McTeague by Frank Norris (leveled readers TXT) 📕

“Say, you⁠—you must be crazy, Trina. I⁠—I⁠—wouldn’t let a dog go hungry.”

“Not even if he’d bitten you, perhaps.”

The dentist stared again.

There was another pause. McTeague looked up at her in silence, a mean and vicious twinkle coming into his small eyes. He uttered a low exclamation, and then checked himself.

“Well, look here, for the last time. I’m starving. I’ve got nowhere to sleep. Will you give me some money, or something to eat? Will you let me in?”

“No⁠—no⁠—no.”

Trina could fancy she almost saw the brassy glint in her husband’s eyes. He raised one enormous lean fist. Then he growled:

“If I had hold of you for a minute, by God, I’d make you dance. An’ I will yet, I will yet. Don’t you be afraid of that.”

He turned about, the moonlight showing like a layer of snow upon his massive shoulders. Trina watched him as he passed under the shadow of the cherry trees and crossed the little court. She heard his great feet grinding on the board flooring. He disappeared.

Miser though she was, Trina was only human, and the echo of the dentist’s heavy feet had not died away before she began to be sorry for what she had done. She stood by the open window in her nightgown, her finger upon her lips.

“He did looked pinched,” she said half aloud. “Maybe he was hungry. I ought to have given him something. I wish I had, I wish I had. Oh,” she cried, suddenly, with a frightened gesture of both hands, “what have I come to be that I would see Mac⁠—my husband⁠—that I would see him starve rather than give him money? No, no. It’s too dreadful. I will give him some. I’ll send it to him tomorrow. Where?⁠—well, he’ll come back.” She leaned from the window and called as loudly as she dared, “Mac, oh, Mac.” There was no answer.

When McTeague had told Trina he had been without food for nearly two days he was speaking the truth. The week before he had spent the last of the four hundred dollars in the bar of a sailor’s lodging-house near the water front, and since that time had lived a veritable hand-to-mouth existence.

He had spent her money here and there about the city in royal fashion, absolutely reckless of the morrow, feasting and drinking for the most part with companions he picked up heaven knows where, acquaintances of twenty-four hours, whose names he forgot in two days. Then suddenly he found himself at the end of his money. He no longer had any friends. Hunger rode him and rowelled him. He was no longer well fed, comfortable. There was no longer a warm place for him to sleep. He went back to Polk Street in the evening, walking on the dark side of the street, lurking in the shadows, ashamed to have any of his old-time friends see him. He entered Zerkow’s old house and knocked at the door of the room Trina and he had occupied. It was empty.

Next day he went to Uncle Oelbermann’s store and asked news of Trina. Trina had not told Uncle Oelbermann of McTeague’s brutalities, giving him other reasons to explain the loss of her fingers; neither had she told him of her husband’s robbery. So when the dentist had asked where Trina could be found, Uncle Oelbermann, believing that McTeague was seeking a reconciliation, had told him without hesitation, and, he added:

“She was in here only yesterday and drew out the balance of her money. She’s been drawing against her money for the last month or so. She’s got it all now, I guess.”

“Ah, she’s got it all.”

The dentist went away from his bootless visit to his wife shaking with rage, hating her with all the strength of a crude and primitive nature. He clenched his fists till his knuckles whitened, his teeth ground furiously upon one another.

“Ah, if I had hold of you once, I’d make you dance. She had five thousand dollars in that room, while I stood there, not twenty feet away, and told her I was starving, and she wouldn’t give me a dime to get a cup of coffee with; not a dime to get a cup of coffee. Oh, if I once get my hands on you!” His wrath strangled him. He clutched at the darkness in front of him, his breath fairly whistling between his teeth.

That night he walked the streets until the morning, wondering what now he was to do to fight the wolf away. The morning of the next day towards ten o’clock he was on Kearney Street, still walking, still tramping the streets, since there was nothing else for him to do. By and by he paused on a corner near a music store, finding a momentary amusement in watching two or three men loading a piano upon a dray. Already half its weight was supported by the dray’s backboard. One of the men, a big mulatto, almost hidden under the mass of glistening rosewood, was guiding its course, while the other two heaved and tugged in the rear. Something in the street frightened the horses and they shied abruptly. The end of the piano was twitched sharply from the backboard. There was a cry, the mulatto staggered and fell with the falling piano, and its weight dropped squarely upon his thigh, which broke with a resounding crack.

An hour later McTeague had found his job. The music store engaged him as handler at six dollars a week. McTeague’s enormous strength, useless all his life, stood him in good stead at last.

He slept in a tiny back room opening from the storeroom of the music store. He was in some sense a watchman as well as handler, and went the rounds of the store twice every night. His room was a box of a place that reeked with odors of stale tobacco smoke. The former occupant had papered the walls with newspapers and had pasted up figures cut out from the posters of