“Mr Lorton, I will report you, sir!” was all he said to me directly; but, as he shuffled off to his desk, with the attendance book recording my misdeeds under his arm and his face purple with passion, we all could hear him muttering pretty loudly to himself. “Smudge! Smudge!”—he was repeating;—“I’ll Smudge him, the impudent rascal! I wonder what the dooce he meant by it! What the dooce did he mean by it?—mean by it?”
I begged his pardon off-hand, immediately, of course, although I would not give him the written apology he peremptorily demanded.
Do you know, I did not like to deprive him of the extreme pleasure it would give him to submit his case against me—in clerkly, cut-and-dried statement—to the chief commissioner, under-secretary, first lord, or whoever else occupied the lofty pedestal of “the board,” that controlled the occasionally-peculiar proceedings of the Obstructor General’s Department.
I knew with what intense relish he would expatiate on the wrong which “the service” had sustained in his person at my hands—the “frightful example” I presented, of insubordination and defiance to constitutional authority; and how, he would draw up the most elaborate document, detailing all this, in flowing but strictly official language, on carefully-folded, quarter-margined foolscap, of the regular, authorised dimensions!
What a pity, I thought, it would be to interfere with such neat arrangements by submitting to a Nolle Prosequi—as I would have done, had I tendered the recantation of my error that he insisted on!
At the same time, however, I checkmated his triumph, by forwarding to the people in high places the resignation of that position as a clerk of the tertiary formation, which I had, been nominated to, examined in respect of, and competed for, under the auspices of Her Majesty’s Polite Letter Writer Commissioners; and which I had been duly appointed to—all in proper official sequence—but one short year before, plus a few additional months, which were of no great consequence to any one.
My withdrawal left, at any rate, one place vacant for some member of Parliament’s constituent’s son, who would, probably, be much more worthy in every way for the honours and duties of the situation—which, really, I do not think I ever estimated at their proper value!
This was some satisfaction to me, I assure you; and, combined with the sum of one hundred and ten pounds sterling—less income-tax on one-fourth part of the said amount, or thereabouts: I like to be correct—was all the benefit I ever received from my connection with “Government.”
My year’s probation was, I may say without any great exaggeration, thrown away; for, the knowledge I gained was not of a character to advance my interests in any other walk in life, professional or mercantile. Still, I bear no malice to officialdom, if officialdom cares to obtain my assurance to that effect. The few words—far between, too—which I have dropped to you, anent the combination of the ill-used servants of the country in opposition to their grievances, have been more intended to redress the wrongs of those hard-worked, poor-paid sufferers in question, than meant as a covert attack on the noble authorities of the great, lumbering institution they belong to—the spokes of whose broadly-tired wheels they may be said to form.
For my part, I adore governmental departments, looking on all of them with a wide admiration that is tempered with wholesome awe; and, believing them to be so many concentrations of virtue and merit, which are none the less real because they are imperceptible.