The Web of the Sun (Adventure Magazine, 1922)/Foreword
Foreword by the Transcriber
I CULTIVATE strangers because it is a tenet of mine that no human being is worth talking to for more than sixty minutes. I go further and hold that it is indiscreet, not to say immoral, to indulge in repeated conversations with any man.
My reasoning on this point is as follows:
Every normal human being desires in his conversation to entertain. When the interesting facts of his life are exhausted (which usually occurs well within the sixty-minute limit) the talker is apt to resort to non-factual material.
However, when two strangers meet, their pasts are to each other virgin fields. It is unnecessary for them to lie. When one does, it is usually because his listener has exhibited listlessness or restlessness and he attempts to supply interest in his narrative
A good listener almost always hears a truthful tale; a bad listener demoralizes the most sincere man. I should say, if there be an after life in which the good and evil of our earthly existences are punished and rewarded, I should say that is paved with bad listeners.
I, myself, am, by profession, a skilful listener. When I heard this story in a little Rio Janeiro wine-shop, Charles Lassiter, who told it, was a complete stranger to me. Therefore it had the psychological setting of truth. Likewise, it possessed every internal evidence of verity. Nevertheless, I have always hesitated to publish the account Lassiter gave me of his sojourn in Motobatl in the year 1917, and of his, shall I say, explosion out of that sinister land.
Personally I have never doubted the genuineness of his narrative. His manner, voice, gesture, his changing color and once, his tears, bore the imprint of sincerity. But heretofore, I did not care to hazard my professional standing as a representative of the Associated Press by publishing so strange a relation upon the uncorroborated word of one man.
Fortunately, the appearance of Cecil Hindshaw's elaborate new volume, “'A Naturalist on the Upper Amazon',”[1] has furnished exactly the corroboration required.
I say, “fortunately,” but really the shoe now pinches the other foot. Sir Cecil's elaborate work not only has allayed all doubt, it has killed all the novelty and all the timeliness of Charles Lassiter's unscientific account. However, the latter is presented herewith, not for its details, which have become trite, but for the human interest it contains, and for a certain dramatic element, which naturally Sir Cecil carefully avoided.
Indeed the dénouement resolves itself so nearly into the form of the more reserved and realistic type of modern fiction, that I have frankly cast the whole narrative into fictional mold, always presupposing, however, a mental attitude in the reader as toward all ordinary fact article.—T. S. S.
- ↑ See “A Naturalist on the Upper Amazon,” Hindshaw. Wier & Duffing, 16 Picadilly Cross, London, 20s. 6d.