“I said, ‘If Jeremias Naegeli commands several thousand expert technicians, why would he want me?’ ‘Because his people are expected to keep on the job during wartime,’ said my boss; ‘it would not look well if he took a first-rate man for what might appear to be a frivolous job. He is old and he doesn’t want to wait until the war is over. But if he borrows you from the museum, and you are a foreigner not engaged in war production, it’s a different thing, do you understand?’ I understood, and in a couple of weeks I was on my way to St Gallen to be looked over by the imperious Jeremias Naegeli.

“It proved that he lived at some distance from St Gallen on his estate in the mountains, and a driver was sent to take me there. That was my first sight of Sorgenfrei. As you gentlemen know, it is an impressive sight, but try to imagine how impressive it was to me, who had never been in a rich house before, to say nothing of such a gingerbread castle as that. I was frightened out of my wits. As soon as I arrived I was taken by a secretary to the great man’s private room, which was called his study, but was really a huge library, dark, hot, stuffy, and smelling of leather furniture, expensive cigars, and rich man’s farts. It was this expensive stench that destroyed the last of my confidence, because it was as if I had entered the den of some fearsome old animal, which was precisely what Jeremias Naegeli was. It had been many years—in Willard’s time—since I had been afraid of anyone, but I was afraid of him.

“He played the role of great industrialist, contemptuous of ceremony and without an instant to spare on inferior people. ‘Have you brought your tools?’ was the first thing he said to me; although it was a silly question—why wouldn’t I have brought my tools?—he made it sound as if I were just the sort of fellow who would have travelled across the whole of Switzerland without them. He questioned me carefully about clockwork, and that was easy because I knew more about that subject than he did; he understood principles but I don’t suppose he could have made a safety-pin. Then he heaved himself out of his chair and gestured to me with his cigar to follow; he was old and very fat, and progress was slow, but we crawled back into the entrance hall, where he showed me the big clock there, which you have all seen; it has dials for everything you can think of—time at Sorgenfrei and at Greenwich, seconds, the day of the week, the date of the month, the seasons, and the signs of the zodiac, the phases of the moon, and a complex sonnerie. ‘What’s that?’ he said. So I told him what it was, and how it was integrated and what metals were probably used to balance one another off with enough compensation to keep the thing from needing continual readjustment. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was pleased. ‘That clock was made for my grandfather, who designed it,’ he said. ‘He must have been a very great technician,’ I said, and that pleased him as well, as I meant it to do. Most men are much more partial to their grandfathers than to their fathers, just as they admire their grandsons but rarely their sons. Then he beckoned me to follow again, and this time we went on quite a long journey, down a flight of steps, through a long corridor, and up steps again into what I judged was another building; we had been through a tunnel.