I was told."
"In that case I know who told you.
It was Persidsky. The same Persidsky who blatantly uses the editorial-office services to send material to Leningrad."
"Pasha," said the editor quietly, "fetch Persidsky."
Life-and-the-Law sat indifferently on the window ledge.
In the garden behind him birds and young skittle players could be seen busily moving about.
They litigated for some time. The editor ended the hearing with a smart move: he deleted the chess and replaced it with Life-and-the-Law.
Persidsky was given a warning.
It was five o'clock, the busiest time for the office.
Smoke curled above the over-heated typewriters.
The reporters dictated in voices harshened by haste.
The senior typist shouted at the rascals who slipped in their material unobserved and out of turn.
Down the corridor came the office poet.
He was courting a typist, whose modest hips unleashed his poetic emotions.
He used to lead her to the end of the corridor by the window and murmur words of love to her, to which she usually replied:
"I'm working overtime today and I'm very busy."
That meant she loved another.
The poet got in everyone's way and asked all his friends the same favour with monotonous regularity.
"Let me have ten kopeks for the tram."
He sauntered into the local correspondents' room in search of the sum.
Wandering about between the desks at which the readers were working, and fingering the piles of despatches, he renewed his efforts.
The readers, the most hardboiled people in the office (they were made that way by the need to read through a hundred letters a day, scrawled by hands which were more used to axes, paint-brushes and wheelbarrows than a pen), were silent.
The poet visited the despatch office and finally migrated to the clerical section.
But besides not getting the ten kopeks, he was buttonholed by Avdotyev, a member of the Young Communist League, who proposed that the poet should join the Automobile Club.
The poet's enamoured soul was enveloped in a cloud of petrol fumes.
He took two paces to the side, changed into third gear, and disappeared from sight.
Avdotyev was not a bit discouraged.
He believed in the triumph of the car idea.
In the editor's room he carried on the struggle, on the sly, which also prevented the editor from finishing the editorial.
"Listen, Alexander Josifovich, wait a moment, it's a serious matter," said Avdotyev, sitting down on the editor's desk. "We've formed an automobile club.
Would the editorial office give us a loan of five hundred roubles for eight months?"
"Like hell it would."
"Why?
Do you think it's a dead duck?"
"I don't think, I know.
How many members are there?"
"A large number already."
For the moment the club only consisted of the organizer, but Avdotyev did not enlarge on this.
"For five hundred roubles we can buy a car at the 'graveyard'.
Yegorov has already picked one out there.
He says the repairs won't come to more than five hundred.
That's a thousand altogether.
So I thought of recruiting twenty people, each of whom will give fifty.
Anyway, it'll be fun.
We'll learn to drive.
Yegorov will be the instructor and in three months' time, by August, we'll all be able to drive. We'll have a car and each one in turn can go where he likes."
"What about the five hundred for the purchase?"
"The mutual-assistance fund will provide that on interest.
We'll pay it off.
So I'll put you down, shall I?"