The Psychology of the Breaking-strain
With my entry into Nordenholt’s house I hoped to gain a clearer
insight into certain sides of his character; for the possessions which
a man accumulates about him serve as an index to his mind even when
his reticence gives no clue to his nature. I had expected something
uncommon, from what I had already seen of him; but my forecasts were
entirely different from the reality.
The room into which he ushered me was spacious and high-ceilinged; a
heavy carpet, into the pile of which my feet sank, covered the floor;
a few arm-chairs were scattered here and there; and a closed roll-top
desk stood in a corner. One entire side of the room was occupied by
bookshelves. Beyond this, there was nothing. It was the simplest
furnishing I had ever seen; and in the house of a multi-millionaire
it astonished me. I had somehow expected to find lavishness in some
form: art in one or other of its interpretations, or at any rate an
indication of Nordenholt’s tastes. But this room defeated me by its
very plainness. There appeared to be no starting-point for an analysis.
To me it seemed a place where a man could think without distraction;
and then, at the desk, put his thoughts into practical application.
As we entered, Nordenholt excused himself for a moment. He wished to
give instructions to his secretary. Some telephoning had to be done at
once; and then he would be at my disposal. I heard him go into the next
room.
When I am left alone in a strange house with nothing to fill in
my time, I gravitate naturally to the bookcases; so that now I
mechanically moved over to the serried rows of shelves which lined one
side of the room. Here at last I might get some clue to the workings
of Nordenholt’s mind. Glancing along the backs of the volumes, I
found that the first shelf contained only works on metaphysics and
psychology. Somewhat puzzled by this selection, I passed from tier to
tier, and still no other subject came in view. A rapid examination of
the cases from end to end showed me that the entire library dealt with
this single theme, the main bulk of the works being psychological.
This discovery overturned in my mind several nebulous conjectures which
I had begun to form as to Nordenholt’s character. What sort of a man
was this, a millionaire, reputed to be one of the shrewdest financiers
of the day, who stocked his study entirely with psychological works
among which not a single financial book of reference was to be found?
Coupled with the stark simplicity of the furniture, this clue seemed
unlikely to lead me far.
As I was pondering, the door opened and Nordenholt returned. While it
was still ajar, I heard the trill of a telephone bell and a girl’s
voice giving a number; then the door closed and cut off further
sounds. Thus after ten minutes in his house I had gathered only three
things about him: he was simple, almost Spartan, in his tastes; he was
interested in psychology; and his secretary was a girl and not a man.
He came forward towards me; and again I had the sensation of command in
his appearance. His great height and easy movements may have accounted
for it in part; but I am taller than the average myself; so that it
was not entirely this. Even now I cannot analyse the feeling which he
produced, not on myself alone, but upon all those with whom he came in
contact. Personal magnetism may satisfy some people as an explanation;
but what is personal magnetism but a name? In some inexplicable manner,
Nordenholt gave the impression of a vast reservoir of pent-up force,
seldom unloosed but ever ready to spring into action if required; and
in these unfathomable eyes there seemed to brood an uncanny and yet not
entirely unsympathetic perception which chilled me with its aloofness
and nevertheless drew me to him in some way which is not clear to me
even now. Under that slow and minute inspection, eye to eye, I felt all
my human littleness, all my petty weaknesses exposed and weighed; but
I felt also that behind this unrelenting scrutiny there was a depth of
understanding which struck an even balance and saved me from contempt.
I can put it no better than that.
He motioned me to a chair and took another himself. For a few moments
he remained silent; and when he spoke I was struck by the change in
his tone. At the meeting, he had spoken decisively, almost bitterly at
times; but now a ring of sadness entered into that great musical voice.
“I wonder, Flint,” he said, “I wonder if you understand what we have
taken in hand to-day? I doubt if any of us see where all this is
leading us. I see the vague outlines of it before us; but beyond a
certain point one cannot go.”
He paused, deep in thought for a few seconds; then, as though waking
suddenly to life again, offered me a cigar and took one himself. When
he spoke again, it was in a different tone.
“Perhaps you wonder why I picked you out--of course it was I who got
you invited to that meeting; I wanted to look you over there before
making up my mind about you. Well, I have means of knowing about
people; and you struck me as the man I needed in this work. I’ve been
watching you for some years, Flint; ever since you made your mark, in
fact. You aren’t one of my young men--the ones they call ‘Nordenholt’s
gang,’ I believe--but you are of my kind; and I knew that I could get
you if I wanted you for something big.”
In any other man this would have struck me as insolence; but Nordenholt
had already established such an influence over me that I felt flattered
rather than ruffled by this calm assumption on his part.
“But in some ways it’s a disadvantage now that we didn’t come together
earlier,” he continued. “You remember Nelson and his captains--the
band of brothers? Nothing can be accomplished on a grand scale without
that feeling; and possibly I have left it until too late to get into
touch with you. It depends on yourself, Flint. I know you, possibly as
well as you know yourself; but you know nothing of me. With my young
men,” and a tinge of pride came into his voice, “with my young men,
that difficulty doesn’t arise. They know me as well as anyone can--well
enough, at any rate, for us to work together for a common object, no
matter how big the stake may be. But you, Flint, represent a foreign
mind in the machine. I want you to understand some things; in fact,
it’s essential that you should see the lines on which I work; for
otherwise we shall be at cross-purposes. I wonder how it can be done?”
He leaned back in his chair and smoked silently for a few minutes. I
said nothing; for I was quite content to await whatever he had to put
into words. I only wondered what form it would take. When he broke the
silence, it was on quite unexpected lines. He looked at his watch.
“Three hours yet before we can do anything further. I might as well
spend part of it on this; and possibly I can give you an idea of my
outlook on things which will help you when we are working together up
North.
“When I was quite a child, Flint, I used to take a certain delight in
doing things which had an element of risk in them--physical risk,
I mean. I liked to climb difficult trees, to work my way out on to
dangerous bits of roof, to walk across tree-trunks spanning streams,
and so forth. There’s that element of risk at the back of all real
enjoyment, to my mind. It needn’t be physical risk necessarily, though
there you have it in perhaps its most acute aspect; but at the root of
a gamble of any sort where the stakes are high you find this factor
lying, whether it is noticeable or not.
“One of my earliest experiences in that direction took the form of
walking along a slippery wall which was high enough to make a fall
from it a serious matter. I mastered the art of keeping on the wall
to perfection; and then, finding that pall upon me, I endeavoured to
complicate it by jumping across the gap made by a gateway. It was an
easy distance: I proved that to myself by practising on the ground from
a standing take-off. And the nature of the wall offered no particular
difficulty, for I tested myself in jumping a similar gap between two
slippery tree-trunks laid end to end. Yet when I came to the actual gap
in the wall, my muscles simply refused to obey me; and time after time
I drew back involuntarily from the spring.
“I was an introspective child; and this puzzled me. I knew that I
could accomplish the feat with ease; and yet something prevented my
attempting it. I fell to analysing my sensations and tracing down the
various factors in the case; and, of course, it was not long until I
came to the crucial point. Does this bore you? I am sorry if it does,
but you’ll see the point of it by-and-by.”
While he had been speaking, I had had a most curious impression. His
argument, whatever it might be, was evidently addressed to me; and yet
all through it I had the feeling that it was not altogether to me that
he was talking. In some way I gathered the idea that while he spoke
to me his mind was working upon another line, testing and re-testing
some chain of reasoning which was illustrated by his anecdote; so that
while I looked upon one aspect of it he was scanning the same facts
from a totally different point of view and reading into them something
which I was not intended to grasp.
“Obviously the crux of the matter was the height of the wall and the
fear of hurting myself severely if I missed my leap,” he continued.
“Once I had discovered that--and of course it took much less time to do
so than it takes now to explain the case--I set about another trial. I
made up my mind that I would think nothing of the chance of slipping,
and that this time I would accomplish the feat with ease. Yet once more
I failed to bring my body up to the effort. Something stronger than my
consciousness was at work; and it defeated me.”
He smiled sardonically at some memory or other.
“I practised jumping along a marked portion of the wall where it was
lower; and I found that I could accomplish the distance with ease.
Whereupon my childish mind formulated the problem in this way; and I
believe that it was correct in doing so. The ultimate factor in the
thing was the fear of a damaging fall. Within limits, I was prepared to
take the risk; as had been shown by the success on the lower parts of
the wall. But at the high place beside the gateway, my resolution had
given way under a strain of nervousness. And at once there came into my
mind the conception of a breaking-strain. Up to a certain tension, my
conscious mind worked perfectly; but, beyond that, there was a complete
collapse. Something had snapped under the strain. I may say that I
finally accomplished the leap successfully; I simply wouldn’t allow
myself to be beaten in a thing I knew I could do.”
He halted for a moment as though this marked a turning-point in his
thoughts.
“This idea of the breaking-strain remained fixed in my child’s mind,
however; and I used to amuse myself by conjecturing all sorts of
hypothetical cases in which it played a part. It finally grew to be a
sort of mild obsession with me, and I would ask myself continually:
“Why did So-and-so do this rather than that?” and would then set
to work to discover the factors at the back of his actions and the
tension-snap which had driven him into something which was unexpected
from his normal line of conduct.
“You can understand, Flint, how this practice grew upon me. It is
the most interesting thing in the world; and the materials for
applying it are everywhere about us in our everyday life. I extracted
endless amusement from it; and as I grew up into boyhood I found its
fascination greater than ever. I took a never-failing interest in
probing at the hidden springs of conduct and trying to establish these
breaking-strains in the people before me.
“Then, as I grew older I discovered the Law Courts. There you see the
philosophy of the breaking-strain brought into touch with real life
in a practical form. I used to go and watch some well-known barrister
handling a hostile witness; and suddenly I understood that all these
men were merely fumbling empirically after the thing that I had studied
from my earliest days. What does a barrister want to do with a hostile
witness? To break him down, to throw him out of his normal line of
thought and then to fish among the dislocated machinery for something
which suits his own case. It afforded me endless interest to follow the
methods of each different cross-examiner. I learned a great deal in the
Courts; and I came away from them convinced that I had found something
of more than mere academic interest. This breaking-strain question
was one which could be applied to affairs of the greatest practical
importance. It was actually so applied in law cases. Why not utilise it
in other directions also?”
I found him watching me keenly to see if I followed his line of
thought. After a moment, he went on:
“It sounds so obvious now, Flint; but I believe that I alone saw it as
a scientific problem. Your blackmailer, your poker-sharp, all those
types of mind had been working on the thing in a crude way; but to me
it appeared from a different angle. Everyone else had looked on it
in the form of special cases, particular men who had to be swayed by
particular motives. I began as a youth where they left off. I spent
some years on it, Flint, examining it in all its bearings; and finally
I evolved a system of classification which enabled me to approach any
specific case along general lines. I can’t go into that now; but it
suddenly gave me an insight into motives and actions such as I doubt if
anyone ever had before.”
He paused and watched the smoke curling up from his cigar. Again he
seemed to be deep in the consideration of some problem connected with
and yet alien to what he had been saying. For a time he was lost in
thought; and I waited to hear the rest of the story.
“Well, Flint,” he went on at last, “it certainly seemed on the face
of it to be a very useless accomplishment from the practical point
of view; from the standpoint of mere cash, I mean. And yet, it still
fascinated me. When I was quite a young man I determined to go to
Canada and take up lumber. I was an orphan; there was nothing to keep
me in this country, for I had no near relations; and I felt that it
might do me good to cut loose from things here and go away into the
woods for a time. I had enough capital to start in a small way; so I
went. My ideas of the lumber-trade were vague at the time. If I had
known what it was, I doubt if I should have touched it.
“At first sight, it looked a hopeless venture. I knew nothing of
the trade; I was a youngster then; I’d had no training in financial
operations. Failure seemed to be the only outcome; and the men on the
spot laughed at me. I simply would not admit that I was beaten at the
start; and everything drove me on against my better judgment. And I
had one tremendous asset. I knew men.
“I knew men better than anyone else out there. I never made a mistake
in my choice. I collected a few good men at the start to help me;
and through them I gathered others almost as good. In a year I had
made progress; in two years I was a success; and very soon I became
somebody to reckon with. And through it all, Flint, I knew practically
nothing about the actual trade. That was only a tool in my hands. What
I dealt in was men and men’s minds. I could gauge a man’s capacity to
a hair; and I picked my managers and foremen from the very best. They
were glad to come to me, somehow. They felt I understood them; and no
inefficients were comfortable with me. I never had to discharge them;
they simply went of their own accord. I left everything to my staff,
for I knew them thoroughly and gauged their capacities to a degree. And
because I knew them I found the right place for each man; so that the
work went forward with perfect smoothness and efficiency. Before I had
been five years there I was on the road to being a rich man.”
His tone expressed no satisfaction. It was clear that I was not
expected to admire his talents.
“Then, suddenly, came the discovery of platinum on a large scale in
the neighbourhood of my district. You know what that meant; but you
must remember that in those days it was a very different matter from
now. It was like the Yukon gold rush in some of its aspects. The place
swarmed with prospectors, mostly men of no education, whose main object
was to get as much as they could in a hurry and then go elsewhere to
spend the money the platinum brought them. Meanwhile, the platinum
market was convulsed, and the price swayed to and fro from day to day.
You must remember that in those times the thing was in the hands of a
very few men; for the supply was limited. The Canadian mines overthrew
the nicely-adjusted balance of the market and everything suffered in
consequence; for the uses of platinum directly or indirectly spread
over a very large field of human industry.”
That part of his history was more or less familiar to me, but I did not
interrupt.
“One day it occurred to me that here in Canada we had a case parallel
to the state of affairs in the Diamond Fields before the Kimberley
amalgamation. Why not repeat Cecil Rhodes’ methods? Just as he
regulated the price of diamonds, I could regulate the price of platinum
if I could get control of the Canadian mines, for they were by far the
most important in the world.
“Again, I knew nothing of platinum, just as I had known nothing of
lumber; but I was able to pay for the best advice, to pay for secrecy
as well; and to judge the experts, I had my knowledge of men to help
me. I got the best men, I chose only men whom my insight enabled me to
pick out; and I began to buy up claims quietly under their guidance.
Here again psychology came in. I could tell at a glance when a man
was a “quitter” and when a miner would refuse to sell. I could gauge
almost to a sovereign the price that would prove the breaking-strain
for any particular owner. I can’t tell you how it is done; it is partly
inborn, perhaps, partly acquired; but I know that my knowledge is quite
incommunicable.
“To make a long story short, I had acquired a very fair percentage of
the valuable ground when suddenly I discovered that five other men had
been struck with the same idea; and that prices were rising beyond
anything I could hope to pay. It was a case for amalgamation; but I
did not see my way through it quite so simply. Two of them I knew to
be honest. One of them I could not trust, although he had hitherto
never shown any signs of crookedness; but I knew his breaking-strain,
and I knew also that the temptations to which he would be exposed
under any amalgamation scheme would be too great for him. He had to
be eliminated. The other two were weak men who could be dealt with
easily enough. I needn’t give you the details. I approached the two
honest men, combined with them, and with the joint capital of the three
of us I bought out the third competitor. The other two we dealt with
separately, buying out the one and taking the other in along with us.
My partners trusted me with the negotiations, again because I knew men
and their motives.
“And that was how I made my first million. Remember, I knew nothing
about the materials I had handled in the making of it. I never took
the slightest interest in the things themselves--and I took very
little interest in the money either, for my tastes are simple. What
did interest me was the psychology of the thing, the probing among
the springs and levers of men’s minds, and the working out of all the
complex strains and stresses which form the background of our reason
and our emotions. The million was a mere by-product of the process.
“But with the million there came another interest. Up to that time
I had applied my methods to individual cases; but it struck me,
after the strain of the amalgamation negotiations was over, that my
generalisations were capable of a wider application. I took up the
study of political affairs over here; and I found that my principles
enabled me to gauge the psychology of masses even more easily than
those of individuals. As a practical test, I stood for Parliament; and
got elected without any difficulty. Of course one of the Parties was
glad to have me--a millionaire isn’t likely to go a-begging at their
door for long--but you may remember that I won that election by my own
methods. The Party machines tried to copy them, of course, at a later
date; but they failed hopelessly because they were merely repeating
mechanically some operations which I had designed for a special case.
“I took very little interest in politics, though. I had no sympathy
with the usual methods of the politicians; and at times I revolted
against them effectually.”
He was evidently thinking of the two episodes which had gained him the
nickname of the Wrecker.
“When I began, I think I told you that the element of risk enters
largely into one’s pleasures; and I believe that holds good in
politics. The work of a politician, and especially of a Cabinet
Minister, is largely in the nature of a gamble. To most of them,
politics is an empirical science; for they have little time to study
the basis of it. I’ll do them the justice to say that I don’t think
it is a mere matter of clinging to their salaries which keeps them
in office; it’s mainly that they enjoy the feeling of swaying great
events. With an Empire like ours, the stakes are tremendous; and
there’s a certain sensation to be got out of gambling on that scale.
Mind you, I doubt if they realise themselves that this is what they
enjoy in the political game; but it is actually what does sway them to
a great extent.
“Now so long as it’s a mere question of some parochial point, I don’t
mind their enjoying their sensations. It matters very little in the
long run whether one Bill or another passes Parliament; and if they
fight over minor questions, I don’t care. But twice in my political
career I saw that the Party game was threatening trouble on bigger
lines. The Anglo-Peruvian agreement and the Malotu Islands question
were affairs that cut down to the bed-rock of things; and I couldn’t
stand aside and see them muddled in the usual way. I had to assert
myself there, whether I liked it or not. And when I did intervene, my
mental equipment made the result a certainty. _I_ knew the country and
the country’s average opinion in a way that none of them did; and I
had only to strike at the vital point. They call me the Wrecker; and
I suppose I did bring down two Governments on these questions; but it
wasn’t so difficult for me.
“But, as I told you, I never had much interest in politics. I like real
things; and the political game is more than half make-believe. I still
have my seat in the House; but I think they are gladdest when I am not
there.
“Well, I am afraid I’m making a long story of it; but I think you will
see the drift of it now. Politics failed to give me what I wanted. I
had no turn for the routine of it; and I had no wish to be involved in
all the petty manœuvres upon which the nursing of a majority depends.
Mind you, I could have done it better than any of them, with that
peculiar bent of mine. They consult me whenever a crisis arises; and
I can generally pull them through. After all, it’s a case of handling
men, there as everywhere else.
“However, I wanted something better to amuse me than the squaring of
some nonentity with a knighthood or the pacification of some indignant
office-seeker who had been passed over. I wanted to feel myself pitted
against men who really were experts in their own line. And that was how
I came to take up finance in earnest.”
He paused again and lighted a fresh cigar. While he was doing so, I
watched his face. In any other man, his autobiographic sketch would
have seemed egotistical; and possibly I have raised that impression in
my reproduction of it; for I can only give the sense of what he said. I
cannot put on paper the tones of his voice--the faint tinge of contempt
with which he spoke of his triumphs, as though they were child’s
play. Nor can I do more than indicate here and there that peculiar
sensation of duality which his talk took on more and more clearly as
he proceeded. It was as though the Nordenholt whom I saw before me
were telling his story whilst over behind him stood some greater
personality, following the narrative and tracing out in it the clues
which were to lead on to some events still in the distant future.
“Finance, Flint,” he continued. “That was the field where I came into
my own at last. Money in itself is nothing, nothing whatever. But the
making of money, the duel of brain against brain with not even the
counters on the table, that’s the great game. The higher branches of
finance are simply a combination of arithmetic and psychology. They’re
divorced absolutely from any idea of material gain or loss. Railways,
steamship lines, coal, oil, wheat, cotton or wool--do you imagine that
one thinks of these concrete things while one plays the game? Not at
all. They are the merest pawns. The whole affair is compressed into
groups of figures and the glimpses of the other man’s brain which one
gets here and there throughout the operations. And I played a straight
game, Flint; no small investor was ever ruined through my manœuvres. I
doubt if any other financier can say as much. I went into the thing as
a game, a big, risky game for my own hand; and I refused to gamble in
the savings of little men. I took my gains from the big men who opposed
me, not from the swarm of innocents.”
It was true, I remembered. Nordenholt had played the game of finance in
a way never seen before. He had made many men’s fortunes--a by-product,
as he would have said, no doubt--but no one had ever gone into the
arena unwarned by him. When he had laid his plans, carried out his
preliminary moves and was ready to strike, a full-page advertisement
had appeared in every newspaper in the country. “MR. NORDENHOLT ADVISES
THE SMALL INVESTOR TO REFRAIN FROM OPERATING IN WHEAT,” or whatever it
might be that he proposed to deal in himself. Then, after giving time
for this to take effect, he struck his first blow. Wonderful struggles
these were, fought out often far in the depths of that strange sea of
finance, so that hardly a ripple came to the surface. Often, too, the
agitation reached the upper waters and there would be glimpses of the
two vast organisations convulsed by their efforts; here a mass of foam
only, there some strange tentacle stretching out to reach its prey or
to coil itself around a vantage-point which it could use as a fulcrum
in further exertions. During this period, the Exchanges of the world
would be shaken, there would be failures, hammerings, ruin for those
who had ventured into the contest despite the warnings. Then, suddenly,
the cascading waves would be stilled. One of the antagonists had gone
under.
A fresh advertisement would appear: “MR. NORDENHOLT HAS CEASED HIS
OPERATIONS.” It was a strange requiem over the grave of some king of
finance. Nordenholt was always victorious. And with the collapse of his
opponent, the small speculators flocked into the markets of the world
and completed the downfall.
Finally, after the gains had been counted, he advertised again asking
all those who had involuntarily suffered by his contest to submit
their claims to him; and every genuine case was paid in full. He could
afford it, no doubt; but how many would have done it? I knew from
that move of his that he really spoke the truth when he said that
money in itself was nothing to him. And it perhaps illustrates as well
as anything the impression he produced upon my mind that afternoon.
On the one side he was cold, calculating, pitiless to those whom he
regarded as his enemies and the enemies of the smaller investor; on the
other, he was full of understanding and compassion for those whom he
had maimed in the course of his gigantic operations. The Wheat Trust,
the Cotton Combine, Consolidated Industries, the Steel Magnates, and
the Associated Railways, all had gone down before him; and he had
ground their leaders into the very dust. And in every case, he had
opened his campaign as soon as they had shown signs of using their
power to oppress the common people. It may have been merely a move
in his psychological strategy; he may have waited until the man in
the street had begun to be uneasy for the future, so that this great
intangible mass of opinion was enlisted on his side. But I prefer
to think otherwise: and I was associated with Nordenholt in the end
as closely as any man. No one ever knew him, no one ever fathomed
that personality--of that I am certain. He was always a riddle. But
I believe that his cool intelligence, his merciless tactics, all had
behind them a depth of understanding and a sympathy with the helpless
minority. I know this is almost incredible in face of his record; but I
am convinced of its truth.
“At the end of it all,” he went on, “I can look back and say that my
theories were justified. I knew nothing of finance; but I chose my
advisers well. I knew what my opponents relied upon and what they
regarded as points which could be given up without affecting their
general position. The rest was simply a matter of psychology. How could
I bring the breaking-strain to bear?
“Well, when I left it, the financial world had handed over to me a
fortune which, I suppose, has seldom been equalled. There was nothing
in it, you know, Flint, nothing whatever. It merely happened that I
was trained in a way different from everyone else. They were plotting
and scheming with shares and stocks and debentures, skying this one,
depressing that one and keeping their attention fixed on the Exchanges.
I came to the thing from a different angle. The movements of the
markets meant little to me in comparison with the workings of the
brains behind those markets. I could foresee the line of their advance;
and I knew how to take them in the flank at the right moment. I fought
them on ground they could not understand. They knew the mind of the
small investor thoroughly, for they had fleeced him again and again.
I began by clearing the small speculator off the board; and thus they
were deprived of their trump card. They had to fight me instead of
ruining him; and they had no idea what I was. It was incredibly simple,
when you think of it. That is why you never found anything about my
personality in the newspapers. I paid them to leave me alone. No one
knew me; and I was able to fight in the dark.
“But when I grew tired of it at last, I had an enormous fortune. What
was I to do with it? Money in itself one can do nothing with. If I were
put to it, I doubt if I could spend £5,000 a year and honestly say that
I had got value for it--I mean direct personal enjoyment. I cast about
for some use to which I could turn this enormous mass of wealth. You
may smile, Flint, but it is one of the most difficult problems I ever
took up. I hate waste; and I wanted to see some direct, practical value
for all these accumulated millions. What was I to do?
“I looked back on the work of some of my predecessors. Carnegie used to
spend his money on libraries; but do libraries yield one any intimate
satisfaction? Can one really say that they would give one a feeling
that one’s money had been spent to a good purpose? Apparently they
did to him; but that sort of thing wouldn’t appeal to me. Then there
is art. Pierpont Morgan amassed a huge collection; but there again I
don’t feel on safe ground. Is one’s money merely to go in accumulating
painted canvas for the elect to pore over? The man in the street cannot
appreciate these things even if he could see them. I gave up that idea.
“Then I came across a life of Cecil Rhodes and he seemed to be more
akin to me in some ways. Empire building is a big thing and, if you
believe in Empires, it’s a good thing. There is something satisfactory
in knowing that you are preparing the way for future generations,
laying the foundations in the desert and awaiting the tramp of those
far-off generations which will throng the streets of the unbuilt
cities. A great dream, Flint. One needs a prospicience and a fund of
hope to deal in things like that. But I want to see results in my own
day; I want to be sure that I’m on the right lines and not merely
rearing a dream-fabric which will fade out and pass away long before
it has its chance of materialisation. I want something which I can see
in action now and yet something which will go down from generation to
generation.
“I thought long over it, Flint. Time and again I seemed to glimpse what
I wanted; and yet it eluded me. Then, suddenly, I realised that I had
the very thing at my gates. Youth.
“All over the world there are youngsters growing up who will be stifled
in their development by mere financial troubles. They have the brains
and the character to make good in time; but at what a cost! All their
best energy goes in fulfilling the requirements of our social system,
getting a roof over their heads, climbing the ladder step by step,
waiting for dead men’s shoes. Then, when they come to their own, more
often than not their heart’s desire has withered. I don’t mean that
they are failures; but they have used up their powers in overcoming
those minor difficulties which beset us all. It was an essay of
Huxley’s that brought the thing clearly before me. ‘If the nation could
purchase a potential Watt, or Davy, or Faraday, at the cost of £100,000
down,’ he said, ‘he would be dirt-cheap at the money.’ And with that,
in a flash, I saw my way clear. I would go about in search of these
potential leaders among our youth. My peculiar insight would suffice to
keep me on the right lines there. I would make the way easy for them,
but not too easy. I would test and re-test them till I was sure of
them. And then I would give them all that they desired and open up the
world to them to work out their destinies.
“I did it in time. Even now I’m only at the beginning of the
experiment, but already I feel that I have spent my money well. I have
given a push to things; and although I can see no further than this
generation, I know that I have opened a road for the next. Each of them
is a centre for others to congregate around and so the thing spreads
like the circles in a pool. I have thrown in the stone; but long after
I am gone the waves will be beating outward and breaking upon unknown
shores....”
He paused and seemed to fall into a day-dream for a few moments. Then
he spoke again.
“That was the origin of my young men, Flint; the Nordenholt gang”--he
sneered perceptibly at the words. “Many of them have gone down in the
race. One cannot foresee everything, you know, try as one may. But
the residuum are a picked lot. They are scattered throughout all the
industries and professions of the Empire; and all of them are far up
in their own pursuits. I often wondered whether anything would come of
it in my day beyond individual successes; but now I see a culmination
before me. We shall all go up side by side to Armageddon and my own men
will be with me in this struggle against the darkness. Man never put
his hand to a bigger task than this in front of us; and I shall need
my young men to help me. If we fail, the Earth falls back beyond the
Eolithic Age once more and Man has lived in vain.”
His voice had risen with pride as he spoke of his helpers; but at the
close I heard again the sub-current of sadness come into the deep
tones. I had been jarred by his exposition at the meeting, by his
apparent callousness in outlook; but now I thought I saw behind the
mask.
Again he sat pondering for some moments; but at last he threw off
his preoccupation; and when he spoke it was more directly to me than
hitherto.
“Possibly you may wonder, Flint, why it is that with all these
resources in my hands I have come to you for help; and why I have never
approached you before. The fact is, I watched you from your start
and stood by to help you if you needed me; but you made good alone,
and I never interfere with a man unless it is absolutely necessary.
You made good without my assistance; and I thought too well of you
to offer any. But I watched you, as I said--I have my own ways of
getting information--and I knew that you were just the man I required
for a particular section of the work in front of us. Your factory
organisation showed me that. There will be an enormous task before you;
but I know that you’ll be the right man in the right place. I never
make a mistake, when it is a case of this kind. You aren’t an untried
man.”
From anyone else, I would have regarded this as clumsy flattery; but so
great an influence had Nordenholt acquired over me even in that single
afternoon that I never looked at the matter in that light at all. His
manner showed no patronage or admiration; it seemed merely that he was
stating facts as he knew them, without caring much about my opinion.
“But it seems to me,” he went on, “that I’ve talked enough about
personal affairs already. I want to try to give you some views on the
main thing in front of us. You and I, Flint, have been born and grown
up in the midst of this civilisation; and I expect that you, like most
other people, have been oblivious of the changes which have come about;
for they have been so gradual that very few of us have noticed them at
all.
“When you begin low down in the scale of Creation, you find creatures
without any specialised organs. The simplest living things are just
spots of protoplasm, mere aggregations of cells, each of which
performs functions common to them all. Then, step by step as you rise
in the scale, specialisation sets in: the cells become differentiated
from one another; and each performs a function of its own. You get
the cells of the nerves receiving and transmitting sensation; you get
cells engaged in nutrition processes; there are other cells devoted
to producing motion. And with this specialisation you get the dawn
of something which apparently did not exist before: the structure
as a whole acquires a personality of its own, distinct from the
individualities of the cells which go to build it up.
“But the inverse process is also possible. When the body as a whole
suffers death, you still have a certain period during which the cells
have an existence. Hair grows after death, for example.
“Now if you look at the trend of civilisation, you will see that we are
passing into a stage of specialisation. In the Middle Ages, a man might
be a celebrated artist and yet be in the forefront of the science of
his day--like Leonardo da Vinci; but in our time you seldom find a man
who is first-class in more than one line. In the national body, each
individual citizen is a specialised cell; and if he diverged from his
normal functions he would disorganise the machine, just as a cancer
cell disorganises the body in which it grows.
“But this civilisation of ours has come to the edge of its grave.
It is going to die. There is no help for it. What I fear is that in
its death-throe it may destroy even the hope of a newer and perhaps
better civilisation in the future. It is going to starve to death;
and a starving organism is desperate. So long as it retains its
present organised and coherent life, it will be a danger to us; and
for our own safety--I mean the safety of the future generations--we
must disorganise it as soon as possible. We must throw it back at a
step, if we can, to the old unspecialised conditions; for then it
will lose its most formidable powers and break up of itself. Did you
ever read Hobbes? He thought of the State as a great Leviathan, an
artificial man of greater strength and stature than the natural man,
for whose protection and defence it was contrived; and the soul of this
artificial creature he found in sovereignty. How can we bring about the
_débâcle_ of this huge organism? That is the problem I have been facing
this afternoon.
“The Leviathan’s life-blood is the system of communications throughout
the country; and I doubt if we can cripple that sufficiently rapidly
and effectively to bring about the downfall. It would take too long
and excite too much opposition if we did it thoroughly. We must
have something subtler, Flint, something which will strike at each
individual intelligence and isolate it from its fellows as far as
possible. It’s my old problem of the breaking-strain again on the
very widest scale. We must find some psychological weapon to help us.
Nothing else will do.”
It seemed as though he were appealing to me for suggestions; but I had
nothing to offer. I had never considered such a problem; and at first
sight it certainly seemed insoluble. Given that men already had the
certainty of death before them, what stronger motive could one bring to
bear?
“I must think over it further,” he said at last, “I think I see a
glimmering of some possibilities. After all, it’s my own line.”
He dropped the subject and seemed to sink into his own thoughts for
a time. When he broke the silence once more, it was on an entirely
different subject.
“I wonder if you ever read the Norse mythology, Flint? No? Well, you’ve
missed something. The gods of Greece were a poor lot, a kind of divine
collection of Fermiers Généreaux with much the same tastes; but the
Scandinavian divinities were in a different class. They were human in
a way; but their humanity wasn’t of the baser sort. And over them
all hung that doom of Ragnarök, their Twilight, when the forces of
Evil would be loosed for the final struggle to bring darkness upon the
earth. It’s the strangest forecast of our present crisis. As Ragnarök
drew near, brother was to turn against brother; bloodshed was to sweep
the land. Then was to come the Winter, three years long, when all
trees were to fail and all fruits to perish, while the race of men
died by hunger and cold and violence. And with Ragnarök the very Gods
themselves were to pass away in their struggle with all the Forces of
Evil and Darkness.
“But they were only half-gods, deified men. Behind them, the All-Father
stood; and beyond that time of terror there lay the hope of Gimle, the
new age when all would again be young and fair.
“I look beyond these coming horrors to a new Gimle, Flint; a time
when Earth will renew her youth and we shall shake free from all the
trammels which this dying civilisation has twined about our feet. It
will come, I feel sure. But only a few of us leaders will see it. The
strain will be too much for us; only the very toughest will survive.
But each of us must work to the very last breath to save something upon
which we can build anew. There must be no shrinking in either will or
emotion. I warn you that it will be terrible. To save mankind from
the terror of the giants, Odin gave his eye to Mimir in return for a
draught of the Well of Knowledge. Some of us will have to give our
lives.... A few of us will lose our very souls.... It will be worth it!”
I was amazed to find this train of mysticism in that cold mind. Yet,
after all, is it surprising? Almost all the great men of history have
been mystics of one kind or another. Nordenholt rose; and something
which had burned in his eyes died out suddenly. He went to the roll-top
desk and took from it a bundle of papers.
“Here are your instructions, Flint. Everything has been foreseen, I
think, for the start. Follow them implicitly as far as they go; and
after that I trust you to carry out the further steps which you will
see are required.”
As he was shaking hands with me, another thought seemed to strike him.
“By the way, of course you understand that the whole of this scheme
depends for success on our being able to exterminate these bacilli? If
we cannot do that, they will simply attack any nitrogenous manure which
we use. I am putting my bacteriologists on to the problem at once; but
in any case the nitrogen scheme must go ahead. Without it, no success
is possible, even if we destroyed _B. diazotans_. So go ahead.”
His car awaited me at the door. On the drive home, I saw in the
streets crowds gathered around hoarding after hoarding and staring up
at enormous placards which had just been posted. The smaller type was
invisible to me; but gigantic lettering caught my eye as I passed.
+-------------------------------------------+
| NITROGEN |
| |
| |
| ONE MILLION MEN WANTED |
| |
| |
| NORDENHOLT |
+-------------------------------------------+