“I think you are right,” he said. “I think this is a triangular affair with the state a party. I am in the service of the state. Will you kindly put the table by this window.”
They thought he wished the air, and would thus escape the closeness of the room. And while my father stood aside, Zindorf and his guest carried the flat writing table to the window and placed a chair.
My father sat down behind the table by the great open window, and looked at Zindorf.
The man moved and acted like a monk. He had the figure and the tonsured head. His coarse, patched clothes cut like the homely garments of the simple people of the day, were not wholly out of keeping to the part. The idea was visualized about him; the simplicity and the poverty of the great monastic orders in their vast, noble humility. All striking and real until one saw his face!
My father used to say that the great orders of God were correct in this humility; for in its vast, comprehensive action, the justice of God moved in a great plain, where every indicatory event was precisely equal; a straw was a weaver's beam.
God hailed men to ruin in his court, not with spectacular devices, but by means of some homely, common thing, as though to abase and overcome our pride.
My father moved the sheets of foolscap, and tested the point of the quill pen like one who considers with deliberation. He dipped the point into the inkpot and slowly wrote a dozen formal words.
Then he stopped and put down the pen.
“The contests of the courts,” he said, “are usually on the question of identity. I ought to see this slave for a correct description.”
The two men seemed for a moment uncertain what to do.