“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 been walking along this coast alone?”
“Yes.”
“Silly sort of thing to do. If you’ll excuse my saying so. Alone! As you say; body fag is no cure for brain fag. Who told you to? No
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