“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.