Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/348

 of the river came in; it would have taken little more to make him go down into the street. Toward morning he flung himself into a chair; though he was wide awake he was now less a prey to agitation. It seemed to him that he saw his idea from the outside, that he judged it and condemned it, and it stood still there all distinct and with a strange face of authority. During the day he tried to keep it down; but it fascinated, haunted, at moments quite frightened him. He tried to amuse himself, paid visits, resorted to several violent devices for diverting his thoughts. If he had been guilty on the morrow of some misdeed the persons he had seen that day would have testified that he had talked incoherently and had not seemed himself. He felt, certainly, very much somebody else; long afterwards, in retrospect, he used to perceive that during those days he had been literally beside himself—even as the ass, in the farmer's row of stalls, may be beside the ox. His uncanny idea persisted; it clung to him like a sturdy beggar. The sense of the matter, roughly expressed, was that if Roderick were really going, as he himself had phrased it, to fizzle out, one might help him on the way—one might smooth the descensus Averni. For forty-eight hours there swam before Rowland's eyes a vision of the wondrous youth, graceful and beautiful as he passed, plunging like a diver into a misty gulf. The gulf was destruction, annihilation, death; but if death had been decreed why should n't the agony be at least brief? Beyond this vision there faintly glimmered another, as in the children's game of the magic lantern a 314