The Master-Knot of Human Fate Part 2

It might be months, or years, or days, I kept no count,--I took no note.

BYRON.

They had been on the island nearly four months. The corn was waving in the soft breeze, and the sun shone down hotly. Indoors sweet corn was boiling in the same pot with new potatoes, while in an improvised milk-boiler on coals, at one side of the fireplace, peas were simmering. The table was spread, and there was white bread and jersey b.u.t.ter and raspberries. Adam, with La.s.sie's puppies crawling over him, sat in the doorway, and watched Robin put the finis.h.i.+ng touches to their Sunday dinner.

His apparel was somewhat picturesque, and he had a brown and thoroughly healthy look. Robin was dressed in a costume of blue denims. The skirt was rather short, and the waist was a blouse, finished at the throat with a broad collar that turned away from a neck still white in spite of much sunlight. Their months of roughing it had not harmed them, and only the intense sadness in Adam's eyes, the pathetic droop of Robin's mouth, when they thought themselves un.o.bserved, told a story different from that of pastoral content.

Their meal was unusually silent. Sometimes they fell into long lapses of silence; there was so much not to say. In all the weeks of the past they had worked, almost feverishly, allowing as little time as possible for thought, and never speaking of what was oftenest in their minds. Much of the time Adam seemed to be in a dream, only half realizing the flight of time, that made hope more and more hopeless.

Robin said nothing. One would not seek to console the sky with phrases if all the stars were wiped out. She half reproached herself at times for the peace, the something akin to happiness, that had crept into her life. She had long before grown very weary of the world and all it had to offer.

She was stung at the sight of Adam's quiet face, with the repressed suffering that had somehow touched it with a beauty it had not possessed, and she said impetuously, "Let us go out, Adam; let us go quite away somewhere, and talk. There is so much I want to ask you, but I have not dared."

He looked up with such a hurt expression that she went on quickly, "Not that; I mean I couldn't. I have been afraid to put things in words. They grow so much more real then. But now I am afraid to keep my thoughts longer."

They went past the wheat and corn fields, through a narrow canon that led them to a valley they had never seen before. It was very beautiful, and the play of the sunlight on the high walls of rock, the murmur of the stream below them, the trembling aspens, the white peaks in the distance, made a scene worthy their attention, but they were blind to it.

They sat down on a broad stone seat; presently Adam said, "Now, tell me; tell me how it seems to you."

"No," she answered, "you must tell me. What has happened to us, Adam?

Where are we, and why were we left?"

"G.o.d knows," he said reverently.

"Do you think it possible," she said slowly, "that we are dead?"

"Oh, I don't know!" he broke out, with a return to something of his old childlike impatience. "Sometimes I think it is all a dream, and directly I shall wake up and find myself in my dingy old law office.

But you are not a dream. These mountains are not a dream. La.s.sie barking down below there is not a dream; and these callous spots on my hands are real enough in all conscience, and no dream could last so long. Sometimes I think we have been hypnotized and carried off and left on an island somewhere. Sometimes--do you remember the man who computed the vast number of 'mysterious disappearances,' and formed a theory that the earth was being sorted out before the opening of the last vial, or some such stuff? Do you think we can be simply another disappearance?"

"I don't know," she said. "It seems easier to believe that, easier to believe anything than that the whole world has disappeared."

"Then I think sometimes," he went on, "that there are evil powers,--I know this sounds as if I had lost my mind, and maybe I have, I'm not sure of anything,--but it seems as if there might be an explanation if we believed in genii who have power over us. Perhaps you and I, who so often found fault with the poor old earth, are being punished by banishment from it. Perhaps we are being prepared for some great work.

I haven't very much religion, and yet I suppose I do believe in a divine purpose back of things, a directing power that wastes nothing.

I have tried to think why this thing should come upon us, you and me, of all the world; and while it seems an evil thing, a terrible and overwhelming disaster, when I realize that it might have befallen me alone, then just the fact that you are here makes it seem almost good.

Do you understand?"

"Yes," she said quickly. "I have felt just so. When, at first, I felt as if I should curse G.o.d and die, I had only to remember you to fall on my knees for thankfulness. Even if a dozen other people had been left instead, no one would have understood as you have. Oh, I would infinitely rather be alone with you than in the utter loneliness of the society of a lot of men and women who would drive me mad with their complaints and inefficiency. I don't know whether it is a dream, or heaven or h.e.l.l, or the work of some black magic; I only know that if it is a punishment it has been commuted, in that you share it. And yet how selfish that sounds, as selfish as love itself. I ought to wish you were in a better, happier place, where you could carry out your ambitions--" She stopped, and her eyes filled.

"Don't mind," he said grimly. "If that is selfishness, I am selfish to the core. I have gone over the whole list, and I don't know any one I would rather sacrifice to companions.h.i.+p with me in this exile than you. My parents were old; they could never have borne the shock. My sisters would be unhappy without their families; my women friends could none of them have met the exigencies of such an existence as you have; and as for men, by this we would all have been barbarians together. You have kept me sane and alive, for that matter."

"But are we sane?" she said slowly, "I think I could stand it if I only knew we were sane and alive. It is the feeling that I don't know anything, that this valley, these mountains, may fade like the baseless fabric of a dream. And sometimes I think that it may be real, all real but you, and that I shall find myself here all alone, dead or alive, sane or mad. G.o.d! how horrible it is!"

"That thought has never troubled me," he said. "Whatever has put us in this dream together will keep us together to the end. You have not wanted me to go far away from you, so we have worked together; I have even let you do work that was unfit for you because I knew you would prefer it. You were more frank about it, but you didn't feel any more strongly than I did. I couldn't, I can't bear to have you out of my sight."

"Have you ever thought that it may be so?" she asked hesitatingly.

"What? That it isn't a dream, and that we are sane and alive? Yes, I have thought of that too. If it be true, how universal is the destruction? We know now, pretty well, from the time that has pa.s.sed,--by the way, how long is it?" He stopped with a sudden dazed look, and turned to her.

"It was the first of May," she said softly. "Now it is nearly the last of August."

"Four months!" he said in a shocked tone. "I did not realize it; I must have been worse stunned than I thought. In that case it seems as if there can't be anything left of this continent, unless it be detached peaks here and there, where other mountain ranges have been.

There may be other men and women waiting as we wait for a sail, a sign, a message, and they do not know any more than we do whence it is to come. The alteration in the climate has convinced me that the waters on our West are those of the Pacific; it has been so warm and pleasant. I have tried to imagine what kind of a winter we may expect, or will the winter of our discontent be made glorious summer--"

"By three crops of strawberries, like California?" she interrupted.

"Perhaps," he said, smiling. "As to the East, that may be the Atlantic, or the Gulf; it seems more probable that it is the latter.

The St. Lawrence district was said to be the oldest section of this continent, and it is reasonable to suppose the earth's crust thickest there, and along the mountain ranges. I suppose the continent has gone to make another layer, a stratum, on top of the pliocene, and after awhile the waters will subside, or some volcanic action will raise up a new continent. If there are any s.h.i.+ps anywhere, on any seas, they will search every degree of lat.i.tude and longitude. Our flag floats, did float, all over this globe; if it still flies anywhere, we shall see it again."

"If I did," she said irreverently, "I should feel sure we were in heaven. It was beautiful before, but what wouldn't it mean now, Adam?

But have you any one left on earth; if this continent is all gone, who would look for you? There are people of my blood, or there were, but they did not even know of my existence."

"There is not a soul," he answered. "Indeed, in this country it would have been one chance in ten million. You might have done it," he said, half jestingly, "but you are here."

"Yes," she echoed; "I am here. Adam, how long will it be before you are satisfied that no one is left, no one in the sense of any civilized people, with a country and means of circ.u.mnavigation?"

"A year," he answered, "perhaps more, but a year anyhow. I shall not give up hope until then."

IV

How gladly would I meet Mortality my sentence, and be earth Insensible! How glad would lay me down As in my mother's lap!

MILTON.

The corn hardened, and the wheat ripened, and was harvested in truly primeval fas.h.i.+on. Adam cut the wheat with a scythe, and Robin followed him, binding it as best she could. They shocked it together, and then began hauling it to the barn with the horses and bob-sleds, their only vehicle. The stacking was weary work and progressed slowly. Adam watched his co-worker toil over the sheaves, and then took them from her and pitched them on the stack haphazard.

"You shall not bother over it any more," he said, "not if we live on hominy all winter. Have you ever been in Mexico? Well, Hawaii was called the land of poco tempo, but Mexico was the land of manana.

There isn't any work there for the work's sake. I mean there wasn't, and we can take a lesson from them. We need not hurry; the legislature will not meet this winter, and there will be no grand opera before spring. Daisy and Lily shall do our work for us. We will find a bit of hard, smooth ground, and then we will not muzzle the cows that tread out the grain."

"Willingly," gasped Robin, climbing down from her slippery eminence on top of the load of grain; "but do you think we are going to have any winter?"

"That is pre-eminently one of the things that no fellow can find out,"

he answered. "In a dream you are likely to have any kind of weather, and on a submerged planet we have no precedents at hand to tell us what to expect. By replanting the vegetables right along we have had a perpetual crop. As long as we have this kind of weather things will grow, and I suppose we would better let them. Shut in as we are, it doesn't seem likely that any very fearful winds are apt to trouble us; and if there is a wet season, on this slope we shall have good drainage. If the worst comes to the worst, there's the tunnel. Could you make that cheerful and homelike?"

Robin smiled rather sadly. "It will do to put the grain in," she said, and they walked on silently.

The spot finally selected for the thres.h.i.+ng floor was brushed as clean as twig brooms would make it, and the wheat spread out upon it. Adam and La.s.sie drove the cows over it leisurely, and between times Adam experimented on a flail. When he finally had one that answered the purpose, and found he could use it without fracturing his skull, the cows were released, and he went on with the work. Seated on a boulder close by, her sombrero tipped well over her eyes, Robin fanned the grain, and converted it into a coa.r.s.e cracked wheat with a venerable coffee-mill.

"I will make you a Mexican mill, when I get through with this," said Adam, "but you cannot use it, because it is too hard work; I shall have to be the miller. It is a rather simple affair, and dates from before the days of Noah; it is made with two stones, sandstone preferred, the lower of which is hollowed out bowl-fas.h.i.+on, with a hole in the centre; the upper stone is rounding, and fits in the bowl, and has a hole in it about four inches from the edge, in which a stout wooden handle is inserted, with which to turn it. The two stones are ground together until they become smooth. Then they are placed on four other stones as rests, and a blanket or cloth is spread underneath to catch the meal. The grain is poured around the edge of the upper stone, and works down. It makes a very tolerable flour."

"How handy you are!" she said. "Isn't it a good thing we hadn't civilized the whole world to such a degree that only patent high-grade flour was used? Where should we be now without the simple devices of the good people of the Stone Age, and their survivors on whom we looked down with so much scorn?"

The snapping of the corn was an easier matter, and it was piled in the tunnel till they should be ready to sh.e.l.l it. Then Adam did what he called his "fall plowing," and left the bare brown sod to lie fallow.