II.—A Darling of the Gods
I see by the papers, with deep concern, that my friend X has been run over by a motor-bus and killed, at the age of only thirty-eight. I wish I could find some one who helped to pick him up, just to see if he said anything about his end: because——
But I will tell you. His foible was to believe that everything that happened was for the best—for himself. Not for mankind; he had none of the great Dr. Pangloss’s satisfaction that everything that is is right, that this is the best of all possible worlds. None at all. But he was persuaded that his own fortunes were being vigilantly and tirelessly watched by tutelary powers—that he was, in short, a pet of Fate.
And in this creed he had grown very ingenious. I remember once hurrying with him to catch a train, which, he said, he must not lose at any cost. Well, after seriously injuring ourselves—or at least myself—by running with our heavy bags, we lost it.
“Never mind,” he said calmly, “I was evidently intended not to catch it.”
“Then why on earth did you drag me along at that infernal pace?” I asked.
“Oh, well,” he said, “one has to try; one does not know what the stars’ game is.”
“What do you think it is?” I inquired coldly.
“I expect the train will meet with an accident; if so, we are well out of it.”
I took the trouble to find out, when we did at last reach the London station, if that train had come safely in.
“To the minute,” said the porter.
“There,” I said to my friend, “what do you make of that?”
“Oh,” he replied, “I daresay some one with an infectious disease had been sitting in our compartment and we should have caught it.”
What are you to do with a man who talks like that?
Your ordinary fatalist who thinks that, everything being ordained and fixed, no effort of his own can matter, is bad enough; but the fatalist who is also an optimist and secure in the knowledge of his own prosperity is worse. And yet it was rather fine too. The hardest rebuffs (as I should call them) left him smiling.
One day he lost a lot of money in an investment.
“That’s very serious,” I said.
“Not so bad as it might have been,” he replied. “It was done to teach me not to speculate. I am not naturally speculative; I was going against my genius when I did it. Now I have lost £500. But if I hadn’t I might have lost £5000 later on.”
I looked at him in amazement. A kind of inverted Christianity was at work had he only known it. But he prided himself on his paganism.
Well, now he is dead and can find no extenuating circumstances; but I have no doubt he would have explained the catastrophe perfectly, had it been anything short of fatal.
“I was getting very cheap,” he would probably have said, “and needed rest. I could not have got it naturally, being far too busy; so this accident was sent to keep me in bed for a couple of months and pull me clean round.”
But it is hard when the protective stars suffer from trop de zèle.