Nordenholt's Million

by J. J. Connington

  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 mesothorium-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 watches, both wound up. One of them, the radioactive watch, 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 watch ticks. Now the second watch, 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 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 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 ge
t 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 that 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.

&nbs
p; “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 thunderstone;

  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 renowned 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 renowned 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.”