Chapter V
On a certain Saturday night in August the engineering workshop was in a ferment of rush and work.
It was a large building covered with glass like a hothouse; along one wall was the power-engine, along the other two forges. There was also a small hammer worked by a hand-wheel, several vices, a lathe, drilling machinery and a number of hand tools. Midnight was approaching, the lights had long been put out in all the other parts of the mill; the tired weavers were asleep in their homes.
But here the great rush goes on. The hurried breath of the engine, the throb of the pumps, the din of the hammer, the rattle of the lathe, the grating of the files increase more and more. The air is soaked with steam, coal-dust and fine iron filings; the flames of the gas-lamps flicker through the heavy atmosphere like will-o'-the-wisps. Outside there is the stillness of night as a background to the mill; the moon peeps in through the glass which quivers incessantly from the noise.
There is hardly any talking in the room; the work is urgent, the hour late, so the men hurry on in silence. Here a group of grimy blacksmiths are dragging a huge white-hot iron bar to be hammered; there a row of them bend and raise themselves as under a command over their vices. Opposite them the turners bend to watch the revolving work in the machines. Sparks fly from under the hammer. From time to time an order or a curse is heard. Sometimes the hammering and filing slackens down, and then the mournful groan of the bellows blowing on to the furnaces begins.
Gosławski is at the lathe, turning a large steel cylinder; the work must be done exactly to the thousandth of an inch! But somehow Gosławski is off his work. There had been so much to do that day that he had not been able to leave the workshop during the evening recess; he is even more than usually tired therefore. A light fever torments him, streams of perspiration flow down his body, at moments he has hallucinations, and then he imagines that he is somewhere else, far away. But he quickly rouses himself, rubs his eyes with his grimy hands to shake off the lassitude, and looks anxiously to see whether the cutting tool has not taken away too much of the cylinder.
"I am dead-beat," said his neighbour to him.
"So am I," replied Gosławski, sitting down on a stool.
"It's the heat," said the other. "The engine is red-hot, the blacksmiths are working with both forges; besides, it is getting late. Take a pinch of snuff."
"No, thank you," replied Gosławski, "I should like a pipe, but not snuff. I would rather have a drink of water."