“I did it in time. Even now I’m only at the beginning of the experiment, but already I feel that I have spent my money well. I have given a push to things; 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. …”
He paused and seemed to fall into a daydream for a few moments. Then he spoke again.
“That was the origin of my young men, Flint; the Nordenholt gang”—he sneered perceptibly at the words. “Many of them have gone down in the race. One cannot foresee everything, you know, try as one may. But the residuum are a picked lot. They are scattered throughout all the industries and professions of the Empire; and all of them are far up in their own pursuits. I often wondered whether anything would come of it in my day beyond individual successes; but now I see a culmination before me. We shall all go up side by side to Armageddon and my own men will be with me in this struggle against the darkness. 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.”
His voice had risen with pride as he spoke of his helpers; but at the close I heard again the sub-current of sadness come into the deep tones. I had been jarred by his exposition at the meeting, by his apparent callousness in outlook; but now I thought I saw behind the mask.
Again he sat pondering for some moments; but at last he threw off his preoccupation; and when he spoke it was more directly to me than hitherto.
“Possibly you may wonder, Flint, why it is that with all these resources in my hands I have come to you for help; and why I have never approached you before. The fact is, I watched you from your start and stood by to help you if you needed me; but you made good alone, and I never interfere with a man unless it is absolutely necessary. You made good without my assistance; and I thought too well of you to offer any. But I watched you, as I said—I have my own ways of getting information—and I knew that you were just the man I required for a particular section of the work in front of us. Your factory organisation showed me that. There will be an enormous task before you; but I know that you’ll be the right man in the right place. I never make a mistake, when it is a case of this kind. You aren’t an untried man.”
From anyone else, I would have regarded this as clumsy flattery; but so great an influence had Nordenholt acquired over me even in that single afternoon that I never looked at the matter in that light at all. His manner showed no patronage or admiration; it seemed merely that he was stating facts as he knew them, without caring much about my opinion.
“But it seems to me,” he went on, “that I’ve talked enough about personal affairs already. I want to try to give you some views on the main thing in front of us. You and I, Flint, have been born and grown up in the midst of this civilisation; and I expect that you, like most other people, have been oblivious of the changes which have come about; for they have been so gradual that very few of us have noticed them at all.
“When you begin low down in the scale of Creation, you find creatures without any specialised organs. The simplest living things are just spots of protoplasm, mere aggregations of cells, each of which performs functions common to them all. Then, step by step as you rise in the scale, specialisation sets in: the cells become differentiated from one another; and each performs a function of its own. You get the cells of the nerves receiving and transmitting sensation; you get cells engaged in nutrition processes; there are other cells devoted to producing motion. And with this specialisation you get the dawn of something which apparently did not exist before: the structure as a whole acquires a personality of its own, distinct from the individualities of the cells which go to build it up.
“But the inverse process is also possible. When the body as a whole suffers death, you still have a certain period during which the cells have an existence. Hair grows after death, for example.
“Now if you look at the trend of civilisation, you will see that we are passing into a stage of specialisation. In the Middle Ages, a man might be a celebrated artist and yet be in the forefront of the science of his day—like Leonardo da
