It was only a day since Gob had stumbled weeping out of the glass house. Will had caught him by the shoulders and said, “I knew it! It’s hurt you to go in there.” But Gob said he was crying tears of joy, and then he hurried off, saying only that he had work to do.
Gob opened the door, looking exhausted but very happy. “My friend!” he said. “There you are!” He clapped Will on the back and drew him inside. It was the finest house that Will had ever seen, though very dirty. There were three reception rooms and two drawing rooms, with what must have been five hundred mirrors hanging on all their high walls. In the dining room there was a table four times as long as Will was himself. There was a meal already set up: soup, corn, green peas, cabbage, beets, puddings and pies, a salad of dandelion greens, pork with stewed apples, steak with peaches, salt fish with onions, coffee and wine and cold root beer. Gob played with his food, arranging it in patterns on his plate, but not eating much. “I’m never hungry when I’ve been working,” he explained. Will waited for Gob to speak of the glass house, to tell him what had happened inside, but he said nothing of it. Will had been ready, when Gob came out, to make a confession to him: I see spirits or I fear I’m insane, and he had hoped, he knew now, that Gob would say, Oh yes, those pesky spirits. They’re everywhere! It would be so pleasant, so unburdening, to share the affliction. But Gob gave no sign of seeing the spirits. As Will had approached Manhattan on the ferry, they’d run like children, leaning dangerously over the rails, pointing excitedly at the churning water. When Gob opened the door, they’d swarmed into his house like yokels bustling to get into Barnum’s. Now, they sported everywhere in the room. Sam stood by the table, looking sadly at a pudding, not a foot from Gob’s elbow.
Will sighed. Since Gob was not forthcoming, he would be rude. Gob was talking about how long ago, with Dr. Wood looking on, he’d removed a tumor from the jaw of Emily McNee, the Sozodont dentifrice heiress. He was praising her teeth when Will interrupted.
“What did you see, there in my little house?”
“Ah,” Gob said, smiling and passing a hand over his eyes. “What did I see?”
“Yes,” said Will. “That’s what I asked.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw nothing,” Will said, “but now I see … spirits. There. I’ve said it. Sir, I think it cost me my sanity to go into that place.”
“Spirits!” Gob said, and Will thought at first that he was angry. He put his face in his hands, and his voice was plaintive. “I wish I saw them! I wish I did. But that comfort is denied me.”
“Comfort? You don’t think,” Will said, “that such visions are manufactured by a sick mind?”
Gob raised his head and gave Will a scornful look. “You insult my mother,” he said. Will did not know whether or not to apologize, because now Gob was laughing, louder and louder, and pounding his fist on the table so forcefully that plates danced and glasses tipped.
“Come along,” Gob said, when he had calmed some. “Let’s have the rest of the tour.” He took Will’s arm and walked with him. In the parlors, there were marble-topped tables, armchairs and sofas of black lacquered wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There were rugs two and three deep on the floor, stained in the corners but otherwise bright and beautiful. And there were books everywhere, stacked on tables or furniture, or against the walls. Will picked one up at random. It was dusty and smelled of mold, but the binding was rich leather, and the title stood out in gold on the spine: The Dove of Archytas.
“Of course,” said Gob. “You’d like to see the library, wouldn’t you?”
That room took up most of the second and third floors. They climbed a spiral staircase to the iron mezzanine and looked down at the floor, where a score of grandfather clocks, all run down and silent, were set randomly around the room, among golden armillary spheres and dusty overstuffed chairs.
“My master liked clocks,” Gob said.
“You mean your late uncle?” Will asked. “Dr. Oetker?” At Bellevue, Dr. Oetker had had a reputation for brilliance. Will had heard that he had made a fortune catering to the ills of fashionable and unfashionable society.
“He was not my uncle. But he admired a good clock. He’d ask me sometimes, ‘Who is the god of the future?’”
“Professor Morse?” said Will. Gob laughed.
“That answer would have gotten you a slap.”
“What was the answer, then?”
Gob was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I don’t like clocks. It used to be my job to care for them, but since he died I’ve been, as you can see, on holiday. Onward and upward.”
He took Will out of the library, and they went down halls that were increasingly, in the upper levels of the house, littered with little pieces of machinery. Gears and struts and cranks and cylinders, they lay in the halls, or they were piled in the guest bedrooms and parlors. In one room, empty of furniture except for a magnificent bed whose mahogany posts were carved with laurel and acanthus leaves, Gob was reunited with a friend. “My aeolipile!” he said, speaking of a tall bronze globe, decorated with a figure of the wind — a gleeful face with pursed lips and puffed cheeks. It was obviously broken, cracked at the bottom and looking as if it were missing parts. “I made this when I was a child,” he said to Will, putting his arms around it and hugging it to him. “I haven’t seen it for years.”
Gob’s bedroom was on the fifth floor. “Lots of stairs,” Will said, “to climb every night.”
Gob shrugged. There were two doors off the hall at the top of the house. One was made of wood, the other iron. The iron door was open, rusted on its hinges so when Will stumbled against it it moaned horribly. He peered inside and saw the gray shapes of dead trees, lit up by weak moonlight falling through a dirty glass roof. “Not in there,” Gob said, pulling Will away and opening the wooden door. This was the neatest place in the house. There was a blue skylight in the ceiling, and a second iron door in the wall on the far side of the room.
“Don’t stand there,” Gob said. Will had stepped into a circle of stone, set incongruously in the wood floor.
“Sorry,” Will said, because a look of extreme displeasure had passed over his friend’s face. He walked out of the circle, and Gob smiled again.
“Now I will show you my house,” he said.
“I think you just did,” Will said, misunderstanding. Gob opened the second iron door in the far side of the room and they entered a place crowded with spirits and machinery. It looked like the pack-hole of some industrious squirrel, one that robbed factories instead of trees. There were gears of all sizes, great tangles of cable, stacks of lumber and steel plates, and underneath an ornate gaselier an assemblage that Will knew must be a machine of some sort, though he had never seen anything like it. Some spirits were caressing it, others milled happily about the room, gazing at pieces of matériel like fascinated gallery-goers.
“What is it?” Will asked, pointing to the machine.
“A combination,” Gob said, “of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinate motions. It’s an engine. My house, you see, like your house.”
Will looked at it, his hands in fists at his sides. It seemed familiar and wonderful, and horrible, too, in the same way his glass house was horrible. “Are you compelled to build it?” Will asked. Gob grabbed him roughly by the shoulders, and Will thought he would eject him from the room, but instead he embraced him, crushing him with his little arms, crying happy tears again and saying, “Oh Will, oh my good friend, you understand me. You are a builder, too.”