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