But the newspapers told nothing more. Their contents, following the repetition of the announcement of the morning, were of a wholly secondary nature, reflecting only the effect of the statement itself. A hundred cranks found their opinions in big type as fast as they were uttered—absurd opinions, pitiful opinions; but they were seized upon. There were religious revivals starting in the land. But the scientists—those banded together who had worked faithfully first to learn the nature of the discovery and then to keep it secret until today—they had nothing more to say.
Tony dropped into a restaurant, where, though it was only afternoon, an evening hilarity already had arrived. The Exchange was closed! No one knew exactly why or what was to happen. Why care? That was the air here.
Two men of Tony’s age, acquaintances in school and friends in Wall Street, stopped at his table. “We’re going the rounds. Come along.”
Tony returned with them to the warm, sunlit street where the exhilaration of night—the irresponsibility of after-hours with offices closed and work done—denied the day.… Their taxi squeezed through Broadway in which frantic policemen wrestled vainly with overwhelming crowds. It stopped at a brownstone house in the West Forties.
A night-club, and it was crowded, though the sun was still shining. The three floors of the house were filled with people in business clothes drinking and dancing. On the top floor two roulette-wheels were surrounded by players. Tony saw heaps of chips, the piles of bills. He looked at the faces of the players and recognized two or three of them. They were hectic faces. The market had closed. This was a real smash,—not merely a money smash,—a smash of the whole world ahead. Naturally money was losing its value, but men played for it—cheered when they won, groaned when they lost, and staked again. The limit had been taken off the game.
Downstairs, at the bar, were three girls to whom Tony’s two friends immediately attached themselves. They were pretty girls of the kind that Broadway produces by an overnight incubation: Girls who had been born far from the Great White Way. Girls whose country and small-town attitudes had vanished. All of them had hair transformed from its original shade to ashen blonde. Around their eyes were beaded lashes; their voices were high; their silk clothes adhered to their bodies. They drank and laughed.
“Here’s to old Bronson!” they toasted. “Here’s to the ol’ world coming to an end!”
Tony sat with them: Clarissa, Jacqueline, Bettina. He gazed at them, laughed with them, drank with them; but he thought of Eve, asleep at last, he hoped. Eve, slender as they, young as they, far, far lovelier than they; and bearing within her mind and soul the frightful burden of the full knowledge of this day.
The room was hazy with smoke. People moved through it incessantly. After a while Tony looked again at the motley crowd; and across the room he saw a friend sitting alone in a booth. Tony rose and went toward the man. He was a person—a personage—worthy of notice. He was lean, gray-haired, immaculate, smooth. His dark eyes were remote and unseeing. First nights knew him. Mothers of very rich daughters, mothers of daughters of impeccable lineage, sought him. Wherever the gayest of the gay world went, he could be found. Southampton, Newport, Biarritz, Cannes, Nice, Deauville, Palm Beach. He was like old silver—yet he was not old. Forty, perhaps. A bachelor. He would have liked it if some one of authority had called him a connoisseur of life and living—an arbiter elegantiæ, a Petronius transferred from Nero’s Rome to our day. He would have been pleased, but he would not have revealed his pleasure. His name was Peter Vanderbilt. And he was trapped too,—Tony was thinking as he saw him,—trapped with him and Eve and Kyto and the panhandler and Bettina and Jacqueline and all the rest on the rim of the world which was going to collide with another world sent from space for that errand; but a world with still another spinning before it, which would pass close to our world—close and spin on, safe.
Tony cleared his brain. “Hello,” he said to Peter Vanderbilt.
Vanderbilt looked up and his face showed welcome. “Tony! Jove! Of all people. Glad to see you. Sit. Sit and contemplate.” He beckoned a waiter and ordered. “You’re a bit on the inside, I take it.”
“Inside?”
“Friend of the Hendrons, I remember. You know a bit more of what’s going on.”
“Yes,” admitted Tony; it was senseless to deny it to this man.
“Don’t tell me. Don’t break confidences for my sake. I’m not one that has to have details ahead of others. The general trend of events is clear enough. Funny. Delicious, isn’t it, to think of the end of all this? I feel stimulated, don’t you? All of it—going to pieces! I feel like saying, ‘Thank God!’ I was sick of it. Every one was. Civilization’s a wretched parody. Evidently there was a just and judging God, after all.
“Democracy! Look at it, lad. Here are the best people, breaking the newest laws they made themselves. Imagine the fool who invented democracy! But what’s better on this world anywhere? So there is a God after all, and He’s taking us in hand again—the way He did in Noah’s time.… Good thing, I say.
“But Hendron and his scientists aren’t doing so well. They’re making a big mistake. They’ve done splendidly—hardly could have done better up to to-day. I mean, keeping it under cover and not letting it out at all until they had some real information. They had luck in the fact that these Bronson bodies were sighted in the south, and have been only visible from the Southern Hemisphere. Not many observatories down there—just South Africa, South America and Australia. That was a break—gave them much more of a chance to keep it to themselves; and I say, they did well up to now. But they’re not well advised if they hold anything back much longer; they’d better tell anything—no matter how bad it is. They’ll have to, as they’ll soon see. Nothing can be as bad as uncertainty.
“It proves that all those names signed to this morning’s manifesto are top-notch scientists. The human element is the one thing they can’t analyze and reduce to figures. What they need is a counsel in public relations. Tell Cole Hendron I recommend Ivy Lee.”
Rising, he left Tony and vanished in the throng. Tony started to pay the check, and saw Vanderbilt’s ten-dollar bill on the table. He rose, secured his hat and went out.
The latest newspaper contained a statement from the White House. The President requested that on the morrow every one return to work. It promised that the Government would maintain stability in the country, and inveighed violently against the exaggerated reaction of the American people to the scientists’ statement.
Tony smiled. “Business as usual! Business going on, as usual, during alterations,” he thought. He realized more than ever how much his countrymen lived for and believed in business.
He wondered how much of the entire truth had been told to the President, and what the political angle on it would be. Amusing to think of the end of the world having a political angle; but of course, it had. Everything had.
He took a taxi to the Hendrons’ apartment. More than a block away from the building, he had to abandon the cab. The crowd and the police cordon about the apartment both had increased; but certain persons could pass; and Tony learned that he still was one of them.
Several men, whose voices he could overhear in loud argument, were with Cole Hendron behind the closed doors of the big study on the roof. No one was with Eve. She awaited him, alone.
She was dressed carefully, charmingly, as she always was, her lovely hair brushed back, her lips cool to look at, but so warm upon his own!
He pressed her to him for a moment; and for that instant when he kissed her and held her close, all wonder and terror was sent away. What matter the end of everything, if first he had her! He had never dreamed of such delight in possession as he felt, holding her; he had never dared dream of such response from her—or from any one. He had won her, and she him, utterly. As he thought of the cataclysm destroying them, he thought of it coming to them together, in each other’s arms; and he could not care.
She felt it, fully as he. Her fingers touched his face with a passionate tenderness which tore him.
“What’s done it for us so suddenly and so completely, Tony?”
“‘The shadow of the sword,’ I suppose, my dear—oh, my dear! I remember reading it in Kipling when I was a boy, but never understanding it. Remember the two in love when they knew that one would surely die? ‘There is no happiness like that snatched under the shadow of the sword.’”
“But we both shall die, if either does, Tony. That’s so much better.”