Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
distinct, loud tones: "Hello--hello--hello!"
What was that whirring? Surely--no--was it the click of a receiver?
She bent close, she moved the pegs in the holes, and called and called,
until her voice rose almost to a shriek, and her heart hammered. It was
as if she had heard the last flicker of creation, and the evil was
silence. Her voice dropped to a sob. She sat stupidly staring into the
black and sarcastic mouthpiece, and the thought came again. Hope lay
dead within her. Yes, the cable and the rockets remained; but the
world--she could not frame the thought or say the word. It was too
mighty--too terrible! She turned toward the door with a new fear in her
heart. For the first time she seemed to realize that she was alone in
the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger,--with a
man alien in blood and culture--unknown, perhaps unknowable. It was
awful! She must escape--she must fly; he must not see her again. Who
knew what awful thoughts--
She gathered her silken skirts deftly about her young, smooth
limbs--listened, and glided into a sidehall. A moment she shrank back:
the hall lay filled with dead women; then she leaped to the door and
tore at it, with bleeding fingers, until it swung wide. She looked out.
He was standing at the top of the alley,--silhouetted, tall and black,
motionless. Was he looking at her or away? She did not know--she did not
care. She simply leaped and ran--ran until she found herself alone amid
the dead and the tall ramparts of towering buildings.
She stopped. She was alone. Alone! Alone on the streets--alone in the
city--perhaps alone in the world! There crept in upon her the sense of
deception--of creeping hands behind her back--of silent, moving things
she could not see,--of voices hushed in fearsome conspiracy. She looked
behind and sideways, started at strange sounds and heard still stranger,
until every nerve within her stood sharp and quivering, stretched to
scream at the barest touch. She whirled and flew back, whimpering like a
child, until she found that narrow alley again and the dark, silent
figure silhouetted at the top. She stopped and rested; then she walked
silently toward him, looked at him timidly; but he said nothing as he
handed her into the car. Her voice caught as she whispered:
"Not--that."
And he answered slowly: "No--not that!"
They climbed into the car. She bent forward on the wheel and sobbed,
with great, dry, quivering sobs, as they flew toward the cable office on
the east side, leaving the world of wealth and prosperity for the world
of poverty and work. In the world behind them were death and silence,
grave and grim, almost cynical, but always decent; here it was hideous.
It clothed itself in every ghastly form of terror, struggle, hate, and
suffering. It lay wreathed in crime and squalor, greed and lust. Only in
its dread and awful silence was it like to death everywhere.
Yet as the two, flying and alone, looked upon the horror of the world,
slowly, gradually, the sense of all-enveloping death deserted them. They
seemed to move in a world silent and asleep,--not dead. They moved in
quiet reverence, lest somehow they wake these sleeping forms who had, at
last, found peace. They moved in some solemn, world-wide _Friedhof_,
above which some mighty arm had waved its magic wand. All nature slept
until--until, and quick with the same startling thought, they looked
into each other's eyes--he, ashen, and she, crimson, with unspoken
thought. To both, the vision of a mighty beauty--of vast, unspoken
things, swelled in their souls; but they put it away.
Great, dark coils of wire came up from the earth and down from the sun
and entered this low lair of witchery. The gathered lightnings of the
world centered here, binding with beams of light the ends of the earth.
The doors gaped on the gloom within. He paused on the threshold.
"Do you know the code?" she asked.
"I know the call for help--we used it formerly at the bank."
She hardly heard. She heard the lapping of the waters far below,--the
dark and restless waters--the cold and luring waters, as they called. He
stepped within. Slowly she walked to the wall, where the water called
below, and stood and waited. Long she waited, and he did not come. Then
with a start she saw him, too, standing beside the black waters. Slowly
he removed his coat and stood there silently. She walked quickly to him
and laid her hand on his arm. He did not start or look. The waters
lapped on in luring, deadly rhythm. He pointed down to the waters, and
said quietly:
"The world lies beneath the waters now--may I go?"
She looked into his stricken, tired face, and a great pity surged within
her heart. She answered in a voice clear and calm, "No."
Upward they turned toward life again, and he seized the wheel. The
world was darkening to twilight, and a great, gray pall was falling
mercifully and gently on the sleeping dead. The ghastly glare of reality
seemed replaced with the dream of some vast romance. The girl lay
silently back, as the motor whizzed along, and looked half-consciously
for the elf-queen to wave life into this dead world again. She forgot to
wonder at the quickness with which he had learned to drive her car. It
seemed natural. And then as they whirled and swung into Madison Square
and at the door of the Metropolitan Tower she gave a low cry, and her
eyes were great! Perhaps she had seen the elf-queen?
The man led her to the elevator of the tower and deftly they ascended.
In her father's office they gathered rugs and chairs, and he wrote a
note and laid it on the desk; then they ascended to the roof and he made
her comfortable. For a while she rested and sank to dreamy somnolence,
watching the worlds above and wondering. Below lay the dark shadows of
the city and afar was the shining of the sea. She glanced at him timidly
as he set food before her and took a shawl and wound her in it, touching
her reverently, yet tenderly. She looked up at him with thankfulness in
her eyes, eating what he served. He watched the city. She watched him.
He seemed very human,--very near now.
"Have you had to work hard?" she asked softly.
"Always," he said.
"I have always been idle," she said. "I was rich."
"I was poor," he almost echoed.
"The rich and the poor are met together," she began, and he finished:
"The Lord is the Maker of them all."
"Yes," she said slowly; "and how foolish our human distinctions
seem--now," looking down to the great dead city stretched below,
swimming in unlightened shadows.
"Yes--I was not--human, yesterday," he said.
She looked at him. "And your people were not my people," she said; "but
today----" She paused. He was a man,--no more; but he was in some larger
sense a gentleman,--sensitive, kindly, chivalrous, everything save his
hands and--his face. Yet yesterday----
"Death, the leveler!" he muttered.
"And the revealer," she whispered gently, rising to her feet with great
eyes. He turned away, and after fumbling a moment sent a rocket into the
darkening air. It arose, shrieked, and flew up, a slim path of light,
and scattering its stars abroad, dropped on the city below. She scarcely
noticed it. A vision of the world had risen before her. Slowly the
mighty prophecy of her destiny overwhelmed her. Above the dead past
hovered the Angel of Annunciation. She was no mere woman. She was
neither high nor low, white nor black, rich nor poor. She was primal
woman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life. She looked
upon the man beside her and forgot all else but his manhood, his strong,
vigorous manhood--his sorrow and sacrifice. She saw him glorified. He
was no longer a thing apart, a creature below, a strange outcast of
another clime and blood, but her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God
and great All-Father of the race to be.
He did not glimpse the glory in her eyes, but stood looking outward
toward the sea and sending rocket after rocket into the unanswering
darkness. Dark-purple clouds lay banked and billowed in the west. Behind
them and all around, the heavens glowed in dim, weird radiance that
suffused the darkening world and made almost a minor music. Suddenly, as
though gathered back in some vast hand, the great cloud-curtain fell
away. Low on the horizon lay a long, white star--mystic, wonderful! And
from it fled upward to the pole, like some wan bridal veil, a pale, wide
sheet of flame that lighted all the world and dimmed the stars.
In fascinated silence the man gazed at the heavens and dropped his
rockets to the floor. Memories of memories stirred to life in the dead
recesses of his mind. The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his
soul. Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leaped
the lone majesty of kings long dead. He arose within the shadows, tall,
straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly scepters
hovering to his grasp. It was as though some mighty Pharaoh lived again,
or curled Assyrian lord. He turned and looked upon the lady, and found
her gazing straight at him.
Silently, immovably, they saw each other face to face--eye to eye. Their
souls lay naked to the night. It was not lust; it was not love--it was
some vaster, mightier thing that needed neither touch of body nor thrill
of soul. It was a thought divine, splendid.
Slowly, noiselessly, they moved toward each other--the heavens above,
the seas around, the city grim and dead below. He loomed from out the
velvet shadows vast and dark. Pearl-white and slender, she shone beneath
the stars. She stretched her jeweled hands abroad. He lifted up his
mighty arms, and they cried each to the other, almost with one voice,
"The world is dead."
"Long live the----"
"Honk! Honk!" Hoarse and sharp the cry of a motor drifted clearly up
from the silence below. They started backward with a cry and gazed upon
each other with eyes that faltered and fell, with blood that boiled.
"Honk! Honk! Honk! Honk!" came the mad cry again, and almost from their
feet a rocket blazed into the air and scattered its stars upon them. She
covered her eyes with her hands, and her shoulders heaved. He dropped
and bowed, groped blindly on his knees about the floor. A blue flame
spluttered lazily after an age, and she heard the scream of an answering
rocket as it flew.
Then they stood still as death, looking to opposite ends of the earth.
"Clang--crash--clang!"
The roar and ring of swift elevators shooting upward from below made the
great tower tremble. A murmur and babel of voices swept in upon the
night. All over the once dead city the lights blinked, flickered, and
flamed; and then with a sudden clanging of doors the entrance to the
platform was filled with men, and one with white and flying hair rushed
to the girl and lifted her to his breast. "My daughter!" he sobbed.
Behind him hurried a younger, comelier man, carefully clad in motor
costume, who bent above the girl with passionate solicitude and gazed
into her staring eyes until they narrowed and dropped and her face
flushed deeper and deeper crimson.
"Julia," he whispered; "my darling, I thought you were gone forever."
She looked up at him with strange, searching eyes.
"Fred," she murmured, almost vaguely, "is the world--gone?"
"Only New York," he answered; "it is terrible--awful! You know,--but
you, how did you escape--how have you endured this horror? Are you well?
Unharmed?"
"Unharmed!" she said.
"And this man here?" he asked, encircling her drooping form with one arm
and turning toward the Negro. Suddenly he stiffened and his hand flew to
his hip. "Why!" he snarled. "It's--a--nigger--Julia! Has he--has he
dared----"
She lifted her head and looked at her late companion curiously and then
dropped her eyes with a sigh.