would be time
enough to stop by and by.

The shock of the immersion brightened his mind immediately. The events
of the ignoble day passed before him in a frieze of pictures, and he
thanked "whatever Gods there be" for that open door of suicide. In such
a little while he would be done with it, the random business at an end,
the prodigal son come home. A very bright planet shone before him and
drew a trenchant wake along the water. He took that for his line and
followed it.

That was the last earthly thing that he should look upon; that radiant
speck, which he had soon magnified into a City of Laputa, along whose
terraces there walked men and women of awful and benignant features,
who viewed him with distant commiseration. These imaginary spectators
consoled him; he told himself their talk, one to another; it was of
himself and his sad destiny.

From such flights of fancy he was aroused by the growing coldness of the
water. Why should he delay? Here, where he was now, let him drop the
curtain, let him seek the ineffable refuge, let him lie down with all
races and generations of men in the house of sleep. It was easy to say,
easy to do. To stop swimming: there was no mystery in that, if he could
do it. Could he? And he could not. He knew it instantly. He was aware
instantly of an opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible,
clinging to life with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger,
sinew by sinew; something that was at once he and not he--at once within
and without him; the shutting of some miniature valve in his brain,
which a single manly thought should suffice to open--and the grasp of an
external fate ineluctable as gravity. To any man there may come at times
a consciousness that there blows, through all the articulations of his
body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his; that his mind rebels; that
another girds him and carries him whither he would not. It came now to
Herrick, with the authority of a revelation. There was no escape
possible. The open door was closed in his recreant face. He must go back
into the world and amongst men without illusion. He must stagger on to
the end with the pack of his responsibility and his disgrace, until a
cold, a blow, a merciful chance ball, or the more merciful hangman,
should dismiss him from his infamy. There were men who could commit
suicide; there were men who could not; and he was one who could not.

For perhaps a minute there raged in his mind the coil of