by Frank Norris
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; a row of empty champagne bottles— “dead soldiers,” as the facetious waiter had called them — lined the mantelpiece. Nothing of the stewed prunes remained but the juice, which was given to Owgooste and the twins. 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!”
“Ah, dot kaf’s het,” murmured her husband, passing his tongue over his lips.
The facetious waiter had disappeared. He and Maria Macapa foregathered in the kitchen. They drew up to the washboard of the sink, feasting off the remnants of the supper, slices of goose, the remains of the lobster salad, and half a bottle of champagne. They were obliged to drink the latter from teacups.
“Here’s how,” said the waiter gallantly, as he raised his tea-cup, bowing to Maria across the sink. “Hark,” he added, “they’re singing inside.”
The company had left the table and had assembled about the melodeon, where Selina was seated. At first they attempted some of the popular songs of the day, but were obliged to give over as none of them knew any of the words beyond the first line of the chorus. Finally they pitched upon “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” as the only song which they all knew. Selina sang the “alto,” very much off the key; Marcus intoned the bass, scowling fiercely, his chin drawn into his collar. They sang in very slow time. The song became a dirge, a lamentable, prolonged wail of distress:
“Nee-rah, my Gahd, to Thee,
Nee-rah to Thee-ah.”
At the end of the song, Uncle Oelbermann put on his hat without a word of warning. Instantly there was a hush. The guests rose.
“Not going so soon, Uncle Oelbermann?” protested Trina, politely. He only nodded. Marcus sprang forward to help him with his overcoat. Mr. Sieppe came up and the two men shook hands.
Then Uncle Oelbermann delivered himself of an oracular phrase. No doubt he had been meditating it during the supper. Addressing Mr. Sieppe, he said:
“You have not lost a daughter, but have gained a son.”
These were the only words he had spoken the entire evening. He departed; the company was profoundly impressed.
About twenty minutes later, when Marcus Schouler was entertaining the guests by eating almonds, shells and all, Mr. Sieppe started to his feet, watch in hand.
“Haf-bast elevun,” he shouted. “Attention! Der dime haf arrive, shtop eferyting. We depart.”
This was a signal for tremendous confusion. Mr. Sieppe immediately threw off his previous air of relaxation, the calf’s head was forgotten, he was once again the leader of vast enterprises.
“To me, to me,” he cried. “Mommer, der tervins, Owgooste.” He marshalled his tribe together, with tremendous commanding gestures. The sleeping twins were suddenly shaken into a dazed consciousness; Owgooste, whom the almond-eating of Marcus Schouler had petrified with admiration, was smacked to a realization of his surroundings.
Old Grannis, with a certain delicacy that was one of his characteristics, felt instinctively that the guests — the mere outsiders — should depart before the family began its leave-taking of Trina. He withdrew unobtrusively, after a hasty good-night to the bride and groom. The rest followed almost immediately.
“Well, Mr. Sieppe,” exclaimed Marcus, “we won’t see each other for some time.” Marcus had given up his first intention of joining in the Sieppe migration. He spoke in a large way of certain affairs that would keep him in San Francisco till the fall. Of late he had entertained ambitions of a ranch life, he would breed cattle, he had a little money and was only looking for some one “to go in with.” He dreamed of a cowboy’s life and saw himself in an entrancing vision involving silver spurs and untamed bronchos. He told himself that Trina had cast him off, that his best friend had “played him for a sucker,” that the “proper caper” was to withdraw from the world entirely.
“If you hear of anybody down there,” he went on, speaking to Mr. Sieppe, “that wants to go in for ranching, why just let me know.”
“Soh, soh,” answered Mr. Sieppe abstractedly, peering about for Owgooste’s cap.
Marcus bade the Sieppes farewell. He and Heise went out together. One heard them, as they descended the stairs, discussing the possibility of Frenna’s place being still open.
Then Miss Baker departed after kissing Trina on both cheeks. Selina went with her. There was only the family left.
Trina watched them go, one by one, with an increasing feeling of uneasiness and vague apprehension. Soon they would all be gone.
“Well, Trina,” exclaimed Mr. Sieppe, “goot-py; perhaps you gome visit us somedime.”
Mrs. Sieppe began crying again.
“Ach, Trina, ven shall I efer see you again?”
Tears came to Trina’s eyes in spite of herself. She put her arms around her mother.
“Oh, sometime, sometime,” she cried. The twins and Owgooste clung to Trina’s skirts, fretting and whimpering.
McTeague was miserable. He stood apart from the group, in a corner. None of them seemed to think of him; he was not of them.
“Write to me very often, mamma, and tell me about everything — about August and the twins.”
“It is dime,” cried Mr. Sieppe, nervously. “Goot-py, Trina. Mommer, Owgooste, say goot-py, den we must go. Goot-py, Trina.” He kissed her. Owgooste and the twins were lifted up. “Gome, gome,” insisted Mr. Sieppe, moving toward the door.
“Goot-py, Trina,” exclaimed Mrs. Sieppe, crying harder than ever. “Doktor — where is der doktor — Doktor, pe goot to her, eh? pe vairy goot, eh, won’t you? Zum day, Dokter, you vill haf a daughter, den you know berhaps how I feel, yes.”
They were standing at the door by this time. Mr. Sieppe, half way down the stairs, kept calling “Gome, gome, we miss der drain.”
Mrs. Sieppe released Trina and started down the hall, the twins and Owgooste following. Trina stood in the doorway, looking after them through her tears. They were going, going. When would she ever see them again? She was to be left alone with this man to whom she had just been married. A sudden vague terror seized her; she left McTeague and ran down the hall and caught her mother around the neck.
“I don’t WANT you to go,” she whispered in her mother’s ear, sobbing. “Oh, mamma, I — I’m ‘fraid.”
“Ach, Trina, you preak my heart. Don’t gry, poor leetle girl.” She rocked Trina in her arms as though she were a child again. “Poor leetle scairt girl, don’ gry — soh — soh — soh, dere’s nuttun to pe ‘fraid oaf. Dere, go to your hoasban’. Listen, popper’s galling again; go den; goot-by.”
She loosened Trina’s arms and started down the stairs. Trina leaned over the banisters, straining her eyes after her mother.
“What is ut, Trina?”
“Oh, good-by, good-by.”
“Gome, gome, we miss der drain.”
“Mamma, oh, mamma!”
“What is ut, Trina?”
“Good-by.”
“Goot-py, leetle daughter.”
“Good-by, good-by, good-by.”
The street door closed. The silence was profound.
For another moment Trina stood leaning over the banisters, looking down into the empty stairway. It was dark. There was nobody. They — her father, her mother, the children — had left her, left her alone. She faced about toward the rooms — faced her husband, faced her new home, the new life that was to begin now.
The hall was empty and deserted. The great flat around her seemed new and huge and strange; she felt horribly alone. Even Maria and the hired waiter were gone. On one of the floors above she hea
rd a baby crying. She stood there an instant in the dark hall, in her wedding finery, looking about her, listening. From the open door of the sitting-room streamed a gold bar of light.
She went down the hall, by the open door of the sitting-room, going on toward the hall door of the bedroom.
As she softly passed the sitting-room she glanced hastily in. The lamps and the gas were burning brightly, the chairs were pushed back from the table just as the guests had left them, and the table itself, abandoned, deserted, presented to view the vague confusion of its dishes, its knives and forks, its empty platters and crumpled napkins. The dentist sat there leaning on his elbows, his back toward her; against the white blur of the table he looked colossal. Above his giant shoulders rose his thick, red neck and mane of yellow hair. The light shone pink through the gristle of his enormous ears.
Trina entered the bedroom, closing the door after her. At the sound, she heard McTeague start and rise.
“Is that you, Trina?”
She did not answer; but paused in the middle of the room, holding her breath, trembling.
The dentist crossed the outside room, parted the chenille portieres, and came in. He came toward her quickly, making as if to take her in his arms. His eyes were alight.
“No, no,” cried Trina, shrinking from him. Suddenly seized with the fear of him — the intuitive feminine fear of the male — her whole being quailed before him. She was terrified at his huge, square-cut head; his powerful, salient jaw; his huge, red hands; his enormous, resistless strength.
“No, no — I’m afraid,” she cried, drawing back from him to the other side of the room.
“Afraid?” answered the dentist in perplexity. “What are you afraid of, Trina? I’m not going to hurt you. What are you afraid of?”
What, indeed, was Trina afraid of? She could not tell. But what did she know of McTeague, after all? Who was this man that had come into her life, who had taken her from her home and from her parents, and with whom she was now left alone here in this strange, vast flat?
“Oh, I’m afraid. I’m afraid,” she cried.
McTeague came nearer, sat down beside her and put one arm around her.
“What are you afraid of, Trina?” he said, reassuringly. “I don’t want to frighten you.”
She looked at him wildly, her adorable little chin quivering, the tears brimming in her narrow blue eyes. Then her glance took on a certain intentness, and she peered curiously into his face, saying almost in a whisper:
“I’m afraid of YOU.”
But the dentist did not heed her. An immense joy seized upon him — the joy of possession. Trina was his very own now. She lay there in the hollow of his arm, helpless and very pretty.
Those instincts that in him were so close to the surface suddenly leaped to life, shouting and clamoring, not to be resisted. He loved her. Ah, did he not love her? The smell of her hair, of her neck, rose to him.
Suddenly he caught her in both his huge arms, crushing down her struggle with his immense strength, kissing her full upon the mouth. Then her great love for McTeague suddenly flashed up in Trina’s breast; she gave up to him as she had done before, yielding all at once to that strange desire of being conquered and subdued. She clung to him, her hands clasped behind his neck, whispering in his ear:
“Oh, you must be good to me — very, very good to me, dear — for you’re all that I have in the world now.”
CHAPTER 10
That summer passed, then the winter. The wet season began in the last days of September and continued all through October, November, and December. At long intervals would come a week of perfect days, the sky without a cloud, the air motionless, but touched with a certain nimbleness, a faint effervescence that was exhilarating. Then, without warning, during a night when a south wind blew, a gray scroll of cloud would unroll and hang high over the city, and the rain would come pattering down again, at first in scattered showers, then in an uninterrupted drizzle.
All day long Trina sat in the bay window of the sitting-room that commanded a view of a small section of Polk Street. As often as she raised her head she could see the big market, a confectionery store, a bell-hanger’s shop, and, farther on, above the roofs, the glass skylights and water tanks of the big public baths. In the nearer foreground ran the street itself; the cable cars trundled up and down, thumping heavily over the joints of the rails; market carts by the score came and went, driven at a great rate by preoccupied young men in their shirt sleeves, with pencils behind their ears, or by reckless boys in blood-stained butcher’s aprons. Upon the sidewalks the little world of Polk Street swarmed and jostled through its daily round of life. On fine days the great ladies from the avenue, one block above, invaded the street, appearing before the butcher stalls, intent upon their day’s marketing. On rainy days their servants — the Chinese cooks or the second girls — took their places. These servants gave themselves great airs, carrying their big cotton umbrellas as they had seen their mistresses carry their parasols, and haggling in supercilious fashion with the market men, their chins in the air.
The rain persisted. Everything in the range of Trina’s vision, from the tarpaulins on the market-cart horses to the panes of glass in the roof of the public baths, looked glazed and varnished. The asphalt of the sidewalks shone like the surface of a patent leather boot; every hollow in the street held its little puddle, that winked like an eye each time a drop of rain struck into it.
Trina still continued to work for Uncle Oelbermann. In the mornings she busied herself about the kitchen, the bedroom, and the sitting-room; but in the afternoon, for two or three hours after lunch, she was occupied with the Noah’s ark animals. She took her work to the bay window, spreading out a great square of canvas underneath her chair, to catch the chips and shavings, which she used afterwards for lighting fires. One after another she caught up the little blocks of straight-grained pine, the knife flashed between her fingers, the little figure grew rapidly under her touch, was finished and ready for painting in a wonderfully short time, and was tossed into the basket that stood at her elbow.
But very often during that rainy winter after her marriage Trina would pause in her work, her hands falling idly into her lap, her eyes — her narrow, pale blue eyes — growing wide and thoughtful as she gazed, unseeing, out into the rain-washed street.
She loved McTeague now with a blind, unreasoning love that admitted of no doubt or hesitancy. Indeed, it seemed to her that it was only AFTER her marriage with the dentist that she had really begun to love him. With the absolute final surrender of herself, the irrevocable, ultimate submission, had come an affection the like of which she had never dreamed in the old B Street days. 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 it had not been so at first. During those long, rainy days of the fall, days when Trina was left alone for hours, at that time when the excitement and novelty of the honeymoon were dying down, when the new household was settling into its grooves, she passed through many an hour of misgiving, of doubt, and even of actual regret.
Never would she forget one Sunday afternoon in particular. She had been married but three weeks. After dinner she and little Miss Baker had gone for a bit of a walk to take advantage of an hour’s sunshine and to look at some wonderful geraniums in a florist’s window on Sutter Street. They had been caught in a shower, and on returning to the flat the little dressmaker had insisted on fetching Trina up to her tiny room and brewing her a cup of strong tea, “to take the chill off.” The two women had chatted over t
heir teacups the better part of the afternoon, then Trina had returned to her rooms. For nearly three hours McTeague had been out of her thoughts, and as she came through their little suite, singing softly to herself, she suddenly came upon him quite unexpectedly. Her husband was in the “Dental Parlors,” lying back in his operating chair, fast asleep. The little stove was crammed with coke, the room was overheated, the air thick and foul with the odors of ether, of coke gas, of stale beer and cheap tobacco. The dentist sprawled his gigantic limbs over the worn velvet of the operating chair; his coat and vest and shoes were off, and his huge feet, in their thick gray socks, dangled over the edge of the foot-rest; his pipe, fallen from his half-open mouth, had spilled the ashes into his lap; while on the floor, at his side stood the half-empty pitcher of steam beer. His head had rolled limply upon one shoulder, his face was red with sleep, and from his open mouth came a terrific sound of snoring.
For a moment Trina stood looking at him as he lay thus, prone, inert, half-dressed, and stupefied with the heat of the room, the steam beer, and the fumes of the cheap tobacco. Then her little chin quivered and a sob rose to her throat; she fled from the “Parlors,” and locking herself in her bedroom, flung herself on the bed and burst into an agony of weeping. Ah, no, ah, no, she could not love him. It had all been a dreadful mistake, and now it was irrevocable; she was bound to this man for life. If it was as bad as this now, only three weeks after her marriage, how would it be in the years to come? Year after year, month after month, hour after hour, she was to see this same face, with its salient jaw, was to feel the touch of those enormous red hands, was to hear the heavy, elephantine tread of those huge feet — in thick gray socks. Year after year, day after day, there would be no change, and it would last all her life. Either it would be one long continued revulsion, or else — worse than all — she would come to be content with him, would come to be like him, would sink to the level of steam beer and cheap tobacco, and all her pretty ways, her clean, trim little habits, would be forgotten, since they would be thrown away upon her stupid, brutish husband. “Her husband!” THAT, was her husband in there — she could yet hear his snores — for life, for life. A great despair seized upon her. She buried her face in the pillow and thought of her mother with an infinite longing.