day.
Now, no one knew him. He had completely passed out of the lives of
Haight, Geary, and Ellis, just as before he had passed 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 illustrated 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 buttons 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 identity--that he had literally _become the
brute_. The attack passed 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,
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