Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  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 Frenn
a’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.

  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 br
oken 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.