McTeague quotes

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 carboy.

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.

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 carboy. 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.

they were hard as wooden mallets, strong as vises, the hands of the old-time carboy. 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.

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.

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.

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 powerhouse 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

Everything was there, every trade was represented, every class of society; things of iron and cloth and wood; all the detritus that a great city sloughs off in its daily life.

Zerkow’s junk shop was the last abiding-place, the almshouse, of such articles as had outlived their usefulness.

Maria found Zerkow himself in the back room, cooking some sort of a meal over an alcohol stove. Zerkow was a Polish Jew—curiously enough his hair was fiery red. He was a dry, shrivelled old man of sixty odd.

and claw-like, prehensile fingers—the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses. It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that greed—inordinate, insatiable greed—was the dominant passion of the man.

He was the Man with the Rake, groping hourly in the muck-heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold.

It was his dream, his passion; at every instant he seemed to feel the generous solid weight of the crude fat metal in his palms. The glint of it was constantly in his eyes;

How had it all come about? A month ago he was perfectly content; he was calm and peaceful, taking his little pleasures as he found them. His life had shaped itself; was, no doubt, to continue always along these same lines.

A woman had entered his small world and instantly there was discord.

The disturbing element had appeared. Wherever the woman had put her foot a score of distressing complications had sprung up, like the sudden growth of strange and puzzling flowers.

he was calm and peaceful, taking his little pleasures as he found them. His life had shaped itself; was, no doubt, to continue always along these same lines. A woman had entered his small world and instantly there was discord. The disturbing element had appeared.

Wherever the woman had put her foot a score of distressing complications had sprung up, like the sudden growth of strange and puzzling flowers.

“Say, Mac, go on; let’s have ut straight,” urged Marcus, leaning toward him. “Has any duck been doing you dirt?” he cried, his face crimson on the instant.

Never had McTeague been so excited; never had he made so long a speech. His arms moved in fierce, uncertain gestures, his face flushed, his enormous jaws shut together with a sharp click at every pause.

It was like some colossal brute trapped in a delicate, invisible mesh, raging, exasperated, powerless to extricate himself.

Marcus Schouler said nothing. There was a long silence. Marcus got up and walked to the window and stood looking out, but seeing nothing. “Well, who would have thought of this?” he muttered under his breath. Here was a fix. Marcus cared for Trina.

What a fine thing was this friendship between men! the dentist treats his friend for an ulcerated tooth and refuses payment; the friend reciprocates by giving up his girl. This was nobility. Their mutual affection and esteem suddenly increased enormously.

It was Damon and Pythias; it was David and Jonathan; nothing could ever estrange them.

Now it was for life or death.

“Oh, don’t think of me!” Marcus would exclaim at other times, even when Trina was by. “Don’t think of me; I don’t count any more. I ain’t in it.”

Marcus seemed to take great pleasure in contemplating the wreck of his life.

There is no doubt he enjoyed himself hugely during these days.

Perhaps he dimly saw that this must be so, that it belonged to the changeless order of things—the man desiring the woman only for what she withholds; the woman worshipping the man for that which she yields up to him.

With each concession gained the man’s desire cools; with every surrender made the woman’s adoration increases.

But why should it be so?

Dimly, as figures seen in a waking dream, these ideas floated through Trina’s mind. It was quite beyond her to realize them clearly; she could not know what they meant.

Until that rainy day by the shore of the bay Trina had lived her life with as little self-consciousness as a tree.

She was frank, straightforward, a healthy, natural human being, without sex as yet. She was almost like a boy. At once there had been a mysterious disturbance. The woman within her suddenly awoke.

Did she love McTeague? Difficult question. Did she choose him for better or for worse, deliberately, of her own free will, or was Trina herself allowed even a choice in the taking of that step that was to make or mar her life?

The Woman is awakened, and, starting from her sleep, catches blindly at what first her newly opened eyes light upon.

It is a spell, a witchery, ruled by chance alone, inexplicable—a fairy queen enamored of a clown with ass’s ears.

but unfortunately for them, these limits were poorly defined. They could never be sure of themselves. At an unguarded moment they might be taken for “toughs,” so they generally erred in the other direction, and were absurdly formal.

No people have a keener eye for the amenities than those whose social position is not assured.

“Oh, sure, you’ll have to take her mother,” insisted Marcus. “It wouldn’t be the proper racket if you didn’t.”

They seemed to be able to wrestle a tune out of almost anything—glass bottles, cigar-box fiddles, strings of sleigh-bells, even graduated brass tubes, which they rubbed with resined fingers. McTeague was stupefied with admiration.

“That’s what you call musicians,” he announced gravely. “ ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ played upon a trombone. Think of that! Art could go no farther.”

The acrobats left him breathless. They were dazzling young men with beautifully parted hair, continually making graceful gestures to the audience.

The other comedian went on. The joke was suddenly evolved. A certain phrase led to a song, which was sung with lightning rapidity, each performer making precisely the same gestures at precisely the same instant. They were irresistible.

McTeague, though he caught but a third of the jokes, could have listened all night.

After the comedians had gone out, the iron advertisement curtain was let down.

“Look at that horse move his head,” he cried excitedly, quite carried away. “Look at that cable car coming—and the man going across the street. See, here comes a truck. Well, I never in all my life! What would Marcus say to this?”

“It’s all a drick!” exclaimed Mrs. Sieppe, with sudden conviction. “I ain’t no fool; dot’s nothun but a drick.”

“Well, of course, mamma,” exclaimed Trina, “it’s—”

“We’ll celebrate, by damn!” exclaimed Marcus. “It ain’t every day you win five thousand dollars. It’s only Sundays and legal holidays.” Again he set the company off into a gale of laughter.

Anything was funny at a time like this.

In some way every one of them felt elated. The wheel of fortune had come spinning close to them. They were near to this great sum of money. It was as though they too had won.

exclaimed Marcus. “It ain’t every day you win five thousand dollars. It’s only Sundays and legal holidays.” Again he set the company off into a gale of laughter. Anything was funny at a time like this. In some way every one of them felt elated.

The wheel of fortune had come spinning close to them.

They were near to this great sum of money. It was as though they too had won.

Marcus brought Old Grannis around the table to little Miss Baker, dragging him by the coat sleeve, exclaiming: “Well, I thought you two people knew each other long ago. Miss Baker, this is Mr. Grannis; Mr. Grannis, this is Miss Baker.” Neither spoke.

Like two little children they faced each other, awkward, constrained, tongue-tied with embarrassment.

Then Miss Baker put out her hand shyly. Old Grannis touched it for an instant and let it fall.

But the agent rose to his feet, a newly filled beer glass in his hand.

He was a man of the world, this agent. He knew life.

He was suave and easy. A diamond was on his little finger.

The two lunched together at a small uptown hotel just around the corner on Sutter Street. They were given a little room to themselves. Nothing could have been more delicious.

They had but to close the sliding door to shut themselves off from the whole world.

Trina would arrive breathless from her raids upon the bargain counters, her pale cheeks flushed, her hair blown about her face and into the corners of her lips, her mother’s net reticule stuffed to bursting.

Trina took an infinite enjoyment in playing with McTeague’s great square-cut head, rumpling his hair till it stood on end, putting her fingers in his eyes, or stretching his ears out straight, and watching the effect with her head on one side.

It was like a little child playing with some gigantic, good-natured Saint Bernard.

One particular amusement they never wearied of. The two would lean across the table towards each other, McTeague folding his arms under his breast.

A sudden chill ran through the room; the others stood transfixed, as at the swift passage of some cold and deadly wind.

Death had stooped there for an instant, had stooped and past, leaving a trail of terror and confusion.

Then the door leading to the street slammed; Marcus had disappeared.

It was inexplicable. McTeague sat down again, looking stupidly about on the floor. In a corner of the room his eye encountered his broken pipe, a dozen little fragments of painted porcelain and the stem of cherry wood and amber.

At that sight his tardy wrath, ever lagging behind the original affront, suddenly blazed up.

Instantly his huge jaws clicked together.

“I’ll show him,” he exclaimed.

As though they had been little children, McTeague set Frenna and the harness-maker aside, and strode out at the door like a raging elephant.

Heise stood rubbing his shoulder.

They were to move to the southern part of the State the day after Trina’s marriage, Mr. Sieppe having bought a third interest in an upholstering business in the suburbs of Los Angeles. It was possible that Marcus Schouler would go with them.

Not Stanley penetrating for the first time into the Dark Continent, not Napoleon leading his army across the Alps, was more weighted with responsibility, more burdened with care, more overcome with the sense of the importance of his undertaking, than was Mr. Sieppe during this period of preparation.

From dawn to dark, from dark to early dawn, he toiled and planned and fretted, organizing and reorganizing, projecting and devising. The trunks were lettered, A, B, and C, the packages and smaller bundles numbered.

But the couple faced the room, Trina throwing back her veil. She—perhaps McTeague as well—felt that there was a certain inadequateness about the ceremony.

Was that all there was to it? Did just those few muttered phrases make them man and wife?

It had been over in a few moments, but it had bound them for life. Had not something been left out? Was not the whole affair cursory, superficial? It was disappointing.

They were thinking of each other and they were conscious of it. Timid, with the timidity of their second childhood, constrained and embarrassed by each other’s presence, they were, nevertheless, in a little Elysium of their own creating.

They walked hand in hand in a delicious garden where it was always autumn; together and alone they entered upon the long retarded romance of their commonplace and uneventful lives.

At last that great supper was over, everything had been eaten; the enormous roast goose had dwindled to a very skeleton. Mr. Sieppe had reduced the calf’s head to a mere skull;

The platters were as clean as if they had been washed; crumbs of bread, potato parings, nutshells, and bits of cake littered the table; coffee and ice-cream stains and spots of congealed gravy marked the position of each plate.

It was a devastation, a pillage; the table presented the appearance of an abandoned battlefield.

“Ouf,” cried Mrs. Sieppe, pushing back, “I haf eatun und eatun, ach, Gott, how I haf eatun!”

But Trina loved her husband, not because she fancied she saw in him any of those noble and generous qualities that inspire affection. The dentist might or might not possess them, it was all one with Trina.

She loved him because she had given herself to him freely, unreservedly; had merged her individuality into his; she was his, she belonged to him forever and forever.

Nothing that he could do (so she told herself), nothing that she herself could do, could change her in this respect. McTeague might cease to love her, might leave her, might even die; it would be all the same, she was his.

But this first crisis, this momentary revolt, as much a matter of high-strung feminine nerves as of anything else, passed, and in the end Trina’s affection for her “old bear” grew in spite of herself.

She began to love him more and more, not for what he was, but for what she had given up to him.

Only once again did Trina undergo a reaction against her husband, and then it was but the matter of an instant, brought on, curiously enough, by the sight of a bit of egg on McTeague’s heavy mustache one morning just after breakfast.

Never, never, never should a penny of that miraculous fortune be spent; rather should it be added to.

It was a nest egg, a monstrous, roc-like nest egg, not so large, however, but that it could be made larger.

Already by the end of that winter Trina had begun to make up the deficit of two hundred dollars that she had been forced to expend on the preparations for her marriage.

Now he’s going to marry her just so’s he can hear that story every day, every hour. He’s pretty near as crazy on the subject as Maria is. They’re a pair for you, aren’t they?

Both crazy over a lot of gold dishes that never existed.

Perhaps Maria’ll marry him because it’s her only chance to get a husband, but I’m sure it’s more for the reason that she’s got someone to talk to now who believes her story. Don’t you think I’m right?”

Then followed a terrible scene.

The brute that in McTeague lay so close to the surface leaped instantly to life, monstrous, not to be resisted.

He sprang to his feet with a shrill and meaningless clamor, totally unlike the ordinary bass of his speaking tones. It was the hideous yelling of a hurt beast, the squealing of a wounded elephant. He framed no words;

It was the hideous yelling of a hurt beast, the squealing of a wounded elephant. He framed no words; in the rush of high-pitched sound that issued from his wide-open mouth there was nothing articulate.

It was something no longer human; it was rather an echo from the jungle.

Sluggish enough and slow to anger on ordinary occasions, McTeague when finally aroused became another man. His rage was a kind of obsession, an evil mania, the drunkenness of passion, the exalted and perverted fury of the Berserker, blind and deaf, a thing insensate.

Nobody was paying any attention to Selina. All at once she began to giggle hysterically again, then cried out with a peal of laughter:

“Oh, what a way for our picnic to end!”

“Rub them out,” she said, her voice trembling; “rub it all out;” and as she spoke her eyes brimmed again, and a great tear dropped on the slate.

“That’s it,” she said; “that’s the way to rub it out, by me crying on it.”

Then she passed her fingers over the tear-blurred writing and washed the slate clean. “All gone, all gone,” she said.

It was late in the afternoon, and there was just light enough for the dentist and his wife to see the results of that day of sale.

Nothing was left, not even the carpet. It was a pillage, a devastation, the barrenness of a field after the passage of a swarm of locusts.

The room had been picked and stripped till only the bare walls and floor remained.

If McTeague had shown a certain energy in the matter the attempt might have been successful; but he was too stupid, or of late had become too listless to exert himself greatly, and the affair resulted only in a violent quarrel with Ryer.

McTeague had lost his ambition. He did not care to better his situation.

All he wanted was a warm place to sleep and three good meals a day.

It was curious to note the effect of the alcohol upon the dentist.

It did not make him drunk, it made him vicious.

So far from being stupefied, he became, after the fourth glass, active, alert, quick-witted, even talkative; a certain wickedness stirred in him then; he was intractable, mean;

She annoyed him because she was so small, so prettily made, so invariably correct and precise. Her avarice incessantly harassed him. Her industry was a constant reproach to him. She seemed to flaunt her work defiantly in his face.

It was the red flag in the eyes of the bull.

One time when he had just come back from Frenna’s and had been sitting in the chair near her, silently watching her at her work, he exclaimed all of a sudden:

Clutched in both his hands was a sack full of old and rusty pans, tin dishes—fully a hundred of them—tin cans, and iron knives and forks, collected from some dump heap.

“And all this,” exclaimed Trina, “on account of a set of gold dishes that never existed.”

It had come at last. After all these years they were together; they understood each other. They stood at length in a little Elysium of their own creating.

They walked hand in hand in a delicious garden where it was always autumn.

Far from the world and together they entered upon the long retarded romance of their commonplace and uneventful lives.

“No, no,” she said to the darkness, “Mac is all right. He can take care of himself.”

But for all that she had a clear-cut vision of her husband’s body, bloated with seawater, his blond hair streaming like kelp, rolling inertly in shifting waters.

“He couldn’t have fallen off the rocks,” she declared firmly. “There—there he is now.” She heaved a great sigh of relief as a heavy tread sounded in the hallway below. She ran to the banisters, looking over, and calling, “Oh, Mac! Is that you, Mac?”

All at once it seemed very still. The only noises were the occasional footfalls of a policeman and the persistent calling of ducks and geese in the closed market across the way. The street was asleep.

When it is night and dark, and one is awake and alone, one’s thoughts take the color of the surroundings; become gloomy, sombre, and very dismal.

All at once an idea came to Trina, a dark, terrible idea; worse, even, than the idea of McTeague’s death.

One can hold a scrubbing-brush with two good fingers and the stumps of two others even if both joints of the thumb are gone, but it takes considerable practice to get used to it.

Trina became a scrub-woman. She had taken council of Selina, and through her had obtained the position of caretaker in a little memorial kindergarten over on Pacific Street.

The empty bag and the hollow, light matchbox troubled her.

Day after day she took them from her trunk and wept over them as other women weep over a dead baby’s shoe.

Her four hundred dollars were gone, were gone, were gone. She would never see them again. She could plainly see her husband spending her savings by handfuls; squandering her beautiful gold pieces that she had been at such pains to polish with soap and ashes.

“Just to make it an even five hundred, anyhow,” she told herself. That day she drew a hundred dollars more, in twenty-dollar gold pieces as before. From that time Trina began to draw steadily upon her capital, a little at a time.

It was a passion with her, a mania, a veritable mental disease; a temptation such as drunkards only know.

It would come upon her all of a sudden. While she was about her work, scrubbing the floor of some vacant house;

The cat who lived on the premises, preferring to be dirty rather than to be wet, had got into the coal scuttle, and over its rim watched her sleepily with a long, complacent purr.

All at once he stopped purring, leaving an abrupt silence in the air like the sudden shutting off of a stream of water, while his eyes grew wide, two lambent disks of yellow in the heap of black fur.

“Who is there?” cried Trina, sitting back on her heels. In the stillness that succeeded, the water dripped from her hands with the steady tick of a clock. Then a brutal fist swung open the street door of the schoolroom and McTeague came in.

The entire region was untamed. In some places east of the Mississippi nature is cozy, intimate, small, and homelike, like a good-natured housewife.

In Placer County, California, she is a vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch, savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to man.

But there were men in these mountains, like lice on mammoths’ hides, fighting them stubbornly, now with hydraulic “monitors,” now with drill and dynamite, boring into the vitals of them, or tearing away great yellow gravelly scars in the flanks of them, sucking their blood, …

Then one could hear the noises that the mountains made in their living. From the canyon, from the crowding crests, from the whole immense landscape, there rose a steady and prolonged sound, coming from all sides at once.

It was that incessant and muffled roar which disengages itself from all vast bodies, from oceans, from cities, from forests, from sleeping armies, and which is like the breathing of an infinitely great monster, alive, palpitating.

McTeague returned to his work. At six in the morning his shift was taken off, and he went out of the mine and back to the bunk house.

He could not move on now. He turned about in his blankets. No, he would not move on. Perhaps it was his fancy, after all. He saw nothing, heard nothing. The emptiness of primeval desolation stretched from him leagues and leagues upon either hand.

The gigantic silence of the night lay close over everything, like a muffling Titanic palm.

Of what was he suspicious? In that treeless waste an object could be seen at half a day’s journey distant. In that vast silence the click of a pebble was as audible as a pistol-shot. And yet there was nothing, nothing.

The whole east, clean of clouds, flamed opalescent from horizon to zenith, crimson at the base, where the earth blackened against it; at the top fading from pink to pale yellow, to green, to light blue, to the turquoise iridescence of the desert sky.

The long, thin shadows of the early hours drew backward like receding serpents, then suddenly the sun looked over the shoulder of the world, and it was day.

At that moment McTeague was already eight miles away from the camp, going steadily eastward. He was descending the lowest spurs of the Panamint hills, following an old and faint cattle trail.

At times, with a vague, nearly automatic gesture, he reached his hand forward, the fingers prehensile, and directed towards the horizon, as if he would clutch it and draw it nearer; and at intervals he muttered, “Hurry, hurry, hurry on, hurry on.”

For now at last McTeague was afraid.

His plans were uncertain. He remembered what Cribbens had said about the Armagosa Mountains in the country on the other side of Death Valley.

It grew hotter. At eleven the earth was like the surface of a furnace; the air, as McTeague breathed it in, was hot to his lips and the roof of his mouth.

The sun was a disk of molten brass swimming in the burnt-out blue of the sky.

McTeague stripped off his woollen shirt, and even unbuttoned his flannel undershirt, tying a handkerchief loosely about his neck.