The Wrong Man (Pain)

by Barry Pain

For works with similar titles, see The Wrong Man.

THE WRONG MAN.

By Barry Pain.

I call him the wrong man for this reason—if he had been any one else he would have been all right. He would have been a success and people would have liked him; his grave mistake lay in being himself. I will explain and illustrate this a little.

I used, a long time ago, to meet him frequently in the train up to town, and I got to know a good deal about him. He told me a good deal himself—he was by no means a reserved man. At first he greatly impressed me. We were going past fields; they looked all right, but to me they were merely fields and they were nothing more. They did not suggest anything. With him, it was different. He pointed out those fields, and asked me if it was not abominable. He added that he referred to to the system of agriculture practised in England. Then he warmed to the subject. His point was that farming could easily be made to pay, and that if he had been a farmer he would have made a fortune. He showed me how. He explained the action of different fertilizers, rotation of crops, supply and demand, foreign competition, the labour market, and many other things, which previously I had not understood. He drew diagrams of new machines. He worked out sums. He knew the exact price of everything, and the address of the place where you could get it still cheaper. He knew, I am sure, more about farming than any farmer in England. It seemed to me quite a pity that he had not gone in for farming practically, because it was obvious that the trade or profession which he followed was not particularly lucrative, and it seemed a pity that he should be missing a fortune. While I was thinking of this, the train stopped at a station, and a friend of the wrong man's got in. The friend was going to see his solicitor about a complicated question of a landlord's responsibility for certain repairs. The wrong man would not hear of his friend going to a solicitor. He said he would explain the law on the point, and make no charge. The law seemed to be child's play to him. He was full of excellent words and phrases—"All that messuage and tenement," "ipso facto," "reasonable wear and tear, and damage by fire excepted," "torts," "ab initio"—and many more which sounded quite as well. I said, and thought, that he ought to have been a solicitor. He replied that if he did not know more law than any solicitor in London, he would eat his hat. His final advice to his friend was that his correct course was to sell the whole of his landlord's property without giving any further notice. If he had been a solicitor, I should certainly have become his client. My own solicitor never tells me such pleasant things as that. I was just going to tell him this, when he noticed some houses which were being erected by the side of the line, and observed that he could himself build houses twice as good as that at half the cost. His friend, who seemed one of those sneering and incredulous people, asked him why he did not do it. He replied, very properly, that he was not a builder. It seemed a pity.

As I got to see more of the man I realised that there was no trade or profession on earth in which he would net have excelled—except his own, and I never knew what that was. He told me, for instance, he had the secret of a new explosive, for which the War Office would thankfully, at any time, pay him ten thousand pounds. When I asked him why he did not sell it, he replied that unfortunately he was not a manufacturer of explosives. That was true—he was not; he was the wrong man. And he did not sell the secret—if he had ten thousand pounds or pence, he would not have worn such a shockingly bad hat. Of course he knew how to edit a paper—everyone knows that—but he also knew how to run a theatre, how to break in a horse, how to stop a tooth, and how to prevent pipes from freezing. He had anticipated Mr. Edison, he explained to me, "in most of his so-called discoveries."

I was a little surprised at first that he never seemed to get any richer, and that all the ordinary accidents which happen to less well-informed men happened to him too. But the explanation, of course, was that he was the wrong man.. He could manage any business to perfection—except his own.

I lost sight of him after a time. But every now and then I come on people who are not altogether unlike him.