McTeague

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.

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.

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.

As they were buying their tamales from the half-breed Mexican at the street corner, McTeague observed:

“Marcus ain’t gone to bed yet. See, there’s a light in his window. There!” he exclaimed at once, “I forgot the doorkey. Well, Marcus can let us in.”

Hardly had he rung the bell at the street door of the flat when the bolt was shot back. In the hall at the top of the long, narrow staircase there was the sound of a great scurrying. Maria Macapa stood there, her hand upon the rope that drew the bolt; Marcus was at her side; Old Grannis was in the background, looking over their shoulders; while little Miss Baker leant over the banisters, a strange man in a drab overcoat at her side. As McTeague’s party stepped into the doorway a half-dozen voices cried:

“Yes, it’s them.”

“Is that you, Mac?”

“Is that you, Miss Sieppe?”

“Is your name Trina Sieppe?”

Then, shriller than all the rest, Maria Macapa screamed:

“Oh, Miss Sieppe, come up here quick. Your lottery ticket has won five thousand dollars!”

The letter⁠—or rather printed notice⁠—informed McTeague that he had never received a diploma from a dental college, and that in consequence he was forbidden to practise his profession any longer. A legal extract bearing upon the case was attached in small type.

“Why, what’s all this?” said Trina, calmly, without thought as yet.

“I don’ know, I don’ know,” answered her husband.

“You can’t practise any longer,” continued Trina⁠—“ ‘is herewith prohibited and enjoined from further continuing⁠—’ ” She reread the extract, her forehead lifting and puckering. She put the sponge carefully away in its wire rack over the sink, and drew up a chair to the table, spreading out the notice before her. “Sit down,” she said to McTeague. “Draw up to the table here, Mac, and let’s see what this is.”

“I got it this morning,” murmured the dentist. “It just now came. I was making some fillings⁠—there, in the Parlors, in the window⁠—and the postman shoved it through the door. I thought it was a number of the American System of Dentistry at first, and when I’d opened it and looked at it I thought I’d better⁠—”

“Say, Mac,” interrupted Trina, looking up from the notice, “didn’t you ever go to a dental college?”

“Huh? What? What?” exclaimed McTeague.

“How did you learn to be a dentist? Did you go to a college?”

“I went along with a fellow who came to the mine once. My mother sent me. We used to go from one camp to another.