way, and seemed just his
natural self; but truly he was mentally detached from the surrounding
scene. For the second time in his life, and to a greater extent than
the first time, he was subjugated and controlled by one dominant idea.
Throughout each day all things around him were dreamlike and
unsubstantial, and he performed many actions as automatically as if he
had been a somnambulist. He walked and talked or rode on the shaft of
a wagon without in the least troubling to think what he was doing, and
every time his thought became active it seemed to spring into vigor
again merely to obey the prompting of the inner voice that now
governed him.

Thus while sitting on the wagon shaft he thought: "If I pitched myself
off and let the wheels go over me, that would be _likely_, just the
accident that fools are always making, but it wouldn't fulfil the
other conditions that have been laid on me. Also it might fail. I
might only mess myself up, and not quite kill myself."

Half an hour afterward, as he walked beside the empty wagon back to
his hay fields, he was still hammering away at the dominant idea.

A gun and a hedge--no accident can be more common than that. Say you
want to shoot some rats that have been showing their ugly whiskers in
the field ditches; take your gun, well charged, and blow your brains
out among the brambles of an untrimmed hedge.

Or these motor-cars! He thought of the way they came racing down the
highroad from Old Manninglea. How would it be to wait for one of these
buzzing, crashing, stinking road monsters over there on the edge of
the heath, and jump out just in front of it? If one stooped down and
took the full shock on one's forehead, it would mean a mess that there
would be no patching together again. But one could not attempt that in
daylight, because the driver would jam the breaks on, swerve round
one, do anything desperate rather than run into one. And if he could
not avoid one, he would tell everybody at the inquest that it was a
plain suicide and nothing else. There would be passengers in the car
too, who would also swear to its being a suicide. And at night these
traveling cars have such powerful head-lamps that the roadway is
lighted up for a hundred yards in front of them. Even at night, they
would recognize it as suicide.

Toward dusk every evening external things became more real, and his
hold on life tightening, he suffered more acutely in each hour that
passed. Night after ni