He did not want to think--not of the letter of the private detective agency, nor of its horrible revelations, which seemed dim and turbid scenes of an immeasurably alien life, and yet the life of his son whom he had loved and whom he still loved. Ah, no, he did not want to think of the innumerable lowly and ugly and horrible events which whirled past his mind in a ghostly panorama--the rooms, the courts, the houses full of groaning, wretched bodies. To prevent himself from thinking of these, he turned the pages of a book, hunted through a drawer filled with old letters, and wandered tirelessly from room to room, followed by the dog Freya. Fleeing from these images, he encountered others that concerned the realm of his work, in which the hopes of all his life were rooted and had ripened, in which the very wheels of his existence had been set in motion. He saw the great shops desolate, the furnaces extinguished, the trip-hammers still, and from a thousand doors and windows arms in gestures of command stretched out toward him who had thought himself the master of them all. It was not the first time that a strike had interfered with the intricate organization of the works. But it was the first time that the feeling came to him that struggle was useless and the end imminent. And the question rose to his lips: “Why have you done this to me?” And this question he addressed to Christian, as though Christian were guilty of the demands of those who had once been willing slaves, of the empty halls, the extinguished furnaces, the silent hammers--guilty, somehow, because of his presence in those rooms amid harlots and murderers, mad and sick men, and in all those haunts of human vermin. Rage quivered up in him, one of those rare attacks that all but robbed him of consciousness. His eyes seemed filled with blood; he sought a sacrifice and a creature to make atonement, and observed the dog gnawing at a rug. He took a bamboo stick, and beat the animal so that it whined piteously--beat it for minutes, until his arm fell exhausted. Calm came, and he felt remorse and shame. But the core of his anger remained in his heart, and he carried it about with him like a hidden poison. The gnawing and burning did not cease, and he knew that it would not cease until he had had a reckoning with Christian, until Christian had given some accounting of himself as man to man, son to father, criminal to judge. The rage corroded his soul. Yet what was the way out? How could he reach Christian? How summon him to an accounting? No active step but would betray his dignity. Was he doomed merely to wait? For weeks and months? The silent rage gnawed at his very life. VI