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 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 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.