Maze, continuing to smoke, sneered: “You would do well, then, to begin at once, for I hear on good authority that you are to be set aside this year for Lesable.”
Boissel raised his hand. “I swear that if—”
The door opened once more, and a dapper little man wearing the side-whiskers of an officer of marine or lawyer, and a high, stiff collar, who spoke his words rapidly as though he could not take the time to finish what he had to say, entered quickly with a preoccupied manner. He shook hands all around with the air of a man who had no leisure for dallying, and approaching the chief-clerk said: “My dear Cachelin, will you give me the Chapelou papers, rope yarn, Toulon A.T.V., 1875?”
The clerk rose, reached for a portfolio above his head, took out a package of sealed documents wrapped in blue linen, and presenting them said: “There, M. Lesable; you remember the chief took three dispatches from their package yesterday.”
“Yes, I have them. Thanks,” and the young man went out hurriedly.
Hardly had he gone when Maze ejaculated: “Well! what an air! One would swear he was already chief.”
And Pitolet replied: “Patience, patience; he will be before any of us.”
M. Cachelin had not resumed his writing. A fixed thought seemed to have taken possession of him. At last he said: “He has a fine future, that boy!”
But Maze murmured in a disdainful tone: “For those who think the ministry is a career—yes. For the others it is a little—”
Pitolet interrupted him: “Perhaps you intend to become ambassador?”
The other made an impatient gesture. “It is not a question of me. I can take care of myself. That has nothing to do with the fact that the position of the head of a department will never be anything very much.”
Father Savon, the copyist, had never ceased his work. But for some little time he had been dipping his pen in the inkstand, then wiping it vigorously on the sponge which stood in a little glass of water on his desk, without being able to trace a letter. The black liquid slipped along the point of the metal and fell in round spots on the paper. The good man, driven to despair as sheet after sheet of paper was thus spoiled, said in a deep and sorrowful voice:
“Here is more adulterated ink!”
A shout of laughter came from every mouth. Cachelin shook the table with his stomach. Maze bent double, as though he were going up the chimney backward. Pitolet stamped and roared and waved his hands in the air, and even Boissel was almost suffocated, although he generally looked at these things on the tragic rather than the comic side.
But father Savon, wiping his pen on the tail of his overcoat, said: “There is nothing to laugh at. I have to go over my whole work two or three times.”
He took from his box another sheet of paper, laid his wax sheet over it, and commenced again at the beginning: “Monsieur le Ministre and dear Colleague—” The pen now held the ink and traced the letters neatly. The old man settled down into his oblique posture and continued his copy.
The others had not stopped laughing. They were fairly choking. For six months they had played the same game on the poor old fellow, who had never detected it. It consisted in pouring several drops of oil on the damp sponge used for wiping pens. The metal, thus becoming coated with liquid grease, would not take the ink, and the perplexed copying-clerk would pass hours in using boxes of pens and bottles of ink, and finally declare that the supplies of the department were becoming perfectly worthless.
Then the jokers would torment the old man in other ways. They put gunpowder in his tobacco, pour drugs into his drinking water, and made him believe that, since the Commune, the majority of articles for general use had been adulterated by the socialists, to put the government in the wrong and bring about a revolution. He had conceived a terrible hatred against the anarchists, whom he believed to be concealed everywhere, and had a mysterious fear of an unknown woman—veiled and formidable.
A sharp ring of the bell sounded in the corridor. They well knew the emphatic ring of their chief, M. Torchebeuf, and each one sprang toward the door that he might regain his own compartment.
Cachelin returned to his work. Then he laid down his pen again, and took his head in his hands and began to think.
He turned over in his mind an idea which had tormented him for some time. An old noncommissioned officer of the marine infantry, retired after receiving three wounds, one at Senegal and two at Cochin China, who had been given a position in the ministry as an exceptional favour, he had had to endure many miseries, many hardships, and many griefs in his long career as an insignificant subordinate. He considered authority, official authority, as the finest thing in the world. The head of a Department seemed to him an exceptional being, living in a higher sphere; and the employee of whom he heard it said: “He is a sharp one; he will get there yet,” appeared to him of another race, another nature, than himself.
He had therefore for his colleague Lesable a high respect which approached veneration, and he cherished the secret desire, which was never absent from his mind, to have him marry his daughter.
She would be rich one day, very rich. This was known throughout the entire ministry, for his sister, Mlle. Cachelin, possessed a million, a clear, cool million, acquired through love, they said, but purified by belated piety.
This ancient spinster, who had led a gay life in her youth, had retired with five hundred thousand francs, which she had more than doubled in eighteen years, thanks to her ferocious economy and more than frugal habits. She had
