The Last Man by Noyes Alfred

Author:Noyes, Alfred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, sci-fi
Published: 1941-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

Suddenly, she covered her face with her hands and, with a sharp, shuddering cry, as though she were protesting against some fearful memory, she put her head down on the table and wept.

Mark rose and stood beside her. "Don't do that," he said abruptly, almost harshly, for he was afraid of tenderness; and indeed it was the harshness of his tone that pulled her together.

"I'm sorry," she said, but the streaming eyes with which she looked at him were estranged and seemed to be wondering at the new hardness of his tone.

"Don't you realize what has happened," he said, and the hardness of his voice was re-doubled. "Don't you realize that, even before the disaster, things had gone utterly beyond the use of tears?"

She saw the torment of all the past weeks, and the memory of five years of war in his eyes; and she knew[Pg 139] instinctively that, while he was trying to save her from breaking down completely, he was also trying to master his own tenderness towards her.

"Forgive me," she said, in a low voice. "Forgive me, Mark."

"Forgive you," he said. "It won't be easy to forgive you for making the world look like the happy place it was intended to be. How can I ever forgive you, unless—unless so far as the past is concerned—we adopt your own brave motto: le coeur se brise ou se bronze? It is one thing or the other now. If we mourn till doomsday, we could never mourn enough for all that has happened. And how are we to mourn for the universe? Let the angels of God do that. I could weep for one or two, or a hundred, or a thousand; but how is it possible to weep for all mankind? Thank God, there was no one very near to either of us. They have gone, by their own act, to their own place; and, if there is anything in what we believe, they've gone to a better world. When I was a child I used to think it would be difficult to find it, and God knows what they'll make of it, if they can't do better there than here. But they can hardly be looked upon as lonely. They've joined all their predecessors at one stride. They've all gone together, to the endless generations that persecuted and burned and slaughtered one another before them; and, if what you believe is true—they've got another chance of purging themselves or being purged."

He stabbed his own heart with the brutality of his own words; but it saved both of them, and in a moment she had regained her composure.

"You were right to pull me up," she said. "When an end comes as this has come, it is impossible to think of it in the old terms of human loss. It's too big for[Pg 140] that. I saw that all along, in the first few days. My first lesson was about the fourth day. I was groping about in Rome, hoping to find some other survivor.

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