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 this

discovery; then cheerless certitude followed; and, with an incredible

simplicity of submission to ascertained fact, he turned round and

struck out for shore. There was a courage in this which he could not

appreciate; the ignobility of his cowardice wholly occupying him. A

164

The Ebb-Tide