Essential Novelists - Frank Norris. Frank Norris

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СКАЧАТЬ here. I've done with you. Don't you ever dare speak to me again”—his voice was shaking with fury—“and don't you sit at my table in the restaurant again. I'm sorry I ever lowered myself to keep company with such dirt. Ah, one-horse dentist! Ah, ten-cent zinc-plugger—hoodlum—MUCKER! Get your damn smoke outa my face.”

      Then matters reached a sudden climax. In his agitation the dentist had been pulling hard on his pipe, and as Marcus for the last time thrust his face close to his own, McTeague, in opening his lips to reply, blew a stifling, acrid cloud directly in Marcus Schouler's eyes. Marcus knocked the pipe from his fingers with a sudden flash of his hand; it spun across the room and broke into a dozen fragments in a far corner.

      McTeague rose to his feet, his eyes wide. But as yet he was not angry, only surprised, taken all aback by the suddenness of Marcus Schouler's outbreak as well as by its unreasonableness. Why had Marcus broken his pipe? What did it all mean, anyway? As he rose the dentist made a vague motion with his right hand. Did Marcus misinterpret it as a gesture of menace? He sprang back as though avoiding a blow. All at once there was a cry. Marcus had made a quick, peculiar motion, swinging his arm upward with a wide and sweeping gesture; his jack-knife lay open in his palm; it shot forward as he flung it, glinted sharply by McTeague's head, and struck quivering into the wall behind.

      A sudden chill ran through the room; the others stood transfixed, as at the swift passage of some cold and deadly wind. Death had stooped there for an instant, had stooped and past, leaving a trail of terror and confusion. Then the door leading to the street slammed; Marcus had disappeared.

      Thereon a great babel of exclamation arose. The tension of that all but fatal instant snapped, and speech became once more possible.

      “He would have knifed you.”

      “Narrow escape.”

      “What kind of a man do you call THAT?”

      “'Tain't his fault he ain't a murderer.”

      “I'd have him up for it.”

      “And they two have been the greatest kind of friends.”

      “He didn't touch you, did he?”

      “No—no—no.”

      “What a—what a devil! What treachery! A regular greaser trick!”

      “Look out he don't stab you in the back. If that's the kind of man he is, you never can tell.”

      Frenna drew the knife from the wall.

      “Guess I'll keep this toad-stabber,” he observed. “That fellow won't come round for it in a hurry; goodsized blade, too.” The group examined it with intense interest.

      “Big enough to let the life out of any man,” observed Heise.

      “What—what—what did he do it for?” stammered McTeague. “I got no quarrel with him.”

      He was puzzled and harassed by the strangeness of it all. Marcus would have killed him; had thrown his knife at him in the true, uncanny “greaser” style. It was inexplicable. McTeague sat down again, looking stupidly about on the floor. In a corner of the room his eye encountered his broken pipe, a dozen little fragments of painted porcelain and the stem of cherry wood and amber.

      At that sight his tardy wrath, ever lagging behind the original affront, suddenly blazed up. Instantly his huge jaws clicked together.

      “He can't make small of ME,” he exclaimed, suddenly. “I'll show Marcus Schouler—I'll show him—I'll——”

      He got up and clapped on his hat.

      “Now, Doctor,” remonstrated Heise, standing between him and the door, “don't go make a fool of yourself.”

      “Let 'um alone,” joined in Frenna, catching the dentist by the arm; “he's full, anyhow.”

      “He broke my pipe,” answered McTeague.

      It was this that had roused him. The thrown knife, the attempt on his life, was beyond his solution; but the breaking of his pipe he understood clearly enough.

      “I'll show him,” he exclaimed.

      As though they had been little children, McTeague set Frenna and the harness-maker aside, and strode out at the door like a raging elephant. Heise stood rubbing his shoulder.

      “Might as well try to stop a locomotive,” he muttered. “The man's made of iron.”

      Meanwhile, McTeague went storming up the street toward the flat, wagging his head and grumbling to himself. Ah, Marcus would break his pipe, would he? Ah, he was a zinc-plugger, was he? He'd show Marcus Schouler. No one should make small of him. He tramped up the stairs to Marcus's room. The door was locked. The dentist put one enormous hand on the knob and pushed the door in, snapping the wood-work, tearing off the lock. Nobody—the room was dark and empty. Never mind, Marcus would have to come home some time that night. McTeague would go down and wait for him in his “Parlors.” He was bound to hear him as he came up the stairs.

      As McTeague reached his room he stumbled over, in the darkness, a big packing-box that stood in the hallway just outside his door. Puzzled, he stepped over it, and lighting the gas in his room, dragged it inside and examined it.

      It was addressed to him. What could it mean? He was expecting nothing. Never since he had first furnished his room had packing-cases been left for him in this fashion. No mistake was possible. There were his name and address unmistakably. “Dr. McTeague, dentist—Polk Street, San Francisco, Cal.,” and the red Wells Fargo tag.

      Seized with the joyful curiosity of an overgrown boy, he pried off the boards with the corner of his fireshovel. The case was stuffed full of excelsior. On the top lay an envelope addressed to him in Trina's handwriting. He opened it and read, “For my dear Mac's birthday, from Trina;” and below, in a kind of post-script, “The man will be round to-morrow to put it in place.” McTeague tore away the excelsior. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation.

      It was the Tooth—the famous golden molar with its huge prongs—his sign, his ambition, the one unrealized dream of his life; and it was French gilt, too, not the cheap German gilt that was no good. Ah, what a dear little woman was this Trina, to keep so quiet, to remember his birthday!

      “Ain't she—ain't she just a—just a JEWEL,” exclaimed McTeague under his breath, “a JEWEL—yes, just a JEWEL; that's the word.”

      Very carefully he removed the rest of the excelsior, and lifting the ponderous Tooth from its box, set it upon the marble-top centre table. How immense it looked in that little room! The thing was tremendous, overpowering—the tooth of a gigantic fossil, golden and dazzling. Beside it everything seemed dwarfed. Even McTeague himself, big boned and enormous as he was, shrank and dwindled in the presence of the monster. As for an instant he bore it in his hands, it was like a puny Gulliver struggling with the molar of some vast Brobdingnag.

      The dentist circled about that golden wonder, gasping with delight and stupefaction, touching it gingerly with his hands as if it were something sacred. At every moment his thought returned to Trina. No, never was there such a little woman as his—the very thing he wanted—how had she remembered? And the money, where had that come from? No one knew better than he how expensive were these signs; not another СКАЧАТЬ