if you know your way about, you follow him in. There are seats within, and you have a newspaper in your pocket: the time will pass more pleasantly. Inside he looks round, bewildered. The German post-office, generally speaking, is about the size of the Bank of England. Some twenty different windows confront your troubled friend, each one bearing its own particular legend. Starting with number one, he sets to work to spell them out. It appears to him that the posting of letters is not a thing that the German post-office desires to encourage. Would he not like a dog licence instead? is what one window suggests to him. “Oh, never mind that letter of yours; come and talk about bicycles,” pleads another. At last he thinks he has found the right hole: the word “Registration” he distinctly recognizes. He taps at the glass.
Nobody takes any notice of him. The foreign official is a man whose life is saddened by a public always wanting something. You read it in his face wherever you go. The man who sells you tickets for the theatre! He is eating sandwiches when you knock at his window. He turns to his companion:
“Good Lord!” you can see him say, “here’s another of ’em. If there has been one man worrying me this morning there have been a hundred. Always the same story: all of ’em want to come and see the play. You listen now; bet you anything he’s going to bother me for tickets. Really, it gets on my nerves sometimes.”
At the railway station it is just the same.
“Another man who wants to go to Antwerp! Don’t seem to care for rest, these people: flying here, flying there, what’s the sense of it?” It is this absurd craze on the part of the public for letter-writing that is spoiling the temper of the continental post-office official. He does his best to discourage it.
“Look at them,” he says to his assistant – the thoughtful German Government is careful to provide every official with another official for company, lest by sheer force of ennui he might be reduced to taking interest in his work – “twenty of ’em, all in a row! Some of ’em been there for the last quarter of an hour.”
“Let ’em wait another quarter of an hour,” advises the assistant; “perhaps they’ll go away.”
“My dear fellow,” he answers, “do you think I haven’t tried that? There’s simply no getting rid of ’em. And it’s always the same cry: ‘Stamps! stamps! stamps!’ ’Pon my word, I think they live on stamps, some of ’em.”
“Well let ’em have their stamps?” suggests the assistant, with a burst of inspiration; “perhaps it will get rid of ’em.”
“What’s the use?” wearily replies the older man. “There will only come a fresh crowd when those are gone.”
“Oh, well,” argues the other, “that will be a change, anyhow. I’m tired of looking at this lot.”
I put it to a German post-office clerk once – a man I had been boring for months. I said:
“You think I write these letters – these short stories, these three-act plays – on purpose to annoy you. Do let me try to get the idea out of your head. Personally, I hate work – hate it as much as you do. This is a pleasant little town of yours: given a free choice, I could spend the whole day mooning round it, never putting pen to paper. But what am I to do? I have a wife and children. You know what it is yourself: they clamour for food, boots – all sorts of things. I have to prepare these little packets for sale and bring them to you to send off. You see, you are here. If you were not here – if there were no post-office in this town, maybe I’d have to train pigeons, or cork the thing up in a bottle, fling it into the river, and trust to luck and the Gulf Stream. But, you being here, and calling yourself a post-office – well, it’s a temptation to a fellow.”
I think it did good. Anyhow, after that he used to grin when I opened the door, instead of greeting me as formerly with a face the picture of despair. But to return to our inexperienced friend.
At last the wicket is suddenly opened. A peremptory official demands of him “name and address.” Not expecting the question, he is a little doubtful of his address, and has to correct himself once or twice. The official eyes him suspiciously.
“Name of mother?” continues the official.
“Name of what?”
“Mother!” repeats the official. “Had a mother of some sort, I suppose.”
He is a man who loved his mother sincerely while she lived, but she has been dead these twenty years, and, for the life of him he cannot recollect her name. He thinks it was Margaret Henrietta, but is not at all sure. Besides, what on earth has his mother got to do with this registered letter that he wants to send to his partner in New York?
“When did it die?” asks the official.
“When did what die? Mother?”
“No, no, the child.”
“What child?” The indignation of the official is almost picturesque.
“All I want to do,” explains your friend, “is to register a letter.”
“A what?”
“This letter, I want – ”
The window is slammed in his face. When, ten minutes later he does reach the right wicket – the bureau for the registration of letters, and not the bureau for the registration of infantile deaths – it is pointed out to him that the letter either is sealed or that it is not sealed.
I have never been able yet to solve this problem. If your letter is sealed, it then appears that it ought not to have been sealed.
If, on the other hand, you have omitted to seal it, that is your fault. In any case, the letter cannot go as it is. The continental official brings up the public on the principle of the nurse who sent the eldest girl to see what Tommy was doing and tell him he mustn’t. Your friend, having wasted half an hour and mislaid his temper for the day, decides to leave this thing over and talk to the hotel porter about it. Next to the Burgomeister, the hotel porter is the most influential man in the continental town: maybe because he can swear in seven different languages. But even he is not omnipotent.
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
