“I—I just don’t seem to want to,” he confessed. “I don’t know why. But I hate to begin. Always dreaded the thing, and out here it seems so unnecessary.”
Then it was that she noticed his finger nails, for he had raised one hand to his shaggy beard and was fondling it abstractedly while it was under discussion. His finger nails were long and black with dirt.
“Why, Andy!” she began; then stopped short, her face whitening.
Always Andy had been clean and neat, so far as the conditions of camp life and the trail would permit. In fact, saving Dr. Shonto, she never had known a more fastidious man. Otherwise she never could have considered him her equal. A terrible thought came to her: This sudden shuffling off of the demands of civilization must be the first symptom of his malady. Considerately she said nothing, but for two days watched him closely, her heart like lead. He neither washed nor cleansed his finger nails during those two days, and she imagined that a certain amount of lustre had left his one-time bright-blue eyes.
And then he yawned directly in her face one night, his mouth wide open, with no hand raised to cover the gap and no apology. And two days later she caught him eating broiled meat with his fingers, tearing it apart as if he never had seen a knife and fork.
She cried herself to sleep that night and rose next morning with terror in her heart.
And now the change came fast. Andy’s eyes became bleary. The colour of his face grew leaden, and the cheeks were bloated. His skin took on a dirty, flabby look. His tongue, which the horrified girl often saw hanging out at one corner of his mouth, had thickened, and the lips were perpetually moist. His breath became asthmatic. When he spoke he mumbled his words. Gradually, but with cruel swiftness, the light of reason left his leaden eyes; and within ten days after the last tablet had been swallowed Charmian Reemy knew that the man she loved was little better than an idiot.
His head lopped forward as he sat at the mouth of the cave and stared, saying not a word, gazing at nothing, occasionally drawing in his swollen tongue, but never wiping from the ragged beard the saliva which he had drooled upon it. Again the tongue would creep out and downward, as if he lacked the muscular energy to keep it in its place. His long hair hung over his imbecile eyes; his long finger nails, unsightly with dirt, looked like the talons of a bird.
He would rouse himself when she shook him and, with tears streaming down her face, begged him to pull himself together. He would grin at her then and lick his lips with his thick tongue, but in a moment or two he would once more lose control of his faculties, and his head would drop forward, while out would creep the repulsive tongue. Sometimes he would laugh—a weird, insane chuckle that wrenched from the tortured girl a sob half of pity, half of horror. He walked occasionally, but did no work at all. When this occurred he dragged his steps, swaying loosely from side to side as if his body knew no joints. He would pause often and, swaying slightly, would gaze this way and that as if trying to replace in his memory the significance of familiar objects.
A few days more and he had ceased to speak. He muttered now and then, for no particular reason whatever, but his wet lips formed no words. Sometimes he gazed at her as she moved about, but in his eyes was no question as to what she might be doing; the motion of her body simply had attracted him momentarily and aroused a flicker of interest. But it would pass at once, and again he would let his head go forward, and sit gazing at the ground, while his tongue hung out and dripped.