“Your promise, David, your promise!”
I released her hands instantly and my eyes closed not to see her so near and so weak. When I knew what I was doing again, I was alone. How long I had been there, I do not know. A great mass was before me, thrusting a torch into the skies and the kindling stars. I went down the deck like a drunken man and ran into Hungerford, who came up gayly.
“Hello, there, seen a paper?” He checked himself, staring at my face. “Here—Big Dale—what’s wrong?”
“Wrong—nothing’s wrong!”
I felt his arm under mine and was glad for this touch of another human being in my blank loneliness. I heard him rambling on, nodded my head, and knew not a word he was saying. This for long minutes, while gradually I fought back to myself.
To this day I can feel the overwhelming insolence of the stone weight of New York rising out of the waters, crushing me down in my utter loneliness. An invisible hand was lighting up the city; glass squadrons suddenly relieved, floated in carnival pomp across the night. Across the vanishing space of bridges, feverish traveling flames shot out,—one, two, and then another. A furnace belched against the sky. Electric signs swarmed out of the dusk. Below me, over the swift, oily, painted waters, were green lights, red lights, ferryboats afire, tugs coming and going, shrieking, puffing, roaring,—and always we moved on, irrevocably on, past the Battery, past the oozing, slimy hulks of the city wharves, rotting below the fiery splendor of the city’s rise; stagnant as poverty beneath the soaring pride of wealth, in the miraculous city of tragic contrasts! How vast it was, how unhuman! Every note a thousand times multiplied,—every sensation of multitude! Multitude on multitude—armies of order and disorder—a collective tyranny that roared over me on the threshold of America, as the resistless downward plunge of Niagara beats endlessly. Torrent of forty nations and twenty creeds, conflict of tongues and churning of races—not my America, but the world-vision of Peter Magnus—multitudes moving like glaciers towards destinies no one might confidently predict!
And, against this howling contention, this churning, grinding background, I saw but one figure,—the shadow of a woman, the woman I loved, exiled and alone.
* * * * *
At six o’clock it was all over. I stood at her carriage door, bareheaded, bending over her hand. The bustle of the landing, the examination of the baggage, the damp, noisy, strident wharf, the pushing and the strife were behind us,—too soon gone. Only this remained.
“You can give him your address,” I said, stepping back.