The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Liar
I HAVE had to do with almost every variety of undergraduate during the last twenty years—the coarse, the illiterate, the sullen, the impertinent, the vicious, and the dissipated—I can do business with any but the liar. I do not know on what ground to meet him.
I was talking to Brown with regard to his study list. "Have you turned in your change slip as you were asked to do last week?" I inquired.
"Yes," was his quick reply. "I gave it to the Dean on the day I saw you."
"I will just speak to him about it," I continued, reaching for the telephone receiver, "and be sure that everything is all right." Brown dropped his head for a moment, but as I called the number, he spoke.
"You needn't ask," he said, "I lied to you; I have the paper in my pocket yet."
It was simply to save himself from censure that he had told the untruth. He had been careless and procrastinating; he intended to do the thing immediately on leaving my office; it never occurred to him, as it seldom occurs to the ordinary young liar, that any one would check up on him. I could with difficulty bring myself to believe him again.
"If you will reinstate me," a boy said to me last semester, "I shall not cut any more this year. Don't you believe me?" he continued, when he saw that I smiled.
"I should, perhaps," I answered, "if you had ever kept your word with me before."
A young fellow can lie, get away with it and brag about it for a few times, but ultimately people find him out. The unfulfilled promise, the broken engagement, the duty that was assumed and then never fulfilled all react on the individual. These things seem trifling at first, but such a man comes in time to realize that his reputation is gone, nobody trusts him, nobody believes him; and a man whom nobody trusts is a failure.
Truth is a virtue; it is more than that; it is a cash account in the bank against which one may always draw. The liar's statements come in time to be discounted even when he is telling the truth.
October