When Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 1)

MRS. MADELINE DRAKE MURDERED BY LOOTERS WHO RAIDED SEVERAL CONNECTICUT FARMS AND ESTATES LATE TO-DAY.

The paper dropped from Tony’s fingers. He slumped to a bench and covered his face with his hands.

He felt Eve’s hand and looked up, utter despair on his face.

“Read that.” He saw that she held his telegram.

“I have read it. Tony—”

“I should have gone to her; or I should have taken her away—but I believed it best to leave her in her home as long as possible. I was going to her to-morrow. Now—now—”

She checked his flow of recrimination, sitting down on the bench beside him and reaching up to smooth his hair as if he were only a child. “You couldn’t have done a thing, Tony. This might have happened wherever you had taken her. All over the country, bands of men have been running like wolves; and to-day they became more merciless.”

Tony leaped to his feet. “I’ll go to her, and find them, and kill them!”

“You’ll never find them, Tony. They’ll have moved on; and no one will have stayed to tell you who they were.… Besides, Tony, they’ll be punished without any one raising a hand. Perhaps already they are dead.”

“But I must go to her!”

“Of course; and I’ll go with you; but we must wait for the tide to fall.”

“Tide?” He stalked to the edge of the roof and stared down; for, strangely, he had forgotten it. Now he saw the streets running full, not with the foul water of the harbor, but with a clean green flood. The Bronson Bodies lit it almost to dim daylight.

Tony gazed up at them, aghast. “My mind, my mind can understand it, Eve; but, good God, she was my mother! Murdered! Cornered somewhere in her house—my home where I was a little boy, and where I ran to her with my triumphs and my troubles, Eve. I wonder where she was, in what room they struck her down, the damned cowards—” He did not finish. He was racked by a succession of great sobs.

Eve caught his hand and brought him again to the bench. Still they were alone, and she sat close beside him, holding him in her arms.

“We’ll go to her, Tony, as soon as we can.… This is happening to everybody. It’s horrible, fiendish, unbelievable—and inevitable. It was frightful that they killed her; and yet probably, Tony, they did it instantly, and surely without agony for her; so perhaps it is much better that she went now, than that she should live through the next months as we know they will be—months of starvation and savagery and horror; leading only to the final catastrophe.”

Tony looked bleakly at the girl. “Yes, I know that! but I can feel only t

hat they killed her.”

For a long time they said nothing more; then they arose, returned to the parapet and gazed down at the water.

Strange sounds rose with the flow of the flood; the collapse of windows under the weight of water; the outrush of air, the inrush of the tide. Away on other streets not citadeled by the massive towers whose steel skeletons reached down to the living rock, the walls were beginning to fall. Smoke drifted like a mist between the buildings as the water, the final enemy of fire, began to cause conflagrations.

Somewhere it “shorted” an electric current, perhaps; somewhere else it had sent a family fleeing before a fire which ought first to have been extinguished; or the water itself entered into chemical combinations which caused heat. Doubtless many a hand deliberately set the flames. But there was no wind to-night; so the flood isolated each fire; here and there a building burned; but the huge terraced towers of Manhattan stood dark and silent, intact.

“You must try to sleep, Tony.”

“And you!”

“Till the tide goes out; yes, Tony. I’ll try, if you will.” She kissed him, and they went in together, to separate at the door of the room where she was to sleep. Tony went on to the bed allotted him, and he lay down without undressing. In the next room Cole Hendron was actually asleep.

Tony, trying not to think, occupied himself with separating the sounds which reached him through the opened window—a woman’s shriek, a bass voice booming a strange song, a flute.

Some one, seated above the flood, was piping in the unnatural light of the Bronson Bodies as the sea swept over the city; but for the most part the people who had remained were silent—paired off, here and there, sharing in each other’s arms the terrible excitement of dawning doomsday.

Tony twisted on his bed and remembered his mother. When this tide turned—and enormous as it was, it must flow six hours, ebb for six before it flowed again, just like the moon tides—he must set off home for his last service to her.

“Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days, that I may be certified how long I have to live.” The lines for the burial of the dead began echoing in his brain. “Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long; and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity.”

Tony had shut his eyes, and now he opened them to the light of the Bronson Bodies slanting into the room.… “For when thou art angry, all our days are gone; we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.”

The woman had ceased to shriek; but the Negro’s bass boomed on. Tony was sure it was a black man singing the weird chant which rode on the waters. The piper, too, played on.…

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