“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, sub-conscious 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 to 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 chords 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 are 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.”