Short story · 4 min read · Set in Cormorant Street ·
The Post That Arrived Early
The Ballast House hotel returns forgotten property by post as a standing courtesy, and its parcels reliably reach guests several days before the guests have noticed leaving anything.
Ballast House on Cormorant Street keeps a framed card in the hall by the letter rack that has hung there past the memory of every current member of staff: property left behind is forwarded by post. The hotel writes first. No reply is necessary. Under the desk, next to the accounts, sits the Found Property Book, ruled for item, room, date found, date despatched, and filled in nightly in the same patient house hand the hall card runs in.
The routine is works-like: housekeeping turns a room, lists what a case has left behind, the desk copies the list into the book by the following morning, and the parcel goes by the first post — brown paper, house string, a house label typed off in the office, and inside, above the object, a slip of house stock: we believe you have left the following with us. With the hotel's compliments. The objects are ordinary ones: reading glasses, umbrellas, a tin of pipe cleaners, half a bottle of tonic water, a tern feather kept flat between two postcards. The hotel has been known to hold nothing back and to bill nobody. The compliments are free, and the post is cheap, and the book is perfect.
What the letters of thanks disclose is the margin. They come back addressed in hosts of different hands, some typed, some pencil, and a good portion of them say some version of the same pleased trouble: it beat me home. The parcel was on the hall table in Blackheath the evening of the very day the guest checked out; it was waiting by the time the train got in; it arrived, in one gentleman's phrasing, before the shave. The book, ruled and audited like every other book in the house, shows the despatch column keeping its lead over the discovery of the loss by periods the guests themselves can only describe — sometimes a week, sometimes a fortnight, once, in a summer visitor's grateful complaint, by the entire length of her holiday.
There are explanations and Ballast House uses them, cordially. Housekeeping is thorough, the first post is prompt, and people do not notice the absence of an umbrella for days; a man may wear his spare glasses for a fortnight and grieve the good pair on the train home. Where the letter comes from a guest still resident in the house, parcel in one hand and room key in the other, the desk's account is that the guest was informed by telephone and has since misremembered the order of comfort and astonishment. Nobody at the desk argues with a guest's pleasure. The book is considered the understanding party in any disagreement with memory.
The one thing the book does not carry, and never has carried, is a column for the address. The register cards at Ballast House hold what the Transit Act requires and no more: name, party, motor registration where given, and nothing whatever in the way of a home direction, because who asks a guest where they live; the guest is, in the hotel's sense of the word, there. The labels nevertheless go out complete — street, town, the postal district, in the house's own steady hand or its own steady type — and the parcels arrive, which is proof of something the mild way most proofs at Ballast House are mild. The night porter says the directions come off the cases, off the tags strapped to the handles, and he copies them onto the labels himself, standing at the desk after his supper. The register says what it says about the rooms marked in the despatch column, and in enough of those rows the guests came down from the wards — came down from the harbor, came down from the coastal camps — with no cases at all.
At audit the book goes up to the office with the rest and comes back initialed like any other book in the house, and the office's finding has stood for years: forwarding, satisfactory; wastage, nil. So the parcels keep to the first post, and the letters of thanks keep to their different hands, and the plain question the whole tidy arrangement leaves lying on the hall table under the letter rack is one no column of the Found Property Book was ever ruled wide enough to take: who, at Ballast House, writes the address first — the porter with his tags, or the house itself, some hours before the guest has finished being there?