McTeague by Frank Norris (leveled readers TXT) 📕

some Kiralfy ballet, very gaudy. By the one window, chittering all day in its little gilt prison, hung the canary bird, a tiny atom of life that McTeague still clung to with a strange obstinacy.

McTeague drank a good deal of whiskey in these days, but the only effect it had upon him was to increase the viciousness and bad temper that had developed in him since the beginning of his misfortunes. He terrorized his fellow-handlers, powerful men though they were. For a gruff word, for an awkward movement in lading the pianos, for a surly look or a muttered oath, the dentist’s elbow would crook and his hand contract to a mallet-like fist. As often as not the blow followed, colossal in its force, swift as the leap of the piston from its cylinder.

His hatred of Trina increased from day to day. He’d make her dance yet. Wait only till he got his hands upon her. She’d let him starve, would she? She’d turn him out of doors while she hid her five thousand dollars in the bottom of her trunk. Aha, he would see about that some day. She couldn’t make small of him. Ah, no. She’d dance all right⁠—all right. McTeague was not an imaginative man by nature, but he would lie awake nights, his clumsy wits galloping and frisking under the lash of the alcohol, and fancy himself thrashing his wife, till a sudden frenzy of rage would overcome him, and he would shake all over, rolling upon the bed and biting the mattress.

On a certain day, about a week after Christmas of that year, McTeague was on one of the top floors of the music store, where the secondhand instruments were kept, helping to move about and rearrange some old pianos. As he passed by one of the counters he paused abruptly, his eye caught by an object that was strangely familiar.

“Say,” he inquired, addressing the clerk in charge, “say, where’d this come from?”

“Why, let’s see. We got that from a secondhand store up on Polk Street, I guess. It’s a fairly good machine; a little tinkering with the stops and a bit of shellac, and we’ll make it about’s good as new. Good tone. See.” And the clerk drew a long, sonorous wail from the depths of McTeague’s old concertina.

“Well, it’s mine,” growled the dentist.

The other laughed. “It’s yours for eleven dollars.”

“It’s mine,” persisted McTeague. “I want it.”

“Go ’long with you, Mac. What do you mean?”

“I mean that it’s mine, that’s what I mean. You got no right to it. It was stolen from me, that’s what I mean,” he added, a sullen anger flaming up in his little eyes.

The clerk raised a shoulder and put the concertina on an upper shelf.

“You talk to the boss about that; t’ain’t none of my affair. If you want to buy it, it’s eleven dollars.”

The dentist had been paid off the day before and had four dollars in his wallet at the moment. He gave the money to the clerk.

“Here, there’s part of the money. You⁠—you put that concertina aside for me, an’ I’ll give you the rest in a week or so⁠—I’ll give it to you tomorrow,” he exclaimed, struck with a sudden idea.

McTeague had sadly missed his concertina. Sunday afternoons when there was no work to be done, he was accustomed to lie flat on his back on his springless bed in the little room in the rear of the music store, his coat and shoes off, reading the paper, drinking steam beer from a pitcher, and smoking his pipe. But he could no longer play his six lugubrious airs upon his concertina, and it was a deprivation. He often wondered where it was gone. It had been lost, no doubt, in the general wreck of his fortunes. Once, even, the dentist had taken a concertina from the lot kept by the music store. It was a Sunday and no one was about. But he found he could not play upon it. The stops were arranged upon a system he did not understand.

Now his own concertina was come back to him. He would buy it back. He had given the clerk four dollars. He knew where he would get the remaining seven.

The clerk had told him the concertina had been sold on Polk Street to the secondhand store there. Trina had sold it. McTeague knew it. Trina had sold his concertina⁠—had stolen it and sold it⁠—his concertina, his beloved concertina, that he had had all his life. Why, barring the canary, there was not one of all his belongings that McTeague had cherished more dearly. His steel engraving of Lorenzo de’ Medici and His Court might be lost, his stone pug dog might go, but his concertina!

“And she sold it⁠—stole it from me and sold it. Just because I happened to forget to take it along with me. Well, we’ll just see about that. You’ll give me the money to buy it back, or⁠—”

His rage loomed big within him. His hatred of Trina came back upon him like a returning surge. He saw her small, prim mouth, her narrow blue eyes, her black mane of hair, and up-tilted chin, and hated her the more because of them. Aha, he’d show her; he’d make her dance. He’d get that seven dollars from her, or he’d know the reason why. He went through his work that day, heaving and hauling at the ponderous pianos, handling them with the ease of a lifting crane, impatient for the coming of evening, when he could be left to his own devices. As often as he had a moment to spare he went down the street to the nearest saloon and drank a pony of whiskey. Now and then as he fought and struggled with the vast masses of ebony, rosewood, and mahogany on the upper floor of the music store, raging and chafing at their inertness and unwillingness, while the whiskey pirouetted in his brain, he would mutter to himself:

“An’