Burning Daylight eBook

Next morning he awoke with parched lips and mouth, and with sensations of heaviness in his head which quickly passed away.  By eight o’clock he was at his desk, buckled down to the fight, by ten o’clock on his personal round of the banks, and after that, without a moment’s cessation, till nightfall, he was handling the knotty tangles of industry, finance, and human nature that crowded upon him.  And with nightfall it was back to the hotel, the double Martinis and the Scotch; and this was his program day after day until the days ran into weeks.

CHAPTER XXI

Though Daylight appeared among his fellows hearty voiced, inexhaustible, spilling over with energy and vitality, deep down he was a very weary man.  And sometime under the liquor drug, snatches of wisdom came to him far more lucidity than in his sober moments, as, for instance, one night, when he sat on the edge of the bed with one shoe in his hand and meditated on Dede’s aphorism to the effect that he could not sleep in more than one bed at a time.  Still holding the shoe, he looked at the array of horsehair bridles on the walls.  Then, carrying the shoe, he got up and solemnly counted them, journeying into the two adjoining rooms to complete the tale.  Then he came back to the bed and gravely addressed his shoe:—­

“The little woman’s right.  Only one bed at a time.  One hundred and forty hair bridles, and nothing doing with ary one of them.  One bridle at a time!  I can’t ride one horse at a time.  Poor old Bob.  I’d better be sending you out to pasture.  Thirty million dollars, and a hundred million or nothing in sight, and what have I got to show for it?  There’s lots of things money can’t buy.  It can’t buy the little woman.  It can’t buy capacity.  What’s the good of thirty millions when I ain’t got room for more than a quart of cocktails a day?  If I had a hundred-quart-cocktail thirst, it’d be different.  But one quart—­one measly little quart!  Here I am, a thirty times over millionaire, slaving harder every day than any dozen men that work for me, and all I get is two meals that don’t taste good, one bed, a quart of Martini, and a hundred and forty hair bridles to look at on the wall.”

He stared around at the array disconsolately.  “Mr. Shoe, I’m sizzled.  Good night.”

Far worse than the controlled, steady drinker is the solitary drinker, and it was this that Daylight was developing into.  He rarely drank sociably any more, but in his own room, by himself.  Returning weary from each day’s unremitting effort, he drugged himself to sleep, knowing that on the morrow he would rise up with a dry and burning mouth and repeat the program.