Algernon Blackwood by A Prisoner in Fairyland

Mr. Rogers's
carriage when he came up just in time to interfere.
    'They got in somehow after all, then,' he said to himself. 'Of course,
I had forgotten. The Company runs third-class carriages on the
continental trains now. Odd!' He mentally rubbed his eyes.
    The train swept round the corner out of sight, leaving a streaming
cloud of smoke and sparks behind it. It went out with a kind of rush
of delight, glad to be off, and conscious of its passengers' pleasure.
    'Odd.' This was the word that filled his mind as he walked home.
'Perhaps—our minds are in such intimate sympathy together—perhaps he
was thinking of—of that kind of thing—er—and some of his thoughts
got into my own imagination. Odd, though, very,
very
odd.'
    He had once read somewhere in one of his new-fangled books that
'thoughts are things.' It had made a great impression on him. He had
read about Marconi too. Later he made a more thorough study of this
'thinking business.'
    And soon afterwards, having put his chief's papers in order at the
flat, he went home to Mrs. Minks and the children with this other
thought—that he had possibly been overworking himself, and that it
was a good thing he was going to have a holiday by the sea.
    He liked to picture himself as an original thinker, not afraid of new
ideas, but in reality he preferred his world sober, ordinary, logical.
It was merely big-sounding names he liked. And this little incident
was somewhere out of joint. It was—odd.
    Success that poisons many a baser mind
May lift—
    But the sonnet had never known completion. In the space it had
occupied in his mind another one abruptly sprouted. The first subject
after all was banal. A better one had come to him—
    Strong thoughts that rise in a creative mind
May flash about the world, and carry joy—
    Then it stuck. He changed 'may' to 'shall,' but a moment later decided
that 'do' was better, truer than either. After that inspiration failed
him. He retired gracefully upon prose again.
    'Odd,' he thought, 'very odd!'
    And he relieved his mind by writing a letter to a newspaper. He did
not send it in the end, for his better judgment prevented, but he had
to do something by way of protest, and the only alternative was to
tell his wife about it, when she would look half puzzled, half pained,
and probably reply with some remark about the general cost of living.
So he wrote the letter instead.
    For Herbert Minks regarded himself as a man with the larger view of
citizenship, a critic of public affairs, and, in a measure, therefore,
an item of that public opinion which moulded governments. Hence he had
a finger, though but a little finger, in the destiny of nations and in
the polity—a grand word that!—of national councils. He wrote
frequent letters, thus, to the lesser weekly journals; these letters
were sometimes printed; occasionally—oh, joy!—they were answered by
others like himself, who referred to him as 'your esteemed
correspondent.' As yet, however, his following letter had never got
into print, nor had he experienced the importance of that editorial
decision, appended between square brackets: 'This correspondence must
now cease'—so vital, that is, that the editor and the entire office
staff might change their opinions unless it
did
cease.
    Having drafted his letter, therefore, and carried it about with him
for several hours in his breast pocket, he finally decided not to send
it after all, for the explanation of his 'odd' experience, he well
knew, was hardly one that a newspaper office could supply, or that
public correspondence could illuminate. His better judgment always won
the day in the end. Thinking
was
creative, after all.

Chapter VII
*
    ... The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night-
Night with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.
    W. E. HENLEY.
    In a southern-facing room on the first floor of La Citadelle the
English family sat after tea. The father, a spare,