And when he had melted us with his heartbreaking stories he wanted to have the pleasure of saying no and leaving us high and dry. He gets a kick out of that. A quiet sort of revenge, as it were, for his inability to cure himself of his sorrows.
I figure it doesn’t help a man any to encourage him in that direction. If a woman gets hysterical you know that the best thing to do is to slap her face good and hard. The same with these poor devils: they’ve got to be made to understand that they are not the only ones in the world who are suffering.
They make a vice of their suffering. An analyst might cure him—and again he might not. And in any case, how would you get him to the analyst? You don’t suppose he’d listen to a suggestion of that sort, do you?
If I hadn’t been so tired, and if I had had more money. I’d have tried another line with him. I’d have bought him some booze—not just a bottle, but a case of whiskey, two cases or three, if I were able to afford it. I tried that once on a friend of mine—another confirmed drunkard. Do you know, he was so damned furious when he saw all that liquor that he never opened a single bottle. He was insulted, so he pretended. It didn’t faze me in the least.
I had gotten rather fed up with his antics. When he was sober he was a prince, but when he got drunk he was just impossible. Well, thereafter, every time he came to see me, as soon as he suggested a little drink, I poured out a half dozen glasses at once for him.
While he was debating whether to touch it or not I would excuse myself and run out to buy more. It worked—in his case, at least. It cost me his friendship, to be sure, but it stopped him from playing the drunkard with me.
They’ve tried similar things in certain prisons I know of. They don’t force a man to work, if he doesn’t want to. On-the contrary, they give him a comfortable cell, plenty to eat, cigars, cigarettes, wine or beer, according to his taste, a servant to wait on him, anything he wants save his freedom. After a few days of it the fellow usually begs to be permitted to work.
A man just can’t stand having too much of a good thing. Give a man all he wants and more and you’ll cure him of his appetites in nine cases out of ten. It’s so damned simple—it’s strange we don’t take advantage of such ideas.”
When I had crawled into bed and turned out the light I found that I was wide awake. Often, when I’ve listened to a man for a whole evening, turning myself into a receiving station, I lie awake and rehearse the man’s story from beginning to end.
I like to see how accurately I can retrace the innumerable incidents which a man can relate in the course of several hours, especially if he is given free rein. I almost always think of such talks as a big tree with limbs and branches and leaves and buds.
Roots, too, which have their grip in the common soil of human experience and which make any story, no matter how fantastic or incredible, quite plausible, provided you give the man the time and attention he demands.
The most wonderful thing, to carry the image further, is the buds: these are the little incidents which like seeds a man will often plant in your mind to blossom later when the memory of him is almost lost.
Some men are particularly skillful in handling these buds; they actually seem to possess the power to graft them on to your own story-telling tree so that when they blossom forth you imagine that they were your own, though you never cease marveling that your own little brain could have produced such astonishing fruit.
As I say, I was turning it all over in my mind and chuckling to myself to think how clever I was to have detected certain definite falsifications, certain distortions and omissions which, when one is listening intently, one seldom catches.
Presently I recalled how he had admitted some slight fabrications only to emphasize that the rest of his yarn was pure wool. At this point I chuckled aloud. Rattner was tossing about, evidently no more able than I to close his eyes.
“Are you still awake?” I asked quietly.
He gave a grunt.
“Listen,” I said, “there’s one thing I want to ask you—do you believe he was telling the truth about himself?”
Rattner, too tired I suppose to go into any subtleties of analysis, began to hem and haw. In the main he thought the fellow had been telling us the truth. “Why, didn’t you believe him?” he asked.
“You remember,” I said, “when I touched him to the quick . . . you remember how sincerely he spoke? Well, it was at that moment that I doubted him. At that moment he told us the biggest lie of all—when he said that the rest was all true. I don’t believe that any of it was true, not even the story about knowing your friend. You remember how quickly he married him off to his sister? That was sheer spontaneous invention.
I was tracing it all back just now. And I remembered very distinctly how, when you were discussing your friend the architect, he always told his part after you had made a few remarks. He was getting his clue from you all the time.
He’s very agile and he’s certainly fertile, I’ll say that for him, but I don’t believe a damned thing he told us, except perhaps that he was in the army and got badly bunged up. Even that, of course, could have been trumped up.
Did you ever feel a head that was trepanned? That seems like solid fact, of course, and yet somehow, I don’t know just why, I could doubt even what my fingers told me. When a man has an inventive brain like his he could tell you anything and make it sound convincing.
Mind you, it doesn’t make his story any less real, as far as I’m concerned. Whether all those things happened or not, they’re true just the same. A minute ago, when I was mulling it over to myself, I caught myself deforming certain incidents, certain remarks he made, in order to make the story a better story. Not to make it more truthful, but more true, if you see the difference. I had it all figured out, how I would tell it myself, if I ever got down to it. . . .”
Rattner began to protest that I was too sweeping in my judgment, which only served to remind me of the marvelous poem he had recited for us.
“I say,” I began again, “what would you think if I told you that the poem which he got off with such gusto was somebody else’s? Would that shock you?”
“You mean you recognized it—you had heard it before?”
“No, I don’t mean to say that, but I’m damned sure he was not the author of it. Why did he talk about his unusual memory immediately afterwards—didn’t that strike you as rather strange? He could have spoken about a thousand things, but no, he had to speak of that. Besides, he recited it too well.
Poets aren’t usually so good at reciting their own things. Very few poets remember their verses, particularly if they’re long ones such as his was. To recite a poem with such feeling a man has to admire it greatly and a poet, once he’s written a poem out, forgets it.
In any case, he wouldn’t be going around spouting it aloud to every Tom, Dick and Harry he meets. A bad poet might, but then that poem wasn’t written by a bad poet. And furthermore, a poem like that couldn’t have been written by a man like our friend who boasted so glibly about turning out crap for the magazines whenever he needed to earn an honest or a dishonest penny. No, he memorized that poem because it was just the sort of thing he would like to have written himself and couldn’t. I’m sure of it.”
“There’s something to what you say there,” said Rattner sleepily. He sighed and turned over, his face towards the wall. In a jiffy he had turned round again and was sitting bolt upright.
“What’s the matter,” I asked, “what hit you?”
“Why my friend what’s his name . . . you know, the architect who was my buddy. Who mentioned his name first—he did, didn’t he? Well, how could he be lying then?”
“That’s easy,” I said. “Your friend’s name is known to millions of people. He selected it just because it was a well-known name; he thought it would add tone to his story. That was when he was talking about his inventions, you remember? He just made a stab in the dark—and happened to strike your friend.”
“He seemed to know a hell of a lot about him,” said Rattner, still unconvinced.
“Well, don’t you know lots of things about people whom you’ve never met? Why, if a man is any kind of celebrity we often know more about him than he does himself. Besides, this bird may have run into him at a bar some
