Farther on in the residence district, occasional lighted windows watched with the street-lamps gazing blankly into the darkness. In particular one house was all ablaze. Every window glowed. No doubt a great festivity was in progress and Verrill could almost fancy that he heard the strains of the music, the rustle of the silks.
Then nearer at hand, but more to the eastward, where the office buildings rose in tower-like clusters and somber groups, Verrill could see a vista of open water—the harbour. Lights were moving here, green and red, as the great hoarse-voiced freighters stood out with the tide.
And beyond this was the sea itself, and more lights, very, very faint where the ships rolled leisurely in the ground swells; ships bound to and from all ports of the earth,—ships that united the nations, that brought the whole world of living men under the view of the lonely watcher in the empty Banquet Hall.
Verrill raised the window. At once a subdued murmur, prolonged, monotonous,—the same murmur as that which disengages itself from forests, from the sea, and from sleeping armies,—rose to meet him. It was the mingling of all the night noises into one great note that came simultaneously from all quarters of the horizon, infinitely vast, infinitely deep,—a steady diapason strain like the undermost bourdon of a great organ as the wind begins to thrill the pipes.
It was the stir of life, the breathing of the Colossus, the push of the nethermost basic force, old as the world, wide as the world, the murmur of the primeval energy, coeval with the centuries, blood-brother to that spirit which in the brooding darkness before creation, moved upon the face of the waters.
And besides this, as Verrill stood there looking out, the night wind brought to him, along with the taint of the sea, the odour of the heaped-up fruit in the city's markets and even the suggestion of the vegetable gardens in the suburbs.
Across his face, like the passing of a long breath, he felt the abrupt sensation of life, indestructible, persistent.
But absorbed in other things, Verrill, unmoved, and only dimly comprehending, closed the window and turned back into the room. At his place stood an unopened bottle and a glass as yet dry. He removed the foil from the neck of the bottle, but after looking at his watch, set it down again without drawing the cork. It lacked some fifteen minutes to midnight.
Once again, as he had already done so many times that evening, Verrill wiped the moisture from his forehead. He shut his teeth against the slow thick labouring of his heart. He was alone. The sense of isolation, of abandonment, weighed down upon him intolerably as he looked up and down the the empty table. Alone, alone; all the rest were gone, and he stood there, in the solitude of that midnight; he, last of all that company whom he had known and loved. Over and over again he muttered:
"All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." Then slowly Verrill began to make the circuit of the table, reading, as if from a roll call, the names written on the cards which lay upon the place-plates. "Anderson, ... Evans, ... Copeland,—dear old 'crooked-face' Copeland, his camp companion in those Maine fishing-trips of the old days, dead now these ten years.... Stryker,—'Buff' Stryker they had called him, dead,—he had forgotten how long,—drowned in his yacht off the Massachusetts coast; Harris, died of typhoid somewhere in Italy; Dick Herndon, killed in a mine accident in Mexico; Rice, old 'Whitey Rice' a suicide in a California cattle town; Curtice, carried off by fever in Durban, South Africa." Thus around the whole table he moved, telling the bead-roll of death, following in the footsteps of the Monster who never relented, who never tired, who never, never,—never forgot.