Chapter 1 - Page 2

exasperating demand of time from the mind--time-- life! Live! We only live in patches. We have to eat, and then comes the dull digestive complacencies-- or irritations. We have to take the air or else our thoughts grow sluggish, stupid, run into gulfs and blind alleys. A thousand distractions arise from within and without, and then comes drowsiness and sleep. Men seem to live for sleep. How little of a man's day is his own--even at the best! And then come those false friends, those Thug helpers, the alkaloids that stifle natural fatigue and kill rest-- black coffee, cocaine--"

"I see," said Isbister.

"I did my work," said the sleepless man with a querulous intonation.

"And this is the price? "

"Yes." For a little while the two remained without speaking.

"You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel--a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady--"

He paused. "Towards the gulf."

"You must sleep," said Isbister decisively, and with an air of a remedy discovered. "Certainly you must sleep."

"My mind is perfectly lucid. It was never clearer. But I know I am drawing towards the vortex. Presently--"

"Yes?"

"You have seen things go down an eddy? Out of the light of the day, out of this sweet world of sanity-- down--"

"But," expostulated Isbister.

The man threw out a hand towards him, and his eyes were wild, and his voice suddenly high. "I shall kill myself. If in no other way--at the foot of yonder dark precipice there, where the waves are green, and the white surge lifts and falls, and that little thread of water trembles down. There at any rate is . . . sleep."

" That's unreasonable," said Isbister, startled at the man's hysterical gust of emotion. "Drugs are better than that."

" There at any rate is sleep," repeated the stranger, not heeding him.

Isbister looked at him and wondered transitorily if some complex Providence had indeed brought them together that afternoon. "It's not a cert, you know," he remarked. " There's a cliff like that at Lulworth Cove--as high, anyhow--and a little girl fell from top to bottom. And lives to-day--sound and well."

"But those rocks there? "

"One might lie on them rather dismally through a cold night, broken bones grating as one shivered, chill water splashing over you. Eh? "

Their eyes met. "Sorry to upset your ideals," said Isbister with a sense of devil-may-careish brilliance.

"But a suicide over that cliff (or any cliff for the matter of that), really, as an artist--" He laughed. "It's so damned amateurish."

"But the other thing," said the sleepless man irritably, "the other thing. No man can keep sane if night after night--"

"Have you