The burgher was soon seen in the company of a little clockwork Frau in a feathered hat, who carried under one arm a Swiss clock from which, every five steps, a cuckoo suddenly emerged — whereupon the lady’s mouth opened, her eyebrows lifted, her eyes rolled around. The clockwork burgher and the clockwork Frau, walking back and forth in states of continual alarm, proved highly amusing to all who passed by, and August began to add other figures in rapid succession: a little black schnauzer who ran alongside the Frau, stopping to bark silently each time the cuckoo leaped out; a young man of fashion who sat down on a bench under a linden tree, lazily took out his watch, and suddenly sprang up and hurried away, after which he returned to the bench and repeated the same motions; an old man bent over so that his dirty white beard trailed on the ground, as he carried on his back an elegantly reproduced grandfather clock. Already people spoke admiringly of the sixteen-year-old boy’s shrewd business sense, a form of praise that pleased old Joseph but made August secretly uneasy. He felt that the business part of things was a mysterious and amusing accident that had nothing to do with clockwork at all, that some dangerous mistake had been made, that someday he would be exposed as a dreamer, a ne’er-do-well, a seedy magician in a drab green tent.
One day about a year later a well-dressed gentleman came into the shop, carrying an ebony walking stick whose ivory top was shaped like the head of a roaring lion. After a cursory examination of an ormolu clock, which he praised without interest, the man removed a business card and handed it to Joseph Eschenburg. Herr Preisendanz was the owner of one of the big department stores that were springing up everywhere in the new Germany, and he offered to purchase three of the clockwork figures for a startling sum. When Joseph replied that they were not for sale, Herr Preisendanz smiled, tripled the sum, and offered to purchase the entire stock of figures at comparable prices, even though not all were suitable for his purposes. When Joseph explained that his son had made them, and that they were not for sale, Herr Preisendanz narrowed his eyes, considered doubling the last sum named, but after a rapid examination of the old man’s face — Herr Preisendanz had had dealings with these small-town shop owners before, some of them could be extremely stubborn — he decided to try another tack instead. He stated that he wished to bring Joseph Eschenburg’s son back with him to Berlin, where he would be extremely well paid to make automated displays for the block-long shopwindow of the Preisendanz Emporium. He well understood that the prospect of parting would be a jolt to the old man, but he declared himself certain that the father would not stand in his son’s way. Moreover, he would personally see to it that the young man was comfortably lodged.
Joseph listened gravely to all that was said and then called in his son. August was amused by the coarse-featured, red-faced man in his elegant clothes, not least because he so strikingly resembled a recent clockwork figure that had proved quite popular. But the offer frightened him; again he felt that somehow he was deceiving people, that they ought to realize … he wasn’t sure what. Besides, he didn’t in the least care for Herr Preisendanz and wanted to remain forever with his father, who understood him as no one else ever could. And Berlin was Prussia, he detested the very idea of Prussia. Without hesitation he turned down the offer, and was startled when his father said that every question had many sides. With grave graciousness the old watchmaker asked Herr Preisendanz to return the next day for a final decision. Herr Preisendanz, who had business to attend to, bowed slightly and took his leave.
Joseph Eschenburg knew perfectly well that the stranger from Berlin did not have his son’s true interests at heart, and that the glib words about not standing in August’s way had been uttered merely to win his compliance. But he was far too intelligent not to see that the offer was a very good one. The rich store-owner had mentioned a salary far greater than August could ever hope to earn in the watchmaker’s shop, despite the recent increase in business; and Mühlenberg, though noted for its dolls, and even for its silverware factory, had little to offer in comparison with the Prussian capital. August ought to be given his chance; if things worked out badly, the boy could always come home. That very spring he would conclude his Gymnasium courses; a university was out of the question, for August showed little interest in formal study and had proved a restless and mediocre student. He seemed to look forward to nothing except working in the watchmaker’s shop by day and constructing clockwork figures by night. And August had a gift, there was no denying it. The boy ought to be given his chance. It might never come again.
And so that summer, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, and rather against his own inclination, August Eschenburg parted from his father and traveled by coach and rail to the capital of the new Reich. Later he could recall nothing of this journey, and Berlin itself remained oddly shadowy in his memory, as if his attention had been elsewhere — although his memory of a particular stretch of shady side-street was so precise that he could still see the brilliant green reflection of heart-shaped linden leaves in a certain plate-glass window as well as in the individual dark wine bottles behind the glass. It was along this street that he walked each day on his way from his two comfortable rooms on the fourth floor of a quiet boarding house to the hot, bright avenue where the Preisendanz Emporium was situated between a fashionable tobacconist’s and a jewelry shop. August could no more tell you the name of that avenue than he could tell you how many Frenchmen had surrendered at Sedan, but he still saw clearly every gleaming item in the tobacconist’s window, from the long, ebon-stemmed and silver-lidded meerschaum displayed in a case lined with blue velvet, as if the pipe were a violin, to the little bronze tobacco-grinder shaped like a shepherdess. The Emporium, which extended from the tobacconist’s on one corner to the jeweler’s on the other, was furnished with four large plate-glass windows in which were displayed, respectively: six female dummies wearing the latest Parisian fashions; a group of glittering optical instruments such as telescopes, ivory-handled magnifying glasses, binoculars, stereoscopes, and cameras; a handsome array of toys, from varnished rocking horses to onyx chess sets; and a nice set of mahogany bedsteads, mattresses, and elegant sheets and spreads. It was August’s job to create miniature clockwork figures for three of these windows. For the fourth, Preisendanz had borrowed a splendid idea from one of the big New York department stores: on two mattresses displayed side by side, a wax figure and a live actor, both wearing striped pajamas, lay as if asleep, and spectators were invited to guess which was the real man.
August had to admit to himself that he found his new work unexpectedly pleasant. Much to his surprise he took an instant liking to the Preisendanz Emporium, whose insistent and even strident modernity was supposed to be a sign of the new Germany but revealed delightful contradictions. Thus the new plate-glass windows were inserted in a façade modeled on a Renaissance palazzo, and the new steam-powered elevators imported from America, which floated you up through all five floors, detracted not at all from the grand stairway of the ground floor, with its marble pillars and its air of Old World elegance. August saw at once that all these effects had been carefully planned by Preisendanz to attract a public easily stirred by two contradictory impulses: love of a vague, mythical, heroic past, and love of a vague, thrilling future representing something entirely new. Both loves betrayed a secret hatred of the present which August felt was the unspoken truth of the new order. But quite aside from these stimulating reflections he enjoyed the look and feel of the place: the thick rugs, the elevator boys in their red uniforms, the glass display cases that reminded him of a museum, the ground-floor drinking fountain that was said to be the first of its kind in Germany. The goods themselves were of high quality; Preisendanz, for all his vulgarity, had surprisingly good taste. But above all August enjoyed his work. He was given a workroom all to himself, on the fifth floor, and was supplied promptly with whatever he required. Never had his clockwork needs been so lavishly, so painstakingly, satisfied; it seemed as if his thought could instantly be turned into matter before his eyes. Preisendanz proved to be a keen and intelligent judge of clockwork figures, and was himself surprised at August’s lack of historical knowledge of his craft; August did not even seem to know that the great age of automatons was past, that it was already a quaint art-form whose true place was in museums and in the cabinets of private collectors, although it continued a last, desperate, and degraded life in fair booths and traveling museums. Preisendanz had been in London when the great Robert-Houdin had arrived from Paris with his Soirées Fantastiques and had displayed his famous pastry-maker, who emerged from his shop bearing whatever confections the audience had called for. It was all extremely clever, but Preisendanz had been somewhat disappointed; the automaton lacked the elegance of the best late-eighteenth-century examples. It could in no way compare, for instance, with the miniature automatons of John Joseph Merlin, a Belgian mechanist who had displayed his figures in London in the sixties of the last century, and whose fifteen-inch clockwork women were said to have imitated human motions with unusual precision, including motions of the neck, the fingers, and even the eyelids. He had seen one of these remarkable figures, badly damaged, in the collection of a viscount. Preisendanz had followed closely the vogue of life-sized automatons, for he felt those old mainstays of the exhibitions had unheralded commercial possibilities; and he himself owned a life-sized automaton writer, clearly based on the famous Jacquet-Droz figure, though no longer in working condition. To all this, August listened with a curious mixture of keen interest and indifference.