The Traveller’s one Friend.

Three of us, on the point of starting for a walking tour through the Tyrol, once sent on our luggage by post from Constance to Innsbruck.  Our idea was that, reaching Innsbruck in the height of the season, after a week’s tramp on two flannel shirts and a change of socks, we should be glad to get into fresh clothes before showing ourselves in civilized society.  Our bags were waiting for us in the post-office: we could see them through the grating.  But some informality—I have never been able to understand what it was—had occurred at Constance.  The suspicion of the Swiss postal authorities had been aroused, and special instructions had been sent that the bags were to be delivered up only to their rightful owners.

It sounds sensible enough.  Nobody wants his bag delivered up to anyone else.  But it had not been explained to the authorities at Innsbruck how they were to know the proper owners.  Three wretched-looking creatures crawled into the post-office and said they wanted those three bags—“those bags, there in the corner”—which happened to be nice, clean, respectable-looking bags, the sort of bags that anyone might want.  One of them produced a bit of paper, it is true, which he said had been given to him as a receipt by the post-office people at Constance.  But in the lonely passes of the Tyrol one man, set upon by three, might easily be robbed of his papers, and his body thrown over a precipice.  The chief clerk shook his head.  He would like us to return accompanied by someone who could identify us.  The hotel porter occurred to us, as a matter of course.  Keeping to the back streets, we returned to the hotel and fished him out of his box.

“I am Mr. J.,” I said: “this is my friend Mr. B. and this is Mr. S.”

The porter bowed and said he was delighted.

“I want you to come with us to the post-office,” I explained, “and identify us.”

The hotel porter is always a practical man: his calling robs him of all sympathy with the hide-bound formality of his compatriots.  He put on his cap and accompanied us back to the office.  He did his best: no one could say he did not.  He told them who we were: they asked him how he knew.  For reply he asked them how they thought he knew his mother: he just knew us: it was second nature with him.  He implied that the question was a silly one, and suggested that, as his time was valuable, they should hand us over the three bags and have done with their nonsense.

They asked him how long he had known us.  He threw up his hands with an eloquent gesture: memory refused to travel back such distance.  It appeared there was never a time when he had not known us.  We had been boys together.

Did he know anybody else who knew us?  The question appeared to him almost insulting.  Everybody in Innsbruck knew us, honoured us, respected us—everybody, that is, except a few post-office officials, people quite out of society.

Would he kindly bring along, say; one undoubtedly respectable citizen who could vouch for our identity?  The request caused him to forget us and our troubles.  The argument became a personal quarrel between the porter and the clerk.  If he, the porter, was not a respectable citizen of Innsbruck, where was such an one to be found?