McTeague

F >> Frank Norris >> McTeague


After he had finished his fillings, he made a hook broach from a bit of
piano wire to replace an old one that he had lost. It was time for his
dinner then, and when he returned from the car conductors' coffee-joint,
he found Miss Baker waiting for him.

The ancient little dressmaker was at all times willing to talk of Old
Grannis to anybody that would listen, quite unconscious of the gossip
of the flat. McTeague found her all a-flutter with excitement. Something
extraordinary had happened. She had found out that the wall-paper in Old
Grannis's room was the same as that in hers.

"It has led me to thinking, Doctor McTeague," she exclaimed, shaking her
little false curls at him. "You know my room is so small, anyhow, and
the wall-paper being the same--the pattern from my room continues right
into his--I declare, I believe at one time that was all one room. Think
of it, do you suppose it was? It almost amounts to our occupying the
same room. I don't know--why, really--do you think I should speak to the
landlady about it? He bound pamphlets last night until half-past nine.
They say that he's the younger son of a baronet; that there are reasons
for his not coming to the title; his stepfather wronged him cruelly."

No one had ever said such a thing. It was preposterous to imagine any
mystery connected with Old Grannis. Miss Baker had chosen to invent the
little fiction, had created the title and the unjust stepfather from
some dim memories of the novels of her girlhood.

She took her place in the operating chair. McTeague began the filling.
There was a long silence. It was impossible for McTeague to work and
talk at the same time.

He was just burnishing the last "mat" in Miss Baker's tooth, when the
door of the "Parlors" opened, jangling the bell which he had hung over
it, and which was absolutely unnecessary. McTeague turned, one foot on
the pedal of his dental engine, the corundum disk whirling between his
fingers.

It was Marcus Schouler who came in, ushering a young girl of about
twenty.

"Hello, Mac," exclaimed Marcus; "busy? Brought my cousin round about
that broken tooth."

McTeague nodded his head gravely.

"In a minute," he answered.

Marcus and his cousin Trina sat down in the rigid chairs underneath the
steel engraving of the Court of Lorenzo de' Medici. They began talking
in low tones. The girl looked about the room, noticing the stone pug
dog, the rifle manufacturer's calendar, the canary in its little gilt
prison, and the tumbled blankets on the unmade bed-lounge against
the wall. Marcus began telling her about McTeague. "We're pals," he
explained, just above a whisper. "Ah, Mac's all right, you bet. Say,
Trina, he's the strongest duck you ever saw. What do you suppose? He can
pull out your teeth with his fingers; yes, he can. What do you think of
that? With his fingers, mind you; he can, for a fact. Get on to the size
of him, anyhow. Ah, Mac's all right!"

Maria Macapa had come into the room while he had been speaking. She was
making up McTeague's bed. Suddenly Marcus exclaimed under his breath:
"Now we'll have some fun. It's the girl that takes care of the rooms.
She's a greaser, and she's queer in the head. She ain't regularly crazy,
but I don't know, she's queer. Y'ought to hear her go on about a gold
dinner service she says her folks used to own. Ask her what her name is
and see what she'll say." Trina shrank back, a little frightened.

"No, you ask," she whispered.

"Ah, go on; what you 'fraid of?" urged Marcus. Trina shook her head
energetically, shutting her lips together.

"Well, listen here," answered Marcus, nudging her; then raising his
voice, he said:

"How do, Maria?" Maria nodded to him over her shoulder as she bent over
the lounge.

"Workun hard nowadays, Maria?"

"Pretty hard."

"Didunt always have to work for your living, though, did you, when you
ate offa gold dishes?" Maria didn't answer, except by putting her chin
in the air and shutting her eyes, as though to say she knew a long story
about that if she had a mind to talk. All Marcus's efforts to draw her
out on the subject were unavailing. She only responded by movements of
her head.

"Can't always start her going," Marcus told his cousin.

"What does she do, though, when you ask her about her name?"

"Oh, sure," said Marcus, who had forgotten. "Say, Maria, what's your
name?"

"Huh?" asked Maria, straightening up, her hands on he hips.

"Tell us your name," repeated Marcus.

"Name is Maria--Miranda--Macapa." Then, after a pause, she added, as
though she had but that moment thought of it, "Had a flying squirrel an'
let him go."

Invariably Maria Macapa made this answer. It was not always she would
talk about the famous service of gold plate, but a question as to her
name never failed to elicit the same strange answer, delivered in a
rapid undertone: "Name is Maria--Miranda--Macapa." Then, as if struck
with an after thought, "Had a flying squirrel an' let him go."

Why Maria should associate the release of the mythical squirrel with
her name could not be said. About Maria the flat knew absolutely nothing
further than that she was Spanish-American. Miss Baker was the oldest
lodger in the flat, and Maria was a fixture there as maid of all work
when she had come. There was a legend to the effect that Maria's people
had been at one time immensely wealthy in Central America.

Maria turned again to her work. Trina and Marcus watched her curiously.
There was a silence. The corundum burr in McTeague's engine hummed in a
prolonged monotone. The canary bird chittered occasionally. The room was
warm, and the breathing of the five people in the narrow space made the
air close and thick. At long intervals an acrid odor of ink floated up
from the branch post-office immediately below.

Maria Macapa finished her work and started to leave. As she passed near
Marcus and his cousin she stopped, and drew a bunch of blue tickets
furtively from her pocket. "Buy a ticket in the lottery?" she inquired,
looking at the girl. "Just a dollar."

"Go along with you, Maria," said Marcus, who had but thirty cents in his
pocket. "Go along; it's against the law."

"Buy a ticket," urged Maria, thrusting the bundle toward Trina. "Try
your luck. The butcher on the next block won twenty dollars the last
drawing."

Very uneasy, Trina bought a ticket for the sake of being rid of her.
Maria disappeared.

"Ain't she a queer bird?" muttered Marcus. He was much embarrassed and
disturbed because he had not bought the ticket for Trina.

But there was a sudden movement. McTeague had just finished with Miss
Baker.

"You should notice," the dressmaker said to the dentist, in a low voice,
"he always leaves the door a little ajar in the afternoon." When she had
gone out, Marcus Schouler brought Trina forward.

"Say, Mac, this is my cousin, Trina Sieppe." The two shook hands dumbly,
McTeague slowly nodding his huge head with its great shock of yellow
hair. Trina was very small and prettily made. Her face was round and
rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and blue, like the half-open eyes
of a little baby; her lips and the lobes of her tiny ears were pale, a
little suggestive of anaemia; while across the bridge of her nose ran
an adorable little line of freckles. But it was to her hair that one's
attention was most attracted. Heaps and heaps of blue-black coils and
braids, a royal crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara, heavy,
abundant, odorous. All the vitality that should have given color to her
face seemed to have been absorbed by this marvellous hair. It was
the coiffure of a queen that shadowed the pale temples of this little
bourgeoise. So heavy was it that it tipped her head backward, and
the position thrust her chin out a little. It was a charming poise,
innocent, confiding, almost infantile.

She was dressed all in black, very modest and plain. The effect of her
pale face in all this contrasting black was almost monastic.

"Well," exclaimed Marcus suddenly, "I got to go. Must get back to work.
Don't hurt her too much, Mac. S'long, Trina."

McTeague and Trina were left alone. He was embarrassed, troubled.
These young girls disturbed and perplexed him. He did not like
them, obstinately cherishing that intuitive suspicion of all things
feminine--the perverse dislike of an overgrown boy. On the other hand,
she was perfectly at her ease; doubtless the woman in her was not yet
awakened; she was yet, as one might say, without sex. She was almost
like a boy, frank, candid, unreserved.

She took her place in the operating chair and told him what was the
matter, looking squarely into his face. She had fallen out of a swing
the afternoon of the preceding day; one of her teeth had been knocked
loose and the other altogether broken out.

McTeague listened to her with apparent stolidity, nodding his head from
time to time as she spoke. The keenness of his dislike of her as a woman
began to be blunted. He thought she was rather pretty, that he even
liked her because she was so small, so prettily made, so good natured
and straightforward.

"Let's have a look at your teeth," he said, picking up his mirror. "You
better take your hat off." She leaned back in her chair and opened her
mouth, showing the rows of little round teeth, as white and even as the
kernels on an ear of green corn, except where an ugly gap came at the
side.

McTeague put the mirror into her mouth, touching one and another of her
teeth with the handle of an excavator. By and by he straightened up,
wiping the moisture from the mirror on his coat-sleeve.

"Well, Doctor," said the girl, anxiously, "it's a dreadful
disfigurement, isn't it?" adding, "What can you do about it?"

"Well," answered McTeague, slowly, looking vaguely about on the floor of
the room, "the roots of the broken tooth are still in the gum; they'll
have to come out, and I guess I'll have to pull that other bicuspid. Let
me look again. Yes," he went on in a moment, peering into her mouth
with the mirror, "I guess that'll have to come out, too." The tooth was
loose, discolored, and evidently dead. "It's a curious case," McTeague
went on. "I don't know as I ever had a tooth like that before. It's
what's called necrosis. It don't often happen. It'll have to come out
sure."

Then a discussion was opened on the subject, Trina sitting up in the
chair, holding her hat in her lap; McTeague leaning against the window
frame his hands in his pockets, his eyes wandering about on the floor.
Trina did not want the other tooth removed; one hole like that was bad
enough; but two--ah, no, it was not to be thought of.

But McTeague reasoned with her, tried in vain to make her understand
that there was no vascular connection between the root and the gum.
Trina was blindly persistent, with the persistency of a girl who has
made up her mind.

McTeague began to like her better and better, and after a while
commenced himself to feel that it would be a pity to disfigure such
a pretty mouth. He became interested; perhaps he could do something,
something in the way of a crown or bridge. "Let's look at that again,"
he said, picking up his mirror. He began to study the situation very
carefully, really desiring to remedy the blemish.

It was the first bicuspid that was missing, and though part of the root
of the second (the loose one) would remain after its extraction, he was
sure it would not be strong enough to sustain a crown. All at once
he grew obstinate, resolving, with all the strength of a crude and
primitive man, to conquer the difficulty in spite of everything. He
turned over in his mind the technicalities of the case. No, evidently
the root was not strong enough to sustain a crown; besides that, it was
placed a little irregularly in the arch. But, fortunately, there were
cavities in the two teeth on either side of the gap--one in the first
molar and one in the palatine surface of the cuspid; might he not drill
a socket in the remaining root and sockets in the molar and cuspid, and,
partly by bridging, partly by crowning, fill in the gap? He made up his
mind to do it.

Why he should pledge himself to this hazardous case McTeague was puzzled
to know. With most of his clients he would have contented himself with
the extraction of the loose tooth and the roots of the broken one. Why
should he risk his reputation in this case? He could not say why.

It was the most difficult operation he had ever performed. He bungled
it considerably, but in the end he succeeded passably well. He extracted
the loose tooth with his bayonet forceps and prepared the roots of the
broken one as if for filling, fitting into them a flattened piece of
platinum wire to serve as a dowel. But this was only the beginning;
altogether it was a fortnight's work. Trina came nearly every other day,
and passed two, and even three, hours in the chair.

By degrees McTeague's first awkwardness and suspicion vanished entirely.
The two became good friends. McTeague even arrived at that point where
he could work and talk to her at the same time--a thing that had never
before been possible for him.

Never until then had McTeague become so well acquainted with a girl of
Trina's age. The younger women of Polk Street--the shop girls, the
young women of the soda fountains, the waitresses in the cheap
restaurants--preferred another dentist, a young fellow just graduated
from the college, a poser, a rider of bicycles, a man about town, who
wore astonishing waistcoats and bet money on greyhound coursing. Trina
was McTeague's first experience. With her the feminine element suddenly
entered his little world. It was not only her that he saw and felt,
it was the woman, the whole sex, an entire new humanity, strange and
alluring, that he seemed to have discovered. How had he ignored it so
long? It was dazzling, delicious, charming beyond all words. His narrow
point of view was at once enlarged and confused, and all at once he
saw that there was something else in life besides concertinas and steam
beer. Everything had to be made over again. His whole rude idea of
life had to be changed. The male virile desire in him tardily awakened,
aroused itself, strong and brutal. It was resistless, untrained, a thing
not to be held in leash an instant.

Little by little, by gradual, almost imperceptible degrees, the thought
of Trina Sieppe occupied his mind from day to day, from hour to hour.
He found himself thinking of her constantly; at every instant he saw
her round, pale face; her narrow, milk-blue eyes; her little out-thrust
chin; her heavy, huge tiara of black hair. At night he lay awake for
hours under the thick blankets of the bed-lounge, staring upward
into the darkness, tormented with the idea of her, exasperated at the
delicate, subtle mesh in which he found himself entangled. During the
forenoons, while he went about his work, he thought of her. As he made
his plaster-of-paris moulds at the washstand in the corner behind the
screen he turned over in his mind all that had happened, all that
had been said at the previous sitting. Her little tooth that he had
extracted he kept wrapped in a bit of newspaper in his vest pocket.
Often he took it out and held it in the palm of his immense, horny hand,
seized with some strange elephantine sentiment, wagging his head at it,
heaving tremendous sighs. What a folly!

At two o'clock on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays Trina arrived and
took her place in the operating chair. While at his work McTeague was
every minute obliged to bend closely over her; his hands touched her
face, her cheeks, her adorable little chin; her lips pressed against his
fingers. She breathed warmly on his forehead and on his eyelids,
while the odor of her hair, a charming feminine perfume, sweet, heavy,
enervating, came to his nostrils, so penetrating, so delicious, that his
flesh pricked and tingled with it; a veritable sensation of faintness
passed over this huge, callous fellow, with his enormous bones and
corded muscles. He drew a short breath through his nose; his jaws
suddenly gripped together vise-like.

But this was only at times--a strange, vexing spasm, that subsided
almost immediately. For the most part, McTeague enjoyed the pleasure of
these sittings with Trina with a certain strong calmness, blindly happy
that she was there. This poor crude dentist of Polk Street, stupid,
ignorant, vulgar, with his sham education and plebeian tastes, whose
only relaxations were to eat, to drink steam beer, and to play upon his
concertina, was living through his first romance, his first idyl. It
was delightful. The long hours he passed alone with Trina in the "Dental
Parlors," silent, only for the scraping of the instruments and the
pouring of bud-burrs in the engine, in the foul atmosphere, overheated
by the little stove and heavy with the smell of ether, creosote, and
stale bedding, had all the charm of secret appointments and stolen
meetings under the moon.

By degrees the operation progressed. One day, just after McTeague had
put in the temporary gutta-percha fillings and nothing more could be
done at that sitting, Trina asked him to examine the rest of her teeth.
They were perfect, with one exception--a spot of white caries on the
lateral surface of an incisor. McTeague filled it with gold, enlarging
the cavity with hard-bits and hoe-excavators, and burring in afterward
with half-cone burrs. The cavity was deep, and Trina began to wince and
moan. To hurt Trina was a positive anguish for McTeague, yet an anguish
which he was obliged to endure at every hour of the sitting. It was
harrowing--he sweated under it--to be forced to torture her, of all
women in the world; could anything be worse than that?

"Hurt?" he inquired, anxiously.

She answered by frowning, with a sharp intake of breath, putting her
fingers over her closed lips and nodding her head. McTeague sprayed the
tooth with glycerite of tannin, but without effect. Rather than hurt her
he found himself forced to the use of anaesthesia, which he hated.
He had a notion that the nitrous oxide gas was dangerous, so on this
occasion, as on all others, used ether.

He put the sponge a half dozen times to Trina's face, more nervous than
he had ever been before, watching the symptoms closely. Her breathing
became short and irregular; there was a slight twitching of the muscles.
When her thumbs turned inward toward the palms, he took the sponge away.
She passed off very quickly, and, with a long sigh, sank back into the
chair.

McTeague straightened up, putting the sponge upon the rack behind him,
his eyes fixed upon Trina's face. For some time he stood watching her as
she lay there, unconscious and helpless, and very pretty. He was alone
with her, and she was absolutely without defense.

Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts
that in him were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and
clamoring.

It was a crisis--a crisis that had arisen all in an instant; a crisis
for which he was totally unprepared. Blindly, and without knowing
why, McTeague fought against it, moved by an unreasoned instinct of
resistance. Within him, a certain second self, another better McTeague
rose with the brute; both were strong, with the huge crude strength
of the man himself. The two were at grapples. There in that cheap and
shabby "Dental Parlor" a dreaded struggle began. It was the old battle,
old as the world, wide as the world--the sudden panther leap of
the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be
resisted, and the simultaneous arousing of the other man, the better
self that cries, "Down, down," without knowing why; that grips the
monster; that fights to strangle it, to thrust it down and back.

Dizzied and bewildered with the shock, the like of which he had never
known before, McTeague turned from Trina, gazing bewilderedly about the
room. The struggle was bitter; his teeth ground themselves together with
a little rasping sound; the blood sang in his ears; his face flushed
scarlet; his hands twisted themselves together like the knotting of
cables. The fury in him was as the fury of a young bull in the heat of
high summer. But for all that he shook his huge head from time to time,
muttering:

"No, by God! No, by God!"

Dimly he seemed to realize that should he yield now he would never be
able to care for Trina again. She would never be the same to him, never
so radiant, so sweet, so adorable; her charm for him would vanish in an
instant. Across her forehead, her little pale forehead, under the shadow
of her royal hair, he would surely see the smudge of a foul ordure, the
footprint of the monster. It would be a sacrilege, an abomination. He
recoiled from it, banding all his strength to the issue.

"No, by God! No, by God!"

He turned to his work, as if seeking a refuge in it. But as he drew near
to her again, the charm of her innocence and helplessness came over
him afresh. It was a final protest against his resolution. Suddenly he
leaned over and kissed her, grossly, full on the mouth. The thing was
done before he knew it. Terrified at his weakness at the very moment he
believed himself strong, he threw himself once more into his work with
desperate energy. By the time he was fastening the sheet of rubber upon
the tooth, he had himself once more in hand. He was disturbed, still
trembling, still vibrating with the throes of the crisis, but he was the
master; the animal was downed, was cowed for this time, at least.

But for all that, the brute was there. Long dormant, it was now at last
alive, awake. From now on he would feel its presence continually; would
feel it tugging at its chain, watching its opportunity. Ah, the pity
of it! Why could he not always love her purely, cleanly? What was this
perverse, vicious thing that lived within him, knitted to his flesh?

Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of
hereditary evil, like a sewer. The vices and sins of his father and
of his father's father, to the third and fourth and five hundredth
generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire race flowed in his veins.
Why should it be? He did not desire it. Was he to blame?

But McTeague could not understand this thing. It had faced him, as
sooner or later it faces every child of man; but its significance was
not for him. To reason with it was beyond him. He could only oppose to
it an instinctive stubborn resistance, blind, inert.

McTeague went on with his work. As he was rapping in the little blocks
and cylinders with the mallet, Trina slowly came back to herself with a
long sigh. She still felt a little confused, and lay quiet in the chair.
There was a long silence, broken only by the uneven tapping of the
hardwood mallet. By and by she said, "I never felt a thing," and then
she smiled at him very prettily beneath the rubber dam. McTeague turned
to her suddenly, his mallet in one hand, his pliers holding a pellet
of sponge-gold in the other. All at once he said, with the unreasoned
simplicity and directness of a child: "Listen here, Miss Trina, I
like you better than any one else; what's the matter with us getting
married?"

Trina sat up in the chair quickly, and then drew back from him,
frightened and bewildered.

"Will you? Will you?" said McTeague. "Say, Miss Trina, will you?"

"What is it? What do you mean?" she cried, confusedly, her words muffled
beneath the rubber.

"Will you?" repeated McTeague.

"No, no," she exclaimed, refusing without knowing why, suddenly seized
with a fear of him, the intuitive feminine fear of the male. McTeague
could only repeat the same thing over and over again. Trina, more
and more frightened at his huge hands--the hands of the old-time
car-boy--his immense square-cut head and his enormous brute strength,
cried out: "No, no," behind the rubber dam, shaking her head violently,
holding out her hands, and shrinking down before him in the operating
chair. McTeague came nearer to her, repeating the same question. "No,
no," she cried, terrified. Then, as she exclaimed, "Oh, I am sick,"
was suddenly taken with a fit of vomiting. It was the not unusual
after effect of the ether, aided now by her excitement and nervousness.
McTeague was checked. He poured some bromide of potassium into a
graduated glass and held it to her lips.

"Here, swallow this," he said.



CHAPTER 3


Once every two months Maria Macapa set the entire flat in commotion.
She roamed the building from garret to cellar, searching each corner,
ferreting through every old box and trunk and barrel, groping about
on the top shelves of closets, peering into rag-bags, exasperating the
lodgers with her persistence and importunity. She was collecting
junks, bits of iron, stone jugs, glass bottles, old sacks, and cast-off
garments. It was one of her perquisites. She sold the junk to Zerkow,
the rags-bottles-sacks man, who lived in a filthy den in the alley just
back of the flat, and who sometimes paid her as much as three cents
a pound. The stone jugs, however, were worth a nickel. The money that
Zerkow paid her, Maria spent on shirt waists and dotted blue neckties,
trying to dress like the girls who tended the soda-water fountain in the
candy store on the corner. She was sick with envy of these young women.
They were in the world, they were elegant, they were debonair, they had
their "young men."