CHAPTER IV

Acquilla cast a swift glance at the centre of the table, and drawing a silver platter towards her on which were a dozen colored bottles about the size of egg cups, said:

“I shall dine as you dine but in a different manner.”

“Pills!” I exclaimed in dismay. “Compressed food--I knew it!”

“You are like all men, I see,” she answered gravely. “Always jumping at conclusions. What I am eating is exactly what you will partake of, only it is in the form of extracts and quite as delicious too, I assure you. As for your fear of compressed tablets, it is groundless. Until the age of seventy, modern dietetics long ago recognized the value of bulk in food. It is only when the problem of preserving tissues and health is one of arrestation rather than development of the vitamins that we eliminate bulk for chemical values. I can recommend the soup, Bogardus, it is a _pot-au-feu_ such as I am certain you have never tasted.”

Saying which she took a little bottle at her side, unscrewed it, and poured a few drops into a silver cup the size of a liqueur glass.

“Take off the cover before you, Bogardus, and give me your opinion.”

At her direction I unscrewed, not without effort, the upper half of a silver melon and discovered the receptacle filled with a liquid of peculiarly agreeable odor. I tasted it and looked at her in surprise.

“Ghosts of Savarin and Vatel! This _is_ a soup!”

“It has been aging twenty-five years,” said Acquilla proudly. “What, that surprises you? True, you applied the principle only to wines and liqueurs; but if the principle, which is after all but the evaporation of noxious gases holds true in one case why not in another?”

“But twenty-five years!” I exclaimed.

“Look at the seal and the date. It comes from the kitchen of the celebrated André Poullardier of Rouen. But eat sparingly. It is very rich and there are other surprises for you.”

Another dish hermetically sealed was opened in a similar manner, and displayed three tender trout _au bleu_ cooked in white wine and seasoned with some herbs that recalled sarriette and cress.

“Acquilla, I am relieved, relieved and delighted,” I said after the first gustatory satisfaction. “My fears were groundless. Your cook is worthy of the progress of science.”

“Cook? I have no cook.”

“But--”

“My dear Bogardus,” Acquilla replied with an evident satisfaction at my increasing amazement. “We have progressed beyond cooks and the hazards of cooking. There are great central restaurants for every day. But all you taste tonight is imported from France, and if I say it, it was prepared by the greatest chefs of the last fifty years. What, you are astonished? But there is nothing more simple. There is no greater difficulty today in preserving a dish at exactly the temperature at which it should be served, than to keep the human body in a process of refrigeration a hundred years. You see?”

“I see at once,” I replied, for already I could feel in my mind a new attitude, the scientific attitude of the 22nd century. “But the mechanics interest me.”

“I shall show you through my culinary library--in its day it was quite famous. The fish is by Grisset of Tours. No one has ever surpassed him in his specialty. After this I am offering you as a special treat, for I have only fifty examples of it left, the masterpiece of Raoul Binard signed by him 2145 as you will see; _ortolans farcis au truffles_, and braised in endives and Beaujolais. For dessert you will have a pineapple glacéed in madeira and champagne. The wine is worthy of the rest, I assure you. The vintages are now exceedingly rare.”

The wines, as she had prophesied, were fragrant and delicious; a mild white wine that resembled an excellent Meursault and a red with the flavor of Romany, only clearer and not so heady.

“I must confess that never in my life have I dined so miraculously,” I said, reclining gorgeously.

“You are looking for tobacco?” said Acquilla, noticing my look.

“I had hoped?”

“There it is before you.” She leaned over, took up a thin, delicately modelled pipe, and filling it with a fine brown powder, offered it to me, at the same time arranging one for herself. The extract, for such I judged it to be, was of a flavor superior to anything I had ever known before, about the strength of a vintage Havana cigar.

“Content, Bogardus?”

“Blissfully.” I settled back languidly among the cushions. “And now tell me. How am I here?”

Acquilla blew a thin vapor into the air and reclined--a charming figure among the purple cushions. Seeing her thus, I was again agreeably reminded of the young Ernesta. To dine on the food of the gods and to have a goddess looking at you with tender eyes, a goddess smitten as goddesses were, by the yearning for a mortal; what could a man ask more of Paradise?

Divinely content and my imagination mellowed by exquisite vintages I threw the reins to my fancy. A fig for that wig or any wig in the world! In the days of the Roi Soleil and his Watteau Duchesses, who but a peasant ever exposed her own hair! Really Acquilla’s headdress was the creation of an artist and the blue and silvery threads in the softened lights gave a harlequin illusion to the scene.

But all at once I remembered Emelia. I set it down to my credit, absurd as it may seem. For the Bogarduses have always stood four-square for the sanctity of the home, the law of the land and the conservative tradition. But an instant’s reflection revealed to me the absurdity of my scruples. Emelia was with history, and I in command of the present, a bachelor again in an age to which no bachelor could object. I turned toward the lovely creature and smiled languorously as a Pacha in his seraglio might have smiled, in his omnipotence.

“You were found about a quarter of a mile from here,” said Acquilla returning my smile. “In the course of a series of excavations I have been undertaking to determine the location of your great museum. You were discovered in a steel vault, that had been strangely preserved by a network of beams which had collapsed in a manner to surround you with the protection of an outer shell. It was due to your being in this pocket that you have survived the destruction that was prevalent about you.”

“Have you a map of New York?” I asked.

Acquilla took up a wireless telephone and gave an order. The table sank by the same invisible service and presently returned with an atlas. I opened it eagerly to the plate of Manhattan and stared at it in perplexity.

“But the city--the city has disappeared!”

“Oh, no, on the contrary we find it already over-crowded,” said Acquilla. She leaned forward and placed her finger on a spot.

“This is where we are and here close by is where you were found.”

“Then we must be directly above the junction of Park Avenue and Seventy-Ninth Street, and the museum--” I stopped again and stared at the map, “But what is this?”

“That is Gotham Lake of course. We use it as a fish preserve.”

“But that is where the Park should be!”

All at once I divined what had happened. In the general collapse of the skyscrapers which had raised the level of Manhattan from a hundred and fifty to two hundred feet, the Park had retained its level and filled up with the water released from the broken mains. I explained to Acquilla.

“Probably the museum, being located on Fifth Avenue, was buried under the opposite apartment houses. If I was found here, you were within two hundred yards of your objective.”

“What a treasure you are going to be to the archeologists, Bogardus,” exclaimed Acquilla.

I was gazing at the map eagerly and indeed with a certain sadness. There were, it is true, indications of public squares and buildings, but though they were on a majestic scale, it was plain to see that New York, my New York, had been blotted out. An involuntary feeling of local pride brought with it a sharp chagrin.

“Then Chicago has become the metropolis of America,” I said sadly.

“In your day,” remarked Acquilla reflectively, “under your dreadful materialistic system, you crowded a million--

“A million? Ten millions!”

“How dreadful, ten million human beings where fifty thousand hardly find space enough now!”

“But Chicago?” I persisted clinging to my obsession.

“Chicago? What about Chicago?”

“What is the population of Chicago?”

“Twenty-five to thirty thousand.”

“San Francisco?”

“The same.”

“Good heavens, but then,” I sat up, staring at her. “But then, how many human beings have survived on this continent?”

“North America? A million.”

“And the entire world?” I said faintly.

“I can tell you that exactly as I happen to be on the International Control of Population Board. All this, of course, Bogardus, you realize is the subject of the most careful regulation. For, as you will learn, it is the foundation of our modern individualization. For the rest of the world the figure with certain seasonal fluctuations is placed at two million, six hundred thousand. Five hundred thousand each for Europe, South America, and Africa. One hundred thousand for Australia, and a million for Asia.”

“Good Lord, do you realize what it was in my day?”

“In the twentieth century about twelve hundred millions, wasn’t it?”

“A billion, six hundred millions.”

“How dreadful! Why that was not humanity, but vermin!”

“But how has all this happened?”

“That, Bogardus, is a matter of history; the rise of womankind,” said Acquilla proudly. “But perhaps it would make it simpler for you to comprehend the changes that have taken place, if I took things in order.” She looked about reflectively a moment. “If you were put in the Frigidrome in 1929--”

“Eleven years after the World War.”

“The World War? Is that what you called that little struggle? Because after all it settled nothing, did it? The first true mondial conflict came in 1984 though there were local conflicts before that; the Japanese-Russian War of 1955, which brought all Asia, including Siberia, into the Oriental Empire; the breaking up of the British Empire and the Unification of Europe under the Germans in 1965.”

“Then Bolshevism did not over-run the world,” I interrupted.

“The Russians had only manpower and inaccessibility in their favor, and to science these two factors are negligible. Of course, Bogardus, you recognize that the object of all the great male civilizations was to crush all competition by evolving a superior form of destruction.”

Feeling myself and my sex attacked, I demurred.

“Isn’t that a sweeping indictment?”

“Why? Look at history. What is it? It is simply the record of a scientifically organized minority overcoming less martially intelligent masses. You are not convinced? Surely you do not ascribe it to moral virtues. Take your America. The white race conquered the red because ten intelligent men with muskets could slaughter a thousand ignorant savages. Take the conquest of Africa by a handful of Europeans. You do not claim it was superior courage?”

“We have always regarded it as such,” I volunteered timidly.

“Because you looked at civilization only from your egocentric point of view. The courage was always on the side of the savage, fighting against incomparable odds. The intelligence was back of the guns. Do you see my point?”

“There is something in your theory,” I said. With the traditional instinct of the male, I have never cared to reason with the opposite sex, but in this instance my curiosity got the better of me. “Yes, there is a great deal in what you say.”

“It is the accepted commonplace of history,” said Acquilla sharply. “It was the Macedonian Phalanx that established the Empire of Alexander. The fleets of Athens brought the Periclean Age. Rome? The Legions. Mohammedanism? The utilization of religious fanaticism as a military weapon. Sea power made Portugal, then Spain, then the British Empire. Napoleon’s Empire? A new art of war, crashing through decayed traditions. Germany? Germany failed in 1914 because it discovered no new principle, because it did not wait for its scientists.”

“It almost succeeded--”

“It would have succeeded if it had developed the submarine and the use of poison gas before it started its conquests. To conquer the world, one must find a new principle of destruction.”

“Then how do you explain the rise of the United States?”

“What do you know of the United States, Bogardus?” said Acquilla, preparing to enjoy my astonishment. “You speak of a nation that in 1930 had existed only a century and a half.”

“Yet in my day it was admitted to be the greatest country in the world in power and in resources,” I protested loyally. “You can’t deny that.”

“A country that fatuously developed the great standardized age of materialistic wealth and forgot to protect itself. A country that drove all Europe into a defensive alliance; by not only exacting a yearly tribute, but by its blind policy of tariff discriminations, aroused the passions and hatreds of Europe’s Socialistic masses. The United States never fought a great war until 1984 and then it was completely destroyed.”

“Destroyed--America!”

“True, these things were after your day. While Japan and China were organizing Asia, Germany and France united into one state, crushed Russia and England, and having founded the United States of Europe conquered the Americas.”

“It was then that New York was destroyed?” I said faintly, feeling my head go round.

“New York and every city, every village, on the continent, Bogardus, was razed to the ground. During this period the population of America and Europe was of course decimated. That was a war.”

“And after that?”

“Ten years later, in 1994, came the real World War; the teeming manpower of Asia against the laboratories of Germano-France. Again history repeated itself. The great discoveries of Europe’s scientists, particularly the perfecting of electronic energy and the destructive Z-rays with which a hundred aeroplanes were able to destroy all forms of life, wiped out in seven days the menace of Cathay forever.”

“How frightful!”

“Bogardus, like all men you are a sentimentalist,” said Acquilla calmly. “You are for little wars, but you stop at pursuing your ideas to a logical conclusion. To end war, a world calamity was necessary to destroy the cause of all war.”

“I don’t comprehend--”

“Really? In your day, your men philosophers and economists never perceived the obstacle to the establishment of a final scientific civilization.”

I put my hand to my head and said slowly:

“I haven’t the slightest idea, unless it can be the conflict of nationalities.”

“Much deeper than that.”

“What then?”

“Over-population, and its concentration in the cities, that and nothing else.”

“The idea is interesting,” I said, meditating.

“Over-population has been the source of all wars and all poverty since men began to congregate in social bodies. The rise of the metropolis has been the doom of the nation. Consider Babylon, Sardanapolis, Rome, Alexandria, London, and New York. But no man perceived that, or at least if he did perceive it, had the courage to advocate the depopulation of the world. That was the first great advance of the feminine state.”

“What an extraordinary idea!”

“All your political failures were due to your obsession of exalting the mass over the individual. What an insensate appetite you had for population! What a horrible negation of human life it was! What a society of vermin your great cities must have been! Democracy, Socialism, Communism; each was an inevitable step forced upon you by your distention of the mass. And the science you boasted of! And your age of efficiency! Did you ever have, as we have, a yearly world survey as to the adjustment of population to that progress of mechanics which continually eliminates human labor?”

“I have no answer,” I replied dumfounded. “It all seems so simple as you state it. Though,” I added, lighting up, “I do seem to remember some serious suggestion that science should take a holiday!”

“The wrong way to approach the problem,” said Acquilla, shaking her head. “Our civilization is based on a hundred acres to each woman.”

“Then the world is run by women?”

“Oh, absolutely, for the last one hundred and fifty years, from 2030 when the collapse of male civilization became evident to all, and men were finally disenfranchised.”

“But--” I stopped, confused by the flood of questions which rose to my lips.

Acquilla who had been watching me carefully and had noticed my heightened color and startled eyes, here interposed.

“I think, Bogardus, we have talked seriously enough for the first day. In fact, I’m afraid in my eagerness that I have gone too far ahead.”

I passed my hand over my forehead and noticed how the veins in my temples quivered.

“I feel as though I had been transplanted to a strange planet. Everything is gone that I knew or could reason by. It leaves me with the feeling of terrible depression, a terrible loneliness.”

Acquilla sprang up and held out her hand.

“Come. We will relax. I have a surprise for you. Dianne, the famous soprano, and Schiappa are singing in ‘Tristan’ tonight. A familiar sensation is just the mental relaxation that you need. Though I must say to your credit, you extraordinary man, that you have stood the shock remarkably well. In some cases of early Frigidrome treatment, we have had serious lapses into brain disorders.”