CHAPTER XVIIn the Nitrogen Area
I haveno 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 guidingstar. The picture of starving millions 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 naturalcomplements 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 periodB. diazotansbegan 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 thatB. diazotanswas 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 ofB. diazotansin 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 worldB. diazotanshad 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 have 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 a kind of synthetic lime juice 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 their 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; sothat 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 under-current 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 were 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 beganmore and more openly to drive them along the road which he wished them to take.
I see that I have omitted to mention the attempted invasion of the Nitrogen Area from the coasts of Europe which took place just before this. To tell the truth, it was so complete a fiasco that it had almost passed from my mind; but a few words may be devoted to it here.
When the Famine had done its work in Germany there still remained for a time a number of inhabitants who had seized the food in the country by force and who were thus enabled to prolong their existence while their fellows died out. They belonged mainly to the old military class. When they in turn ran short of supplies, their natural thought was to plunder someone weaker than themselves; and learning of the existence of the Clyde Valley colony, they determined that it furnished the most probable source of loot. Apparently they imagined that the Fleet in the Firth of Forth was deserted; for in order to excite no suspicion they had kept their airships at long-range in the reconnaissances which they undoubtedly made in advance of their actual onset; and it seems most probable that they imagined they had nothing to fear beyond the risks incident to the invasion of an unprotected country. At least, so it appears to me; and there were no survivors of the expedition from whom the truth might have been discovered.
Under cover of night, they seem to have put most of their men on board merchant ships and sailed for the British coast at a time which would have brought them off the land in the early hours of the morning when, no doubt, they expected to get ashore without attracting attention, since they must have supposed all the coastal inhabitants had perished. Actually, however, their manœuvres had been followed by the seaplane patrol which cruised in the North Sea; and as soon as they left port, the Fleet was gotinto a state of preparedness. The two forces met somewhere on the high seas; the German squadron, utterly defenceless, was sunk without any resistance worthy of the name.
This was the only actual attempt at invasion which the Nitrogen Area had to repel; for Nordenholt’s aeroplane propaganda had checked any desire on the part of the survivors of the Famine in this country to approach the Clyde Valley under any conditions.
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 streets. 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 moralstates of affairs; and without abandoning his whole scheme it was impossible to change these things.
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 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 evenweighings of the situation I detected an unspoken yet whole-hearted 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 strongesprit de corpsamong 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 radioactivity, 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. Oncehe 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 have faced half a dozen other kinds of death rather 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 does go 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 goalong 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 itcanbe 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 notbear 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 super-man; 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 could 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 these 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 horribleaffair for her; and you must remember that, if you think hardly of her at times.”
“Ithink 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 onlyoccasionally 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.