Transcriber’s note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
NORDENHOLT’S MILLION
* * * * * *
_RECENT FICTION_
THE DOVE’S NEST & OTHER STORIES
By KATHERINE MANSFIELD
THE KEY OF DREAMS
By L. ADAMS BECK
THE SLEEPER BY MOONLIGHT
By K. BALBERNIE
THE THRESHOLD
By MARTHA KINROSS
SWEET PEPPER
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
CHAP. PAGE
I. GENESIS 1
II. THE COMING OF “THE BLIGHT” 16
III. _B. DIAZOTANS_ 26
IV. PANIC 35
V. NORDENHOLT 41
VI. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BREAKING-STRAIN 64
VII. NORDENHOLT’S MILLION 88
VIII. THE CLYDE VALLEY 103
IX. INTERMEZZO 125
X. THE DEATH OF THE LEVIATHAN 140
XI. FATA MORGANA 149
XII. NUIT BLANCHE 156
XIII. RECONSTRUCTION 189
XIV. WINTER IN THE OUTER WORLD 208
XV. DOCUMENT B. 53. X. 15 224
XVI. IN THE NITROGEN AREA 240
XVII. PER ITER TENEBRICOSUM 256
XVIII. THE ELEVENTH HOUR 271
XIX. THE BREAKING-STRAIN 289
XX. ASGARD 298
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.