On high was heard the droning hum of the propellers. It ceased, and in wide, sure, evenly balanced spirals the great planes one by one slid down and took the earth as easily as a gull sinks to rest upon the bosom of a quiet sea.
“They do work well, my equilibrators!” murmured Allan, unable to suppress a thrill of pride. “Simple, too; but, after all, how wonderfully effective!”
The crowd parted to let him through with Beatrice. Two minutes later he was clasping the hands of the last Folk ever to be brought from the strange, buried village under the cliff beside the Sunless Sea.
He summoned Zangamon and Frumuos, together with Sivad and the three aviators.
“Well done!” said he; and that was all—all, yet enough. Then, while the people cheered again and, crowding round, greeted their kinsfolk, he gave orders for the housing and the care of the travel-wearied newcomers.
Through the summer air drifted slow smoke. Off on the edge of the grove that flanked the plaza to southward the crackling of new-built fires was heard.
Allan turned to Beta with a smile.
“Getting ready for the barbecue already!” said he, “With that and the games and all, they ought to have enough to keep them busy for one day. Don’t you think they’ll have to let us go a while? There are still a few finishing touches to put to the new laws I’m going to hand the Council this afternoon for the Folk to hear. Yes, by all means, they’ll have to let us go.”
Together they walked back to their bungalow amid its gardens of palm-growths, ferns and flowers. Here they stopped a moment to chat with some good friend, there to watch the children and—parentlike—make sure young Allan was safe and only normally dirty and grass-stained.
They gained their broad piazza at length, turned, and for a while watched the busy, happy scene in the shaded street, the plaza and the playground.
Then Beta sat down by the cradle—still in that same low chair Allan had built for her five years ago, a chair she had steadily refused to barter for a finer one.
He drew up another beside her. From his pocket he drew a paper—the new laws—and for a minute studied it with bent brows.
The soft wind stirred the woman’s hair as she sat there half dreaming, her blue-gray eyes, a little moist, seeing far more than just what lay before them. On his head a shaft of sunlight fell, and had you looked you might have seen the crisp, black hair none too sparingly lined with gray.
But his gaze was strong and level and his smile the same as in bygone years, as with his left hand he pressed hers and, with a look eloquent of many things, said:
“Now, sweetheart, if you’re quite ready—?”
CHAPTER XXXIV. 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 characterbuilding, 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, boyl 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 adornnent 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. z930. The astronomical observatory on Round Top Hill, one mile south of Newport Heights, was finished to-day and the last of the apparatus frown 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.”