The Sleeper Awakes H. G. Wells

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INSOMNIA

One afternoon, at low water, Mr. Isbister, a young artist
lodging at Boscastle, walked from that place to the picturesque
cove of Pentargen, desiring to examine the caves there.
Halfway down the precipitous path to the Pentargen beach he
came suddenly upon a man sitting in an attitude of profound
distress beneath a projecting mass of rock. The hands of this
man hung limply over his knees, his eyes were red and staring
before him, and his face was wet with tears.
He glanced round at Isbister's footfall. Both men were disconcerted,
Isbister the more so, and, to override the awkwardness
of his involuntary pause, he remarked, with an air of mature
conviction, that the weather was hot for the time of year.
"Very," answered the stranger shortly, hesitated a second,
and added in a colourless tone, "I can't sleep."
Isbister stopped abruptly. "No?" was all he said, but his bearing
conveyed his helpful impulse.
"It may sound incredible," said the stranger, turning weary
eyes to Isbister's face and emphasizing his words with a languid
hand, "but I have had no sleep—no sleep at all for six
nights."
"Had advice?"
"Yes. Bad advice for the most part. Drugs. My nervous system….
They are all very well for the run of people. It's hard to
explain. I dare not take … sufficiently powerful drugs."
"That makes it difficult," said Isbister.
He stood helplessly in the narrow path, perplexed what to do.
Clearly the man wanted to talk. An idea natural enough under
the circumstances, prompted him to keep the conversation going.
"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, 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.
"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. "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 today—
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 wonder; walking! And the sun on your head, heat, fag,
solitude, all the day long, and then, I suppose, you go to bed
and try very hard—eh?"
Isbister stopped short and looked at the sufferer doubtfully.
"Look at these rocks!" cried the seated man with a sudden
force of gesture. "Look at that sea that has shone and quivered
there for ever! See the white spume rush into darkness under
that great cliff. And this blue vault, with the blinding sun pouring
from the dome of it. It is your world. You accept it, you rejoice
in it. It warms and supports and delights you. And for
me—"
He turned his head and showed a ghastly face, bloodshot pallid
eyes and bloodless lips. He spoke almost in a whisper. "It is
the garment of my misery. The whole world … is the garment
of my misery."
Isbister looked at all the wild beauty of the sunlit cliffs about
them and back to that face of despair. For a moment he was
silent.
He started, and made a gesture of impatient rejection. "You
get a night's sleep," he said, "and you won't see much misery
out here. Take my word for it."
He was quite sure now that this was a providential encounter.
Only half an hour ago he had been feeling horribly
bored. Here was employment the bare thought of which, was
righteous self-applause. He took possession forthwith. The first
need of this exhausted being was companionship. He flung
himself down on the steeply sloping turf beside the motionless
seated figure, and threw out a skirmishing line of gossip.
His hearer lapsed into apathy; he stared dismally seaward,
and spoke only in answer to Isbister's direct questions—and
not to all of those. But he made no objection to this benevolent
intrusion upon his despair.
He seemed even grateful, and when presently Isbister, feeling
that his unsupported talk was losing vigour, suggested that
they should reascend the steep and return towards Boscastle,
alleging the view into Blackapit, he submitted quietly. Halfway
up he began talking to himself, and abruptly turned a ghastly
face on his helper. "What can be happening?" he asked with a
gaunt illustrative hand. "What can be happening? Spin, spin,
spin, spin. It goes round and round, round and round for
evermore."
He stood with his hand circling.
"It's all right, old chap," said Isbister with the air of an old
friend. "Don't worry yourself. Trust to me,"
The man dropped his hand and turned again. They went over
the brow and to the headland beyond Penally, with the sleepless
man gesticulating ever and again, and speaking fragmentary
things concerning his whirling brain. At the headland they
stood by the seat that looks into the dark mysteries of Blackapit,
and then he sat down. Isbister had resumed his talk
whenever the path had widened sufficiently for them to walk
abreast. He was enlarging upon the complex difficulty of making
Boscastle Harbour in bad weather, when suddenly and
quite irrelevantly his companion interrupted him again.
"My head is not like what it was," he said, gesticulating for
want of expressive phrases. "It's not like what it was. There is a
sort of oppression, a weight. No—not drowsiness, would God it
were! It is like a shadow, a deep shadow falling suddenly and
swiftly across something busy. Spin, spin into the darkness.
The tumult of thought, the confusion, the eddy and eddy. I
can't express it. I can hardly keep my mind on it—steadily
enough to tell you."
He stopped feebly.
"Don't trouble, old chap," said Isbister. "I think I can understand.
At any rate, it don't matter very much just at present
about telling me, you know."
The sleepless man thrust his knuckles into his eyes and
rubbed them. Isbister talked for awhile while this rubbing continued,
and then he had a fresh idea. "Come down to my room,"
he said, "and try a pipe. I can show you some sketches of this
Blackapit. If you'd care?"
The other rose obediently and followed him down the steep.
Several times Isbister heard him stumble as they came down,
and his movements were slow and hesitating. "Come in with
me," said Isbister, "and try some cigarettes and the blessed gift
of alcohol. If you take alcohol?"
The stranger hesitated at the garden gate. He seemed no
longer aware of his actions. "I don't drink," he said slowly,
coming up the garden path, and after a moment's interval repeated
absently, "No—I don't drink. It goes round. Spin, it
goes—spin—"
He stumbled at the doorstep and entered the room with the
bearing of one who sees nothing.
Then he sat down heavily in the easy chair, seemed almost to
fall into it. He leant forward with his brows on his hands and
became motionless. Presently he made a faint sound in his
throat.
Isbister moved about the room with the nervousness of an inexperienced
host, making little remarks that scarcely required
answering. He crossed the room to his portfolio, placed it on
the table and noticed the mantel clock.
"I don't know if you'd care to have supper with me," he said
with an unlighted cigarette in his hand—his mind troubled with
ideas of a furtive administration of chloral. "Only cold mutton,
you know, but passing sweet. Welsh. And a tart, I believe." He
repeated this after momentary silence.
The seated man made no answer. Isbister stopped, match in
hand, regarding him.
The stillness lengthened. The match went out, the cigarette
was put down unlit. The man was certainly very still. Isbister
took up the portfolio, opened it, put it down, hesitated, seemed
about to speak. "Perhaps," he whispered doubtfully. Presently
he glanced at the door and back to the figure. Then he stole on
tiptoe out of the room, glancing at his companion after each
elaborate pace.
He closed the door noiselessly. The house door was standing
open, and he went out beyond the porch, and stood where the
monkshood rose at the corner of the garden bed. From this
point he could see the stranger through the open window, still
and dim, sitting head on hand. He had not moved.
A number of children going along the road stopped and regarded
the artist curiously. A boatman exchanged civilities
with him. He felt that possibly his circumspect attitude and position
looked peculiar and unaccountable. Smoking, perhaps,
might seem more natural. He drew pipe and pouch from his
pocket, filled the pipe slowly.
"I wonder," … he said, with a scarcely perceptible loss of
complacency. "At any rate one must give him a chance." He
struck a match in the virile way, and proceeded to light his
pipe.
He heard his landlady behind him, coming with his lamp lit
from the kitchen. He turned, gesticulating with his pipe, and
stopped her at the door of his sitting-room. He had some difficulty
in explaining the situation in whispers, for she did not
know he had a visitor. She retreated again with the lamp, still a
little mystified to judge from her manner, and he resumed his
hovering at the corner of the porch, flushed and less at his
ease.
Long after he had smoked out his pipe, and when the bats
were abroad, curiosity dominated his complex hesitations, and
he stole back into his darkling sitting-room. He paused in the
doorway. The stranger was still in the same attitude, dark
against the window. Save for the singing of some sailors
aboard one of the little slate-carrying ships in the harbour the
evening was very still. Outside, the spikes of monkshood and
delphinium stood erect and motionless against the shadow of
the hillside. Something flashed into Isbister's mind; he started,
and leaning over the table, listened. An unpleasant suspicion
grew stronger; became conviction. Astonishment seized him
and became—dread!
No sound of breathing came from the seated figure!
He crept slowly and noiselessly round the table, pausing
twice to listen. At last he could lay his hand on the back of the
armchair. He bent down until the two heads were ear to ear.
Then he bent still lower to look up at his visitor's face. He
started violently and uttered an exclamation. The eyes were
void spaces of white.
He looked again and saw that they were open and with the
pupils rolled under the lids. He was afraid. He took the man by
the shoulder and shook him. "Are you asleep?" he said, with his
voice jumping, and again, "Are you asleep?"
A conviction took possession of his mind that this man was
dead. He became active and noisy, strode across the room,
blundering against the table as he did so, and rang the bell.
"Please bring a light at once," he said in the passage. "There
is something wrong with my friend."
He returned to the motionless seated figure, grasped the
shoulder, shook it, shouted. The room was flooded with yellow
glare as his landlady entered with the light. His face was white
as he turned blinking towards her. "I must fetch a doctor," he
said. "It is either death or a fit. Is there a doctor in the village?
Where is a doctor to be found?"