I said I was a courier. It seemed to stun him, and before he could come to we were gone.
When I arrived in the third story of the hotel I found our quarters vacant. I was not surprised. The moment a courier takes his eye off his tribe they go shopping. The nearer it is to train time the surer they are to go. I sat down to try and think out what I had best do next, but presently the hall boy found me there, and said the Expedition had gone to the station half an hour before. It was the first time I had known them to do a rational thing, and it was very confusing. This is one of the things that make a courier’s life so difficult and uncertain. Just as matters are going the smoothest, his people will strike a lucid interval, and down go all his arrangements to wreck and ruin.
The train was to leave at twelve noon sharp. It was now ten minutes after twelve. I could be at the station in ten minutes. I saw I had no great amount of leeway, for this was the lightning express, and on the Continent the lightning expresses are pretty fastidious about getting away some time during the advertised day. My people were the only ones remaining in the waiting room; everybody else had passed through and ‘mounted the train,’ as they say in those regions. They were exhausted with nervousness and fret, but I comforted them and heartened them up, and we made our rush.
But no; we were out of luck again. The doorkeeper was not satisfied with the tickets. He examined them cautiously, deliberately, suspiciously: then glared at me awhile, and after that he called another official. The two examined the tickets and called another official. These called others, and the convention discussed and discussed, and gesticulated and carried on until I begged that they would consider how time was flying, and just pass a few resolutions and let us go. Then they said very courteously that there was a defect in the tickets, and asked me where I got them.
I judged I saw what the trouble was, now. You see, I had bought the tickets in a cigar shop, and of course the tobacco smell was on them: without doubt the thing they were up to was to work the tickets through the Custom House and to collect duty on that smell. So I resolved to be perfectly frank: it is sometimes the best way. I said:
‘Gentlemen, I will not deceive you. These railway tickets——’
‘Ah! pardon, monsieur! These are not railway tickets.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘is that the defect?’
‘Ah, truly yes, monsieur. These are lottery tickets, yes; and it is a lottery which has been drawn two years ago.’
I affected to be greatly amused; it is all one can do in such circumstances; it is all one can do, and yet there is no value in it; it deceives nobody, and you can see that everybody around pities you and is ashamed of you. One of the hardest situations in life, I think, is to be full of grief and a sense of defeat and shabbiness that way, and yet have to put on an outside of archness and gaiety, while all the time you know that your own expedition, the treasures of your heart, and whose love and reverence you are by the custom of our civilisation entitled to, are being consumed with humiliation before strangers to see you earning and getting a compassion, which is a stigma, a brand—a brand which certifies you to be—oh, anything and everything which is fatal to human respect.