LABOR AND COMRADESHIP
Four days later, having hastened all their preparations and
worked with untiring energy, they broke camp for the long, perilous
trek in quest of the ruins of a dead and buried city.
It was at daylight that they started from the little shack in the edge
of the forest. Both were refreshed by a long sleep and by a plunge in
the curling breakers that now, at high tide, were driven up the beach
by a stiff sea-breeze.
The morning, which must have been toward the end of September--Stern
had lost accurate count but reckoned the day at about the
twenty-fifth--dawned clear and bracing, with just a tang of winelike
exhilaration in the air. Before them the beach spread away and away to
eastward, beyond the line of vision, a broad and yellow road to bid
them travel on.
"Come, girl, _en marche!_" cried the man cheerily, as he adjusted
Beta's knapsack so that the platted cord should not chafe her
shoulders, then swung his own across his back. And with a buoyant
sense of conquest, yet a regret at leaving the little camp which,
though crude and rough, had yet been a home to them for a week, they
turned their faces to the rising sun and set out on the journey into
the unexplored.
Much altered were they now from those days at Hope Villa, when they
had been able to restore most of the necessities and even some of the
refinements of civilization. Now the girl's hair hung in two thick
braids down over her worn tiger-skin, each braid as big as a strong
man's wrist, for she lacked any means to do it up; she had not so much
as a comb, nor could Stern, without a knife, fashion one for her.
Their sandals hung in tatters. Stern had tried to repair them with
strips of squirrel-skin clumsily hacked out with the sharp clam-shell,
but the result was crude.
Long were his hair and beard, untrimmed now, unkempt and red. Clad in
his ragged fur garment, bare legged and bare armed, with the
grass-cloth sack slung over his sinewy shoulder and the heavy stone-ax
in his hand, he looked the very image of prehistoric man--as she, too,
seemed the woman of that distant age.
But though their outward guise was that of savages far cruder than the
North American Indian was when Columbus first beheld him, yet in their
brains lay all the splendid inheritance of a world-civilization. And
as the fire-materials in Stern's sack contained, in germ, all the
mechanic arts, so their joint intelligence presaged everything that
yet might be.
They traveled at an easy pace, like voyagers who foresee many hard
days of journeying and who are cautious not at first to drain their
strength. Five hours they walked, with now and then a pause. Stern
calculated they had made twelve miles or more before they camped
beside a stream that flowing thinly from the wood, sank into the sand
and was lost before it reached the sea.
Here they ate and rested till the sun began to pass its meridian, when
once more they started on their pilgrimage. That night, after a day
wherein they had met no other sign of life than gulls and crows
ravaging the mussel-beds, they slept on piles of sun-dried kelp which
they heaped into some crevices under an overhanging brow of low cliffs
on a rocky point. And dawn found them again, traveling steadily
eastward, battle-axes swinging, hopes high, in perfect comradeship and
faith.
Toward what must have been about ten o'clock of that morning they
reached the mouth of a river, something like half a mile wide where it
joined the sea. By following this up a mile or so they reached a
narrow point; but even here, burdened as they were, swimming was out
of the question.
"The only thing to do," said Stern, "will be to wait till the tide
backs up and gives us quiet water, then make our way across on a log
or two"--a plan they put into effect with good success. Mid-afternoon,
and they were on their way again, east-bound.
"Was that the Connecticut?" asked Beatrice. "Car do you think we've
passed that already?"
"More likely to be the Thames," he answered. "I figure that what used
be New London is less than five miles from here."
"Why not visit the ruins? There might be something there."
"Not enough to bother with. We mustn't be diverted from the main
issue, Boston! Forward, march!"
Next day Stern descried a point jutting far out to sea, which he
declared was none other than Watch Hill Point, on the Rhode Island
boundary. And on the afternoon of the following day they reached what
was indisputably Point Judith and Narragansett Bay.
Here they were forced to turn northward; and when camping time came,
after they had dug their due allowance of clams and gathered their
breadfruit and made their fire in the edge of the woods, they held
conclave about their future course.
The bay was, indeed, a factor neither Stern nor she had reckoned on.
To follow its detours all the way around would add seventy to a
hundred miles to their journey, according as they hugged the shore or
made straight cuts across some of the wooded promontories.
"And from Providence, at the head of the bay, to Boston, is only forty
miles in a direct line northwest-by-north," said he, poking the fire
contemplatively.
"But if we miss our way?"
"How can we, if we follow the remains of the railroad? The cuts and
embankments will guide us all the way."
"I know; but the forest is so thick!"
"Not so thick but we can make at least five miles a day. That is,
inside of eight days we can reach the Hub. And we shall have the help
of tools and guns, remember. In a place the size of Providence there
must be a few ruins still containing something of value. Yes, by all
means the overland route is best, from now on. It means forty miles
instead of probably two hundred."
Thus they agreed upon it; and, having settled matters, gave them no
more thought, but prepared for rest. And sunset came down once more;
it faded, smoldering along the forest-line to westward; it burned to
dull timbers and vague purples, then went out. And "the wind that runs
after the sun awoke and sang softly among the tree-tops, a while, like
the intoning of a choir invisible, and was silent again."
There by the firelight he half saw, half sensed her presence, vague
and beautiful despite the travel-worn, tattered skin that clothed her.
He felt her warm, vital nearness; his hand sought hers and pressed it,
and the pressure was returned. And with a thrill of overwhelming
tenderness he realized what this girl was to him and what his love
meant and what it all portended.
Until long after dark they sat and talked of the future, and of life
and death, and of the soul and of the great mystery that had swept the
earth clean of all of their kind and had left them, alone, of all
those fifteen hundred million human creatures.
And overhead, blotting out a patch of sky and stars, moved slowly the
dark object which had so puzzled Stern since the first time he had
observed it--the thing he meant to know about and solve, once he could
reach the Cambridge Observatory. And of this, too, they talked; but
neither he nor she could solve the riddle of its nature.
Their talk together, that night, was typical of the relationship that
had grown up between them in the long weeks since their awakening in
the Tower. Almost all, if not quite all, the old-time idea of sex had
faded--the old, false assumption on the part of the man that he was by
his very nature the superior of woman.
Stern and Beatrice now stood on a different footing; their friendship,
comradeship and love were based on the tacit recognition of absolute
equality, save for Stern's accidental physical superiority. It was as
though they had been two men, one a little stronger and larger than
the other, so far as the notion of equality went; though this by no
means destroyed that magnetic sex-emotion which, in other aspects,
thrilled and attracted and infused them both.
Their love never for a moment obscured Stern's recognition of the girl
as primarily a human being, his associate on even terms in this great
game that they were playing together, this tremendous problem they
were laboring to solve--the vastest and most vital problem that ever
yet had confronted the human race, now represented in its totality by
these two living creatures.
And as Beatrice recalled the world of other times, with all its false
conventions, limitations and pettily stupid gallantries, she shuddered
with repulsion. In her heart she knew that, had the choice been hers,
she would not have gone back to that former state of half-chattel
patronage, half-hypocritical homage and total misconception.
Contrasting her present state with her past one, and comparing this
man--all ragged, unshaven and long-haired as he was, yet a true man in
every inch of his lithe, virile body--with others she remembered, she
found up-welling in her a love so deep and powerful, grounded on such
broad bases of respect and gratitude, mutual interest and latent
passion, that she herself could not yet understand it in all its
phases and its moods.
The relation which had grown up between them, comrades and partners in
all things, partook of a fine tolerance, an exquisite and
never-failing tenderness, a wealth of all intimate, yet respectful
adoration. It held elements of brotherhood and parenthood; it was the
love of coworkers striving toward a common goal, of companions in life
and in learning, in striving, doing, accomplishing, even failing.
Failure mattered nothing; for still the comradeship was there.
And on this soil was growing daily and hourly a love such as never
since the world began had been equaled in purity and power, faith,
hope, integrity. It purified all things, made easy all things, braved
all things, pardoned all things; it was long-suffering and very kind.
They had no need to speak of it; it showed in every word and look and
act, even in the humblest and most commonplace of services each for
each. Their love was lived, not talked about.
All their trials and tremendous hardships, their narrow passes with
death, and their hard-won escapes, the vicissitudes of a savage life
in the open, with every imaginable difficulty and hard expedient,
could not destroy their illusions or do aught than bind them in closer
bonds of unity.
And each realized when the time should ripen for another and a more
vital love, that, too, would circle them with deeper tenderness,
binding them in still more intense and poignant bonds of joy.