things are sometimes otherwise

FERENC MOLNÁR

some striking examples of the mistakes created by too strong a faith in circumstantial evidence

Most of the time questionnaires sent out by newspapers are of the type which one answers only unwillingly and rather diffidently. (Tristan Bernard once ended his answer to one of these questions: "You are greatly mistaken if you think that I have ever had any set ideas about this problem. I made up my 'opinion' five minutes ago in order to answer your query.")

On my desk lies a questionnaire sent out by a German newspaper. Only a very hot summer could have possibly prompted it: "What was the most agreeable sight you ever witnessed?" I rack my brain but I cannot think of any "most agreeable sights." And whenever one occurs to me, it seems to me that it is not meant for the general public. As a matter of fact, the most agreeable ones have no place in a newspaper.

On the other hand, ever since I have received the questionnaire, another question has been pursuing me—a question wholly its opposite: "What was the most horrible sight you ever witnessed?" I could answer this any minute. In fact, the incident lives so vividly in my memory that I shall relate it here— although no one has asked me to.

I was a young student then and lived with my parents in a large four-story house. One night, I reached home after midnight. I was about to ring for the concierge when I discovered that the door was not locked. It was slightly ajar. I stepped into the hall and there I saw a woman lying prone on her back, with blood streaming from her forehead. A young man was kneeling by her side wiping the blood from her face with a handkerchief. Next to them, on the floor, lay the decapitated head of an old man with grey hair with a hideous wound on his face.

This was the most horrible sight I ever saw in my life.

I should not say any more in reply to the questionnaire, because I would adhere strictly to the answer requested. But here I shall explain the sight, for—although there is no moral to the tale—it is worthy of an explanation, chiefly because one could easily imagine what would have happened if only the witness had not been a student, but a police-officer suddenly confronted with the situation and asked to explain it.

As a matter of fact, the answer is simple, almost naive. A young physician lived in the house, in a furnished room. He lived there because the house was near the clinic of the Budapest University and he spent all his time at the clinic. He was about to be appointed assistant to a famous professor, and he often worked at the Anatomical Institute, in the dissecting room, until late at night. In fact he was so zealous that he often took parts of human bodies home with him, wrapped in a piece of paper, and worked on them in his room. But no one in the house knew anything about this. All the concierge knew was that he often came home at night with big parcels under his arm.

On that, for me, memorable night, the student brought home with him the head of a man. He rang the bell and the wife of the concierge opened the door for him. A municipal ordinance set a small fee for this service but the young doctor had not paid the concierge anything for some weeks. That evening, he gave her a large banknote. The woman could not change it. "You will pay me some other time," she said. But the doctor did not want to owe her any longer. "Wait a minute," he said. "I'll run across the street and get change at the cafe." He put his parcel on the floor and went out.

The woman at last saw her chance to find out what the doctor's packages contained and, driven by curiosity, bent down to examine the parcel. She turned aside the paper wrapper, and the head rolled out. She was so horrified that she fainted and, falling, hit her head against the floor, receiving a wound on her forehead. When the doctor returned with the change, he immediately began to administer first aid. It was then that I entered the hall.

It seems to me—now that I have reached the end—that the incident is excellent material for a questionnaire. All one has to do is to describe the scene as I found it and ask famous detectives, police-captains, and coroners to explain it. One thing is certain; all the answers would be much more interesting than the actual truth.

The following incident took place in Budapest, during the late war. The actor, S., told it to me, a few minutes after it had happened, and he was quite beside himself as he related it.

He was walking along the Boulevard in the night. It was a damp, foggy, cold night. Suddenly he noticed a ragged, hungry-looking individual approaching, with the characteristic, short-paced, dance-like tripping of shellshocked invalids. The actor took pity on him. He gave the veteran some money. The invalid thanked him and staggered on.

"Where do you live?" the actor asked him.

"At Kö-kö-köbánya," answered the invalid. Kobanya was a distant suburb.

"A stammerer, too," thought the actor. "Poor man. It's terrible, it'll be morning by the time he gets home." He noticed a hansom and beckoned to it. The cab drove up to the curb.

"Take this poor man home to Kobanya," he said to the driver and paid the fare in advance. The invalid stammered something that sounded like: "Thank you."

The actor helped him into the cab and shut the door. He loathed all expressions of gratitude.

The cab drove away. The actor ambled on toward the Cafe New York, where some friends were waiting for him. A few feet from the entrance to the café, in the bright light of the restaurant, he noticed his invalid from Kobanya. In a fraction of a second he perceived what must have happened: the driver, secure of his fare, had thrown the helpless, shell-shocked soldier out of his cab... outraged at this idea, he ran to him.

The invalid began to yell. "He-he-help! He wants to hurt me!" he screamed and he tried to run away from the actor.

In a moment, passersby gathered around them.

"What's happened?" they, asked.

"He-he-help! He wants to hurt me," the invalid went on; "he won't let me beg. . . . Mu-mu-murderer! ... He fo-fo-forced me into a cab! ... I don't want to go home. . . . Help! . . . Sc-sc-scoundrel!"

The pitying crowd grew larger. The actor turned up the collar of his great coat, pulled his hat down, hurriedly crossed the street, and rapidly fled down a dark alley.

Moral: It is not enough to be good; one must be fortunate in the choice of one's beneficiary.

There was, a long time ago, a very popular actor in Budapest. The local press constantly referred to him as "the favourite of women," "the ideal of the ladies," "the perfect hero," and so on. He was a matineeidol ne plus ultra. Young girls used to cut his name out of the papers, and frame his photographs.

This perfect Romeo appeared one day at the office of a physician friend of mine. He was in a state of utter despair and asked the physician to do him a great favour. He described his position as positively horrible. Years before, he had often complained of attacks of heart-burn. One night, at the Newspapermen's Club, he told this to a young doctor of his acquaintance. The young man examined him, prescribed for him a strict diet, and, in a short time, cured him of his unpleasant illness. The question of honorarium, of course, never came up. But the matinee-idol, wishing to express his gratitude in some way, sent the young physician a beautiful, large photograph of himself, with the following dedication: To Dr. Charles S—r, my saviour, who has cured me of my unfortunate malady. His eternally grateful friend—and the signature. The young doctor considered himself greatly honoured and, very proudly, hung the photograph above his desk so that every one of his patients might see it.

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But ill-fate pursued the young doctor, and he decided to leave Budapest. Somehow he scraped together a little money and went to Paris, to Professor G., who, at that time, was the world's foremost specialist in social diseases. He stayed with the professor for a few years and became an authority on the subject. Later he returned to his practice in Budapest and, in a very short time, became the best known and most sought after specialist in that particular branch of medicine. He had been practicing medicine for some three years when, one day, the actor, who had continued his work at the National Theatre, was accosted by one of his many friends:

"After all you are a fool. Why did you give a photograph to Dr. S—? And why did you write on it that he was your saviour and that he had cured you of your unfortunate malady? If this gets around, I am sure it will injure your reputation."

The actor nearly swooned when he realized this. But when he convinced himself that the grateful doctor still honoured his dyspeptical old photograph above his desk, he ran to a friend of the now great specialist. He begged him to do everything in his power to remove the photograph.

How the story ended, I do not know. It is of no importance anyway. But I wish to add that when I told this twenty-year old Budapest story, whose every character I personally knew, at a gathering of authors in Paris in 1927, a French writer remarked that he had already heard it.

Copy of a letter.

Dear Sir:

"Among other things, you write this in your letter: '. . . next Autumn, I shall register my son at the Budapest Academy of Dramatic Arts, because the boy likes the stage, and when one chooses a profession, inclination, after all, is most important.' Permit me to remind you of the following. There was once a boy who had such an inclination towards chemistry, so passionate an inclination, that in 1848, when all Hungary was full of revolutionary ideas and everybody dreamed of nothing but battle and the coming war for liberty, he wrote a long essay entitled The Volatile Acids in Cocoanut Oil and published it in the Journal of the Viennese Academy of Sciences. The name of this boy was Arthur Görgei, and a few months later he was Commanderin-Chief of the Hungarian army.

"And then there was another boy who had so little inclination towards music that his father, who wanted to make a musician out of him, was forced to apply strong, almost brutal, measures to make him learn at least the rudiments of music. The name of this boy was Ludwig van Beethoven.

"Very sincerely yours, etc. etc."