Thousands of them still prevailed, indeed; but a huge oblong, which had been lighted before, was darkened now.
“The flood has caught the conduits!” And with the word, the little gleaming rows which etched the streets throughout another district died; but the rest burned on in beautiful defiance.
The city officially was abandoned; but men remained. Some men, whatever the warning, whatever the danger, refused to surrender; they stuck to their duties and to their services to the last. Some men and some boys; and some women and girls too. And so, on this night, New York had lights; it kept communication—telephone and telegraph too.
But now another pattern of blocks disappeared; Brooklyn went black. Beacons burned—airplane-guides and lighthouses. Ships, having their own electric installations, could be seen seeking the sea.
That too, thought Tony, was only a splendid gesture; yet the sight of the ships, like the stubborn persistence of the lights, threw a tingle in his blood and made him more proud of his people. They couldn’t give up—some of them! To leave the ships at the dock to take the tide that now was flooding in, was certain destruction. What use to steer them out to sea? For what would they be saved? Yet captains and crews could be found to steer and stoke them.
More blocks were black; the lights from the awful orbs of the Bronson Bodies slanted sharp across the streets, their shadows unbroken by the last lamps of the city’s defiance.
Now the street gave up sounds—the rush of water as the loud edge of the flood advanced filling the last floor of the cañons between the buildings. All over the world at the seaboard it must be the same, except that some cities already were overswept and this tide was now retiring. To rise higher yet twelve hours later; and then still higher!
Eliot James moved closer to Eve.
“What does it do to you?” he said.
She answered: “Too much.”
“Yes,” he said. “And it’s only begun?”
“It’s not begun,” whispered Eve. “This—this is really nothing. To-night, the waters will merely rise over the lower buildings of the city, and then subside. We will all leave in the ebb tide.”
“Which, I suppose, will drain the rivers dry? There was clearly no practical purpose for staying this twelve hours longer; but I am glad we did. I would not have escaped this sensation. I wonder where the people have gone who also stayed for it—whom we saw in the streets awhile ago?”
Eve attempted no answer; nor did Tony.
“I imagine,” persisted the poet, “they are also glad they remained. It is a new intoxication—annihilation. It multiplies every emotion.”
Tony so fully agreed with him that he drew Eve away. He made the excuse that, her father having retired, she also should sleep; but having taken her away from the others, he kept her to himself.
“Eve, we’ve got to marry!”
“My dear, what would marriage mean now?”
“But you feel it—don’t you?”
“Need for you—”
“As never before, Eve?”
“Yes, Tony. It’s as he said—oh, my dear! The waters overwhelm you—the flood rising and rising, with scarcely a sound, and those two yellow discs doing it! And no one can stop them! They’re coming on, Tony! They’re coming on, to lift the waters higher and higher; they’re coming on to crack open the shell of the earth! Tony—oh, hold me!”
“I have you, Eve. You have me! Here we are, two of us together.… They’re in pairs wherever they are in New York to-night, Eve. Didn’t you see them? Wherever they waited, a woman waited with a man. There’s only one answer to—annihilation. That’s it.”
“Tony!”
“My dear—”
“What’s that.… Your name? Some one’s searching for you. A message seems to have come.”
“How could a message come?”
Yet in the yellow light on the roof, they could see a uniformed boy; and Tony stepped out to meet him.
He had arrived at the building an hour ago, the boy was saying; with the elevators stopped, he had climbed the roof by the stairs.
Tony took his telegram, tore it open and, in the light of the two baleful Bodies, he read: