2
"I've never suffered from sleeplessness myself," he said in a tone of commonplace gossip, "but in those cases I have known, people have usually found something --"
"I dare make no experiments."
He spoke wearily. He gave a gesture of rejection, and for a space both men were silent.
"Exercise?" suggested Isbister diffidently, with a glance from his interlocutor's face of wretchedness to the touring costume he wore.
"That is what I have tried. Unwisely perhaps. I have followed the coast, day after day -- from New Quay. It has only added muscular fatigue to the mental. The cause of this unrest was overwork -- trouble. There was something --"
He stopped as if from sheer fatigue. He rubbed his forehead with a lean hand. He resumed speech like one who talks to himself.
"I am a lone wolf, a solitary man, wandering through a world in which I have no part. I am wifeless -- childless -- who is it speaks of the childless as the dead twigs on the tree of life? I am wifeless, I childless -- I could find no duty to do. No desire even in my heart. One thing at last I set myself to do.
"I said, I will do this, and to do it, to overcome the inertia of this dull body, I resorted to drugs. Great God, I've had enough of drugs! I don't know if you feel the heavy inconvenience of the body, its 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