“Elsa,” I said, “do you remember the first evening we met?”
She never moved.
“You sang that dirge from Cymbeline, you remember? When you’re calmer, I want you to think over it. I don’t want you to have any regrets. Mr. Nordenholt can’t last for ever under this strain. Think carefully.”
She made no sign that she had heard me speak. The car whirred through the dusk, while we sat silent and aloof from each other. It was a return very different from that which I had hoped for when I set out. I was almost glad when, further down the loch, the beams of the headlights showed us the figure of Nordenholt in the road. I pulled up the car beside him; and Elsa leaned forward in her seat.
“Uncle Stanley, Mr. Flint has told me everything. I saw a document this morning, B.53.X.15; and I forced Mr. Flint to explain what it meant. Did you really plan this awful thing?”
I could not see Nordenholt’s face in the shadow; but his voice was as steady as ever in his reply. Afterwards I realised that he must have foreseen such a situation as this long before.
“It is perfectly true, Elsa. Anything that Mr. Flint has told you is probably correct, though his connection with the matter is very slight.”
“But he says that you planned it all and that he helped you. I can’t . . . I can’t quite understand it all. It’s a mistake, isn’t it? It’s not your real plan, surely. You’re going to save all these people in the South, aren’t you?”
“Every soul that can be saved by me will be saved, Elsa. You can count on that.”
“But you will give them all a chance of life, won’t you? You won’t take away all the food from them?”
“There’s no food to spare.”
For a few moments there was silence. Elsa made a sudden movement, and I guessed that she had recoiled from Nordenholt’s touch. At last she spoke again, in a way I had not anticipated.
“Do you remember my three wishes, Uncle Stanley? You gave me two of them and now I want the third. You promised me the whole three; and you never broke your word yet. I want you to save these people in the South. That’s my third wish.”
I think it was that that made me realise the gulf that yawned between us, more than anything that had gone before. How could she imagine that Nordenholt’s vast machine could be deflected on account of some childish promise? And yet her voice had taken on a new tone of confidence; everything, she thought, was going to be set right. It seems she must have believed, even then, that the treatment of the South was only one of a number of alternative schemes; and that she could force the adoption of some other, not so good, perhaps, but still possible, as a solution. Her very belief in Nordenholt’s powers led her to assume that he must have several plans ready pigeonholed, and that the rejection of one merely entailed the substitution of some other which was already cut and dried.
“When that promise was made, Elsa, there was one condition: your wish was not to be an impossible one. This is impossible.”
“Oh!” There was such an agony in her voice that I felt it rasp my already over-tried nerves.
“That is final, Elsa. There is nothing more to be said.”
For almost a minute she made no reply. In the silence I could feel her struggling for control of her voice. When at last she spoke, she seemed to have fought down her emotion, for her tone was almost indifferent:
“Very well, Uncle Stanley. You refuse to help these people; but I am not so easy in my mind. I will go into the South myself and do my best to help them; and if I cannot help, I can at least take the same risks as they do. I can’t stay here, well fed and well cared for when they are suffering.”
“You will not do that, Elsa. No, I don’t mean to prevent you going if you wish, though you have no idea what you would be going to. But I haven’t brought you up to be a shirker; and you’re needed here. You have the whole of your work at your finger-ends and if you go it will dislocate that department temporarily; and we can’t afford to have even a temporary upset at this stage. You promised you would stay, no matter what happened; and I ask you to keep your promise now. I also tell you that I need you, and your work here is helping to save lives in the Area, more lives than you could ever save outside. Now do you wish to go?”
She thought for a time, evidently weighing one thing and another. While she was still silent, I broke in, wisely or unwisely, I did not know.
“If Elsa goes into the South, Nordenholt, I go with her to look after her. You must find someone else to take my place. I can’t let her go alone.”
Nordenholt’s voice was as calm as ever.
“You understand, Elsa? If you go, you take away Mr. Flint; and although I can replace you in your department, I doubt if I can get anyone as good as he is in his line. Go South and you cripple one of the essential parts of the Area. Stay here, and you will help us all towards safety—and we’re not near the safety-line yet. Which is it to be? I put no pressure on you. I only point out what I think is your duty.”
I had expected some angry reply, some hurried decision which might bring disaster in its train; but luckily things took a different turn. I believe that the strain had been too great for her. Now came the collapse; and before I knew what had happened, she had broken into tears. Nordenholt leaned over her, trying to comfort her; but it was useless; and he let her work out her fit of emotion to the end. At last she pulled herself together.
“If you are sure you need me, I will stay. But I hate you both. I hate the work. I hate the Area and everything in it. I’ll keep my promise to you; but things will never be the same again. . . . And, oh, this morning I was so happy.”
Nordenholt climbed aboard the car without another word, and I drove on into the dark. Now and again, I heard a half-suppressed sob from the girl at my side; but that was all. At the door of Nordenholt’s house I stopped. Elsa left me without uttering even “Good-night.” I watched her tall, slim figure go up the steps and disappear; and something blinded me. I found Nordenholt standing at the side of the car.
“Poor chap,” he said, with an immense pity in his voice. “So you’re involved too? I wish it had been otherwise. Well, well; I couldn’t hope to keep it from her much longer at the best. But I’m very, very sorry. She’ll take it so hard. Her type never looks at these things the way we do.”
He paused and looked at me keenly in the light of the terrace lamps. When he spoke once more, his voice sounded very weary.
“Stand by me, Jack. Get your part ready in time. Don’t flinch because of this. I’m nearly at the end of my tether.”
I could not trust myself to speak. We shook hands in silence, and he went up the steps into the house.
CHAPTER XVI
IN THE NITROGEN AREA
I HAVE no wish to dwell overmuch upon my own affairs in this narrative; for they formed a mere ripple on the surface of the torrent of events which was bearing all of us along in its course. Yet to exclude them entirely would be to omit something which is of importance; for they must have influenced my outlook upon the situation as a whole and possibly made me view it through eyes different from those which I had used before.
My dreams and desires had come to the ground almost ere they were in being; and what made it more bitter to me was that I felt they had been crushed, not on their merits, but merely as subsidiaries which had shared in the collapse of a more central matter. I guessed that Elsa had, to some extent, at any rate, shared my feelings; and it was this which made the downfall of my hopes all the harder to bear.
Try as I would, I could find no reason behind her attitude; and even now, looking back upon that time, I cannot appreciate her motives. In the whole affair of the Nitrogen Area I had been guided by purely intellectual considerations. Nordenholt himself had advised me to keep a tight rein upon any feelings which might divert me from this course. And I was thus, perhaps, less able to appreciate her standpoint then than I would have been a few months earlier.
On her side, emotion and not intellect was the guiding star. The picture of starving mil
lions which had broken upon her without warning had overpowered her normally clear brain. Thus there lay between us a gulf which nothing seemed capable of filling. I thought, and still believe, that emotion is a will-o’-the-wisp by which alone no man can steer a course; but it is useless to deny its power when once it has laid its influence upon a mind. Even had she given me a chance, I doubt if I would have tried to reason with her; and she gave me no chance. I never saw her alone; and when she met me perforce or by accident, she treated me practically as a stranger. All the long evenings of planning and dreaming had gone out of our lives.
As soon as I could make an opportunity, I questioned Nordenholt as to the state of affairs. He answered me perfectly frankly.
“Elsa has never said a word to me about the South. I think she shrinks from the idea even in her own mind; and she shrinks from me because of it, as I can see. But she sticks to her work, even if she loathes coming into contact with me daily; and I keep her as hard at it as I can. The less time she has to think, the better for her; and I don’t mean to leave her any time to brood over the affair. Poor girl, you mustn’t feel hard about her, Jack. I can understand what it means to her; and to you also: and her part is the saddest. She simply hates me now; I can feel it. And neither of us can help her, that’s the worst of it.”
To Nordenholt himself the situation must have been a terrible one; for Elsa was closer to him than any other human being could ever be: and the position now was worse even than if he had lost her entirely. I am sure that he had never felt anything more than affection for her; but she had become more to him, perhaps, just for that reason. I often used to think that they formed natural complements for one another: he with his great build and powerful personality, she with her slender grace and her character, strong as his own, perhaps, but in a far different sphere.
*****
It was about this period B. diazotans began to die out from the face of the world which it had wrecked. I have already told how Nordenholt had given me the news when it was still a possibility of the future. From their studies upon isolated colonies of the microbe, the bacteriologists had predicted its end. They had found a rapid falling-off in its power of multiplication; and the segregation of a number of the pests soon led to their perishing.
When it became clear that B. diazotans was doomed, Nordenholt began to send out scouting aeroplanes to collect samples of soil from various districts and bring them back to the laboratories of the Nitrogen Area where they could be examined. All told the same tale of extinction. Gradually, the aeroplanes were sent further and further on their journeys into the stricken lands; and at last it became clear that as far as a large part of Europe was concerned, the terror was at an end. The soil, of course, was completely ruined; but there was little to fear in the way of a recrudescence of the blight.
It seems, nowadays, very strange that we had not already foreseen this result; for the cause of it lay upon the surface of things. Once the denitrifying bacteria had destroyed all the nitrogen compounds in the soil, there was nothing left for them to live upon; and they perished of starvation in their turn, following in the track of all the larger organisms which their depredations had ruined.
As soon as Nordenholt had established the definite decease of B. diazotans in the accessible parts of the European continent, he sent out the news to the whole remaining world with which he was in touch through his wireless installation; and after some time had been spent in various centres in which the remnants of humanity were gathered together, word came back from the most widely-separated areas that all over the world B. diazotans had ceased to exist. In many places it had even left no traces of any kind behind it; for as some of the bacteria died their bodies, being nitrogenous, had served as food for those still living; until at last the merest trace of their organisms was all that could be found in the soil.
So this plague passed from the world, as swiftly as it came; and its passing left the future more certain than seemed possible in the early stages of its career.
*****
But if our gravest danger was thus removed, we in the Nitrogen Area had other troubles which were nearer to us at that time. In his very earliest calculations, Nordenholt, as I had told, had foreseen that disease would be prevalent owing to the monotony of the diet which was entailed by our conditions. The lack of fresh vegetables and the use of salted meat gave rise to scurvy, which we endeavoured to ward off by manufacturing synthetic vitamins for the population. The success of this was not complete, however, and the disease caused a very marked falling-off in the productive power of our labour. For a time it seemed as though we were actually losing ground in our factories, just at the moment when the destruction of the denitrifying bacteria had raised our hopes to a high degree.
Nor was scurvy our only trouble. The debilitated health of the people laid them open to all sorts of minor diseases, with the concomitant decline in physical energy. Of these, the most serious was a new type of influenza which ravaged the Nitrogen Area and caused thousands of deaths. Here again, a fall in output coincided with the growth and spread of the disease; but since the death-roll was a heavy one, the number of mouths diminished markedly as well; so that it almost appeared as though the two factors might balance each other. If there were less food in the future, there would be fewer people to consume it.
I think the period of the influenza epidemic was one of the most trying of all in the Nitrogen Area. As the reported cases increased in number, individual medical attention became impossible; for many doctors died of the scourge, and we could not risk the total annihilation of the medical profession. Treatment of the disease was standardised as far as possible and committed to the care of rapidly-trained laymen. Possibly this led to many deaths which might have been avoided with more efficient methods; but it was the only means which would leave us with a supply of trained medical men who would be required in the future.
*****
On the heels of the influenza epidemic, and possibly produced by it, came a period of labour unrest in the Area. It was only what I had always anticipated; for the strain which we were putting upon the workers had now increased almost to the breaking-point. There was no way out of the difficulty, however; for unless the work was done, the safety of the whole community would be imperilled. None the less, I could not help finding excuses in my mind for those toiling millions. To them, the connection between the factories and the food-supply must have been difficult to trace; for they could hardly follow all the ramifications in the lines between the coal in the pits and the next harvest which was not even sown.
Nordenholt succeeded in stifling most of the disaffection by means of a fresh newspaper campaign of propaganda. He had given his journals a long period of rest in this direction, purposely, I believe, in order that he might utilise them more effectively when this new emergency arose. But though he certainly produced a marked effect by his efforts, there remained among the workers an undercurrent of discontent which could not be exorcised. It was not a case of open disaffection which could have been dealt with by drastic methods; the Intelligence section were unable to fasten upon any clear cases of what in the old days would have been called sedition. It was rather a change for the worse in the general attitude and outlook of the labouring part of the community: an affair of atmosphere which left nothing solid for Nordenholt to grasp firmly. Though I was out of direct touch with affairs at the time, even I could not help the feeling that things were out of joint. The demeanour of the workers in the streets was somehow different from what it had been in the earlier days. There was a sullenness and a tinge of aggressiveness in the air.
And in Nordenholt himself I noticed a corresponding change. He seemed to me by degrees to be losing his impersonal standpoint. The new situation appeared to be making him more and more dictatorial as time went by. He had always acted as a Dictator; but in his personal contact with men he had preserved an attitude of aloofness and certainty which had taken the edge off the Dictatorship. Now, I noticed, his methods wer
e becoming more direct: and he was making certain test-points into trials of strength, open and avowed, between himself and those who opposed him. He always won, of course; but it was a different state of things from that which had marked the inception of the Nitrogen Area. There was more of the master and less of the comrade about him now.
Yet, looking back upon it all, I cannot but admit that his methods were justified. The disaffection was noticeable; and only a strong hand could put it down. Nordenholt’s tactics were probably the best under the circumstances; but nevertheless they brought him into a fresh orientation with regard to the workers. Instead of leading them, he began more and more openly to drive them along the road which he wished them to take.
*****
Though Nordenholt succeeded in suppressing the outward manifestations of labour unrest at this period, I think it is fairly clear that he was unable to reach down to the sources of the trouble. At the root of things lay a vague dissatisfaction with general conditions, which it was impossible to exorcise; and this peculiar spirit manifested itself in all sorts of sporadic forms which gave a good deal of trouble before they could be got under control.
For example, at about this time, there was an outbreak of something akin to the dancing mania which I had seen in London. It began by a rapid extension of normal dancing in the halls of the city; but from this it soon passed into revelry in the public squares at night; and finally took the form of corybantic displays in the street. As soon as it began to demoralise the people, Nordenholt applied the drastic treatment of a fire-hose to the groups of dancers; and, between this method and ridicule, he succeeded in stamping out the disease before it had attained dangerous proportions.
But this was only one of the symptoms of the grave troubles which were menacing the success of Nordenholt’s plans. I do not doubt that he had foreseen the condition into which affairs had drifted; but it seems to me that he recognised the impossibility of eradicating the roots of the discontent. Its origin lay in the actual material and moral states of affairs; and without abandoning his whole scheme it was impossible to change these things.
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