The other bridges, newer and stronger far, still remained standing. But even from that distance Stern could quite plainly see, without the telescope, that the Williamsburg Bridge had “buckled” downward and that the farther span of the Blackwell's Island Bridge was in ruinous disrepair.
“How horrible, how ghastly is all this waste and ruin!” thought the engineer. “Yet, even in their overthrow, how wonderful are the works of man!”
A vast wonder seized him as he stood there gazing; a fierce desire to rehabilitate all this wreckage, to set it right, to start the wheels of the world-machinery running once more.
At the thought of his own powerlessness a bitter smile curled his lips.
Beatrice seemed to share something of his wonder.
“Can it be possible,” whispered she, “that you and--and I--are really like Macaulay's lone watcher of the world-wreck on London Bridge?”
“That we are actually seeing the thing so often dreamed of by prophets and poets? That ‘All this mighty heart is lying still,’ at last--forever? The heart of the world, never to beat again?”
He made no answer, save to shake his head; but fast his thoughts were running.
So then, could he and Beatrice, just they two, be in stern reality the sole survivors of the entire human race? That race for whose material welfare he had, once on a time, done such tremendous work?
Could they be destined, he and she, to witness the closing chapter in the long, painful, glorious Book of Evolution? Slightly he shivered and glanced round.