Albrecht Wahnschaffe arose too. “Do not be rash, Christian,” he admonished his son. “I shall not conceal the fact that a definitive refusal on your part would wound me deeply. I have counted on you.” He looked at Christian with a firm glance. But Christian was silent.
After a while he asked: “How long ago is it since you were at the works?”
“It must be three or four years ago,” Christian answered.
“It was three years ago on Whitsuntide, if I remember rightly,” Albrecht Wahnschaffe said, with his habitual touch of pride in his memory, which was rarely at fault. “You had agreed on a pleasure trip in the Harz mountains with your cousin, Theo Friesen, and Theo was anxious to pay a flying visit to the factories. He had heard of our new welfare movement for workingmen, and was interested in it. But you scarcely stopped after all.”
“No, I persuaded Theo to go on. We had a long way ahead of us, and I was anxious to get to our quarters.”
Christian remembered the whole incident now. Evening had come before the car drove through the streets of the factory village. He had yielded to his cousin’s wish, but suddenly his aversion for this world of smoke and dust and sweat and iron had awakened. He had not wanted to leave the car, and had ordered the driver to speed up.
Nevertheless he recalled the hellish music made up of beaten steel and whirring wheels. He could still hear the thundering, whistling, wheezing, screeching, hissing; he could still see the swift procession of forges, cylinders, pumps, steam-hammers, furnaces, of all kinds; the thousands of blackened faces, a race that seemed made of coal in the breath of the fierce glow of white and crimson fires; misty electric moons that quivered in space; vehicles like death barrows swallowed up in the violet darkness; the workingmen’s homes, with their appearance of comfort, and their reality of a bottomless dreariness; the baths, libraries, club-houses, crêches, hospitals, infants’ homes, ware-houses, churches, and cinemas. The stamp of force and servitude, of all that is ugliest on earth, was bedizened and tinted in fair colours here, and all menaces were throttled and fettered.
Young Friesen had exhausted himself with admiration, but Christian had not breathed freely again until their car was out on the open road and had left the flaring horror in its panic flight.
“And you have not been there since?” Albrecht Wahnschaffe asked.