"You--you had some queer idea about yourself!"

"Yes, I know," answered Vandover quickly. "Fancied I was some kind of a beast, didn't I--some kind of wolf? I have that notion sometimes and I can't get it out of my head. It's curious just the same."

They went up to Vandover's room. Vandover lit the gas, but he could hardly keep back an exclamation as the glare suddenly struck young Haight's face. What in heaven's name was the matter with his old-time chum? He seemed to be blighted, shattered, struck down by some terrible, overwhelming calamity. A dreadful anguish looked through his eyes. The sense of a hopeless misery had drawn and twisted his face. There could be no doubt that something had made shipwreck of his life. Vandover was looking at a ruined man.

"My G.o.d, Dolly!" exclaimed Vandover, "what's happened to you? You look like a death's-head, man! What's gone wrong? Aren't you well?"

Haight caught his friend's searching gaze, and for a moment they looked at each other without speaking. There was no mistaking the fearful grief that smouldered behind Haight's dull, listless eyes. For a moment Vandover thought of Turner Ravis. But even if she had turned him off, that alone would not account for his friend's fearful condition of mind and body.

"What is it, Dolly?" persisted Vandover. "We used to be pretty good chums, not so long ago."

They sat down on the edge of the bed, and for a moment their positions seemed reversed: Haight the one to be protected and consoled, Vandover the shielding and self-reliant one.

Young Haight pa.s.sed his hand over his face before he answered, and Vandover noticed that his fingers trembled like an old man's.

"Do you remember that night, Van, when you and Charlie and I all went out to Turner's house, and we had _tamales_ and beer, and a gla.s.s broke in that peculiar way, and I cut my lip?"

Vandover nodded, forcing his attention against the alcoholic fumes, to follow his friend's words.

"We went down to the Imperial afterward," Haight continued, "and ran into Ellis, and we had something more to eat. Do you remember that as we sat there, Toby, the waiter, brought Flossie in, and she sat there with us a while?"

He paused, choosing his words. Vandover listened closely, trying to recall the incident.

"She kissed me," said young Haight slowly, "and the court-plaster came off. You know I never had anything to do with women, Van. I always tried to keep away from them. But that's where my life practically came to an end."

"You mean--" began Vandover. "You mean--that you--that Flossie--?"

Haight nodded.

"Good G.o.d! I can't believe it. It's not possible! I _know_ Flossie!"

Haight shook his head, smiling grimly.

"I can't help that, Van," said he. "There's no denying facts, there's no other possible explanation! As soon as I knew, I went to the doctors here, and then I went to New York for treatment, but there's no hope. I didn't know, you see. I didn't believe it possible. Turner Ravis and I were engaged. I waited too long! There's only one escape for me now."

His voice dropped, he stared for a moment at the floor. Then he straightened up, and said in a different tone, "But, d.a.m.n it, Van, let's not talk about it! I'm haunted with the thing day and night. I want to talk to you! I want to talk to you seriously. You know you are ruining yourself, old man!"

But Vandover interrupted him with a gesture, saying, "Don't go on, Dolly; it isn't the least use. There _was_ a time for that, but that was long ago. I used to care, I used to be sorry and all that, but I'm not now. Ruining myself? Why, I _have_ ruined myself long ago. We're both ruined--only in your case it wasn't your fault. It's too late for me now, and I'm even not sorry that it _is_ too late. Dolly, I don't _want_ to pull up. You can't imagine a man fallen as low as that, can you? I couldn't imagine it myself a few years ago. I'm going right straight to the devil now, and you might as well stand aside and give me a free course, for I'm bound to get there sooner or later. I suppose you would think that a man who could see this as plainly as I do would be afraid, would have remorse and all that sort of thing. Well, I did at first.

I'll never forget the night when I first saw it; came near shooting myself, but I got over it, and now I'm used to the idea. Dolly, _I can get used to almost anything_. Nothing makes much difference to me nowadays--only I like to play cards. Look here!" he went on, laying out the notice from the bank upon the table, "this came to-day. You see what it is! I sold the old house on California Street. Well, I've gambled away that money in less than a year. It seems that I'm a financial ruin now, but"--and he began to laugh--"I live through it somehow. The news didn't prevent me from getting drunk to-night."

After young Haight was gone, Vandover went to bed, turning out the gas and drawing down the window half-way from the top. The wine had made him sleepy; he was dropping away into a very grateful doze when a sudden shock, a violent leap of every nerve in his body, brought him up to a sitting posture, gasping for breath, his heart fluttering, his hands beating at the empty air. He settled down again, turning upon his pillow, closing his eyes, very weary, longing for a good night's sleep.

Dolly Haight's terrible story, his unjustified fate, and the hopeless tragedy of it, came back to him. Vandover would gladly have changed places with him. Young Haight had the affection and respect of even those that knew. He, Vandover, had thrown away his friends' love and their esteem with the rest of the things he had once valued. His thoughts, released from all control of his will, began to come and go through his head with incredible rapidity, confused ideas, half-remembered scenes, incidents of the past few days, bits and ends of conversation recalled for no especial reason, all galloping across his brain like a long herd of terrified horses; an excitement grew upon him, a strange thrill of exhilaration. He was broad awake now, but suddenly his left leg, his left arm and wrist, all his left side jerked with the suddenness of a sprung trap; so violent was the shock that the entire bed shook and creaked with it. Then the inevitable reaction followed, the slow crisping and torsion of his nerves, twisting upon each other like a vast swarm of tiny serpents; it seemed to begin with his ankles, spreading slowly to every part of his body; it was a veritable torture, so poignant that Vandover groaned under it, shutting his eyes. He could not keep quiet a second--to lie in bed was an impossibility; he threw the bed-clothes from him and sprang up. He did not light the gas, but threw on his bathrobe and began to walk the floor. Even as he walked, his eyelids drooped lower and lower. The need of sleep overcame him like a narcotic, but as soon as he was about to lose himself he would be suddenly and violently awakened by the same shock, the same jangling recoil of his nerves. Then his hands and head seemed to swell; next, it was as though the whole room was too small for him. He threw open the window and, leaning upon his elbows, looked out.

The clouds had begun to break, the rain was gradually ceasing, leaving in the air a damp, fresh smell, the smell of wet asphalt and the odour of dripping woodwork. It was warm; the atmosphere was dank, heavy, tepid. One or two stars were out, and a faint gray light showed him the vast reach of roofs below stretching away to meet the abrupt rise of Telegraph Hill. Not far off the slender, graceful smokestack puffed steadily, throwing off continually the little flock of white jets that rose into the air very brave and gay, but in the end dwindled irresolutely, discouraged, disheartened, fading sadly away, vanishing under the night, like illusions disappearing at the first touch of the outside world. As Vandover leaned from his window, looking out into the night with eyes that saw nothing, the college slogan rose again from the great crowd of students who still continued to hold the streets.

"Rah, rah, rah! Rah, rah, rah!"

He turned back into the room, groping among the bottles on his washstand for his bromide of pota.s.sium. As he poured out the required dose into the teaspoon his hand twitched again sharply, flirting the medicine over his bared neck and chest, exposed by the bathrobe which he had left open at the throat. It was cold, and he shivered a bit as he wiped it dry with the back of his hand.

He knew very well that his nervous attack was coming on again. As he set down the bottle upon the washstand he muttered to himself, "Now I'm going to have a night of it." He began to walk the floor again with great strides, fighting with all his pitiful, shattered mind against the increasing hysteria, trying to keep out of his brain the strange hallucination that a.s.sailed it from time to time, the hallucination of a thing four-footed, a thing that sulked and snarled. The hotel grew quiet; a watchman went down the hall turning out each alternate gas jet.

Just outside of the door was a burner in a red globe, fixed at a stair landing to show the exit in case of fire. This burned all night and it streamed through the transom of Vandover's room, splotching the ceiling with a great square of red light. Vandover was in a torment, overcome now by that same fear with which he had at last become so familiar, the unreasoning terror of something unknown. He uttered an exclamation, a suppressed cry of despair, of misery, and then suddenly checked himself, astonished, seized with the fancy that his cry was not human, was not of himself, but of something four-footed, the snarl of some exasperated brute. He paused abruptly in his walk, listening, for what he did not know. The silence of the great city spread itself around him, like the still waters of some vast lagoon. Through the silence he heard the noise of the throng of college youths. They were returning, doubling upon their line of march. A long puff of tepid air breathing through the open window brought to his ears the distant joyous sound of their slogan:

"Rah, rah, rah! Rah, rah, rah!"

They pa.s.sed by along the adjacent street, their sounds growing faint.

Vandover took up his restless pacing again. Little by little the hallucination gained upon him; little by little his mind slipped from his grasp. The wolf--the beast--whatever the creature was, seemed in his diseased fancy to grow stronger in him from moment to moment. But with all his strength he fought against it, fought against this strange mania, that overcame him at these periodical intervals--fought with his hands so tightly clenched that the knuckles grew white, that the nails bit into the palm. It seemed to him that in some way his personality divided itself into three. There was himself, the real Vandover of every day, the same familiar Vandover that looked back at him from his mirror; then there was the wolf, the beast, whatever the creature was that lived in his flesh, and that struggled with him now, striving to gain the ascendency, to absorb the real Vandover into its own hideous ident.i.ty; and last of all, there was a third self, formless, very vague, elusive, that stood aside and watched the strife of the other two. But as he fought against his madness, concentrating all his attention with a tremendous effort of the will, the queer numbness that came upon his mind whenever he exerted it enwrapped his brain like a fog, and this third self grew vaguer than ever, dwindled and disappeared. Somehow it seemed to be a.s.sociated with consciousness, for after this the sense of the reality of things grew dim and blurred to him. He ceased to know exactly what he was doing. His intellectual parts dropped away one by one, leaving only the instincts, the blind, unreasoning impulses of the animal.

Still he continued his restless, lurching walk back and forth in his room, his head hanging low and swinging from side to side with the movement of his gait. He had become so nervous that the restraint imposed upon his freedom of movement by his bathrobe and his loose night-clothes chafed and irritated him. At length he had stripped off everything.

Suddenly and without the slightest warning Vandover's hands came slowly above his head and he dropped forward, landing upon his palms. All in an instant he had given way, yielding in a second to the strange hallucination of that four-footed thing that sulked and snarled. Now without a moment's stop he ran back and forth along the wall of the room, upon the palms of his hands and his toes, a ludicrous figure, like that of certain clowns one sees at the circus, contortionists walking about the sawdust, imitating some kind of enormous dog. Still he swung his head from side to side with the motion of his shuffling gait, his eyes dull and fixed. At long intervals he uttered a sound, half word, half cry, "Wolf--wolf!" but it was m.u.f.fled, indistinct, raucous, coming more from his throat than from his lips. It might easily have been the growl of an animal. A long time pa.s.sed. Naked, four-footed, Vandover ran back and forth the length of the room.

By an hour after midnight the sky was clear, all the stars were out, the moon a thin, low-swinging scimitar, set behind the black ma.s.s of the roofs of the city, leaving a pale bluish light that seemed to come from all quarters of the horizon. As the great stillness grew more and more complete, the persistent puffing of the slender tin stack, the three gay and joyous little noises, each sounding like a note of discreet laughter interrupted by a cough, became clear and distinct. Inside the room there was no sound except the persistent patter of something four-footed going up and down. At length even this sound ceased abruptly. Worn out, Vandover had just fallen, dropping forward upon his face with a long breath. He lay still, sleeping at last. The remnant of the great band of college men went down an adjacent street, raising their cadenced slogan for the last time. It came through the open window, softened as it were by the warm air, thick with damp, through which it travelled:

"Rah, rah, rah! Rah, rah, rah!"

Naked, exhausted, Vandover slept profoundly, stretched at full length at the foot of the bare, white wall of the room beneath two of the little placards, scrawled with ink, that read, "Stove Here"; "Mona Lisa Here."

Chapter Seventeen

On A certain Sat.u.r.day morning two years later Vandover awoke in his room at the Reno House, the room he had now occupied for fifteen months.

One might almost say that he had been expelled from the Lick House. For a time he had tried to retain his room there with the idea of paying his bills by the money he should win at gambling. But his bad luck was now become a settled thing--almost invariably he lost. At last Ellis and the Dummy had refused to play with him, since he was never able to pay them when they won. They had had a great quarrel. Ellis broke with him sullenly, growling wrathfully under his heavy moustache, and the Dummy had written upon his pad--so hastily and angrily that the words could hardly be read--that he would not play with professional gamblers, men who supported themselves by their winnings. d.a.m.n it! one had to be a gentleman.

Next, Vandover had tried to borrow some money of Charlie Geary. Geary had told him that he could not afford as much as Vandover needed. Then Vandover became enraged. He had long since seen that Geary had practically swindled him out of his block in the Mission, and at that very moment the huge boot and shoe "concern" was completing the factory built upon the ground that Vandover had once owned. Geary had cleared seven thousand dollars on his "deal." His refusal to loan his old-time friend fifty dollars upon this occasion had exasperated Vandover out of all bounds. There was a scene. Vandover told Geary what he thought of his "deal" in very plain words. They shouted "swindler" and "gambler"

into each other's faces; the whole office was aroused; Vandover was ejected by force. On a stair landing half-way to the street he sat down and cried into his arms folded upon his knees. When he returned to his room he had a sudden return of his dreadful nervous malady and barked and whined under the bed.

Then Vandover wrote a fifty-dollar check on the bank--the same bank that had just notified him that he was overdrawn--and pa.s.sed it upon young Haight. How he came to do the thing he could not tell; it might have been the influence of Geary's successful robbery, or it might have been that he had at last lost all principle, all sense of honour and integrity. At any rate, he could not bring himself to feel very sorry.

He knew that young Haight would not prosecute him for the dishonesty; he traded upon Haight's magnanimity; he only felt glad that he had the fifty dollars. But by this time Vandover did not even wonder at his own baseness and degradation. A few years ago this would have been the case; now his character was so changed that the theft seemed somehow consistent. He had destroyed young Haight's friendship for him. He had cast from him his college chum, his best friend, but neither did this affect him. Nothing made much difference to him now.

Nevertheless, Vandover was evicted from the Lick House three days after he had stolen young Haight's money. Instead of paying his bills with the amount, he gambled it away in a back room of a new cafe on Market Street with Toby, the red-eyed waiter from the Imperial, and a certain German "professor," a billiard marker, who wore a waistcoat figured with little designs of the Eiffel Tower, and who was a third owner in a trotting mare named Tomato Ketchup.

Vandover was now left with only his bonds, his U.S. 4 per cents. These brought him in but sixty-nine dollars a quarter, or as he had had it arranged, twenty-three dollars a month. Just at this time, as if by a miracle, a veritable G.o.d from the Machine, Vandover's lawyer, Mr. Field, found him an opportunity to earn some money. For the first and only time in his life Vandover knew what it was to work for a living. The work that Field secured for him was the work of painting those little pictures on the lacquered surface of iron safes, those little oval landscapes between the lines of red and gold lettering--landscapes, rugged gorges, ocean steamships under all sail, mountain lakes with sailboats careening upon their surfaces, the boat indicated by two little triangular dabs of Chinese white, one for the sail itself and the other for its reflection in the water. Sometimes even he was called upon to paint other little pictures upon the sides of big express wagons--two horses, one white and the other bay, galloping very free in an open field, their manes and tails flying, or a bulldog, very savage, sitting upon a green and black safe, or the head of a mastiff with a spiked collar about his neck.

What with the pay for this sort of work and the interest of his bonds, Vandover managed to lead a haphazard sort of life, living about in cheap lodging-houses and cheap restaurants. But he was never more than a second-cla.s.s workman, and he was so irregular that he could never be depended upon.

The moment he began to paint again--even to paint such pitiful little pictures as these--the same familiar experience repeated itself, the unwillingness of his fingers, their failure to rightly interpret his ideas, the resulting crudity of his work, the sudden numbness in his brain, the queer, tense sensation behind his eyes. But Vandover had long since become accustomed to these symptoms and would not have minded them at this time had it not been that they were occasionally followed by a nervous twitching and jerking of his whole arm, so that sometimes he could not hold the brush steady a minute at a time.

For two years he had drifted about the city, living now here and now there, a real hand-to-mouth existence, sinking a little lower each day.

Now, no one knew him. He had completely pa.s.sed out of the lives of Haight, Geary, and Ellis, just as before he had pa.s.sed out of the life of Turner Ravis. At the end of the first year they had ceased even to think about him. For a long time they thought that he was dead, until one day Ellis declared that he had seen him far down on Kearney Street, near the Barbary Coast, looking at the pictures in the ill.u.s.trated weeklies that were tacked upon the show-board on the sidewalk in front of a stationer's. Ellis had told the others that on this occasion Vandover seemed to be more sickly than ever; he described his appearance in detail, wagging his head at his own story, pursing his lips, putting his chin in the air. Vandover had worn an old paint-stained pair of blue trousers, fastened with a strap, so that his shirt showed below his vest; he had no collar, and he had allowed his beard to grow, a straggling thin beard, through which one could see the b.u.t.tons of his shirt, a dirty beard full of the cracker crumbs from the free lunch-counters of cheap saloons; he had on a hat which he had worn when they had known him; but one should see that hat now!

It was all true: little by little Vandover had abandoned all interest in his personal appearance. Of course it was impossible for him to dress well at this time, but he had even lost regard for decency and cleanliness. He washed himself but rarely. He had even acquired the habit of sleeping with all his clothes on during the colder nights of the year.

Nothing made any difference. Gradually his mind grew more and more clouded; he became stupid, sluggish. He went about the city from dawn to dark, his feet dragging, his head hanging low and swinging from side to side with the motion of his gait. He rarely spoke; his eyes took on a dull, glazed appearance, filmy, like the eyes of a dead fish. At certain intervals his mania came upon him, the strange hallucination of something four-footed, the persistent fancy that the brute in him had now grown so large, so insatiable, that it had taken everything, even to his very self, his own ident.i.ty--that he had literally _become the brute_. The attack pa.s.sed off and left him wondering, perplexed.

The Reno House, where Vandover had lived for some fifteen months, was a sort of hotel on Sacramento Street below Kearney. The neighbourhood was low--just on the edge of the Barbary Coast, abounding in stores for second-hand clothing, saloons, p.a.w.nshops, gun-stores, bird-stores, and the shops of Chinese cobblers. Around the corner on Kearney Street was a concert hall, a dive, to which the admission was free. Near by was the old Plaza.