The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nordenholt's Million, by J. J. Connington

NORDENHOLT’S
MILLION

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By Geoffrey Moss

PONJOLA

By Cynthia Stockley

DESOLATE SPLENDOUR

By Michael Sadleir

CONSTABLE & CO. LTD.

NORDENHOLT’S
MILLION
BY
J. J. CONNINGTON

CONSTABLE & CO. LTD.
LONDON · BOMBAY · SYDNEY
1923

Printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

TO
J. N. C.

CONTENTS

NORDENHOLT’S MILLION

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.

It was about this time that Henley-Davenport was making his earlier discoveries in the field of induced radioactivity. The results were too technical for the unscientific man to appreciate; but I had become interested, not so much in details as in possibilities; and I determined to go across the Park and pay a visit to Wotherspoon one evening. I knew that, as far as published information went, he would be in possession of the latest news; and it was easier to get it from him than to read it myself.

It was warm weather then. I decided to use my car instead of walking through the Park. I had a slight headache, and I thought that possibly a short spin later, in the cool of the evening, might take it away. As I drove, I noticed how thunder-clouds were banking up on the horizon, and I congratulated myself that even if they broke I should have the shelter of the car and be saved a walk home through the rain.

When I reached Cumberland Terrace, I was, as I expected, shown up into Wotherspoon’s sanctum. I found him, as usual, deeply engrossed in work: he had his eye to the tube of a large microscope, down which he was staring intently. I noticed a slight change in the equipment of the room. There seemed to be fewer retorts, flasks and test-tube racks than there usually were; and two large tables at the windows were littered with flat glass dishes containing thin slabs of pinkish material which seemed to be gelatine. Things like incubators took up a good deal of the remaining space. But I doubt if it is worth while describing what I saw: I know very little of such things; and I question whether his apparatus would have passed muster with an expert in any case.

After a certain amount of fumbling with the microscope, which seemed largely a formal matter leading to nothing, he rose from his seat and greeted me with his customary pre-occupied air. For a time we smoked and talked of Henley-Davenport’s work; but after he had answered my questions it became evident that he had no further interest in the subject; and I was not surprised when, after a pause, he broke entirely new ground in his next remark.

“Do you know, Flint,” he said, “I am losing interest in all these investigations of the atomic structure. It seems to me that while unimaginative people like Henley-Davenport are groping into the depths of the material Universe, the real thing is passing them by. After all, what is mere matter in comparison with the problems of life? I have given up atoms and I am going to begin work upon living organisms.”

That was so characteristic of Wotherspoon. He was always “losing interest in” something and “going to begin work” upon something else. I nodded without saying anything. After all, it seemed of very little importance what he “worked” at.

“I wonder if you ever reflect, Flint,” he continued, “if you ever ponder over our position in this Universe? Here we stand, like Dante, ‘midway in this our mortal life’; at the half-way house between the cradle and the grave in time. And in space, too, we represent the middle term between the endless stretches of the Macrocosm and the bottomless deeps of the Microcosm. Look up at the night-sky and your eyes will tingle with the rays from long-dead stars, suns that were blotted out ages ago though the light they sent out before they died still thrills across the ether on its journey to our Earth. Take your microscope, and you find a new world before you; increase the magnification and another, tinier cosmos sweeps into your ken. And so, with ever-growing lens-power, we can peer either upward into stellar space or downward into the regions of the infinitesimal, while between these deeps we ourselves stand for a time on our precarious bridge of Earth.”

I began to suspect that he was trying over some phrases for a coming lecture; but it was early yet and I could not decently make an excuse for leaving him. I took a fresh cigar and let him go on without interruption.

“It always seems strange to me how little the man in the street knows of the things around him. The microscopic world has no existence as far as his mind is concerned. A grain of dust is too small for him to notice; it must blow into his eye before he appreciates that it has perceptible size at all. And yet, all about him and within him there lives this wonderful race of beings, passing to and fro in his veins as we do in the streets and avenues of a great city; coming to birth, going about their concerns, falling ill and dying, just as men do in London at this hour. Think of the battles, the victories, and the defeats which take place minute by minute in the tiniest drop of our blood; and the issue of the war may be the life or death of one of us. They talk of the struggle for existence; but the real struggle for existence is going on within us and not in the outer world. Phagocyte against bacterium—that is where the fitness of an organism comes to its ultimate test. A slight hitch in the reinforcements, a minute’s delay in bringing numbers to bear, and the keystone is out of the edifice; nothing is left but a ruin.

“It always reminds me of those frontier skirmishes—a mere handful of troops engaged on either side—upon the issue of which the fate of an empire may depend. Get a new set of enemies, some novel type of bacteria with fresh tactics which the phagocytes cannot cope with—and down comes a human being. It strikes wonder into me, that, you know. A human body is so colossal in comparison with these bacteria that they can have no idea even of our existence; and yet they can destroy the whole machinery upon which our life depends. It’s almost as if a few shots fired in Africa could crumble the whole Earth into an impalpable dust.

“And it is not only within us that these struggles are going on. When you came in, I was just studying some specimens of organisms which are equally vital to us. Come over here to the microscope, Flint, and have a look at them yourself.”

When I had got the focus adjusted to suit my eyes, I must confess that I was astonished by what I saw. Somehow, in the course of my reading, I had picked up the idea that bacteria were rod-like creatures which floated inertly in liquids at the mercy of the currents; but at the first glance I realised how much below the reality my conception had been. In the field of the instrument I saw a score of objects, rod-like in their main structure, it is true, but so mantled with the fringes of their fine, thread-like cilia that their baculite character was almost concealed. Nor were they the inert things which I had supposed them to be; for, as I watched them, now one and again another would dart with prodigious swiftness from point to point in the circle of illumination. I had rarely seen such relative activity in any creature. The speed of their movements was so great that my eye could not follow them in their tracks. They appeared to be at rest one instant and then to vanish, reappearing as suddenly in some fresh spot. I watched them, fascinated, for some minutes, trying to trace the vibrations of the cilia which projected them from place to place at such enormous speeds; but either my eye was untrained or the movements of the thread-like fringes were too rapid to be seen. It was certainly an illuminating glimpse into the life of the under-world.

When I had risen from the microscope table, Wotherspoon took me over to one of the benches before the window and showed me the glass vessels containing the pinkish gelatine. These slabs, he told me, were cultures of bacteria. One placed a few organisms on the gelatine and there they grew and multiplied enormously.

“These specimens here,” said Wotherspoon, “are not the same variety as the ones on the microscope slide. They have nothing whatever to do with disease; and yet, as I told you, they have an influence upon animal life. I suppose you never heard of nitrifying and denitrifying bacteria?”

I admitted that the names were unfamiliar to me.

“Just so. Few people seem to take any interest in these vital problems. Now you do know that internally we swarm with all sorts of germs, noxious in some cases, beneficent in others; but I suppose it never struck you that our bodies form only a trifling part of the material world; and that outside these living islets there is space for all sorts of microscopic flora and fauna to grow and multiply? And need these creatures be absolutely isolated from the interests of animals? Not at all.

“Now what is the essential thing, apart from air and water, which we derive from the outside world? Food, isn’t it? Did it ever occur to you to inquire where your food comes from, ultimately?”

“Well, of course,” I said, “it comes from all over the world. I don’t know whether the wheat I eat in my bread comes from Canada or the States or Argentina, or was home-grown. It doesn’t seem to me a matter of importance, anyway.”

“That isn’t what I mean at all,” Wotherspoon interrupted, “I want you to look at it in another way. I suppose you had your usual style of dinner to-day. Just think of the items: soup, fish, meat, bread, and so on. Your soup was made from bones and vegetables; your fish course was originally an animal; so was your joint; your sweet was probably purely vegetable; and your dessert certainly was a plant product. Now don’t you see what I mean?”

“No, I confess I don’t.”

“Haven’t I just shown you that everything you ate comes from either the animal or vegetable kingdom? You don’t bite bits out of the crockery, like the Mad Hatter. Everything you use to keep your physical machine alive is something which has already had life in it? Isn’t that so? You never think of having a meal of pure chemicals, do you?”

“It never occurred to me; and I doubt it I shall begin now. It doesn’t sound very appetising.”

“It would be worse than that; but follow my argument further. Take the case of your joint. Presumably that came from an ox or a sheep. Where did the animal, whatever it was, get its food? From the vegetable kingdom, in the form of grass. Isn’t it clear that everything you yourself eat comes, either directly or indirectly, from the plants? And aren’t all animals on the same footing as yourself—they depend ultimately on the vegetables for their sustenance, don’t they? A fox may live on poultry; but the chickens he kills have grown fat by eating grain; and so you come back to the plants again. If you like to look on it in that way, we are all parasites on the plants; we cannot live without them. Our digestive machinery is so specialised that it will assimilate only a certain type of material—protoplasm—and unless it is supplied with that material, we starve. We can convert the protoplasm of other animals or of plants to our own use; but we cannot manufacture protoplasm from its elements. We have to get it ready-made from the vegetables, either directly or indirectly.

“Now the foundation-stone of protoplasm is the element nitrogen. The plants draw on the store of nitrogenous compounds in the soil in order to build up their tissues; and then we eat the plants and thus transfer this material to our own organisms. What happens next? Do we return the nitrogen to the soil? Not we. We throw it into the sea in the form of sewage. So you see the net outcome of the process is that we are gradually using up the stores of nitrogen compounds in the soil, with the result that the plants have less and less nitrogen to live on.”

“Well, but surely four-fifths of the atmosphere is nitrogen? That seems to me a big enough reserve to be drawn on.”

“So it would be, if the plants could tap it directly; but they can’t do that except in the case of some exceptional ones. Most plants simply cannot utilise nitrogen until it has been combined with some other element. They can’t touch it in the uncombined state, as it is in the atmosphere; so that as far as the nitrogen in the air goes, it is useless to plants. They can’t thrive on pure nitrogen, any more than you can feed yourself on a mixture of charcoal, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen; though these elements are all that you need in the way of diet to keep life going.

“No, Flint, we are actually depleting the soil of these nitrogen compounds at a very rapid rate indeed. Why, even in the first decade of the twentieth century South America was exporting no less than 15,000,000 tons of nitrogen compounds which she dug out of the natural deposits in the nitre beds of Chili and Peru; and all that vast quantity was being used as artificial manure to replace the nitrogenous loss in the soil of the agricultural parts of the world. The loss is so great that it even pays to run chemical processes for making nitrogenous materials from the nitrogen of the air—the fixation of nitrogen, they call it.

“Well, that is surely enough to show you how much hangs upon this nitrogen question. If we go on as we are doing, there will eventually be a nitrogen famine; the soil will cease to yield crops; and we shall go short of food. It’s no vision I am giving you; the thing has already happened in a modified form in America. There they used up the soil by continual drafts on it, wheat crops year after year in the same places. The result was that the land ceased to be productive; and we had the rush of American farmers into Canada in the early days of the century to utilise the virgin soil across the border instead of their own exhausted fields.”

“I suppose you know all about it,” I said, “but where do these come in?”

I pointed to the pinkish disks of the cultures.

“These are what are called denitrifying bacteria. Although the plants can’t act upon pure nitrogen and convert it into compounds which they can feed upon, some bacteria have the knack. The nitrifying bacteria can link up nitrogen with other elements so as to produce nitrogenous material which the plants can then utilise. So that if we grow these nitrifying bacteria in the soil, we help the plants to get more food. The denitrifying bacteria, on the other hand—these ones here—act in just the opposite way. Wherever they find nitrogenous compounds, they break them down and liberate the nitrogen from them, so that it goes back into the air and is lost to us again.

“So you see that outside our bodies we have bacteria working for or against us. The nitrifying bacteria are helping to pile up further supplies of nitrogen compounds upon which the plants can draw and whereon, indirectly, we ourselves can be supported. The denitrifying bacteria, on the other hand, are continually nibbling at the basic store of our food; decomposing the nitrogen compounds and freeing the nitrogen from them in the form of the pure gas which is useless to us from the point of view of food.”

“You mean that a large increase in the numbers of the one set would put us in clover, whereas multiplication of the other lot would mean a shortness of supplies?”

“Exactly. And we have no idea of the forces which govern the reproduction of these creatures. It’s quite within the bounds of possibility that some slight change in the external conditions might reinforce one set and decimate the other; and such a change would have almost unpredictable influences on our food problem.”

At this moment the thunder-clouds, which had grown heavier as time passed, evidently reached their full tension. A tremendous flash shot across the sky; and on its heel, so close as to be almost simultaneous, there came a shattering peal of thunder. We looked out; but I had been so dazzled by the brilliance of the flash that I could see little. The air was very still; no rain had yet fallen; and my skin tingled with the electrical tension of the atmosphere. Wotherspoon felt it also, he told me. It was evident that we were in the vicinity of some very powerful disturbance.

“Awfully hot to-night, isn’t it?” I said. “Suppose we have some more air? It’s stifling in here.”

Wotherspoon pushed the broad leaves of the French windows apart; but no breeze came to cool us; though in the silence after the thunder-clap I heard the rustle of leaves from the trees below us. We stood, one at either end of the bench with the cultures on it, trying to draw cooler air into our lungs; and all the while I felt as though a multitude of tiny electric sparks were running to and fro upon the surface of my body.

Suddenly, over St. Katherine’s House, a sphere of light appeared in the air. It was not like lightning, brilliantly though it shone. It seemed to hover for a few seconds above the roof, almost motionless. Then it began slowly to advance in a wavering flight, approaching us and sinking by degrees in the sky as it came. To me, it appeared to be about a foot in diameter; but Wotherspoon afterwards estimated it at rather less. In any case, it was of no great size; and its rate of approach was not more than five miles an hour.

For some seconds I watched it coming. It had a peculiar vacillating motion, rather like that which one sees in the flight of certain kinds of summer flies. Now it would hover almost motionless, then suddenly it would dart forward for twenty yards or so, only to resume its oscillation about a fixed point.

But to tell the truth, I watched it in such a state of fascination that I doubt if any coherent thoughts passed through my mind; so that my impressions may have been inaccurate. All that I remember clearly is a state of extreme tension. I never feel quite comfortable during a thunder-storm; and the novelty of the phenomenon increased this discomfort, for I did not know what turn it might take next.

Slowly the luminous sphere crossed the edge of the Park, dipping suddenly as though the iron railings had attracted it; and now it was almost opposite our window. For a moment its impetus seemed to carry it onwards, slantingly along the terrace; then, with a dart it swung from its course and entered the window at which we stood.

From its behaviour at the Park rail, I am inclined to think that it was drawn from its line of flight by the attracting power of the metal balustrade which protected the little balcony outside the window; and that its velocity carried it past the iron, so that it came to rest within the room, just over the table between us.

Instinctively, both Wotherspoon and I recoiled from this flaming apparition, shrinking back as far as possible from it on either side. Beyond this movement we seemed unable to go, for neither of us stepped out of the window recess. Between us, the ball of fire hung almost motionless; but before my eyes were dazzled I saw that it was spinning with tremendous velocity on a horizontal axis; and it seemed to me that its substance was a multitude of tiny sparks whirling in orbits about its centre. Its light was like that from a spirit-lamp charged with common salt; for over it I caught a glimpse of Wotherspoon’s flinching face, all shadowed and green. As I watched the fire-ball, shading my eyes with my hands, I saw that it was slowly settling, just as a soap-bubble sinks in the air. Lower it descended and lower, still spinning furiously on its axis. Then, after what seemed an interminable period of suspense, it collided with the table.

There came a dull explosion which jerked me from my feet and drove me back against a chair. I saw Wotherspoon collapse and then everything vanished in the darkness which followed the concussion.

It must have been half a minute before I was able to recover from the shock and pull myself together. When I got to my feet again, I found Wotherspoon half-standing, half-leaning against the door, one panel of which had been blown out. The room was strewn with wreckage: broken glass, scattered papers, and shattered furniture. The electric lamps had been smashed by the force of the explosion.

Wotherspoon and I recovered almost simultaneously; and on comparing notes—which was difficult at first owing to our being temporarily deaf—we found that neither of us had suffered any serious injury. A few slight cuts with flying glass were apparently the worst of the damage which we had sustained. There was a sharp tang in the air of the room which made us cough for some time until it cleared away; but whatever the gas may have been, it left no permanent effects on us.

When we had procured lights and pulled ourselves together sufficiently to make a fuller examination of the room, we began to appreciate the extent of the damage and to congratulate ourselves still more upon the escape which we had had. The whole place was littered with fragments of furniture. The incubators had been shattered; and their contents, smashed into countless fragments, lay all over the floor. But it was on the bench at the window that the full force of the fire-ball had spent itself. There was hardly anything recognisable in the heap of debris. The wooden planks had been torn and broken with tremendous force. The little balcony was filled with sticks which had been thrown outward by the explosion; and, as we found afterwards, a good deal of material had been projected half-way across the road. Of the denitrifying bacteria cultures or their cases there was hardly a trace, except a few tiny splinters of glass.

I did not wait much longer with Wotherspoon; for, to tell the truth, my nerves were badly shaken by my experiences. I got him to come downstairs with me and we had a stiff glass of brandy each; and then I telephoned for a taxi to take me home. My own car was standing at the door; but I did not trust my ability to drive it in traffic at that moment. It seemed better to send my man round for it after I got home.

I went back in the taxi, with my nerves on edge.

CHAPTER II
The Coming of “The Blight”

Next morning I still felt the effects of the shock; and decided not to go to my office. I stayed indoors all day. When the evening papers came, I found in them brief accounts of the fire-ball; and in one case there was an article by Wotherspoon under the heading: “Well-known Scientist’s Strange Experience.” One or two reporters called at my house later in the day in search of copy, but I sent them on to Cumberland Terrace. In some of the reports I figured as “a well-known motor manufacturer,” whilst in others I was referred to simply as “a friend of Mr. Wotherspoon.” I had little difficulty in surmising the authorship of the latter group.

In the ordinary course of events, the fire-ball would have been much less than a nine days’ wonder, even in spite of Wotherspoon’s industry in compiling accounts of it and digging out parallel cases from the correspondence columns of old volumes of Nature and Knowledge; actually its career as a news item was made briefer still. An entirely different phenomenon shouldered it out of the limelight almost immediately.

After staying indoors all day, I felt the need of fresh air; and resolved to walk across the Park to Cumberland Terrace to see whether Wotherspoon had quite recovered from the shock. I had not much doubt in my mind upon the point; for the traces of his journalistic activity were plain enough; and showed that he was certainly not incapacitated. However, as I wanted a stroll and as I might as well have an object before me, I decided to go and see him.

Twilight was coming on as I crossed the suspension bridge. Even after the thunder-storm on the previous night there had been no rainfall; and although the temperature had fallen until the air was almost chilly, there was as yet no dew on the ground. I stopped on the bridge to watch the tints of the western sky; for these London after-glow effects always pleased me.

As I leaned on the rail, I heard the low drone of aerial engines; and in a few seconds the broad wings of the Australian Express swept between me and the sky. Even in those days I could never see one of these vast argosies passing overhead without a throb in my veins.

The great air-services had just come to their own; and aeroplanes started from London four and five times daily for America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. In the windows of the air-offices the flight of these vessels could be followed hour by hour on the huge world-maps over which moved tiny models showing the exact positions of the various aeroplanes on the globe. Watching the dots moving across the surface of the charts, one could call up, with very little imagination, the landscapes which were sweeping into the view of travellers on board the real machines as they glided through these far-distant spaces of the air. This one, two days out from London, would be sighting the pagoda roofs of Pekin as the night was coming on; that one, on the Pacific route, had just finished filling up its tanks at Singapore and was starting on the long course to Australia; the passengers on this other would be watching the sun standing high over Victoria Nyanza; while, on the Atlantic, the Western Ocean Express and the South American Mail were racing the daylight into a fourth continent.

I think it was these maps which first brought home to me distinctly how the spaces of the world had shrunk on the “time-scale” with the coming of the giant aeroplanes. The pace had been growing swifter and ever swifter since the middle of the nineteenth century. Up to that day, there had been little advance since the time of the earlier sailing-vessels. Then came the change from sail to steam; and the Atlantic crossing contracted in its duration. The great Trans-continental railways quickened transit once more; again there was a shrinkage in the time-scale. Vladivostok came within ten days of London; from Cairo to the Cape was only five days. But with the coming of the air-ways the acceleration was greater still; and we reckoned in hours the journeys which, in the nineteenth century days, had been calculated in weeks and even months. All the outposts of the world were drawing nearer together.

It was not this shrinkage only which the air-maps suggested. In the early twentieth century the telegraphs and submarine cables had spread their network over the world, linking nation to nation and coast to coast; but their ramifications dwindled in perspective when compared with the complex network of the air-ways which now enmeshed the globe. London lay like a spider at the centre of the web of communications, the like of which the world had never seen before; and along each thread the aeroplanes were speeding to and from all the quarters of the earth.

Rapid communication we had had since the days of the extension of the telegraph; but it had been limited to the transmission of thoughts and of news. The coming of the aeroplanes had changed all that. These tracks on the air-maps were not mere wires thrilling with the quiverings of the electric current. Along them material things were passing continually; a constant interchange of passengers and goods was taking place hourly over the multitudinous routes. For good or ill, humanity was becoming linked together until it formed a single unit.

It is curious that all the prophetic writers of the early twentieth century concentrated their attention almost exclusively upon the racial and social reactions which might be expected to follow from this knitting of the world into a connected whole and the resultant increase of traffic between the nations over the now contracted world-spaces. They had seen the interminglings of races which began in the steamship days; and they deduced that the process would be intensified in the new era of air-transit; so that, in the end of their dreams, they saw the possibility of a World Federation stretching its rule over the whole globe and bringing with it the end of wars. None of them, strangely enough, had foreseen the real effects which this intercommunication was to bring forth.

To a certain extent, their foresight had been justified. With the coming of the air-ways, the war-spirit was temporarily exorcised. The vast increase in the size and number of air-craft and the terrors of an aerial war, with all its untested possibilities, served to rein in even the most ardent of military nations. Standing armies still persisted; but their numbers had been diminished to a few thousands; for under the new conditions the old huge and unwieldy terrestrial forces could neither be fed, nor protected from aerial attacks.

Thus as I leaned on the rail of the suspension bridge and looked out over the greenery of the Park it seemed to me a very pleasant world. Those of the younger generation can hardly imagine how fair it was or how inexhaustible it seemed. Thousands of square miles of Africa and South America were still virgin soil, store-houses of untapped resources waiting for humanity to draw upon their abundance. There was food for all the thousand millions of mankind; and, as the population rose, fresh lands could be brought under cultivation for the mere labour of clearing the soil of its surplus vegetation. It was the Golden Age of humanity; yet few of us recognised it. We looked either backward into the past or forward into the future when we sought the Islands of the Blest: while all about us lay Paradise, and the Earth blossomed like a huge garden which was ours for the taking.

I left my visions with a sigh and continued my way across the Park. The prolonged spell of heat was affecting the vegetation. The trees were dusty; and the grass seemed to have lost something of its brilliant green. I remember that after I had crossed the Broad Walk I noticed especially how moribund all the plant-life of the Park appeared to be. There was an air of decline about it, though no tints of autumn had yet appeared in the leaves.

Wotherspoon was, as usual, in his laboratory. The glass of the windows had been replaced; but otherwise the place was much in its disordered condition. I suspect that he had purposely refrained from getting it cleared up, in order to impress reporters with the actual damage which the explosion had done; and that when the reporters had ceased to call he had left things as they were with the idea of fascinating any visitors who might come.

He was sitting at his writing-desk, surrounded by piles of books from which he was apparently extracting information for the purpose of some fresh article he had in hand; and when I came in he asked me to excuse him for a few minutes until he had got his data completed. In order to amuse me in the meanwhile, he dragged out his microscope and a pile of slides which he thought might interest me.

Before he went back to his work, it struck me that I would like to see the bacteria again; and I picked up from the floor some fragments of glass which evidently had formed part of his cultures, since particles of the pink gelatine adhered to them still. I asked him to fix the microscope for me, so that I could examine these things; and he wetted the stuff with some water and put a drop of it under the lens, leaving me to focus it myself while he went back to his writing-desk. He was soon deep in his article.

As I gazed down at the field of the microscope, I saw again the clumps of bacilli, some floating aimlessly in masses, others darting here and there in the disk of illumination. I studied them for a time without noticing anything peculiar; but at last it struck me that the field was becoming congested with the creatures. I looked more carefully; and now there seemed little doubt of the fact. The numbers of them were increasing almost visibly. I concentrated my attention on a small group in one corner of the slide and was able, in spite of the confusion introduced by their rapid and erratic movements, to feel certain that they were multiplying so fast that I could almost estimate the increase in percentages minute by minute.

“Here, Wotherspoon,” I said, “come and have a look through this. These bacteria of yours seem to be spawning or something.”

“I wish you wouldn’t interrupt, there’s a good chap,” he said in a peevish tone. “Don’t you know that writing takes all one’s attention? I can’t do two things at once; and this article must be finished on time if it is to be of any use to me or anyone else. Just amuse yourself for half an hour and then I shall be at your disposal if you want me.”

It was said so ungraciously that I took offence; and as his original “few minutes” had now apparently extended to “half an hour” I thought it best to leave him to himself. When I said good-night to him, he seemed to regard it as an extra interruption; so I was not sorry to go. I left him still delving into the masses of printed material around him.

And that was how Wotherspoon missed the greatest discovery that ever came his way. It was waiting for him across the table, for I doubt if he could have failed to draw the obvious conclusion had he actually taken the trouble to examine the phenomenon with his own eyes. But his interest was concentrated upon his writing; and his chance passed him by. After Johnston published his views, Wotherspoon made what I can only consider to be a dishonest attempt to secure priority on the ground that he was aware of the facts but had not had time to work out the subject fully before Johnston rushed into print; but he secured no support from any authoritative quarter; and even the newspapers had by that time seen the necessity of consulting experts, so that he was unable to place the numerous articles which he wrote to confute Johnston.

Three days later, Regent’s Park again figured in the columns of the newspapers.

The first mention of the matter which I saw was in an evening journal. I had been reading a short account of a locust plague in China which was reported to have destroyed crops upon a large scale and caused a panic emigration of the inhabitants of the devastated district, owing to the failure of supplies. Just below this article, my eye caught a paragraph headed:

Strange Blight in Regent’s Park.

It appeared that the vegetation in the Park had been attacked by some peculiar disease, the symptoms of which were evidently not very clear to the writer of the paragraph. According to him, the plants were withering away; but there seemed to be no fungus or growth on the leaves which would account for their decrepitude. Trees and flowers equally with the grass were attacked by the blight. While throwing out a hint that the prolonged drought might possibly account for the phenomenon, the reporter indicated that the thing was rather more local than might have been anticipated from this cause; for the worst effects of the blight were to be found in the vegetation of the strip between Gloucester Gate and the Outer Circle in one direction and between the Broad Walk and the Park edge in the other. Beyond this oblong, the damage done was not so readily recognisable.

That evening, as the fine weather still held, I walked through Regent’s Park to see for myself what truth there was in the newspaper talk. More people than usual were out; for in addition to the normal crowds of pedestrians, it was evident that others had come, like myself, to examine the blight. The Broad Walk was thronged; for the Londoner of those days was one of the most inquisitive creatures in existence.

It was evident that, considered from the “show” point of view, the state of affairs had been a disappointment to the people. I heard numerous comments as I walked among the crowd; and the tone was one of disparagement. The general feeling seemed to be that the thing was a mare’s nest or a newspaper hoax.

“Blight, they calls it?” said one stout old woman as I passed; “I’d like to blight the young feller what wrote all that in the papers about it, I would! Me putting on my best things and walking ever so far on a hot night to see nothing better than a lot of dried grass. I thought it would be fair seething with grasshoppers,” and she shook her head till the trimmings of her antique hat trembled with her vehemence. Evidently she had mixed up the Chinese locusts and the Regent’s Park affair in her mind.

Other people shared her discontent; and the younger section of the crowd had begun to seek for amusement by means of spasmodic outbursts of horse-play.

What I saw of the phenomenon was certainly not very thrilling. All the grass to the east of the Broad Walk had the appearance of being sun-blasted. The green tint had gone from it and it had turned straw-colour. On the west side of the Walk there were patches of stricken vegetation scattered here and there as far as one could see, but the effect was not so marked towards the Inner Circle.

I stooped down and rooted up a tuft of withered grass in order to examine it more closely; and to my surprise it came away readily in my hand, leaving the roots almost clear of earth. I could see nothing peculiar about the grass itself; even the most careful inspection failed to reveal any adherent fungus or growth of any description which might account for the phenomenon. I began to think that, after all, the whole thing was due to the heat of the past few weeks, and that the local appearance of the effects was a mere chance.

Next day, however, this idea was put out of court by the news that the blight had spread to the other London parks. Hyde Park suffered severely in the corner between the Marble Arch and the Serpentine; the gardens of Buckingham Palace were also affected; and the grass in Battersea Park showed sporadic outbreaks of the disease also. Victoria Park, however, seemed to have escaped almost intact; though some traces could be detected.

I learned that the Park gardeners had endeavoured to check the extension of the disease—for it spread almost visibly in places—by spraying the vegetation with the usual vermin-killers; but these had been found to have no influence upon the growth of the smitten areas.

By this time, the newspapers had begun to make the matter a main feature. The heading: “The Blight” occupied the principal column; and correspondence had been opened on the subject in several of the journals. But as yet the matter was not exciting any interest outside London. It was regarded as a purely local manifestation of no particular import; and although some of the writers of London Letters for the provincial Press alluded to it in their articles, it was usually referred to with a sneer at the “silly season attitude” of supposedly weighty newspapers.

This tone underwent a rapid change, however, on the following day. Even the staid dailies of the Provinces became electrified with the news; and over most of the area of southern England the breakfast tables were ahum with conversations on the Blight and its effects; for the morning papers were filled with telegrams announcing the extension of the affected area broadcast over the Home Counties; and the headlines ran:

SPREAD OF THE NEW BLIGHT

All Home Counties Affected

TOTAL FAILURE OF CROPS FEARED

CHAPTER III
B. Diazotans[1]

At this point, I remember, the long spell of dry weather reached its end. A heavy series of thunderstorms marked its termination; and for three days the country was deluged with rain and swept by intermittent gales. The cracked ground drank up the moisture; but still more showers fell, until there was mud everywhere.

These meteorological changes in themselves were sufficiently grave from the farmer’s point of view; but even more serious was the state of things revealed after the rain had ceased. Whether it was due to the weather conditions or whether it was a vagary produced by factors beyond discovery will never be known; but the fact is established that the spread of the Blight became accentuated during the rainy period. Wherever it had secured a hold during the hot weather it became more malignant in its effects; and its extension to fresh fields was so great that hardly a grain-growing area in the country escaped at this time. It penetrated as far north as the Border agricultural districts; and devastated fields were found even in Perthshire.

Since the potato blight in 1845, no such rapid and extensive destruction of food supplies had been known. The standing crops in the affected areas withered; and a total failure of the home-grown cereals seemed to be inevitable. Nor was it only in this section of the food-supply that the attacks of the Blight became evident. Fruit-trees seemed arrested in their productivity; vegetables failed to ripen and began to rot. Everywhere the vegetable kingdom seemed to be falling into a decline. The great market-gardens and nurseries showed the trace of the same mysterious agent. Roses withered on their stems; and even the hot-house plants suffered equally with their open-air fellows. The only crop which appeared to escape the general disaster was hay.

And now it became clear that the Blight, as it was still called, was going to produce effects in the most widely-separated fields of activity. With a total failure of the crops, the financial side of the question came to the front. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, small farmers were beginning to realise that it was to be a year of utter disaster, ending probably in bankruptcy and ruin. The larger land-owners looked forward to the collapse of tenants and the failure of rents. Mortgage-holders began to consider the nature of their security, and when it was agricultural land they were placed in doubt as to their best course; for no one could foresee whether the Blight was a temporary epidemic or a permanent factor which would reappear with the next crops. And all these varying influences had their effects upon the great financial operations of the City; for even in that industrial age the land had maintained its value as a basic security which apparently could not suffer deterioration beyond a definite point.

This, however, was only a minor field of the Blight’s reactions. With the probable failure of the home crop looming before him, even the man in the street could not fail to perceive the more obvious results. It meant a greater dependence upon imported food-stuffs and especially imported grain. Argentina, Canada, India and the United States must make up the missing supplies; and since almost half our cereals were home-grown at that period, the price of food was certain to rise by leaps and bounds; so that every family in the land would be affected by the catastrophe.

Then a further factor was brought to light. With the failure of grain and even of grass, it would be impossible to keep alive the cattle which furnished part of the nation’s food. The milk supply would be gravely affected also, from the same cause.

It is difficult for us now to look back and catch again the spirit of that time. Never before, even during the war, had the food of Britain been endangered to such a degree. And the steadily rising prices were sufficient to bring home to the most thoughtless the actual imminence of the peril. I can recall, however, that at first there was no panic of any kind. It was assumed by all of us that although we might have to go short of our usual lavish supplies, yet we should always have enough food to carry us through to the next harvest. The whole world was our granary; and if we were prepared to pay the higher prices which we saw to be inevitable, we had no reason to suppose that we should lack imported grain. Our attitude was quite comprehensible under the circumstances, I think. In the past we had always been able to obtain food; and there seemed no doubt that the same would hold good through this shortage.

The newspapers were fairly evenly divided in their expressed opinions. The Government had recently adjourned Parliament, after a session in which their majority had oscillated dangerously more than once, and the Opposition Press seized upon the Blight in order to embarrass the Cabinet, and especially the Prime Minister, as far as possible. They clamoured that the Government should take steps to secure the food supply of the country by making immediate purchases of wheat in the foreign markets. They demanded that a system of rationing should be established forthwith; and that cases of food-hoarding should be stringently punished. Day after day they held up to public obloquy the individual members of the Cabinet, who were then scattered on holiday; the amusements of each of them were described and coupled with sneering hopes that they would succeed better in their games than they had done in the government of the country and the safeguarding of the national interests. Echoes of the Mazanderan Development Syndicate scandal were kept alive in the most ingenious manner.

The Government Press, naturally, professed to see in the inactivity of the Cabinet a proof that they had the matter well in hand. Avoidance of panic, restriction by voluntary effort of all unnecessary consumption of food, and the postponement of inquiries likely to interfere with the wise projects of the Premier: these formed the stock of their leading articles.

The gutter organ of the Opposition retorted by publishing the complete menu of the Premier’s dinner on the previous day, which it had obtained from some waiter in the hotel at which he was staying; and it accompanied this item of news by interspersed extracts from the Government organs in which appeals had been made for a less luxurious form of living.

It must be remembered that this stage of the sequence of events occupied only a brief period. If I am not wrong, it was within ten days of the outbreak of the Blight that we got the first American cables announcing the appearance of the epidemic among the great wheat areas of the Middle West. Almost immediately after came similar news from Canada.

The meaning of this was not at first appreciated by the people as a whole. They still clung to the idea that grain would be forthcoming if a sufficiently high price were paid for it; but those of us who had tried to forecast the possibilities of the situation found our worst fears taking concrete form. Soon even the unthinking were forced to understand what the American news implied. If the Blight spread over the wheat-fields of the Western continent, there would be no surplus grain there for export at all. That source of supply would barely suffice for the mouths at home.

Then, following each other like hammer-strokes upon metal, each biting deeper than the last, came the cables from the rest of the world. Egypt reported the outbreak of the Blight in the Nile valley; British East Africa became affected. The news from the Argentine fell like a thunderbolt, for we realised that with it the last great open source of wheat had failed. The Don and Volga basins followed with the same tale. Over India, the Blight raged with almost unheard-of virulence. Then, days after the others, Australia was smitten, and our last hopes vanished.

During all this period, it must be remembered, we had no idea of the origin of our calamities. We referred to the thing always as “The Blight,” though it was made clear at quite an early stage that no plant parasite was concerned in the matter at all. The most careful microscopic examination of affected vegetation had been made without revealing anything in the nature of a fungus or noxious growth.

Yet, on looking backward, I cannot help feeling that we, and especially I myself, were strangely blind to the obvious in the matter. I have already mentioned that when I rooted up a clump of grass in Regent’s Park it came away from the soil without resistance; and that when I examined the roots I found them almost as free of earthy deposit as if it had been grown in sand. That, coupled with what I already knew, should have put me on the track of the explanation; and yet I failed to draw the simplest deduction from what I observed. To account for this obtuseness, I can only suggest that already the idea of a “Blight” had taken root in my mind; and that I was so obsessed with the idea of a parasite that I never considered the facts from any other point of view. Since others proved to be equally slow in arriving at the truth, I can only conclude that they were misled in their mental processes much as I myself was.

As I have said on a previous page, it was to Johnston, the bacteriologist, that we owe the discovery. It appears that he had been growing some bacteria in cultures; and, whether by accident or design, he had left one of his cultivation media open to the air. On examining the germs some days later, he had discovered in the culture a type of bacterium with which he was unfamiliar. He proceeded to isolate it in the usual way—I believe it is done by dabbing a needle-point into the culture and using the few micro-organisms which stick to the needle as the parents of a fresh colony—and he was amazed at its fecundity. There had never been such a case of bacterial fertility in his experience.

A paper in the Lancet brought the description of the creature to the notice of the scientific world. Johnston himself had not recognised the nature of the organism, as he had never dealt with this type of bacteria before; but from his description an agricultural bacteriologist named Vincent was able to identify it as being almost identical with one of the denitrifying group, from which it differed only in its immense power of multiplication. It was hurriedly christened Bacterium diazotans, on account of its denitrifying qualities. Further examination showed that its capacity for breaking down nitrogenous material far surpassed that of any known denitrifying agent.

With these discoveries, the mystery of the new blight vanished. An examination of the soil of stricken areas showed that it swarmed with colonies of B. diazotans—to use the customary medical contraction—and the whole secret of the destruction was revealed.

It was evident that these new and super-active bacteria attacked the soil, disintegrated all the nitrogenous compounds within their range and thus left the plants without nourishment. The death of the plant followed as a natural result; but the matter did not end there. By destroying the nitrogenous compounds in the soil, the bacteria altered the whole texture of the earth in which they grew. All the nitrogenous organic matter which forms so large a part of the binding material of some soils was destroyed utterly; with the consequence that the mineral particles, which previously had been resting in an organic matrix, were now free to move. Only the clays retained their tenacious character: all other soils degenerated into sand.

There has, of course, been a great deal of speculation upon the origin of B. diazotans. Hartwell suggested that it came to us from Venus, propelled by light-pressure across the abysses of space. Inshelwood put forward the view that in B. diazotans we had an example of bacteria, originally endemic, changing their habits and spreading into fresh regions.

Personally, I believe neither hypothesis. I feel sure that I saw the birth of the first B. diazotans on that night in Wotherspoon’s laboratory, under the action of the fire-ball; and the evidence is simple enough.

Every living creature is a wonderfully constructed electrical machine. Each beat of our hearts, each systole of our lungs, each contraction of a muscle in our frame produces a tiny electrical current. Our organism is a mass of colloids and electrolytes which transmit these charges hither and thither throughout our systems; and were we gifted with an electrical sense in addition to those which we already have, we should see each other as complexities of conductors along which currents were playing with every movement of our body.

This complex electrical system is acutely sensible to external electrical conditions. Anyone who has held the handles of an induction coil or who has taken a spark from a Leyden jar knows the physiological effects which these things produce. The influence of high-tension currents upon the growth of plants has been proved beyond dispute.

Now it seems to me that in this effect of an external electric charge upon the internal mechanism of an organism we have a clue to the origin of these new bacteria. I have already told how the fire-ball, in its explosion, shattered the denitrifying cultures in Wotherspoon’s room; and it seems clear that at the moment of the concussion there must have been a tremendous play of electrical forces about the spot. We know hardly anything with regard to the nature of the electrical fields existing in such things as these fire-balls; and it is quite possible that they may be different from anything of which we have any knowledge among the more usual displays of electrical energy. I believe, then, that it is in the action of the fire-ball that we must seek for an explanation of the change in habit of Wotherspoon’s denitrifying bacteria.

Again, I have mentioned my observation of the rapid multiplication of the denitrifying bacteria which I made with Wotherspoon’s microscope on the following day. That also seems to me to have a bearing upon the problem; though I admit quite frankly that my evidence is only that of a layman. It is in every way regrettable that Wotherspoon, having tired of using his room as an exhibit, should have cleared away every trace of the wreckage before any expert examination of it could be made; for in this way the crucial evidence on the point was destroyed.

Further, in support of my views, I would point out that the very first known occurrence of B. diazotans was that which had Regent’s Park as its site; and that the first place of attack was in the immediate neighbourhood of Wotherspoon’s house in Cumberland Terrace. This can hardly be disregarded, when it is considered in connection with the other facts which I have mentioned.

At this time of day there can be no question that London formed the focus from which B. diazotans spread throughout the world. I have described the ramifications of the great air-services; and it seems to me obvious that the organisms were carried to and fro upon the surface of the globe by the agency of the aeroplanes. The order of attack at various points indicates this very clearly, in my opinion. First came the American and Egyptian outbreaks; then Uganda and South America; and finally, long after the others, Australia showed traces of the devastation. I have checked the possible dates of arrival in these various places, taking into account the relative swiftnesses of the aeroplanes on the different routes; and the results can hardly be gainsaid. Allowing, as one must, a certain latitude for the time of development of the microbe in various spots, there seems little doubt that the dates of the outbreaks fell into the same succession as the times of arrival of the various London air-services.

CHAPTER IV
Panic

In dealing with the subsequent stage of affairs in this country, I feel myself at a loss. Matters of fact, sequences of events, definite incidents in a chain of affairs: all these can be described without much difficulty and with a certain detachment on the part of the narrator. But when it comes to indicating the transition from one psychological state to another, the task is one which would require for its proper fulfilment a more practised pen than mine; and it is precisely this transitional period which I must now attempt to make clear in retrospect; for without an understanding of it my narrative would lack one of its corner-stones.

Apart from the mere question of narration, however, there is a further difficulty which cannot be evaded. I myself passed through this crisis and underwent day by day these changes in outlook which I shall have to portray; so that the personal factor cannot be eliminated from my account. Yet my own feelings and views must not be allowed to monopolise the field; since they had not the slightest influence upon the main current of popular feeling.

I have used the word “current,” and perhaps it is the best one which I could have chosen to express the thing which baffles me. As a man walks by the side of a mountain stream, he sees the volume of the water change as it grows from rill to rivulet and from rivulet to river; yet no single tributary is of any notable size. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the banks diverge, the sound of the running water grows louder and yet louder: until at last comes a sweep over the rapids and the thunder of the fall below.

It was in this way that events merged into each other between the outbreak and the complete realisation of our fears. The transition from security to panic was not made in one swift step. Rather it came little by little, and at no point could one indicate precisely how the public feeling had changed from that of the previous day. A whole series of tiny impulses, each in itself almost negligible, served to drive us from one mental position to the next; and a complete analysis of the psychology of the time would be an impossible task. I propose, therefore, merely to indicate some of these innumerable factors which played upon our spirits; so that this blank in my narrative may be filled in some way, even if only roughly.

It was not until the Blight had spread far over the Home Counties that the general public became interested in the matter at all; and at this period the mass of people in the country districts were almost the only ones who saw any cause for alarm. The town-dwellers seldom came in direct contact with the sources of their food-supply; in fact it is doubtful if the lower-class Londoner of the old days could have answered a direct question as to the date of harvesting. Food came to them daily in a form which suggested very little with regard to its original nature. Wheat they knew only in the form of bread or flour; meat was divorced almost entirely from the shapes of the animals from which it was derived; tea, coffee and sugar brought with them no visions of tea-gardens on the Indian hills or sugar plantations under the West Indian sun. The furthest traceable point of origin of these things, as far as most of the population was concerned, was to be found in the retail shops. Thus there was a certain sluggishness in apprehension among the main bulk of the people when they read in the newspapers that the crops had failed. To them, it simply meant that we should have to buy in another market; just as they had to go to a fresh grocer when their own dealer ran short of some commodity which they required.

In the country districts, and especially in the great centres of the agricultural portions of the kingdom, the outlook was different, but still restricted in its scope. Failure of the crops to them meant financial loss, hard times, stringency, urgent personal economy and the hope of better luck in the following season. Though closer to the soil, the country folk were unmoved by any outlook wider than that which included the direct effects of the Blight upon their industry. And, indeed, they had little time in which to speculate upon ultimate reactions, for their attention was concentrated almost wholly upon their efforts to remedy the damage already done or to protect from injury any portions of the crop which had not yet been attacked.

Thus at this stage the mental surface of the country as a whole remained unruffled. Here and there, of course, a few of us had grasped what might be entailed if the Blight destroyed the whole of the home supplies; but I doubt if even the most far-sighted had imagined that anything but a local shortage was in prospect.

With the arrival of the American cables, the situation changed slightly. The tone of the newspapers became graver, and they endeavoured to awake their readers to the fact that the possibility of a serious shortage had become a certainty. Edition after edition poured out from the printing-presses and the headlines grew in magnitude from hour to hour. “The Blight in America” was the first type of intimation, which attracted but little interest and was placed in the “third-class” column of the papers. Then came appreciation of the importance of the news; the headlines increased in size and moved up nearer the centre of readers’ interest: “Spread of the Blight in the Wheat Districts.” Next came a sudden jump to the first place on the page and heavily leaded type in the headlines: “Failure of Wheat Crop in America.”

Even at this stage, the readers as a whole failed to connect the news with anything in their daily life. Gradually it was borne in upon their minds that the collapse of the American crops—including the Canadian—meant a very rapid rise in the price of cereal food-stuffs; but further than this they refused to look. At that time the cattle question had not been noticed at all; and the general feeling simply resolved itself into a decision to avoid bread as far as possible and eat meat instead.

With the arrival of reports from the remaining wheat-growing districts, the newspapers increased their efforts to awaken their readers to the gravity of the situation. “The World Shortage” occupied the place of honour in their columns, and was supported by telegrams and cables from all parts of the globe telling the same tale of crop failure with a steady monotony.

As I look back upon these days I can only marvel at the ingrained conservatism of the human mind. It is true that on the whole the public were at last beginning to understand the situation. They had grasped the fact that almost all the known regions of wheat-growing land had been attacked; and that a shortage was inevitable. But, none the less, in their inmost thoughts they still clung to the fixed idea that somewhere in the world there was bound to be a store of wheat—or if not wheat, then rice or some other edible grain—which would enable us to pass through the coming winter without undue restriction of our food supplies. It was perhaps a manifestation of that eternal optimism which is necessary if the race is to survive at all; or possibly it represented a trust in the Government’s capacity to arrange some means whereby supplies would be forthcoming in due course. Whatever its origin, it was among the most marked features of that strange time.

I remember that one of the side-issues of the disaster created at that stage far deeper impressions than the catastrophe itself. With the failure of the American supplies over a huge area, the Wheat Pit became convulsed with an outbreak of gambling such as had never been seen before. Chicago went crazy; and legitimate business gave place to a fury of speculation which grew ever more intense as the news came in of further extensions of the devastated areas. Before the Blight appeared in America, December wheat had been offered at 233¼; but in the earlier stages of the game of speculation it rushed up to 405: and before the end came it was dealt with at prices which were purely illusory, since they corresponded to nothing tangible in commodities. Thousands of bears were ruined in the preliminary moves; and in the end the whole machinery of the Pit was brought to a standstill owing to there being no sellers.

Of course that series of transactions had no real influence upon the course of events; but the public, both here and in America, failed to see this; and the bitterest feelings found vent concerning “gambling in the food of the people.” It is quite possible that the anger uselessly expended on this subject served to keep the public from concentrating their attention upon the real problem of the world shortage. Huge quantities of wheat were dealt with on paper; and the people, being unfamiliar with the methods of Chicago speculation, assumed that these enormous transactions actually represented the transfer of millions of bushels of real grain from seller to buyer. The sharp upward trend of flour and bread prices at home served to confirm their impression that the gambling in the Pit was responsible for their troubles; and Rodman’s attempt—which was practically successful—to corner wheat, led to violent criticism and even, at one time, to an effort to lynch him.

It was not only in the wheat market that this fever of speculation showed itself. Maize, oats, barley and cotton also became counters in the game and rose to incredible prices. Unknown men appeared in the world of finance and for days maintained their positions as controllers of the markets. Many of the great firms in America ventured their capital rashly and suffered disaster.

In its ultimate effects also, the gamble in food-stuffs exerted a profound influence on the stream of public opinion. The news of the speculations in Chicago, the descriptions of the turbulent scenes in the Wheat Pit, where at one time revolvers were fired by super-excited members, the tales of huge fortunes won and lost in a day, the deep under-current of resentment at this callous trading upon the world’s necessities, all tended in the end to bring into view the real state of the wheat question. And now the newspapers were printing the single word FAMINE as a headline; and the people were beginning to ask in ominous tones: “What is the Government doing?”

It was at this time that, to my profound surprise, I received a private letter from the Prime Minister requesting my attendance at a meeting which he had arranged.

CHAPTER V
Nordenholt

Probably with a view to avoiding the attention of the Press, the meeting was held elsewhere than at No. 10 Downing Street. I found myself in what looked like a Board meeting-room. A fire burned in the grate, for it was a chilly day. Down the centre of the room stretched a long table around which a number of men were sitting, some of whom were familiar as great figures in the industrial world. At the head of the table I recognised the Premier, flanked on either hand by a Cabinet Minister. A chair was vacant half-way up the table, opposite the fireplace; and I took it on a gesture from the Premier.

Almost at once, the Prime Minister rose to his feet. He looked worn and agitated; but even under the evidences of the strain he endeavoured to assume a cheerful and confident air. He was a man I had never trusted; and I now had my first opportunity of examining him at close quarters. In repose, his face fell into the heavy lines of the successful barrister; but when he became animated, a mechanical smile flitted across it which in some way displeased me more than the expression which it veiled. He seemed to me a typical example of the faux bonhomme. In politics he had gained a reputation for dilatory conduct combined with a mastery in the art of managing a majority; and his mind was saturated with the idea of Party advantage. Of real loyalty I suspect he had very little; but when one of his Cabinet blundered heavily, he would step into the limelight with a fine gesture and assume all responsibility. In this way he kept his Government intact and gained a reputation for fidelity without losing anything; for he well knew that no one would call him to account for the responsibility which he had assumed.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you will probably wonder why we have invited you to meet us here to-day. We all know the unhappy state of affairs into which the country has fallen. There is dissatisfaction abroad; and the Government is being held responsible for conditions which were none of its making. I will speak plainly to you, for it is no time for reservations. Something must be done to allay public anxiety, which is growing more intense as time goes on. I am not one of those who take these passing scares seriously; but we cannot afford to ignore the present feeling: and some measures are necessary to satisfy this clamour. It is a time when all of us must come to the aid of the Executive.

“The Cabinet is dispersed at the moment. Many of the members are abroad and are unable to return at present, owing to a disorganisation of transport. But pending their return and the decisions which we shall then be forced to take, I thought it right to call together you gentlemen, large employers of labour, and to enlist your aid in the work we shall have to do. It is essential that the Government should retain public confidence at the present time. I think we are agreed upon that point. Nothing could be more fatal than a General Election forced upon us under the reigning conditions.

“We have taken steps to call Parliament together immediately, in order to lay before it certain measures which we believe will enable us to tide over this crisis. But in the meantime we must try to pacify the working classes, who are being agitated by the dismal forecasts of the newspapers. I have no desire to inquire into the origin of the jeremiads which are being printed daily in a certain group of papers; but I cannot help noticing that they all tend towards a discrediting of myself and my colleagues. There is a cry for action; whereas I think all of you will agree that consideration is required, so that the action, if it should become necessary, may be well-contrived.

“It is in these circumstances that we have called you gentlemen together. We propose to lay before you the main points of our scheme; and when you have heard them, we count upon you, as great employers of labour, to lay the matter before your employés. We shall use the newspapers also to disseminate our proposals; but personal efforts can do more than any printed appeals. I trust that we shall not look in vain for the cordial co-operation which is absolutely requisite at this crisis.”

As this speech proceeded, I had become more and more uneasy. Through it all ran the governing thought that something must be done, which was true enough; but the thing which he proposed to do, it appeared to me, was to persuade the country that all was well, whereas I felt that the essential matter was to prepare against a practical calamity.

“We have given a great deal of thought to our proposals, though we have not wasted time in the consideration of details. The broad outlines are all that are required for our present purpose; and we have confined our attention to them. My friend the Home Secretary”—he indicated the colleague who sat on his left—“will be good enough to read to you the heads of our decisions. I may say, however, that these decisions are only of a temporary nature. We may find it necessary to modify some of them in due course; and they must not be regarded as in any way final. Possibly”—he let the mechanical smile play over the company—“possibly some of those present may be able to suggest certain modifications at this meeting. If these modifications are such that we can adopt them, we shall be only too glad to do so.”

He sat down; and the Home Secretary rose in his turn. Saxenham had the reputation of being dull but honest. He had no force of character, but he had won his way into the Cabinet mainly because he had never been known to stoop to a false action in the whole course of his career. On this account he represented a mainstay of the Government, which in other ways was not too scrupulous. His brain was one which worked slowly; and his personal admiration for the Prime Minister was such that he followed him blindly without seeing too clearly whither he was being led. He cleared his throat and took up a sheet of paper which contained the Government proposals.

“I think that it will be best if I take the various proposals seriatim and elucidate each of them, as I come to it, by a short commentary.

“First, we shall issue a Government statement to the Press with the object of reassuring the public and putting an end to this rising clamour for action in haste. In this statement we shall call attention to the fact that there is at present a twelve-weeks’ supply of food in the country, which, with due care, would itself be sufficient to last the population until the next harvest. We shall make it clear that the Government have under earnest consideration the steps which it may be necessary to take in the future; and we shall appeal to the public to pay no heed to alarmist statements from interested quarters.

“Second, we shall advise the King to issue a Proclamation on the same lines. We believe that this may have a greater effect in some quarters than an official Government statement.

“Third, we shall make arrangements for taking over the food stores in the country, though we hope that it will not be necessary to do so.

“Fourth, we shall make arrangements to purchase with the national moneys the surplus food supplies of grain. We shall be able to pay higher prices than private importers; and I have little doubt that we shall thus be able to stock our granaries with food sufficient to carry us through until well beyond the next harvest.

“Fifth, we shall prepare a system of rationing, as soon as we have obtained our supplies and know definitely how much food can be allotted per head to the population.

“Sixth, since a continuance of the present crisis will undoubtedly lead to widespread distress and unemployment, we propose to take under consideration a system of unemployment relief; so that there may be no centres of disturbance generated among the population by idleness or lack of money.

“Seventh, we shall invite the scientific experts on agriculture to devote their attention to the problem of increasing the crops in the next harvest, so that such a state of affairs as this may not again arise.”

He paused, with an air of finality, though he did not resume his seat. At the head of the table, the Prime Minister was apparently plunged in thought. Suddenly I was struck by the employment to which the third member of the Cabinet was putting his time. With the sheets of paper in front of him he was constructing a series of toys. A box, a cock-boat, an extraordinarily life-like frog lay before him on the table, and he was busily engaged in the production of something which looked like a bird. I learned afterwards that this was a trick of his, the outcome of his peculiarly nervous temperament. Not wishing to be detected watching him, I turned my eyes away; and as I swept my glance round the table, I suddenly found myself in turn the object of scrutiny.

My first impression was of two steel-blue eyes fixed upon my own with an almost disquieting intensity of gaze. I had the feeling of being examined, not only physically but mentally, as though by some hypnotic power my very thoughts were being brought to light. Usually, in a casual interchange of glances, one or other of two is diverted almost at once; but in this case I felt in some way unable to withdraw my eyes from those before me; while my vis-à-vis continued to examine me with a steadfast attention which, strangely enough, suggested no rudeness.

He was a man of more than the average height, over six feet I found later when he rose from his chair. His features suggested no particular race, though there was an elusive resemblance to the Red Indian type which I felt rather than saw; but this was perhaps intensified by the jet-black hair and the clean-shaven face. All these are mere details of little importance. What impressed me most about him was an air of conscious power, which would have singled him out in any gathering. Looking from him to the Prime Minister, it crossed my mind that while the Premier counterfeited power in his appearance, this unknown embodied it; and yet there was no parade, for he appeared to be entirely devoid of self-consciousness. Before he removed his eyes from mine I saw an inscrutable smile curve his lips. I say inscrutable, for I could not read what it meant; but it resembled the expression of a man who has just checked a calculation and found it to be accurate.

It has taken me some time to describe this incident; but actually it can have occupied hardly more than a fraction of a minute; for, as I took my eyes away from his, I heard the Home Secretary continue:

“These, gentlemen, are our proposals; and I think that they cover the necessary ground. We wish especially to draw your attention to the sixth one: for it is that which has chiefly moved us to lay these matters before you ere we make them public. It concerns unemployment, if you remember. We have brought you into our councils because all of you are large employers of labour in different lines of industry; and we would welcome any suggestions from you now with regard to the possible modes of application of this scheme in practice. As Mr. Biles has told you, it is essential at this moment to avoid discontent among the proletariat. Europe is in a very disturbed condition, and a change of Government at this juncture would have disastrous effects. I can say no more upon that point; but I wish you to understand that we urgently require your co-operation at this time.”

He sat down; and the Prime Minister rose again.

“I think you will see, gentlemen, from what the Home Secretary has said, that the Government has the situation well in hand. The only matter about which we are at all concerned is the liquor question. It is clear that we can hardly sacrifice grain for the manufacture of alcohol until we are sure that we have in stock a sufficiency of food for the country’s needs. A shortage of liquor, however, may lead to industrial unrest; and it is this possible unrest which we desire your help in preventing. We wish if possible to get directly into touch with the workers of the nation; and we have approached you first of all. Later we intend to interview the Trades Union leaders with the same object. But time presses; and I shall be glad to hear any criticisms of our plans if you will be so good as to give your views.”

He sank back into his chair and again the smile faded almost at once. For a moment there was a pause. Then the man opposite me rose to his feet.

“Who is that?” I whispered to my neighbour.

“Nordenholt.”

Nordenholt! I looked at him with even more attention than before. For two decades that name had rung through the world, and yet, meeting him now face to face, I had not recognised him. Nor was this astonishing; for no portrait of him had ever come to my notice. The daily photo papers, the illustrated weeklies, even Punch itself, had never printed so much as a sketch of him. He had leaped into fame simply as a name to which no physical complement had been attached. By some mysterious influence behind the scenes, he had avoided the usual Press illustrator with a success which left him unrecognisable to the man in the street.

So this—I looked at him again—so this was Nordenholt, the Platinum King, the multi-millionaire, wrecker of two Governments. No wonder that I had felt him to be out of the common. I am no hero-worshipper; yet Nordenholt had always exercised an attraction upon my mind, even though he was only a name. In many respects he seemed to be the kind of man I should have liked to be, if I had his character and gifts.

When he rose, I found that his voice matched his appearance; it was deep, grave and harmonious, although he spoke without any rhetorical turn. Had he chosen to force himself to the front in politics, that instrument would have served him to sway masses of men by its mere charm. I thought that I detected a faint sub-tinge of irony in it as he began. He wasted no time upon preliminaries but went straight to the point.

“Are we to understand that this paper in the hands of the Home Secretary contains a full statement of the measures which the Cabinet—or such members of it as are available—have decided upon up to the present?”

The Prime Minister nodded assent. I seemed to detect a certain uneasiness in his pose since Nordenholt had risen.

“May I see the paper?... Thank you.”

He read it over slowly and then, still retaining it in his hand, continued:

“Perhaps I have not fathomed your purpose in drawing it up; but if I am correct in my interpretation, it seems to me an excellent scheme. I doubt if anything better could be devised.”

The nervous frown left the Premier’s face and was replaced by a satisfied smile; the Home Secretary, after a pause of mental calculation, also seemed to be relieved; while the Colonial Secretary put down his paper model and looked up at Nordenholt with an expression of mild astonishment. It was evident that they had hardly expected this approval. The hint of irony in the speaker’s voice grew more pronounced:

“This scheme of yours, if I am not mistaken, is a piece of window-dressing, pure and simple. You felt that you had to make some show of energy; and to pacify the public you bring forward these proposals. The first two of them achieve nothing practical; and the remaining five concern steps which you propose to take at some future time, but which you have not yet considered fully. Am I correct?”

The Colonial Secretary broke in angrily in reply:

“I object to the word window-dressing. These proposals give in outline the steps which we shall take in due course. They represent the principles which we shall use as our guides. You surely did not expect us to work out the details for this meeting?”

Nordenholt’s voice remained unchanged.

“No, I did not expect you to have worked out the details of this scheme. I will confine myself to principles if you wish it. I see that in the fourth clause you anticipate the purchase of foreign grain, though at an enhanced price. May I ask where you propose to secure it? It is common knowledge that it cannot be obtained within the Empire, so presumably you have some other granary in your minds. Possibly you have already taken steps.”

The face of the Colonial Secretary lit up with a flash of malice.

“You are quite correct in both conjectures. Australia and Canada have suffered so severely from the Blight that we can expect nothing from them, and I am afraid that Russia is in the same condition. But we have actually issued instructions to agents in America to purchase all the wheat which they can obtain, and advices have arrived showing that we control already a very large supply.”

“Excellent forethought. I fear, however, that it has been wasted through no fault of yours. At ten o’clock this morning, the Government of the United States prohibited the export of food-stuffs of any description. You will not get your supplies.”

“But that is contrary to their Constitution! How can they do that?” The Prime Minister was evidently startled. “And how do you come to know of it while we have had no advice?”

“A censorship was established over the American cables and wireless just before this decision was made public. They do not wish it to be known here until they have had time to make their arrangements. My information came through my private wireless, which was seized immediately after transmitting it.”

“But ... but ...” stammered the Home Secretary, “this complicates our arrangements in a most unforeseen manner. It is a most serious piece of news. Biles, we never took that into account.”

“Sufficient unto the day, Saxenham. This Government has been in difficult places before; but we always succeeded in turning the corner successfully. Don’t let us yield to panic now. If we think over the matter for a while, I do not doubt that we shall see daylight through it in the end.”

Nordenholt listened to this interchange of views in scornful silence.

“One of the details which have still to be thought out, I suppose, Biles,” he continued. “Don’t let it delay us at present. There is another point upon which I wish some information.”

The meeting was a curious study by this time. Almost without seeming to notice it, Nordenholt had driven the three Cabinet Ministers into a corner; and he now seemed to dominate them as though they were clerks who had been detected in scamping their work. Personality was telling in the contest, for contest it had now become.

“This news which I have given you implies that the twelve-weeks’ supply of food in the country is all that we have at our command anywhere. What do you propose to do?”

“We shall have to take stock and begin the issue of ration tickets as soon as possible.”

“Twelve-weeks’ supply; how long will that last the country under your arrangements?”

The Colonial Secretary made a rapid calculation on a sheet of paper.

“As we shall need to carry on till the next harvest, I suppose it means that the daily ration will have to be reduced to less than a quarter of the full amount—three-thirteenths, to be exact.”

“And you are satisfied with that calculation?”

The Colonial Secretary glanced over his figures.

“Yes, I see no reason to alter it. Naturally it will mean great privation; and the working class will be difficult to keep in hand; but I see no objection to carrying on till next year when the harvest will be due. The potato crop will come in early and help us.”

Nordenholt looked at him for a moment and then laughed contemptuously. Suddenly his almost pedantic phraseology dropped away.

“Simpson, you beat the band. I never heard anything like it.”

Then his manner changed abruptly.

“Do you mean to say,” he asked roughly, “that you haven’t realised yet that there will be no next harvest? Don’t you understand that things have changed, once for all? The soil is done for. There will be no crops again until every inch of it is revivified in some way. ‘The potato crop will come in early and help us!’ I’ve consulted some men who know; and they tell me that within a year it will be impossible to raise more than a small fraction even of the worst crop we ever saw in this country.”

The Premier was the only one of the three who stood fast under this blow.

“That is certainly a serious matter, Nordenholt,” he said; “but there is nothing to be gained from hard words. Let us think over the case, and I feel sure that some way out of this apparent impasse can be found. Surely some of these scientific experts could suggest something which might get us out of the difficulty. I don’t despair. Past experience has always shown that with care one can avoid most awkward embarrassments.”

“The ‘awkward embarrassment,’ as you call it, amounts to this. How are you going to feed fifty millions of people for an indefinite time when your supplies are only capable of feeding them normally for twelve weeks? Put them on ‘three-thirteenth rations’ as Simpson suggests; and when the next harvest comes in you will find you have a good deal less than ‘three-thirteenth rations’ per head for them. What’s your solution, Biles? You will have to produce it quick; for every hour you sit thinking means a bigger inroad into the available supplies. Remember, this is something new in your experience. You aren’t up against a majority you can wheedle into taking your advice. This time you are up against plain facts of Nature; and arguments are out of court. Now I ask a plain question; and I’m going to get a straight answer from you for once: What are your plans?”

The Premier pondered the matter in silence for a couple of minutes; then, apparently, the instinct of the old Parliamentary hand came uppermost in his mind. The habits of thought which have lasted through a generation cannot be broken instantaneously. With a striving after dignity, which was only half successful he said:

“Parliament is about to meet. I shall go there and lay this matter before the Great Inquest of the nation and let them decide.”

“Three days wasted; and probably two days of talk at least before anything is settled; then two days more before you can bring anything into gear: one week’s supplies eaten up and nothing to show for it. Is that your solution?”

“Yes.”

“You are determined on that? No wavering?”

“No.”

“Very good, Biles. I give you the fairest warning. On the day that you meet the House of Commons, I shall place upon the paper a series of questions which will expose the very root of the Mazanderan scandal, and I shall supply full information on the subject to the Opposition Press. I have had every document in my possession for the last year. I can prove that you yourself were in it up to the neck; I have notes of all the transactions with Rimanez and Co. And I know all about the Party Funds also. If that once gets into print, Biles, you are done for—thumbs down!”

He imitated the old death sign of the Roman arena. The Premier sat as if frozen in his chair. His face had gone a dirty grey. Nordenholt towered over him with contempt on his features. Suddenly the Colonial Secretary sprang to his feet.

“This is blackmail, Nordenholt,” he cried furiously. “Do you think you can do that sort of thing and not be touched? You may think you are safe behind your millions; but if you carried out your threat there isn’t a decent man who would speak to you again. You daren’t do it!”

“If you speak to me like that again, Simpson, I’ll take care that no decent man speaks to you either,” Nordenholt said, calmly. “There’s another set of notes besides those on Mazanderan. I have the whole dossier of the house in Carshalton Terrace in my desk. I’ll publish them too, unless you come to heel. It will be worse than Mazanderan, Simpson. It will be prison.”

In his turn, the Colonial Secretary collapsed into his chair. Whatever the threat had been, it had evidently brought him face to face with ruin; and guilt was written across his face.

But Saxenham had paid no attention to this interruption. In his slow way he was evidently turning over in his mind what Nordenholt had said to the Prime Minister; and now he spoke almost in a tone of anguish:

“Johnnie, Johnnie,” he said. “Deny it! Deny it at once. You can’t sit under that foul charge. Our hands were clean, weren’t they? You said they were, in the House. There’s no truth in what Nordenholt says, is there? Is there, Johnnie?”

But the Premier sat like a statue in his chair, staring in front of him with unseeing eyes. The affairs of the Mazanderan Development Syndicate had been a bad business; and if the connection between it and the Government could be proved, after what had already passed, it was an end of Biles and the total discredit of his Party. Nordenholt, still on his feet, looked down at the silent figure without a gleam of pity in his face. Somehow I understood that he was playing for a great stake, though no flicker of interest crossed his countenance.

The strain was broken by Saxenham getting to his feet. I knew his record, and I could guess what his feelings must have been. He stood there, a pathetic little figure, with shaking hands and dim eyes, a worshipper who had found his god only a broken image. He turned and looked at us in a pitiful way and then faced round to the wrecker.

“Nordenholt,” he said, “he doesn’t deny it. Is it really true? Can you give me your word?”

Nordenholt’s face became very gentle and all the hardness died out of his voice.

“Yes, Saxenham, it is true. I give you my word of honour for its truth. He can’t deny it.”

“Then I’ve backed a lie. I believed him. And now I’ve misled people. I’ve gone on to platforms and denied the truth of it; pledged my word that it was a malicious falsehood. Oh! I can’t face it, Nordenholt. I can’t face it. This finishes me with public service. I—I——”

He covered his face with his hands and I could see the tears trickle between his fingers. He had paid his price for being honest.

But the Premier was of sterner stuff. He looked up at Nordenholt at last with a gleam of hatred which he suppressed almost as it came:

“Well, Nordenholt, what’s your price?”

“So you’ve seen reason, Biles? Not like poor Saxenham, eh?” There was an under-current of bitterness in the tone, but it was almost imperceptible. “Well, it’s not hard. You take your orders from me now. You cover me with your full responsibility. You understand? You always were good at assuming responsibility. Have it now.”

“Do I understand you to mean that you would like to be a Dictator?”

“No, you haven’t got it quite correctly. I mean to be Dictator.”

The Prime Minister had relapsed into his stony attitude. There was no trace of feeling on his face; but I could understand the mental commotion which must lie behind that blank countenance. Under cover of fine phrases, he had always sought the lowest form of Party advantage; his political nostrum had become part and parcel of his individuality, and he had never looked higher than the intricacies of the Parliamentary game. Now, suddenly, he had been brought face to face with reality; and it had broken him. To do him justice, I believe that he might have faced personal discredit with indifference. He had done it before and escaped with his political life. But Nordenholt had struck him on an even more vital spot. If the Mazanderan affair came into the daylight, his Party would be ruined; and he would have been responsible. I give him the credit of supposing that it was upon the larger and not upon the personal issue that he surrendered.

Nordenholt, having gained his object, refrained from going further. He turned away from the upper end of the table and addressed the rest of us.

“Gentlemen, you see the state of affairs. We cannot wait for the slow machinery of politics to revolve through its time-honoured cycles before beginning to act. Something must be done at once. Every moment is now of importance. I wish to lay before you what appears to me the only method whereby we can save something out of the wreck.

“I have been thinking out the problem with the greatest care; and I believe that even now it is not too late, if you will give me your support. This meeting was called at my suggestion; and I supplied a list of your names because all of you will be needed if my scheme is to be carried out. But before I divulge it, I must ask from each of you an absolutely unconditional promise of secrecy. Will you give that, Ross? And you, Arbuthnot?...”

He went from individual to individual round the table; and to my astonishment, used my own name with the others. How he knew me, I could not understand.

When he had secured a promise from all present, he continued:

“In the first place, I had better tell you what I have done. Immediately the Blight began to ravage the American wheat-fields, I bought up all the grain which was available from last year’s crop and got it shipped as soon as possible. It is on the high seas now; so we have evaded the new prohibition of exports. I need not give you figures; but it amounts to a considerable quantity. This, of course, I carried through at my own expense.

“I have also had printed a series of ration tickets and explanatory leaflets sufficient to last the whole country for three weeks. This also I did at my private charges.

“Further, I have placed orders with the printers and bill-posters for the placarding of certain notices. Some of these, I expect, are already posted up on the hoardings.

“I mention these matters merely in order to show you that I have not been idle and that I am fully convinced of the necessity for speed.”

He paused for a few seconds to let this sink in.

“Now we come to the main problem. Saxenham has told you the state of affairs; and I have supplemented it sufficiently to allow of your forming a judgment on the case. We have a population of fifty millions in the country. We have a food supply which will last, with my additions to it, for perhaps fourteen weeks. Beyond that we have nothing in hand. The next supply cannot make its appearance for at least a year. I have omitted the yield of the present crop, as I wish to be on the safe side; and I find that most of the grain is useless. When the new crop comes in, it will be, under present conditions, negligible in quantity owing to the soil-destruction which the Bacillus diazotans has wrought. That, I think, is a fair statement of the case as it stands.

“What results can we look for? If we ration the nation, even if we allow only a quarter of the normal supplies per day, our whole stock will be exhausted within the year. There will be a large percentage of deaths owing to underfeeding; but at the end of the year I think we might look forward to having a debilitated population of some thirty millions to feed. Will the new crop give us food for them? I have consulted men who know the subject and they tell me that it is an impossibility. We could not raise food enough, under the present conditions, to support even a reasonable percentage of that population.”

He paused again, as though to let this sink in also.

“Gentlemen, this nation stands at the edge of its grave. That is the simple truth.”

We had all seen the trend of his reasoning; but this cold statement sent a shiver through the meeting. When he spoke again, it was in an even graver tone.

“You must admit, gentlemen, that we cannot hope to keep alive even half of the population until crops become plentiful once more. There is only a single choice before us. Either we distribute the available food uniformly throughout the country or we take upon ourselves the responsibility of an unequal allotment. If we choose the first course, all of us will die without reprieve. It is not a matter of sentiment; it is the plain logic of figures. No safety lies in that course. What about the second?

“Let us assume that we choose the alternative. We select from the fifty millions of our population those whom we regard as most fitted to survive. We lay aside from our stores sufficient to support this fraction; and we distribute among the remainder of the people the residuum of our food. If they can survive on that scale of rations, well and good. If not, we cannot turn aside the course of Nature.”

The Prime Minister looked up. Evidently, behind his impassive mask, he had been following the reasoning.

“If I understand you aright,” he said, “you are proposing to murder a large proportion of the population by slow starvation?”

“No. What I am trying to do is to save some millions of them from a certain death. It just depends upon which way you look at it, Biles. But have it your own way if it pleases you.

“Now, gentlemen, the calculation is a simple one. We have enough food to last a population of fifty millions for fourteen weeks. From that we deduct five weeks’ supplies for the whole population; which leaves us with four hundred and fifty million weekly rations. We select five million people whom we decide must survive; and these four hundred and fifty million rations will keep them fed for ninety weeks—say a year and nine months. It will really be longer than that; for I anticipate rather heavy ravages of disease on account of the monotony of the diet and the lack of fresh vegetables. That is in the nature of things; and we cannot evade it.

“That then, is the only alternative. It is, as the Prime Minister has said, a death sentence on by far the greater part of the people in these islands; but I see no way out of the difficulties in which we are involved. It is not we who have passed that sentence. Nature has done it; and all that we can achieve is the rescue of a certain number of the victims. With your help, I propose to undertake that work of rescue.”

I doubt if those sitting round the table had more than the vaguest glimpse of what all this meant. When a death-roll reaches high figures, the mind refuses to grasp its implications. Very few people have any concrete idea of what the words “one million” stand for. We only understood that there was impending a human catastrophe on a scale which dwarfed all preceding tragedies. Beyond that, I know that I, for one, could not force my mind.

“We are thus left with five million survivors,” Nordenholt continued. “But this does not reach the crux of the matter. The nitrogen of the soil has vanished; and it must be replaced if the earth is ever again to bring forth fruits. That task devolves upon mankind, for Nature works too slowly for our purposes. In order to feed these five million mouths—or what is left of them when the food supply runs out—we have to raise crops next year; and to raise these crops we must supply the soil with the necessary nitrogenous material.

“I have consulted men who know”—this seemed to be his only phrase when he referred to his authorities—“and they tell me that it can be done if we bend our whole energies to the task. All the methods of using the nitrogen of the air have been worked out in detail long ago: the Birkeland-Eyde process, Serpek’s method, the Schönherr and the Haber-Le Rossignol processes, as well as nitrolim manufacture and so forth. We have only to set up enough machinery and work hard—very hard—and we shall be able to produce by chemical processes the material which we require. That is what the five million will have to do. There will be no idlers among them. At first it will be work in the dark, for we cannot calculate how much material we require until the agricultural experts have made their experiments upon the soil. But I understand that it is quite within the bounds of possibility that we shall be successful.

“I come now to another point. These five million survivors cannot be scattered up and down the country. They must be brought into a definite area, for two reasons. In the first place, we must have them under our control so that we can make food-distribution simple; and, in the second place, we must be able to protect them from attack. Remember, outside this area there will be millions dying of starvation, and these millions will be desperate. We can take no risks.”

He took a roll from behind his chair and unfolded upon the table a large map of the British Isles marked with patches of colour.

“As to the choice of a segregation area, we are limited by various factors. We shall need coal for the basis of our work; therefore it would suit us best to place our colony near one of the coal-fields. We shall need iron for our new machinery; and it would be best to choose some centre in which foundries are already numerous. We shall need to house our five million survivors and we cannot spend time in building new cities for them. And, finally, we need a huge water-supply for that population. On this map, I have had these various factors marked in colour. In some places, as you see, three of the desiderata are co-existent; but there is only one region in which we find all four conditions satisfied—in the Clyde Valley. There you have coal and iron; there are already in existence enormous numbers of foundries and machine-shops; the city of Glasgow alone is capable of accommodating over a million human beings; and the water-supply is ample. This, I think, is sufficient to direct our choice to that spot.