Between our hotel and the main part of the town there yawned a black
valley, rather nobly bridged, or viaducted, and beyond it in every
direction the chimneys of the many works thickened in the perspectives.
It was really like a dead forest, or like thick-set masts of shipping
in a thronged port; or the vents of tellurian fires, which send up
their flames by night and their smoke by day. It was splendid, it was
magnificent, it was insurpassably picturesque. People must have painted
it often, but if some bravest artist-soul would come, reverently, not
patronizingly, and portray the sight in its naked ugliness, he would
create one of the most beautiful masterpieces in the world. On our first
morning the sun, when it climbed to the upper heavens, found a little
hole in the dun pall, and shone down through it, and tried to pierce
through the more immediate cloud above the works; but it could not, and
it ended by shutting the hole under it, and disappearing.
Beyond the foul avenues thridding the region of the works, and smelling
of the decay of market-houses, were fine streets of shops and churches,
and I dare say comely dwellings, with tram-cars ascending and descending
their hilly slopes. The stores I find noted as splendid, and in my
pocket-book I say that outside of the market-house, before you got to
those streets, there are doves and guinea-pigs as well as a raven for
sale in cages; and the usual horrible English display of flesh meats.
The trams were one story, like our trolleys, without roof-seats, and
there were plenty of them; but nothing could keep me, I suppose, till
I had seen one of the works. Each of these stands in a vast yard, or
close, by itself, with many buildings, and they are of all sorts; but
I chose what I thought the most typical, and overcame the reluctance
of the manager to let me see it. He said I had no idea what tricks were
played by other makers to find out any new processes and steal them; but
this was after I had pleaded my innocent trade of novelist, and assured
him of my congenital incapability of understanding, much less conveying
from the premises, the image of the simplest and oldest process. Then he
gave me for guide an intelligent man who was a penknife-maker by trade,
but was presently out of work, and glad to earn my fee.
My guide proved a most decent, patient, and kindly person, and I hope
it is no betrayal of confidence to say that he told me the men in
these multitudinous shops work by the piece. The grinders furnish their
grindstones and all their tools for making the knives; there is no dry
grinding, such as used to fill the lungs of the grinders with deadly
particles of steel and stone, and bring them to an early death; but
sometimes a stone, which ordinarily lasts six months, will burst and
drive the grinder through the roof. The blade-makers do their own
forging and hammering, and it is from first to last apparently all
hand-work. But it is head-work and heart-work too, and the men who
wrought at it wrought with such intensity and constancy that they did
not once look up or round where we paused to look on. I was made to know
that trade was dull and work slack, and these fellows were lucky fellows
to have anything to do. Still I did not envy them; and I felt it a
distinct relief to pass from their shops into the cool, dim crypt which
was filled with tusks of ivory, in all sizes from those of the
largest father elephant to those of the babes of the herd; these were
milk-tusks, I suppose. They get dearer as the elephants get scarcer; and
that must have been why I paid as much for a penknife in the glittering
showroom as it would have cost me in New York, with the passage money
and the duties added. Because of the price, perhaps, I did not think of
buying the two-thousand-bladed penknife I saw there; but I could never
have used all the blades, now that we no longer make quill pens. I
looked fondly at the maker’s name on the knife I did buy, and said that
the table cutlery of a certain small household which set itself up forty
years ago had borne the same: but the pleasant salesman did not seem to
feel the pathos of the fact so much as I.