McTeague by Frank Norris (leveled readers TXT) 📕

till only the bare walls and floor remained. Here where they had been married, where the wedding supper had taken place, where Trina had bade farewell to her father and mother, here where she had spent those first few hard months of her married life, where afterward she had grown to be happy and contented, where she had passed the long hours of the afternoon at her work of whittling, and where she and her husband had spent so many evenings looking out of the window before the lamp was lit⁠—here in what had been her home, nothing was left but echoes and the emptiness of complete desolation. Only one thing remained. On the wall between the windows, in its oval glass frame, preserved by some unknown and fearful process, a melancholy relic of a vanished happiness, unsold, neglected, and forgotten, a thing that nobody wanted, hung Trina’s wedding bouquet. XV

Then the grind began. It would have been easier for the McTeagues to have faced their misfortunes had they befallen them immediately after their marriage, when their love for each other was fresh and fine, and when they could have found a certain happiness in helping each other and sharing each other’s privations. Trina, no doubt, loved her husband more than ever, in the sense that she felt she belonged to him. But McTeague’s affection for his wife was dwindling a little every day⁠—had been dwindling for a long time, in fact. He had become used to her by now. She was part of the order of the things with which he found himself surrounded. He saw nothing extraordinary about her; it was no longer a pleasure for him to kiss her and take her in his arms; she was merely his wife. He did not dislike her; he did not love her. She was his wife, that was all. But he sadly missed and regretted all those little animal comforts which in the old prosperous life Trina had managed to find for him. He missed the cabbage soups and steaming chocolate that Trina had taught him to like; he missed his good tobacco that Trina had educated him to prefer; he missed the Sunday afternoon walks that she had caused him to substitute in place of his nap in the operating chair; and he missed the bottled beer that she had induced him to drink in place of the steam beer from Frenna’s. In the end he grew morose and sulky, and sometimes neglected to answer his wife when she spoke to him. Besides this, Trina’s avarice was a perpetual annoyance to him. Oftentimes when a considerable alleviation of this unhappiness could have been obtained at the expense of a nickel or a dime, Trina refused the money with a pettishness that was exasperating.

“No, no,” she would exclaim. “To ride to the park Sunday afternoon, that means ten cents, and I can’t afford it.”

“Let’s walk there, then.”

“I’ve got to work.”

“But you’ve worked morning and afternoon every day this week.”

“I don’t care, I’ve got to work.”

There had been a time when Trina had hated the idea of McTeague drinking steam beer as common and vulgar.

“Say, let’s have a bottle of beer tonight. We haven’t had a drop of beer in three weeks.”

“We can’t afford it. It’s fifteen cents a bottle.”

“But I haven’t had a swallow of beer in three weeks.”

“Drink steam beer, then. You’ve got a nickel. I gave you a quarter day before yesterday.”

“But I don’t like steam beer now.”

It was so with everything. Unfortunately, Trina had cultivated tastes in McTeague which now could not be gratified. He had come to be very proud of his silk hat and “Prince Albert” coat, and liked to wear them on Sundays. Trina had made him sell both. He preferred “Yale mixture” in his pipe; Trina had made him come down to “Mastiff,” a five-cent tobacco with which he was once contented, but now abhorred. He liked to wear clean cuffs; Trina allowed him a fresh pair on Sundays only. At first these deprivations angered McTeague. Then, all of a sudden, he slipped back into the old habits (that had been his before he knew Trina) with an ease that was surprising. Sundays he dined at the car conductors’ coffee-joint once more, and spent the afternoon lying full length upon the bed, crop-full, stupid, warm, smoking his huge pipe, drinking his steam beer, and playing his six mournful tunes upon his concertina, dozing off to sleep towards four o’clock.

The sale of their furniture had, after paying the rent and outstanding bills, netted about a hundred and thirty dollars. Trina believed that the auctioneer from the secondhand store had swindled and cheated them and had made a great outcry to no effect. But she had arranged the affair with the auctioneer herself, and offset her disappointment in the matter of the sale by deceiving her husband as to the real amount of the returns. It was easy to lie to McTeague, who took everything for granted; and since the occasion of her trickery with the money that was to have been sent to her mother, Trina had found falsehood easier than ever.

“Seventy dollars is all the auctioneer gave me,” she told her husband; “and after paying the balance due on the rent, and the grocer’s bill, there’s only fifty left.”

“Only fifty?” murmured McTeague, wagging his head, “only fifty? Think of that.”

“Only fifty,” declared Trina. Afterwards she said to herself with a certain admiration for her cleverness:

“Couldn’t save sixty dollars much easier than that,” and she had added the hundred and thirty to the little hoard in the chamois-skin bag and brass matchbox in the bottom of her trunk.

In these first months of their misfortunes the routine of the McTeagues was as follows: They rose at seven and breakfasted in their room, Trina cooking the very meagre meal on an oil stove. Immediately after breakfast Trina sat down to her work of whittling the Noah’s ark animals, and McTeague