McTeague by Frank Norris (leveled readers TXT) 📕

There was a knock on the door. Confused and embarrassed, as if they were not married, Trina scrambled off McTeague’s lap, hastening to light the lamp, whispering, “Put on your coat, Mac, and smooth your hair,” and making gestures for him to put the beer bottles out of sight. She opened the door and uttered an exclamation.

“Why, Cousin Mark!” she said. McTeague glared at him, struck speechless, confused beyond expression. Marcus Schouler, perfectly at his ease, stood in the doorway, smiling with great affability.

“Say,” he remarked, “can I come in?”

Taken all aback, Trina could only answer:

“Why⁠—I suppose so. Yes, of course⁠—come in.”

“Yes, yes, come in,” exclaimed the dentist, suddenly, speaking without thought. “Have some beer?” he added, struck with an idea.

“No, thanks, Doctor,” said Marcus, pleasantly.

McTeague and Trina were puzzled. What could it all mean? Did Marcus want to become reconciled to his enemy? “I know.” Trina said to herself. “He’s going away, and he wants to borrow some money. He won’t get a penny, not a penny.” She set her teeth together hard.

“Well,” said Marcus, “how’s business, Doctor?”

“Oh,” said McTeague, uneasily, “oh, I don’ know. I guess⁠—I guess,” he broke off in helpless embarrassment. They had all sat down by now. Marcus continued, holding his hat and his cane⁠—the black wand of ebony with the gold top presented to him by the “Improvement Club.”

“Ah!” said he, wagging his head and looking about the sitting-room, “you people have got the best fixed rooms in the whole flat. Yes, sir; you have, for a fact.” He glanced from the lithograph framed in gilt and red plush⁠—the two little girls at their prayers⁠—to the “I’m Grandpa” and “I’m Grandma” pictures, noted the clean white matting and the gay worsted tidies over the chair backs, and appeared to contemplate in ecstasy the framed photograph of McTeague and Trina in their wedding finery.

“Well, you two are pretty happy together, ain’t you?” said he, smiling good-humoredly.

“Oh, we don’t complain,” answered Trina.

“Plenty of money, lots to do, everything fine, hey?”

“We’ve got lots to do,” returned Trina, thinking to head him off, “but we’ve not got lots of money.”

But evidently Marcus wanted no money.

“Well, Cousin Trina,” he said, rubbing his knee, “I’m going away.”

“Yes, mamma wrote me; you’re going on a ranch.”

“I’m going in ranching with an English duck,” corrected Marcus. “Mr. Sieppe has fixed things. We’ll see if we can’t raise some cattle. I know a lot about horses, and he’s ranched some before⁠—this English duck. And then I’m going to keep my eye open for a political chance down there. I got some introductions from the President of the Improvement Club. I’ll work things somehow, oh, sure.”

“How long you going to be gone?” asked Trina.

Marcus stared.

“Why, I ain’t ever coming back,” he vociferated. “I’m going tomorrow, and I’m going for good. I come to say goodbye.”

Marcus stayed for upwards of an hour that evening. He talked on easily and agreeably, addressing himself as much to McTeague as to Trina. At last he rose.

“Well, goodbye, Doc.”

“Goodbye, Marcus,” returned McTeague. The two shook hands.

“Guess we won’t ever see each other again,” continued Marcus. “But good luck to you, Doc. Hope some day you’ll have the patients standing in line on the stairs.”

“Huh! I guess so, I guess so,” said the dentist.

“Goodbye, Cousin Trina.”

“Goodbye, Marcus,” answered Trina. “You be sure to remember me to mamma, and papa, and everybody. I’m going to make two great big sets of Noah’s ark animals for the twins on their next birthday; August is too old for toys. But you can tell the twins that I’ll make them some great big animals. Goodbye, success to you, Marcus.”

“Goodbye, goodbye. Good luck to you both.”

“Goodbye, Cousin Mark.”

“Goodbye, Marcus.”

He was gone.

One morning about a week after Marcus had left for the southern part of the State, McTeague found an oblong letter thrust through the letter-drop of the door of his Parlors. The address was typewritten. He opened it. The letter had been sent from the City Hall and was stamped in one corner with the seal of the State of California, very official; the form and file numbers superscribed.

McTeague had been making fillings when this letter arrived. He was in his Parlors, pottering over his movable rack underneath the bird cage in the bay window. He was making “blocks” to be used in large proximal cavities and “cylinders” for commencing fillings. He heard the postman’s step in the hall and saw the envelopes begin to shuttle themselves through the slit of his letter-drop. Then came the fat oblong envelope, with its official seal, that dropped flatwise to the floor with a sodden, dull impact.

The dentist put down the broach and scissors and gathered up his mail. There were four letters altogether. One was for Trina, in Selina’s “elegant” handwriting; another was an advertisement of a new kind of operating chair for dentists; the third was a card from a milliner on the next block, announcing an opening; and the fourth, contained in the fat oblong envelope, was a printed form with blanks left for names and dates, and addressed to McTeague, from an office in the City Hall. McTeague read it through laboriously. “I don’ know, I don’ know,” he muttered, looking stupidly at the rifle manufacturer’s calendar. Then he heard Trina, from the kitchen, singing as she made a clattering noise with the breakfast dishes. “I guess I’ll ask Trina about it,” he muttered.

He went through the suite, by the sitting-room, where the sun was pouring in through the looped backed Nottingham curtains upon the clean white matting and the varnished surface of the melodeon, passed on through the bedroom, with its framed lithographs of round-cheeked English babies and alert fox terriers, and came out into the brick-paved kitchen. The kitchen was clean as a new whistle; the freshly blackened cook stove glowed like a negro’s hide; the tins and porcelain-lined stewpans might have been of silver and of ivory. Trina was in the centre