“You’ve told me all I need to know; but I must hear it from Uncle Stanley himself. I’ll go on being his secretary. I’ll do all I can to help. But I hate you both. Yes, if this is true, I hate him too. What else do you expect? You look on yourselves as saviours, it seems. You may be that, but you certainly are murderers. You can’t even see why I abhor you both. That shows you the gulf between us. Oh, I hate you, I hate you, with this cold calculation of yours: so much food, so many lives. Is that the way to handle human destinies? Drive on.”
A little further down the road, she spoke again in a quivering voice which she strove to keep level and cold:
“This ends any work together. I couldn’t bear it in your case. With Uncle Stanley it’s different. I will go back to my old place with him. But I never want to see you again, Mr. Flint. I’ve lost two illusions today; and I don’t wish to be reminded of them more than I need be. I promised him that I would always help him; and I’m going to keep my promise, cost what it may. But I never promised you anything.”
For a few minutes I drove on in silence. The whole world seemed to have fallen around me. All that I had longed for, all my future, seemed to have collapsed in that short afternoon. I was not angry; I don’t think I was even completely conscious of what it all meant. I felt stunned by an unexpected blow. At last I roused myself.
“Elsa,” I said, “do you remember the first evening we met?”
She never moved.
“You sang that dirge from Cymbeline, you remember? When you’re calmer, I want you to think over it. I don’t want you to have any regrets. Mr. Nordenholt can’t last forever under this strain. Think carefully.”
She made no sign that she had heard me speak. The car whirred through the dusk, while we sat silent and aloof from each other. It was a return very different from that which I had hoped for when I set out. I was almost glad when, further down the loch, the beams of the headlights showed us the figure of Nordenholt in the road. I pulled up the car beside him; and Elsa leaned forward in her seat.
“Uncle Stanley, Mr. Flint has told me everything. I saw a document this morning, B. 53. X. 15; and I forced Mr. Flint to explain what it meant. Did you really plan this awful thing?”
I could not see Nordenholt’s face in the shadow; but his voice was as steady as ever in his reply. Afterwards I realised that he must have foreseen such a situation as this long before.
“It is perfectly true, Elsa. Anything that Mr. Flint has told you is probably correct, though his connection with the matter is very slight.”
“But he says that you planned it all and that he helped you. I can’t … I can’t quite understand it all. It’s a mistake, isn’t it? It’s not your real plan, surely. You’re going to save all these people in the South, aren’t you?”
“Every soul that can be saved by me will be saved, Elsa. You can count on that.”
“But you will give them all a chance of life, won’t you? You won’t take away all the food from them?”
“There’s no food to spare.”
For a few moments there was silence. Elsa made a sudden movement, and I guessed that she had recoiled from Nordenholt’s touch. At last she spoke again, in a way I had not anticipated.
“Do you remember my three wishes, Uncle Stanley? You gave me two of them and now I want the third. You promised me the whole three; and you never broke your word yet. I want you to save these people in the South. That’s my third wish.”
I think it was that which made me realise the gulf that yawned between us, more than anything that had gone before. How could she imagine that Nordenholt’s vast machine could be deflected on account of some childish promise? And yet her voice had taken on a new tone of confidence; everything, she thought, was going to be set right. It seems she must have believed, even then, that the treatment of the South was only one of a number of alternative schemes; and that she could force the adoption of some other, not so good, perhaps, but still possible, as a solution. Her very belief in Nordenholt’s powers led her to assume that he must have several plans ready pigeonholed, and that the rejection of one merely entailed the substitution of some other which was already cut and dried.
“When that promise was made, Elsa, there was one condition: your wish was not to be an impossible one. This is impossible.”
“Oh!” There was such an agony in her voice that I felt it rasp my already over-tried nerves.
“That is final, Elsa. There is nothing more to be said.”
For almost a minute she made no reply. In the silence I could feel her struggling for control of her voice. When at last she spoke, she seemed to have fought down her emotion, for her tone was almost indifferent:
“Very well, Uncle Stanley. You refuse to help these people; but I am not so easy in my mind. I will go into the South myself and do my best to help them; and if I cannot help, I can at least take the same risks as they do. I can’t stay here, well fed and well cared for when they are suffering.”
“You will not do that, Elsa. No, I don’t mean to prevent you going if you wish, though you have no idea what you would be going to. But I haven’t brought you up to be a shirker; and you’re needed here. You have the whole of your work at your finger-ends and if you go it will dislocate
