Edwin could not keep out of the printing office. He went
inconspicuously and, as it were, by accident up the stone steps, and
disappeared into the interior. When you entered the office you were
first of all impressed by the multiplicity of odours competing for your
attention, the chief among them being those of ink, oil, and paraffin.
Despite the fact that the door was open and one window gone, the smell
and heat in the office on that warm morning were notable. Old sheets of
the "Manchester Examiner" had been pinned over the skylight to keep out
the sun, but, as these were torn and rent, the sun was not kept out.
Nobody, however, seemed to suffer inconvenience. After the odours, the
remarkable feature of the place was the quantity of machinery on its
uneven floor. Timid employes had occasionally suggested to Darius that
the floor might yield one day and add themselves and all the machinery
to the baker's stores below; but Darius knew that floors never did
yield.
In the middle of the floor was a huge and heavy heating stove, whose
pipe ran straight upwards to the visible roof. The mighty cylinder
machine stood to the left hand. Behind was a small rough-and-ready
binding department with a guillotine cutting machine, a
cardboard-cutting machine, and a perforating machine, trifles by the
side of the cylinder, but still each of them formidable masses of metal
heavy enough to crush a horse; the cutting machines might have served to
illustrate the French Revolution, and the perforating machine the Holy
Inquisition.
Then there was what was called in the office the `old machine,' a relic
of Clayhanger's predecessor, and at least eighty years old. It was one
of those machines whose worn physiognomies, full of character, show at
once that they have a history. In construction it carried solidity to
an absurd degree. Its pillars were like the piles of a pier. Once, in
a historic rat-catching, a rat had got up one of them, and a piece of
smouldering brown paper had done what a terrier could not do. The
machine at one period of its career had been enlarged, and the neat
seaming of the metal was an ecstasy to the eye of a good workman. Long
ago, it was known, this machine had printed a Reform newspaper at
Stockport. Now, after thus participating in the violent politics of an
age heroic and unhappy, it had been put to printing small posters of
auctions and tea-meetings. Its movement was double: first that of a
handle to bring the bed under the platen, and second, a lever pulled
over to make contact between the type and the paper. It still worked
perfectly. It was so solid, and it had been so honestly made, that it
could never get out of order nor wear away. And, indeed, the
conscientiousness and skill of artificers in the eighteenth century are
still, through that resistless machine, producing their effect in the
twentieth. But it needed a strong hand to bestir its smooth
plum-coloured limbs of metal, and a speed of a hundred an hour meant
gentle perspiration. The machine was loved like an animal.
Near this honourable and lumbering survival stood pertly an Empire
treadle-machine for printing envelopes and similar trifles. It was new,
and full of natty little devices. It worked with the lightness of
something unsubstantial. A child could actuate it, and it would print
delicately a thousand envelopes an hour. This machine, with the latest
purchase, which was away at the other end of the room near the large
double-pointed case-rack, completed the tale of machines. That
case-rack alone held fifty different founts of type, and there were
other case-racks. The lead-rack was nearly as large, and beneath the
lead-rack was a rack containing all those "furnitures" which help to
hold a forme of type together without betraying themselves to the reader
of the printed sheet. And under the furniture rack was the `random,'
full of galleys. Then there was a table with a top of solid stone, upon
which the formes were bolted up. And there was the ink-slab, another
solidity, upon which the ink-rollers were inked. Rollers of various
weightiness lay about, and large heavy cans, and many bottles, and metal
galleys, and nameless fragments of metal. Everything contributed to the
impression of immense ponderosity exceeding the imagination. The fancy
of being pinned down by even the lightest of these constructions was
excruciating. You moved about in narrow alleys among upstanding,
unyielding metallic enormities, and you felt fragile and perilously
soft.
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