“And what a chance they have! It’s when men are most helpless that they turn to religion; and here we are going to have a field in which much might be sown. If only they are equal to the times! But it’s no affair of mine. They must work out their own salvation and perhaps the salvation of their people if they can.
“As for us, Flint, we’ve got enough work of our own in this world. Take my advice and clear every idea of humanity out of your mind: stick to your curves and graphs and don’t think beyond them. If once you let your imagination stray over the real meaning of them—in toil and pain and death—you’ll never be able to carry on. I can’t help seeing it all; and that’s why I pin myself to the Curve there. I don’t want to look beyond it. I want to keep myself detached from all that as far as possible; for I can’t afford to be biased. It’s difficult; and in a few weeks more it will be still harder, when these unheard cries of agony go up in the South. But what can one do? I must shut my ears as best I can and go forward; or everything will fall to pieces and we shall save nothing out of the wreck. What a prospect, eh?
“Now, Flint,”—he sprang up—“off to work again, both of us. We can’t afford to waste time if we are to have an evening free from worry. I’ll see you at dinner.”
As I reached the door, he called me back and spoke low:
“By the way, Miss Huntingtower doesn’t know all our plans. Keep off the subject of the South. She hasn’t been told anything about that; and I want to keep it from her as long as I can. You understand?”
“Yes, if you wish it. But surely she must have some knowledge of the state of affairs. You can’t have managed to keep her in the dark about the whole thing?”
“It wasn’t difficult. She looks after certain special branches of my correspondence and so on; and nothing except actual Area business passes through her hands, so she has seen nothing beyond that. And once she finishes her work for the day I’ve made it a rule for her that she takes no further interest in the situation. I told her she must get her mind clear of it at night, or she would get stale and be no use to me. That was quite enough. She doesn’t even read the newspapers.”
“But what’s the use of keeping her in the dark? She is bound to know all about it soon enough.”
“There’s a great difference, Flint, between learning of a thing after it is irrevocable and hearing of it while there is time to protest against it. Once a catastrophe is over, it is over; and the shock is lighter than if one feels it coming and struggles against it. I don’t wish Miss Huntingtower to hear anything about the South until the whole thing is at an end down there. She’ll accept it then, since there is nothing else for it. I don’t wish her to be put in the position of feeling that she ought to do all she can to prevent its coming about. You understand?”
IX
Intermezzo
In order to understand the impression which that evening left upon me, it is necessary to bear in mind the conditions under which I had been living for the last few weeks. In the earlier stages I had been oscillating between my office, with its ever-accumulating mass of papers, on the one hand; and the grime and clangour of the factories and furnaces upon the other. Then, gradually, I saw less and less of the concrete machinery of our safety and slipped almost wholly into the work of control from a distance. Lists, sheets of figures, graphs, letters dictated or read, telephonic communications, reports from factory managers, all surged up before me in a daily deluge. My meals were eaten hurriedly at a side-table in my office; and my lights burned far into the morning in the attempt to cope with the torrent which I had to control. Often as the dawn was coming up through the smoke-clouds of the city I walked home with a wearied mind through which endless columns of figures chased each other; and my eyes had broken down under the strain to the extent that I had to use pilocarpine almost constantly. I was beginning to look back on the old life in London, with its theatre parties and dinners, as if it were another existence which I should never reenter. I seemed shut off from it by some nebulous yet impenetrable curtain; and when I thought of it at times, I felt that it had passed away beyond recall. All the softer side of civilisation, it seemed, must go down, once for all, in this cataclysm; and from our efforts a harder, harsher world would be born. Ease and luxury had vanished, leaving us stripped to our necessities.
And suddenly I found myself in the old surroundings once more. I was ushered into a room which, though its simplicity recalled Nordenholt’s other environments, still betrayed a woman’s hand at every point. There was no litter of meaningless nicknacks; every touch went to build up a harmonious whole: and it was unmistakably a feminine mind which had designed it. As I glanced down the room, I saw Miss Huntingtower standing by
