by Frank Norris
“Hark,” said Trina, suddenly. “Wasn’t that the bell of your office?” They had both heard the jangling of the bell that McTeague had hung over the door of his “Parlors.” The dentist looked at the kitchen clock.
“That’s Vanovitch,” said he. “He’s a plumber round on Sutter Street. He’s got an appointment with me to have a bicuspid pulled. I got to go back to work.” He rose.
“But you can’t,” cried Trina, the back of her hand upon her lips, her eyes brimming. “Mac, don’t you see? Can’t you understand? You’ve got to stop. Oh, it’s dreadful! Listen.” She hurried around the table to him and caught his arm in both her hands.
“Huh?” growled McTeague, looking at her with a puzzled frown.
“They’ll arrest you. You’ll go to prison. You can’t work — can’t work any more. We’re ruined.”
Vanovitch was pounding on the door of the sitting-room.
“He’ll be gone in a minute,” exclaimed McTeague.
“Well, let him go. Tell him to go; tell him to come again.”
“Why, he’s got an APPOINTMENT with me,” exclaimed McTeague, his hand upon the door.
Trina caught him back. “But, Mac, you ain’t a dentist any longer; you ain’t a doctor. You haven’t the right to work. You never went to a dental college.”
“Well, suppose I never went to a college, ain’t I a dentist just the same? Listen, he’s pounding there again. No, I’m going, sure.”
“Well, of course, go,” said Trina, with sudden reaction. “It ain’t possible they’ll make you stop. If you’re a good dentist, that’s all that’s wanted. Go on, Mac; hurry, before he goes.”
McTeague went out, closing the door. Trina stood for a moment looking intently at the bricks at her feet. Then she returned to the table, and sat down again before the notice, and, resting her head in both her fists, read it yet another time. Suddenly the conviction seized upon her that it was all true. McTeague would be obliged to stop work, no matter how good a dentist he was. But why had the authorities at the City Hall waited this long before serving the notice? All at once Trina snapped her fingers, with a quick flash of intelligence.
“It’s Marcus that’s done it,” she cried.
It was like a clap of thunder. McTeague was stunned, stupefied. He said nothing. Never in his life had he been so taciturn. At times he did not seem to hear Trina when she spoke to him, and often she had to shake him by the shoulder to arouse his attention. He would sit apart in his “Parlors,” turning the notice about in his enormous clumsy fingers, reading it stupidly over and over again. He couldn’t understand. What had a clerk at the City Hall to do with him? Why couldn’t they let him alone?
“Oh, what’s to become of us NOW?” wailed Trina. “What’s to become of us now? We’re paupers, beggars — and all so sudden.” And once, in a quick, inexplicable fury, totally unlike anything that McTeague had noticed in her before, she had started up, with fists and teeth shut tight, and had cried, “Oh, if you’d only KILLED Marcus Schouler that time he fought you!”
McTeague had continued his work, acting from sheer force of habit; his sluggish, deliberate nature, methodical, obstinate, refusing to adapt itself to the new conditions.
“Maybe Marcus was only trying to scare us,” Trina had said. “How are they going to know whether you’re practising or not?”
“I got a mould to make to-morrow,” McTeague said, “and Vanovitch, that plumber round on Sutter Street, he’s coming again at three.”
“Well, you go right ahead,” Trina told him, decisively; “you go right ahead and make the mould, and pull every tooth in Vanovitch’s head if you want to. Who’s going to know? Maybe they just sent that notice as a matter of form. Maybe Marcus got that paper and filled it in himself.”
The two would lie awake all night long, staring up into the dark, talking, talking, talking.
“Haven’t you got any right to practise if you’ve not been to a dental college, Mac? Didn’t you ever go?” Trina would ask again and again.
“No, no,” answered the dentist, “I never went. I learnt from the fellow I was apprenticed to. I don’ know anything about a dental college. Ain’t I got a right to do as I like?” he suddenly exclaimed.
“If you know your profession, isn’t that enough?” cried Trina.
“Sure, sure,” growled McTeague. “I ain’t going to stop for them.”
“You go right on,” Trina said, “and I bet you won’t hear another word about it.”
“Suppose I go round to the City Hall and see them,” hazarded McTeague.
“No, no, don’t you do it, Mac,” exclaimed Trina. “Because, if Marcus has done this just to scare you, they won’t know anything about it there at the City Hall; but they’ll begin to ask you questions, and find out that you never HAD graduated from a dental college, and you’d be just as bad off as ever.”
“Well, I ain’t going to quit for just a piece of paper,” declared the dentist. The phrase stuck to him. All day long he went about their rooms or continued at his work in the “Parlors,” growling behind his thick mustache: “I ain’t going to quit for just a piece of paper. No, I ain’t going to quit for just a piece of paper. Sure not.”
The days passed, a week went by, McTeague continued his work as usual. They heard no more from the City Hall, but the suspense of the situation was harrowing. Trina was actually sick with it. The terror of the thing was ever at their elbows, going to bed with them, sitting down with them at breakfast in the kitchen, keeping them company all through the day. Trina dared not think of what would be their fate if the income derived from McTeague’s practice was suddenly taken from them. Then they would have to fall back on the interest of her lottery money and the pittance she derived from the manufacture of the Noah’s ark animals, a little over thirty dollars a month. No, no, it was not to be thought of. It could not be that their means of livelihood was to be thus stricken from them.
A fortnight went by. “I guess we’re all right, Mac,” Trina allowed herself to say. “It looks as though we were all right. How are they going to tell whether you’re practising or not?”
That day a second and much more peremptory notice was served upon McTeague by an official in person. Then suddenly Trina was seized with a panic terror, unreasoned, instinctive. If McTeague persisted they would both be sent to a prison, she was sure of it; a place where people were chained to the wall, in the dark, and fed on bread and water.
“Oh, Mac, you’ve got to quit,” she wailed. “You can’t go on. They can make you stop. Oh, why didn’t you go to a dental college? Why didn’t you find out that you had to have a college degree? And now we’re paupers, beggars. We’ve got to leave here — leave this flat where I’ve been — where WE’VE been so happy, and sell all the pretty things; sell the pictures and the melodeon, and — Oh, it’s too dreadful!”
“Huh? Huh? What? What?” exclaimed the dentist, bewildered. “I ain’t going to quit for just a piece of paper. Let them put me out. I’ll show them. They — they can’t make small of me.”
“Oh, that’s all very fine to talk that way, but you’ll have to quit.”
“Well, we ain’t paupers,” McTeague suddenly exclaimed, an idea entering his mind. “We’ve got our money yet. You’ve got your five thousand dollars and the money you’ve been saving up. People ain’t paupers when they’ve got over five thousand dollars.”
“What do you mean, Mac?” cried Trina, apprehensively.
“Well, we can live on THAT money until — until — until—” he broke off with an uncertain movement of his shoulders, looking about him stupidly.
“Until WHEN?” cried Trina. “There ain’t ever going to be any ‘until.’ We’ve got the INTEREST of that five thousand and we’ve got what Uncle Oelbermann gives me, a little over thirty dollars a month, and that’s all we’ve got. You’ll have to find something else to do.”
“What will I find to do?”
What, indeed? McTeague was over thirty now, sluggish and slow-witted at
best. What new trade could he learn at this age?
Little by little Trina made the dentist understand the calamity that had befallen them, and McTeague at last began cancelling his appointments. Trina gave it out that he was sick.
“Not a soul need know what’s happened to us,” she said to her husband.
But it was only by slow degrees that McTeague abandoned his profession. Every morning after breakfast he would go into his “Parlors” as usual and potter about his instruments, his dental engine, and his washstand in the corner behind his screen where he made his moulds. Now he would sharpen a “hoe” excavator, now he would busy himself for a whole hour making “mats” and “cylinders.” Then he would look over his slate where he kept a record of his appointments.
One day Trina softly opened the door of the “Parlors” and came in from the sitting-room. She had not heard McTeague moving about for some time and had begun to wonder what he was doing. She came in, quietly shutting the door behind her.
McTeague had tidied the room with the greatest care. The volumes of the “Practical Dentist” and the “American System of Dentistry” were piled upon the marble-top centre-table in rectangular blocks. The few chairs were drawn up against the wall under the steel engraving of “Lorenzo de’ Medici” with more than usual precision. The dental engine and the nickelled trimmings of the operating chair had been furbished till they shone, while on the movable rack in the bay window McTeague had arranged his instruments with the greatest neatness and regularity. “Hoe” excavators, pluggers, forceps, pliers, corundum disks and burrs, even the boxwood mallet that Trina was never to use again, all were laid out and ready for immediate use.
McTeague himself sat in his operating chair, looking stupidly out of the windows, across the roofs opposite, with an unseeing gaze, his red hands lying idly in his lap. Trina came up to him. There was something in his eyes that made her put both arms around his neck and lay his huge head with its coarse blond hair upon her shoulder.
“I — I got everything fixed,” he said. “I got everything fixed an’ ready. See, everything ready an’ waiting, an’ — an’ — an’ nobody comes, an’ nobody’s ever going to come any more. Oh, Trina!” He put his arms about her and drew her down closer to him.
“Never mind, dear; never mind,” cried Trina, through her tears. “It’ll all come right in the end, and we’ll be poor together if we have to. You can sure find something else to do. We’ll start in again.”
“Look at the slate there,” said McTeague, pulling away from her and reaching down the slate on which he kept a record of his appointments. “Look at them. There’s Vanovitch at two on Wednesday, and Loughhead’s wife Thursday morning, and Heise’s little girl Thursday afternoon at one-thirty; Mrs. Watson on Friday, and Vanovitch again Saturday morning early — at seven. That’s what I was to have had, and they ain’t going to come. They ain’t ever going to come any more.”
Trina took the little slate from him and looked at it ruefully.
“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.
“All gone,” echoed the dentist. There was a silence. Then McTeague heaved himself up to his full six feet two, his face purpling, his enormous mallet-like fists raised over his head. His massive jaw protruded more than ever, while his teeth clicked and grated together; then he growled:
“If ever I meet Marcus Schouler—” he broke off abruptly, the white of his eyes growing suddenly pink.
“Oh, if ever you DO,” exclaimed Trina, catching her breath.
CHAPTER 14
“Well, what do you think?” said Trina.
She and McTeague stood in a tiny room at the back of the flat and on its very top floor. The room was whitewashed. It contained a bed, three cane-seated chairs, and a wooden washstand with its washbowl and pitcher. From its single uncurtained window one looked down into the flat’s dirty back yard and upon the roofs of the hovels that bordered the alley in the rear. There was a rag carpet on the floor. In place of a closet some dozen wooden pegs were affixed to the wall over the washstand. There was a smell of cheap soap and of ancient hair-oil in the air.
“That’s a single bed,” said Trina, “but the landlady says she’ll put in a double one for us. You see — —”
“I ain’t going to live here,” growled McTeague.
“Well, you’ve got to live somewhere,” said Trina, impatiently. “We’ve looked Polk Street over, and this is the only thing we can afford.”
“Afford, afford,” muttered the dentist. “You with your five thousand dollars, and the two or three hundred you got saved up, talking about ‘afford.’ You make me sick.”
“Now, Mac,” exclaimed Trina, deliberately, sitting down in one of the cane-seated chairs; “now, Mac, let’s have this thing — —”
“Well, I don’t figure on living in one room,” growled the dentist, sullenly. “Let’s live decently until we can get a fresh start. We’ve got the money.”
“Who’s got the money?”
“WE’VE got it.”
“We!”
“Well, it’s all in the family. What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is yours, ain’t it?”
“No, it’s not; no, it’s not,” cried Trina, vehemently. “It’s all mine, mine. There’s not a penny of it belongs to anybody else. I don’t like to have to talk this way to you, but you just make me. We’re not going to touch a penny of my five thousand nor a penny of that little money I managed to save — that seventy-five.”
“That TWO hundred, you mean.”
“That SEVENTY-FIVE. We’re just going to live on the interest of that and on what I earn from Uncle Oelbermann — on just that thirty-one or two dollars.”
“Huh! Think I’m going to do that, an’ live in such a room as this?”
Trina folded her arms and looked him squarely in the face.
“Well, what ARE you going to do, then?”
“Huh?”
“I say, what ARE you going to do? You can go on and find something to do and earn some more money, and THEN we’ll talk.”
“Well, I ain’t going to live here.”
“Oh, very well, suit yourself. I’M going to live here.”
“You’ll live where I TELL you,” the dentist suddenly cried, exasperated at the mincing tone she affected.
“Then YOU’LL pay the rent,” exclaimed Trina, quite as angry as he.
“Are you my boss, I’d like to know? Who’s the boss, you or I?”
“Who’s got the MONEY, I’d like to know?” cried Trina, flushing to her pale lips. “Answer me that, McTeague, who’s got the money?”
“You make me sick, you and your money. Why, you’re a miser. I never saw anything like it. When I was practising, I never thought of my fees as my own; we lumped everything in together.”
“Exactly; and I’M doing the working now. I’m working for Uncle Oelbermann, and you’re not lumping in ANYTHING now. I’m doing it all. Do you know what I’m doing, McTeague? I’m supporting you.”
“Ah, shut up; you make me sick.”
“You got no RIGHT to talk to me that way. I won’t let you. I — I won’t have it.” She caught her breath. Tears were in her eyes.
“Oh, live where you like, then,” said McTeague, sullenly.
“Well, shall we take this room then?”
“All right, we’ll take it. But why can’t you take a little of your money an’ — an’ — sort of fix it up?”
“Not a penny, not a single penny.”
“Oh, I don’t care WHAT you do.” And for the rest of the day the dentist and his wife did not speak.
This was not the only quarrel they had during these days when they were occupied in moving from their suite and in looking for new quarters.
Every hour the question of money came up. Trina had become more niggardly than ever since the loss of McTeague’s practice. It was not mere economy with her now. It was a panic terror lest a fraction of a cent of her little savings should be touched; a passionate eagerness to continue to save in spite of all that had happened. Trina could have easily afforded better quarters than the single whitewashed room at the top of the flat, but she made McTeague believe that it was impossible.
“I can still save a little,” she said to herself, after the room had been engaged; “perhaps almost as much as ever. I’ll have three hundred dollars pretty soon, and Mac thinks it’s only two hundred. It’s almost two hundred and fifty; and I’ll get a good deal out of the sale.”
But this sale was a long agony. It lasted a week. Everything went — everything but the few big pieces that went with the suite, and that belonged to the photographer. The melodeon, the chairs, the black walnut table before which they were married, the extension table in the sitting-room, the kitchen table with its oilcloth cover, the framed lithographs from the English illustrated papers, the very carpets on the floors. But Trina’s heart nearly broke when the kitchen utensils and furnishings began to go. Every pot, every stewpan, every knife and fork, was an old friend. How she had worked over them! How clean she had kept them! What a pleasure it had been to invade that little brick-paved kitchen every morning, and to wash up and put to rights after breakfast, turning on the hot water at the sink, raking down the ashes in the cook-stove, going and coming over the warm bricks, her head in the air, singing at her work, proud in the sense of her proprietorship and her independence! How happy had she been the day after her marriage when she had first entered that kitchen and knew that it was all her own! And how well she remembered her raids upon the bargain counters in the house-furnishing departments of the great down-town stores! And now it was all to go. Some one else would have it all, while she was relegated to cheap restaurants and meals cooked by hired servants. Night after night she sobbed herself to sleep at the thought of her past happiness and her present wretchedness. However, she was not alone in her unhappiness.