I
An immense gallery, five hundred feet long, occupied the upper floor of
the main factory-building. Looking down the gallery, a perspective of
iron girders spanned the roof, gaunt skeletons of architecture,
uncompromising, inexorably utilitarian, inflexible, remorseless. A drone
of machinery filled the air, neither very loud nor very near at hand,
but softly and unremittingly continuous; the drone of clanking, of
loosely-running wheels and leather belts, muffled by the intervening
floor into a not unpleasant murmur. Outside the windows three chimneys
reared their heads side by side, emitting three parallel streams of
smoke, gigantic black plumes that floated horizontally away over the
flooded country, and that at night were flecked with red sparks as they
flowed out from the red glare at their base.
All these things, the chimneys and the girders, were crushingly larger
than the men who laboured amongst them. The men seemed of pigmy size as
they pushed their hand-trucks along the floor of the big gallery. They
pushed them down the narrow passage-ways left between the vats. The
gallery was full of vats, set in pairs down the whole length of the
building; square vats twenty feet each way, as large and as deep as an
ordinary room. Some of the vats were empty, temporarily not in use; some
were only half full; but in most the hot, liquid soap boiled and bubbled
right up to the rim.
The smell which filled the gallery was the smell of the soap, pungent
and acrid on the surface, but fat and nauseating underneath, rasping the
throat of the chance visitor before it penetrated deeper with its hot,
furry smell that tickled and disgusted the sensitiveness at the back of
his nose. The chance visitor rarely lingered long in the gallery. He
would stand for a few moments watching the men that came and went in
their splashed overalls, indifferent to his presence; then he would turn
to go carefully down the steep iron stair into the pleasanter rooms
where white powder was heaped on the floor in miniature mountains, and
where lines of girls seated on high stools were occupied in tying
ribbons with the twist of dexterity round the necks of scent bottles,
and the room was filled with scent like a garden of orange-trees in
blossom.
Up in the gallery, the soap in the vats moved uneasily with the motion
of an evil quicksand. The soap was yellow, and its consistency one of
slimy liquidity. If the vat were not sufficiently full, the quantity
increased mysteriously from below, the level rising thanks to the unseen
source of supply. It was not hard to believe that the recesses of the
vat were inhabited by some foul and secret monster whose jaws emitted
the viscid, yellow stream to conceal his abode. The soap moved
restlessly, boiling and bursting into little craters, which subsided,
leaving wrinkles and circles on the surface. Quiet for a moment, it
heaved in another place; heaved slowly and deliberately, but did not
break; heaved again; broke with a spout of steam and a sluggish splash
as the walls of the crater fell in. It was never altogether still. It
seemed alive, because it swelled and breathed and vomited, or at least
it seemed as though some live creature dwelt within, occasioning by its
movements the disturbances and eruptions of the slime.
In other vats a wrinkled brown skin had formed over the cooling soap, a
skin puckered and broken up into valleys and chasms, plains and ridges,
so that of all things it most resembled the physical map of a country.
The parallel was exact as to colour, even to the greenish stretches at
the bottom of the valleys. Mountain ridges three inches high, chasms
three inches deep, plateaux six inches across, the landscape of some
dead but perpetually changing world. For here the slime moved also, but
with a difference; it did not seethe, it did not erupt; it rather
subsided; was a dead, rather than a living thing. The monster that dwelt
in those depths had died, and lay at the bottom, a heap of corruption
the imagination would not willingly picture.
Other vats were empty, and if the hot boiling soap resembled a shifting
quicksand, and the cooling soap the desolation of a dead world, the
empty vats resembled the sea-bottom. The others, with their hint of
greed and evil, might be more terrifying; these empty vats were
infinitely more fantastic. Their sides were caked with the dry soap,
brown-yellow, and their depths were surprisingly revealed; ending in a
blunt point, like the point of a cone; they were sunk lower than the
floor of the gallery into an unlighted chamber of corresponding size
below. In these empty vats, various portions of apparatus were brought
to light: immense chains, caked and corroded, hung like ship’s cables
and were lost in the deposit at the bottom; vast strainers swung against
the sides; ropes, stiffened hard as wood, spanned diagonally from side
to side; and, emerging from the tapering depths, stumps of wreckage
stood up, transformed from their original shape to stalagmites of dry
frangible matter, that would chip away, crisp and powdery, betraying the
nature of their kernel,—was it a shovel? was it an anchor? was it the
decaying bones of the ancient monster?—and the low parapets of the vats
were coated with the same brittle dryness that yellowed the walls of
those grotesque and extraordinary pits.