him.
He was all prepared to cleave a diamond for my benefit; it was
obviously a solemn occasion, but he was a young man with a merry,
square face, and his grin kept breaking through. The diamond he
intended to operate on was a knobby stone, embedded edge upward in
reddish cement that was fixed in a clamp, which in turn was held in the
vise. He took the contraption out so that I might look at it closely,
then he returned it and picked up a small tool, a sharp-edged diamond
firmly fixed in a handle. Using this as a file he began scratching at
the other diamond, across the edge, back and forth. The scratching made
a squeaky noise of the kind that hurts the teeth.
"He
must start it just so," said Mr. Briefel, "in exactly the right place;
otherwise the diamond may break into bits. This is the hardest thing to
learn." I asked if diamonds were ever spoiled at this stage. The
demonstrator laughed rather ruefully, and Mr. Briefel said that almost
every apprentice ruined a few stones before he finished his training.
Now the cutter was satisfied with the tiny impression he had made on
the diamond. He gave me his loupe so that I could examine it, and then
he picked up a piece of steel that was wedge-shaped on one edge and
blunt on the other. Fitting the wedge into the crack, he took a small
mallet and aimed carefully at the blunt edge. He struck sharply. A part
of the diamond flew off into the air.
"It's
lost!" I said excitedly. But it was not: it had landed in the cutter's
lap, caught in his capacious blue apron. He gave it to me to examine:
it was sheared off neatly and presented a glassy surface broken only by
faint striations.
"Now
comes the sawing," said Mr. Briefel. We walked down a passage which, as
he apologetically pointed out, was dark and narrow. "We had to expand
when we took on disabled soldiers
