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 non-commissioned 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.