He paused in his tracks: "I had forgotten that they closed down."
She scanned him with a swift glance.
"Forgive me," he said in an undertone, "really, I had forgotten, Rachel, if I ever knew it. But you must see the place now you are here.—Mr. Barbieri," he added, "I am going to show Mrs. Hart over the works," and he led the way across a narrow court to an adjoining structure.
The marble shop covered an extensive area, and the white light that fell through its glass roof inundated its farthest corner. In this bath of light, in this silence, unbroken by a single sound; in the midst of casts, dust, artistic litter of all sorts, were the statues. Some scarcely blocked from the rough stone, they rose on all sides. They overtopped the miniature plaster models, like giants overtopping pygmies; they elbowed the grotesque machines that are used for enlarging purposes; they crowded the walls; they occupied every foot of space not reserved for the workmen; some even, with their Titan tread, had passed through the lofty doorway and stood among barrels and rubbish in the garish sunlight of the yard. On every side monoliths of stone were being cut into human shape. There was a torso with the girth of a Colossus; over yonder a hand chiseled from a boulder; beyond that, a monumental figure frowning like a tortured Atlas. All in sections—painful, writhing, some of the statues lacked a head, others an arm or a foot, and others had their limbs still entangled in uncut blocks of stone.
It was like a workshop of surgeons of stone men; like a manufactory of the gods where were created marble monsters that suffered with the age and immobility of stone, in which petty human qualities of Fortitude, Justice, Fidelity were being stamped. Hewn out of the womb of the earth, the marble was tortured here to wear man's face, his form; finally it would be set up under the sun to testify with the might of marble limbs to the ideals that govern his heart.
As she viewed the stone population, no one could have told what was passing in Rachel's stormy little breast, for if there was a spark in her eyes that seemed to indicate subterranean depths of passion, the rest of her features were astonishingly passive. Her gloves hampered her, and with nervous gestures she began taking them off. Tense and silent and acutely vital, she stood beside Emil, an expression of all that is baffling and mysterious in woman.
Conscious of a dryness in his throat, he kept his eyes to the statues.
"They are said to be the largest figures ever cut," he murmured. "They are for the pediment of the new Century Library."
"How still they are!"
"Yes, and one rather expects them to speak and move." Suddenly swinging round, he looked her in the eyes. "Oh, my own!" he cried. With uncertain steps he moved toward her.