honest probabilityâbut itâs the ones who arenât that you need to study carefully. Look at the ones who lose more often than they win, not just at their predicaments but at their attitudes. You and I know that their misfortunes are just a matter of chance, and so do theyâbut thatâs not the way they feel. They feel victimized, Can. They feel tormented. They feel that fate has it in for them. Only a few of them get around to thinking, consciously, that they must have deserved the bad things that happen to them, but it doesnât matter whether they get that far or not, because itâs just as bad thinking that they didnât deserve it as it is thinking that they did.â
Canny felt the expression on his own face setting hard as the words got through to him. Even his father it seemed, had drunk his fill of popular psychology. Even his father had worked out the elements of psychological probability. The old manâs eyes were as dark and taut as they had ever beenâno slackness or hollowness there!âand they were boring into him with all the fervor of a mind that desperately needed morphine to ease its distress but wasnât prepared to compromise, for the moment, between raw wakefulness and sugared dreaming.
âIf itâs like that for them, Can,â the old man went on, relentlessly, âimagine what itâs going to be like for you. Youâll be the thirty-second Earl, Can, at the tail end of a winning streak thatâs lasted eight hundred years . Imagine what itâs going to feel like if things go wrong for you ! Whatever you believe now about the necessity or otherwise of following the rules, you wonât be able to forgive yourself if things go awry after youâve decided to break them. Oh, youâll tell yourself that itâs just a coincidence, not your fault at all...but youâll never be able to believe it. Youâve been favored by fate all your life, and for you the dominion of probability really would be victimization by neglect. For you, it really would be torment. Believe me, Can, I know . I came back; I saved myselfâbut Iâve been to the kind of Hell thatâs specially reserved for people of our kind, and Iâm telling you that itâs a place to stay out of if you can possibly avoid it, and that itâs certainly not a place to spend your entire life.â
The sick man finally trailed off, and slumped back against the heaped-up pillows, exhausted and agonized. Canny knew what an effort it had cost him to say all that, and exactly what his father now needed to hearâbut he also realized, belatedly, that there were certain things he could only say to his father, and that the opportunity to say them would soon be lost. On the Riviera it had seemed easy enough to be alone with his burden, his doubts and his questionsâbut now that he was home again, it suddenly seemed very much harder.
âThanks, Daddy,â he said, sincerely. âI know you needed to say that, and I did need to hear it. You probably think Iâve never loved you as much as I could and should, because I always resented sharing my luck, blah de blah de blah, but we can cut that crap now. Weâre in the same boat. Your luckâs running out, and so is mine. Maybe if I wasnât benefiting from my half of the partnership, that crab would never have got its claws into your guts. Who knows? Weâve both looked long and hard at the family tree, and we know that our kind of luck isnât the kind that guarantees long life. How could it be? Renewability implies death. If any father had ever outlived his son, the streak would have ended there and then, according to the rules. The death of the father, before or soon after the marriage of the son, is part of the pattern.â
It was his turn to pause, without fear of interruption.
âCancer of the liver and pancreas isnât a pretty way to go,â he continued, âand it