"Earth Abides" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart George Rippey)

Chapter 7

He lay quietly awake after she slept beside him, and his thoughts rushed by him so fast that he could not stop them long enough to get to sleep. That was what she had said before, earlier in the evening—no matter what happened to the world, it did not change the person, and he remained what he had been. Yes, that was the way! lbough so much had happened, and even though he might be deeply moved by that great experience, yet still he was the observer—the man who sat by the side, watching what happened, never quite losing himself in the experience. The strangeness! In the old world it might well never have happened. Out of destruction had come, for him, love.

He slept. When he woke, it was daylight, and she was gone. He looked around the room fearfully. Yes, it was really a shabby little room, and he suddenly had a fear that perhaps all this seemingly great experience of love was, after all, only something which in the old days would have been no more than a pick-up of a restless waitress and a grimy room in a cheap hotel. And she—she was no goddess, no hamadryad glimpsed whitely in the dusk! Except at the moment of desire, she would never be Ashtoreth or Aphrodite. He trembled a little to think of how she might look in the morning light. She was older than he; perhaps he was merely mixing her in some vague kind of mother-image. “Oh, don’t worry,” he thought, putting it into words, “there never has been perfection yet, and it certainly isn’t going to start now for me.” Then he remembered how she had first spoken, not in question or command, but merely in affirmation. Yes, that was the way it ought to be. Take what was good in a situation, not worrying about what might not be there.

He got up and dressed. As he dressed, he sniffed the aroma of coffee.

Coffee! That was a kind of modern symbol, too.

She had the table set in the breakfast-nook when he came out, as any commuter’s wife might have done. He looked at her almost bashfully. He saw again, more clearly by morning light, the wide-set black eyes in the dark face, the full ripe lips, the swelling curve of the breasts beneath a light-green smock.

He did not offer to kiss her, and she did not seem to expect it. But they smiled back and forth, one at the other. “Where’s Princess?” he said. “I put her out for her run.”

“Good—And it’s going to be a good day, too, I think.”

“Yes, looks like it. Sorry there are no eggs.”

“No matter. What is it? Bacon, I see.”

“Yes.”

They were little words, meaning nothing, yet there was a great joy to say them. A greater joy, perhaps, saying the little things than saying something much greater. A whole contentment came over him. This was no affair of the rented room. His luck was in! He looked across into her level eyes, and felt new security and courage rise up within him! This would endure!

They moved back, later that day, to the house on San Lupo Drive, chiefly because he seemed to have more possessionsbooks, especially-than she did. It was less trouble to move to the books than to move the books to them.

The days went more swiftly and more comfortably after that. There were many ways of sharing. “What was it?” he thought. “’A friend doubles joys and cuts griefs in half’?”

She never talked about herself. Once or twice he tried to draw her out with questions, thinking that she might need to tell things. But she did not respond easily, and he decided that she had already made her adjustment in her own way. She had drawn the veil across the view toward the past; now she looked forward only

Yet she made no apparent attempt at secrecy. He learned from casual remarks that she had been married (happily, he was sure), and had had two small children. She had gone to high school but not to college; her grammar lapsed occasionally. Her soft accent, which he had noticed when she first spoke, had perhaps the touch of Kentucky or Tennessee in it.

But she never mentioned having lived anywhere except in California.

Her social status must have been, Ish judged, somewhat lower than his. But there was nothing more ridiculous to contemplate, now, than all that business of social classes.

“Amazing, how little everything Re that matters now!” And the days slid by easily.

One morning, finding that they needed some supplies, he went down to start the car. He put his thumb on the smrter button. There was a sudden click, nothing more. He pressed it again, and it clicked. That was all.

He heard no sudden comforting whir as the motor took over, no reassuring little bangs as the cold cylinders began to fire. Panic fell upon him again. He pressed the button once more, and still once more, and every time came only the little click. “Battery gone!” he thought.

He got out, raised the hood of the car, and stared hopelessly at the orderly but complex array of wires and gadgets. It was too much for him. He had a sudden hopeless feeling within him; he went back to the house.

“The car won’t start,” he said. “Battery gone, or something!” He knew that his face must be even more woebegone than his voice. That was why he could hardly believe it, when she laughed. “There’s no place we have to go so badly as all that,” she said. “To look at you, you’d think that things had gone to pieces!”

Then he laughed too. It made all the difference in the world whether you had that other to cut the grief in half, and the trouble suddenly seemed tiny. A car was convenient when you wanted to go to the stores and load up with some more supplies. But you could live just as well without a car. She was right-they had really no place that they needed so badly to go!

He had imagined a desperate day, tying to find a new car or to fix up the old one. As it was, they made it a sport, even though it did take them most of the morning before they located another one. Most of the cars had no keys in them, and while he might have shorted a wire somewhere, they agreed that it would be an inconvenience to have to drive a car without a key. And when they found one with a key in it, the battery, unused now for several months, would not work. At last they found one that had a key in it, and was parked on a hill. The battery was too weak to turn the engine over, but it would burn the lights faintly, and Ish judged that it would send out enough of a current to fire the spark-plugs.

They got the car rolling downhill, and then after a minute the cylinders began to bang and putter and backfire. Ish and Em laughed together happily at the adventure of it. At last the gasoline worked up through the feed-pipes, and the engine warmed, and began to run smoothly. Now they laughed in triumph, and went speeding at sixty miles an hour down the empty boulevard, and Em leaned over and kissed him. And suddenly, queer as it seemed, Ish realized that he had never felt so happy in his life.

This car was not such a good one as the station-wagon. Because of this, they used it merely to make some exploration through the warehouse district, checking up in the classified telephone book to locate dealers in batteries. At last they forced the entrance to the proper room and found dozens of batteries with the acid not yet in them. There were also supplies of acid, and although neither of them was mechanically minded, they made the experiment of pouring the acid into a battery of the right size. They took it back, and put it into the station-wagon. It worked perfectly, the first time.

As at last the motor of the station-wagon hummed tunefully, responding to the pressure of his foot on the throttle, Ish thought that on that day he had met, and faced, two problems. First, he had seen that he could do a great deal toward keeping a car running for a long time. But of even greater importance, he had faced the possibility that there would come a time when there would no longer be any cars, and yet still he could live happily and without fear.

The next day, indeed, the new battery in the station-wagon was dead again. Either it was defective or he had made some mistake in installing it. This time, however, he was in no panic. In fact he did not even bother to do anything about it for a couple, of days. Then they repeated the process. Either by luck or by greater care, they had better success, and the battery continued to work.

Sleek with lacquer, shining with chromium, their motors machined to the thousandth of the inch, their commutators accurate as watches, they had been the pride and the symbol of civilization.

Now, they were locked ingloriously in garages, or stood in the lots, or were parked at the curb. The dead leaves dropped, the blowing dust settled. The rains fell, and spotted the dust, and made the leaves stick more tightly and then more dust and more leavesfell. The windshields were so thickly coated that you could scarcely see through them now.

More deeply, they changed little. The rust ate here and there, but on the grease-smeared surfaces it could not work rapidly. Unused, the coils and the timers, the carburetors and the spark-plugs, all remained as good as ever.

In the batteries the slow processes of chemistry worked day and night, breaking down, neutralizing. A few months, and the unused batteries were dead. But as long as the battery and acid were kept separate, neither deteriorated, and it would always be a small matter to add the acid and start out again with a new battery; the batteries were not the weakest link.

More likely it was the tires. In the rubber the processes of decay worked slowly. The tires would last a year, five years. But nevertheless, the weakness worked in them. The air leaked from the tires, and after the car had stood on the flat tires for a while, they were no longer of any use. Even in the warehouses, decay worked in the rubber. The stored tires would have ten years, and still some life. Twenty years they would last, perhaps even more. Quite likely the roads, themselves, would be broken and men forget how to drive cars and lose the desire for driving them before the cars themselves were rendered undrivable.

Her head rested in the crook of his arm, and he looked down upon the black liquid eyes. They lay on the davenport in the living-room. Her face looked darker than ever now in the twilight.

There was one question, he knew, that they had not yet faced, and now she brought it forward.

“That would be fine!” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, it would.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You mean you don’t like it about me?”.

“Yes. It’s dangerous. There’d be no one else but me, and I wouldn’t be any use.”

“But you can read—all the books.”

“Books!” he laughed a little as he spoke. “The Practical Midwife? The Pathology of Parturition? I don’t think I’d like to face it, even if you would.”

“But, yet, you really could find some books and read them. That would be a lot of use. And I wouldn’t really need so much help.” She paused a moment: “I’ve been through it twice before, you know. It wasn’t bad.”

“Maybe not. But it might be different this time without hospitals and doctors and all that. And just why, why do you think so much about it?”

“Biology, don’t they call it, or something like that? I guess it’s natural.”

“Do you think life must go on, we have a duty to the future, all that?”

She paused a minute. He could tell that she was thinking, and thinking was not the best thing that she did; she reacted at deeper levels than those of mere thought.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know whether life needs to go on. Why should it? Just as likely I’m selfish. I want a baby for myself. I mean, oh, I don’t talk this sort of thing well. I’d like to be kissed, though.” He did it.

“I wish I could talk,” she said. “I wish I could tell what it is I think about it.”

Then she stretched her arm out, and took a match from the box on the table. She smoked, more than he did, and he expected her to take a cigarette also. But she did not. It was a big kitchen-match, the kind she liked. She turned it between thumb and finger, saying nothing. Then she scratched it against the box.

The matchhead spurted into a flare. Then the fierceness faded out, and the wood of the match-shank burned quietly in yellow flame. Suddenly she blew it out.

Vaguely he knew that she, who did not find words easily, had tried—perhaps half unconsciously—to act out something that she could not say. Slowly he thought that he understood. The match lived, not when it lay in the box, but merely when it burned—and it could not burn forever. So too with men and women. Not by denying life was life lived.

He thought then of his old fear during the first days and of the time when he had overthrown it, when he had unlashed the motorcycle from the tail-gate of the station-wagon in the desert and tossed it to one side. He remembered the wild feeling of exaltation which had come when he had offered defiance to death and all the powers of darkness. He felt her body stir gently in his arms. Yes, he thought humbly, that strong courage was his only at great moments—with her it was part of daily life.

“All right,” he said, “I suppose you’re right. I’ll read the books.”

“You know,” she said, “I might need a little more help than that!”

Her body was close and warm against him. Still he held back, feeling all the loneliness and the emptiness and the terror. Who was he to set mankind again on the long and uncertain road to the future? But it was only for a moment. Then her courage and the confidence of her courage flowed out from her to him. “Yes,” he thought, “she will be the mother of nations! Without courage there is nothing!”

And then suddenly he was conscious again of her body, and his strength came upon him.

To thee be the glory, because the love of life was brighter before thy face than the fear of death was dark. Thou art Demeter and Hertha and Isis; Cybele of the Lions, and the Mountain-Mother. From thy daughters shall spring tribes; and from thy grandsons, nations! Thy name is The Mother, and they shall call thee blessed.

There will be laughter and song again. Maidens will walk in the meadows; young men, leap by the brooks. Their children’s children shall be again as the pine trees of the mountainside. They shall call thee blessed, because in a dark time thy look was toward the light.

While they were still uncertain, Em looked out one morning and said, “See, some rats!”

He looked. Sure enough, two rats were nosing their way along the base of the hedge, foraging about or merely investigating. Em pointed out the rats to Princess through the window, and then opened the door. But being a dog who gave tongue to tell the hunter where the chase was leading, she leaped out baying, and the rats vanished before she was anywhere near them.

That afternoon they saw more rats at several times, one place and another, near the house, in the street, or running in the gardens.

Next morning the wave had engulfed them. Rats were everywhere. These were merely ordinary-looking rats, no larger or smaller than rats were expected to be, not particularly fat or particularly lean-just rats. Ish thought of the way the ants had been some time ago, and felt a cold shiver run through him.

The only thing to do was to make an investigation, and thus render the rats less horrible, because when you knew sometlung about the situation, you saw the interest that lay in it.

In the station-wagon they drove about here and there, often crushing some rat which decided to dash across the street, just ahead of their fires. At first they shuddered a little at the soft squash, and looked at each other, but before long it had become so common that they thought nothing about it. The area which the rats were occupying was roughly the city, although they spread outward from the built-up area, covering somewhat larger an area than the ants had done. -

What had happened, in general, was clear enough. Ish remembered some kind of statistics which declared that the number of rats in a city was generally about equal to the number of people.

“Well,” he explained to Em, “you start then with, say, a million rats, half of them being does or bitches or whatever you call lady rats. Some of the stores and warehouses are rat-proof, but still there has been for all this tune what you can call an unlimited supply of food.”

“Then how many rats should there be now?”

“I can’t do that problem in my head. I’ll try later.”

That evening at home he sat down to it as a mathematical problem. With the aid of his father’s encyclopedia he determined that rats had approximately one litter a month, with an average of about ten young. That is, one month of uninterrupted breeding might have produced about a population of ten million rats in this given area. These young females, in turn, would begin to breed before they reached the age of two months. There must be some casualties, of course, and he had no way of determining just how many of the rats would live to maturity But, c: ertainly the increase must be prodigious under the circumstances. His mathematics broke down.

But even if the rats should only be increasing at the rate of doubling their numbers every month, an estimate which seemed ridiculously conservative, there should by this time be already somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty million. If they were increasing threefold each month, an estimate which still seemed conservative, there would now be in the area approximately one billion rats.

As he considered the problem, he saw no reason at all why. the rats, with unlimited food, might not possibly quadruple their numbers every month. In the Old Times man had been the only important natural enemy of the city rats, and even man had had to maintain constant war against them to keep their numbers under control. With man gone, their only enemies would have been the small number of dogs whose instinct led them to catch rats, and somewhat larger number of cats. But here a secondary result must have influenced the situation in favor of the rats. As he had noticed, the rat-catching dogs seemed to hold the ground alone without the help of any cats. Probably the dogs had killed the cats as much as they had the rats, and so had eliminated the chief control. And in the end, the dogs themselves had probably been overwhelmed in the mere increase of numbers. Now he no longer saw any dogs. It seemed unlikely that they had actually been killed by the rats, although the rats may very well have cleaned out many litters of puppies. Probably, the dogs had merely retreated before the swarms of rats, and were still hanging around on the outskirts, now having been driven from the city into the suburbs.

Whether there were a billion rats or only fifty million made very little difference. There certainly were too many rats, and Ish and Em felt themselves in a state of siege. They watched all the doors carefully. Nevertheless, one rat appeared in the kitchen from some unknown quarter, and they had a mad scurry as Ish pursued it with a broom. Cornered, it leaped viciously at the broom-handle, and left teeth marks in the hard wood before he was able to crush it against the floor.

After a few days, moreover, they began to see a kind of difference, both in the appearance and in the behavior of the rats. Apparently, the supplies of food, vast though they were, had at last begun to yield before the attack of an ever-pyramiding number of rats. The rats now appeared thinner, and they ran around even more feverishly in search of food. They began to burrow in the ground. They dug up the tulip bulbs, first of all, seeming particularly fond of them. Then they attacked the less palatable bulbs and roots. They ran along the branches of the trees, apparently eating any insects they could find or any remains of seeds or fruit. They even, at last, began to gnaw the bark of young trees, like rabbits.

Ish parked the car as close to the house as he could now, and made a dash for it, wearing high boots. But actually the rats never made any attempt at an attack. Ish kept Princess in the house mostly, although the rats had offered her no violence either.

Still driving about to investigate, Ish became more and more accustomed to the soft squash beneath his tires. He began to feel as if he were plastering the streets with a continuous line of crushed rats. In the angle of two walls, as he drove slowly by, a small white object caught his attention. Stopping the car and looking carefully, he saw that it was the skull of some small dog. The long teeth, still shining white, indicated that it had probably been a terrier. Apparently, the rats had cornered the dog in the angle of the walls; or else, the dog ’ fighting for its life, had retreated there. Whether the rats had dared attack a strong and healthy dog, Ish could not know. Perhaps it had suffered an accident or had been chewed up in a fight with another dog. Perhaps it was old or sick. But apparendy’ for once, the swarm of rats had been too much even for the ratter. Ish saw only a few of the larger bones; 4he rest had apparently either been gnawed to pieces or dragged away. In the vicinity, he saw also the skulls of several rats, indicating that the terrier had gone down fighting. He tried to imagine the scene. The swarrning gray bodies clambering all over the struggling dog, the dog unable to attack those which hung to its back. Others must have slashed at the hamstrings like wolves attacking an old bison-bull. Though the dog might kill a dozen or fifty, in the end the mad, hunger-frenzied rodents must have gnawed through the skin and tendons until the dog collapsed. Ish drove away from the spot feeling definitely sober, and deciding that they must keep an even more careful watch on Princess.

He remembered, hopefully, that the ants had vanished almost overnight, and he kept expecting that something like that also might happen to the rats. But there was no indication of it.

“Are the rats going to take over the world?” Em asked. “Now that men are gone, are the rats going to be next?”

“Of course I don’t know for sure,” said Ish, “but I hardly think so. They’ve got a head-start because they know how to use the food-supplies in the city and because they breed fast. But once they get away from the city they’ll have to forage on their own, and the foxes and snakes and owls are going to build up too because man is gone and because they’ll have lots of rats to feed on.”

“I never thought of that!” she said. “You mean rats are kind of domestic animals because people supply them food and kill off their enemies.”

“More like parasites on man, I suppose really.” And then, just, to be saying something to keep her interest, he ran on: “And speaking of parasites, of course rats have them too. Just like the ants! When anything gets too numerous it’s likely to get hit by some plague—I mean—” (Something had suddenly exploded in his mind at the word.) He coughed to cover up his hesitation, and then went on, without making a point of it. “Yes, some plague is likely to hit them.”

Em, to his relief, did not seem to have noticed.

“All we can do then,” she said, “I guess, is to sit around and cheer for the rat’s parasites.”

Ish did not tell her what had disturbed him. It was the realization that not just plague in the general sense, but bubonic plague was a common epidemic among rats. It was spread, he knew, by fleas, and those infected fleas readily hopped from dead rats to living people. The thought of being among the new people left in an area inhabited by millions of rats being killed off by bubonic plague was a horrible situation to contemplate.

He began to deluge the house with DDT and spray it upon his clothing and Em’s. Naturally then she became suspicious, and he had to tell her.

She was not disturbed. Her natural courage rose superior to even the thought of plague, and perhaps there was a vein of fatalism in her too. The simplest and safest thing would have been to hurry out of the city, and get to some place—the desert, perhaps—where few rats could live.

But each of them had already decided independently that life was not to be lived on the basis of fear. Her courage indeed was stronger than his, and the horror of the rats pressed in more closely upon him. Occasionally he even felt panic and was ready to force her into the car for flight. But always in such times her courage seemed to flow out from her and sustain him.

As the days passed, he watched individual rats carefully to see if they seemed sickly. On the contrary, they seemed more active than ever.

Then Em called to him one morning from the window.

“Look, they’re fighting!” He went to look, quickly, but without too much interest. Probably, he thought, it was merely whatever kind of sex-play rats indulged in. But it was not.

He saw a large rat definitely attacking a smaller one. The small one fought back, and dodged desperately, and seemed just about to make its escape through a hole which might be too small for the larger one. Then suddenly a third and still larger rat appeared, and sprang also upon the small one. The little pool of blood spread out from the torn throat, and then the largest rat dragged the body away, the one who had made the original attack scurrying close after.

In high boots, well gloved, carrying a stout stick in his hand, Ish made an expedition to the nearest business-center and foraged for some more food. Curiously, to him, he found very few rats in the stores, and when he investigated, he found that everything which a rat could get and eat had been completely wiped out. The stores were a great disgusting litter of torn papers, and chewed cartons and rat-droppings. They had even chewed the labels on the cans and bottles, so that sometimes it was difficult even to tell what was contained in them. Certainly, as yet, starvation and not disease was c losing in upon the hordes. He took the news back to Em.

Next morning they let Princess out for her daily run. (They had been allowing her out only once a day as a matter of precaution.) After a few minutes they heard her wild howling, and she came tearing back to the door with rats skirmishing all around her, and two or three actually clinging to her back. Opening the door they let her in, and necessarily admitted three or four rats along with her. Princess refired under the davenport in a flurry of howling. Deserted by the cause of the disaster, Ish and Em spent a lively quarter hour routing out the rats and killing them. They hunted the house most carefully, aided by a now partially recovered Princess, to find whether any rat was still lurking in a closet or behind the books of the bookcase. But they decided that they had killed them all. They kept Princess shut up, after that, out of necessary precaution, and they also muzzled her for fear of hydrophobia.

By now they were quite sure that the rats were preying one upon another. Sometimes they saw a large rat pursuing a smaller rat, and sometimes it seemed as if several banded together in a pack to attack a single one. They seemed less numerous now, but that might be because they were keeping out of sight under the new conditions.

To Ish the whole affair, in spite of a certain horror that he still held of it, came to be a most interesting study in ecology, almost a laboratory problem. The rats had first lived upon the stores of food which men had laid up for them, and these had gradually been transformed into a great reservoir of rat-flesh. Then, when the cereals and dried fruit and packaged beans were depleted, there was left—for certain individual rats at least—this other supply of food. Under such circumstances, it seemed a question whether any single rat would die of starvation, even though the rats as a species might be dying of starvation.

“The old and sickly and weak and immature will go first,” he said, “and then those that are not quite so old or sickly or weak or immature—and so on.”

“And eventually,” said Em, who sometimes showed disconcerting logic, “there’ll just be two great strong rats left to fight it out—like (what was it?) the Kilkenny cats?”

Ish explained that before such a fate ensued the rats would have become so scarce that they would again have begun to forage upon other sources of food.

When he thought more deeply, he saw that the rats were not actually destroying the species for their own individual preservation; they were really saving the species. If the rats had been sentimental and had decided that they would all starve together without indulging in cannibalism, then indeed there might have been some danger. But rats were realists, and so their racial future seemed secure from this emergency.

Day by day, the numbers of rats became fewer, and then one morning they seemed to be gone entirely. Ish knew that there still must be many rats in the city, but what had happened was merely what would happen in the decline of any species. Under natural circumstances, the rats kept out of sight, like narrow passageways and holes and brash-filled gullies. Only when their numbers became so great that they could not all find such refuges did they spill over and inhabit the open places where they could be seen.

Doubtless, at the end, disease may have helped, but he was never sure of this. One great advantage of the disappearance through cannibalism was that there were no bodies of rats left around. They had gone on to preserve. the species into the next generation. Also, he knew, although he did not investigate, that the rats must have done a great deal toward removing the bodies of the human beings who had died in the original disaster.

As he collected his thoughts upon the subject, he was surprised that there had been no plague of mice. The ants had come first, and then had come the rats. Between the two there should have been a rapid increase of mice, because the mice should have had almost as good an opportunity as the rats and because their breeding rate was even faster. He never learned the answer, but merely had to suppose that some control of which he knew nothing had acted to prevent the rapid increase of mice.

Both Ish and Em took a little while to recover from the horror with which the rats had filled them. But after a while they decided that Princess had not contracted hydrophobia. They loosed her, and life became more normal, and they forgot about the constant crawling of the gray bodies.

The fables were wrong. Not the Lion, but Man, was the King of Beasts.

Throughout his reign the rule was heavy, often harsh.

But though the cry rise up, “The Kind is dead!” it shall not go on: “Long live the King!”

As in the old days when some conqueror died, leaving no tall son, and the captains strove together for the scepter and none proved strong enough and the realm fell apart, so it shall be again, for neither the ant nor the rat nor the dog nor the ape is wise enough above his fellows. For a little while there will be jostlings, quick rises and sudden falls; then, a quiet and a peace such as the earth has not known in twenty thousand years.

Again her head lay in the crook of his arm, and he looked down into the dark eyes. She spoke. “Well, you’d better get busy at that book-work now. I guess it’s happened.”

And then suddenly before he could say anything, he felt her tremble and she was crying. He had not thought this of her—this fear! He felt the sudden weakness of his own terror. What if she collapsed?

“Oh, darling,” he cried out. “Maybe we can still do something! There are ways. You mustn’t try to go through with it!”

“Oh, it’s not that! It’s not that!” she cried out, still trembling. “I lied. Not what I said, what I didn’t say! But it’s all the same. You’re just a nice boy. You looked at my hands, and said they were nice. You never even noticed the blue in the half-moons.”

He felt the shock, and he knew that she felt the shock mi him. Now everything came together in his mind—brunette complexion, dark liquid eyes, full lips, white teeth, rich voice, accepting temperament.

Then she spoke again, scarcely in more than a whisper, “It didn’t matter at first, of course. No man cares then about that. But my mother’s people never had much luck in the world. Maybe when things are starting out again, it shouldn’t be with them. But mostly, I guess, I think it wasn’t right with you.”

Then suddenly he heard nothing more, for the whole vast farce of everything broke in upon him, and he laughed, and all he could do was to laugh and laugh more, and then he found that she, too, had relaxed and was laughing with him and holding him all the closer.

“Oh, darling,” he said, “everything is smashed and New York lies empty from Spuyten Duyvil to the Battery, and there’s no government in Washington. The senators and the judges and the governors are all dead and rotten, and the Jewbaiters and the Negro-baiters along with them. We’re just two poor people, picking at the leavings of civilization for our lives, not knowing whether it’s to be the ants or the rats or something else will get us. Maybe a thousand years from now people can afford the luxury of wondering and worrying about that kind of thing again. But I doubt it. And now there are just the two of us here, or maybe three, now.”

He kissed her while she still was weeping quietly. And he knew that for once he had seen more clearly and more deeply and been stronger than she.