He lied, of course. He's a Levantine from Constantinople, with Greek, Armenian, Hindu, and perhaps some Turkish blood in his veins. This combination insures him good temper, capacity, and imagination—not a bad mixture for a courier. Besides, he is reasonably honest—not punctiliously so—not as to francs, perhaps, but certainly as to fifty-pound notes—that is, he was while he served me. Of course, I never had a fifty-pound note—not all at once—but if I had had I don't think he would have absorbed it—not if I had signed it on the back for identification and had kept it in a money-belt around my waist and close to my skin.
Those things, however, never trouble me. I don't want to make a savings-bank of Joseph. It is his vivid imagination that appeals to me, or perhaps the picturesqueness with which he puts things. In this he is a veritable master. His material, too, is not only uncommonly rich, but practically inexhaustible. He knows everybody; has travelled with everybody; has always kept one ear and one eye open even when asleep, and has thus picked up an immense amount of information regarding people and events—mostly his own patrons—the telling of which has served to enliven many a quiet hour while he sat beside me as I painted. Why, once I remember in Stamboul, when some Arabs had——
But I forget that I am following Joseph upstairs, and that his mission is to see that I am comfortably lodged at the Baur au Lac in Zurich.
When we reached the second floor Joseph met the porter emerging into the corridor with my large luggage. He had mounted the back stairs.
"Let me see Number 13, porter," cried Joseph. "Ah, yes—it is just as I supposed. Is it in that hole you would put my Lord—where there is noise all the time? You see that window, my Lord?" (By this time I had reached the two disputants and had entered the room.) "You remember, your Highness, that enormous omnibus in which you have arrived just? It is there that it sleeps." And Joseph craned his head out of the window and pointed in the direction of the court-yard. "When it goes out in the morning at seven o'clock for the train it is like thunder. The Count Monflot had this room. You should have seen him when he was awoke at seven. He was like a crazy man. He pulled all the strings out of the bells, and when the waiter come he had the hat-box of Monsieur the Count at his head."
Dismissing the apartment with a contemptuous wave of his hand, Joseph, with the porter's assistance, who had a pass-key, began a search of the other vacant rooms: half the hotel was vacant, I afterward learned; all this telegram and book business was merely an attempt to bolster up the declining days of a bad season.
"Number 21? No—it is a little better, but it's too near the behind stairs. It would be absurd to put his Lordship there. Number 24?"—here he looked into another room. "No, you can hear the grande baggage in the night going up and down. No, it will not do."
The manager, having disposed of the other members of the Emperor's household, now approached with a servile smile fitted to all parts of his face. Joseph attacked him at once.
"Is his Lordship a valet, Monsieur, that you should put him in such holes? Do you not know that he never wakes until ten, and has his coffee at eleven, and the omnibus, you know, sleeps there?" And he pointed outside. (Another Levantine lie: I am up at seven when the light is right.)
Here the porter unlocked another room and stood by smiling. He knew the game was up now, and had reserved this one for the last.