoke-house" near the
beach, and here he smoked considerable quantities of meat--deer-meat,
beef from a wild steer which he was so fortunate as to shoot during
the third week of their stay at the bungalow, and a good score of hams
from the wild pigs which rooted now and then among the beech growth
half a mile downstream.
Often the girl and he discussed this coming trip, of an evening,
sitting together by the river to watch the stars and moon and that
strange black wandering blotch that now and then obscured a portion of
the night sky--or perchance leaning back in their huge, rustic easy
chairs lined with furs on the broad piazza; or again, if the night
were cool or rainy, in front of their blazing fire of pine knots and
driftwood, which burned with gorgeous blues and greens and crimsons in
the vast throat of Hope Lodge fireplace.
Other matters, too, they talked of--strange speculations, impossible
to solve, yet filling them with vague uneasiness, with wonder and a
kind of mighty awe in face of the vast, unknowable mysteries
surrounding them; the forces and phenomena which might, though
friendly in their outward aspect, at any time precipitate catastrophe,
ruin and death upon them and extinguish in their persons all hopes of
a world reborn.
The haunting thought was never very far away: "Should either one of us
be killed--what then?"
One day Stern voiced his fear.
"Beatrice," he said, "if anything should ever happen to me, and you be
left alone in a world which, without me, would become instantly
hostile and impossible, remember that the most scientific way out is a
bullet. That's _my_ way if anything happens to _you!_ Understand?"
She nodded, and for a long time that day the silence of a great pact
weighed upon their souls.