The captain caught him by the sleeve; and he shook him off and turned on
him, for the moment, like a demoniac.

'Go to hell in your own way!' he cried.

And he turned away again, this time unchecked, and stepped forward to
where the boat rocked alongside and ground occasionally against the
schooner. He looked about him. A corner of the house was interposed
between the captain and himself; all was well; no eye must see him in
that last act. He slid silently into the boat; thence, silently, into
the starry water.

Instinctively he swam a little; it 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.