The Devil

Two or three days passed. The busy yet peaceful life of home and fields was going on; the hay had been carried; the rick was made, and the rick-sheet covered a handsome pile.

Dale worked hard, quite in his old untiring 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.