Chapter 34: History And Roses

Allan sat writing in his library. Ten years had now slipped past since the last of the Folk had been brought to the surface and the ancient settlement in the bowels of the earth forever abandoned. Heavily sprinkled with gray, the man’s hair showed the stress of time and labors incredible.

Lines marked his face with the record of their character-building, even as his rapid pen traced on white paper the all but completing history of the new world whereat he had been laboring so long.

Through the open window, where the midsummer breeze swayed the silken curtains, drifted a hum from the long file of bee-hives in the garden. Farther away sounded the comfortable gossip of hens as they breasted their soft feathers into the dust-baths behind the stables. A dog barked.

Came voices from without. Along the street growled a motor. Laughter of children echoed from the playground. Allan ceased writing a moment, with a smile, and gazed about him as though waking from a dream.

“Can this be true?” he murmured. “After having worked over the records of the earlier time they still seem the reality and this the dream!”

On the garden-path sounded footfalls. Then the voice of Beatrice calling:

“Come out, boy! See my new roses--just opened this morning!”

He got up and went to the window. She--matronly now and of ampler bosom, yet still very beautiful to look upon--was standing there by the rose-tree, scissors in hand.

Allan, Junior, now a rugged, hardy-looking chap of nearly sixteen--tall, well built and with his father’s peculiar alertness of bearing--was bending down a high branch for his mother.

Beyond, on the lawn, the ten-year-old daughter, Frances, had young Harold in charge, swinging him high in a stout hammock under the apple-trees.

“Can’t you come out a minute, dear?” asked Beatrice imploringly. “Let your work go for once! Surely these new roses are worth more than a hundred pages of dry statistics that nobody’ll ever read, anyhow!”

He laughed merrily, threw her a kiss, and answered:

“Still a girl, I see! Ah, well, don’t tempt me, Beta. It’s hard enough to work on such a day, anyhow, without your trying to entice me out!”

“Won’t you come, Allan?”

“Just give me half an hour more and I’ll call it off for to-day!”

“All right; but make it a short half-hour, boy!”

He returned to his desk. The library, like the whole house now, was fully and beautifully furnished. The spoils of twenty cities had contributed to the adornment of “The Nest,” as they had christened their home.

In time Allan planned even to bring art-works from Europe to grace it still further. As yet he had not attempted to cross the Atlantic, but in his seaport near the ruins of Mobile a powerful one hundred and fifty-foot motor-yacht was building.

In less than six months he counted on making the first voyage of discovery to the Old World.

Contentedly he glanced around the familiar room. Upon the mantel over the capacious fireplace stood rare and beautiful bronzes. Priceless rugs adorned the polished floor.

The broad windows admitted floods of sunlight that fell across the great jars of flowers Beta always kept there for him and lighted up the heavy tiers of books in their mahogany cases. Books everywhere--under the window-seats, up the walls, even lining a deep alcove in the far corner. Books, hundreds upon hundreds, precious and cherished above all else.

“Who ever would have thought, after all,” murmured he, “that we’d find books intact as we did? A miracle--nothing less! With our printing-plant already at work under the cliff, all the art, science and literature of the ages--all that’s worth preserving--can be still kept for mankind. But if I hadn’t happened to find a library of books in a New York bonded warehouse all cased up for transportation, the work of preservation would have been forever impossible!”

He turned back to his history, and before writing again idly thumbed over a few pages of his voluminous manuscript. He read:

“March 1, A. D. 2930. The astronomical observatory on Round Top Hill, one mile south of Newport Heights, was finished to-day and the last of the apparatus from Cambridge, Lick, and other ruins was installed. I find my data for reckoning time are unreliable, and have therefore assumed this date arbitrarily and readjusted the calendar accordingly.

“Our Daily Messenger, circulating through the entire community and educating the people both in English and in scientific thought, will soon popularize the new date.

“Just as I have substituted the metric system for the old-time chaotic hodge-podge we once used, so I shall substitute English for Merucaan definitely inside of a few years. Already the younger generation hardly understands the native Merucaan speech. It will eventually become a dead, historically interesting language, like all other former tongues. The catastrophe has rendered possible, as nothing else could have done, the realization of universal speech, labor-unit exchange values in place of money, and a political and economic democracy unhampered by ideas of selfish, personal gain.”