"You must not be angry with Kurt for it," said Paula; "he cannot imagine that you would wish to keep anything secret from your sister."
"Have you then no secrets from me?" I said.
"What do you mean?" she asked, with a look in which I thought I detected traces of confusion.
I did not wish to press my question, for this would have brought me to the ticklish point which I had so carefully avoided--whether there was any mention of me in the correspondence between Paula and Hermine; so I muttered something unintelligible in reply, and brought the conversation back to my plans, my hopes, and wishes in reference to the works.
"You have lately kept me so uninformed as to what is going on in your world that I am quite in the dark. Let me read your memorial; give it to Kurt this evening to bring home."
This was on a Sunday, and the next week there was much work to do in the factory, for me especially. A large machine of peculiar construction had been built, intended to operate in a chalk-quarry, which the commerzienrath had opened at Zehrendorf among his other industrial undertakings there. I was employed in mounting the machine. All went smoothly on: the bed-plate had been laid exactly level, and some little unevenness left in planing corrected; the fly-wheel was hung, the journals adjusted, and the bolt-holes drilled; the machine was at last so far finished that all that remained to be done was the arrangement of the guiding-apparatus, and the regulation of the piston-rod. This was also set right; but when the foreman took hold of the flywheel to set the machine in motion to try it, it became evident that the driving-rod did not work with a true motion. The foreman and I looked at each other anxiously; we most carefully compared the dimensions of the various parts by scale with those of the plan, but there was no error discoverable.
"This is a confounded piece of business!" said the foreman.
"What is the matter?" asked the head-foreman, Roland, who came up at the moment.
Head-foreman Roland was a man of Cyclopean stature, whose left leg had once been broken in some machinery, giving him a limping gait, of which he was rather proud after once hearing that the god Vulcan, the patron of his craft, had the same infirmity. Head-foreman Roland had moreover so good an opinion of himself that under the projecting thatch of his thick moustache, around the left corner of his mouth, there was usually playing a consequential smile, which from time to time glided into the dense forest of his bushy beard and whiskers, where it continued its course unseen.
When the matter was explained to him he looked first at the foreman and then at the two workmen, each in turn, let the consequential smile play under the thatch, and said: "There must be some mistake in the execution; give me the plans."