Intermezzo
In order to understand the impression which that evening left upon
me, it is necessary to bear in mind the conditions under which I had
been living for the last few weeks. In the earlier stages I had been
oscillating between my office, with its ever-accumulating mass of
papers, on the one hand; and the grime and clangour of the factories
and furnaces upon the other. Then, gradually, I saw less and less
of the concrete machinery of our safety and slipped almost wholly
into the work of control from a distance. Lists, sheets of figures,
graphs, letters dictated or read, telephonic communications, reports
from factory managers, all surged up before me in a daily deluge. My
meals were eaten hurriedly at a side-table in my office; and my lights
burned far into the morning in the attempt to cope with the torrent
which I had to control. Often as the dawn was coming up through the
smoke-clouds of the city I walked home with a wearied mind through
which endless columns of figures chased each other; and my eyes
had broken down under the strain to the extent that I had to use
pilocarpine almost constantly. I was beginning to look back on the old
life in London, with its theatre parties and dinners, as if it were
another existence which I should never re-enter. I seemed shut off from
it by some nebulous yet impenetrable curtain; and when I thought of it
at times, I felt that it had passed away beyond recall. All the softer
side of civilisation, it seemed, must go down, once for all, in this
cataclysm; and from our efforts a harder, harsher world would be born.
Ease and luxury had vanished, leaving us stripped to our necessities.
And suddenly I found myself in the old surroundings once more. I was
ushered into a room which, though its simplicity recalled Nordenholt’s
other environments, still betrayed a woman’s hand at every point. There
was no litter of meaningless nicknacks; every touch went to build up
a harmonious whole: and it was unmistakably a feminine mind which
had designed it. As I glanced down the room, I saw Miss Huntingtower
standing by the fireplace; and it flashed across me that, whether by
accident or design, the room formed a framework for her.
As she came forward to meet me, her smile effaced the strained
expression which I had noticed in the morning. In these surroundings
she seemed different, somehow. The artistry of the room fitted her own
beauty so that each appeared to find its complement in the other. It
seemed to me that she was designed by destiny for this environment, and
not for the harder work of the world. And yet, she gave no suggestion
of triviality; there was no hint of a feminine desire to attract. It
must have been that she harmonised so well with the frame in which I
saw her. And the personality which gazed from her eyes seemed in some
way to blend with this world of shaded lights, graceful outlines and
innate simplicity.
Nordenholt came into the room almost at once with a grave apology to
Miss Huntingtower for being late.
“Convenient having a house in the University Square,” he said to me.
“If we hadn’t taken over some of these professors’ residences, it would
have meant such a waste of time getting to and fro between one’s home
and the office. That was one reason why I selected the University as a
centre. We had the whole thing ready-made for us.”
Henley-Davenport arrived almost at once; and we went down to dinner. I
had begun to re-acclimatise myself in these surroundings; but I still
recall that evening in every detail. The shaded candles on the table,
which soothed my straining eyes, the glitter of silver and crystal on
the snowy cloth, Nordenholt’s lean visage half in shadow except when
he leaned forward into the soft illumination, Henley-Davenport’s sharp
voice driving home a point, and Miss Huntingtower’s eager face as she
glanced from speaker to speaker or put a question to one of us: with
it all, I seemed back again in my lost world and the Nitrogen Area
appeared to belong to another region of my life.
But even here it penetrated, though faintly. The usual topics of
conversation were gone: theatres, books, all our old interests had been
uprooted and cast aside, so that we could only take them up in the
form of reminiscence. And, as a matter of fact, we talked very little
about them. I tried one or two tentative efforts; but Henley-Davenport,
who had known Nordenholt and his ward longer than I, made very little
attempt to follow me: and I soon gathered that Miss Huntingtower was
better pleased with other subjects.
What appeared to interest her most was the general situation; and I was
rather flattered to find that she seemed anxious to hear my own views.
She seemed to be one of those people who are gifted with the faculty of
drawing one out. I don’t mean that she sat silent and merely listened;
but she had the knack of stimulating one to talk and of keeping one to
the main line by occasional questions, which showed that she had not
only followed what had been said but had silently commented upon it
as one went along. Yet she never appeared to lose her charm by aping
masculinity. Her outlook was a feminine one in its essentials, even if
her mind was acute. And she had the gift of naturalness. There was no
artificiality either in look or speech. She made me feel almost at once
as though I had known her for years.
One thing I did notice about her. Whenever Nordenholt spoke she seemed
to hang on his words and to weigh them mentally. The two seemed to be
joined by some intimate bond of understanding; and I could see that
Nordenholt was proud of her in his way.
Dinner drew to an end, and Nordenholt began to question Henley-Davenport
about his researches. Miss Huntingtower interrupted at the beginning
with a request for simple language.
“If you begin talking about uranium-X₁ and meso-thorium-2, then I won’t
understand you, and I want to know what it is all about.”
“Well, Miss Huntingtower, I think I can make it plain without using
uranium-X₁ or even eka-tantalum; but it’s hard that I should be
forbidden to use all these fine-sounding words, eh? Isn’t it? I submit
under protest. It takes away half the pleasure of telling things when
one has to put them in mere vulgar English.
“Well”--he had an extraordinary habit of interjecting “well” and by
inflecting it in various ways, making it serve as a kind of prelude to
his sentences, a sort of keynote, as it were--“Well, I take it that
you know what radioactivity is. Some of the atoms are spontaneously
breaking down into simpler materials, and in that breakdown they
liberate an amount of energy which is immeasurably greater than
anything we can obtain by the ordinary chemical reactions which occur
when coal is burned or when gas is lighted.
“Well, if we could tap that store of energy which evidently lies within
the atom we should have Nature at our feet. She would be done for,
beaten, out of the struggle: and we should simply have to walk over the
remains and take what we wanted. Until the thing is actually done, none
of us can grasp what it will mean; for no one has ever seen unlimited
energy under control in this world. We have always had to fight hard
for every unit of it that we used.
“Well, there is no doubt that atoms _can_ be broken down. All the
radioactive elements split up spontaneously without any help from
us. But the quantities of them which we can gather together are so
extremely minute that as a source of energy they are feebler than an
ordinary wax vesta, for all practical purposes.
“So far, so good. We know the thing can be done; but we haven’t hit on
the way of doing it. Is that clear?”
“Quite clear, thanks,” said Miss Huntingtower, with a smile. “Radium
without tears, Part I. Now the second lesson, please.”
“Well, don’t be too optimistic. There may be tears in the second part.
It’s a little stiffer. The majority of the elements are perfectly
stable; they undergo no radioactive decompositions; so that they give
off no energy. But all the same, if our views are right, they contain
a store of pent-up energy quite as great as that of the radioactive
set. It’s like two clocks, both wound up. One of them, the radioactive
clock, is going all the time and the mainspring is running down.
You know it is going because it gives out a tick; and we recognise
radioactivity by certain tests of a somewhat similar type, only we
‘listen’ for electrical effects instead of the sound-waves you detect
when the clock ticks. Now the second clock, the one that is wound up
but hasn’t been started, is like the ordinary element. If you could
give it a shake, it would start off ticking.
“Well, what we want to do is to start the non-radioactive elements
ticking. We are looking for the right kind of shake to give them in
order to start them off. If we can find that, then we shall get all the
energy we need, because we can utilise enormous quantities of material
where now we have only the traces of radioactive stuff.”
“A risky business,” said Nordenholt. “Your first successful experiment
will be rather catastrophic, won’t it?”
“Probably. But I’ve left full notes of everything I’ve done, so someone
else will be able to continue if anything happens to me.
“Well, the real trouble is that it takes a lot to shake up the internal
machinery of an atom. Rutherford did it long ago by using a stream of
alpha-particles from radium to smash up the nitrogen atom. That was
in 1920 or thereabouts. You see, we have no ordinary force intense
enough to break up atoms of the stable elements; we have to go to the
radioactive materials to get energy sufficiently concentrated to make a
beginning.
“Now, what I have been following out is this. Perhaps I can show you it
best by an experiment. Can you get me some safety match-boxes?”
A dozen of these were brought, and he stood them each on its end in a
line.
“Now,” he continued, “it requires a certain force in a blow from my
finger to knock down one of these boxes; and if I take the ten boxes
separately, it would need ten times that force to throw them all
flat. But if I arrange them so that as each one falls it strikes its
neighbour, then I can knock the whole lot down with a single touch. The
first one collides with the second, and the second in falling upsets
the third, and so on to the end of the line.
“Well, that is what I have been following out amongst the atoms. I
know that the alpha-rays of radium will upset the equilibrium of other
atoms; and what is wanted is to get the second set of atoms to upset
a third and so forth. Hitherto I have not been able to hit upon the
proper train of atoms to use. Somehow it seems to sputter out half-way,
just as a train of powder fails to catch fire all along its line if one
part of it isn’t thick enough to carry the flame on. But I have got far
enough to show that it can be done. It’s rather pretty to follow, if
one has enough imagination to read behind the measurements. You really
must come and see it, Nordenholt.”
“Do you think it will come out soon?” asked Miss Huntingtower.
“Sooner or later, is all one can say. But it might come any day.”
Nordenholt rose from the table.
“I’ll come across now, if you can let me see that experiment,” he said.
“I’m more interested than I can tell you; and I want to discuss some
points with you. I’m taking the evening off anyway, and I may as well
make myself useful. How long will it take--an hour? All right. Flint,
will you amuse Miss Huntingtower till I get back?”
He and Henley-Davenport went out, leaving us to return upstairs.
For a time we talked of one thing and another till at last, by what
transitions I cannot now remember, we touched upon her secretaryship,
and I asked her how she came to occupy the post.
“Do you really want to know?” she asked. “I warn you it will be rather
a long story if I tell you it; and it will probably seem rather dull to
you.”
“Don’t be afraid. I am sure I shall not find it dull.”
“Well, let’s pretend we are characters in a novel and the distressed
heroine will proceed to relate the story of her life. ‘I was born of
poor but honest parents....’ Will that do to start?”
“Must you begin at the beginning? I usually skip first chapters myself.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to begin fairly early if you are to understand.
Mr. Nordenholt isn’t my uncle, really, you know. My father was a
distant relation of his. When Father and Mother died I was quite a tiny
child; I only remember them vaguely now: and Uncle Stanley was the
only relation I had in the world. I believe, too, that I was the only
relative he had, certainly I was the only one I ever heard him speak
of, except Father and Mother. It was just after he had made his fortune
in Canada, and he must have been about thirty then. It appears that
Father had written to him much earlier, asking him to look after me if
anything happened to him and Mother; and when they were drowned--it was
a boating accident--he came home to this country and took me to live
with him.
“I was only about eight then, and I missed Father and Mother so. I
cried and cried; and he spent hours with me, trying to comfort me.
Somehow he did me good. I don’t know how he did it; but he seemed to
understand so well.”
Again I had come across a new side in Nordenholt’s character. I could
hardly picture that grim figure--for even at thirty Nordenholt must
have been grim--comforting that tiny scrap of humanity in distress. And
yet she was right: he did understand.
“And with it all, he didn’t spoil me. He knew, of course, that when I
grew up I would have more money than I knew what to do with; and he
determined that I should get the full pleasure out of it by coming to
it unspoilt and with unjaded feelings. He brought me up in the simplest
way you can imagine. I had no expensive toys, but I liked the ones I
had all the better for that. It gave more scope for the imagination,
you see: and I had even more than the child’s ordinary imaginative
power. When we played fairy tales together he used to be the Ogre or
the Prince Charming, and I could see him so well either way. He laughs
now when I remind him that he used to make a good Prince Charming.
“Well, so it went on, year after year; and we grew up with more in
common than either father and daughter or brother and sister. Somehow
I picked up his ways of looking at things; and I caught from him
something of his understanding of people. He never put any ideals
before me; but I think he himself gave me something to carve out an
ideal from. Oh, there’s nobody like Uncle Stanley! I don’t know anybody
who comes up to his shoulder.”
“I’ve only known him for a few weeks, Miss Huntingtower,” I said, “but
I’ve seen enough to agree with you in that.”
“Have you? I’m so glad. It shows that we’re the same sort of person,
doesn’t it? For I know some people hate him--and I hate them for it!”
She clenched her teeth with an air that was half-play, half-earnest.
“I’m going to skip a few years and come to the fairy-tale part of my
story: the Three Wishes. When I grew up, Uncle Stanley told me that
he had settled an immense sum on me and that I could do exactly as I
wished. I think I failed him at that point. He expected me to go and
have a good time; and--I didn’t. I didn’t want to have a good time. I
had been thinking over all he had done for me; and I wanted something
else entirely. I wanted to give him something in return for all his
kindness to me when I was a tiny little thing; and I was afraid that he
wouldn’t let me. I went to him one day and asked him to give me three
wishes. Now even with me, Uncle Stanley is careful; and he wanted to
know what the wishes were before he would promise.
“‘I don’t know myself yet,’ I said, ‘but I want to feel that I have
three things in reserve that I can ask you to do.’ ‘I promise no
impossibilities,’ he told me, ‘but if the things are really possible,
you can have them.’ ‘Very well,’ said I, ‘the first of them is that I
want to be trained as a secretary.’
“He laughed at me, of course; and when I persisted, he pointed out
to me that I was my own mistress and that I needn’t have asked his
permission to get trained. ‘You’ve wasted one of your wishes, Elsa,’
he said, ‘and I’m going to hold you to your bargain.’ ‘Well, I wanted
your consent to it anyway,’ I told him.
“I went and took a secretary’s training, the most complete I could
get. You don’t know how I enjoyed it. I hated the work, of course; but
I felt all the time that I was getting ready to be of use to Uncle
Stanley; and even the dullest parts of the thing seemed to be lightened
by that.
“When I was fully trained, I went to him again. ‘I want my second wish
now: I want you to take me as your private secretary.’ I don’t know
that he was altogether pleased then. I think he imagined that I would
be a nuisance or inefficient or something. But he kept his promise and
took me to work with him.
“You can’t guess what I felt about it. I worked hard; I did everything
correctly; and I knew him better than anyone else, so that I could help
him just when he needed it. Of course, I’m not his only secretary; but
I know I suit him better than any of the others. I’ve begun to pay
off my debt to him bit by bit; and yet I always seem just as deep in
as ever. He’s always been so good to me, you know. But still, I _am_
useful to him; and I’m not merely there on sufferance now. I know he
appreciates my work.”
“I doubt if you would be there long if he didn’t,” I said. “From what I
have seen of him he isn’t likely to employ amateurs even as a favour.
I think he would have let you see you were useless unless you had made
good.”
“Oh, if he had been the least dissatisfied with me I would have gone at
once as soon as I saw it. I want to be a help and not a hindrance. But
now I have answered your question, although it has taken rather a long
time to do it.”
Some inane compliment came to my lips but I bit it back without
speaking it. She didn’t seem to be the sort of girl who wanted flattery.
“I think you are helping more than Mr. Nordenholt with your work just
now,” I said at length. “You seem to have found your way into the
centre of the biggest thing this country has ever seen.”
Her face clouded for a moment.
“Yes, it’s a great thing, isn’t it? But do you ever think what failure
might mean, Mr. Flint? Think of all these poor people starving and of
us unable to help them. It would be terrible. Sometimes I think of it
and it makes me feel that we bear a fearful responsibility. I don’t
mean that I personally have any real responsibility. I don’t take
myself so seriously as all that. But the men at the head, Uncle Stanley
and the rest of you--it’s a fearful burden to take on your shoulders.
I’m only a cog in the machine and could be replaced to-morrow; but you
people, the experts, couldn’t be replaced. Fifty millions of people! I
can’t even begin to understand what fifty million deaths would mean. I
do hope, oh, I do so hope that we shall be successful. If anyone but
Uncle Stanley were at the head of it I should doubt; but I feel almost
quite safe with him at the helm. He never failed yet, you know.”
“No,” I said, “he never failed yet.”
What would she think when the full plans of Nordenholt--who “never
failed yet”--were revealed to her? I wondered how this fragile girl
would take it. She wouldn’t simply weep and forget, I was sure. She
seemed to have high ideals and she evidently idolised Nordenholt. It
would be a terrible catastrophe for her. I dreaded the next steps in
the conversation, for I did not want to lie to her; and I saw no other
way out of it if she turned the talk into the wrong channel.
Nordenholt’s hour was up and I began to feel that the old life was
slipping away from me again. For a few minutes we sat silent; for she
did not speak and I was afraid to reopen the conversation lest she
should continue her line of thought. I watched her as she sat: the
tiny shoe, the sweep of the black gown without a sparkle of jewellery
to relieve it, the clean curves of her white throat, and over all the
lustre of her hair. Would there be any place for all this in the new
world? I wondered. Things would be too hard for her fragility, perhaps.
As ten o’clock struck Nordenholt came in. He looked more cheerful than
when he had left us, though as he dropped into a chair I noticed that
he seemed to be physically tired.
“Henley-Davenport asked me to make his excuses to you, Elsa. He wants
to work out something which struck him when we were over at his
laboratory; so I left him there.”
He smoked for a while in silence, as though ruminating over what he had
seen.
“That’s a brave man if you want to see one,” he said at last. “From
what he told me, there will be a terrible explosion the first time he
manages to jar up his atomic powder-magazine; and yet he goes into the
thing as coolly as though he were lighting a cigarette. I hope he pulls
it off. More hangs on that than one can well estimate just now. It may
be the last shot in our locker for all we know.”
“But surely, Uncle Stanley, you have foreseen everything?”
“I’m not omniscient, Elsa, though perhaps you have illusions on the
point. I do what I can, but one must allow a good deal of latitude for
the unpredictable which always exists. And in this affair, I am afraid
the unpredictable will not be on the helping side. But don’t worry your
head over that; we can’t help it. What’s wrong with you to-night. You
look more worried than usual. Tired?”
“Not specially.”
“Would you sing to us a little?”
“Only something very short, then.” She moved to the piano. “What do you
want?”
“Oh, let’s see.... I’d like.... No, you wouldn’t care for it. Let’s
think again.”
“No, no, Uncle Stanley; I’ll sing anything you wish,” she said, but
when he asked for the second Song in Cymbeline, her brows contracted.
“Must you have that one? Won’t the first song do instead?”
“I’d rather have the other. Only the last two verses, for I see you are
tired.”
She sat down at the piano and played the preliminary chords. I had
never heard the air, possibly it was an unusual setting.
“_Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must,
Consign to thee, and come to dust._”
It was a wonderful piece of singing. In the first lines her voice rose
clear and confident, reassuring against the mere physical perils. Then
with the faintest change of tone, just sufficient to mark the shift
in the form of menace, she sang the third line; and let a tinge of
melancholy creep into the next. With the last couplet something new
came into the music, possibly a drop into the minor; and her voice
seemed to fill with an echo of all lost hopes and spent delights. Then
it rose again, full and strong in the mandatory lines of the final
verse, set to a different air, till at last it died away once more with
infinite tenderness:
“_Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave._”
I sat spellbound after she had ended. It was wonderful art. She closed
the piano and rose from her seat.
“I can’t imagine why you dislike that air,” said Nordenholt.
“Oh, it’s so gloomy, Uncle Stanley. I don’t care to think about things
like that.”
“Gloomy? You misread it, I’m sure. I wish I could be sure of Fidele’s
luck.
‘_Fear not slander, censure rash._’
Which of us can feel sure of being free from these? Not I. And what
better could one wish for in the end?
‘_And renownèd be thy grave._’
How many ghosts could boast of that after a hundred years?”
“Well, none of us will know about that part of it,” she said lightly.
“But I don’t think you need trouble about the ‘censure rash.’ None of
your own people will blame you; and I know you care nothing for the
rest. Even if they all turned against you, you would always have me,
you know.”
“Is that a promise, Elsa?” he asked gravely; and something in his tone
made her glance at him. “Would you really stand by me no matter what
happened? Don’t say yes, unless you really mean it.”
She stood in front of him, eye to eye, for a moment without speaking.
“I don’t understand,” she said at last. “You never doubted me before.
It hurts. Of course I promise you. No matter what happens I won’t leave
you. But you must promise never to send me away until I want to go.”
“Very good, Elsa, I promise.”
The strain seemed to relax in a moment. I don’t think they realised how
strange it all seemed to me. They were living in their own world, and
I was outside, I felt, rather bitterly. And of course, none of us was
quite normal at that time.
Miss Huntingtower came to me and held out her hand.
“Thanks so much for coming, Mr. Flint. Somehow I feel as if I
had known you for years instead of only a few hours. Now I’ll say
good-night and leave you with Uncle Stanley.”
“Wait a minute, Elsa,” said Nordenholt. “It seems to me that all three
of us have been cooped up indoors too much lately. Our nerves are
getting on edge. Don’t deny it, Flint, in your case. You haven’t a leg
to stand on. I heard you differing from one of your clerks to-day. We’d
all be the better for fresh air now and again. One afternoon a week,
after this, we’ll take a car out into the country. I can do my thinking
there just as well as anywhere else; and Mr. Flint can drive to keep
his mind off business. That’s settled. I told you before that amusement
of some sort has to come into our routine, Flint; so you must just make
up your mind to it. I can’t replace you if you collapse; so I can’t
allow you to go on like this. You don’t look half the man you were six
weeks ago.”
I required no pressing, partly because I knew that Nordenholt was right
in what he said.