I know that during these months he stiffened the discipline of the Labour Defence Force considerably in view of eventualities; and he had frequent conferences with the officers in command of its various units. I guessed, from what I saw, that in future he intended to drive the population into safety if he could not lead them there; and I confess that at times I took a very gloomy view of our chances of success.
*****
It was during this trying period, I think, that Nordenholt’s young men were his greatest source of strength. He was always in touch with them and in some way he seemed to draw encouragement from them while spurring them on to further efforts. They seemed to lean on him and yet to support him in his work; and often I felt that without some comradeship such as this our whole plans would have been doomed to failure. The Nordenholt Gang practically occupied all the posts of any responsibility in the Nitrogen Area; and this, I expect, rendered the working of the machine much smoother than it would otherwise have been.
Since my new work brought me into touch with many fresh departments, my acquaintance with Nordenholt’s men increased; and I was amazed to find the ramifications of his system and the super-excellence of the human material in which he had dealt. They were all young, hardly any were over thirty-five and most were younger; yet they seemed to have a fund of moral courage and self-reliance which struck me, especially in those dark times. They never seemed to doubt that in the end things would come right. It was not that they blindly trusted in Nordenholt to the exclusion of common sense: for they all seemed to face the facts quite squarely. But behind their even weighings of the situation I detected an unspoken yet wholehearted belief that Nordenholt would bring us through without a hitch. Hero-worship has its uses, when it is soundly based; and all of them, it was easy to see, had made Nordenholt their hero. When I thought over the many-sided nature of their activities and the differences of personality among them, I could not help finding my view of Nordenholt himself expanding. They were all picked men, far above the average; their minds worked on different lines; their interests were as divergent as the Poles: and yet, one and all, they recognised Nordenholt as their master. I do not mean that he excelled them in their own special lines: for I doubt, in many cases, whether he had even a grip of the elements of the subjects which they had made their own. But he had been able to impress upon all these various intellects the feeling that he was in a class by himself; and that effect implied immense personality in him.
Despite their widely-different fields of activity, there was a very strong esprit de corps among them all; and it was not for some time that I felt myself to be received on equal terms with the rest. I think they felt that I was outside their particular circle, at first. But the real passport into it was efficiency; and when I had had time to show my power of organisation, they accepted me at once as one of themselves.
Of them all, I think Henley-Davenport interested me most, though I can hardly put into words the reasons which led to this attraction. I never learned how Nordenholt had discovered him originally; but I found that when Henley-Davenport began to open up the subject of induced radio-activity, Nordenholt had stepped in and bought up for him a huge supply of various radioactive materials which he required in his work and which he had despaired of acquiring on account of their enormous cost.
What struck me most about him was his fearlessness. Once he gave me, incidentally in the course of a talk upon something else, a suggestion of the risks which his work entailed. It seemed to me that I would rather have faced a dozen other kinds of death than that one. Purely as a matter of physiological interest, he told me that the effect of radioactive materials on a large scale upon the human body would exceed the worst inventions of mediæval torturers.
“The radiations, you know,” he said, drawing at his cigarette. “The radiations have a knack of destroying tissue; but they don’t produce immediate effects. The skin remains quite healthy, to all appearances, for days after the damage is done. Then you get festering sores appearing on the affected parts.
“Well, on a large scale, the affected parts will be the whole surface of the body; so that in itself will be pretty bad, as you can see. Poor old Job will have to take a back seat after this.
“Then, again, I expect enormous quantities of radioactive gas will be evolved; and probably one will breathe some of it into one’s lungs. The result of that will be rather worse than the external injuries, of course. I doubt if a man will last half an hour under that treatment; but that half-hour will be the limit in pain.”
“Can’t you use a mask or some lead protection?” I asked. “Or could you not fix up the whole thing in a bomb-proof case which would keep the rays from things outside?”
“Well, that’s the first thing one thinks of, naturally; but to tell the truth it’s impracticable for various reasons. Some of them are implicit in the nature of the processes I’m using; but even apart from that, look at the state of affairs when the thing goes off with a bang. It will be one of the biggest explosions, considering the amounts I have to use; and if I’m going to be flung about like a child’s toy, I prefer to fly light and not have a sheet of lead mail to go along with me and crush me when I strike anything. As to a mask, nothing would stick on. You would simply be asking to have your face driven in, if you wore anything of the kind.
“No, I’ve been lucky so far. I’ve only lost three fingers in a minor burst-up. And I’m going to stake on my luck rather than risk certain damage. But if I can only pull it off, Flint . . . Nordenholt thinks a lot of it; and I don’t want to disappoint him if I can help it. If I do go to glory, I’ll at least leave something behind me which will make it more than worth while.”
Nordenholt, I learned later, did “think a lot of it.” I spoke to him on the subject one day; and I was astonished to find how much stress he laid on the Henley-Davenport work.
“You don’t realise it, Jack; but it’s just on the cards that our whole future turns on Henley-Davenport. I see things coming. They’re banking up on the horizon already; and if the storm bursts, nothing but Henley-Davenport can save us. And the worst of it is that he doesn’t seem to be getting ahead much at present. It’s no fault of his. No one could work harder; and the other two—Struthers and Anderson—are just as keen. But it doesn’t come out, somehow. And the tantalising thing is that he has proved it can be done; only at present it isn’t economical. He gets energy liberated, all right; but where we need a ton of gunpowder, he can only give us a percussion cap, so to speak. If only he can hit on it in time . . .”
*****
For my own part, that period was depressing. All the joy had gone out of my work. Only after I had lost her did I realise how great a part Elsa had played in my planning of the future. Her disappearance cast a shade over all my schemes; and soon I gave up entirely the side of the reconstruction in which we had collaborated. I could not bear to think over again the lines along which we had worked so intimately in common. I simply put them out of my mind and concentrated my attention exclusively upon the material aspects of the problem.
I have said this quite freely; though possibly the reader may look upon me as a weak man for allowing such factors to enter into so vast a matter. Had I been superhuman, no doubt, I could have shut my mind to the past, and gone forward without flinching. But I never imagined that I was a superman; and at this time especially I felt anything but superhuman. I was wounded to the quick; and all I desired was to avoid the whole subject of Elsa in my thoughts. And when I come to think of it, it seems quite probable that I did my best work in this way. If I had continued to dream of Fata Morgana and all its wonders, I should simply have drugged myself with a mental opiate and my work would have suffered on other sides.
Elsa’s whole attitude to Nordenholt and myself had been a puzzle. I could not understand why she should have been so bitter against us; for try as I could, I failed to see anything discreditable in our doings. The logic of events had thrust us into the position we occupied, it seemed to me; and I co
uld not appreciate her view of the situation.
Nordenholt kept silence on the subject for some days after our trip up Loch Lomond; but he finally gave me his views in reply to urgent questioning.
“I think it’s something like this, Jack: from what I know of Elsa in the past, she’s got a vivid imagination, very vivid; and it happens to be the pictorial imagination. Give her a line of description, and she has the power of calling up the scene in her mind, filling in missing details and producing something which impresses her profoundly.”
“Well, I don’t see what that’s got to do with calling me a brute,” I said. “It doesn’t seem to help me much.”
“It’s quite clear to me. The few details she got from that confounded missorted form were enough to start her imagination. She instinctively called up a vision of starving people, suffering children and all the rest of the affairs in the South. And you know, Jack, these visions of hers are wonderfully clear and sharp. It wasn’t you who built Fata Morgana on those afternoons; it was her imagination that did it and you followed in her track.”
“Yes, you’re quite right, Nordenholt. I don’t think I would have so much as thought of dream-cities if she hadn’t led the way. And she certainly had the knack of making them seem concrete.”
“Very well; assume she had this vision of starving humanity. You know her type of mind—everything for others! What sort of effect would that picture produce upon her? A tremendous revulsion of feeling, eh? Her whole emotional side would be up in arms; and she has strong emotions, though she doesn’t betray them. Her intellectual side didn’t get a chance against the combination of that picture and her ideals. It was simply swept out at once.
“But in spite of all her emotions, she’s level-headed. Sooner or later she’ll begin to think more calmly. And she’s very just, too. That ought to help, I think. Oh, I don’t despair about her; or rather, I wouldn’t despair about her if it weren’t for some things that are coming yet. I’m not going to buoy you up with any hopes, Jack, for I believe in dealing straight. I can’t let you hope for much; we’ve both lost enormously in her eyes. But I’ve seen cases in which her imagination misled her before and her reason came out in the end. It may be so this time. But don’t expect anything, Jack; and don’t try to gain anything. She’s a very straight girl, and if she finds she has been wrong she won’t hesitate to come and admit it to you without any encouragement on your part. But it has been a horrible affair for her; and you must remember that, if you think hardly of her at times.”
“I think hardly of her! You don’t know me, Nordenholt, or you wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, for both our sakes, I hope her intellect will get control of her feelings. I hate to see her going about her work and know that she has lost all faith in me now. She was the one creature in the world that loved me, you know, Jack; and it’s hard.”
Then he laughed contemptuously, as though at his own weakness.
“It’s quite evident I’m not the man I was, Jack. But somehow, in this affair we’re both in the same boat to some extent; and I let that slip out. You see that Elsa hasn’t the monopoly of an emotional temperament!”
*****
All great undertakings with uncertain ends appear to run the same course. First there is the period of inception, a time of high hopes and eager toil and self-sacrifice; then, as the novelty wears away, there follows a stage in which the first enthusiasm has died down and an almost automatic persistence takes the place of the great emotional driving-force of the early days; later still, when enthusiasm has vanished, there comes a time when the meaner side of human nature reasserts itself. My narrative has reached the point of junction between these last two divisions; and the pages which I have yet to write must perforce deal mainly with the troubles which beset us in the period of lassitude and nerve-strain which followed naturally upon the other phases of the situation.
I have thrown this chapter into a series of isolated sections; for I believe that such a treatment best suggests the state of things at the time. We had lost the habit of connected thought, as far as the greater events were concerned. Our daily round absorbed our attention; and it was only occasionally that we were jarred out of our grooves by some event of salient importance.
The whole atmosphere which surrounded us was depressing; and it slowly and surely made its impression upon our minds and formed the background upon which our thoughts moved. The gloom of the smoke-filled sky had its reaction upon our psychology. The old sunlight seemed to have vanished from our lives. And at this time we were all beginning to pay the price for the feverish activity of the earlier days in the Area. Our work, whether mental or physical, wearied us sooner than before; and its monotony irritated our nerves. Such recreations as we had—and they were few enough at this time—failed to relieve the tension. Among the labouring classes, in particular, this condition of lassitude showed itself in a marked degree.
Nordenholt, with his finger on the pulse of things, grew more and more anxious as time went on. On the surface, he still appeared optimistic; but from chance phrases here and there I deduced that his uneasiness was increasing; and that he anticipated something which I myself could not foresee. Knowing what I do now, it seems to me that in those days I must have been blind indeed not to understand what was before us; but I frankly confess that I missed the many signs which lay in our path from day to day. When the disaster came upon us, it took me almost completely by surprise.
CHAPTER XVII
PER ITER TENEBRICOSUM
AFTER Elsa had rejected any further collaboration with me, I was forced at times to consult Nordenholt upon certain points in my schemes which seemed to me to require the criticism of a fresh mind; and I thus fell into the habit of seeing him in his office at intervals.
“Things are in a bad way, Jack,” he said to me at the end of one of these interviews. “You don’t see everything that’s going on, of course; so you couldn’t be expected to be on the alert for it; but it’s only right to warn you that we’re coming up against the biggest trouble we’ve had yet in the Area.”
“Of course things are anything but satisfactory, I know,” I replied. “The output’s going down and there seems to be no way of screwing the men up to increase it. But is it really fatal, do you think? We seem even now to have the thing well in hand.”
I glanced up at the great Nitrogen Curve above the fireplace. The red and green lines upon it appeared to me to show a state of affairs which, if not all that we could wish, was at least satisfactory as compared with what might have been. Nordenholt followed my glance.
“That practical trend of mind which you have, Jack, sometimes keeps you from seeing realities. What lies at the root of the trouble just now isn’t output or slackness or anything like that. These are only symptoms of the real disease. It’s not in the concrete things that I see the danger, except indirectly. The true peril comes from the intangibles; ideas, states of mind, subconscious reflections. I’ve told you often that the material world is only the outward show which hardly matters: the real things are the minds of the men who live in it. It’s their movements you need to look at if you want to gauge affairs.”
“I stick to what I know, Nordenholt, as I’ve often told you. I’m no psychologist; and I have to look on the material side because I’m out of my depth in the other. But let’s hear what you have in your mind about the state of affairs.”
“Well, you’ve been busy enough with your own work; so probably you haven’t had time to observe how things are going; but I can put the thing in a nutshell. We’ve weathered a good many difficulties; but now we’re up against the biggest of them all. I see all the signs of a revival in the near future—and it isn’t going to be a Christian revival. It spells trouble of the worst description.”
Now that my attention had been drawn to the point, a score of incidents flashed across my mind in confirmation of what he said. I had noticed an increased attendance at the meetings of street-preachers; and also a growth in the number of
the preachers themselves. As I went about the city in the evenings I had seen in many places knots of people assembled round some speaker who, with emotion-contorted visage, was striving to move them by his eloquence.
Once I had even stopped for a few minutes to listen to a sermon being preached outside the Central Station by the Reverend John P. Wester; and I still remembered the effect which it had produced upon me. He was a tall man with a flowing red beard and a voice which enabled him to make himself heard by huge audiences in the open air. He repelled me by the cloudiness of his utterances—I hate loose thinking—and also by the touch of fanaticism which clung to his discourses; for I instinctively detest a fanatic. Yet in spite of this I felt strangely attracted by him. He had the gift of gripping his hearers; and I could see how he played upon them as a great musician plays upon a favourite instrument. Remotely he reminded me of Nordenholt in the way in which he seemed to know by instinct the points to which his rhetorical attacks should be directed; but the resemblance between the two men ended at this. It was always reason to which Nordenholt appealed in the end; whilst emotional strings were the ones which the Reverend John fingered with success.
“Now you’ve told me, I believe you’re right,” I said. “I have seen signs of something like a revival. The crowds seem to be taking a greater interest in religion.”
“I wish they would,” Nordenholt returned, abruptly. “They won’t get it from the Reverend John. He’s out for something quite different. It’s just what I feared would happen sooner or later. It always crops up under conditions like those we are in just now. We’ve strained the human machine to its utmost in all this work; and we’re on the edge of possibilities in the way of collective hysteria.
“Now that man Wester is at the root of half the trouble we’re having just now. I don’t mean that he is creating it; nothing of that sort: but his personality forms a centre round which the thing collects. The thing itself is there anyway: but if it weren’t for him and some others, it would remain fluid; it wouldn’t become really dangerous. But Wester is a fanatic and with his oratorical powers he carries the weaker people off their feet, especially the women. He’s got a following. What worries me is, where he’s going to lead them. He’s got a kink in him. Still, I’m trusting that we may be able to weather the thing without using force even now. But if he goes too far, I’ll break him like that.”
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