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![The Oil from Our Soil 39
fuel potential; rather, its value was shaped by the structure of political power,
which in the Third Republic (1870–1940) was dominated by Parliament, where
agricultural interests were well entrenched. Alcohol producers were tightly
organized, had support across the political spectrum, and had a dispropor-
tionate amount of influence in Parliament. State officials were aware that
when alcohol producers could not find enough buyers, producers took to the
streets. In 1907, for instance, five hundred thousand strong had descended on
Montpellier, the heartland of wine production. Protests erupted episodically
throughout the 1920s and 1930s, causing regional economic paralysis and thus
political problems in Paris. It should come as no surprise, then, that interwar
research on alcohol fuel was led by Édouard Barthe, a socialist parliamentari-
an from wine country. Immediately after the war, Barthe was named the state’s
fuel commissioner. The fact that state officials nominated Barthe suggests just
how much power the alcohol industry possessed and how much interest the
political elite had in alcohol fuel as a way to curb foreign oil dependency. Even
Bérenger, France’s most prominent oil activist of the 1920s, and someone who
was far removed from agricultural politics, did not see oil and alcohol as an-
tagonistic.33
One commentator believed that the oil industry could help make
alcohol fuel a viable option: French oil industrialists “are as wealthy as anyone
in capital, in factories, and in laboratories to experiment with [fuel] blends
and motors.”34
Barthe and his allies, then, carried much influence over how
alcohol fuel was perceived given the large number of citizens with a stake in
the alcohol industry and their power over Parliament.
To win over policymakers and the wider public to their plight, Barthe and
his followers evoked a potent image: that of the “Anglo-Saxon trusts” threaten-
ing the French peasantry. Fear of the inherent superiority of the Anglo-Saxon
race was a long-standing trope in French political culture.35
In deploying this
rhetoric, alcohol producers mobilized a number of different and sometimes
antagonistic groups. Other raucous and powerful agricultural interest groups
that hoped to obtain similar protection threw their support behind the state
alcohol agency. Since the 1920s, Barthe had claimed that alcohol fuel would
help France “escape the hegemony of the great worldwide trusts” and “in-
crease the financial and economic strength of the nation by the limitless de-
velopment of the richness of its soil.” A deputy from the northern beet-grow-
ing region thanked Barthe for “the fine fight he had waged for twenty years
on behalf of industrial alcohol.” The main farm lobby called alcohol protec-
tion an “enormous advance for all French agriculture.” Finally, the minister
of finance claimed that alcohol fuel boosted “France’s domestic finances and
her foreign-exchange balance.”36
Alcohol fuel thus rallied various agricultural](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25220817-250518190956-65083727/75/New-Energies-A-History-Of-Energy-Transitions-In-Europe-And-North-America-Stephen-Gross-54-2048.jpg)
New Energies A History Of Energy Transitions In Europe And North America Stephen Gross
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- 6.
- 8. NEW ENERGIES A HISTORY OF ENERGYTRANSITIONS IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA Edited by STEPHEN G. GROSS & ANDREW NEEDHAM UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
- 9. Published by theUniversity of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2023, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid- free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4776-9 ISBN 10: 0-8229-4776-5 Cover photo: People watch the demolition of four 113-meter-high (370 feet) cooling towers of a lignite-fired power station after a controlled detonation in the eastern German town of Boxberg, April 13, 2006. Photo © Reuters via Alamy Photo. Cover design: Joel W. Coggins
- 10. TO LUCY, DUNCAN,JACK, RAYMOND, AND CHILDREN EVERYWHERE- may their bright futures have less carbon than our present.
- 12. Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Towarda New Energy History Stephen G. Gross and Andrew Needham 3 Part I. The Rise of Oil and the Transformation of Coal: Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention 1. The Oil from Our Soil: French Alcohol Fuel versus Foreign Oil, 1918–1957 Joseph Bohling 33 2. The Politics of Creative Destruction: West German Hard Coal and the Postwar Oil Transition Stephen G. Gross 48 3. Accounting the Dead: The Moral Economy of the Coal- Fired Social Contract Trish Kahle 62 4. Hard Hat Cowboys: Energy Workers and Coalfield Capitalism in the Anthropocene Ryan Driskell Tate 76 Part II. Oil Transition in Crisis: The 1970s 5. American Politics and Energy Transitions in the 1970s Victor McFarland 95 6. The Decade of the “Energy Transition”: A Critical Review of the Global Energy Debates of the 1970s Duccio Basosi 107
- 13. viii NEW ENERGIES 7. Reversing the Transition from Coal to Oil?: The International Energy Agency and the Western Industrialized Countries’ Restructuring of Energy Supply in the 1970s Henning Türk 119 8. From State to Market: A Transition in the Economics of Energy Resource Conservation Thomas Turnbull 131 Part III. A Stalled Transition? Nuclear Energy’s Dilemmas and Possibilities 9. Nuclear Energy and the Dream of Independence: The Case of Eastern Europe Sonja D. Schmid 157 10. Contamination without Representation: Fetal Citizenship and Atomic Power in the Postwar United States Natasha Zaretsky 168 11. The Rise of Counterexpertise and the Anti–Nuclear Power Movement in West Germany Dolores L. Augustine 182 Part IV. The Transition off Fossil Fuels: Challenges and Possibilities 12. A Future Foreseen and Transition Delayed: Big Oil and Global Warming, 1959–1986 Benjamin Franta 203 13. Renewable Energies in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1970s–1990s: Discourses, Contexts, and Policies Eva Oberloskamp 220 Notes 235 Contributors 317 Index 321
- 14. Acknowledgments This volume wasmade possible by a grant from the Carnegie Foun- dation of New York, which sponsored an international conference, “The New Energy History: Energy Transitions in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” held at New York University on November 1 and 2, 2018. The essays and ideas of this volume grew from that conference. In addition to the authors in Toward a New Energy History, we are grateful to the other conference participants who authored papers or chaired sessions. These include Zachary Cuyler, Giuliano Garavini, Carol Hager, Frank Laird, Matthew Shutzer, and Troy Vettese. We would also like to thank Alexander Maro, Margaret Miller, Samantha Dawn Paul, Tim O’Donnell, Guerline Semexant, and Christopher Van Demark for their outstanding assistance organizing the event or helping put this volume together. Anastasia Skyobedo and Mikhala Stein Kotlyar at the Center for Eu- ropean and Mediterranean Studies at New York University provided generous support throughout this entire project, from conference to volume. Lastly, we would like to thank Sandra Crooms and Josh Shanholtzer at the University of Pittsburgh Press, Varsha Venkatasubramanian for her work preparing the in- dex, and the two anonymous reviewers for their help in improving our collec- tion of essays. We hope these writing here provide some inspiration for think- ing creatively about the history of energy transitions, and integrating energy into the bigger questions of European, North American, and global history.
- 16.
- 18. Introduction TOWARD A NEWENERGY HISTORY Stephen G. Gross and Andrew Needham In 1973 the Italian nuclear physicist Cesare Marchetti began for- mulating a “simple and predictive model describing energy markets for the last century.” Four years later he produced one of the most iconic pictures in energy history: a schematic graph depicting energy systems rising and falling like clockwork over time. The age of wood replaced by the age of coal, then oil, then natural gas, and then, so he predicted, nuclear energy and solar power. “It is as though the system,” Marchetti reflected, “had a schedule, a will, and a clock.” All it took was time, and the right price. His imagery of regular transi- tions, unfolding smoothly without interruption, free from outside forces like politics or values, gripped experts around the world as they strove to change their nation’s energy systems following the oil shock of 1973. Marchetti was working for the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, a think tank founded to bridge the Cold War divide with cutting- edge models for global problems. IIASA’s ideas spread through Western Eu- rope, North America, and the Eastern Bloc, and graphs strikingly similar in their assumptions informed policy across the Global North during the 1970s.1 A generation later, as global temperatures rise, sparking our glaciers to melt and our forests to burn, humanity stands before what could be the great- est collective challenge in history. In many respects, experts and politicians
- 19. 4 NEW ENERGIES FigureI.1: Cesare Marchetti’s model “Historical Evolution of the Primary Energy Mix for the World.” 1850–2100. f = market fraction of an energy. Source: Cleaned image of Marchetti’s diagram from Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017), 84. Figure I.2: Historical fuel shifts according to President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 Na- tional Energy Plan. 1860–1980. Source: Frank Laird, Solar Energy, Technology Policy and Institutional Values (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 114.
- 20. Toward a NewEnergy History 5 are approaching global warming with historical assumptions about energy that have changed little since the 1970s. One hopes for a transition toward re- newable sources of power like the sun and the wind. But the models informing public debate today— whether historical, digital, or cognitive— bear an eerie Figure I.3: First scenario forecast for West Germany’s primary energy consump- tion, in the Social Democratic Party’s Energy Forum of 1977. 1950–2100. Million tons of hard coal equivalent. Kernenergie = nuclear power; Sonne, Wasser und Sonstiges = sun, water, and miscellaneous; Erdöl = oil; Erdgas = natural gas; Braun- kohle = lignite coal; Steinkohle = hard coal. Source: SPD, Energie: Leitfaden zur Diskussion (Bonn: SPD, 1977), 52.
- 21. 6 NEW ENERGIES resemblanceto earlier ones. In his famous appeal to repower the United States in 2008, former vice president Al Gore claimed the United States could adopt a carbon- free electricity network within decades. A year later Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, engineers writing in Scientific American, suggested the world could achieve 100 percent renewable energy in twenty years. Ten years on they remained firm in their timeline, illustrating it with smooth curves of rising renewables and falling fossil fuels.2 Many advocates of solar and wind claim this transition not only “mirrors” previous ones, but that the move from “fossil fuels to renewables has become inevitable” as costs fall. As Bruce Usher puts it, “Basic economic principles, primarily cost, are the main drivers of energy transitions. Cost is key.”3 This narrative of grand sweeping curves, where transitions are defined by efficiency and price, is comforting: if only we can lower the cost of solar or wind, we can solve global warming. Or at least be on our way. But energy shifts are far more complex, far more human, and in fact far more interesting than lines on a graph, efficiency ratios, or prices. Historians have unearthed this complexity; they have a long tradition of studying the human side of energy in its many facets, even if histories of energy have often been fragmented into different wings of the discipline, from environmental history to the history of technology or diplomacy.4 Despite this fragmentation, three points stand out in more nuanced histories of energy: (1) commercializing a new energy in- frastructure involves protracted processes of political and economic change, (2) new energies almost never wholly replace old ones, and (3) the causes and effects of transitions reach far and wide, changing people’s lives in unexpected and profound ways. Since roughly 2010, diverse strands of historical study have been coalescing into a new field of energy history, a coalescence that motivated this volume. The chapters here explore the causes, courses, effects, and aftershocks of en- ergy transitions in North America and Europe during the twentieth century. They not only historicize popular and economic notions of energy but also show how energy has reshaped everything from social life and economic or- ganization to political governance. The volume draws on a range of historical approaches— including intellectual and cultural history, labor history, and political economy— to understand why some energy systems flourish while others do not, and to capture the cultural, intellectual, and political implica- tions of new energy systems as they struggle to take shape. Over the past 250 years, energy transitions have occurred at a seemingly relentless pace— the rise of coal in the nineteenth century, the explosion of oil in the twentieth century, the nuclear utopianism of the 1950s and 1960s, and today the expan- sion of renewable power. These transitions have been as revolutionary as any
- 22.
- 23. 8 NEW ENERGIES politicalor economic upheaval, but they have rarely featured in the grand nar- ratives of twentieth- century Europe and North America.5 Given the urgency of global warming, historians have a twofold task, which we hope to advance with this volume. We must do more to integrate a history of energy transi- tions into broader narratives of political, economic, or cultural change. And we must do more to bring our knowledge of the complexity and humanity of energy to the current debate— shaped in large part by economists, engineers, and scientists— over what could be the most monumental energy transition ever: the shift away from fossil fuels. In doing so, we aim to steer the public away from, on the one hand, doom- saying narratives of the impossibility of meaningful transition and, on the other, stories of revolutionary technologi- cal fixes driven by heroic individual entrepreneurs. Only by attending to the socially complex and technologically messy histories of energy transitions as they occurred can we provide a past usable for the present moment. Why Energy Now? Since the turn of the twenty- first century, global warming has emerged as the world’s most pressing challenge. This wicked problem has led scholars to craft not only a new geological label but also a new category of analysis, the “An- thropocene,” a concept coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to describe how humans are becoming a force of nature in their ability to alter the environment. While there was a delay between the uptake of this term by the natural sciences and the humanities, with the publication of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History” in 2010, the Anthropocene as a his- torical concept arrived. Chakrabarty’s work sparked a debate about the ori- gins of the Anthropocene, with starting points ranging from humanity’s very nature as an extinctive species, to the Agricultural Revolution or Industrial Revolution, to the advent of the atomic age.6 Embedded within this debate are fundamental questions about how to understand human- driven environmental transformations. Historians have a rich tradition of studying the environment. Until recently, however, energy existed at the relative margins of environmental history, often surpassed in importance by themes such as wilderness management, agriculture, urban- ization, water use, and forestry.7 The urgency of the Anthropocene, however, has foregrounded the study of energy. For if the Anthropocene elevated global warming as the challenge of our century, it also illustrated the importance of studying fossil fuel energy systems, because these have accounted for 70 percent of all of the carbon humanity has emitted since 1870. At the heart of environmental degradation and climate change is the extraction, distribution, and consumption of energy.8
- 24. Toward a NewEnergy History 9 The need to understand how energy- intensive, fossil fuel–centered, growth-oriented societies came to dominate the world is thus more important now than ever before. As Stephen Gardiner presciently underscored, global warming is “seriously backloaded,” making it different from other histori- cal events that diminish in importance the further they recede into the past. Carbon from human sources, by contrast, has flowed into the atmosphere in ever greater quantities since the Industrial Revolution, gaining transformative power as it intensifies in the atmosphere.9 Historians, in other words, can offer a unique perspective to help understand how and why global warming began, how it accelerated, and why it is proving so difficult to halt. A wave of recent studies, what one might call a “New Energy History,” have recognized this, placing energy extraction, production, transportation, distribution, owner- ship, and consumption at the center of their narratives.10 Energy has also gained new attention from historians for reasons entirely unrelated to climate change, like the renewed interest in capitalism and in- equality. Even before the financial crisis of 2007–2008, historians returned to the economy to understand the formation of the great disparities of wealth that were becoming more apparent in the twenty- first century. They strove to integrate a study of ideas, values, and identities with material life and interest groups.11 The financial crisis, the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression, lent urgency to this task of historicizing the economy, a sen- timent captured by Thomas Piketty’s groundbreaking study on capital and in- equality. Historians working in similar veins have sought to understand how markets were constructed over time intellectually as well as institutionally or politically, and thus to learn why they have gone horribly awry as often as they have yielded positive benefits: disempowering labor and minorities, forcing millions into unemployment through periodic crises, or polluting nature as much as they have lifted people out of poverty or stimulated technological advances.12 Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx superseded Adam Smith as the chan- nel through which historians approached capitalism, inspiring critical studies about the changing form of economic governance throughout the twentieth century— from classic liberal capitalism to Keynesian or social democratic capitalism to neoliberal capitalism.13 All varieties of twentieth- century capitalism, however, required vast amounts of energy. One does not have to be an energeticist like Frederick Sod- dy or Lewis Mumford— early twentieth- century thinkers who saw energy as the root of all value— to appreciate that capitalism has historically excelled at organizing different technologies, institutions, resources, and laborers to con- vert energy into economic work. The consumption of energy is, in fact, deeply correlated with wealth, and one of the most powerful markers of global in-
- 25. 10 NEW ENERGIES equality.Great Britain’s pioneering transition to sustained economic growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hinged on the exploitation of coal on a new, mass scale. The United States’ hegemonic position in the global cap- italist order after World War II involved its astounding lead in energy con- sumption per capita: more than twice as much as its nearest rivals. In 2019 the average US resident consumed nearly eighty thousand kilowatt hours a year; those in Germany and France roughly forty thousand; those in Chad, Niger, Mali, or South Sudan less than one thousand. The reasons for such incredible disparities in energy consumption, of course, have a history.14 The perceived decline of the nation- state, meanwhile, encouraged histori- ans to turn their attention to the new captains of globalization: corporations.15 In American historiography, financial corporations often took center stage in this new history of capitalism.16 Yet in many ways energy corporations, not banks, have been the largest, most influential, and most globalized companies of the twentieth century. Take ExxonMobil, itself a descendant of Standard Oil, one of the world’s most powerful corporations before it was broken apart in 1911. Today, ExxonMobil has a market capitalization of over $300 billion, conducts business in dozens of countries, and builds infrastructure in dozens more.17 It, and other energy multinationals, have constructed business mod- els designed to shield operations from social control on the local level while obscuring profits from state control through interlocking “offshore” subsid- iaries.18 In the words of the oil industry’s leading chronicler, firms like these belong to the “world’s biggest and most pervasive business.” In 2018 six of the world’s ten largest corporations were energy firms, while two more were automobile manufacturers whose business models are unthinkable without gasoline. The production of energy stands as much at the heart of capitalism as does the flow of money: indeed, coal and oil have been called, with only a little hyperbole, the “mainspring of modern material civilization” or the “life- blood” of modern economies. As historians have returned to capitalism as a subject, studies about energy production, distribution, and consumption, and the firms that control these channels have multiplied, yielding new insights about growth, inequality, class identity, and the geography of markets.19 From still a different angle, the history of commodities and the supply chains that bring them into shopping centers and homes has changed the way we think about global connections. Histories of salt, cod, pepper, coffee, pa- per, sugar, cotton, or even the T- shirt have lifted the hood of the engine of glo- balization to reveal intricate networks of production, distribution, and mar- keting. These studies have illustrated how the labor forms and the institutions used to produce and distribute a given commodity vary immensely depending on their position in a global supply chain, promoting democracy and wealth
- 26. Toward a NewEnergy History 11 and protecting nature in one region while undermining polities, impoverish- ing people, and damaging the environment in another.20 This approach of fol- lowing the flow of a commodity from start to finish reveals the points at which different actors can insert themselves in order to reap economic gain, achieve leverage over people or resources, and even shape the evolution of states and societies.21 Many of the commodities studied in these histories are raw materi- als, taken from the earth and used in products and processes that we take for granted. In many ways, energy is the raw material par excellence because it is so essential to modern life, both industrial and postindustrial. It lends itself to spatial analysis as a variety of recent histories have illustrated, which trace the supply chains that render particular forms of energy useable, and which connect points in space or historical processes that have traditionally been considered in isolation.22 Toward a New History of Energy Transitions Together, global warming and the Anthropocene, the new history of capital- ism, and the study of commodities have turned energy into a dynamic histor- ical field. Fortunately, historians today have much to build upon, for there is a long precedent in showing how energy shaped human affairs. Already in the 1930s John Nef authored a two-volume study unsurpassed in its detail of show- ing how coal influenced everything from capitalism and political power to the ecology of forests in early modern Great Britain.23 In 1983 Thomas Hughes traced the rise of massive new technological systems that brought electricity into the households and urban centers of North America and Europe. Under- standing these energy networks, he hoped, would do nothing less than help scholars tackle the big questions of history, about “the ordering, integrating, coordinating, and systematizing nature of modern human societies.”24 And since the 1990s and 2000s, our understanding of the Industrial Revolution, or what many scholars now call the Great Divergence, has hinged not only on questions of imperialism, slavery, institutions, and trade, but also on coal.25 Yet “energy” as such was often not the object of these earlier, discerning studies. Instead, they focused on discrete forms of energy, like anthracite or wood, or on particular technologies or organizations that delivered energy, like multinational oil companies or electrical utilities. These earlier authors, in other words, were less interested in energy as a historical category or how contemporaries conceptualized energy than in exploring individual energy forms and using them to answer questions about other topics such as indus- trial development, the interconnectivity of “socio-technical arrangements,” or economic institutions.26 Toward the end of the twentieth century, energy became its own catego-
- 27. 12 NEW ENERGIES ryof analysis, but with a few important exceptions it fell under the purview of economists.27 After the oil crisis of 1973, economists revived frameworks for understanding the nature of exhaustible resources, and economics as a profession began including energy in their models alongside labor, capital, and land.28 Quantitative economic historians followed this trend and began looking to the past for empirical evidence of how energy related to econom- ic growth, the totem of post–1945 economic theory.29 They put moments of transition between fuel sources at the center of their analysis about energy’s causal role in historical changee. For the Industrial Revolution, arguably the seminal event of energy history in European and American historiography, the work of E. A. Wrigley, Robert Allen, Peter J. G. Pearson, and Roger Fou- quet from the mid- 1990s on defined a paradigm that placed price, scarcity, and technology at the heart of the story. Through the painstaking reconstruc- tion of long- run data sets on population, gross domestic product (GDP), and the prices of wood, charcoal, and coal, they mapped the contours of British economic history in minute detail. In their hands, the Industrial Revolution was redefined as an energy transition, one of the most momentous in history, from an organic society fueled by wood, grain, and the muscles of animals to an inorganic economy driven by coal. And the mechanisms of change were straightforward. As population and the economy grew, wood and land— the dominant sources of energy before the eighteenth century— became scarce. Their prices rose, encouraging the substitution of new energies through new technologies. In Britain, so this argument went, rising wood and land pric- es induced producers and consumers to turn to coal on a grand scale.30 The crucial breakthrough came when engineers, driven by price incentives, im- proved the steam engine so they could use coal not only for heat but also for mechanical power to run factories and power railroads. In the words of Rob- ert Allen, “High wages and cheap energy were the distinctive features of the British economy during the Industrial Revolution . . . creating a demand for technology that substituted capital and energy for labour.”31 Expanding scope beyond Britain only seemed to confirm economic historians in their para- digm. In a lead editorial for the journal Energy Policy, for instance, Fouquet and Pearson could write that “a review of 14 past transitions indicated that, for a new energy source to become dominant, the energy services . . . it provided had been cheaper than the incumbent energy source.”32 Price and efficiency, in their hands, were the kings of transitions, and technology the queen. Yet in the process of unearthing amazing statistical series that yielded new insights, these historians of transitions veered too far into the macro and the structural. The drama was gone. The human agency or conflict fell out of view in the face of impersonal forces. When these economic historians spoke of
- 28. Toward a NewEnergy History 13 lock- in— how energy systems once in place built their own momentum— they rarely discussed the producers, consumer groups, or businesses that lost out or reinvented themselves because they backed the “wrong” system.33 When they traced the rise of new fuel sources, they rarely had a place for geopoli- tics, labor struggles, cultural shifts, or even states, which do “not seem to have played a highly proactive role in previous transitions.”34 At the most extreme, a picture emerged of an almost steady progression through virtuous feedback loops toward ever more efficient fuels driving ever more energy- hungry societies: a stagism devoid of contingency. In 2012 a special issue on energy transitions in the leading journal for energy policy could even posit a historical pattern: “New technological combinations en- abled entirely new, or vastly improved traditional services, at greater energy efficiency and ever falling costs in a virtual, self- reinforcing positive feedback loop.”35 The spirit of Cesare Marchetti, it seemed, was alive. So it should not be surprising that advocates of renewable power today who follow this par- adigm place their hope in sending the right “price signal,” that they speak of climate change as “fundamentally a technological challenge,” or that they argue moving to wind, solar, and biomass will benefit everyone and generate little resistance.36 “Increased deployment of clean energy technologies . . .” so the International Renewable Energy Council argues, “translates to increased economic opportunities. And everyone can find a way to support that.”37 Even ExxonMobil? These accounts, however much they have expanded our understanding of past transitions, paint a narrow historical picture. This is, after all, the nature of models that aspire to aid policy for the future: they strive for simplification. But where is the conflict in energy transitions? Where are the politics? Where is the human agency— for or against transition? Where is the knowledge of energy— as a social category, a scientific object, or an instrument of power? These are all burning questions that historians have posed with ever more ur- gency since 2010, against the backdrop of global warming and financial crisis. Indeed, a range of new monographs written by historians in history depart- ments, or by unorthodox social scientists, have challenged the narrative that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, pointing the way toward a new approach to energy history that foregrounds struggle, ideology, class, knowledge, geo- politics, culture, and geography. New monographs that combine a history of capitalism with the environment around the theme of energy have forced us to rethink everything from Britain and the United States’ industrialization, to the Cold War experience with nuclear power, to the very foundation of de- mocracy itself.38 New studies about struggles over labor, over language, or over political economy have helped turn “energy” into a category of analysis that
- 29. 14 NEW ENERGIES canbring together historians of various ilk to reopen some of the most basic questions about change in society, about the nation- state, globalization, pol- itics, capitalism, and identity.39 As even Pearson, a pioneer of the data- driven studies of the 1990s and 2000s, himself now writes, social scientists have come to appreciate the “multifaceted nature” of energy transitions. Past transitions cannot be explained by price alone; they have “co- evolved or been entangled with other broader socio-economic, demographic, technological and environ- mental changes and processes.”40 What Is an Energy Transition? But what do we even mean by an “energy transition”? The concept itself evokes images of a linear shift from one stage to another. In fact, this was how it was first used and politicized in the 1970s. As a concept that initially related to the pure chemical transformation of one energy into another, energy transition was popularized by the technocratic response to the oil shock of 1973. Experts hoped to defend North America and Western Europe from the “oil weapon” deployed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) by facilitating an energy transition. President Jimmy Carter, the Trilateral Com- mission, and the European Economic Community (EEC) all used the lan- guage of transition to develop more hydrocarbons outside of OPEC territory.41 But this is hardly the type of transition one hopes for in the age of global warming, and the term itself harbors the danger of obscuring the messiness of new energy systems by suggesting transitions can be rationally managed, or that they proceed in a linear or straightforward manner. In fact, some doubt the concept can fully capture the complexity of changing infrastructural, technopolitical, or knowledge systems around energy. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean- Baptiste Fressoz, for instance, argue that “if history teaches us one thing, it is that there never has been an energy transition . . . rather a successive addition of new sources of primary energy.” Using transition as a concept, in their view, obscures the extent to which the old remains and the new merely brings forth ever more consumption of energy.42 Nevertheless, many historians use transition with care, and remain keenly aware that older systems never wither, and instead often adapt and expand.43 Transition, moreover, is not merely a cover for some form of crisis— in an ex- tant energy system or in society more broadly— as Bonneuil and Fressoz sug- gest, since in many cases societies incorporate new forms of energy and build new infrastructure during periods of stability. Natural gas is the most telling example, which much of Western Europe first began using before the shocks of the 1970s, and which the continent only fully integrated well after the effects of those shocks had passed, during the 1980s and 1990s.
- 30. Toward a NewEnergy History 15 More generally, the concept of energy transition adds value if one under- stands transition less as a discrete, punctuated shift from one stage or system or fuel to another, but rather—to draw from the new histories of capitalism—a layering and an “ongoing transformation” that leads to new and “hybrid” forms of energy provision, energy services, and energy consumption, a trans- formation that can reshape society in the process.44 Much as transitions to capitalism or the nation- state have all been deconstructed, to show how el- ements of older systems persist, adapt, and become crucial to newer ones, so too should historians work to expose the less visible transformations that arise out of transitions, whether they be new economic geographies, new political values or morals, new knowledge systems or discourses, or even new temporal or mental frameworks.45 All of this complexity is obscured if one abstracts energy transition into a line on a chart or a price for a fuel. Using this broader approach, our volume emphasizes five pivotal themes of energy transitions, some of which have often been overlooked by earlier liter- ature. Most fundamentally, energy on the scale required by modern societies has historically come through systems of vast complexity, a fact that informs most chapters in this volume. Energy production and consumption can be understood as a socio-technical system that includes humans, materials, tech- nologies, and ideas, as well as the particular energy itself. The infrastructure needed to extract, refine, and transform energy into something usable— the networks of ships, roads, trucks, and pipelines that move energy from the point of extraction to the point of consumption— forms an interconnected system worth trillions of dollars of investments built up over decades. But beyond its physical presence, energy systems also shape how people “work, play, eat, and socialize, . . . how industries cluster, how cities and economies grow, and how nations conduct their foreign affairs.”46 The components of en- ergy systems are so interlinked, moreover, that change in one often ripples through and affects other elements and participants, and crucially, other ener- gy systems. As Clark Miller and others have underscored, the key decisions to study are often political, social, or cultural as much as they are technological or economic.47 Second, this volume shows how prices and technological efficiency, or pro- ducer and consumer desires alone, cannot fully explain why one energy rises, another falls, and another reinvents itself, as chapters by Joseph Bohling, Ste- phen Gross, Victor McFarland, Eva Oberloskamp, Sonja Schmid, and Benja- min Franta demonstrate. Energy systems are embedded in a broader political economy of interest groups that have their own networks and agendas, wheth- er seeking profit, preserving the environment, or attaining geopolitical secu- rity. Energy transitions, put differently, are profoundly shaped by competition
- 31. 16 NEW ENERGIES betweenvarious groups to mobilize the levers of power at their disposal to advance one energy or restrict another, or to change the extant system. Price and profit are important to the success of any new energy, to be sure, since modern transitions have unfolded through a global capitalism in which ener- gy providers must earn a return on their investments. Yet price and profit are never everything, for states, consumers, workers, experts, and environmental groups all use politics to reshape the economic playing field, and to pursue agendas that make little sense in the logic of the market. States in particu- lar have interests that range from geopolitics to social security and prestige. These interests often overlap with the quest for inexpensive energy, but not always. Governments have historically favored geopolitically secure energy sources, sources that generate domestic employment and social stability, or sources that are considered part of the national culture, even when their costs are high. In any case, what is cheap and what is expensive is rarely determined by supply and demand alone, as markets are political constructs that require state- made rules to function, that are shaped by incentives created by states, and that are embedded in larger global markets. Who has access to the levers of government, or who has arguments that resonate with the voting public, thus matter immensely. Energy transitions cannot be understood apart from the constant ebb and flow among interest groups and political parties to shape energy policy. Third, these chapters illustrate the staying power of older energy systems, showing how these have historically been reinvented in any number of ways to remain a vital part of modern societies, as chapters by Ryan Driskoll Tate, Trish Kahle, and Henning Türk show. This is so above all for coal. Merely looking at a different sort of graph than those used by Marchetti— graphs that display the total volume of energy consumed rather than their relative shares— one sees how voluminous the consumption of coal has been through- out the twentieth century. Even after oil became the dominant energy, coal retained a place at the heart of the industrial societies of Europe and North America, rising in absolute levels in the final quarter of the century. More coal was consumed on these continents in 2000 than in the 1960s.48 Coal survived because firms, workers, governments, consumers, labor leaders, and interna- tional organizations reinvented it as an energy: shifting its geographical locus, revolutionizing the technologies used to produce it, changing people’s atti- tudes toward it, reimagining its place in an evolving geopolitical landscape, and even altering the very nature of coal consumption. Coal’s importance as a fuel for transportation or chemistry diminished in the face of oil’s rise, but nevertheless it remained an essential part of the foundation of the high energy consumer society that emerged after World War II. Huge new coal- fired pow-
- 32. Toward a NewEnergy History 17 er plants located far from city centers facilitated mass electrification while at the same time making the production of energy, and much of the ecological degradation that came with it, seem invisible to many urban consumers. Nov- el machinery permitted the rise of new coal regions and eroded the power that labor organizations derived from coal, altering the very nature of coal’s poli- tics. Indeed, twentieth-century coal is an outstanding example of why we need a more capacious understanding of energy transitions, one that captures how old and new energy systems often exist side by side, and how their interaction can lead to mutual intensification and transformation.49 Fourth, energy transitions change the way we think, not just about energy itself but also about larger issues such as political representation, knowledge, and even time, as chapters by Trish Kahle, Natasha Zaretsky, Duccio Basosi, Thomas Turnbull, and Dolores Augustine demonstrate. Because energy tran- sitions are contested processes, with winners and losers, the tensions they gen- erate lead people to reevaluate long- standing assumptions that govern society. Entirely new costs associated with emergent forms of energy became apparent during transitions, costs that go beyond economic measures to include hu- man life itself, or the lives of future generations, or the lives of people living in other political spaces in other parts of the world. How should representa- tive democracies handle these spatial and temporal questions, given that only citizens who are currently alive have the right to vote? How should politics handle an energy like nuclear power, which has the potential to threaten not only individual lives but humanity as a species— a threat that first appeared with the atomic bomb in 1945? How should the concerns that emerged about Figure I.5: World Commercial Energy Production. 1800–2000. Source: Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (Phila- delphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 6.
- 33. 18 NEW ENERGIES thedanger nuclear power posed to the future shape our understandings of the future of global warming? Who, moreover, can be entrusted to provide the knowledge to guide such social decisions, given that established science has itself been one of the forces pushing fossil energy and nuclear power in the first place? These questions have defied easy answer, and the process of trying to answer them has historically transformed the nature of representation and expertise in Europe and North America. Finally, energy transitions can transform the very political and econom- ic geography of a nation or even the world, as chapters by Tate and Schmid demonstrate. Fossil fuels come from the earth, and thus the discovery of new sources can shift the center of production and transform the flow of these com- modities as new networks arise to bring supplies to the consumer. Changes in energy geography, however, can affect more than just prices— they can lead to new political alliances, new ways of conceptualizing politics, new relations of dependency or influence, and new secondary effects that outlive the primary reason an energy source was tapped in the first place. The geographical reloca- tion and technological transformation of mining in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, transformed the politics of coal as the min- ing workforce migrated from the political Left to the Right. Nuclear energy promised to liberate states from previous forms of foreign influence, but in fact, it just as often created new channels of dependency after crucial parts of this complex technology were monopolized by powerful actors like the United States or the Soviet Union. The concept of energy transition, in other words, if broadened to mean more than just the rise of a new fuel source, can capture the evolving way humans use energy to achieve their many goals. How this evolution funda- mentally changes the nature of society, from the distribution of wealth, power, and inequality, to the way politics, time, and geography are imagined, lies at the heart of this book. Transitions in North America and Europe Geographically, this volume focuses on North America and Europe. We chose these regions partly because they reflect the expertise of the two editors— one an Europeanist, the other an Americanist— and because we hoped to empha- size depth over breadth of coverage. Energy transitions in the twentieth cen- tury is an enormous topic, and by limiting the geographical scope we hoped to find energy stories that spoke to and built on one another. This constraint al- lows the volume to focus on questions of political economy, culture, and ideol- ogy in the high energy, consumer societies of the Global North, and on issues of labor mobilization related to the procurement and distribution of domestic
- 34. Toward a NewEnergy History 19 energy sources such as coal. Unfortunately, our geographical focus does rule out other important lines of inquiry that research into energy transitions can open up, above all about transnational entanglements and the flow of energy across space. There is a developing literature on the movement of hydrocar- bons from the Middle East or Russia to Europe in the second half of the twen- tieth century, for instance, which traces how the transition to a high energy society in one region shaped extraction, labor relations, or the environment in another. More recently, understanding carbon outsourcing from North America and Europe to the most important energy region in the twenty- first century, China, has become increasingly urgent. Both sorts of flows— oil to Europe, energy- intensive manufacturing out of China— represent outstand- ing topics for future research that this volume set aside in its focus on political economy, culture, and ideas in Europe and North America.50 North America and Europe, though, share certain commonalities as the first regions to transform into energy-intensive consumer societies—what Da- vid Nye has called “high energy societies.” There is a certain logic, in other words, for uniting histories of these two regions into a single volume on ener- gy transitions. These two regions were the first to experience the energy tran- sitions studied in this volume. Many of the new technologies driving these shifts, from thermal cracking of oil to controlled nuclear fission, were devel- oped in either Europe or North America. More generally, these two continents have been at the forefront of energy consumption. At the turn of the twenti- eth century, North Americans and Europeans already used far more energy per capita than consumers in Asia, Africa, or South America. This gap only widened over the first two- thirds of the century as the economies of North America and Europe and their wealth per capita expanded dramatically, as they began burning oil in huge volumes, and as their consumer lifestyles and industrial systems came to depend on ever more energy. By the 1970s, these continents together accounted for over half of global GDP, and their GDP per capita was eight to ten times higher than much of Africa or Asia. These differences between the Global North and Global South appear even starker when examined through the lens of energy. As North America and Europe passed through an unprecedented phase of growth between 1950 and 1973— the so- called Great Acceleration that saw dramatic increase in many mea- sures, from welfare to life expectancy to fertilizer usage to pollution— they widened the gap with other continents. By the 1970s, North Americans and Europeans consumed three-quarters of all energy produced in the world, even though they numbered less than a quarter of global population. And energy consumption corresponded closely with carbon emissions. Precisely because North America and Europe became the world’s first high- energy, oil- soaked
- 35. 20 NEW ENERGIES societies,they also sparked the onset of global warming. By 1990, when scien- tists began to reach a consensus that fossil fuel use was warming the planet, North America and Europe together were responsible for three- quarters of the cumulative human- generated carbon in the atmosphere.51 These continents developed such massive carbon footprints because they followed a trajectory of growth that had been energy- intensive for two hun- dred years. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new technologies of mining and the steam engine permitted the states of Europe and North America to tap energy on a grand scale that had had previously been con- verted by geological forces from organic matter into anthracite, bitumen, and lignite.52 In the twentieth century, North America and Europe deepened this path of energy- intensive growth as they led some of the most important ener- gy transitions: the rise of oil at mid- century and the concomitant transforma- tion of coal, the technological revolution and state development that led to nu- clear power, and after the 1980s the dispersion of new forms of decentralized, renewable power that potentially challenged fossil fuels. These three twentieth- century transitions, plus the shock to the global oil network in the 1970s, are the organizing pillars of New Energies. These two continents, however, channeled energy transitions through different social, political, and cultural institutions, and herein lies part of the novelty of this volume— comparing the path and effects of energy shifts across space as well as time Part I, “The Rise of Oil and the Transformation of Coal: Creation, De- struction, and Reinvention,” explores the interaction between energy systems that were based on coal and oil, through an arc of time that stretches from the 1920s to the 1970s. Oil had been used as a fuel throughout history, but during the twentieth century it penetrated into vast new areas of consumer society. With the growth of the lamp oil industry in Burma in the 1800s, and the gusher of crude that exploded near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, en- trepreneurs had started to commercialize oil on a grand scale. At first oil filled tertiary needs created by the coal- fired industrial order of the late nineteenth century— lubricating mining machinery, for instance, or providing lighting for cities heated by coal. But by the twentieth century oil began moving out of secondary markets that complemented coal to become a rival to many of coal’s core markets— in industry, heating, and chemistry, but above all in transportation with the emergence of inexpensive, gasoline- powered automo- biles.53 By the middle of the twentieth century, the oil industry would grow to encompass the entire world with massive multinational petroleum corpora- tions, what contemporaries dubbed the “oil majors,” spreading their networks
- 36. Toward a NewEnergy History 21 across the Middle East, South America, sub- Saharan Africa, and Central and Southeast Asia.54 By mid- century, if not earlier, North America and Europe consumed oil on a larger scale than anywhere else, apart from particular oil- producing countries like Mexico or Saudi Arabia, and economies with entire ecosystems of industry, transportation, and consumer products that revolved around oil first took root. In the process, this new hydrocarbon network reshaped coal systems by putting them under stress. Chapters 1–4 dive into key problematics stemming from this energy transition and interaction between oil and coal, exploring the political economy of interest groups that navigated the rise of oil in France, Germany, and the United States, and tracing how coal producers and workers reacted to the onslaught of this cheap new energy. At first, crude oil had to contend with other rivals to fuel the internal combustion engine, above all biofuels, as Joseph Bohling illustrates in chapter 1. As oil use spread, in some instances coal as an energy system actually declined, as Stephen G. Gross describes in the case of hard coal mining in Germany’s Ruhr in chapter 2. In many other instances, however, coal evolved in response to the new en- ergy landscape, changing in terms of its geography, its uses, and even in how it was extracted and imagined, as Trish Kahle and Ryan Driskell Tate recount in chapters 3 and 4, respectively. And in important respects, coal thrived: as oil brought more growth and accelerated the rise of a high energy society, coal powered the expanding grid that supported new consumer lifestyles. High energy society, in fact, revolved around two icons—one rooted in oil; the other in coal— the car and electricity. Part II, “Oil Transition in Crisis: The 1970s,” follows how the high energy societies of North America and Europe navigated an unprecedented peace- time shock to their energy systems. By the early 1970s, both continents had come to depend on oil for roughly half their total primary energy needs. This fuel facilitated the incredible growth experienced by both sides of the Atlantic after World War II. And by the 1970s, much of this oil came from the Middle East and North Africa: production there influenced prices around the world and provided most of the petroleum consumed in Western Europe. But in the fall of 1973, the foundation of this system was put into question when coun- tries in the Middle East and elsewhere used their newfound market power vis- à- vis international corporations to raise the price at which they sold crude on the global market fourfold, advancing a bid to wrest back sovereign con- trol over this resource found in their own territory. Chapters 5–8 explore how North Americans and Europeans responded to this “oil shock,” the shadow of which lasted into the 1980s.55 For the crisis posed not only economic and geo-
- 37. 22 NEW ENERGIES politicalchallenges to the states of these continents, as Victor McFarland and Henning Türk illustrate in chapters 5 and 7, respectively. It also opened a win- dow of opportunity for these societies to imagine and conceptualize a transi- tion away from fossil fuel–centered, energy- intensive growth, as recounted by Duccio Basosi and Thomas Turnbull in chapters 6 and 8, respectively. While this window closed before such a shift could occur, developments in the 1970s nevertheless laid the foundation for later efforts to build a post- petroleum world. Part III, “A Stalled Transition? Nuclear Energy’s Dilemmas and Possi- bilities,” explores a twentieth- century energy transition that was never fully realized: the turn toward nuclear power. As with the spread of oil and the transformation of coal, North America and Europe commenced a nuclear energy transition before other regions, by crafting the scientific networks, political institutions, and infrastructure to commercialize this new source of electricity. American and European scientists first theorized about splitting the atom before World War II; they weaponized these ideas with the atom- ic bomb during the war; and after 1945 they, along with the Japanese, first linked nuclear reactors to the grid. As a result, these societies were some of the first to grapple with the unprecedented nature of atomic power, which posed an existential threat to humankind while at the same time offering hope of radically improving life, satisfying the world’s energy needs at all times, and opening pathways for resource- poor states to achieve geopolitical auton- omy from the fossil fuel networks that had emerged over the preceding cen- tury. The contributions by Sonja D. Schmid, Natasha Zaretsky, and Dolores L. Augustine in chapters 9, 10, and 11, respectively, explore the contradictions generated by this new energy, following the rise of nuclear utopianism in the 1950s, the vast plans for nuclear expansion in the wake of the oil shock, and the erosion of that momentum as a result of cost problems, safety issues, and grassroots movements. These chapters provide a counterview to convention- al narratives by illustrating how atomic power generated new anxieties that revolved around human reproduction, and focusing on issues often left unex- plored in traditional energy histories, such as political representation, gender, the nature of expertise, and the path dependencies generated by technological transfers. Part IV, “The Transition off Fossil Fuels: Challenges and Possibilities,” completes the volume by discussing the origins and challenges of what could be the next great energy transition, the shift off fossil fuels toward renewables. Even though solar and wind power have histories that began well before the twentieth century, environmental historians often portray the 1970s as the de- cade of origin for modern renewable energy.56 The dramatic spike in oil prices,
- 38. Toward a NewEnergy History 23 the fears of resource exhaustion, and the surging environmental movement led certain groups to seek salvation in new sources of energy that could be re- plenished. But as chapters 12 and 13 illustrate, this process was far more com- plex and less linear than most narratives suggest, and here again, questions of price and efficiency are only part of the story. In fact, the 1980s and the 1990s emerge as crucial decades in the history of renewables and their relationship with fossil fuels. For the initial desire to cultivate wind and solar in the 1970s came more from fears that the world would run out of hydrocarbons, not that burning hydrocarbons would generate catastrophic climate change from too much fossil fuels. When a wave of new oil discoveries shattered the market power of OPEC in the early 1980s, causing oil prices to plummet, this initial raison d’être for renewables disintegrated. But, as Benjamin Franta recounts in chapter 12, well before this moment the oil industry realized global warm- ing was a likely outcome of their business model, and they began generating knowledge to counteract the moment when climate change would become po- liticized. That moment came in the 1980s with the consolidation of scientific knowledge that showed fossil fuel–induced global warming was real. Only in the 1990s, however, with the emergence of social movements, political institu- tions, and interest groups to support renewables, as these Eva Oberloskamp il- lustrates in chapter 13, did the transition toward solar and wind gain momen- tum. This story is still being written, with its most pivotal chapter yet to come, since fossil fuel consumption in much of North America and Europe, and the world for that matter, remains undiminished by solar and wind. Indeed, what distinguishes the hoped-for transition to renewables from most previous transitions is that to actually address global warming, the new system must not just transform, but radically dismantle the old energy system. This has few precedents in history. Overall, the aim of New Energies is to move beyond a narrow and linear conception of energy transitions. We hope to show how energy transitions are a rich, multifaceted line of inquiry that can bring different types of history to- gether, and how those studying contemporary energy affairs can benefit from a more detailed understanding the complex, nonlinear, and highly contested nature of energy transitions from the past. This volume illustrates how tran- sitions are long affairs that take decades to unfold, rarely have finite starting and ending points, and are characterized by advances as well as backtracking and changes in entirely unpredictable directions. It underscores the persist- ing influence of older energy forms, like coal, whose supporters have histor- ically found ways to overcome challenges and adapt to new circumstances. It shows how important interest groups, coalitions, counter- experts, states, and grassroots actors have been to the success of new energy systems— that
- 39. 24 NEW ENERGIES alldoes not hinge on technology and price. It shows how particular moments or constellations of circumstances have emerged to create the opportunity for change, and how quickly those moments can vanish. Lastly, it highlights just how profoundly our experience with energy shapes almost every facet of life, from democratic governance to the environment that surrounds us to even how we think about human reproduction.
- 40. 25 Part I THE RISEOF OIL AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF COAL Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention The first energy transition in twentieth-century Europe and the United States was also the most profound. Globally, oil use experienced a me- teoric expansion that rivaled in its astounding pace the rise of coal during the preceding century. Oil’s share of total global energy first crested 5 per- cent in 1915, and within just sixty years it hit 40 percent.1 After engineers and corporations wedded the internal combustion engine to gasoline, a process that was far from inevitable, oil producers found a ravenous new market for their product in the form of the car industry. New uses for petroleum soon followed, including fuel oil to heat homes and run machinery, synthetic fertil- izers for large- scale agriculture, and raw materials for the chemical industry. Automobiles threatened public transportation that ran on coal, while other applications for petroleum encroached on a variety of markets once fueled by hard coal and lignite. On both sides of the Atlantic, coal and oil found themselves locked in an intense contest that not only led to wrenching social transformations, but that would change the politics, the moral economy, and the economic geography of these two continents. This contest played out at very different tempos and resulted in very dif- ferent outcomes in North America and Western Europe, illustrating how this energy transition was far from inevitable and hinged on much more than just
- 41. 26 NEW ENERGIES prices.Though some scholars point to price as the key factor leading to pe- troleum’s rise, the question of when the price of oil fell below that of coal is still unsettled and differs by region. In British thermal units (BTU), the price of coal actually remained lower than crude through much of the 1950s. Most price comparisons, however, do little to explore the cost of distribution and transportation, which began to favor oil with the construction of pipeline net- works at midcentury. In Europe, by 1958 at the latest, when the first major coal crisis erupted, the price of using fuel oil had fallen below that of coal. In the United States, that tipping point came sooner.2 Energy prices in North America and Europe during the middle of the twentieth century, however, were hardly determined by market forces alone. Coal’s challenges, in other words, had little to do with scarcity: in the twen- tieth century, more coal was mined than ever before. In the United States, informal and formal quotas on foreign oil combined with domestic regulation to keep oil prices higher than they otherwise would have been. Europe, mean- while, had different oil regimes in nearly every nation, ranging from state- controlled pricing in France to relatively free prices in postwar West Ger- many. But even here, in what contemporaries called the most liberal energy market in the world, prices were free relative to France, but not compared to any model of a competitive market economy, as Stephen G. Gross points out in chapter 2. In any case, the international oil companies that delivered crude to Europe determined their prices through negotiation with the producer coun- tries and through offtake agreements with each other. From 1930 until 1973, the international price of crude followed a remarkably straight line, indicating how little market forces held sway. As a pioneering study on American energy history concluded, using language that could equally apply to Europe, “Rarely since 1945 have producers, consumers, or their political representatives been willing to rely on price for the restoration of equilibrium.”3 Throughout this period, in fact, the price of energy was determined as much by politics or interest groups as by supply and demand. Nation- states had very good reason to advance oil, beginning with war. World War I illus- trated the geopolitical benefits of mobility that could be gained from support- ing militaries by trucks and gasoline instead of rail and coal, and securing oil became a major strategic aim of the conflict. Meanwhile, between 1916 and 1922, the coal industry experienced some of the most strained labor relations in its history, as miners across Europe and the United States clamored for bet- ter conditions like the eight- hour workday and higher pay. War underscored just how different the production structures of coal and oil were, and how the latter could more easily be controlled by capital and the state. Where coal production required mass labor that could leverage key choke points in the
- 42. The Rise ofOil and the Transformation of Coal 27 extraction process, oil production at this moment was capital- intensive, and at least in North America and Europe, its workers were relatively well- paid.4 After 1918, geopolitics and the quest for economic and social stability led to a scramble for what would become the world’s largest source of crude, the Middle East. While British, French, and Dutch companies initially held the upper hand, American companies gained access to this new center of global oil with the Red Line Agreement in 1928. But they succeeded only with exten- sive support from their government, including diplomatic pressure applied by the Department of State on America’s allies, and a depletion allowance that allowed firms to deduct the entire market value of oil properties from their tax bill. State support for oil accelerated during and after the World War II, above all in the United States, which boasted five of the world’s seven largest oil companies. In 1943 the US government cooperated with private companies in building the world’s longest oil pipeline, linking Texas to the Northeast. In 1947 the United States waived its antitrust laws to allow its largest oil firms to merge into ARAMCO to exploit the huge fields of Saudi Arabia. That same year President Harry S. Truman established a security umbrella in Turkey and Greece that cordoned the Middle East off from Soviet encroachment. Oil’s rise, in other words, was an affair of the state as much as it was one of private enterprise.5 Even before 1945, the fortunes of oil in the United States and Europe diverged. In the former, the transition to oil took off in the 1920s with the gasoline- powered internal combustion engine. Despite its high energy den- sity, gasoline was never preordained to fuel the automobile, as Joseph Boh- ling illustrates in chapter 1. Electric engines were cleaner and quieter; steam- powered ones more reliable. Gasoline- powered cars, meanwhile, suffered from a range of technical problems and had to compete with biofuels. Despite the European origins of early automobile innovations, it was the American Henry Ford, an organizational genius and anti- Semite, who unleashed the automobile revolution when he fit the internal combustion engine into a car that middle- class consumers could afford. In his new assembly line plants, powered by electricity, he began producing more automobiles than all other carmakers combined. Between 1914 and 1920, the number of registered cars in the United States exploded from 1.8 million to 9.2 million. In Ford’s licensed dealerships, consumers encountered industrial abundance along with the Dearborn Independent, the Ford- owned newspaper warning of global Jewish conspiracy that dealers were required to distribute. As with oil exploration, infrastructure for the gasoline- powered car de- pended on the state. In the midst of World War I, the United States unveiled its first federal highway funding act, devoting millions of dollars to connect
- 43. 28 NEW ENERGIES ruralregions with cities.At nearly the same time, California set off on its path of becoming the world icon for suburban sprawl by pursuing a road- building project financed by user fees. Thus even before the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, the United States had become home to the oil-car nexus.6 In Europe, oil and the car spread much more slowly. In the 1920s, no less than 80 percent of the world’s automobiles existed in the United States. Gaso- line use and automobile ownership were held back in Europe by a number of structural forces, including a lower standard of living, the Great Depression, and powerful interest groups advocating other automotive fuels, as Bohling demonstrates in chapter 1. After 1945, Europe began following America’s en- ergy trajectory. The Marshall Plan, which devoted funds toward oil use and re- finery construction, stimulated this trajectory. But it was only after the thirty years of incredible postwar growth had already commenced, in the late 1950s and 1960s, that Western Europe built the pipeline, refinery, and road network that transformed oil into a mass consumer fuel, spurred by an activist state in even the most liberal of economies, as Gross illustrates in chapter 2.7 The oil- car nexus, however, brought upheaval alongside welfare and mo- bility as cars undercut coal-based rail and public transport. Soon fuel oil, once a byproduct of the process that made gasoline, became a commodity of its own that challenged markets hitherto dominated by coal. This energy rivalry unfolded in the United States earlier than in Europe, but on both continents it overlapped with dynamics internal to the production of coal to precipitate a transformation in how this solid fossil fuel was mined and used. The pro- cess began in World War I, which drove American coal mines to overexpand and begin to mechanize and electrify production with mechanical cutters and underground conveyor belts. Over the coming decades the mechanization of coal mining would dramatically raise the output per worker. Miners fought the introduction of these new techniques because mechanization threatened to reduce the workforce but also because of the danger it imposed on the workplace through noise, harmful dust, and the heightened risk of cave- ins. Nevertheless, during the 1920s and 1930s, the mechanization of subterranean mines advanced dramatically across the United States and much of Europe: in the former over 90 percent of mines were mechanized by the eve of World War II; in the latter roughly half were. After 1918, the return to peacetime pro- duction, the Great Depression, and the gradual conversion of shipping from coal to diesel oil— the first oceangoing diesel liners appeared in 1912— hurt demand for coal even as mechanization allowed more coal to come from fewer workers. The result was a dramatic collapse in the mining workforce that hit the United States first, then later Europe. By 1939, only 530,000 people worked
- 44. The Rise ofOil and the Transformation of Coal 29 in America’s mines, down from a postwar peak of 860,000. After 1945, decline turned into collapse, as strikes increased the political volatility of this energy, as mechanization of open- pit strip mines advanced, and as oil eroded more of the traditional markets for coal when railways began converting to die- sel motors. When coal employment finally stabilized shortly after 1960 fewer than 200,000 Americans worked in the mines, less than a quarter of the peak workforce thirty- five years earlier. Similar trends emerged in Europe, though largely after 1945.8 Coal, however, reinvented itself during the 1960s and 1970s, illustrating how energy transitions involve the transformation of old systems as well as the rise of new ones. The sector passed through a technological, geographical, and labor transformation that entirely changed coal’s politics, as Trish Kahle and Ryan Driskell Tate illustrate in chapters 3 and 4, respectively. By the 1960s, the United States had become a high energy society, as industry expanded and as a welter of new consumer products became affordable to the middle class. Many of these new household items ran on electricity, such as refriger- ators, toasters, washers, driers, and televisions. Industry, too, used ever more electricity as mechanized production and assembly line techniques spread, and with them the need for power. Between 1950 and 1970 the United States’ demand for electricity more than quadrupled, and utilities became the largest industry by capital assets in the United States, generating as much power as the Soviet Union, Japan, West Germany, and Canada combined. Electricity consumption provided a huge market for coal even as its traditional ones were drying up. Coal, in other words, became primarily a source of electrical pow- er: in the 1960s roughly half of all coal went to fuel power plants; by 2000 that figure had risen to over nine- tenths.9 As electricity became the “lifeblood” of the nation, Kahle shows in chap- ter 3, miners were able to stake new claims about safety and moral economy, claims that cemented coal as an indispensable component of the nation’s en- ergy between 1969 and 1972. Accelerating the reinvention of American coal were novel, mechanized strip- mining techniques that opened up entirely new areas of exploitation and shifted the geographical heart of coal country from Appalachia to the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana. With guid- ance from corporate leaders, as Tate illustrates in chapter 4, this new tech- nology forged a nonunionized workforce that was imbued with an entirely different identity and politics than miners in the Appalachian Mountains. In the United States, coal became more like oil as formerly labor- intensive oper- ations gave way to capital- intensive ones that disassociated mining from the organized, East Coast workforce, and shifted miners politically to the Right. Where coal reinvented itself in the United States during the 1960s and
- 45. 30 NEW ENERGIES 1970s,in Europe during these same years the oil transition generated social effects that were as wrenching as what came with the oil shock of 1973. Cer- tain types of coal production collapsed entirely, while other types flourished, as Gross illustrates in chapter 2 through a narrative the collapse of hard coal mining Germany’s industrial heartland of the Ruhr. Hard coal there and in Belgium and northern France was becoming increasingly expensive as miners had to dig shafts ever deeper to tap new seams. Meanwhile, with the develop- ment of Middle East oil fields just several hundred miles from the shores of southern Europe, international petroleum companies were awash with cheap crude and in search of an outlet. The result was an astounding decline in Eu- ropean hard coal production that shattered what had been a main branch of employment for nearly a century. Massive government intervention avoid- ed social catastrophe. But this came with a huge price tag for taxpayers. In the United States, Wyoming and Montana had accessible hard coal near the surface. Europe had no such easy access hard coal seams. Instead, as domes- tic hard coal collapsed parts of Europe embraced the surface mining of soft lignite, the most sulfurous form of coal. With the application of the largest machines in the world— bucket- wheel excavators that scoop out thousands of tons of topsoil a day— lignite mines in Germany and Poland expanded to pro- vide a stable share of Central Europe’s growing demand for electricity since the 1970s and 1980s. With this expansion came more carbon emissions as well as other forms of particulate pollution with significant consequences for local environments and public health. Together, the chapters in this section suggest new ways of understanding our current transition toward renewables. In chapter 1 Bohling illustrates just how important coalitions, political struggles, and policy linkages are for pro- pelling or stalling the rise of a new energy. If a diverse alliance of winegrowers, farmers, engineers, and state officials could hinder the onslaught of gasoline in interwar France by raising concerns of energy dependency, what coalitions could be rallied in the name of reducing oil and coal use today, and to what other political goals can a green transition be linked? Gross illustrates how states can guide the collapse of an energy system. The sunk capital in West Germany’s hard coal sector in the 1960s resembles the issue of stranded as- sets that is arising in the fossil fuel industry today as renewable power makes sufficient headway. The West German state forged a type of bad bank to take on these failing assets at great public expense, but this maneuver deflated resistance from mineowners and gave government officials a say over what mines to shut down and when. Would a similar framework work today on a global scale for hydrocarbons? In chapter 3 Kahle, through an examination of the suffering endured by Appalachian miners, reminds us of the disparity
- 46. The Rise ofOil and the Transformation of Coal 31 between the human cost of producing fossil fuels and the social and economic benefits that have rested on their consumption. Those advocating for a transi- tion to renewables might find success by highlighting not only the ecological but also the moral failings of fossil energy, and by seeking a just transition to an energy system that no longer hinges on the endangerment of human life. In chapter 4, finally, Tate shows how particular energies can become linked to identities, and it follows that phasing out an energy will be challenging precisely because this might put the identity of entire communities at risk. In Wyoming’s coal fields, mineowners associated coal to white working- class, rural culture, a bond that remains to this day. Any effort to end coal must consequently grapple with this hard question of losing or changing a commu- nity’s identity.
- 48. one THE OIL FROMOUR SOIL French Alcohol Fuel versus Foreign Oil, 1918–1957 Joseph Bohling At the close of World War I, Henry Bérenger, head of the French government’s Petroleum Committee, went before an international group of industrialists, bureaucrats, and politicians to share his prediction that “as oil had been the blood of war, so it would be the blood of peace . . . At this hour, at the beginning of the peace, our civilian populations, our businesses, our commerce, our agriculture demand more oil, always more oil—more gasoline, always more gasoline.”1 Bérenger had good reason to make such an appeal, for he was all too aware of France’s lack of oil. The French army had faced severe oil shortages late in a war whose outcome was largely determined by the ability of a nation to fuel its fleet of airplanes, ships, trucks, and tanks. Bérenger knew that victory had depended less on French blood and valor than on American oil. This scene reinforces the conventional narrative that World War I ushered in the “century of oil,” for France as for other industrialized countries, be- cause it raised awareness about the need to secure oil supplies to fuel modern armies, economies, and state power.2 This narrative, however, is compelling only in retrospect. Over the last couple of decades, scholars have restored con- flict to analyses of the global oil transition, focusing especially on the battle that was waged between oil and coal.3 Yet arguably less attention has been devoted to another of oil’s early competitors, biofuels like ethanol and other
- 49. 34 NEW ENERGIES alcoholfuels, in propelling the newly invented internal combustion engine.4 Scholars have assumed that the motor vehicle revolution inevitably led to the oil transition.5 The consequence of this assumption has been to dismiss biofu- els, either explicitly or implicitly, as impractical, without understanding how they came to be seen as such. Against the standard narrative, then, this article contends that gasoline’s journey to becoming the most viable energy source for fueling engines was neither predetermined nor inevitable. Among the countries where the gasoline-biofuel debate was especially intense was France, one of the industrialized world’s smallest oil-producing countries and the largest alcohol-producing country. Until the mid-1950s, oil was found in small quantities in places like Pechelbronn in northeastern France and was still largely undiscovered in the French colonies. France’s in- ternational oil infrastructure was still in its early stages of development. With- in the metropole, French refineries employed approximately twelve thousand persons.6 Alcohol, on the other hand, was found in large quantities throughout the countryside and the colonies. In a country with a metropolitan population of forty-two million in the 1930s, an astonishing seven million were reported- ly either directly or indirectly employed in the alcohol industry.7 Those with a stake in the alcohol fuel included especially the powerful beet cultivators and winegrowers. Frequent surplus crises gripped this well-organized communi- ty. In their search for new outlets for these surpluses, beet and wine producers proposed the creation of an alcohol fuel that would also limit France’s foreign oil dependency. This chapter examines the motor fuel debate at two critical moments in France’s transition to gasoline-powered vehicles: the interwar years and the immediate post–World War II years. After each war, a range of groups—en- gineers; scientists; economists; political scientists; farmers; the oil industry; the automobile, trucking, and tourism industries; and politicians and bu- reaucrats—debated the pros and cons of foreign oil dependency. While in the interwar years, the alcohol fuel was seen as a viable alternative to imported oil, after World War II, it was marginalized and then nearly entirely removed from the fuel mix. Why was alcohol adopted as a fuel, then marginalized? After 1945, scientific reports on energy choices concluded that alcohol fuel was inefficient and uneconomical. Yet these reports elided the sociopolitical context in which such choices were embedded. While gasoline would come to have certain technical and economic advantages over alcohol fuel, these were not seen as advantages until a particular political constellation made them so. New ideas, interests, and alliances operating in a new context ultimately ren- dered alcohol fuel less efficient and less economical than gasoline. The question of whether to include alcohol in the fuel mix, then, was
- 50. The Oil fromOur Soil 35 never simply a technical question about its compatibility with engines or an economic question about its cost, even if decisions about engine design and calculations about cost would ultimately open up some fuel possibilities and close down others. The outcome of the motor fuel debate was determined by political struggles over who had the right to shape energy policy: politicians who were bound to their constituencies, or technocrats who claimed to speak more objectively on behalf of the “national interest”? Each group, based on its own assumptions, interests, and vision of future France, had different ways of defining fuel “cost.” The fuel debate thus ran deeper still, as it was shaped by but also helped change France’s economic orientation and political insti- tutions as the country urbanized, motorized, and sought greater centralized control over its energy supplies. The Interwar Motor Fuel Debate Conventional wisdom says that the battlefields of World War I laid the groundwork for oil’s global preeminence. At that time, motor vehicles over- took horses and trains in waging war. This narrative, polished by hindsight, is not so neat when seen from the perspective of policy debates at the time. It is true that during the war, French policymakers became aware that both the army and the economy were growing increasingly reliant on the internal combustion engine to move machines, men, and material. Consequently, they grew anxious about how to fuel these engines. How to fuel them, however, was still very much open to debate throughout the interwar years. Obstacles stood in the way of a full-scale shift to oil in France. First, neither metropolitan France nor its colonies were known to contain much oil. Most attempts at prospecting for oil had failed. In 1918 metropolitan oil amounted to only 12 percent of France’s fuel needs; in 1938, once the motor vehicle rev- olution had begun to accelerate, domestic supply covered only 1 percent of those needs.8 Oil exploration intensified in the colonies during the interwar period, but the Great Depression and World War II hindered major discov- eries.9 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, France depended on oil that came from the Middle East, Romania, and the United States, and whose supplies were largely controlled by American, British, and Dutch oil companies, the so-called majors.10 Second, policymakers expressed concern about French dependency on for- eign companies like Standard Oil and Royal Dutch/Shell for both security and economic reasons. Oil shortages and reliance on American supplies during World War I haunted interwar thinking. After 1918, these multinational com- panies abandoned their role as mere oil suppliers and moved into the retail field by buying up French companies, making them subsidiaries, and investing
- 51. 36 NEW ENERGIES substantialsums of money in France. They had close contacts in the French government and influenced public opinion through newspapers.11 France paid these companies two to three billion francs per year, thus adversely affecting France’s balance of payments, a problem that became especially acute during the Great Depression.12 This dependency induced anxieties about economic stagnation, national defense, and the erosion of state sovereignty, and incit- ed policymakers to devise a national fuel strategy and look for alternatives to oil. To check the influence of the majors and protect state sovereignty, a young generation emerged that fought to build a national oil industry. These “new men,” as they have been retrospectively dubbed (as opposed to the “old men” who opposed oil), included influential economic strategists, men with such varied political outlooks as Francis Delaisi, Ernest Mercier, and Lou- is Loucheur. In 1924 the French government encouraged the creation of the partly state-owned French Oil Company (CFP).13 In 1925 state officials created the National Office of Combustible Fuels, which was responsible primarily for supervising the oil industry but also for researching engine technology. Through legislation, especially a 1928 law, state officials aimed to curtail the “Anglo-Saxon trusts” by developing the French share of Romanian and Mid- dle East oil, by prospecting for oil in the colonies, and by building a refining industry on French soil.14 State control of the oil market extended to authoriz- ing the opening of new gas stations, which allowed state agents to monitor the kinds of gasoline on sale.15 These measures indicated that state officials and businessmen were starting to take an interest in building an oil industry, even if their commitment to it was hesitant and would pale in comparison to that of the post-1945 years. Significantly, oil activists like Delaisi, Mercier, and Loucheur tended to see the development of a national oil industry as contingent upon a larger restruc- turing of the country’s economic and political system. Many of these activists participated in the technocratic movement that emerged in the interwar years, a movement that was highly critical of parliamentary lawmaking. In their view, Parliament failed to take decisive action against the economic and social turmoil of the period. These oil activists and technocrats attacked the overall “Malthusian” mindset of France’s business and political class that was reluc- tant to venture further into creating an oil industry that would help liberate France from foreign oil companies.16 Moreover, the Budget Department of the Ministry of Finance refused to fund oil exploration.17 For these “new men,” the sluggish development of a national oil industry was a sign of state weakness. The third obstacle to the oil transition in France was the inability of engi- neers and scientists to arrive at a consensus on gasoline’s compatibility with
- 52. The Oil fromOur Soil 37 motors. Across the industrialized world, they continued to experiment with different fuels, and gasoline did not always produce the best results. At the time, gasoline was often low octane and led to engine knock, an unpleasant noise that occurs when fuel is improperly ignited and that can damage the engine. Moreover, at a high compression, gasoline could cause engines to ex- plode. Nevertheless, in the United States, engine design slowly began to solid- ify around gasoline due to a combination of scientific developments and oil lobbying.18 While American automobile engineers had tested different engine prototypes with alcohol, diesel, and steam, these engines were being built with low compression ratios in order to accommodate low-octane gasoline. The growing preference for gasoline had little to do with its superiority to alcohol fuel; rather, it hinged on the fact that in order to work with either fuel, early vehicles had to be designed to consume the less powerful of the two, which was gasoline. Over the long term, this ultimately worked against alcohol fuel. Given that they had been designed for gasoline, lower-compression engines did not perform as well when run on alcohol.19 Changes in American gasoline manufacture in the 1920s would give fur- ther advantages to gasoline. Improvements in thermal-cracking technology were beginning to help refiners produce greater gasoline yields, and the in- troduction of tetraethyl lead, a relatively cheap way to combat engine knock, nullified the octane-boosting advantages of alcohol.20 In France, however, en- gineers were slow to follow American developments because few businesses or state officials wished to invest in the new technology, because scientists showed concern about lead’s noxious fumes,21 and because France lacked do- mestic oil. Engine design in France did not solidify around any one fuel con- figuration in the interwar years, thus further obstructing the oil transition. The geopolitical, economic, and technical uncertainties surrounding gaso- line led engineers and scientists to experiment with alternative fuels like alco- hol. Already at the turn of the twentieth century, they had conducted the first tests with alcohol fuel and had concluded in favor of it.22 More experiments were conducted after World War I. In 1921 the French government created the Scientific Committee of National Fuels, which comprised France’s scien- tific elite. The committee ran trials and weighed alcohol fuel’s weaknesses, such as its relatively low energy density and its tendency to clog fuel lines and carburetors, against its strengths, such as its anti-knock and high-octane properties that were missing in gasoline. The committee concluded that “the alcohol-gasoline blend could be employed without any inconvenience in all the automobile motors built for being fueled by gasoline alone.”23 Despite the imperfections of both alcohol fuel and gasoline, most scientists agreed that a 50 percent alcohol–50 percent gasoline blend, what its proponents called a
- 53. 38 NEW ENERGIES “nationalfuel,” was the optimal blend because it corrected each fuel’s flaws.24 In 1935, as the United States was turning away from ethanol, the liberal econ- omists at L’économiste français, who were otherwise critical of agricultural protectionism, called the alcohol-gasoline mixture “perfect.”25 Finally, in 1938, at a time when military officials were once again growing concerned about secure energy supplies, another prominent fuel specialist observed that oil importers, who had previously been opposed to alcohol fuel, now appreciat- ed its nonexplosive and high-octane properties.26 Technical conclusions were clouded by political concerns. Alcohol fuel also seemed to serve long-term security and economic inter- ests. Numerous geological reports suggested that in twenty years worldwide oil production would no longer be able to assure the gasoline necessary to fuel the rapidly increasing fleet of motor vehicles.27 In the United States, the Federal Oil Conservation Board issued a report in 1932 that expected the de- pletion of known oil reserves within ten to twelve years and argued that al- cohol was an essential renewable fuel source.28 A French oil expert declared that “three generations will suffice to see oil rise and fall.”29 Another French observer wondered “if gasoline really is exhausted and if the large trusts will refuse to deliver it, we’ll either have to pay an exorbitant price or replace it with alcohol.”30 Given the fear that the industrialized world would quickly exhaust the earth’s oil supplies, officials looked to alternatives like alcohol fuel. Given these security concerns, and especially the support that it would bring to farmers, Parliament incrementally set up an agency (here called the state alcohol agency) between World War I and 1935 that was based at the Ministry of Finance and that purchased alcohol surpluses and found outlets for them. The alcohol-gasoline–based national fuel was among those outlets. The French government sold the national fuel for thirty francs less per hecto- liter than gasoline, even though government calculations showed that it cost thirty-five francs more than gasoline to make.31 Alcohol tended to be expensive to produce because it required an organized labor force and large amounts of fertilizer and because the distilleries burned coal imported from neighboring countries like Great Britain and Germany. The government surtaxed oil and alcoholic beverages to make up for the losses it incurred on alcohol fuel.32 As we will see, after World War II, these surtaxes on oil and drinks would mobi- lize consumer groups against alcohol fuel. Significantly, interwar calculations of the cost of both alcohol and oil included the long-term security factor and reflected the important place of farmers in French economic and social life. Alcohol’s value did not simply reflect an objective understanding of its
- 54. The Oil fromOur Soil 39 fuel potential; rather, its value was shaped by the structure of political power, which in the Third Republic (1870–1940) was dominated by Parliament, where agricultural interests were well entrenched. Alcohol producers were tightly organized, had support across the political spectrum, and had a dispropor- tionate amount of influence in Parliament. State officials were aware that when alcohol producers could not find enough buyers, producers took to the streets. In 1907, for instance, five hundred thousand strong had descended on Montpellier, the heartland of wine production. Protests erupted episodically throughout the 1920s and 1930s, causing regional economic paralysis and thus political problems in Paris. It should come as no surprise, then, that interwar research on alcohol fuel was led by Édouard Barthe, a socialist parliamentari- an from wine country. Immediately after the war, Barthe was named the state’s fuel commissioner. The fact that state officials nominated Barthe suggests just how much power the alcohol industry possessed and how much interest the political elite had in alcohol fuel as a way to curb foreign oil dependency. Even Bérenger, France’s most prominent oil activist of the 1920s, and someone who was far removed from agricultural politics, did not see oil and alcohol as an- tagonistic.33 One commentator believed that the oil industry could help make alcohol fuel a viable option: French oil industrialists “are as wealthy as anyone in capital, in factories, and in laboratories to experiment with [fuel] blends and motors.”34 Barthe and his allies, then, carried much influence over how alcohol fuel was perceived given the large number of citizens with a stake in the alcohol industry and their power over Parliament. To win over policymakers and the wider public to their plight, Barthe and his followers evoked a potent image: that of the “Anglo-Saxon trusts” threaten- ing the French peasantry. Fear of the inherent superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race was a long-standing trope in French political culture.35 In deploying this rhetoric, alcohol producers mobilized a number of different and sometimes antagonistic groups. Other raucous and powerful agricultural interest groups that hoped to obtain similar protection threw their support behind the state alcohol agency. Since the 1920s, Barthe had claimed that alcohol fuel would help France “escape the hegemony of the great worldwide trusts” and “in- crease the financial and economic strength of the nation by the limitless de- velopment of the richness of its soil.” A deputy from the northern beet-grow- ing region thanked Barthe for “the fine fight he had waged for twenty years on behalf of industrial alcohol.” The main farm lobby called alcohol protec- tion an “enormous advance for all French agriculture.” Finally, the minister of finance claimed that alcohol fuel boosted “France’s domestic finances and her foreign-exchange balance.”36 Alcohol fuel thus rallied various agricultural
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- 56. was blowing fromthe village, but even that did not wholly explain the phenomenon, since the various noises were so markedly distinct. Finally, Vernon concluded, and no doubt was correct in his conjecture, that the narrow gorge acted as a kind of telephone, which, with the aid of the steady wind blowing up its length, conducted the sounds accurately. The discovery amused the young man, and he sat where he was for a considerable time trying to distinguish between the several noises. Later in the day he decided to get Lucy to sit on the dam and then from the bottom of the gorge a mile away to call out and see if she could understand what he was saying. The experiment would be both scientific and interesting. For quite an hour Vernon waited, but no Hokar put in an appearance. He then spent another hour in walking slowly round the reservoir, and finally, without having seen a single person, he returned to luncheon. At the meal Colonel Towton mentioned that he had written a note to Miss Hest stating that the visit would be paid at three o'clock. "And I have given orders for a room to be got ready for Ida next to yours, Lady Corsoon," said the Colonel. "I doubt if Ida will come," sighed his guest. "She is singularly obstinate in having her own way. What she can see in that woman is a puzzle to me." "Miss Hest is very clever," remarked Lucy, "but there is something about her that I do not like." "For instance?" queried Vernon bending forward. "I can hardly say," said the girl thoughtfully. "She is clever and agreeable and quite well-bred. Yet she seems to be--be-- dangerous." "I think that word applies more to Maunders than to Miss Hest," observed Towton, "although I am bound to say that Miss Hest does not satisfy me in many ways. She is too masterful. Dangerous, no. I should not describe her as dangerous, Miss Corsoon."
- 57. "I should, andI do, Colonel. I may be wrong, but the first time I met Miss Hest at 'Rangoon' she gave me that impression." "One should never go against impressions," said Vernon gravely; "They are the instincts of the soul." "Nonsense," contradicted Lady Corsoon vigorously. "I'm sure when I first met my husband I could not bear him, and my mother had simply to drive me to the altar. Yet I married him, and I'm sure we are a most attached pair." The gentlemen were too well-bred to smile at this statement, yet it secretly amused both. Everyone knew that the undeniable good feeling which existed between Sir Julius and his wife was mainly due to their diverse interests in life, which kept them more or less apart. Lady Corsoon was always fluttering about as a society butterfly, while Sir Julius remained constantly in the City, earning money for her to spend. It was little credit to either that they were civil to one another on the rare occasions when they met. Cain and Abel themselves would not have quarrelled when only meeting--as the saying goes--once in a blue moon But Lady Corsoon felt quite certain that she was a model wife and a typical British matron (new style), and prattled on about her domestic happiness until it was time to start for Gerby Hall. "Vernon will escort you two ladies," said Towton, who was in riding kit, and exhibited a more youthful air than usual. "I can follow." "You won't ride to Gatehead until you have called at the Hall," urged Lady Corsoon; "for I may need you to insist upon Ida coming to The Grange." "I shall assuredly be at Gerby Hall in half an hour, more or less," replied the Colonel quietly. "But I should not think of insisting upon Ida becoming my guest unless she honours me of her own free will with a visit."
- 58. "Oh, nonsense," saidLady Corsoon pettishly. "When you know how infatuated she is with this woman Hest." And all the way down the winding road she lamented that Ida was so impossible, and the owner of Gerby Hall so second-rate. "For she is second-rate," finished Lady Corsoon triumphantly. "I always said so, and would say so with my dying breath." In due time the trio arrived at the gloomy Hall, and were shown by the fat maid into the dingy drawing-room. It was less chill and dismal on this occasion, as the windows were wide open and the warm breath of the day stole in to ameliorate the damp atmosphere, as did the sunshine to lighten the darkness. In the glare of day the furniture looked quite faded, and the hangings extremely shabby; but there was something dignified about the ancient room which impressed even Lady Corsoon. "A very quaint old place," she said surveying it through her lorgnette; "but damp. They ought to have a fire in the grate." "They couldn't very well have it anywhere else, mamma," giggled Lucy. "My dear, pray do not afflict me with your cheap wit. You perfectly well understand my meaning. I shall take this chair, as the light tries my eyes." So saying she selected a seat with its back to the windows, but less to preserve her eyesight than to prevent Miss Hest from seeing too plain evidence of her age. She throned herself in the spacious chair with the air of a queen, and assumed a dignified mein as the door opened to admit Ida and her hostess. Lady Corsoon's first remark was scarcely polite. "You _do_ look ill, Ida," she said submitting her cheek to a kiss, "and more than twice your age. Miss Hest, what have you been doing with her?"
- 59. "Trying to comforther," replied Frances drily. "But you can scarcely expect an affectionate girl like Ida to lose her father and not show some signs of grief." "Signs of fiddlestick, if you will excuse the expression. It's want of food and cheerful company, to say nothing of living in this vault." "Thank you, Lady Corsoon. I find the house of my ancestors very comfortable." "I think not," replied the visitor rudely. "Quaint, as I have already observed, old-world and interesting to an antiquarian, but I don't think anyone could call this comfortable. However, this state of things, so far as Ida is concerned, can be easily remedied. Ida, child, I have come to take you to the Grange, which stands in a much more healthy position." Ida, who had saluted her cousin and Vernon, turned even paler than she already was and looked sideways at Frances. "I think that I prefer to remain in this house," she said timidly. "Oh, you must not burden Miss Hest any longer," said her aunt coolly. "Ida's company is no burden to me," snapped Miss Hest, who seemed to be trying to keep her temper, "but if she chooses to leave me, she can." "I should think so; as she is free to come and go as she wishes. Ida?" "I would rather stop with Frances," said Ida faintly, and again sought the eye of her friend, as if seeking direction. "We are very happy here." "Miss Hest, I appeal to you," cried Lady Corsoon, looking important. "You can see for yourself that the dear child is like a plant, she wants air and sunlight and every attention."
- 60. "Ida is freeto go and come as she chooses," repeated Frances with a stealthy glance at the girl. "And perhaps it is just as well she should go. I am returning to London in a week or so." "Frances!" Ida started to her feet, and a faint hue tinged her cheek. "You never told me of this." "I never arrived at any decision until last night," replied Frances coldly, removing the arm which the girl had thrown fondly round her neck. "But a search amongst my brother's papers has shown me that my position financially speaking is not so secure as I thought it was. As it is necessary for me to earn my living I must go back to Professor Gail's at Isleworth, and probably I shall agree to his proposal that I should appear on the stage." "But, Frances, I have plenty of money. Share with me." "Ida," said Lady Corsoon sharply, "you must let older and wiser heads guide you as regards the disposition of your fortune. Besides, it may not be so secure as you think." "What?" Ida turned to face her aunt. "Then you already know that I am not Mr. Dimsdale's daughter." "I know something about it," said Lady Corsoon, concealing her exact knowledge and determined to appear surprised at nothing. "I received a letter stating that on certain conditions I could get the money of my brother. Whether you are my niece or not I can't say, but assuredly if the money is mine I must enter into possession of it. Of course, you may rely on my doing my best to help you." "I want nothing," said Ida, proudly lifting her head. "If the money is yours you shall certainly have it. Am I not right, Frances?" "Perfectly right. But Lady Corsoon's fortune--to use her own words with regard to you--may not be so secure as she thinks."
- 61. "If Ida isnot Martin's daughter, and there is no will, I should certainly inherit," cried Lady Corsoon quite fiercely. "And I confess that I am surprised to hear that my brother is not the father of the girl I have always supposed to be my niece. I should like an explanation." "You will have one to-morrow," said Miss Hest coolly. "I want one to-day," said the elder woman rapping her knuckles with her lorgnette. "What have you to do with this matter, may I ask?" "More than you suppose. But, after I have seen Colonel Towton, you shall be enlightened as to my exact position." "Frances, do you mean to say that the money is really mine?" demanded Ida with a look of breathless interest. "If it was, what would you do?" asked Miss Hest doubtfully. "I should give you all the money you required." Frances hesitated, then came forward and kissed the girl quietly. "You are a good child, Ida. I thought that I had lost your confidence." Miss Dimsdale did not contradict this statement. "I shall always remember how kind you have been to me," she said, shrinking a trifle from her friend's caress. "Nothing can make me forget the past." "Come, come," said Lady Corsoon, rising in a fussy manner. "This sort of thing will not do at all. I must understand plainly what this means. In the meantime, I request my niece to follow me to The Grange." "I am not your niece, if all I have learned is true, and I decline to be dictated to," said Ida quickly. "To-morrow I shall come to The
- 62. Grange." "Will you leaveme, Ida?" asked Frances quickly and with a look of pain. "For a time only," muttered the girl averting her head. "But I wish to go to Colonel Towton's to-morrow." "Many things seem about to happen to-morrow," observed Lady Corsoon walking towards the door in her most stately manner. "And as Ida refuses to obey me, I wash my hands of her. Come, Lucy. Come, Mr. Vernon. We must depart." "But the Colonel will be here shortly," protested Vernon, and Lucy took Ida's hand kindly between her own. "The Colonel may do what he pleases," said Lady Corsoon loftily. "I am not bound by his actions. Ida, I learn, is not my niece, and therefore I shall instruct my lawyer--since there is no will--to demand a surrender of Martin's property. Now that Miss Dimsdale-- no, not that--what is your name, may I ask?" And she hoisted the lorgnette again. Ida shrank back before that severe look, and broken down in health as she was with all she had gone through, burst into tears. Frances stepped between her and Lady Corsoon. "You are a cruel woman," she said indignantly, "and you shall leave my house at once." "Only too willingly, only too willingly," cried Lady Corsoon swelling with pompous indignation. "But I call everyone to witness that I shall have these matters examined into, and intend to claim my rights. Ida, you are no niece of mine by your own showing, so I have finished with you. Lucy! Mr. Vernon!" and she sailed out of the room and out of the house in a high state of indignation. The fact is, the good lady was greatly perplexed over the unexpected information that she had received. She had believed that her brother had made a will in her favour which Ida had destroyed; but she had never
- 63. expected to hearthat the girl was not Dimsdale's daughter. In her hurry she left Vernon and Lucy behind, while she simply rushed down the short avenue and came face to face with Colonel Towton, who was riding in at the gate. "What is the matter?" asked the Colonel surprised at seeing his guest alone. "Matter!" Lady Corsoon halted, breathing hard with anger. "I really don't know, save that the Hest woman has insulted me. Also I have heard that Ida is not my niece, and therefore I am sure the property belongs to me. I decline to stay longer in that house, and so I am returning home. Perhaps, Colonel, you will demand an explanation. If I don't receive a satisfactory one to-night, I write to my lawyer. So there!" Towton tried to stem the torrent of this speech, but without any result. Still talking of the way in which she had been treated, Lady Corsoon babbled her way out of the gate and disappeared. The Colonel rode up to the door, and, alighting from his horse, bound the bridle to a ring in the wall. As he stepped inside, Vernon appeared in attendance on Lucy. They had stayed behind to comfort Ida, who was weeping over the harsh treatment she had received from her presumed aunt. "What on earth is the matter?" asked Towton, putting the same question to the couple as he had put to Lady Corsoon. "Miss Lucy, I have met your mother rushing home in a high state of anger." "Miss Hest and mother have fallen out," said Lucy, hesitating how much to say, for she knew how Towton loved Ida. "And Lady Corsoon has learned that Ida is not her niece," put in Vernon. "Go in and comfort her, Colonel. I shall go after Lady Corsoon with Lucy."
- 64. "That is thebest thing to be done," cried Frances, overbearing, and putting her head out of the window. "Colonel Towton, I desire a private conversation." "Do you wish me to remain?" Vernon asked his friend in a low voice. "No, no. I must see Miss Hest alone. I understand what she wants. Go with Miss Lucy. She has already reached the gate." "But if you want me----" "I don't. When I return you shall know everything." "What do you mean?" demanded Vernon anxiously. "Colonel, Colonel," called out Miss Hest again. "I must go. Follow Miss Corsoon and pacify the old lady," said Towton hurriedly, and hastened into the house, leaving Vernon much astonished by his behaviour. Had the young man known of Miss Hest's visit on the previous evening, he might not have been so perplexed. As it was, he hastened after Lucy, who by this time was rapidly gaining on her indignant mother, with a feeling that Towton knew more than he did concerning the present state of affairs. Which as he afterwards learned, was precisely the case. The Colonel entered the gloomy drawing-room to find Ida weeping on the sofa and Frances comforting her. Before he could say a word, the latter turned on him indignantly. "Why did you send that insulting woman here?" "She came of her own accord," explained Towton frowning at the speech, "and surely Lady Corsoon has not insulted Ida." "And me. She has insulted us both," cried Miss Hest angrily. "I should have had her turned out of the house had she not gone."
- 65. "It was myfault by telling her that I was not her niece," said Ida in an agitated tone. "As if I could help that. But I won't trouble her in any way; she has never been kind to me. I shall not set eyes on her again." "But, Ida," said Towton, taking her hand and striving to speak cheerfully, "I want you to come to the Grange." "Not while Lady Corsoon is there, Richard." Frances drew a long breath of relief, which annoyed the Colonel. "Are you detaining Miss Dimsdale here?" he asked snappishly, for late events had tried his temper greatly. "Oh, no," cried Ida before her friend could speak. "As if Frances would do such a thing! But Lady Corsoon has been so rude." "You speak of her as Lady Corsoon?" "Naturally, since I am not her niece," said Ida simply. "When she leaves The Grange I shall be delighted to come." Colonel Towton flushed through his tan. "I am a bachelor, Ida," he said in stiff tones. "You can't come to my house without a lady is staying there. That is unless you will marry me at once." Ida placed her two hands on his shoulders and looked at him kindly through her tears. "If you will take a girl without a sixpence, I shall marry you as soon as you please, Richard." "Don't put his chivalry to the test, Ida," remarked Frances in somewhat acrid tones. "Colonel Towton knows that you have ten thousand a year." "But if this story is true----" "It's quite true, only there is a will."
- 66. "A will?" Idastared and flushed with pleasure. "Then poor Mr. Dimsdale did not entirely forget me." "He did not forget you at all. I found this will--well it doesn't matter where, since I explained everything to our friend here last night. But you inherit the Dimsdale property as Ida Menteith, so Lady Corsoon will not be able to strip you of your worldly goods." "Oh!"--Ida grew even more scarlet--"then, Richard----" He caught her hands and pressed them to his breast. "My dear, I would take you without a single penny." "And that is the way in which you will have to take her," said Frances drily, "unless you consent to my demands." "I leave that to Ida," said Towton, once more stiff and military. "Leave what to me?" asked Ida, looking from one to the other. Frances turned to her in a business-like way. "The property my brother has made over to me is mortgaged and I am penniless. If you marry the Colonel I lose your society and also the chance of being your companion at a certain wage. To make amends I ask for ten thousand pounds." "You shall have it, of course,' said Ida promptly. "Will you sign this document giving it to me?" asked Miss Hest pulling a sheet of paper out of her pocket. "At once, if you will give me pen and ink." The two women went towards a table upon which stood what was required. Apparently Frances had made all necessary preparations to get the money. "You can give me a cheque also. Here is the book," she said eagerly.
- 67. "Ida, Ida! Areyou wise in doing this?" warned the Colonel, following. "Yes," said the girl rapidly signing her name and without even reading the document. "I want to marry you and be rid of Frances." Miss Hest sneered, while Towton started back, utterly astonished by the change of tone. "I thought--I fancied--I believed," he stuttered, "that you were deeply attached to Miss Hest." "I was, but--there are circumstances----" "Oh, let us have the truth," interposed Frances sharply. "You liked me well enough and I liked you until you found that I was too clever for you, so----" Ida caught at her lover's hand and made an effort to pull herself together in the face of Miss Hest's contemptuous eyes. "You treated me shamefully, Frances," she said in tones of reproach. "I loved you dearly until you began to bully me and to make my life a burden. You got me down here in order to gain possession of my money, and have been trying to influence me into giving up not only my property but Richard also. I saw what you were ever since we came to this house, but, to deceive you, I played my part, and led you to believe that I still loved----" "Oh, rubbish," said Miss Hest, whose eyes were as hard as jade. "You played your part very badly. I saw through your weak tricks. You were afraid of me, you know you were." "Yes, I was," said Ida, clinging to the amazed Colonel. "Because I believe if you could have got me to sign away my property that you would have killed me. I am willing to give you ten thousand pounds, as I once had some affection for you; but now that you have got your pound of flesh I shall leave this house with Richard." "To go to Lady Corsoon?"
- 68. "Richard will protectme. And, heaven help me!" said Ida, putting her hand to her head piteously. "I feel so dazed that I scarcely know what I am saying." "You are not too dazed to sign a cheque." Ida without a word stepped to the table and began to write in the cheque-book. Towton protested. "You shall not do this," he declared. "While I fancied you loved Miss Hest, I was willing you should make her a present of this large sum. But since she has treated you badly- ---" "If Ida does not sign the cheque she does not get the will," said Frances imperiously. "You can save your breath, Colonel." "You may hand over a false will?" "If I did that I should not get the ten thousand pounds," retorted Frances. "Don't be a fool. I am acting straightforwardly enough." "Here is the money," said Ida tearing out the signed cheque and passing it to her quondam friend. "And here is the will," replied Miss Hest, offering a paper, which Ida took and gave to the Colonel. Towton glanced rapidly at the document. It certainly seemed to be a genuine will signed by Martin Dimsdale and also by Venery and Smith. He felt sure that there was no trickery about the paper, since Miss Hest--now that Lady Corsoon knew the truth--would not be able to get the money unless the testament of Martin Dimsdale was above reproach. "It's all right," he remarked, slipping the precious paper into the breast pocket of his coat. "But you, Miss Hest, are little else than a blackmailer. You are the worthy sister of your confounded brother."
- 69. The woman laughedafter a critical glance at the cheque and signed document to make sure that both were in order. "I am able to bear all your hard names since I have secured the money. But that Ida refused to obey me and kicked over the traces you would never have had the will." "I thought that the money did not belong to me," protested Ida, sheltering herself under the wing of her lover, "and wanted to return it to Lady Corsoon." Frances nodded with a sneer. "Oh, I know how tender your conscience is. You have whimpered enough about it. Only because of your silly attitude did I make this arrangement, which is the best I can do for myself. But I must say one thing, Ida, and you can take it as a compliment. Clever as I am, you with your soft over-scrupulous nature have been too many for me. Few people can say that. And now that all is over between us, you can leave my house, as I hate the sight of your insipid face." Ida shrank back into the Colonel's arms, and he addressed Miss Hest in a voice rendered hoarse with indignation. "You are a thoroughly bad woman. I never did approve of you, and now that I see you, as Ida does, in your true colours, I tell you----" "My true colours," scoffed the other contemptuously. "No one knows what they are. You least of all, you narrow-minded idiot." "What do you mean?" demanded Towton, taken aback by the malignant look on her hard white face. "Don't ask her," implored Ida, striving to pull her lover to the door, "she will only lie. Let us leave this wicked house, as I am certain that there is something terrible concealed here." "Something terrible," echoed Towton looking startled.
- 70. "Don't talk rubbish,"muttered Frances, with a dangerous expression in her eyes. "Colonel, you had better take away that fool, or it will be the worse for her. I warn you." "I have heard strange noises," went on Ida feverishly. "People have been coming and going in the dead of night. Then that Hindoo----" "Hokar!" cried the Colonel. "Miss Hest, how do you explain Hokar?" "I explain nothing," snapped Frances, marching to the door in an imperious way and throwing it open. "Out you go, both of you," She recoiled. "Ah! you dare to!"--with a gasp she tried to close the door again, but Towton dashed forward and caught her arm. "I have seen; it is too late," he almost shouted. "Maunders. Come in!" It was indeed Maunders who stood on the threshold. He looked the ghost of his former handsome, insolent, prosperous self. Thin and haggard and worn, with his clothes hanging loosely on his figure, he presented a woeful spectacle. "What have you been doing to yourself? How did you come here?" asked Towton, stepping back much startled, with Ida on his arm. "Ask that woman how I came here; ask her how she has treated me. But I escaped from the room she locked me in by climbing out of the window. Now I shall show her the mercy she has shown me. She is-- --" Frances darted forward and clapped her hand on his mouth. "I'll kill you if you say the word. You cursed fool. Be silent or I give you up." Maunders, with a strength which his frail looks scarcely suggested, threw her off and staggered against the door. "I give _you_ up," he shrieked, wild with anger, "you thief, you blackmailer, you murderess!"
- 71. "What?" cried Towtoneagerly, and grasping vaguely at the terrible truth. "Yes." Maunders pointed an accusing finger at Frances Hest. "There is The Spider. A woman; a devil! Arrest her; imprison her; hang her on the gallows," and he sank down on the floor, his back to the door, with hatred written on his white and ghastly face. CHAPTER XXI. JUSTICE. There was a long pause, a sinister lull in the tempest of passion which was raging in that quiet, prosaic room. Gasping with impotent passion, Maunders lay, resting his head against the door, an obstacle which prevented the guilty woman from escaping. Not that she attempted to escape. With a deadly white face, with steady, cold, malignant eyes, like those of a snake, and with a contemptuous smile on her thin lips. The Spider, visible at last in all her brazen wickedness, stood defiantly at bay. Towton, with Ida clinging to his arm almost terrified out of her senses, stared aghast at the evil being who had been such a curse to many. The ominous silence was like the year-long moment before the bursting of a bomb. Ida, with chattering teeth and trembling limbs, was the first to recover the use of her tongue; but she could scarcely form the words. "Oh, God! oh, God!" she whimpered, hiding her face on her lover's breast; "it's too awful. I never thought--I never thought--oh-- oh--oh!" She broke down with a strange, hysterical, choking cry, and
- 72. would have fallento the ground but that the Colonel placed her gently in a near chair. Then he turned with military precision to face Miss Hest. "You are The Spider?" he asked in dry, precise tones, and now entirely master of himself. "Yes," she replied coolly, and her mouth closed with a triumphant snap. "You infernal fiend----" "Gently! Gently! Hard names break no bones, Colonel. You should be more of a man than to throw words at a woman." "Are you a woman?" "Yes," gasped Maunders, raising himself on his elbow and wiping the froth from his pale lips; "she is Frances Hest right enough. Her brother is a myth invented by herself to mask her devilries. But Frances or Francis--she is The Spider!" "I did not mean that exactly," said Towton in his hard voice; "but I asked if one capable of the enormities credited to The Spider can possibly be a woman." "I am The Spider," said Miss Hest with a shrug. "There is your answer." "You are a demon." "More names! Really, Colonel Towton, you are very childish. You sink to the level of that fool," and she pointed scornfully to Ida, who was weeping in the chair as though her heart would break. "To think that I should have been her friend," moaned Ida with a fresh burst of tears and hiding her face.
- 73. "You little fool,"said Frances in a gentle, dangerous voice. "I have been a better friend to you than you think. But that I pitied you as being a poor, weak, silly worm, I would have murdered you long ago." "You murdered my father," shivered Ida, not daring to meet the cold eyes which rested on her prostrate form. "Martin Dimsdale was not your father." "You--you--you murdered him." "Yes, I did." "What!" Towton could scarcely believe his ears. "You admit the crime?" Frances yawned ostentatiously. "If I admit that I am The Spider it follows that I must have murdered Dimsdale." "Well, no," replied Towton, truthfully and justly. "You may have employed Hokar to strangle him." "That is very good of you," said Frances satirically, "but I don't place my own sins on the shoulders of others. Hokar taught me how to strangle in the Thug fashion certainly, but he did not kill Dimsdale. I did." "Still, I don't believe that the murder was premeditated," insisted Towton. "Upon my word," said Miss Hest good-humouredly and as coolly as though she were gossiping over a cup of tea, "one would think you were counsel for the defence. No, you are right. I did not intend to murder Dimsdale. Having got you out of the way----" "You mean that you got Vernon out of the way?"
- 74. "Of course," assentedFrances, sitting down and crossing her legs in a gentlemanly fashion; "but you must excuse my bad memory, as I have so much to think of. I got Vernon out of the way, as I overheard, and Maunders there overheard, the arrangement for a trap. We were both on the verandah." "And I was with you," wailed Ida, shivering again. "So you were," said Miss Hest raising her eyebrows, "but you heard nothing. Maunders caught a word or two through the open window of the library and warned me. While you, my dear Ida, were talking to him I stole round the corner and listened. Knowing all about the trap, I had Vernon decoyed to the Kensington house, and at the appointed time I went into the library, masked and cloaked, as were the other guests at the ball. Dimsdale was waiting for me. I stole up behind him and slipped a handkerchief round his neck." "Oh!" The Colonel was revolted. "And you say that the crime was not premeditated?" "I say truly. I simply prepared to strangle him slightly should he have made an outcry. Remember, I was in a dangerous position and could not stand on ceremony. Had Dimsdale given me the money and permitted me to leave by the window I would have spared his life. As it was, he saw me in the mirror, which was directly in front of him." "But you were masked: he could not recognise you?" "I am coming to that. He waited for a moment, until I made my demand for the money, then suddenly threw back his hand, and before I guessed his intention he tore the mask from my face. When he recognised me I was obliged, for my own safety, to strangle him. As the handkerchief was in position I simply tightened it, and he was soon dead. Then I searched for the money, but, not being able to find it, I resumed my mask and returned to the ballroom. Maunders, of course, was with me all the time, and awaited my return."
- 75. "I did notknow that you had committed a murder," said Maunders gloomily. "No, I did not tell you at the time: it would have spoilt your pleasure. But when Ida learned the truth by entering the library you guessed what had taken place. I kept you with me for your own sake, to provide an _alibi_ should you be suspected, as I feared Vernon might be clever enough to guess that you had something to do with it. As a matter of fact, he did hint at it when he called many days later, but I was enabled to say that you were with me all the time, and so he was put off the scent." "I remember," murmured the Colonel to himself, but not so low as not to be overheard by Miss Hest's marvellously sharp ears. "Vernon was quite satisfied when you provided the _alibi_ for Maunders. He never suspected _you_." "No one ever suspected me," said Frances coolly. "There is no need for me to speak of my own cleverness. Anyone who can baffle the police as I have done has no need to boast." "But why, in heaven's name, with your abilities, did you embark on such an evil course?" asked Towton amazed at her _sang-froid_. "Fate, Fortune, Destiny: what name you will," said Miss Hest carelessly. "But you have tried to exonerate me, Colonel, and because of that you shall hear the whole story," and, leaning forward, she pulled the bell-rope. "Remember, I shall repeat all you say to the police," warned Towton. "I am not afraid of the police," retorted Frances with a shrug; "all my plans are made--to escape. As that fool," she pointed to Maunders lying sullenly on the floor, "has betrayed me twice I give him to you as a sacrifice. But I shall never stand in the dock, you may be sure." "Will you kill yourself?" cried Ida, terrified at this strength of mind.
- 76. "No, my dear.I am too much in love with life. You shall know my plan presently. Meantime, you shall hear how I came to be a blackmailer, as you have already heard why I murdered Dimsdale, to my misfortune." "To your misfortune, indeed! sharply. "You may well say so, Colonel. I never intended to soil my hands with blood, least of all with that of a man whom I liked and who was kind to me. Don't sigh, Ida; after all, I did not shed his blood, as I merely strangled him. But that death brought you and Vernon in chase of me, Colonel, and so I am hunted down. Still, had Maunders been true, I should have been safe. You knew Francis Hest as the criminal, thanks to Maunders. I merged the brother in the sister and made everything safe. Now," she shrugged her shoulders, "I must flit." "You shall go to prison with me," panted Maunders furiously. "I think not," rejoined Miss Hest contemptuously. "Don't you know me well enough yet to be aware that I provide against all contingencies. Come in!" she added, raising her voice, and, when the door opened, looked at Towton. "I shall ask my old nurse, Miss Jewin, to relate the beginning of my career; at a later time I can take up the tale, and then our tumbled-down friend yonder can finish the story. Sarah, enter and close the door." Miss Sarah Jewin was peaked-faced and white, with thin lips, scanty grey hair and cold grey eyes. She was thin and bony and very tall, so that in her plain black dress she looked like a line--length without breadth. As she entered Maunders with a groan hoisted himself into a chair. Miss Jewin had already pushed him aside when she entered the room and, in place of replying to her mistress, stood looking at his scowling, haggard face with a look of consternation. Maunders replied to the look with petty triumph.
- 77. "Yes, I gotout," he said, rubbing the ragged beard which disfigured his well-moulded chin. "I wrenched a bar out of the window and climbed down by the ivy. Now the murder's out, and you and your hellish mistress are about to be brought to book." "Don't mind him, Sarah," said Frances lazily and leaning back in her chair to light a cigarette; "you are safe and so am I. Let the fool talk. In the meantime, tell Colonel Towton here how I came to England and how you knew that Ida was merely Dimsdale's adopted daughter." "I thought you wanted these things kept secret," said Miss Jewin in dismay and turning pale with dread at the situation in which she found herself. "The time for secrets is past, Sarah. Shortly, thanks to your having allowed Maunders to escape and to Colonel Towton's sense of justice, the hue and cry will be out against the whole of us. Is Hokar at his post?" "Yes. He went away when you gave orders." "That's all right. I'll escape, sure enough, and so will you. We'll leave Maunders behind to face justice: he can declare himself to be The Spider instead of me if he chooses." "Oh!" Miss Jewin started back looking terrified. "Do they know----" "Maunders has told them, you dear old idiot. But there's no time to be lost, Sarah; tell your story." "And be frank," broke in the Colonel, who was truly amazed at Miss Hest's cool composure. "If you turn King's evidence you may receive a short sentence for your complicity." Sarah Jewin folded her arms primly. "Begging your pardon, sir, but I won't receive any sentence at all. I am quite sure that Miss Frances
- 78. will save mefrom going to prison." "I fail to see how she can save herself, let alone you," said Towton coldly. "My horse is at the door. After placing Miss Dimsdale in safety I shall ride to Gatehead and send for the police. You needn't chuckle, Miss Hest, and think you will escape meantime. I shall raise the village and you will be carefully watched." "You can act as you please," said Frances coolly. "I am not The Spider for nothing, and I shall baffle you as I have baffled others. Meantime since you were so just to me, I shall satisfy your curiosity, which I am sure is very great. Sarah, tell your story." "One moment," said Towton, turning to the prim woman, "you lured Vernon into the kitchen of that empty Kensington house?" She dropped an ironical curtsey. "Yes, sir. Miss Frances was pleased that I managed so cleverly." Ida stared wide-eyed at the shameless looks and speech of the housekeeper, and Towton frowned. That these creatures should so audaciously confess their crimes when they knew he would shortly summon the police puzzled him greatly. Also, remembering the wonderful craft of The Spider, he felt uneasy as to what might happen, but he could not conjecture in what way she could extricate herself and her accomplice from the trap in which they were safely caught. However, he made no comment on Miss Jewin's insolence, but merely ordered her to proceed. "About thirty-five years ago," said Miss Jewin, plunging into her story without any preliminary explanation, "I was in India and nurse to Mrs. Hest, who was the wife of Captain Theodore Hest, stationed at Bombay. The Captain's father, who lived here, was angry when his son went into the Army, and cut him off with a shilling, but my master believed that if a son were born to inherit the estates his father would relent. When my mistress's baby proved to be a girl he was much disappointed. However, as his father was old and might
- 79. die before hefound out the trick, he sent home news that the baby was a boy, and had her baptised Francis." "So you see," broke in Miss Hest who was smoking quietly, "that my real name is Francis, and by law I am a man. As a woman I am Frances, so there is merely the difference of one letter. Go on, Sarah." "She," said Miss Jewin, pointing to her mistress, "was dressed as a boy and brought up as a boy, so that the estates might come to her. My master's father relented when he heard that he had, as he supposed, a grandson, and made a will in the boy's favour." "The boy, you understand, Colonel, being a girl--myself," said Frances for the sake of clearness. "I quite understand," said the Colonel frowning. "Go on." "Then my master and mistress were carried off within a month of one another by fever," continued Miss Jewin. "They died in Burmah, where the Captain had gone with his regiment. I then took charge of Miss Hest, who was always called Master Francis, and came to Gerby Hall. Old Mr. Hest, the grandfather, just lived six months longer, but he died under the impression that his grand-daughter was a grandson. Miss Frances thus became possessed of the property." "Didn't the lawyer know that she was a girl?" asked Towton surprised. "No. As she had always been brought up as a boy the deception was complete, sir," said Miss Jewin, using the word with shameless deliberation. "The lawyer came here and saw Miss Frances in her boy's clothes." "And in this way," explained Miss Hest, "it became current gossip in the village that I had a twin brother."
- 80. "A twin sister,you mean?" said the Colonel doubtfully. "Well, you might put it that way. At all events, everyone in Bowderstyke believes to this day that there is a boy and a girl, or, rather, a man and a woman Hest. I alternately wore male and female clothes." "Why was there any need for you to wear female clothes at all?" "That was my fault," said Miss Jewin quickly. "When the succession to the estates was settled I could not bear that Miss Frances should masquerade any longer as a boy. I therefore dressed her in girl's clothes, to which she was entitled, and invented the twin story. Sometimes she was a boy, so that the lawyers should not learn the truth, and sometimes a girl to please me. There's the whole story." "Now it's my turn," said Frances, throwing away her cigarette. "When I grew up and learned how Sarah had muddled my sex in the eyes of the world I decided to make use of it in order to earn money." "Why did you need money when you had the estates?" asked Towton briefly. "Oh, those were mortgaged up to the hilt, my dear sir. I wanted to be rich and to restore the Hest family to their old position For this reason I posed as a philanthropist and spent the money I did. What with the sums I have given in charity and the buildings I have constructed, and the dam, which is my work, I think, Colonel, that the Hests can hold their own with the Towtons. I hated to think that my family was down while yours was up." "Oh," said the Colonel with contempt, "so it's a case of jealousy merely. All your philanthropy was a fraud?" For the first time Frances coloured and rose out of her chair to reply with more emphasis. "No; you must not say that. I really have a mixed nature, and like to help people. My good qualities are the outcome of my evil ones. I wanted to aggrandize the Hests,
- 81. certainly, since theywere lords of Bowderstyke Valley, until your family robbed them of their property. But also I really wished to do good and help people. I think I succeeded." "At the cost of murder," said Ida resentfully. "That was a mistake," replied Frances glibly, "as I never intended to murder Dimsdale. When I went to London in my woman's dress, with very little money in my pocket, I simply intended to earn my fortune on the stage, and by reciting to make Francis Hest--my other self, who was supposed to live here--wealthy and popular. I found that the reciting did not pay and cast about for some better means of making money. Alternately I lived in London as Frances, and in Bowderstyke as Francis. But I could not gain my ends by honest means, and so was obliged to take to dishonest ways. If you wish to know the devil who tempted me to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, he is before you," and she pointed deliberately to Constantine. "It's a lie," cried Maunders, starting to his feet with a fine appearance of indignation. "I met you three or four years ago in London and you discovered that I earned my living by telling fortunes as Diabella. That was all, except," he added, scowling, "that you blackmailed me." "Quite so," said Miss Hest quietly. "I tried my 'prentice hand on you, and the means of making money in this way was so easy that I took it up as a trade and adopted you as a partner. Go on, Maunders, you tell the rest of the story so that everything may be made clear." "There's nothing to tell," said Maunders doggedly, and casting down his eyes as he met Ida's sorrowful look, for he was not so entirely lost to all sense of shame as were the other two law-breakers. "You made me find out all manner of secrets from my clients by hinting at things and asking questions and by----" "I know," interrupted Towton waving his hand. "I am aware of how fortune-tellers hint at a possibility and so find out the actual truth
- 82. from their toocredulous clients. No wonder The Spider learned much that people would fain have kept to themselves. Who told you about Dimsdale?" "You know," said Maunders sullenly, "that woman there." "Yes," said Miss Jewin, still prim and shameless. "When in Burmah with my master I heard about Mr. Dimsdale's love for Mrs. Menteith and how, when her husband died, he adopted the child. But I never said that Mr. Dimsdale delayed any expedition so as to get Mr. Menteith killed." "No. I invented that and made Maunders tell it to you, Ida, and to you, Colonel, with the additions," put in Miss Hest, with great coolness. "Also, on finding out that Ida was not Dimsdale's daughter, I became alarmed as to the disposition of the property, therefore I made myself a friend of the family and secured the free run of the house." "You intended to get my money?" asked Ida reproachfully. "Certainly, my dear," replied Frances, raising her eyebrows. "Ten thousand a year was far too much for a chit like you to handle. I intended to get command of the whole lot. First I hunted in the dead of night for the will, and found it in the library desk. Then I made Maunders tell you that you were not Dimsdale's daughter, after the murder, so that you might be dependent on me, since I knew a secret which could rob you of the money. I had the secret told also to the Colonel so that he might learn he would only have a penniless wife should he marry you, my dear Ida." "Did you think so meanly of me as that?" demanded Towton, colouring indignantly. Miss Hest raised her eyebrows. "My dear sir, my experience of human nature has shown me that there is no mean trick which the majority of men will not commit for money. You, however, were in
- 83. the minority, andso was Ida, as you both were honest. This upset my calculations, as I could not provide against the unseen in human nature. You, Colonel, still insisted upon marrying Ida, and she wished to hand over the money to Lady Corsoon. For this reason I was forced to play my last card and produce the will." "But you did not intend to be found out as The Spider?" "No, I did not," confessed Frances calmly. "When Maunders betrayed me at Isleworth you thought that The Spider was a man, which was exactly what I wanted and what I counted upon should such an event as unexpected betrayal happen. In the fog I dragged Maunders away, and we went to the house of a friend of mine whose name I don't intend you to know. I wired in cypher to Miss Jewin here to send a telegram to Francis Hest at Professor Gail's." "We got that," said the Colonel quickly, "and it threw us off the scent." "I thought it would," said Miss Hest coolly. "So while you were hunting for The Spider as a man in London I went down with Maunders--he was disguised as an old gentleman and I resumed my womanly dress. Then I wrote you on the plea of talking about Ida and asked after my pretended brother to still further puzzle you." "You certainly succeeded," retorted Towton, trying to conceal his wonder at all this clever trickery; "but Ida was here and must have known that you were absent from the house as Francis." "Oh, no. I appeared before her twice in this room, which is, as you see, not very well lighted, in my male disguise and with the painted scar on my face. She was entirely taken in." "The very simplicity of your disguise took me in," said Ida angrily and wincing at having been so blinded. "Had you worn a beard or a wig I should have recognised you."
- 84. "I think not,"said Miss Hest quietly and with an amused smile. "As the man I wore my hair somewhat long----" "I noted that," said the Colonel quickly. "How clever of you. Well, then, as a woman I merely knitted in false hair. I couldn't wear false hair as a man since Ida would then have been sharp enough to have recognised me. But plenty of women wear false plaits, so I was safe on that score: she never suspected me. My sole disguise was the cicatrice, skilfully painted, and the success of the whole business lay--as Ida has submitted--in its boldness and in the belief that I had a twin brother. I have always found," added Miss Hest musingly, "that the bolder one is the safer it is: audacity always scores. At all events, I so closely resembled my own true self that no one thought I was anyone else but what I represented myself to be. As Francis I told Ida that I was taking my sister away for a week, and so slipped up to London to meet Vernon at Lady Corsoon's and to be nearly trapped at Isleworth." "What about Hokar and Bahadur?" asked the Colonel abruptly. "Hokar," said Miss Jewin, making the explanation instead of Frances, "was an old servant of Captain Hest's and came to England with me and the child. Later he sent for his nephew, who was Bahadur." "Yes. And I gave them both to Maunders when I set him up in those splendid Egyptian rooms in Bond Street," observed her mistress. "They were not engaged to strangle people, as you may think, Colonel, but I merely wished them to add to the fantastical look of the place when fortunes were being told. That you were so nearly strangled, and Vernon also, was your own fault and his own. You should mind your own business, my friend." "I am going to mind it now," said Towton with a frown; "but first tell me, since you are so frank, what about Lady Corsoon's jewels?" "They are in this house. I gave them into Miss Jewin's possession."
- 85. "And Lady Corsooncan have them for one hundred pounds," said Miss Jewin. "A very modest demand, Sarah," said Miss Hest approvingly, "but as the game is up I don't think you will get more. I shall leave you to arrange about getting the money and handing back the jewels. Lady Corsoon will be safe, and at a small loss. But I am glad to think that she will not get your money, Ida, dear." "Don't speak to me," cried Ida starting to her feet. "The more you say the more I see how shamefully you have treated me." "I have spared you," said Miss Hest coolly. "I could have stripped you entirely bare had I so chosen." "No. By your own showing I was too clever for you." "Why, that is true, and simply because you were honest. I always wished to keep on the right side of the law, or I could have got you to make a will in my favour, and then you would have been poisoned." "How dare you?" shouted Towton, while Ida gave a faint cry. "You have learned how much I dare," said Frances with an unpleasant look. "So, now the story is told, perhaps you will leave my house." Colonel Towton walked towards the door with Ida on his arm and roughly pushed Miss Jewin aside. "I shall place Miss Dimsdale----" "Miss Menteith," sneered Frances. "In safety," continued Towton without noticing the interruption, "and then I shall ride for the police."
- 86. "I shall come,too," cried Maunders starting to his feet. "She will lock me up again and perhaps may kill me." "Stay where you are," commanded Frances sharply. "I intend to----" Maunders did not wait to hear the end of the sentence. Seeing that Towton and Ida blocked the door he made a rush at the nearest window and sprang out of it with a dexterity begotten of sheer fear. Whether Frances intended to take him with her when she fled, or whether she intended to murder him he could not say, but he preferred to trust in the mercy of the law rather than in that of the woman who had been his evil genius. Crazy with terror, he tumbled to the ground, and Towton, along with Ida, ran to the front door, to see him speeding across the grass. A moment later and Frances, with a revolver in her hand, leaped from the window in pursuit. From the expression on her face she evidently intended nothing less than murder. Towton hastily unbuckled the bridle from the ring and flung himself on his horse. "Place your foot on my toe, Ida," he commanded; "up you get. There," he added, gathering up the reins as she sat on his saddle-bow and placed her arms round his neck; "now let us alarm the village. That poor devil will be shot if this fiendish woman is not arrested." And he rode forward at a moderately fast pace. "She'll catch him," chuckled Sarah Jewin, who had come to the door and was looking out from under the palm of her hand. "Shoot, Miss Frances. Shoot!" Maunders, finding that he was being chased, could not make directly for the gate and dodged behind some shrubs. Frances sighted him and fired a shot. It winged him, for he gave a yell of fear and ran directly towards her in the open. She fired another shot, which struck him in the breast, and he pitched forward at her feet. Just as she fired a third shot into his prostrate body there came a noise like thunder and a terrible cry from Miss Jewin.
- 87. "The signal! Thesignal! The dam's burst!" and she bolted into the house. In a flash Towton comprehended and set spurs to his horse. Frances strove to fly, but Maunders with a last effort caught at her foot and she fell heavily, fighting for freedom like a wild cat. The next moment he had her by the throat. And in the distance a mighty roaring struck the ears of all as the flood came down gigantically. CHAPTER XXII. THE END OF IT ALL. Towton could not quite understand the situation, as there was no time to consider matters. All he knew was that the Bolly Dam had burst, and even had Miss Jewin not spoken, the appalling noise would have informed him of the catastrophe. With Ida in his arms he spurred his horse frantically out of the gate and across the village bridge. He found the crooked street filled with people, called out by the unexpected thunder. "The dam's burst: get on the high ground," shouted Towton, and with a yell of fear men, women, and children began to run wildly in the direction of the gorge and to disappear amongst the houses in the hope of gaining some level beyond the height of the down- coming flood. But there was scanty time for safety. The hollow booming sound of the waters plunging through the narrows sounded ever nearer and nearer with terrible distinctness: it seemed as though the waters were bellowing for their prey. In a moment the
- 88. Colonel comprehended thatit was too late to skirt the village and gain the winding road, where they would be safe. Ida gave a cry of alarm as he wrenched round the now startled horse and clattered through the village street on his way down the valley. It seemed the only chance. "I'll save you yet, my darling," muttered Towton, setting his teeth. "We must make for Gatehead," and he drove his spurs into the animal, which now was becoming unmanageable with the roaring of the flood. Ida, almost insensible with terror, clung to her lover's neck, and the horse, making no more of the double burden than if it had been a feather, tore at top speed along the road between the torrent and the precipice. There was no safety on either side, as the precipice could not be climbed, and the dry bed of the stream merely offered a deeper grave. Fortunately, the road sloped gradually to the mouth of the valley, some two miles away, therefore the downward trend offered extra means to escape the pursuing greedy waters. A backward glance showed Towton that a tremendous flood was shooting out of the bottle-mouth of the upper gorge with terrific rapidity. The whole of the huge lake, artificial as well as natural, was emptying itself in one vast outpour, and owing to the narrowness of the valley the concentrated force was gigantic. If the flood caught them they would either be dashed to pieces against the rocks or would be borne onward--horse and maid and man--to be expelled at Gatehead, as if fired from the mouth of a cannon. "Oh, God, save us! Oh, God, save us!" was all that Ida could moan. "He will; He will," cried Towton, riding under spur and whip with a mad joy in the adventure, perilous as it was. "He will save the innocent and punish the guilty. Never fear, never fear, my darling." On roared the enormous body of water, curling like a mighty wave crested with foam and glistening like a colossal jewel in the serene sunshine. It passed with a hoarse triumphant screaming over the
- 89. fated village, andin a single moment Bowderstyke was not. Bearing _débris_ and bodies of cattle and men, women and children on its breast, the water rolled majestically on its destroying way. Like a wall of steel it stood up, stretching from wall to wall of the valley, and before it tore the terrified horse, warned by its instinct of rapidly approaching danger. "We are lost! we are lost!" screamed Ida, hiding her face on Towton's shoulder. "We can never escape. It's a mile further." "There's a crack--a path--a break in the precipice," panted the man, almost despairing of saving what he loved best in the world. "If we can gain that we can scramble up, and--and---- Great God! How it travels!" From the sides of the valley trees were being wrenched up by their roots, and even the stones lying in the bed of the torrent were being lifted and swept onward like pieces of straw. Owing to the increasing breadth of the valley the shouting and the level of the flood had somewhat lessened, but the hoarse, steady murmur with which it smoothly advanced seemed to be even more terrible than its triumphant screaming. Nearer and nearer it rolled, towering, as it seems to the desperate fugitives, right up to the high heavens. The horse raced onward furiously, but there seemed to be no chance of escaping that rapidly approaching death-wave, which swept along with relentless speed. The man and woman were both silent, and both prayed inwardly, as they faced the eleventh hour of death. And it was the eleventh hour, for there was still hope. Rounding a corner swiftly Towton rose in his stirrups and sent forth a cry almost as hoarse as that of the flood. A short distance ahead he saw a streak of green grass marking the ruddy stone face of the precipice, and knew that here was the crack to which he had referred. It was a mere chink in the wall, of no great width, caused, no doubt, by the volcanic action which had formed the valley in far distant ages. Many a time as a lad had Towton climbed up that narrow natural staircase
- 90. to the moorsabove, but never had he expected to find it a means of preserving his own life and the life he valued dearer than his own. Setting his teeth, he glanced backward and then urged the horse to renewed efforts. The wall of water was almost upon them, advancing with terrible and steady persistence. The last moment seemed to be at hand. Suddenly the Colonel wrenched at the horse's bit and pulled the animal up with a jerk. As it fell back on its haunches he slipped off with the almost insensible girl in his arms and ran desperately towards the sloping green bank, which showed itself like a port of safety between the bare, bleak stones. As he gained it the horse, having recovered itself, rushed past with a loose bridle and with the stirrups lashing its sides. But Towton paid no heed. Almost in a dream he scrambled up the bank, bearing Ida as though she were a feather-weight. With straining eyes and bursting temples, and with his heart beating furiously, he clambered desperately, dragging the girl rather than carrying her, as he needed at least one hand free to grip the tough grasses. Fortunately the slope was gradual, and had it not been there would have been no hope of escape. As it was, when they were a considerable way up the mighty wave surged majestically past, and its waters shot up the crevice with gigantic force. This was rather a help than a hindrance, as it assisted the almost broken man to mount higher. But to the end of his days Colonel Towton never knew how he saved his wife. All he could remember was straining upward, dragging the now insensible woman with aching limbs and a blood-red mist before his eyes. When his brain was somewhat clearer he found himself bending over Ida in a turfy nook, while barely three feet below him the grey water gurgled and sang and bubbled as if in a witch's cauldron. "Safe! Safe!" muttered Towton, and dropped insensible across the inanimate body of the woman he had so miraculously saved from a terrible death.
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