“I think hardly of her! You don’t know me, Nordenholt, or you wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, for both our sakes, I hope her intellect will get control of her feelings. I hate to see her going about her work and know that she has lost all faith in me now. She was the one creature in the world that loved me, you know, Jack; and it’s hard.”
Then he laughed contemptuously, as though at his own weakness.
“It’s quite evident I’m not the man I was, Jack. But somehow, in this affair we’re both in the same boat to some extent; and I let that slip out. You see that Elsa hasn’t the monopoly of an emotional temperament!”
All great undertakings with uncertain ends appear to run the same course. First there is the period of inception, a time of high hopes and eager toil and self-sacrifice; then, as the novelty wears away, there follows a stage in which the first enthusiasm has died down and an almost automatic persistence takes the place of the great emotional driving-force of the early days; later still, when enthusiasm has vanished, there comes a time when the meaner side of human nature reasserts itself. My narrative has reached the point of junction between these last two divisions; and the pages which I have yet to write must perforce deal mainly with the troubles which beset us in the period of lassitude and nerve-strain which followed naturally upon the other phases of the situation.
I have thrown this chapter into a series of isolated sections; for I believe that such a treatment best suggests the state of things at the time. We had lost the habit of connected thought, as far as the greater events were concerned. Our daily round absorbed our attention; and it was only occasionally that we were jarred out of our grooves by some event of salient importance.
The whole atmosphere which surrounded us was depressing; and it slowly and surely made its impression upon our minds and formed the background upon which our thoughts moved. The gloom of the smoke-filled sky had its reaction upon our psychology. The old sunlight seemed to have vanished from our lives. And at this time we were all beginning to pay the price for the feverish activity of the earlier days in the Area. Our work, whether mental or physical, wearied us sooner than before; and its monotony irritated our nerves. Such recreations as we had—and they were few enough at this time—failed to relieve the tension. Among the labouring classes, in particular, this condition of lassitude showed itself in a marked degree.
Nordenholt, with his finger on the pulse of things, grew more and more anxious as time went on. On the surface, he still appeared optimistic; but from chance phrases here and there I deduced that his uneasiness was increasing; and that he anticipated something which I myself could not foresee. Knowing what I do now, it seems to me that in those days I must have been blind indeed not to understand what was before us; but I frankly confess that I missed the many signs which lay in our path from day to day. When the disaster came upon us, it took me almost completely by surprise.
XVII
Per Iter Tenebricosum
After Elsa had rejected any further collaboration with me, I was forced at times to consult Nordenholt upon certain points in my schemes which seemed to me to require the criticism of a fresh mind; and I thus fell into the habit of seeing him in his office at intervals.
“Things are in a bad way, Jack,” he said to me at the end of one of these interviews. “You don’t see everything that’s going on, of course; so you couldn’t be expected to be on the alert for it; but it’s only right to warn you that we’re coming up against the biggest trouble we’ve had yet in the Area.”
“Of course things are anything but satisfactory, I know,” I replied. “The output’s going down and there seems to be no way of screwing the men up to increase it. But is it really fatal, do you think? We seem even now to have the thing well in hand.”
I glanced up at the great Nitrogen Curve above the fireplace. The red and green lines upon it appeared to me to show a state of affairs which, if not all that we could wish, was at least satisfactory as compared with what might have been. Nordenholt followed my glance.
“That practical trend of mind which you have, Jack, sometimes keeps you from seeing realities. 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
