The subjects included, among others, fat monks and lean beggars, dancing gipsy-girls with tambourines, elegant young men with eyeglasses, postillions blowing horns, chickens picking corn, and hounds retrieving game. There were calendars set in horse-shoes, cigar-clips shaped like champagne bottles, pelicans three feet tall holding aloft lamps in their bills; fancy figures, both male and female, stretching out arms as they had done in Herr Kellermann's studio, but not without reason here, for they all held up vases, candelabra, or basins. Arbours screened loving pairs, and had red electric bulbs hidden in the foliage, goblins sat astride on mushrooms; sea-shells served the purpose of ash-trays; punch-bowls, antique cream-jugs, night-light holders, snakes coiled round flower-stems or china ducks-eggs. The whole gamut of vulgarity and poverty in artistic invention seemed herded together here, ready to be let loose in rampant distribution over all the four quarters of the globe.
When Lilly gave her friend an inquiring or mystified look now and again, as she examined some monstrosity, he shrugged his shoulders and remarked, "That is what the public likes."
In spite of a feeling of being jarred, Lilly would not have minded spending hours amidst this glitter. She would have been in her element if her judgment had been appealed to, and she would have said unhesitatingly, "That is bad, weed it out; throw that away, and that ... and this too." But no one asked her opinion, and everything seemed to get on very well without it.
Her friend next took her across to the factory. Unfortunately the foundry, which was the first stage and basis of all the work turned out, happened to be temporarily closed. But Lilly saw through an open window the black yawning throats of the furnaces and the dirty trucks standing about. Everything was covered with a mist of grey ash--the chimney-pieces, casks, and utensils all seemed to float in the same impenetrable sea of ashen greyness.
They went down some dirty steps and passed through damp cellars smelling of poisonous chemicals, where huge vats containing foul fluids were ranged. Men prematurely aged by work and disease hovered about here looking like ascetic phantoms, when they were only common labourers. As Lilly came in they gave her a quick glance of surprise, and then didn't trouble to look again. They had no greeting for their employer.
"This is the galvanic department," explained Herr Dehnicke. "Here is the nickel-plate bath, the steel bath, the quicksilver, and so on."
He pointed to a loft surrounded by an iron crate, where the wheels of a machine whirled and the light of electric lamps gleamed.
"There the current is generated which galvanises the various baths," he said.
Lilly did not understand, but she took pleasure in the rapid whirl of the wheels and the subdued buzz which they made as they spun round.
"There will be some that whirl more madly still," she thought, and expected to hear, when the next door was opened, a deafening thunder. But nothing of the sort happened. This was the one machine in the whole factory to provide her with entertainment.