Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 20, 1896 - Travels and excursion, Volume III

THE OPEN DOOR
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 in-
vincible, 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.
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