CHAPTER XVIIIThe Eleventh Hour
I haveset down all my doubts as to the wisdom of Nordenholt’s treatment of the Reverend John; and it is only right to place on the other side the fact that events proved he had gauged matters better than I had done. He had foreseen the trend of the revivalist’s thoughts and had deduced their climax, probably long before Wester himself had understood the road he had placed his feet upon. Nordenholt had allowed the excitement to grow without check, even to its highest point, without interfering in the least; because he calculated that the supreme disillusion would produce a revulsion of feeling which could be attained in no other way. And his calculation proved to be correct. Morally shaken by the failure of the miracle which they had been led to expect, and which many of them had counted upon with certainty, the populace allowed itself to be driven back into the factories and mines without a word of protest. Their dreams were shattered and they fell back into reality without the strength to resist any dominant will. It seemed as though the last difficulties were disappearing before us; and that the path now led straight onward to our goal. So I thought, at least, but Nordenholt doubted. And, as it turned out, he again saw more clearly than I. We might be done with the Reverend John; but the Reverend John had not finished with us, dead as he was.
The next ten days saw the institution of a merciless system in the works and mines of the Area. During theperiod of the revivalist’s activity there had been an accelerated fall in the output; and Nordenholt determined that this must be made good as soon as possible. Possibly also he believed that a spell of intense physical exertion would exhaust the workers and leave them no time to indulge in recollections and reflections which might be dangerous. Whatever his motives may have been, his methods were drastic in the extreme. The minimum necessary output was trebled; and the members of any group who failed to attain it were promptly deported into the desert of the South. Surely entrenched behind the loyalty of the Labour Defence Force, Nordenholt threw aside any concealment and ruled the whole Area as a despot. The end in view was all that he now seemed to see; and he broke men and threw them aside without the slightest hesitation. More than ever, it seemed to me at this time, he was like a machine, rolling forward along its appointed path, careless of all the human lives and the human interests which he ground to powder under his irresistible wheels. I began to think of him at times in the likeness of Jagannatha, the Lord of the World, under whose car believers cast themselves to death. But none of Nordenholt’s victims were willing ones.
Unlimited power, as Nordenholt himself had pointed out to me, is a perilous gift to any man. The human mind is not fitted for strains of this magnitude; and even Nordenholt’s colossal personality suffered, I believe, from the stress of his despotic rule. But where a smaller man would have frittered away his energies in petty oppression or aimless regulation, Nordenholt never lost sight of his main objective: and I believe that his harshness in the end arose merely from his ever-growing determination to bring his enterprise to success. Concentrating his mind entirely upon this, he may have suffered from a loss of perspective which made him ruthless in his demands upon the labouring masses of theArea. If this were so, I cannot find it in me to blame him, in view of the responsibility which he bore. But I have a suspicion that he feared a coming disaster, and that he was determined to take time by the forelock by forcing up production ere the catastrophe overtook us.
After the death of the revivalist, his followers disappeared. The meetings at street corners no longer took place; the wild skin-clad figures ran no more through the city. I believe that Nordenholt took steps to arrest those of the inner circle who escaped the machine-guns in the Park; but many of them seem to have slipped through his fingers in spite of the efficiency of his Secret Service. Probably they were kept in concealment by sympathisers, of whom there were still a number in spite of the general disillusionment. On the surface, the whole movement appeared to have been arrested completely; but, as we were to learn, it was not blotted out.
I can still remember the first news of the disaster. A trill on my telephone bell, and then the voice of Nordenholt speaking:
“Hullo!... That you, Jack?... Come over here, will you?... At my office. I may need you.... It’s a bad affair.... What?... Two of the pit-shafts have been destroyed. No way of reaching the crowd underground. I’m afraid it’s a bad business.”
When I reached his office he was still at the telephone, evidently speaking to the scene of the catastrophe.
“Yes?... Shaft closed completely?... How long do you think it will take to reopen it?... Permanent? Mean to say you can’t reopen it?... Months?... How many men below just now?... Six hundred, you think?... That’s taking the number of lamps missing, I suppose.... Well, find out exactly as soon as you can.”
He rang off and was just about to call up another number,the second pit, I suppose, when the telephone bell sounded an inward call.
“Yes?... What’s that? Numbers what?... Three, seven, eight, ten, thirteen, fourteen.... Ring off! I’ll speak to you again.”
He rang furiously for the exchange.
“Put me through to the Coal Control. Quick, now.... Hullo! Is that you, Sinclair?... Nordenholt.... Send out a general call. Bring every man to the surface at once.... Yes, every pit in the Area. Hurry! It’s life or death.... Report when you get news.”
Without leaving the instrument he called up another number.
“Go on. No. 14 was the last.... Take down these numbers, Jack.... 3, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19.... That all?... Good. Get me the figures of losses as soon as you can. Also a note of the damage. Good-bye.”
Behind this disjointed sequence of phrases I had caught hints of the magnitude of the calamity; and I was to some extent prepared for what I heard when he had time to turn to me at last.
“Eleven pits have been destroyed almost simultaneously, Jack. No. 23 and No. 27 went first; and then that list I gave you just now. There are no details yet; but it’s quite evidently malicious. Dynamite, I think, to judge from the few facts I’ve got. The shafts are completely blocked, as far as we know; and every man underground is done for.”
“How many does that amount to?”
“There are no figures yet; but it will run into more than three figures anyway.”
Again the shrill call of the telephone bell sounded. He took up the receiver.
“Yes?... What’s that? No. 31 and No. 33?... Complete block? No hope?... Do your best.”
He turned to me.
“Two more gone, before we could get the men up. It’s a very widespread affair. I told you we hadn’t done with the Reverend John.”
“What’s he got to do with it?” I asked, astonished.
“Some of his friends carrying out the work he left unfinished. They mean to smash the Area; and they’ve hit us on our weakest point, there’s no doubt. No coal, no work in the factories, no nitrogen. This is serious, Jack.”
Another call on the telephone brought the news that three more pits had been destroyed. Nordenholt rang up the Coal Control once more and urged them to even greater haste in their efforts to get the men to the surface. Then he turned back to me.
“Do you realise what it all means, Jack? As far as I can see, it’s the beginning of the end for us. We can’t pull through on this basis; and I doubt if we have heard the full extent of the disaster even now.”
I have endeavoured to convey the impression made upon my mind by the first news of the catastrophe; but little purpose would be served by continuing the story in detail. All that morning we stood by the telephone, gathering in the tale of disaster bit by bit in disjointed fragments as it came over the wire. Here and there, items of better news filtered through: reports that in some pits the whole of the underground workers had been brought safely to the surface, accounts of the immunity of certain shafts. But as a whole it was a black record which we gathered in. The work had been planned with skill; and the execution had not fallen below the level of the plan. In one or two cases the miscreants had been detected in the act and captured before they had time to do any damage; but these discoveries were very few. As far as most of the pits wereconcerned, we never were able to establish how the work had been done; for all traces were buried under the debris in the wrecked shafts, which have been left unopened ever since the catastrophe. One thing was certain, the whole of the workers actually in the galleries at the time of the explosions were lost for good and all. They were far beyond the reach of any human help.
It is no part of my plan to do more than indicate the horror of this calamity. I draw no pen-pictures of the crowds around the pit-heads, the crying of the women, the ever-recurring demands for the names of the lost. These were features common to all mining accidents in the old days; and this one differed from the rest only in its magnitude and not in its form.
Owing to the colossal scale of the casualty list it was impossible to minimise the matter in any way. Nordenholt decided to tell the truth in full as soon as the total losses were definitely established. He gave his newspapers a free hand; and by the late afternoon the placards were in the streets.
Terrible Disasters in Coal District.Many Shafts Blocked.All Underground Workers Entombed.11,000 Dead.
To most of those who read the accounts of the catastrophe, it seemed a terrible blow of Fate; but we at the centre of things knew that the immediate loss was as nothing in comparison with the ultimate results which it would bring in its train. All the largest pits were out of action. The coal output, even at the best, could not possibly keep pace with the demands of the future; and with the failure of fuel, the whole activities of the Area must come to astandstill. Just on the edge of success, it seemed all our efforts were to be in vain. From beyond the grave the dead fanatic had struck his blow at the material world which he hated; and we shuddered under the shock.
Throughout that day I was with Nordenholt. I think that he felt the need of someone beside him, some audience which would force him to keep an outwardly unshaken front. But to me it was a nightmare. Thedébâclein itself had broken my nerve, coming thus without warning; but Nordenholt’s prevision of the ultimate results which it would exercise seemed to take away the last ray of hope.
“It’s no use whining, Jack; we’ve just got to take it as well as we can. First of all, the coal output will cease entirely for a long time. Not a man will go into even the ‘safe’ pits after this until everything has been examined thoroughly; and that will take days and days. It’s no use blinking that side of it.”
“Why not force them in?” I asked. “Turn out the Defence Force and drive them to the pits. Wemusthave coal.”
“No good. I know what they’re thinking now; and even if you shot half of them the rest wouldn’t go down. It’s no use thinking of it. I know.”
“Why didn’t the Intelligence Section get wind of it?”
“Don’t blame them; they couldn’t have done more than they did. Don’t you realise that if a man is prepared to sacrifice his life—and these fanatics who did the damage were the first victims themselves—there’s nothing that can stop him? The Intelligence people had nothing to go on. The whole of this thing was organised and carried through by a handful of men, some of whom were evidently employed in the pits themselves. It was so rapidly planned and executed that no secret service could have got at it in time. Remember, we’re making explosives on a big scale, so that thefts are easy.”
“And if you’re right, what is to happen?”
“Go on as long as we can; then see how we stand; and after that, if necessary, decimate the population of the Area so as to bring our numbers down to what we can feed in future. There’s nothing else for it.”
“I hope it won’t come to that, Nordenholt.”
“It’s no choice of mine; but if it’s forced on me, I’ll do it. I’m going to see this thing through, Jack, atanycost now. Millions have been swept out of existence already by the Famine; and I’m not going to stick at the loss of a few more hundred thousands so long as we pull through in the end.”
In the main, Nordenholt’s forecast of the attitude which the miners would adopt proved to be correct. A certain number of workers, braver or less imaginative than the rest, returned to work in the “safe” pits in the course of a day or two; but the main bulk of the labour remained sullenly aloof. Nothing would induce them to set foot in the galleries. Work above-ground they would do, wherever it was necessary to preserve the pits from deterioration; but they had no intention of descending into the subterranean world again. Better to starve in the light of day than run the risk of hungering in some prison in the bowels of the earth. Neither threats nor cajolings served to move them from this decision.
Nordenholt, as a last resource, sent exploring parties into the South to examine the deserted coal-fields of England in the hope that some of them might be workable; but the various missions returned with reports that nothing could be done. During the period since the mining population had died out, the pits had become unsafe, some by the infiltration of water, others by the destruction of the machinery and yet more by the disrepair of the galleries. Here and there a mine was discovered which could still beoperated; and parties were drafted South to work it; but in most cases so much labour was required to put the shafts and galleries in repair that we were unable to look forward to anything like the previous coal-supply even at the best.
Meanwhile Nordenholt, day by day, grew more and more grim. While there was any hope of utilising the mining population, he clung to it tenaciously; but as time passed it became clearer that the Area had received its death-blow. He began to draft his ex-miners into other branches of industry bit by bit; but with the fall in the coal-supply there was little use for them there, since very soon all the activities of the Area would have to cease.
I watched him closely during that period; and I could see the effect which the strain was producing upon him. The disaster had struck us just when we seemed to have reached the turning-point in the Area’s history, at the very time when all seemed to be sure in front of us. It was a blow which would have prostrated a weaker man; but Nordenholt had a tenacity far above the ordinary. He meant, I know, to carry out his decision to decimate the Area if necessary; but he held his hand until it was absolutely certain that all was lost. I think he must have had at the back of his mind a hope that everything would come right in the end; though I doubt if his grounds for that belief were any but the most slender.
For my own part, I went through that period like an automaton. The suddenness of the catastrophe seemed, in some way, to have deadened my imagination; and I carried on my work mechanically without thinking of where it was all leading us. With this new holocaust looming over the Area, Elsa seemed further away than ever. If she had revolted at the story of the South, it seemed to me that this fresh sacrifice of lives in the Area itself would deepen her hatred for the men who planned it.
It seemed the very irony of Fate that Nordenholt should choose this juncture to tell me his views on her feelings.
“Elsa seems to be coming round a little at last, Jack,” he said to me one day, “I think her emotional side has worked itself out in the contemplation of the Famine; and her reason’s getting a chance again.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked. “I haven’t seen anything to make me hopeful about it.”
“You wouldn’t notice anything. You don’t know her well enough—Oh, don’t get vexed. Even if you are in love with her, you’ve only known her for a very short time, whereas I’ve studied her since she was a child. I know the symptoms. She’s coming round a little.”
“Much good that will do now! If you decimate the Area it will be worse than ever. I hate to think of my own affairs in the middle of this catastrophe; but I simply can’t help it. If your plan goes through, it’s the end of my romance.”
He played with the cord of his desk telephone for a moment before replying. I could see that he had some doubt as to whether he ought to speak or not. At last he made up his mind.
“If you’re brooding over things as much as all that, Jack, I suppose I must say something; but I’m very much afraid of raising false hopes. You wonder, probably, why I don’t go straight ahead and weed out the useless mouths now and be done with it? Well, the fact is I’m staking it all on the next couple of days. Henley-Davenport seems, by his way of it, to be just on the edge of something definite at last. If he pulls it off, then all’s well. If not....”
“What do you mean?”
“If Henley-Davenport gets his results, we won’t need coal; because we shall have all the energy we require from his process. I’ve stretched things to the limit in the hope that he will give us the ace of trumps and not the two. Ifhe succeeds, we don’t need to weed out the Area; we can go on as we are; and we shall be absolutely certain to pull through with every soul alive. But I shouldn’t have told you this, perhaps; it may be only a false hope and will just depress you more by the reaction. But you look so miserable that I thought I had better take the risk.”
“When do you expect to know definitely?”
“He promised me that within two days he would be able to tell me, one way or the other. Of course, even if he fails now, he may pull it off later; but I can only wait two days more before beginning the elimination of all the useless mouths in the Area. Everything is ready to put into operation in that direction. But I hope we may not need these plans. It’s just a chance, Jack; so don’t build too much on it.”
It was advice easy enough to give; but I found it very hard to follow. All that day my hopes were rising; things seemed brighter at last: and it was only now and again that I stopped to remind myself that the whole thing was a gamble with colossal stakes. Even Nordenholt himself was afraid to count too much upon Henley-Davenport, though I knew that he believed implicitly in his capacity. But even as I said this to myself I felt my spirits rising. After the certainty of disaster which had confronted us, even this hazard was a relief. For the first time in many weeks I began to build castles in the air once more. I was half-afraid to do so; but I could not help myself. And as the hours passed by bringing no news of success or failure, I think my nerves must have become more and more tense. A whole day went by without news of any kind.
The morning of the following day seemed interminable to me. I knew that within another twenty-four hours Nordenholt would have given up all hope of Henley-Davenport’s success and would be setting in motion themachinery which he had devised for reducing the population of the Area; and as hour after hour passed without bringing any news, I became more and more restless. I tried to work and to ease my mind by concentrating it upon details; but I soon found that this was useless. Strive as I might, I could not banish the thought of the tragedy which hung over us.
At 3.27 p.m.—I know the exact minute, because my watch was stopped then and I read the time from it afterwards—I was standing beside my desk, consulting some papers on a file. Suddenly I heard a high detonation, a sound so sharp that I can liken it to nothing familiar. The air seemed full of flying splinters of glass; and simultaneously I was wrenched from my foothold and flung with tremendous violence against my desk. Then, it seemed, a dead silence fell.
I found that my right hand was streaming with blood from various cuts made by the razor-edges of the broken glass of the window. More blood was pouring from a gash on my forehead; but my eyes had escaped injury. When I moved, I found I suffered acute pain; though no bones seemed to be broken. The concussion had completely deafened me; and, as I found afterwards, my left ear-drum had been perforated, so that even to this day I can hear nothing on that side.
All about me the office was in confusion. Every pane of glass had been blown inward from the windows and the place looked as though a whirlwind had swept through it, scattering furniture and papers in its track. The shock had dazed me; and for several minutes I stood gazing stupidly at the havoc around me. It was, I am sure, at least five minutes before I grasped what had happened. As soon as I did so, I made my way, still in intense pain, down the stairs and into the quadrangle.
The pavements were littered with fragments of brokenglass which had fallen outward in the breaking of the windows; but there was not so much of this as I had expected, since most of the panes had been driven inward by the explosion. Quite a crowd of people were running out of the building and making in the direction of the new Chemistry Department in University Avenue. I followed them, noticing as I passed the Square that all the chimney-pots of the houses seemed to have been swept off, though I could see no traces of them on the ground. Later on, I found that they had been blown down on the further side of the terrace.
When I came in sight of the Chemistry building I was amazed, even though I was prepared for a catastrophe. One whole wing had been reduced to a heap of ruins, a mere pile of building-stone and joists flung together in utter confusion. Here and there among the debris, jets of steam and dust were spouting up; and from time to time came an eruption of small stones from the wreckage. The remainder of the edifice still stood almost intact save for its broken windows and shattered doors.
What astonished me at the time was that the whole scene recalled a cinema picture—violent motion without a sound to accompany it. I saw spouts of dust, falling masses of masonry, people running and gesticulating in the most excited manner; yet no whisper of sound reached me. It was only when someone came up and spoke directly to me that I discovered that I was temporarily stone deaf; for I could see his lips moving but could hear nothing whatever.
Like everyone else, I began to remove the debris. I think that we understood even then that it was hopeless to think of saving anyone from this wreckage, but we were all moved to do something which might at least give us the illusion that we were helping. As I pulled and tugged with the others, I began to appreciate the enormous power of theexplosive which had been at work. In an ordinary concussion, iron can be bent out of shape; but here I came across steel rafters which were cut clean through as though by a knife. I remember thinking vaguely that the explosive must have acted, as dynamite does, against the solid materials around it instead of spending its force upwards; for otherwise the whole place would have suffered a bombardment from flying blocks of stone.
For some time I toiled with the others. I saw Nordenholt’s figure close at hand. Then the sky seemed to take on a tinge of violet which deepened suddenly. I saw a black spot before my eyes; and apparently I fainted from loss of blood.
Even now, the causes of the Chemistry Department disaster are unknown. Henley-Davenport and his two assistants perished instantaneously in the explosion—in fact Henley-Davenport’s body was never recovered from the wreckage at all. A third assistant, who had been in the next room at the time, lived long enough to tell us the exact stage at which the catastrophe occurred; but even he could throw no direct light upon its origin.
From Henley-Davenport’s notes, which we found in his house, it seems clear that his efforts had been directed towards producing the disintegration of iron; and that on the morning of the accident he had completed his chain of radioactive materials which furnished the accelerated evolution of energy required to break up the iron atoms. As we know now, he succeeded in his experiment and his iron yielded the short-period isotopes of chromium, titanium and calcium until the end-product of the series—argon—was produced. The four successive alpha-ray changes, following each other at intervals of a few seconds, liberated a tremendous store of intra-atomic energy; but, knowing the extremely minute quantities with whichHenley-Davenport worked, it seems difficult to believe that the explosion which destroyed his laboratory was produced by this trace of material. To me it seems much more probable that his apparatus was shattered at the moment of the first disintegration of iron and that thus some of the short-period products were scattered abroad throughout the room, setting up radioactive change in certain of the metallic objects which they touched. No other explanation appears to fit the facts. We shall never learn the truth of the matter now; but knowing Henley-Davenport’s care and foresight, I cannot see any other way of accounting for the violence of the explosion.
Luckily for us, no radioactive gas is produced by the disintegration of iron; for had there been any such material among the decay products it is probable that most of those who had run to the scene of the disaster would have perished.
When I recovered consciousness again I found myself lying on a couch. A doctor was bandaging my hand. Nordenholt, looking very white and shaken, was sitting in a chair by the fire. At first I was too weak to do more than look round me; but after a few minutes I felt better and was able to speak to Nordenholt.
“What has happened? Did they get Henley-Davenport out of the wreck?”
“No, there’s no hope of that, Jack. He’s dead; and the best thing one can say is that he must have been killed instantaneously. But he’s done the trick for us, if we can only follow his track. He evidently tapped atomic energy of some kind or other. Did you notice the sharpness of the explosion before you were knocked out? There’s never been anything like it.”
“What’s going to happen now?” I was still unable to think clearly.
“I’ve sent Mitchell down to Henley-Davenport’s house to look at his last notes—he kept them there and he promised me to indicate each day what he proposed to do next, so that we’d have something to go on if anything like this happened. Mitchell will ring up as soon as he has found them.”
I heard afterwards that among the ruins of the laboratory Nordenholt had been struck by a falling beam and had just escaped with his life; but his voice gave no hint of it. I think that his complete concentration upon the main problem prevented him from realising that he might be badly hurt.
The telephone bell rang suddenly and Nordenholt went to the receiver.
“Yes, Mitchell.... You’ve got the notes?... Good.... You can repeat what he was doing?... No doubt about it?... All right. Start at once. We must have it immediately, cost what it may.... Come round here before you begin; but get going at once. There isn’t a minute to spare.”
Nordenholt replaced the receiver.
“I thought I could trust Henley-Davenport,” he said. “He’s left everything in order, notes written up to lunch-time complete and a full draft of his last experiment, which will allow Mitchell to carry on.”
A few minutes later, Mitchell himself appeared and gave us some further details. In his jottings, Henley-Davenport had suggested some possible modifications of the experiment which had ended so disastrously; and Mitchell proposed to try the effect of these alterations in the conditions. Before he left us, he sat down at Nordenholt’s desk and made a few notes of the process he intended to try, handing the paper to Nordenholt when he had finished. I can still remember his alert expression as he wrote and the almost finical care with which he flicked the ash from the end ofthe cigarette as he rose from the desk. It was the last time any of us saw him.
“Well, that’s all. I’m off.”
Nordenholt rose stiffly from his chair and shook hands with Mitchell as he went out. Then he passed to the telephone and rang up a number.
“Is that you, Kingan? Go across to the South Wing of the Chemistry place. Mitchell is there. See all that he does and then clear out before he tries the experiment. We must keep track of things, come what may. If he goes down, you will take on after him. Good-bye.”
Just after seven o’clock, there was another tremendous explosion; but this time the concussion seemed less violent than before. Mitchell himself was not killed outright; but he suffered injuries which proved fatal within a few days. Meanwhile the work went on. One after another, the Chemistry section of Nordenholt’s young men went into the furnace, some to be killed instantaneously, others to escape alive, but blasted almost out of recognition by the forces which they unchained. Yet none of them faltered. Link by link they built up the chain which was to bring safety to the Area; and each link represented a life lost or a body crippled. Day after day the work went on, interrupted periodically by the rending crash of these fearful explosions, until at last it seemed almost beyond hope that the problem would ever be solved. But ten days later Barclay staggered into Nordenholt’s room, smothered in bandages, with one arm useless at his side, and gasped out the news that he had been successful.
Looking back on that moment, I sometimes wonder that we were not almost hysterical with joy; but as a matter of fact, none of us said anything at all. Probably we did not really grasp the thing at the time. I know that I was busygetting a drink ready for Barclay, who had collapsed as soon as he gave his news; and all that I remember of Nordenholt is a picture of him standing looking out of the window with his back to us. Certainly it wasn’t the kind of scene one might have imagined.