He
felt a certain scornful amusement. Doctors, he supposed, had to
get off that sort of talk to earn their money.
He reached out for the bottle, and as he grasped it his eye was
caught by something on the floor. A brown monkey with a long, grey
tail was sitting there staring at him.
There was one of those painful pauses. Nutty looked at the monkey
rather like an elongated Macbeth inspecting the ghost of Banquo.
The monkey looked at Nutty. The pause continued. Nutty shut his
eyes, counted ten slowly, and opened them.
The monkey was still there.
'Boo!' said Nutty, in an apprehensive undertone.
The monkey looked at him.
Nutty shut his eyes again. He would count sixty this time. A cold
fear had laid its clammy fingers on his heart. This was what that
doctor--not such a chump after all--must have meant!
Nutty began to count. There seemed to be a heavy lump inside him,
and his mouth was dry; but otherwise he felt all right. That was
the gruesome part of it--this dreadful thing had come upon him at
a moment when he could have sworn that he was sound as a bell. If
this had happened in the days when he ranged the Great White Way,
sucking up deleterious moisture like a cloud, it would have been
intelligible. But it had sneaked upon him like a thief in the
night; it had stolen unheralded into his life when he had
practically reformed.
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