*****
During the inception of Nordenholt’s scheme, my own work had dealt with varied lines of activity which brought me into contact with diverse departments of the machine; but when the transfer to the Clyde Valley took place, I settled down into more definite duties. Nordenholt had picked me out, I believe, on the strength of my knowledge of factory organisation; and my first post in the North dealt with this branch. Thus in the earlier days, my work took me into the machine-shops and yards where the heavy machinery was being built or remodelled; and so I came into direct contact with the human element.
But as time went on, the range of my control increased; and as my work extended I had to delegate this section more and more to my subordinates. I became, through a gradual series of transitions, the checker of efficiency over most of the Area activities.
The under-current of all my memories of that time is a series of curves. Graphs of coal-supply from each pit, so that the fluctuation of output might be controlled and investigated; graphs of furnace-production from day to day, whereby all might be kept up to concert-pitch; graphs comparing one process with another in terms of power and efficiency; graphs of workmen’s ages and effectiveness; graphs of total power-consumption; graphs of remaining food-supplies extrapolated to show probable consumption under various scales; graphs of population changes; graphs of health-statistics: all these passed through my hands in their final form until I began to lose touch with the real world about me and to look upon disasters costing many lives merely as something which produced a point of inflexion in my curves.
Nordenholt had established his central offices in the University and had cleared the benches from all the classrooms to make room for his staff. It was probably the best choice he could have made; since it provided within a limited area sufficient office-room to house everyone whom he might wish to call into consultation at a moment’s notice at any time; and it had the further advantage that all the scientific experts had been given the University laboratories to work in, so that they also were within easy call. He himself had chosen as his private office the old Senate Room. The Randolph Hall had been fitted up as a kind of card-index library wherein were stored all the facts of which he might be in need at any time; and the Court Room was converted into his secretary’s office and connected with the Senate Room by a door driven through the wall.
In Nordenholt’s office a huge graph extended right across the wall over the fire-place. It was an enormous diagram, covering the period from the starting of the Nitrogen Area and extending, as far as its numbered abscissæ were concerned, beyond the harvest-time in the next year. Each morning, before Nordenholt came to his office, the new daily points were inserted on it and joined up with the preceding curves. One line, in red, expressed the amount of food remaining; another, in green, showed the quantity of nitrogenous material synthesised up to date; whilst the third curve, in purple, indicated, approximately, the crop which might be expected from the nitrogenous manure in hand. Of all the sights in the Nitrogen Area, I think that series of curves made the deepest impression upon me. It was so impersonal, a cold record of our position and our prospects, untinged by any human factor. The slow rise of the green curve; the steady fall of the red line—our whole future was locked up in these relative trends.
I remember one morning in Nordenholt’s office, where I had gone to consult him on some point or other. We had discussed the matter in hand; and I was about to leave him when he called me back.
“I haven’t seen much of you lately, Flint,” he said. “Sit down for a few minutes, will you? I want a rest from all this for a short time; and I think it would do you good to get clear of things for a while also. What do you do with yourself at nights?”
I told him that I usually worked rather late.
“That won’t do as a steady thing. I know the work has to be done; and I know you have to work till midnight, and after it often, to keep abreast of things. But if you do it without a break now and again you’ll simply get stale and lose grip. You may keep on working long hours; but what you do in the end won’t be so efficient. Take to-night off. Come to dinner with me and we’ll try to shake loose from Nitrogen for a while. I’ve asked Henley-Davenport also.”
I accepted eagerly enough, though with a somewhat rueful feeling that it meant harder work on the following day if I was to overtake arrears. But I wanted to meet Henley-Davenport. As I mentioned at the beginning of this narrative, before the irruption of B. diazotans into the world, he had been engaged upon radioactivity investigations; and I was anxious to hear what he was doing. I knew that Nordenholt set great store by his work—he was one of the Nordenholt young men—and I was interested. But my main reason for accepting was, of course, Nordenholt himself. As time went on, he fascinated me more and more; and I grasped at every opportunity of studying his complex personality. I doubt if I have been able to throw light upon it in these pages. I have given vignettes here and there to the best of my ability; but I know that I have failed to set down clearly the feeling which he always gave me, the distinction between the surface personality and the greater forces moving behind that screen. The superficial part is easy to describe; but the noumenon of Nordenholt is a thing beyond me. I only felt it; I never saw it: and I doubt if any man ever saw it fully revealed.
Just then the door of the secretary’s room opened and someone came in. Curiously enough, I had never seen Nordenholt’s secretary before. She seemed to be about twenty-four, fair-haired and slim, dressed like any other business girl; but it was her face which struck me most. She looked fragile and at the corners of the sensitive mouth I thought I saw evidences of strain. Somehow she seemed out of place amid all this grimness: her world should have been one of ease and happiness.
“These are the figures you wanted with regard to A.323, Uncle Stanley,” she said, as she handed over a card.
“Thanks, Elsa. By the way, this is Mr. Flint. You’ve heard me speak of him often. My ward, Miss Huntingtower, Flint. She acts as my secretary.”
We exchanged the commonplaces usual to the situation. I noticed that Nordenholt’s voice changed as he spoke to her: a ring of cheerfulness came into it which was not usually there. In a few minutes he dismissed her and we sat down again.
“Now, Flint, there’s another example of the effect of too hard work. We’re all running things rather fine, nowadays. As for myself, it doesn’t matter. So long as I can see this year through, it’s immaterial to me what the ultimate effect may be. I can afford to run things to their end. But you younger people have most of your lives before you. I’m not hinting that you can spare yourselves; but you must try to leave something for the future. When it’s all over, we shall still need directors; and you must manage to combine hard work now with enough reserve force to prevent a collapse in the moment of success.
“That’s why I planned amusement for the workers as well as a time schedule for the factories. We aren’t dealing with machines which can be run continuously and not suffer. We have to give the men a change of interest. I suppose some of you thought I was wrong in cumbering ourselves with all these football players, actors and actresses, music-hall artistes and so on, who produce nothing directly towards our object? For all I know you may jib at the sight of the thousands who go down to the Celtic Park every Saturday afternoon to watch a gang of professionals playing Soccer. I don’t. I know that these thousands are getting fresh air and exercising their lungs in yelling applause. I couldn’t get them to do it any other way; and I want them to do it. Then the halls and theatres occupy them in the evenings when they aren’t working; and that keeps them from brooding over their troubles. I don’t want men to accumulate here and there and grouse over the strain I put on them. That’s why I picked out the best of the whole Stage and brought them here. The Labour section is getting better value for its amusement money than it ever got in its life before; and I’m getting what I want too.
“That’s why I cornered tobacco and liquor also. We must remove every scrap of res
traint on pleasure, Flint, or we should have trouble at once. They must have their smoke and they must have drink in moderation. You can’t run this kind of colony on narrow lines.
“And there’s another thing, perhaps the most important of all under the conditions we are in: religion. I’m not talking about creeds or anything of that kind. I’ve studied most of them from the point of view of psychology; and they’re empty things; life left them long ago. But behind all that mass of outworn lumber there’s a real feeling which can’t be neglected if we are to get the best out of things. That’s why I brought all these ministers of the various denominations into the Area. We must have them; and as far as I could, I picked the best of them. But I’ll have no idlers here. They have to do their day’s work with the rest of us and do their teaching afterwards. Every man ought to be able to do something. After all, Christ was a carpenter before He took up His work. That’s what has been wrong with ninety per cent of parsons since the Churches started. They don’t know anything practical and they mistake talk for work. What was the average sermon except expanding a text, with illustrations—diluting the Bible with talk, just as a dishonest milkman waters his milk?
“Well, I’ve picked the best I could get; and I’ve given them a free hand. But I wish I were sure where it is all going to lead. It’s the most difficult problem I ever tackled, I know. Our conditions aren’t parallel, but I am half afraid of reproducing the story of the Anabaptists in Münster. You can’t get heavy physical and mental tension in an unprepared population without seeing some strange things. I introduced these ministers as a brake on that line of development.
“And what a chance they have! It’s when men are most helpless that they turn to religion; and here we are going to have a field in which much might be sown. If only they are equal to the times! But it’s no affair of mine. They must work out their own salvation and perhaps the salvation of their people if they can.
“As for us, Flint, we’ve got enough work of our own in this world. Take my advice and clear every idea of humanity out of your mind: stick to your curves and graphs and don’t think beyond them. If once you let your imagination stray over the real meaning of them—in toil and pain and death—you’ll never be able to carry on. I can’t help seeing it all; and that’s why I pin myself to the Curve there. I don’t want to look beyond it. I want to keep myself detached from all that as far as possible; for I can’t afford to be biassed. It’s difficult; and in a few weeks more it will be still harder, when these unheard cries of agony go up in the South. But what can one do? I must shut my ears as best I can and go forward; or everything will fall to pieces and we shall save nothing out of the wreck. What a prospect, eh?
“Now, Flint,”—he sprang up—“off to work again, both of us. We can’t afford to waste time if we are to have an evening free from worry. I’ll see you at dinner.”
As I reached the door, he called me back and spoke low:
“By the way, Miss Huntingtower doesn’t know all our plans. Keep off the subject of the South. She hasn’t been told anything about that; and I want to keep it from her as long as I can. You understand?”
“Yes, if you wish it. But surely she must have some knowledge of the state of affairs. You can’t have managed to keep her in the dark about the whole thing?”
“It wasn’t difficult. She looks after certain special branches of my correspondence and so on; and nothing except actual Area business passes through her hands, so she has seen nothing beyond that. And once she finishes her work for the day I’ve made it a rule for her that she takes no further interest in the situation. I told her she must get her mind clear of it at night, or she would get stale and be no use to me. That was quite enough. She doesn’t even read the newspapers.”
“But what’s the use in keeping her in the dark? She is bound to know all about it soon enough.”
“There’s a great difference, Flint, between learning of a thing after it is irrevocable and hearing of it while there is time to protest against it. Once a catastrophe is over, it is over; and the shock is lighter than if one feels it coming and struggles against it. I don’t wish Miss Huntingtower to hear anything about the South until the whole thing is at an end down there. She’ll accept it then, since there is nothing else for it. I don’t wish her to be put in the position of feeling that she ought to do all she can to prevent its coming about. You understand?”
CHAPTER IX
INTERMEZZO
IN order to understand the impression which that evening left upon me, it is necessary to bear in mind the conditions under which I had been living for the last few weeks. In the earlier stages I had been oscillating between my office, with its ever-accumulating mass of papers, on the one hand; and the grime and clangour of the factories and furnaces upon the other. Then, gradually, I saw less and less of the concrete machinery of our safety and slipped almost wholly into the work of control from a distance. Lists, sheets of figures, graphs, letters dictated or read, telephonic communications, reports from factory managers, all surged up before me in a daily deluge. My meals were eaten hurriedly at a side-table in my office; and my lights burned far into the morning in the attempt to cope with the torrent which I had to control. Often as the dawn was coming up through the smoke-clouds of the city I walked home with a wearied mind through which endless columns of figures chased each other; and my eyes had broken down under the strain to the extent that I had to use pilocarpine almost constantly. I was beginning to look back on the old life in London, with its theatre parties and dinners, as if it were another existence which I should never re-enter. I seemed shut off from it by some nebulous yet impenetrable curtain; and when I thought of it at times, I felt that it had passed away beyond recall. All the softer side of civilisation, it seemed, must go down, once for all, in this cataclysm; and from our efforts a harder, harsher world would be born. Ease and luxury had vanished, leaving us stripped to our necessities.
And suddenly I found myself in the old surroundings once more. I was ushered into a room which, though its simplicity recalled Nordenholt’s other environments, still betrayed a woman’s hand at every point. There was no litter of meaningless nicknacks; every touch went to build up a harmonious whole: and it was unmistakably a feminine mind which had designed it. As I glanced down the room, I saw Miss Huntingtower standing by the fireplace; and it flashed across me that, whether by accident or design, the room formed a framework for her.
As she came forward to meet me, her smile effaced the strained expression which I had noticed in the morning. In these surroundings she seemed different, somehow. The artistry of the room fitted her own beauty so that each appeared to find its complement in the other. It seemed to me that she was designed by destiny for this environment, and not for the harder work of the world. And yet, she gave no suggestion of triviality; there was no hint of a feminine desire to attract. It must have been that she harmonised so well with the frame in which I saw her. And the personality which gazed from her eyes seemed in some way to blend with this world of shaded lights, graceful outlines and innate simplicity.
Nordenholt came into the room almost at once with a grave apology to Miss Huntingtower for being late.
“Convenient having a house in the University Square,” he said to me. “If we hadn’t taken over some of these professors’ residences, it would have meant such a waste of time getting to and fro between one’s home and the office. That was one reason why I selected the University as a centre. We had the whole thing ready-made for us.”
Henley-Davenport arrived almost at once; and we went down to dinner. I had begun to re-acclimatise myself in these surroundings; but I still recall that evening in every detail. The shaded candles on the table, which soothed my straining eyes, the glitter of silver and crystal on the table, Nordenholt’s lean visage half in shadow except when he leaned forward into the soft illumination, Henley-Davenport’s sharp face driving home a point, and Miss Huntingtower’s eager face as she glanced from speaker to speaker or put a question
to one of us: with it all, I seemed back again in my lost world and the Nitrogen Area appeared to belong to another region of my life.
But even here it penetrated, though faintly. The usual topics of conversation were gone: theatres, books, all our old interests had been uprooted and cast aside, so that we could only take them up in the form of reminiscence. And, as a matter of fact, we talked very little about them. I tried one or two tentative efforts; but Henley-Davenport who had known Nordenholt and his ward longer than I, made very little attempt to follow me: and I soon gathered that Miss Huntingtower was better pleased with other subjects.
What appeared to interest her most was the general situation; and I was rather flattered to find that she seemed anxious to hear my own views.
She seemed to be one of those people who are gifted with the faculty of drawing one out. I don’t mean that she sat silent and merely listened; but she had the knack of stimulating one to talk and of keeping one to the main line by occasional questions which showed that she had not only followed what had been said but had silently commented upon it as one went along. Yet she never appeared to lose her charm by aping masculinity. And she had the gift of naturalness. There was no artificiality either in look or speech. She made me feel almost at once as though I had known her for years.
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