McTeague

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McTEAGUE

A Story of San Francisco

by Frank Norris




CHAPTER 1

It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took
his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors' coffee-joint
on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone meat, very
hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet
pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office,
one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna's saloon and bought a pitcher
of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to
dinner.

Once in his office, or, as he called it on his signboard, "Dental
Parlors," he took off his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and,
having crammed his little stove full of coke, lay back in his operating
chair at the bay window, reading the paper, drinking his beer, and
smoking his huge porcelain pipe while his food digested; crop-full,
stupid, and warm. By and by, gorged with steam beer, and overcome by the
heat of the room, the cheap tobacco, and the effects of his heavy meal,
he dropped off to sleep. Late in the afternoon his canary bird, in its
gilt cage just over his head, began to sing. He woke slowly, finished
the rest of his beer--very flat and stale by this time--and taking down
his concertina from the bookcase, where in week days it kept the company
of seven volumes of "Allen's Practical Dentist," played upon it some
half-dozen very mournful airs.

McTeague looked forward to these Sunday afternoons as a period of
relaxation and enjoyment. He invariably spent them in the same fashion.
These were his only pleasures--to eat, to smoke, to sleep, and to play
upon his concertina.

The six lugubrious airs that he knew, always carried him back to the
time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten
years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling the
heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his
father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady,
hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an
irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.

McTeague remembered his mother, too, who, with the help of the Chinaman,
cooked for forty miners. She was an overworked drudge, fiery and
energetic for all that, filled with the one idea of having her son rise
in life and enter a profession. The chance had come at last when the
father died, corroded with alcohol, collapsing in a few hours. Two or
three years later a travelling dentist visited the mine and put up his
tent near the bunk-house. He was more or less of a charlatan, but he
fired Mrs. McTeague's ambition, and young McTeague went away with him
to learn his profession. He had learnt it after a fashion, mostly by
watching the charlatan operate. He had read many of the necessary books,
but he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from them.

Then one day at San Francisco had come the news of his mother's death;
she had left him some money--not much, but enough to set him up in
business; so he had cut loose from the charlatan and had opened his
"Dental Parlors" on Polk Street, an "accommodation street" of small
shops in the residence quarter of the town. Here he had slowly
collected a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks, and car
conductors. He made but few acquaintances. Polk Street called him the
"Doctor" and spoke of his enormous strength. For McTeague was a young
giant, carrying his huge shock of blond hair six feet three inches
from the ground; moving his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle,
slowly, ponderously. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with a
fell of stiff yellow hair; they were hard as wooden mallets, strong
as vises, the hands of the old-time car-boy. Often he dispensed with
forceps and extracted a refractory tooth with his thumb and finger.
His head was square-cut, angular; the jaw salient, like that of the
carnivora.

McTeague's mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish. Yet there
was nothing vicious about the man. Altogether he suggested the draught
horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient.

When he opened his "Dental Parlors," he felt that his life was a
success, that he could hope for nothing better. In spite of the name,
there was but one room. It was a corner room on the second floor over
the branch post-office, and faced the street. McTeague made it do for
a bedroom as well, sleeping on the big bed-lounge against the wall
opposite the window. There was a washstand behind the screen in the
corner where he manufactured his moulds. In the round bay window were
his operating chair, his dental engine, and the movable rack on which
he laid out his instruments. Three chairs, a bargain at the second-hand
store, ranged themselves against the wall with military precision
underneath a steel engraving of the court of Lorenzo de' Medici, which
he had bought because there were a great many figures in it for the
money. Over the bed-lounge hung a rifle manufacturer's advertisement
calendar which he never used. The other ornaments were a small
marble-topped centre table covered with back numbers of "The American
System of Dentistry," a stone pug dog sitting before the little stove,
and a thermometer. A stand of shelves occupied one corner, filled with
the seven volumes of "Allen's Practical Dentist." On the top shelf
McTeague kept his concertina and a bag of bird seed for the canary. The
whole place exhaled a mingled odor of bedding, creosote, and ether.

But for one thing, McTeague would have been perfectly contented. Just
outside his window was his signboard--a modest affair--that read:
"Doctor McTeague. Dental Parlors. Gas Given"; but that was all. It was
his ambition, his dream, to have projecting from that corner window a
huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous and
attractive. He would have it some day, on that he was resolved; but as
yet such a thing was far beyond his means.

When he had finished the last of his beer, McTeague slowly wiped his
lips and huge yellow mustache with the side of his hand. Bull-like, he
heaved himself laboriously up, and, going to the window, stood looking
down into the street.

The street never failed to interest him. It was one of those cross
streets peculiar to Western cities, situated in the heart of the
residence quarter, but occupied by small tradespeople who lived in the
rooms above their shops. There were corner drug stores with huge jars
of red, yellow, and green liquids in their windows, very brave and gay;
stationers' stores, where illustrated weeklies were tacked upon bulletin
boards; barber shops with cigar stands in their vestibules; sad-looking
plumbers' offices; cheap restaurants, in whose windows one saw piles of
unopened oysters weighted down by cubes of ice, and china pigs and cows
knee deep in layers of white beans. At one end of the street McTeague
could see the huge power-house of the cable line. Immediately opposite
him was a great market; while farther on, over the chimney stacks of the
intervening houses, the glass roof of some huge public baths glittered
like crystal in the afternoon sun. Underneath him the branch post-office
was opening its doors, as was its custom between two and three
o'clock on Sunday afternoons. An acrid odor of ink rose upward to him.
Occasionally a cable car passed, trundling heavily, with a strident
whirring of jostled glass windows.

On week days the street was very lively. It woke to its work about seven
o'clock, at the time when the newsboys made their appearance together
with the day laborers. The laborers went trudging past in a straggling
file--plumbers' apprentices, their pockets stuffed with sections of
lead pipe, tweezers, and pliers; carpenters, carrying nothing but their
little pasteboard lunch baskets painted to imitate leather; gangs of
street workers, their overalls soiled with yellow clay, their picks and
long-handled shovels over their shoulders; plasterers, spotted with lime
from head to foot. This little army of workers, tramping steadily in
one direction, met and mingled with other toilers of a different
description--conductors and "swing men" of the cable company going on
duty; heavy-eyed night clerks from the drug stores on their way home to
sleep; roundsmen returning to the precinct police station to make their
night report, and Chinese market gardeners teetering past under their
heavy baskets. The cable cars began to fill up; all along the street
could be seen the shopkeepers taking down their shutters.

Between seven and eight the street breakfasted. Now and then a waiter
from one of the cheap restaurants crossed from one sidewalk to the
other, balancing on one palm a tray covered with a napkin. Everywhere
was the smell of coffee and of frying steaks. A little later, following
in the path of the day laborers, came the clerks and shop girls,
dressed with a certain cheap smartness, always in a hurry, glancing
apprehensively at the power-house clock. Their employers followed
an hour or so later--on the cable cars for the most part whiskered
gentlemen with huge stomachs, reading the morning papers with great
gravity; bank cashiers and insurance clerks with flowers in their
buttonholes.

At the same time the school children invaded the street, filling the air
with a clamor of shrill voices, stopping at the stationers' shops, or
idling a moment in the doorways of the candy stores. For over half an
hour they held possession of the sidewalks, then suddenly disappeared,
leaving behind one or two stragglers who hurried along with great
strides of their little thin legs, very anxious and preoccupied.

Towards eleven o'clock the ladies from the great avenue a block above
Polk Street made their appearance, promenading the sidewalks leisurely,
deliberately. They were at their morning's marketing. They were handsome
women, beautifully dressed. They knew by name their butchers and grocers
and vegetable men. From his window McTeague saw them in front of the
stalls, gloved and veiled and daintily shod, the subservient provision
men at their elbows, scribbling hastily in the order books. They all
seemed to know one another, these grand ladies from the fashionable
avenue. Meetings took place here and there; a conversation was begun;
others arrived; groups were formed; little impromptu receptions were
held before the chopping blocks of butchers' stalls, or on the sidewalk,
around boxes of berries and fruit.

From noon to evening the population of the street was of a mixed
character. The street was busiest at that time; a vast and prolonged
murmur arose--the mingled shuffling of feet, the rattle of wheels, the
heavy trundling of cable cars. At four o'clock the school children
once more swarmed the sidewalks, again disappearing with surprising
suddenness. At six the great homeward march commenced; the cars were
crowded, the laborers thronged the sidewalks, the newsboys chanted the
evening papers. Then all at once the street fell quiet; hardly a soul
was in sight; the sidewalks were deserted. It was supper hour. Evening
began; and one by one a multitude of lights, from the demoniac glare of
the druggists' windows to the dazzling blue whiteness of the electric
globes, grew thick from street corner to street corner. Once more the
street was crowded. Now there was no thought but for amusement. The
cable cars were loaded with theatre-goers--men in high hats and
young girls in furred opera cloaks. On the sidewalks were groups and
couples--the plumbers' apprentices, the girls of the ribbon counters,
the little families that lived on the second stories over their shops,
the dressmakers, the small doctors, the harness-makers--all the various
inhabitants of the street were abroad, strolling idly from shop window
to shop window, taking the air after the day's work. Groups of girls
collected on the corners, talking and laughing very loud, making remarks
upon the young men that passed them. The tamale men appeared. A band of
Salvationists began to sing before a saloon.

Then, little by little, Polk Street dropped back to solitude. Eleven
o'clock struck from the power-house clock. Lights were extinguished. At
one o'clock the cable stopped, leaving an abrupt silence in the air.
All at once it seemed very still. The ugly noises were the occasional
footfalls of a policeman and the persistent calling of ducks and geese
in the closed market. The street was asleep.

Day after day, McTeague saw the same panorama unroll itself. The bay
window of his "Dental Parlors" was for him a point of vantage from which
he watched the world go past.

On Sundays, however, all was changed. As he stood in the bay window,
after finishing his beer, wiping his lips, and looking out into the
street, McTeague was conscious of the difference. Nearly all the stores
were closed. No wagons passed. A few people hurried up and down the
sidewalks, dressed in cheap Sunday finery. A cable car went by; on the
outside seats were a party of returning picnickers. The mother, the
father, a young man, and a young girl, and three children. The two older
people held empty lunch baskets in their laps, while the bands of the
children's hats were stuck full of oak leaves. The girl carried a huge
bunch of wilting poppies and wild flowers.

As the car approached McTeague's window the young man got up and swung
himself off the platform, waving goodby to the party. Suddenly McTeague
recognized him.

"There's Marcus Schouler," he muttered behind his mustache.

Marcus Schouler was the dentist's one intimate friend. The acquaintance
had begun at the car conductors' coffee-joint, where the two occupied
the same table and met at every meal. Then they made the discovery that
they both lived in the same flat, Marcus occupying a room on the floor
above McTeague. On different occasions McTeague had treated Marcus for
an ulcerated tooth and had refused to accept payment. Soon it came to be
an understood thing between them. They were "pals."

McTeague, listening, heard Marcus go up-stairs to his room above. In a
few minutes his door opened again. McTeague knew that he had come out
into the hall and was leaning over the banisters.

"Oh, Mac!" he called. McTeague came to his door.

"Hullo! 'sthat you, Mark?"

"Sure," answered Marcus. "Come on up."

"You come on down."

"No, come on up."

"Oh, you come on down."

"Oh, you lazy duck!" retorted Marcus, coming down the stairs.

"Been out to the Cliff House on a picnic," he explained as he sat down
on the bed-lounge, "with my uncle and his people--the Sieppes, you know.
By damn! it was hot," he suddenly vociferated. "Just look at that! Just
look at that!" he cried, dragging at his limp collar. "That's the third
one since morning; it is--it is, for a fact--and you got your stove
going." He began to tell about the picnic, talking very loud and fast,
gesturing furiously, very excited over trivial details. Marcus could not
talk without getting excited.

"You ought t'have seen, y'ought t'have seen. I tell you, it was outa
sight. It was; it was, for a fact."

"Yes, yes," answered McTeague, bewildered, trying to follow. "Yes,
that's so."

In recounting a certain dispute with an awkward bicyclist, in which it
appeared he had become involved, Marcus quivered with rage. "'Say that
again,' says I to um. 'Just say that once more, and'"--here a rolling
explosion of oaths--"'you'll go back to the city in the Morgue wagon.
Ain't I got a right to cross a street even, I'd like to know, without
being run down--what?' I say it's outrageous. I'd a knifed him in
another minute. It was an outrage. I say it was an OUTRAGE."

"Sure it was," McTeague hastened to reply. "Sure, sure."

"Oh, and we had an accident," shouted the other, suddenly off on another
tack. "It was awful. Trina was in the swing there--that's my cousin
Trina, you know who I mean--and she fell out. By damn! I thought she'd
killed herself; struck her face on a rock and knocked out a front tooth.
It's a wonder she didn't kill herself. It IS a wonder; it is, for a
fact. Ain't it, now? Huh? Ain't it? Y'ought t'have seen."

McTeague had a vague idea that Marcus Schouler was stuck on his cousin
Trina. They "kept company" a good deal; Marcus took dinner with the
Sieppes every Saturday evening at their home at B Street station, across
the bay, and Sunday afternoons he and the family usually made little
excursions into the suburbs. McTeague began to wonder dimly how it
was that on this occasion Marcus had not gone home with his cousin. As
sometimes happens, Marcus furnished the explanation upon the instant.

"I promised a duck up here on the avenue I'd call for his dog at four
this afternoon."

Marcus was Old Grannis's assistant in a little dog hospital that the
latter had opened in a sort of alley just off Polk Street, some four
blocks above Old Grannis lived in one of the back rooms of McTeague's
flat. He was an Englishman and an expert dog surgeon, but Marcus
Schouler was a bungler in the profession. His father had been a
veterinary surgeon who had kept a livery stable near by, on California
Street, and Marcus's knowledge of the diseases of domestic animals had
been picked up in a haphazard way, much after the manner of McTeague's
education. Somehow he managed to impress Old Grannis, a gentle,
simple-minded old man, with a sense of his fitness, bewildering him with
a torrent of empty phrases that he delivered with fierce gestures and
with a manner of the greatest conviction.

"You'd better come along with me, Mac," observed Marcus. "We'll get the
duck's dog, and then we'll take a little walk, huh? You got nothun to
do. Come along."

McTeague went out with him, and the two friends proceeded up to the
avenue to the house where the dog was to be found. It was a huge
mansion-like place, set in an enormous garden that occupied a whole
third of the block; and while Marcus tramped up the front steps and rang
the doorbell boldly, to show his independence, McTeague remained below
on the sidewalk, gazing stupidly at the curtained windows, the marble
steps, and the bronze griffins, troubled and a little confused by all
this massive luxury.

After they had taken the dog to the hospital and had left him to whimper
behind the wire netting, they returned to Polk Street and had a glass of
beer in the back room of Joe Frenna's corner grocery.

Ever since they had left the huge mansion on the avenue, Marcus had been
attacking the capitalists, a class which he pretended to execrate. It
was a pose which he often assumed, certain of impressing the dentist.
Marcus had picked up a few half-truths of political economy--it was
impossible to say where--and as soon as the two had settled themselves
to their beer in Frenna's back room he took up the theme of the labor
question. He discussed it at the top of his voice, vociferating, shaking
his fists, exciting himself with his own noise. He was continually
making use of the stock phrases of the professional politician--phrases
he had caught at some of the ward "rallies" and "ratification meetings."
These rolled off his tongue with incredible emphasis, appearing at every
turn of his conversation--"Outraged constituencies," "cause of labor,"
"wage earners," "opinions biased by personal interests," "eyes blinded
by party prejudice." McTeague listened to him, awestruck.

"There's where the evil lies," Marcus would cry. "The masses must learn
self-control; it stands to reason. Look at the figures, look at the
figures. Decrease the number of wage earners and you increase wages,
don't you? don't you?"

Absolutely stupid, and understanding never a word, McTeague would
answer:

"Yes, yes, that's it--self-control--that's the word."

"It's the capitalists that's ruining the cause of labor," shouted
Marcus, banging the table with his fist till the beer glasses danced;
"white-livered drones, traitors, with their livers white as snow, eatun
the bread of widows and orphuns; there's where the evil lies."

Stupefied with his clamor, McTeague answered, wagging his head:

"Yes, that's it; I think it's their livers."

Suddenly Marcus fell calm again, forgetting his pose all in an instant.

"Say, Mac, I told my cousin Trina to come round and see you about that
tooth of her's. She'll be in to-morrow, I guess."



CHAPTER 2


After his breakfast the following Monday morning, McTeague looked over
the appointments he had written down in the book-slate that hung against
the screen. His writing was immense, very clumsy, and very round, with
huge, full-bellied l's and h's. He saw that he had made an appointment
at one o'clock for Miss Baker, the retired dressmaker, a little old maid
who had a tiny room a few doors down the hall. It adjoined that of Old
Grannis.

Quite an affair had arisen from this circumstance. Miss Baker and Old
Grannis were both over sixty, and yet it was current talk amongst
the lodgers of the flat that the two were in love with each other.
Singularly enough, they were not even acquaintances; never a word had
passed between them. At intervals they met on the stairway; he on his
way to his little dog hospital, she returning from a bit of marketing
in the street. At such times they passed each other with averted
eyes, pretending a certain preoccupation, suddenly seized with a great
embarrassment, the timidity of a second childhood. He went on about his
business, disturbed and thoughtful. She hurried up to her tiny room,
her curious little false curls shaking with her agitation, the faintest
suggestion of a flush coming and going in her withered cheeks. The
emotion of one of these chance meetings remained with them during all
the rest of the day.

Was it the first romance in the lives of each? Did Old Grannis ever
remember a certain face amongst those that he had known when he was
young Grannis--the face of some pale-haired girl, such as one sees in
the old cathedral towns of England? Did Miss Baker still treasure up
in a seldom opened drawer or box some faded daguerreotype, some strange
old-fashioned likeness, with its curling hair and high stock? It was
impossible to say.

Maria Macapa, the Mexican woman who took care of the lodgers' rooms, had
been the first to call the flat's attention to the affair, spreading the
news of it from room to room, from floor to floor. Of late she had made
a great discovery; all the women folk of the flat were yet vibrant with
it. Old Grannis came home from his work at four o'clock, and between
that time and six Miss Baker would sit in her room, her hands idle in
her lap, doing nothing, listening, waiting. Old Grannis did the same,
drawing his arm-chair near to the wall, knowing that Miss Baker was upon
the other side, conscious, perhaps, that she was thinking of him; and
there the two would sit through the hours of the afternoon, listening
and waiting, they did not know exactly for what, but near to each other,
separated only by the thin partition of their rooms. They had come
to know each other's habits. Old Grannis knew that at quarter of five
precisely Miss Baker made a cup of tea over the oil stove on the stand
between the bureau and the window. Miss Baker felt instinctively the
exact moment when Old Grannis took down his little binding apparatus
from the second shelf of his clothes closet and began his favorite
occupation of binding pamphlets--pamphlets that he never read, for all
that.

In his "Parlors" McTeague began his week's work. He glanced in the glass
saucer in which he kept his sponge-gold, and noticing that he had
used up all his pellets, set about making some more. In examining Miss
Baker's teeth at the preliminary sitting he had found a cavity in one
of the incisors. Miss Baker had decided to have it filled with gold.
McTeague remembered now that it was what is called a "proximate case,"
where there is not sufficient room to fill with large pieces of gold. He
told himself that he should have to use "mats" in the filling. He made
some dozen of these "mats" from his tape of non-cohesive gold, cutting
it transversely into small pieces that could be inserted edgewise
between the teeth and consolidated by packing. After he had made his
"mats" he continued with the other kind of gold fillings, such as he
would have occasion to use during the week; "blocks" to be used in large
proximal cavities, made by folding the tape on itself a number of
times and then shaping it with the soldering pliers; "cylinders" for
commencing fillings, which he formed by rolling the tape around a needle
called a "broach," cutting it afterwards into different lengths. He
worked slowly, mechanically, turning the foil between his fingers with
the manual dexterity that one sometimes sees in stupid persons. His head
was quite empty of all thought, and he did not whistle over his work
as another man might have done. The canary made up for his silence,
trilling and chittering continually, splashing about in its morning
bath, keeping up an incessant noise and movement that would have been
maddening to any one but McTeague, who seemed to have no nerves at all.