The next morning we were on our way to the tailor's, where I had ordered several suits of clothes. The tailor, while fitting me, began to jabber to Ling.
“What does he say?” I asked.
Ling spat judiciously, Western style. “He wants to know what side of your trousers you wear your waterspout.”
“Well, I'll be a son-of-a-bitch,” I said, imitating Monty after all these years. “Tell the bastard he flatters me.”
All officialdom becomes involved in red tape and suffocates under its own documents, but the Chinese, without the aid of dictaphones, duplicating machines, and other devices, are peculiarly lost in their own memoranda. They must be years and decades in arrears of events. One can visualize the governmental departments of the future steadily losing ground until eventually the morning memorandum on the desk of an executive will have to do with events which occurred in his grandfather's time and the Chinese ideal of identification of the living with their dead ancestors be wholly realized.
“Kid,” said Monty, “I'm going to read you excerpts from 'The Purloined letter'.” He took from the shelf a volume by Edgar Allan Poe. “If you give what I read some thought, you will profit in your poker playing.”
“This,” continued Monty, opening the book, “is one of the characters Poe invents, Monsieur C. Dupin. Dupin is discussing the intelligence of the Prefect of the French police. He says:”
'Many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight years ago whose success at guessing in the game of even and odd attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and that lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, “Are they even or odd?” Our schoolboy replies, odd, and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;—he guesses odd, and wins.'
'Now with a simpleton a degree above the first' (Monty continued reading) 'he would have reasoned thus: This fellow finds that in the first instance I guess odd, and in the second, he will propose to himself upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even;—he guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning by the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed lucky—what, in its last analysis is it?'
“Poe is asked this question,” said Monty looking up from the page. “Poe replies:”
'It is merely an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent.'
“Do you grasp what I have read in its relation to poker?” Monty asked, sipping his drink.
“I think so,” I said. “If you overvalue or undervalue another's intellect you will guess wrong. If you want to know when to call and when to bluff, identify yourself with your opponent's cunning.”
“Exactly,” said Monty.