“Yes.”
“You are determined on that? No wavering?”
“No.”
“Very good, Biles. I give you the fairest warning. On the day that you meet the House of Commons, I shall place upon the paper a series of questions which will expose the very root of the Mazanderan scandal, and I shall supply full information on the subject to the Opposition Press. I have had every document in my possession for the last year. I can prove that you yourself were in it up to the neck; I have notes of all the transactions with Rimanez and Co. And I know all about the Party Funds also. If that once gets into print, Biles, you are done for!”
He imitated the old death sign of the Roman arena. The Premier sat as if frozen in his chair. His face had gone a dirty grey. Nordenholt towered over him with contempt on his features. Suddenly the Colonial Secretary sprang to his feet.
“This is blackmail, Nordenholt,” he cried furiously. “Do you think you can do that sort of thing and not be touched? You may think you are safe behind your millions; but if you carried out your threat there isn’t a decent man who would speak to you again. You daren’t do it!”
“If you speak to me like that again, Simpson, I’ll take care that no decent man speaks to you either,” Nordenholt said, calmly. “There’s another set of notes besides those on Mazanderan. I have the whole dossier of the house in Carshalton Terrace in my desk. I’ll publish that too, unless you come to heel. It will be worse than Mazanderan, Simpson. It will be prison.”
In his turn, the Colonial Secretary collapsed into his chair. Whatever the threat had been, it had evidently brought him face to face with ruin; and guilt was written across his face.
But Saxenham had paid no attention to this interruption. In his slow way he was evidently turning over in his mind what Nordenholt had said to the Prime Minister; and now he spoke almost in a tone of anguish:
“Johnnie, Johnnie,” he said. “Deny it! Deny it at once. You can’t sit under that foul charge. Our hands were clean, weren’t they? You said they were, in the House. There’s no truth in what Nordenholt says, is there? Is there, Johnnie?”
But the Premier sat like a statue in his chair, staring in front of him with unseeing eyes. The affairs of the Mazanderan Development Syndicate had been a bad business; and if the connection between it and the Government could be proved, after what had already passed, it was an end of Biles and the total discredit of his Party. Nordenholt, still on his feet, looked down at the silent figure without a gleam of pity in his face. Somehow I understood that he was playing for a great stake, though no flicker of interest crossed his countenance.
The strain was broken by Saxenham getting to his feet. I knew his record, and I could guess what his feelings must have been. He stood there, a pathetic little figure, with shaking hands and dim eyes, a worshipper who had found his god only a broken image. He turned and looked at us in a pitiful way and then faced round to the wrecker.
“Nordenholt,” he said, “he doesn’t deny it. Is it really true? Can you give me your word?”
Nordenholt’s face became very gentle and all the hardness died out of his voice.
“Yes, Saxenham, it is true. I give you my word of honour for its truth. He can’t deny it.”
“Then I’ve backed a lie. I believed him. And now I’ve misled people. I’ve gone on to platforms and denied the truth of it; pledged my word that it was a malicious falsehood. Oh! I can’t face it, Nordenholt. I can’t face it. This finishes me with public service. I—I——”
He covered his face with his hands and I could see the tears trickle between his fingers. He had paid his price for being honest.
But the Premier was of sterner stuff. He looked up at Nordenholt at last with a gleam of hatred which he suppressed almost as it came:
“Well, Nordenholt, what’s your price?”
“So you’ve seen reason, Biles? Not like poor Saxenham, eh?” There was an under-current of bitterness in the tone, but it was almost imperceptible. “Well, it’s not hard. You take your orders from me now. You cover me with your full responsibility. You understand? You always were good at assuming responsibility. Have it now.”
“Do I understand you to mean that you would like to be a Dictator?”
“No, you haven’t got it quite correctly. I mean to be Dictator.”
The Prime Minister had relapsed into his stony attitude. There was no trace of feeling on his face; but I could understand the mental commotion which must lie behind that blank countenance. Under cover of fine phrases, he had always sought the lowest form of Party advantage; his political nostrum had become part and parcel of his individuality, and he had never looked higher than the intricacies of the Parliamentary game. Now, suddenly, he had been brought face to face with reality; and it had broken him. To do him justice, I believe that he might have faced personal discredit with indifference. He had done it before and escaped with his political life. But Nordenholt had struck him on an even more vital spot. If the Mazanderan affair came into the daylight, his Party would be ruined; and he would have been responsible. I give him the credit of supposing that it was upon the larger and not upon the personal issue that he surrendered.
Nordenholt, having gained his object, refrained from going further. He turned away from the upper end of the table and addressed the rest of us.
“Gentlemen, you see the state of affairs. We cannot wait for the slow machinery of politics to revolve through its time-honoured cycles before beginning to act. Something must be done at once. Every moment is now of importance. I wish to lay before you what appears to me the only method whereby we can save something out of the wreck.
“I have been thinking out the problem with the greatest care; and I believe that even now it is not too late, if you will give me your support. This meeting was called at my suggestion; and I supplied a list of your names because all of you will be needed if my scheme is to be carried out. But before I divulge it, I must ask from each of you an absolutely unconditional promise of secrecy. Will you give that, Ross? And you, Arbuthnot? . . .”
He went from individual to individual round the table; and, to my astonishment, used my own name with the others. How he knew me, I could not understand.
When he had secured a promise from all present, he continued:
“In the first place, I had better tell you what I have done. Immediately the Blight began to ravage the American wheat-fields, I bought up all the grain which was available from last year’s crop and got it shipped as soon as possible. It is on the high seas now; so we have evaded the new prohibition of exports. I need not give you figures; but it amounts to a considerable quantity. This, of course, I carried through at my own expense.
“I have also had printed a series of ration tickets and explanatory leaflets sufficient to last the whole country for three weeks. This also I did at my private charges.
“Further, I have placed orders with the printers and bill-posters for the placarding of certain notices. Some of these, I expect, are already posted up on the hoardings,
“I mention these matters merely in order to show you that I have not been idle and that I am fully convinced of the necessity for speed.”
He paused for a few seconds to let this sink in.
“Now we come to the main problem. Saxenham has told you the state of affairs; and I have supplemented it sufficiently to allow of your forming a judgment on the case. We have a population of fifty millions in the country. We have a food supply which will last, with my additions to it, for perhaps fourteen weeks. Beyond that we have nothing in hand. The next supply cannot make its appearance for at least a year. I have omitted the yield of the present crop, as I wish to be on the safe side; and I find that most of the grain is useless. When the new crop comes in, it will be, under present conditions, negligible in quantity owing to the soil-destruction which the Bacillus diazotans has wrought. That, I think, is a fair statement of the case as it stands.
“What results can we look for? If we ration the nation, even if we allow only a quar
ter of the normal supplies per day, our whole stock will be exhausted within the year. There will be a large percentage of deaths owing to under-feeding; but at the end of the year I think we might look forward to having a debilitated population of some thirty millions to feed. Will the new crop give us food for them? I have consulted men who know the subject and they tell me that it is an impossibility. We could not raise food enough, under the present conditions, to support even a reasonable percentage of that population.”
He paused again, as though to let this sink in.
“Gentlemen, this nation stands at the edge of its grave. That is the simple truth.”
We had all seen the trend of his reasoning; but this cold statement sent a shiver through the meeting. When he spoke again, it was in an even graver tone.
“You must admit, gentlemen, that we cannot hope to keep alive even half of the population until crops become plentiful once more. There is only a single choice before us. Either we distribute the available food uniformly throughout the country or we take upon ourselves the responsibility of an unequal allotment. If we choose the first course, all of us will die without reprieve. It is not a matter of sentiment; it is the plain logic of figures. No safety lies in that course. What about the second?
“Let us assume that we choose the alternative. We select from the fifty millions of our population those whom we regard as most fitted to survive. We lay aside from our stores sufficient to support this fraction; and we distribute among the remainder of the people the residuum of our food. If they can survive on that scale of rations, well and good. If not, we cannot turn aside the course of Nature.”
The Prime Minister looked up. Evidently, behind his impassive mask, he had been following the reasoning.
“If I understand you aright,” he said, “you are proposing to murder a large proportion of the population by slow starvation?”
“No. What I am trying to do is to save some millions of them from a certain death. It just depends upon which way you look at it, Biles. But have it your own way if it pleases you.
“Now, gentlemen, the calculation is a simple one. We have enough food to last a population of fifty millions for fourteen weeks. From that we deduct five weeks’ supplies for the whole population; which leaves us with four hundred and fifty million weekly rations. We select five million people whom we decide must survive; and these four hundred and fifty million rations will keep them fed for ninety weeks—say a year and nine months. It will really be longer than that; for I anticipate rather heavy ravages of disease on account of the monotony of the diet and the lack of fresh vegetables. That is in the nature of things; and we cannot evade it.
“That, then, is the only alternative. It is, as the Prime Minister has said, a death sentence on by far the greater part of the people in these islands; but I see no way out of the difficulties in which we are involved. It is not we who have passed that sentence. Nature has done it; and all that we can achieve is the rescue of a certain number of the victims. With your help, I propose to undertake that work of rescue.”
I doubt if those sitting round the table had more than the vaguest glimpse of what all this meant. When a death-roll reaches high figures, the mind refuses to grasp its implications. Very few people have any concrete idea of what the words “one million” stand for. We only understood that there was impending a human catastrophe on a scale which dwarfed all preceding tragedies. Beyond that, I know that I, for one, could not force my mind.
“We are thus left with five million survivors,” Nordenholt continued. “But this does not reach the crux of the matter. The nitrogen of the soil has vanished; and it must be replaced if the earth is ever again to bring forth fruits. That task devolves upon mankind, for Nature works too slowly for our purposes. In order to feed these five million mouths—or what is left of them when the food supply runs out—we have to raise crops next year; and to raise these crops we must supply the soil with the necessary nitrogenous material.
“I have consulted men who know”—this seemed to be his only phrase when he referred to his authorities—“and they tell me that it can be done if we bend our whole energies to the task. All the methods of using the nitrogen of the air have been worked out in detail long ago: the Birkel and Eyde process, Serpek’s method, the Schönherr and the Haber-Le Rossignol processes, as well as nitrolim manufacture and so forth. We have only to set up enough machinery and work hard—very hard—and we shall be able to produce by chemical processes the material which we require. That is what the five million will have to do. There will be no idlers among them. At first it will be work in the dark, for we cannot calculate how much material we require until the agricultural experts have made their experiments upon the soil. But I understand that it is quite within the bounds of possibility that we shall be successful.
“I come now to another point. These five million survivors cannot be scattered up and down the country. They must be brought into a definite area, for two reasons. In the first place, we must have them under our control so that we can make food-distribution simple; and, in the second place, we must be able to protect them from attack. Remember, outside this area there will be millions dying of starvation, and these millions will be desperate. We can take no risks.”
He took a roll from behind his chair and unfolded upon the table a large map of the British Isles marked with patches of colour.
“As to the choice of a segregation area, we are limited by various factors. We shall need coal for the basis of our work; therefore it would suit us best to place our colony near one of the coal-fields. We shall need iron for our new machinery; and it would be best to choose some centre in which foundries are already numerous. We shall need to house our five million survivors and we cannot spend time in building new cities for them. And finally, we need a huge water-supply for that population. On this map, I have had these various factors marked in colour. In some places, as you see, three of the desiderata are co-existent; but there is only one region in which we find all four conditions satisfied—in the Clyde Valley. There you have coal and iron; there are already in existence enormous numbers of foundries and machine shops; the city of Glasgow alone is capable of accommodating over a million human beings; and the water-supply is ample. This, I think, is sufficient to direct our choice to that spot.
“There are two further reasons why I am in favour of the Clyde Valley. It is a defensible position, for one thing. North of it you have only a very limited population—some three millions or even less. On the south, it is far removed from the main centres of population in the Midlands and London. This will be an advantage later on. Again, second point, we have to look forward to cultivation next year. Bordering the Clyde Valley within easy reach lie the tracts which, before the Blight, used to be the most fertile land in the country. The fields are ready for us to sow, once we have replaced the vanished nitrogen. I think there is no better place which we could select.
“Now, gentlemen, I have put my scheme before you. I have not given you more than the outlines of it. I know that it seems visionary at first; but you must either take it or leave it. We cannot wait for Parliament or for anybody else. The thing must be done now. Will you help?”
A murmur of assent passed round the table. Even the Prime Minister joined in the common approval; and I saw Nordenholt thank him with a glance.
“Very good, gentlemen. I have most of the preliminaries worked out in sufficient detail to let us get ahead. To-morrow we meet again here at nine in the morning, and by that time I hope to have further information for each of you. In the meantime, will you be good enough to think over the points at which this scheme will touch your own special branches of industry. We have an immense amount of improvisation before us; and we must be ready for things as they come. Thank you.”
He seated himself; and for the first time I realised what he had done. By sheer force of personality and a clear mind, he had carried us along with him and secured our assent to a scheme which, wild-cat though it might appear, see
med to be the only possible way out of the crisis. He had constituted himself a kind of Dictator, though without any of the trappings of the office; and no one had dared to oppose him. The cold brutality with which he had treated the politicians was apparently justified; for I now saw whither their procrastination would have led us. But I must confess that I was dazed by the rapidity with which his moves had been made. Possibly in my account I have failed to reproduce the exact series of transitions by which he passed from stage to stage. I was too intent at the time to take clear mental notes of what occurred; but I believe that I have at least drawn a picture which comes near to the reality.
The meeting was at its end. Nordenholt went across to speak to the Prime Minister; while the others began to leave the room in groups of two and three. I moved towards the door; then Nordenholt looked up and caught my eye.
“Just wait a minute, Flint, please.”
He continued his earnest talk with the Premier for a few minutes, then handed over an envelope containing a bulky mass of papers. At last he came to me and we went out together.
“You might come round to my place for a short time, Flint,” he said. “My car is waiting for us. I want you to be one of my right-hand men in this business and there are some things I wish to explain to you now. It may not seem altogether relevant to you; but I think it is necessary if we are to work together well.”
CHAPTER VI
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.
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