Now the loneliness was no longer bearable. Freder stood up and opened the windows. The works lay, in quivering brightness, before him. He pressed his eyes closed, standing still, hardly breathing. He felt the proximity of the servants, standing silently, waiting for the command which would permit them to come to life.
There was one among them—Slim, with his courteous face, the expression of which never changed—Freder knew of him: one word to him, and, if the girl still walked on earth with her silent step, then Slim would find her. But one does not set a bloodhound on the track of a sacred, white hind, if one does not want to be cursed, and to be, all his life long, a miserable, miserable man.
Freder saw, without looking at him, how Slim’s eyes were taking stock of him. He knew that the silent creature, ordained, by his father, to be his all-powerful protector, was, at the same time, his keeper. During the fever of nights, bereft of sleep, during the fever of his work, in his workshop, during the fever when playing his organ, calling upon God, there would be Slim measuring the pulse of the son of his great master. He gave no reports; they were not required of him. But, if the hour should come in which they were demanded of him, he would certainly have a diary of faultless perfection to produce, from the number of steps with which one in torment treads out his loneliness with heavy foot, from minute to minute, to the dropping of a brow into propped up hands, tired with longing.
Could it be possible that this man, who knew everything, knew nothing of her?
Nothing about him betrayed that he was aware of the upheaval in the well-being and disposition of his young master, since that day in the “Club of the Sons.” But it was one of the slim, silent one’s greatest secrets never to give himself away, and, although he had no entrance to the “Club of the Sons” Freder was by no means sure that the money-backed agent of his father would be turned back by the rules of the club.
He felt himself exposed, unclothed. A cruel brightness, which left nothing concealed, bathed him and everything in his workshop which was almost the most highly situated room in Metropolis.
“I wish to be quite alone,” he said softly.
Silently the servants vanished. Slim went.... But all these doors, which closed without the least sound, could also, without the least sound, be opened again to the narrowest chink.
His eyes aching, Freder fingered all the doors of his work-room.
A smile, a rather bitter smile, drew down the corners of his mouth. He was a treasure which must be guarded as crown jewels are guarded. The son of a great father, and the only son.