Property:Has text
From Off the Road Database
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">Up and down, over and across, back again––on went that ghostly search. Everywhere was silence and death––death and silence! They hunted from Madison Square to Spuyten Duyvel; they rushed across the Williamsburg Bridge; they swept over Brooklyn; from the Battery and Morningside Heights they scanned the river. Silence, silence everywhere, and no human sign. Haggard and bedraggled they puffed a third time slowly down Broadway, under the broiling sun, and at last stopped. He sniffed the air. An odor––a smell––and with the shifting breeze a sickening stench filled their nostrils and brought its awful warning. The girl settled back helplessly in her seat.</span>
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">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.</span>
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">How silent the street was! Not a soul was stirring, and yet it was high-noon––Wall Street? Broadway? He glanced almost wildly up and down, then across the street, and as he looked, a sickening horror froze in his limbs. With a choking cry of utter fright he lunged, leaned giddily against the cold building, and stared helplessly at the sight.</span>
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">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.</span>
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">"What can we do?" she cried.</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">It was his turn now to take the lead, and he did it quickly.</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">"The long distance telephone––the telegraph and the cable––night rockets and then––flight!"</span>
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">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.</span>
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">"Yesterday, they would not have served me," he whispered, as he forced the food down.</span><br />
Then he started up the street,––looking, peering, telephoning, ringing alarms; silent,<br />
silent all. Was nobody––nobody––he dared not think the thought and hurried on.
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">Then they stood still as death, looking to opposite ends of the earth.</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">"Clang—crash—clang!"</span>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">He wheeled the car in a sudden circle, running over the still body of a child and leaping on the curb. Then he rushed up the steps and tried the door and rang violently. There was a long pause, but at last the heavy door swung back. They stared a moment in silence. She had not noticed before that he was a Negro. He had not thought of her as white. She was a woman of perhaps twenty-five––rarely beautiful and richly gowned, with darkly-golden hair, and jewels. Yesterday, he thought with bitterness, she would scarcely have looked at him twice. He would have been dirt beneath her silken feet. She stared at him. Of all the sorts of men she had pictured as coming to her rescue she had not dreamed of one like him. Not that he was not human, but he dwelt in a world so far from hers, so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought. Yet as she looked at him curiously he seemed quite commonplace and usual. He was a tall, dark workingman of the better class, with a sensitive face trained to stolidity and a poor man's clothes and hands. His face was soft and slow and his manner at once cold and nervous, like fires long banked, but not out.</span>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">In ten minutes they were flying to Harlem on the wind. The Stutz rose and raced like an airplane. They took the turn at 110th Street on two wheels and slipped with a shriek into l35th.</span>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">“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––––"</span>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">“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.</span>
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<div class="poem">
<p>He drew a long breath as he threw back the last great iron door and stepped into the fetid slime within. Here at last was peace, and he groped moodily forward. A great rat leaped past him and cobwebs crept across his face. He felt carefully around the room, shelf by shelf, on the muddied floor, and in crevice and corner. Nothing. Then he went back to the far end, where somehow the wall felt different. He sounded and pushed and pried. Nothing. He started away. Then something brought him back. He was sounding and working again when suddenly the whole black wall swung as on mighty hinges, and blackness yawned beyond. He peered in; it was evidently a secret vault––some hiding place of the old bank unknown in newer times. He entered hesitatingly. It was a long, narrow room with shelves, and at the far end, an old iron chest. On a high shelf lay the two missing volumes of records, and others. He put them carefully aside and stepped to the chest. It was old, strong, and rusty. He looked at the vast and old-fashioned lock and flashed his light on the hinges. They were deeply incrusted with rust. Looking about, he found a bit of iron and began to pry. The rust had eaten a hundred years, and it had gone deep. Slowly, wearily, the old lid lifted, and with a last, low groan laid bare its treasure––and he saw the dull sheen of gold!
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">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."</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">"Long live the––––"</span>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">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?</span>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">"I'm afraid I was selfish," he said. But already the car was moving toward the park among the dark and lined dead of Harlem––the brown, still faces, the knotted hands, the homely garments, and the silence––the wild and haunting silence. Out of the park, and down Fifth Avenue they whirled. In and out among the dead they slipped and quivered, needing no sound of bell or horn, until the great, square Metropolitan Tower hove in sight. Gently he laid the dead elevator boy aside; the car shot upward. The door of the office stood open. On the threshold lay the stenographer, and, staring at her, sat the dead clerk. The inner office was empty, but a note lay on the desk, folded and addressed but unsent:</span>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">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.</span>
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<div class="poem">
<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">Suddenly he stopped still. He had forgotten. My God! How could he have forgotten? He must rush to the subway––then he almost laughed. No––a car; if he could find a Ford. He saw one. Gently he lifted off its burden, and took his place on the seat. He tested the throttle. There was gas. He glided off, shivering, and drove up the street. Everywhere stood, leaned, lounged, and lay the dead, in grim and awful silence. On he ran past an automobile, wrecked and overturned; past another, filled with a gay party whose smiles yet lingered on their death-struck lips; on past crowds and groups of cars, pausing by dead policemen; at 42nd Street he had to detour to Park Avenue to avoid the dead congestion. He came back on Fifth Avenue at 57th and flew past the Plaza and by the park with its hushed babies and silent throng, until as he was rushing past 72nd Street he heard a sharp cry, and saw a living form leaning wildly out an upper window. He gasped. The human voice sounded in his ears like the voice of God.</span>
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">"Jim!"</span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 4em;">He whirled and, with a sob of joy, caught her in his arms.</span>
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