Читать книгу Nordenholt's Million - J. J. Connington - Страница 5

Table of Contents

At this point, I remember, the long spell of dry weather reached its end. A heavy series of thunderstorms marked its termination; and for three days the country was deluged with rain and swept by intermittent gales. The cracked ground drank up the moisture; but still more showers fell, until there was mud everywhere.

These meteorological changes in themselves were sufficiently grave from the farmer’s point of view; but even more serious was the state of things revealed after the rain had ceased. Whether it was due to the weather conditions or whether it was a vagary produced by factors beyond discovery will never be known; but the fact is established that the spread of the Blight became accentuated during the rainy period. Wherever it had secured a hold during the hot weather it became more malignant in its effects; and its extension to fresh fields was so great that hardly a grain-growing area in the country escaped at this time. It penetrated as far north as the Border agricultural districts; and devastated fields were found even in Perthshire.

Since the potato blight in 1845, no such rapid and extensive destruction of food supplies had been known. The standing crops in the affected areas withered; and a total failure of the home-grown cereals seemed to be inevitable. Nor was it only in this section of the food-supply that the attacks of the Blight became evident. Fruit-trees seemed arrested in their productivity; vegetables failed to ripen and began to rot. Everywhere the vegetable kingdom seemed to be falling into a decline. The great market-gardens and nurseries showed the trace of the same mysterious agent. Roses withered on their stems; and even the hot-house plants suffered equally with their open-air fellows. The only crop which appeared to escape the general disaster was hay.

And now it became clear that the Blight, as it was still called, was going to produce effects in the most widely-separated fields of activity. With a total failure of the crops, the financial side of the question came to the front. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, small farmers were beginning to realise that it was to be a year of utter disaster, ending probably in bankruptcy and ruin. The larger land-owners looked forward to the collapse of tenants and the failure of rents. Mortgage-holders began to consider the nature of their security, and when it was agricultural land they were placed in doubt as to their best course; for no one could foresee whether the Blight was a temporary epidemic or a permanent factor which would reappear with the next crops. And all these varying influences had their effects upon the great financial operations of the City; for even in that industrial age the land had maintained its value as a basic security which apparently could not suffer deterioration beyond a definite point.

This, however, was only a minor field of the Blight’s reactions. With the probable failure of the home crop looming before him, even the man in the street could not fail to perceive the more obvious results. It meant a greater dependence upon imported food-stuffs and especially imported grain. Argentina, Canada, India and the United States must make up the missing supplies; and since almost half our cereals were home-grown at that period, the price of food was certain to rise by leaps and bounds; so that every family in the land would be affected by the catastrophe.

Then a further factor was brought to light. With the failure of grain and even of grass, it would be impossible to keep alive the cattle which furnished part of the nation’s food. The milk supply would be gravely affected also, from the same cause.

It is difficult for us now to look back and catch again the spirit of that time. Never before, even during the war, had the food of Britain been endangered to such a degree. And the steadily rising prices were sufficient to bring home to the most thoughtless the actual imminence of the peril. I can recall, however, that at first there was no panic of any kind. It was assumed by all of us that although we might have to go short of our usual lavish supplies, yet we should always have enough food to carry us through to the next harvest. The whole world was our granary; and if we were prepared to pay the higher prices which we saw to be inevitable, we had no reason to suppose that we should lack imported grain. Our attitude was quite comprehensible under the circumstances, I think. In the past we had always been able to obtain food; and there seemed no doubt that the same would hold good through this shortage.

The newspapers were fairly evenly divided in their expressed opinions. The Government had recently adjourned Parliament, after a session in which their majority had oscillated dangerously more than once, and the Opposition Press seized upon the Blight in order to embarrass the Cabinet, and especially the Prime Minister, as far as possible. They clamoured that the Government should take steps to secure the food supply of the country by making immediate purchases of wheat in the foreign markets. They demanded that a system of rationing should be established forthwith; and that cases of food-hoarding should be stringently punished. Day after day they held up to public obloquy the individual members of the Cabinet, who were then scattered on holiday; the amusements of each of them were described and coupled with sneering hopes that they would succeed better in their games than they had done in the government of the country and the safeguarding of the national interests. Echoes of the Mazanderan Development Syndicate scandal were kept alive in the most ingenious manner.

The Government Press, naturally, professed to see in the inactivity of the Cabinet a proof that they had the matter well in hand. Avoidance of panic, restriction by voluntary effort of all unnecessary consumption of food, and the postponement of inquiries likely to interfere with the wise projects of the Premier: these formed the stock of their leading articles.

The gutter organ of the Opposition retorted by publishing the complete menu of the Premier’s dinner on the previous day, which it had obtained from some waiter in the hotel at which he was staying; and it accompanied this item of news by interspersed extracts from the Government organs in which appeals had been made for a less luxurious form of living.

It must be remembered that this stage of the sequence of events occupied only a brief period. If I am not wrong, it was within ten days of the outbreak of the Blight that we got the first American cables announcing the appearance of the epidemic among the great wheat areas of the Middle West. Almost immediately after came similar news from Canada.

The meaning of this was not at first appreciated by the people as a whole. They still clung to the idea that grain would be forthcoming if a sufficiently high price were paid for it; but those of us who had tried to forecast the possibilities of the situation found our worst fears taking concrete form. Soon even the unthinking were forced to understand what the American news implied. If the Blight spread over the wheat-fields of the Western continent, there would be no surplus grain there for export at all. That source of supply would barely suffice for the mouths at home.

Then, following each other like hammer-strokes upon metal, each biting deeper than the last, came the cables from the rest of the world. Egypt reported the outbreak of the Blight in the Nile valley; British East Africa became affected. The news from the Argentine fell like a thunderbolt, for we realised that with it the last great open source of wheat had failed. The Don and Volga basins followed with the same tale. Over India, the Blight raged with almost unheard-of virulence. Then, days after the others, Australia was smitten, and our last hopes vanished.

During all this period, it must be remembered, we had no idea of the origin of our calamities. We referred to the thing always as “The Blight,” though it was made clear at quite an early stage that no plant parasite was concerned in the matter at all. The most careful microscopic examination of affected vegetation had been made without revealing anything in the nature of a fungus or noxious growth.

Yet, on looking backward, I cannot help feeling that we, and especially I myself, were strangely blind to the obvious in the matter. I have already mentioned that when I rooted up a clump of grass in Regent’s Park it came away from the soil without resistance; and that when I examined the roots I found them almost as free of earthy deposit as if it had been grown in sand. That, coupled with what I already knew, should have put me on the track of the explanation; and yet I failed to draw the simplest deduction from what I observed. To account for this obtuseness, I can only suggest that already the idea of a “Blight” had taken root in my mind; and that I was so obsessed with the idea of a parasite that I never considered the facts from any other point of view. Since others proved to be equally slow in arriving at the truth, I can only conclude that they were misled in their mental processes much as I myself was.

As I have said on a previous page, it was to Johnston, the bacteriologist, that we owe the discovery. It appears that he had been growing some bacteria in cultures; and, whether by accident or design, he had left one of his cultivation media open to the air. On examining the germs some days later, he had discovered in the culture a type of bacterium with which he was unfamiliar. He proceeded to isolate it in the usual way—I believe it is done by dabbing a needle-point into the culture and using the few micro-organisms which stick to the needle as the parents of a fresh colony—and he was amazed at its fecundity. There had never been such a case of bacterial fertility in his experience.

A paper in the Lancet brought the description of the creature to the notice of the scientific world. Johnston himself had not recognised the nature of the organism, as he had never dealt with this type of bacteria before; but from his description an agricultural bacteriologist named Vincent was able to identify it as being almost identical with one of the denitrifying group, from which it differed only in its immense power of multiplication. It was hurriedly christened Bacterium diazotans, on account of its denitrifying qualities. Further examination showed that its capacity for breaking down nitrogenous material far surpassed that of any known denitrifying agent.

With these discoveries, the mystery of the new blight vanished. An examination of the soil of stricken areas showed that it swarmed with colonies of B. diazotans—to use the customary medical contraction—and the whole secret of the destruction was revealed.

It was evident that these new and super-active bacteria attacked the soil, disintegrated all the nitrogenous compounds within their range and thus left the plants without nourishment. The death of the plant followed as a natural result; but the matter did not end there. By destroying the nitrogenous compounds in the soil, the bacteria altered the whole texture of the earth in which they grew. All the nitrogenous organic matter which forms so large a part of the binding material of some soils was destroyed utterly; with the consequence that the mineral particles, which previously had been resting in an organic matrix, were now free to move. Only the clays retained their tenacious character: all other soils degenerated into sand.

There has, of course, been a great deal of speculation upon the origin of B. diazotans. Hartwell suggested that it came to us from Venus, propelled by light-pressure across the abysses of space. Inshelwood put forward the view that in B. diazotans we had an example of bacteria, originally endemic, changing their habits and spreading into fresh regions.

Personally, I believe neither hypothesis. I feel sure that I saw the birth of the first B. diazotans on that night in Wotherspoon’s laboratory, under the action of the fire-ball; and the evidence is simple enough.

Every living creature is a wonderfully constructed electrical machine. Each beat of our hearts, each systole of our lungs, each contraction of a muscle in our frame produces a tiny electrical current. Our organism is a mass of colloids and electrolytes which transmit these charges hither and thither throughout our systems; and were we gifted with an electrical sense in addition to those which we already have, we should see each other as complexities of conductors along which currents were playing with every movement of our body.

This complex electrical system is acutely sensible to external electrical conditions. Anyone who has held the handles of an induction coil or who has taken a spark from a Leyden jar knows the physiological effects which these things produce. The influence of high-tension currents upon the growth of plants has been proved beyond dispute.

Now it seems to me that in this effect of an external electric charge upon the internal mechanism of an organism we have a clue to the origin of these new bacteria. I have already told how the fire-ball, in its explosion, shattered the denitrifying cultures in Wotherspoon’s room; and it seems clear that at the moment of the concussion there must have been a tremendous play of electrical forces about the spot. We know hardly anything with regard to the nature of the electrical fields existing in such things as these fire-balls; and it is quite possible that they may be different from anything of which we have any knowledge among the more usual displays of electrical energy. I believe, then, that it is in the action of the fire-ball that we must seek for an explanation of the change in habit of Wotherspoon’s denitrifying bacteria.

Again, I have mentioned my observation of the rapid multiplication of the denitrifying bacteria which I made with Wotherspoon’s microscope on the following day. That also seems to me to have a bearing upon the problem; though I admit quite frankly that my evidence is only that of a layman. It is in every way regrettable that Wotherspoon, having tired of using his room as an exhibit, should have cleared away every trace of the wreckage before any expert examination of it could be made; for in this way the crucial evidence on the point was destroyed.

Further, in support of my views, I would point out that the very first known occurrence of B. diazotans was that which had Regent’s Park as its site; and that the first place of attack was in the immediate neighbourhood of Wotherspoon’s house in Cumberland Terrace. This can hardly be disregarded, when it is considered in connection with the other facts which I have mentioned.

At this time of day there can be no question that London formed the focus from which B. diazotans spread throughout the world. I have described the ramifications of the great air-services; and it seems to me obvious that the organisms were carried to and fro upon the surface of the globe by the agency of the aeroplanes. The order of attack at various points indicates this very clearly, in my opinion. First came the American and Egyptian outbreaks; then Uganda and South America; and finally, long after the others, Australia showed traces of the devastation. I have checked the possible dates of arrival in these various places, taking into account the relative swiftnesses of the aeroplanes on the different routes; and the results can hardly be gainsaid. Allowing, as one must, a certain latitude for the time of development of the microbe in various spots, there seems little doubt that the dates of the outbreaks fell into the same succession as the times of arrival of the various London air-services.