CHAPTER I
Genesis
I suppose that in the days before the catastrophe I was a very fair representative of the better type of business man. I had been successful in my own line, which was the application of mass-production methods to a better pattern of motor-car than had yet been dealt with upon a large scale; and the Flint car had been a good speculation. I was thinking of bringing out an economical type of gyroscopic two-wheeler just at the time we were overwhelmed. Organisation was my strong point; and much of my commercial success was due to a new system of control which I had introduced into my factories. I mention this point in passing, because it was this capacity of mine which first brought me to the notice of Nordenholt.
Although at the time of which I speak I had become more a director than a designer, I was originally by profession a mechanical engineer; and in my student days I had had a scientific training, some remnants of which still fluttered in tatters in odd corners of my mind. I could check the newspaper accounts of new discoveries in chemistry and physics well enough to know when the reporters blundered grossly; geology I remembered vaguely, though I could barely have distinguished augite from muscovite under a microscope: but the biological group of subjects had never come within my ken. The medical side of science was a closed book as far as I was concerned.
Yet, like many educated men of that time, I took a certain interest in scientific affairs. I read the accounts of the British Association in the newspapers year by year; I bought a copy of Nature now and again when a new line of research caught my attention; and occasionally I glanced through some of these popular réchauffés of various scientific topics by means of which people like myself were able to persuade themselves that they were keeping in touch with the advance of knowledge.
It was this taste of mine which brought me into contact with Wotherspoon; for, beyond his interest in scientific affairs, he and I had little enough in common. It is over a quarter of a century since I saw him last, for he must have died in the first year of our troubles; but I can still recall him very clearly: a short, stout man—“pudgy” is perhaps the word which best describes him—with a drooping, untidy moustache half-covering but not concealing the slackness of his mouth; fair hair, generally brushed in a lank mass to one side of his forehead; and watery eyes which had a look in them as of one crushed beneath a weight of knowledge and responsibility.
As a matter of fact, I doubt if his knowledge was sufficiently profound or extensive to crush any ordinary person; and as he had a private income and no dependants, I could not understand what responsibilities weighed upon him. He certainly held no official post in the scientific world which might have burdened him; for despite numerous applications on his part, none of the Universities had seen fit to utilise his services in even the meanest capacity.
To be quite frank, he was a dabbler. He originated nothing, discovered nothing, improved nothing; and yet, by some means, he had succeeded in imposing himself upon the public mind. He delivered courses of popular lectures on the work of real investigators; and I believe that these lectures were well attended. He wrote numerous books dealing with the researches of other men; and the publication of volume after volume kept him in the public eye. Whenever an important discovery was made by some real scientific expert, Wotherspoon would sit down and compile newspaper articles on the subject with great facility; and by these methods he achieved, among inexperienced readers, the reputation of a sort of arbiter in the scientific field. “As Mr. Wotherspoon says in the article which we publish elsewhere” was a phrase which appeared from time to time in the leader columns of the more sensational Press.
Naturally, he was disliked by the men who actually did the scientific work of the world and who had little time to spare for cultivating notoriety. He was a member of a large number of those societies to which admission can be gained by payment of an entrance fee and subscription; and on the bills of his lectures and the title-pages of his books his name was followed by a string of letters which the uninitiated assumed to imply great scientific ability. His application for admission to the Royal Society had, however, been unsuccessful—a failure which he frequently and publicly attributed to jealousy.
It appears strange that such a man as this should have been selected by Fate as the agent of disaster; and it seems characteristic of him that, when the key of the problem was lying beside him, his energy was entirely engrossed in writing newspaper paragraphs on another matter. His mind worked exclusively through the medium of print and paper; so that even the most striking natural phenomenon escaped his observation.
At that time he lived in one of the houses of Cumberland Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park. I cannot recall the number; and the place has long ago disappeared; but I remember that it was near St. Katherine’s College and it overlooked the grounds of St. Katherine’s House. Wotherspoon carried his scientific aura even into the arrangement of his residence; for what was normally the drawing-room of the house had been turned into a kind of laboratory-reception-room; so that casual visitors might be impressed by his ardour in the pursuit of knowledge. When anyone called upon him, he was always discovered in this room, fingering apparatus, pouring liquids from one tube into another, producing precipitates or doing something else which would strike the unwary as being part of a recondite process. I had a feeling, when I came upon him in the midst of these manœuvres, that he had sprung up from his chair at the sound of the door bell and had plunged hastily into his operations. I know enough to distinguish real work from make-believe; and Wotherspoon never gave me the impression that he was engaged in anything better than window-dressing. At any rate, nothing ever was made public with regard to the results of these multitudinous experiments; and when, occasionally, I asked him if he proposed to bring out a paper, he merely launched into a diatribe against the jealousy of scientific men.