Nordenholt’s Million quotes

He certainly held no official post in the scientific world which might have burdened him; for despite numerous applications on his part, none of the Universities had seen fit to utilise his services in even the meanest capacity.

To be quite frank, he was a dabbler. He originated nothing, discovered nothing, improved nothing; and yet, by some means, he had succeeded in imposing himself upon the public mind.

He delivered courses of popular lectures on the work of real investigators; and I believe that these lectures were well attended. He wrote numerous books dealing with the researches of other men; and the publication of volume after volume kept him in the public eye.

and it seems characteristic of him that, when the key of the problem was lying beside him, his energy was entirely engrossed in writing newspaper paragraphs on another matter.

His mind worked exclusively through the medium of print and paper; so that even the most striking natural phenomenon escaped his observation.

At that time he lived in one of the houses of Cumberland Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park. I cannot recall the number; and the place has long ago disappeared; but I remember that it was near St. Katherine’s College and it overlooked the grounds of St.

and the issue of the war may be the life or death of one of us. They talk of the struggle for existence; but the real struggle for existence is going on within us and not in the outer world.

Phagocyte against bacterium⁠—that is where the fitness of an organism comes to its ultimate test.

A slight hitch in the reinforcements, a minute’s delay in bringing numbers to bear, and the keystone is out of the edifice; nothing is left but a ruin.

With the coming of the airways, the war-spirit was temporarily exorcised. The vast increase in the size and number of aircraft and the terrors of an aerial war, with all its untested possibilities, served to rein in even the most ardent of military nations.

Standing armies still persisted; but their numbers had been diminished to a few thousands

; for under the new conditions the old huge and unwieldy terrestrial forces could neither be fed, nor protected from aerial attacks.

There was food for all the thousand millions of mankind; and, as the population rose, fresh lands could be brought under cultivation for the mere labour of clearing the soil of its surplus vegetation.

It was the Golden Age of humanity; yet few of us recognised it.

We looked either backward into the past or forward into the future when we sought the Islands of the Blest: while all about us lay Paradise, and the Earth blossomed like a huge garden which was ours for the taking.

… clung to the fixed idea that somewhere in the world there was bound to be a store of wheat—or if not wheat, then rice or some other edible grain—which would enable us to pass through the coming winter without undue restriction of our food supplies.

It was perhaps a manifestation of that eternal optimism which is necessary if the race is to survive at all

; or possibly it represented a trust in the Government’s capacity to arrange some means whereby supplies would be forthcoming in due course. Whatever its origin, it was among the most marked features of that strange time.

but this was perhaps intensified by the jet-black hair and the clean-shaven face. All these are mere details of little importance. What impressed me most about him was an air of conscious power, which would have singled him out in any gathering.

Looking from him to the Prime Minister, it crossed my mind that while the Premier counterfeited power in his appearance, this unknown embodied it

; and yet there was no parade, for he appeared to be entirely devoid of self-consciousness. Before he removed his eyes from mine I saw an inscrutable smile curve his lips. I say inscrutable, for I could not read what it meant;

Nordenholt!

I looked at him with even more attention than before.

For two decades that name had rung through the world, and yet, meeting him now face to face, I had not recognised him. Nor was this astonishing; for no portrait of him had ever come to my notice.

Nordenholt looked at him for a moment and then laughed contemptuously. Suddenly his almost pedantic phraseology dropped away.

“Simpson, you beat the band. I never heard anything like it.”

Then his manner changed abruptly.

You will have to produce it quick; for every hour you sit thinking means a bigger inroad into the available supplies. Remember, this is something new in your experience. You aren’t up against a majority you can wheedle into taking your advice.

This time you are up against plain facts of Nature; and arguments are out of court.

Now I ask a plain question; and I’m going to get a straight answer from you for once: What are your plans?”

“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.

He paused again, as though to let this sink in also.

“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.

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.

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.

“

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;

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.

“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.

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 byproduct, as he would have said, no doubt—but no one had ever gone into the arena unwarned by him.

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.

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.

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.

…”

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.

”

“

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.

“He understood perfectly,” Nordenholt said to me later. “Both of them thoroughly understood what it meant.

I think they felt that a Crown rescued at that price wouldn’t be worth wearing.

At any rate, they refused to come North.”

In one respect Nordenholt gauged the psychology of the masses accurately. He did not make himself cheap. Except at a few mass meetings which he addressed, none of the rank and file ever saw him at all.

He knew the value of aloofness and a touch of mystery.

But he did not confine himself to moves made openly upon the board. Behind the scenes he had collected an Intelligence Division, the existence of which was known only to a few;

The effect of this was striking; and certainly it was a novelty in working conditions.

Every man became a policeman for his neighbours, since he knew that slackness on their part would demand greater exertions upon his own.

The Committees instituted a system of inspectors, nominated by themselves, to see that work was properly carried out; and these inspectors reported both to the Committees and to Nordenholt himself, through special officials.

The thing was done with absolute silence and with such efficiency that it seemed more like kidnapping than an ordinary process of arrest. Nordenholt knew the advantage of mystery; and he proposed to make these disappearances strike home on the public mind.

The inefficients vanished without leaving a clue behind.

At the Border, each of them was supplied with provisions exactly equivalent to the rations remaining in the outer world; and they were then abandoned as they stood. Nothing was ever known of their fate.

after which a redistribution took place which closed up the gaps. But the very mystery served to heighten the effect of the lesson.

For the first time, Fear in more than one form had entered the Nitrogen Area.

I remembered what Nordenholt had said to me some weeks earlier: “I shall deal with them—and I shall do it by the hand of their own fellows.”

I do not mean that they talked like supermen or that the investigations were always successful; but over it all there was an atmosphere of clockwork precision which somehow gave one confidence.

These men, it struck me for the first time, had always been contending with Nature in their struggle to wrest her secrets from her

; while we in the other world had been sparring against our fellows with Nature standing above us in the conflict, so great and so remote that we had never understood even that she was there.

Of all the sights in the Nitrogen Area, I think that series of curves made the deepest impression upon me. It was so impersonal, a cold record of our position and our prospects, untinged by any human factor.

The slow rise of the green curve; the steady fall of the red line⁠—our whole future was locked up in these relative trends.

I remember one morning in Nordenholt’s office, where I had gone to consult him on some point or other. We had discussed the matter in hand; and I was about to leave him when he called me back.

The winter was an exceptionally bitter one—possibly the change in the surface conditions produced by B. diazotans affected the world-climate, though that is still a moot point—and the cold completed the work.

Long before the spring came, Britain was a mere Raft of the Medusa lying upon the waters and peopled by a handful of survivors out of what had once been a mighty company.

Fata Morgana we christened our City, after the mirage in the Straits of Messina; for it had that mixture of clear outline and unsubstantiality which seemed to fit the name.

So we planned the future together out of such stuff as dreams are made on. And behind us, grim and silent, sat Nordenholt, the real architect of the coming time.

He never interrupted our talks; and I had no idea that he had even overheard them until one day he called me into his office. He seemed unusually grave.

As we did so a black shadow dropped out of the sky and I saw a huge crow alighting by the side of the corpse. I think that this incident made as great an effect upon me as any.

Times had changed indeed when crows became night-birds.

Glendyne watched me drive the brute away from the corpse without attempting to help.

With that, all the evil passions were unleashed and free to run abroad. Bolder and bolder they grew, till at last civilisation went down before them, feebly attempting to ward them off and failing more and more to protect itself.

It was the dying man and the rats on a gigantic scale.

I came back to the Clyde Valley a very different being. Now I knew what had to be fought if our Fata Morgana was to rise on solid foundations; and the task appalled me.

I came back to the Clyde Valley a very different being.

Now I knew what had to be fought if our Fata Morgana was to rise on solid foundations; and the task appalled me.

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.

“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;

“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.

Had we known in time, we might have ventured to launch into the air the high towers of Fata Morgana itself to catch the rising sun. On the material side, we could have done it; but I believe we were wise in our timidity.

Dream-cities are not to be trodden by the human foot.

The refining of mankind will be a longer process than the building of cities; and only a pure race could live in happiness in that Theleme which we planned.

It never seems to have occurred to any of them that they bore with them the very thing which they were trying to escape.

So they went from island to island, seeking refuge from a plague which stood ever at their elbow, until at last their stores failed.

On the West Coast of South America a new phenomenon appeared. The huge deposits of nitrates in Bolivia and South Peru formed the best breeding-ground for B. diazotans which had yet been detected, with the result that nitrogen poured into the atmosphere in unheard-of volumes.

On her side emotion, and not intellect, was the guiding star. The picture of starving millions which had broken upon her without warning had overpowered her normally clear brain. Thus there lay between us a gulf which nothing seemed capable of filling.

I thought, and still believe, that emotion is a will-o’-the-wisp by which alone no man can steer a course

; but it is useless to deny its power when once it has laid its influence upon a mind. Even had she given me a chance, I doubt if I would have tried to reason with her; and she gave me no chance.

for they all seemed to face the facts quite squarely. But behind their even weighings of the situation I detected an unspoken yet wholehearted belief that Nordenholt would bring us through without a hitch.

Hero-worship has its uses, when it is soundly based

; and all of them, it was easy to see, had made Nordenholt their hero. When I thought over the many-sided nature of their activities and the differences of personality among them, I could not help finding my view of Nordenholt himself expanding.

… Henley-Davenport began to open up the subject of induced radioactivity, Nordenholt had stepped in and bought up for him a huge supply of various radioactive materials which he required in his work and which he had despaired of acquiring on account of their enormous cost.

What struck me most about him was his fearlessness.

Once he gave me, incidentally in the course of a talk upon something else, a suggestion of the risks which his work entailed. It seemed to me that I would have faced half a dozen other kinds of death rather than that one.

“Well, on a large scale, the affected parts will be the whole surface of the body; so that in itself will be pretty bad, as you can see.

Poor old Job will have to take a back seat after this.

“Then, again, I expect enormous quantities of radioactive gas will be evolved; and probably one will breathe some of it into one’s lungs. The result of that will be rather worse than the external injuries, of course.

What lies at the root of the trouble just now isn’t output or slackness or anything like that. These are only symptoms of the real disease. It’s not in the concrete things that I see the danger, except indirectly.

The true peril comes from the intangibles; ideas, states of mind, subconscious reflections.

I’ve told you often that the material world is only the outward show which hardly matters: the real things are the minds of the men who live in it. It’s their movements you need to look at if you want to gauge affairs.”

This appeared to me a mere preaching of suicide; but if his followers chose to adopt his suggestions, it seemed to me a matter for themselves.

I had always regarded suicide as the backdoor out of life; though I had never underestimated the courage of those who turn its handle.

Yet it seemed to me evidence of a certain want of toughness of fibre, a lack of fitness to survive; and, personally, I had no desire to retain in the world anyone who seemed unable to bear its strains.

In some ways, the two men resembled each other; but their motives were wide apart as the Poles. Both had their ideals, higher than the normal; but these ideals were in deadly antagonism to each other.

Both, it is possible, were right; but the clash of right with right is the highest form of tragedy; and collision between them was inevitable.

“The Reverend John has been a great disappointment to me, Jack,” Nordenholt admitted to me one day. “That man has the makings of a great demagogue or a great saint in him;

His heaven may be all right; but if it is to be attained by shirking one’s work on earth—not striving to live—it seems to me a poor business.

I think life is important, or it wouldn’t exist; and I’m working to keep it in existence.

He seems to believe it is of no value, if he really means what he says. We can’t agree, that’s evident.”

Nothing would induce them to set foot in the galleries. Work aboveground they would do, wherever it was necessary to preserve the pits from deterioration; but they had no intention of descending into the subterranean world again.

Better to starve in the light of day than run the risk of hungering in some prison in the bowels of the earth.

Neither threats nor cajolings served to move them from this decision.