The Hat-Pin

A Moral Tale Wherein a Celebrated Gambler Both Wins and Loses His Last Game of Chance

FERENC MOLNAR

A VERY dear friend of mine is the hero of this story, a friend who accompanied me through most of the years of my youth. He was an artist: a sculptor, painter, architect. His talent was powerful and soaring, his temperament overwhelming, and there was a glimpse of the true genius in him. In the years of our closest friendship, he was a passionate gambler. In the Newspapermen's Club in Budapest, in Ostend, in Monte Carlo

—in fact wherever gambling was known. He

was a daring yet lucky gambler. I often spent long nights sitting silently at his side, watching his hold game and his devilishly sure instinct. When, after an uncertain and hesitant quarter of an hour, he managed to fall into a streak of luck he would not let it go for anything in the world until he was through for the night. In which respect he did not differ from any of the truly great gamblers of history.

He is dead now.

One day, he visited me and asked me to go with him to Vienna for a few days. He had been complaining for a long time that there was something seriously the matter with his stomach.

"I have money now," he said. ''Been rather lucky lately. I want to take this opportunity to go to Vienna and consult the best specialist I can find."

WE went to Vienna, and together we visited Professor O., one of the greatest authorities in the world on internal diseases. My friend forced me to be present at the consultation. The examination took a long time and it seemed to me to be a very careful and thorough one.

The result was considerably unpleasant. Professor 0. told us that there was nothing wrong with my friend's stomach, but he advised us to go immediately to a nerve-specialist, He gave us the address of an eminent colleague of his, and he even promised us that he would telephone to him and inform him of our coming.

Both of us were laymen, but sufficiently educated to suspect that the worst was still in store. A stomach trouble—and the physician seemingly not interested in the stomach but considerably more so in the reflexes of the knee and the pupil of the eye—well, it all seemed to us rather serious.

We went over to the nerve specialist, and I was again forced to accompany my friend into the inner office. He undressed himself until he stood naked, and then he was subjected to the well-known ceremonies: He walked about the room with closed eyes, attempted to hit the middle-finger of his right hand with the middle-finger of his left in the air, etc. Then followed a test I had previously not known. My friend was told to He down on his stomach on the sofa, and the physician took a hat-pin. It was a long, ordinary looking hat-pin, an instrument the ladies of to-day do not even know. Nerve-specialists used it in the old days to ascertain the sensitiveness of the nerves in the back. The physician explained that he would touch the bare skin of my friend's back intermittently with the point and with the knob of the hat-pin, and the patient would have to guess which part of the pin had touched him. The test began. The specialist first touched my friend's back with the point of the hat-pin.

"Point!" said my friend.

"Correct!" said the physician, and he touched him again with the point.

"Again point," said my friend.

"Bravo!" said the doctor. "And now?"

"Again the point."

"Bravo! And now?"

"Again the point!"

"Excellent!"

Now he touched my friend with the other ('lid of the pin.

"Knob," said the patient.

"And now?"

"Point."

"Very good."

The physician touched him eight or ten times, and my friend always correctly guessed whether it was with the point or with the knob of the hat-pin. I began to breathe more easilv, the unpleasant feeling that had tortured me on my way to the specialist had passed away. When we went down the stairs I felt almost lighthearted, and, reaching the street, I was just about to make a not too complimentary remark concerning the stomach-professor's abilities, when my friend turned and spoke to me in a serious tone.

"Do you know that I am very sick?"

I looked at him in astonishment.

"Yes, yes," he said. "My case is extremely serious."

"But how can you say that?" I exploded. "Why, the examination was eminently successful. To be quite frank, at first I was a little bit afraid, but when I saw how exactly you indicated every time he touched you with the hat-pin . . . . "

"I swear to you," he said, with a sad smile. "I swear to you I did not know once whether it was the point or the knob of the hat-pin he was prodding me with.

"You see, it was like this. When he first touched me, I reasoned: If anyone is holding a pin in his hand, he notices first its point, because the essential part of a pin is its point and not its knob. Then the specialist committed the great blunder of saving 'correct' in answer to my first 'point'."

"THAT moment a thought struck me like lightning: I realized that I was merely gambling. I was doing nothing hut gambling on two chances, for in cases of hat-pins there are only two possibilities: points and knobs. To me it seemed exactly like roulette in Monte Carlo: rouge and noir. And roulette is something I know damn well, and for weeks past I've been playing for large stakes with luck constantly on my side.

"When He touched me again, I played 'point' again, and he said: 'Bravo!' Then that pleasant feeling of excitement got hold of me that always seizes the gambler when He feels that to-day He has a lucky streak. I played 'point' again and again, but when I won for the fourth time I knew that the series was at an end. Applying the gambler's logic, the rest seemed comparatively easy.

"The next winner would be 'knob'. I played 'knob' and won again. I remembered the wellknown rule: After a series of rouge, noir comes only once, and the game returns again to a series of rouge. I played according to the rule, and was successful again. I tell you, all that happened in the office of the specialist was nothing but that I played and won eight or ten rounds—just as if I had been playing roulette and had gambled on rouge and noir . . . . which is neither complicated nor very rare. In Monte Carlo, I often won fifteen, even twenty times in succession. ... If the doctor had kept quiet every time after touching me with the pin, I would have been terribly embarrassed."

I assure you that never in my life shall I forget this story—nor the sad smile that played on my friend's lips while he offered me the explanation of his fatal accuracy, which vindicated him as a gambler, but cost him his life.