In the workroom where the chiselling was done, dozens of men stood at long tables, levelling the uneven surface of the cast metal, and making the separate parts of an ornament ready for joining. This was done in the room adjacent, where the flames of the blowpipes leapt and hissed, and clouds of metallic vapour shot up sparks. Each workman had a little pile of burnished arms and legs beside him that looked as if they had been amputated and had left the body they belonged to behind.
Then they came to the "filigree" department, where all the flowers and foliage were elaborated--the ribbons, tendrils, and arabesques, everything of a light, curly, and daintily twining character. So delicate was the work that it made the men engaged on it look all the clumsier and coarser. They scarcely raised their eyes, and hammered on in a dogged mechanical way.
Lilly, wherever she went, had a keener eye for the appearance and manner of the workpeople than for the work itself. She drew comparisons inwardly, decided who was well-to-do and who the reverse, who pursued his avocation because he liked it, and who only because he was goaded to it by necessity and sickness at home. Each department had its own marked physiognomy. In one the majority would be fresh and active; in another, weary and exhausted. Lilly felt as she had done when Herr Dehnicke first told her about his workpeople: an insane desire to have the wielding of their fate in her hands, to help them when help was needed, to bring sunshine into their gloomy lives, and to be a good angel to the suffering. But she was careful not to confide her absurd notions to Herr Dehnicke.
"Now we come to the most critical part of the business," he said, "the patina application, which gives the figures their style."
He opened the door of a workshop which exhaled the odour of a thousand more poisons. Here women were at work with the men, putting on varnish and acids, rubbing and brushing busily. They looked haggard and tired out. At the sight of Lilly they dropped their implements to stare at her in blank amazement.
"One would have to begin here," she thought, "to win the confidence of all." So she nodded at them pleasantly and spoke a few friendly words. But her little advances were wrongly interpreted. They thought she mocked them, and with an almost contemptuous grimace went back to their work. Lilly's appearance in the packing-room, where women and children alone were employed, produced a happier impression. The girls giggled, whispered, and nudged each other. Only one woman, who was enceinte, took no notice of her. She seemed hardly able to stand on her feet and was near to sinking on the floor. She kept her relaxed pale lips tightly compressed, her cheeks wore a hectic flush, and her arms moved in feverish zeal as she wrapped one sheet of paper after the other round the limbs of the figures standing before her on the table, swaying first to the right and then to the left under her touch.
"May I give her something?" asked Lilly, in an aside to Herr Dehnicke.
"She is being looked after," he answered uneasily, as if displeased, and he quickly led the way to another door.
"This is where the figures are stored," he said, "until sold, with the exception of those, naturally, that are made to order."
Lilly looked down a long dusky gallery and met an icy-cold draught. Ranged on stands and shelves she saw endless regiments of ghostly objects, dwarfs, gnomes, monsters, shapeless in their wrappings of paper, yet looking somehow human, and as if they had been petrified by accident.