He looked around. The bell which had summoned the workpeople to their breakfast as Cilli came out of the house rang again. The men returned to their work. Looking round the corner of the house, he had a peep through the wide-open doors of the workshops, which seemed to occupy the whole of the ground-floor. Crosses and tombstones were being chiselled and carved by busy hands.
A chill came over Reinhold, to see this sad, gloomy sight just now, when the world lay so bright before him, lighted up by the fancies of the blind girl who lived over these melancholy workshops, and in whose dreams the tapping and knocking of these dreadful hammers and chisels must mingle!
He asked for his uncle. No one had seen him that morning; he might be in the engine-room or in some of the back yards. Where was Herr Anders’ studio? Here in this very building, the first door round the corner; the second was the young lady’s studio.
Reinhold walked round the house and knocked at the first door, near which was a high window half shaded from within. No one answered, and he was going on when the door opened a little way. But it was not the friendly countenance of the sculptor, with its bright eyes and cheery smile, that met him, but a strange, dark face, from which a pair of black, sparkling eyes glared at him.
“Beg pardon! I expected to see Herr Anders.”
“Herr Anders is not here; he is in his own house, the third door upstairs.”
He of the dark complexion said this in a forbidding tone and in German, which, though fluent enough, betrayed the foreigner in every syllable.
“Then I will go and look for him there.”
“Herr Anders is going to the Exhibition; he is dressing.”
Reinhold now observed that the young man himself was in the act of dressing and still in his shirtsleeves, whose extreme whiteness made the darkness of his complexion even more remarkable. The interruption of his toilette quite explained the unfriendly tone of his answers, and the want of hospitality that made him hold the door only just enough open for him to speak to the stranger.
“Perhaps you know whether Fräulein Schmidt is in her studio?”
The pertinacity of the question seemed to irritate the young man. The black brows frowned heavily, the delicate upper lip with its slight moustache curled sufficiently to show the white teeth for a moment. “Non lo so,” he blurted out.
He shut the door, muttering between his teeth something else in Italian which did not sound like a blessing.
Reinhold felt convinced that Ferdinanda was in her studio, and that the ungracious youth knew it; but at the same time it would not make her very unhappy if he paid his visit later, or did not pay it at all. At all events he must look for his uncle first.
He returned to the yard, passing a place where huge blocks of marble were being cut through by the aid of large suspended saws, each of which was regulated by a man. It must have been fatiguing work, requiring great strength, and indeed was only undertaken when the machinery could not turn out enough work, as was now the case; there was no doubt that the machine certainly could do much more. So said the workman, taking the opportunity to get a little breathing-time. The steam saws were in that building; they had just seen the master go there. But Uncle Ernst was not near the steam saws, he had just been there; perhaps he was in the lathe-room close by.
Reinhold had some difficulty in taking in the words which a workman shouted in his ear, so loud was the screeching, overpowering noise of the immense saws as the steam power drove them backwards and forwards with inconceivable rapidity through great blocks of marble as high as a man; eight, ten, and twelve saws working at once through the same block and cutting it into as many inch-thick slabs. And between each two blocks was a man upon a small platform incessantly busied in throwing water, mixed with sand from a pail, upon the sparks caused by the saws; and the one who had got down to answer Reinhold sprang hurriedly back to his place to extinguish the sparks which now came from his block in trails almost a yard in length.
In the next room which Reinhold entered a less awful noise was going on. Though here, too, was heard the rattle of the driving bands as they stretched like interminable snakes from a wheel in one corner of the ceiling to another at the other end, and so descended to a second at a medium height, and once more went up and down in bewildering quivering lines; and here again wheels rattled and clattered, and the iron strained and screeched and creaked as it cut through the marble, boring holes, cutting with chisels, filing, shaving, scraping, and in every possible way converting it into skilful and sometimes even artistic forms. Entablatures with sharp plinths, slender fluted columns, elegant pedestals for candelabra or vases, even vases themselves which, rapidly revolving, were polished by busy hands with pumice stone.
Herr Schmidt had been here a few minutes ago—was perhaps now upstairs in the workshops where the fine work was done before it came here to be polished.
Those workshops lay on the opposite side of the yard, so that Reinhold now first obtained a true idea of the dimensions of the establishment as well as of the enormous extent of the business. He had already been into three workshops, and had glanced into as many more in passing. What an amount of capital must be sunk in these massive buildings, and in the ground alone which was taken up by them
