It was all in vain. He played with me, openly and ostentatiously, like a skilful matador finessing round an infuriated bull. It was obvious that he was enjoying himself, that it was for this that he had disturbed my repose. He wanted a little sport, and what sport like being chased by this huge, lumbering windmill of a creature, who tasted so good and seemed so helpless and so stupid? I began to enter into the spirit of the fellow. He was no longer a mere insect. He was developing into a personality, an intelligence that challenged the possession of this compartment with me on equal terms. I felt my heart warming towards him and the sense of superiority fading. How could I feel superior to a creature who was so manifestly my master in the only competition in which we had ever engaged? Why not be magnanimous again? Magnanimity and mercy were the noblest attributes of man. In the exercise of these high qualities I could recover my prestige. At present I was a ridiculous figure, a thing for laughter and derision. By being merciful I could reassert the moral dignity of man and go back to my corner with honour. I withdraw the sentence of death, I said, returning to my seat. I cannot kill you, but I can reprieve you. I do it.
I took up my paper and he came and sat on it. Foolish fellow, I said, you have delivered yourself into my hands. I have but to give this respectable weekly organ of opinion a smack on both covers and you are a corpse, neatly sandwiched between an article on "Peace Traps" and another on "The Modesty of Mr. Hughes." But I shall not do it. I have reprieved you, and I will satisfy you that when this large animal says a thing he means it. Moreover, I no longer desire to kill you. Through knowing you better I have come to feel—shall I say?—a sort of affection for you. I fancy that St. Francis would have called you "little brother." I cannot go so far as that in Christian charity and civility. But I recognise a more distant relationship. Fortune has made us fellow travellers on this summer night. I have interested you and you have entertained me. The obligation is mutual and it is founded on the fundamental fact that we are fellow mortals. The miracle of life is ours in common and its mystery too. I suppose you don't know anything about your journey. I'm not sure that I know much about mine. We are really, when you come to think of it, a good deal alike—just apparitions that are and then are not, coming out of the night into the lighted carriage, fluttering about the lamp for a while and going out into the night again. Perhaps...
"Going on to-night, sir?" said a voice at the window. It was a friendly porter giving me a hint that this was my station. I thanked him and said I must have been dozing. And seizing my hat and stick I went out into the cool summer night. As I closed the door of the compartment I saw my fellow traveller fluttering round the lamp....
ON A FAMOUS SERMON
I see that Queen Alexandra has made a further distribution among charities of the profits from the sale of the late Canon Fleming's sermon, "On Recognition in Eternity." The sermon was preached on the occasion of the death of the Duke of Clarence, and judging from its popularity I have no doubt it is a good sermon. But I am tempted to write on the subject by a mischievous thought suggested by the authorship of this famous sermon. There is no idea which makes so universal an appeal to the deepest instincts of humanity as the idea that when we awake from the dream of life we shall pass into the companionship of those who have shared and lightened our pilgrimage here. The intellect may dismiss the idea as unscientific, but, as Newman says, the finite can tell us nothing about the infinite Creator, and the Quaker poet's serene assurance—
Yet love will hope and faith will trust
(Since He Who knows our needs is just)
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must—
defies all the buffetings of reason.
Even Shelley, for all his aggressive Atheism, could not, as Francis Thompson points out, escape the instinct of personal immortality. In his glorious elegy on Keats he implicitly assumes the personal immortality which the poem explicitly denies, as when, to greet the dead youth,
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought
Far in the unapparent.