Nordenholt's Million

by J. J. Connington

  My third stage of evolution led on from this conclusion. I accepted the present as it was and then tried to discover ways in which improvements might be made in the future. Again I spent days in picking out faults and making additions to the fabric of society; and at the end of it all I found, as I had done before, that the result was a patchwork, something which had no organic life of its own.

  At this point, I think, I began to despair entirely; and I fell back upon pure materialism. I considered the matter solely from the standpoint of the practical needs of the time; for there I felt myself upon sure ground. Whatever happened, I must have ready a concrete scheme which would tide us over our early stages in the future.

  I secured statistics showing the proportions of the population which would be required in all the different branches of labour during the coming year; and in doing this I had to divide them into groups according as they were to work on the land or were required for keeping up the supply of fixed nitrogen from the factories. My charts showed me the areas which we expected to have under cultivation at given dates in the future. I was back again in the unreal world of graphs and curves; and I think that in some ways it was an advantage to me to eliminate the human factor. It kept me from brooding too much over my recollections of humanity in its decline.

  On this materialistic basis, the whole thing resolved itself into a problem of labour economy: the devising of a method whereby the greatest yield of food could be obtained with the smallest expenditure of power. Here I was on familiar ground; for it was my factory problem over again, though the actual conditions were different. There were only two main sides to the question: on the one hand I had to ensure the greatest amount of food possible and on the other I had to look to the ease of distribution of that food when it was produced. The idea of huge tractor-ploughed areas followed as a matter of course; and from this developed the conception of humanity gathered into a number of moderately-sized aggregations rather than spread in cottages here and there throughout the country-side. Each of these centres of population would contain within itself all the essentials of existence and would thus be a single unit capable of almost independent existence.

  Having in this way roughed out my scheme, other factors forced themselves on my attention. I had no wish to utilise the old villages which still remained dotted here and there about the country-side. Their sizes and positions had been dictated by conditions which had now passed away; and it seemed better to make a clean sweep of them and start afresh. From the purely practical standpoint, the erection of huge phalansteries at fixed points would no doubt have been the simplest solution of the problem; but I rejected this conception. I wanted something better than barracks for my people to live in. I wanted variety, not a depressing uniformity. And I wanted beauty also.

  Step by step I began to see my way clearer before me. And now that I look back upon it, I was simply following in the track of Nature herself. To make sure of the material things, to preserve the race first of all; then to increase comfort, to make some spot of the Earth’s surface different from the rest for each of us, to create a “home”; lastly, when the material side had been buttressed securely, to turn to the mind and open it to beauty: that seems to me to be the normal progress of humanity in the past, from the Stone Age onwards.

  *****

  It was at this period that Elsa Huntingtower came more into my life. While I was laying down the broad outlines of the material side of the coming reconstruction, I had preferred to work alone; for in dealing with problems of this nature, it seems to me best to have a single mind upon the work. It was largely a matter of dry statistics, calculations, graphs, estimates, cartography and so forth; and since it seemed to me to be governed almost entirely by practical factors, I did not think that much could be gained by calling for her help. I waited till I had the outlines of the project completed before applying to Nordenholt in the matter. When I spoke to him, he agreed with what I had done.

  “I don’t want to see your plans, Jack. It’s your show; and if I were to see them I would probably want to make suggestions and shake your trust in your own judgment. Much better not.”

  “What about Miss Huntingtower’s help? Am I not to get that?”

  “That’s a different matter entirely. She ought to give you the feminine point of view, which I couldn’t do. Let’s see. She can consult with you in the evenings. Will that do?”

  I agreed; and it was arranged that thereafter I was to spend the evenings at Nordenholt’s house, where she and I could discuss things in peace. Nordenholt left us almost entirely to ourselves, though occasionally he would come into the room where we worked: but he refused to take any interest in our affairs.

  “One thing at a time for me, nowadays,” he used to say, when she appealed to him. “My affair is to bring things up to the point where you two can take over. Your business is to be ready to pull the starting-lever when I give you the word. I won’t look beyond my limits.”

  And, indeed, he had enough to do at that time. Things were not always smooth in the Nitrogen Area; and I could see signs that they might even become more difficult. Since I had left my own department, I had gained more information about the general state of affairs; and I could comprehend the possibilities of wreck which menaced us as the months went by.

  I have said before that it is almost impossible for me to retrace in detail the evolution of my reconstruction plans; and in the part where Elsa Huntingtower and I collaborated, my recollections are even more confused than they are with regard to the work I did alone. So much of it was developed by discussions between us that in the end it was hard to say who was really responsible for the final form of the schemes which we laid down in common. She brought a totally new atmosphere into the problem, details mostly, but details which meant the remodelling of much that I had planned.

  One example will be sufficient to show what I mean. I had, as I have mentioned, planned a series of semi-isolated communities scattered over the cultivable area; and I had gone the length of getting my architects to design houses which I thought would be the best possible compromise: something that would please the average taste without offending people who happened to be particular in details. I showed some of these drawings to her, expecting approval. She examined them carefully for a long time, without saying anything.

  “Well, Mr. Flint,” she said at last, “I know you will think I am very hard to please; but personally I wouldn’t live in one of these things if you paid me to do it.”

  “What’s wrong with them? That one was drawn by Atkinson, and I believe he’s supposed to be a rather good architect.”

  “Of course he is. That’s just what condemns him in my mind. Don’t you know that for generations the ‘best architects’ have been imposing on people, giving them something that no one wants; and carrying it off just because they are the ‘best architects’ and are supposed to know what is the right thing. And not one of them ever seems to have taken the trouble to find out what a woman wants in a house. Not one.

  “Don’t you see the awful sameness in these designs, for one thing? You men seem to think that if you get four walls and a roof, everything is all right. Can’t you understand that one woman wants something different from another one?”

  There certainly was a monotony about the designs, now I came to look at them.

  “Now here’s a suggestion,” she went on. “It may not be practical, but it’s your business to make it practicable, and not simply to accept what another man tells you is possible or impossible. You say that your trouble is that you want to standardise, so as to make production on a large scale easy. So you’ve simply set out to standardise your finished product; and you want to build so many houses of one type and so many of another type and let your people choose between the two types. Now my idea is quite different. Suppose that you were to standardise your material so that it is capable of adaptation. You see what I mean?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.

  “Like Meccano
. You get a dozen strips of metal and some screws and wheels; and out of that you can build fifty different models, using the same pieces in each model. Well, why not try to design your girders and beams and doors and so forth, in such a way that out of the same set you could erect a whole series of different houses. It doesn’t seem to me an impossibility if you get someone with brains to do it.”

  “It sounds all right in theory; but I’m not so sure about the practical side.”

  “Of course if you put some old fogey on to it he won’t be able to do it; but try a young man who believes in the idea and you’ll get it done, I’m sure. It may mean making each part a little more complicated than it would normally be; but that doesn’t matter much in mass-production, does it?”

  “It’s not an insuperable difficulty.”

  “Well, another thing. Get your architect to draw up sketches of all the possible combinations he can get out of his standardised material; and then when people want a house, they can look at the different designs and among them all they are almost sure to find something that suits their taste. It is much better than your idea of standard house-patterns, anyway.”

  “I’ll see what can be done.”

  “Oh, the thing will be easy enough if you mean to have it. A child can build endless castles with a single box of bricks; and surely a man’s brain ought to be able to do with beams and joists what a child does with bricks.”

  I give this as an example of her suggestions. Some of her improvements seemed trivial to me; but I took it that it was just these trivial things that made all the difference to a feminine mind; so I followed her more or less blindly.

  Our collaboration was an ideal one, notwithstanding some hard-fought debatable points. More and more, as time went on, I began to understand the wisdom Nordenholt had shown in demanding that I should take her into partnership. Our minds worked on totally different lines; but for that very reason we completed each other, one seeing what the other had missed. I found that she was open to conviction if one could actually put a finger on any weak point in her schemes.

  And, behind the details of our plans, I began to see more and more clearly the outlines of her character. I suppose that most men, thrown into daily contact with any girl above the average in looks and brains, will drift into some sort of admiration which is hardly platonic; but in these affairs propinquity usually completes what it has begun by showing up weak points in character or little mannerisms which end by repelling instead of attracting. In a drawing-room, people are always on their guard to some extent; but in the midst of absorbing work, real character comes out. One sees gaps in intelligence; failures to follow out a line of thought become apparent; any inharmony in character soon makes itself felt. One seldom sees teachers marrying their girl-students. But in Elsa Huntingtower I found a brain as good as my own, though working along different lines. I expect that her association with Nordenholt had given her chances which few girls ever have; but she had natural abilities which had been sharpened by that contact. She puzzled me, I must admit. My mind works very much in the concrete; I like to see every step along the road, to test each foothold before trusting my weight upon it. To me, her mental processes seemed to depend more upon some intuition than did mine; but I believe now that her reasoning was as rigid as my own and that it seemed disjointed merely because her steps were different from mine. My brain worked in arithmetical progression, if I may put it so, whilst hers followed a geometrical progression. Often it was a dead heat between the hare and the tortoise; for my steady advance attained the goal just when her mysterious leaps of intelligence had brought her to the same point by a different path.

  It was not until we had cleared the ground of the main practical difficulties that we allowed ourselves to think of the future. At first, everything was subordinated to the necessity of getting something coherent planned which would be ready for the ensuing stage after the Nitrogen Area had done its work. But once we had convinced ourselves that we had roughed out things on the material side, we turned our minds in other directions as a kind of relaxation. Of course we held divergent opinions upon many questions.

  “What you want, Mr. Flint, is to build a kind of human rabbit hutch, designed on the best hygienic lines. I can see that at the back of your mind all the time. You think material things ought to come first, don’t you?”

  “I certainly want to see the people well housed and well cared for before going any further.”

  “And then?”

  “Oh, after that, I want other things as well, naturally.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I want. I want to see them happy.”

  I can still remember that evening. The table between us was covered with papers; and a shaded lamp threw a soothing light upon them. All the rest of the room was in shadow; and I saw her face against the setting of the darkness behind her. In the next room I could feel the slow steps of Nordenholt in his study, pacing up and down as he revolved some problem in his mind.

  “When I think about it,” she went on, after a pause, “you men amaze me. In the mass, I mean, of course; I’m not talking about individuals. There seem to be three classes of you. The biggest class is simply looking for what it calls ‘a good time.’ It wants to enjoy itself; it looks on the world just as a playground; and it never seems to get beyond the stage of a child crying for amusement in a nursery. At the end of things, that type leaves the world just where the world was before. It achieves nothing; and often it merely bores itself. It doesn’t even know how to look for happiness. I don’t see much chance for that type in the future, now that things have changed.

  “Then there’s a second class which is a shade better. They want to make money; and they’re generally successful in that, for they are single-minded. But in concentrating on money, it seems to me, they lose everything else. In the end, they can do nothing with their money except turn it into more. They can’t spend it profitably; they haven’t had the education for that. They just gather money in, and gather it in, and become more and more slaves to their acquisitive instincts. To a certain extent they are better than the first type of men, for they do incidentally achieve something in the world. You can’t begin to make money without doing something. You need to manufacture or to transport goods or develop resources or organise in some way; so mankind as a whole profits incidentally.

  “Then you come to the last of the types: the men who want to do something. Activity is their form of happiness. All the inventors and discoverers and explorers belong to that class, all the artists and engineers and builders of things, great or small. Their happiness is in creation, bringing something new into the world, whether it’s new knowledge or new methods or new beauty. But they are the smallest class of all.”

  “What amazes you in that?”

  “The difference in the proportions of men in the different classes, of course. You know what the third type get out of life: you’re one of them yourself. Wouldn’t things be better if everyone got these things? Don’t you think the pleasure of creation is the greatest of all?”

  “Of course I do; but that’s because I’m built that way. I can’t help it.”

  “Well, I think that a good many of the rest of us have the instinct too; but it gets stifled very early. It seems to me that our education in the past has been all wrong. It has never been education at all, in the proper sense of the term. It’s been a case of putting things into minds instead of drawing out what the mind contains already.”

  I was struck by the similarity between her thoughts and mine upon this matter; but after all, there was nothing surprising in that; it was what everyone thought who had speculated at all on the problem. She was silent for a time; then she continued:

  “It’s just like the thing we were speaking of to-night. A child’s mind is like a box of bricks; and each child has a different box with bricks unlike those of any other child. Our educational system has been arranged to force each child to build a standard pattern of house from its bricks, whether the bricks wer
e suitable or not. The whole training has been drawn up to suit what they call ‘the average child’—a thing that never existed. So you get each child’s mind cramped in all sorts of directions, capacities stifled, a rooted distaste for knowledge engendered—a pretty result to aim at!”

  “I don’t think you realise the difficulties of the thing,” I said. “The younger generation isn’t a handful; it’s a largish mass to tackle: and one must cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth. The number of possible instructors is limited by the labour market.”

  “Hearken to the voice of the ‘practical man.’ ” She laughed, but not unkindly. “You don’t seem to realise, Mr. Flint, that things can be done if one is determined to do them—physical impossibilities apart, of course. When a conjurer devises a trick, do you think that he sets out by considering his available machinery? Not at all. He first thinks of the illusion he wants to produce; and he fits his machinery to that. What we need to do is to fix on our aim and then invent machinery for it. You seem to me always to put the cart before the horse and to work on the lines: ‘What can we do with the machinery we have?’ That’s all wrong, you know. We’re on the edge of a new time now; and we can do as we please. The old system is gone; and we can set up anything we choose. What we have to be sure is that the end we work towards is the right one.”

  We discussed education from various points of view, I remember; but what struck me most in her ideas was the emphasis which she laid on the faculty of wonder. One of her fears was that, in the stress of the new time, life would become machine-made and that the human race might degenerate into a mere set of engine-tenders to whom the whole world of imagination was closed.

  “I would begin with the tiny children,” she said, “and feed their minds on fairy tales. Only they would be new kinds of fairy tales—something to bring the wonder of Fairyland into their daily life. The old fairy tales were always about things ‘once upon a time’ and in some dim far-off country which no child ever reached. I want to bring Fairyland to their very doors and keep some of the mystery in life. I wouldn’t mind if they grew superstitious and believed in gnomes and elves and sprites and such things, so long as they felt the world was wonderful. We mustn’t let them become mere slaves to machinery. Life needs a tinge of unreality if one is to get the most out of it, so long as it is the right kind of unreality. Did you ever read Hudson’s Crystal Age?”