One can hold a scrubbing-brush with two good fingers and the stumps
of two others even if both joints of the thumb are gone, but it takes
considerable practice to get used to it.
Trina became a scrub-woman. She had taken council of Selina, and
through her had obtained the position of caretaker in a little memorial
kindergarten over on Pacific Street. Like Polk Street, it was an
accommodation street, but running through a much poorer and more sordid
quarter. Trina had a little room over the kindergarten schoolroom. It
was not an unpleasant room. It looked out upon a sunny little court
floored with boards and used as the children's playground. Two great
cherry trees grew here, the leaves almost brushing against the window of
Trina's room and filtering the sunlight so that it fell in round golden
spots upon the floor of the room. “Like gold pieces,” Trina said to
herself.
Trina's work consisted in taking care of the kindergarten rooms,
scrubbing the floors, washing the windows, dusting and airing, and
carrying out the ashes. Besides this she earned some five dollars a
month by washing down the front steps of some big flats on Washington
Street, and by cleaning out vacant houses after the tenants had left.
She saw no one. Nobody knew her. She went about her work from dawn to
dark, and often entire days passed when she did not hear the sound of
her own voice. She was alone, a solitary, abandoned woman, lost in the
lowest eddies of the great city's tide--the tide that always ebbs.
When Trina had been discharged from the hospital after the operation on
her fingers, she found herself alone in the world, alone with her five
thousand dollars. The interest of this would support her, and yet allow
her to save a little.
But for a time Trina had thought of giving up the fight altogether and
of joining her family in the southern part of the State. But even while
she hesitated about this she received a long letter from her mother, an
answer to one she herself had written just before the amputation of her
right-hand fingers--the last letter she would ever be able to write.
Mrs. Sieppe's letter was one long lamentation; she had her own
misfortunes to bewail as well as those of her daughter. The
carpet-cleaning and upholstery business had failed. Mr. Sieppe and
Owgooste had left for New Zealand with a colonization company, whither
Mrs. Sieppe and the twins were to follow them as soon as the colony
established itself. So far from helping Trina in her ill fortune, it
was she, her mother, who might some day in the near future be obliged to
turn to Trina for aid. So Trina had given up the idea of any help from
her family. For that matter she needed none. She still had her five
thousand, and Uncle Oelbermann paid her the interest with a machine-like
regularity. Now that McTeague had left her, there was one less mouth to
feed; and with this saving, together with the little she could earn as
scrub-woman, Trina could almost manage to make good the amount she lost
by being obliged to cease work upon the Noah's ark animals.
Little by little her sorrow over the loss of her precious savings
overcame the grief of McTeague's desertion of her. Her avarice had grown
to be her one dominant passion; her love of money for the money's
sake brooded in her heart, driving out by degrees every other natural
affection. She grew thin and meagre; her flesh clove tight to her small
skeleton; her small pale mouth and little uplifted chin grew to have a
certain feline eagerness of expression; her long, narrow eyes glistened
continually, as if they caught and held the glint of metal. One day as
she sat in her room, the empty brass match-box and the limp chamois bag
in her hands, she suddenly exclaimed:
“I could have forgiven him if he had only gone away and left me my
money. I could have--yes, I could have forgiven him even THIS”--she
looked at the stumps of her fingers. “But now,” her teeth closed
tight and her eyes flashed,
“now--I'll--never--forgive--him--as-long--as--I--live.”
The empty bag and the hollow, light match-box troubled her. Day after
day she took them from her trunk and wept over them as other women weep
over a dead baby's shoe. Her four hundred dollars were gone, were gone,
were gone. She would never see them again. She could plainly see her
husband spending her savings by handfuls; squandering her beautiful gold
pieces that she had been at such pains to polish with soap and ashes.
The thought filled her with an unspeakable anguish. She would wake at
night from a dream of McTeague revelling down her money, and ask of the
darkness, “How much did he spend to-day? How many of the gold pieces are
left? Has he broken either of the two twenty-dollar pieces yet? What did
he spend it for?”
The instant she was out of the hospital Trina had begun to save again,
but now it was with an eagerness that amounted at times to a veritable
frenzy. She even denied herself lights and fuel in order to put by a
quarter or so, grudging every penny she was obliged to spend. She did
her own washing and cooking. Finally she sold her wedding dress, that
had hitherto lain in the bottom of her trunk.
The day she moved from Zerkow's old house, she came suddenly upon the
dentist's concertina under a heap of old clothes in the closet. Within
twenty minutes she had sold it to the dealer in second-hand furniture,
returning to her room with seven dollars in her pocket, happy for the
first time since McTeague had left her.
But for all that the match-box and the bag refused to fill up; after
three weeks of the most rigid economy they contained but eighteen
dollars and some small change. What was that compared with four hundred?
Trina told herself that she must have her money in hand. She longed to
see again the heap of it upon her work-table, where she could plunge her
hands into it, her face into it, feeling the cool, smooth metal upon her
cheeks. At such moments she would see in her imagination her wonderful
five thousand dollars piled in columns, shining and gleaming somewhere
at the bottom of Uncle Oelbermann's vault. She would look at the
paper that Uncle Oelbermann had given her, and tell herself that it
represented five thousand dollars. But in the end this ceased to satisfy
her, she must have the money itself. She must have her four hundred
dollars back again, there in her trunk, in her bag and her match-box,
where she could touch it and see it whenever she desired.
At length she could stand it no longer, and one day presented herself
before Uncle Oelbermann as he sat in his office in the wholesale toy
store, and told him she wanted to have four hundred dollars of her
money.
“But this is very irregular, you know, Mrs. McTeague,” said the great
man. “Not business-like at all.”
But his niece's misfortunes and the sight of her poor maimed hand
appealed to him. He opened his check-book. “You understand, of course,”
he said, “that this will reduce the amount of your interest by just so
much.”
“I know, I know. I've thought of that,” said Trina.
“Four hundred, did you say?” remarked Uncle Oelbermann, taking the cap
from his fountain pen.
“Yes, four hundred,” exclaimed Trina, quickly, her eyes glistening.
Trina cashed the check and returned home with the money--all in
twenty-dollar pieces as she had desired--in an ecstasy of delight. For
half of that night she sat up playing with her money, counting it and
recounting it, polishing the duller pieces until they shone. Altogether
there were twenty twenty-dollar gold pieces.
“Oh-h, you beauties!” murmured Trina, running her palms over them,
fairly quivering with pleasure. “You beauties! IS there anything
prettier than a twenty-dollar gold piece? You dear, dear money! Oh,
don't I LOVE you! Mine, mine, mine--all of you mine.”
She laid them out in a row on the ledge of the table, or arranged them
in patterns--triangles, circles, and squares--or built them all up into
a pyramid which she afterward overthrew for the sake of hearing the
delicious clink of the pieces tumbling against each other. Then at last
she put them away in the brass match-box and chamois bag, delighted
beyond words that they were once more full and heavy.
Then, a few days after, the thought of the money still remaining in
Uncle Oelbermann's keeping returned to her. It was hers, all hers--all
that four thousand six hundred. She could have as much of it or as
little of it as she chose. She only had to ask. For a week Trina
resisted, knowing very well that taking from her capital was
proportionately reducing her monthly income. Then at last she yielded.
“Just to make it an even five hundred, anyhow,” she told herself. That
day she drew a hundred dollars more, in twenty-dollar gold pieces as
before. From that time Trina began to draw steadily upon her capital, a
little at a time. It was a passion with her, a mania, a veritable mental
disease; a temptation such as drunkards only know.
It would come upon her all of a sudden. While she was about her work,
scrubbing the floor of some vacant house; or in her room, in the
morning, as she made her coffee on the oil stove, or when she woke in
the night, a brusque access of cupidity would seize upon her. Her cheeks
flushed, her eyes glistened, her breath came short. At times she would
leave her work just as it was, put on her old bonnet of black straw,
throw her shawl about her, and go straight to Uncle Oelbermann's store
and draw against her money. Now it would be a hundred dollars, now
sixty; now she would content herself with only twenty; and once, after a
fortnight's abstinence, she permitted herself a positive debauch of five
hundred. Little by little she drew her capital from Uncle Oelbermann,
and little by little her original interest of twenty-five dollars a
month dwindled.
One day she presented herself again in the office of the whole-sale toy
store.
“Will you let me have a check for two hundred dollars, Uncle
Oelbermann?” she said.
The great man laid down his fountain pen and leaned back in his swivel
chair with great deliberation.
“I don't understand, Mrs. McTeague,” he said. “Every week you come here
and draw out a little of your money. I've told you that it is not at all
regular or business-like for me to let you have it this way. And more
than this, it's a great inconvenience to me to give you these checks at
unstated times. If you wish to draw out the whole amount let's have some
understanding. Draw it in monthly installments of, say, five hundred
dollars, or else,” he added, abruptly, “draw it all at once, now,
to-day. I would even prefer it that way. Otherwise it's--it's annoying.
Come, shall I draw you a check for thirty-seven hundred, and have it
over and done with?”
“No, no,” cried Trina, with instinctive apprehension, refusing, she did
not know why. “No, I'll leave it with you. I won't draw out any more.”
She took her departure, but paused on the pavement outside the store,
and stood for a moment lost in thought, her eyes beginning to glisten
and her breath coming short. Slowly she turned about and reentered the
store; she came back into the office, and stood trembling at the corner
of Uncle Oelbermann's desk. He looked up sharply. Twice Trina tried to
get her voice, and when it did come to her, she could hardly recognize
it. Between breaths she said:
“Yes, all right--I'll--you can give me--will you give me a check for
thirty-seven hundred? Give me ALL of my money.”
A few hours later she entered her little room over the kindergarten,
bolted the door with shaking fingers, and emptied a heavy canvas sack
upon the middle of her bed. Then she opened her trunk, and taking thence
the brass match-box and chamois-skin bag added their contents to the
pile. Next she laid herself upon the bed and gathered the gleaming heaps
of gold pieces to her with both arms, burying her face in them with long
sighs of unspeakable delight.
It was a little past noon, and the day was fine and warm. The leaves
of the huge cherry trees threw off a certain pungent aroma that entered
through the open window, together with long thin shafts of golden
sunlight. Below, in the kindergarten, the children were singing gayly
and marching to the jangling of the piano. Trina heard nothing, saw
nothing. She lay on her bed, her eyes closed, her face buried in a pile
of gold that she encircled with both her arms.
Trina even told herself at last that she was happy once more. McTeague
became a memory--a memory that faded a little every day--dim and
indistinct in the golden splendor of five thousand dollars.
“And yet,” Trina would say, “I did love Mac, loved him dearly, only a
little while ago. Even when he hurt me, it only made me love him more.
How is it I've changed so sudden? How COULD I forget him so soon? It
must be because he stole my money. That is it. I couldn't forgive anyone
that--no, not even my MOTHER. And I never--never--will forgive him.”
What had become of her husband Trina did not know. She never saw any of
the old Polk Street people. There was no way she could have news of him,
even if she had cared to have it. She had her money, that was the main
thing. Her passion for it excluded every other sentiment. There it was
in the bottom of her trunk, in the canvas sack, the chamois-skin bag,
and the little brass match-safe. Not a day passed that Trina did not
have it out where she could see and touch it. One evening she had even
spread all the gold pieces between the sheets, and had then gone to
bed, stripping herself, and had slept all night upon the money, taking a
strange and ecstatic pleasure in the touch of the smooth flat pieces the
length of her entire body.
One night, some three months after she had come to live at the
kindergarten, Trina was awakened by a sharp tap on the pane of the
window. She sat up quickly in bed, her heart beating thickly, her eyes
rolling wildly in the direction of her trunk. The tap was repeated.
Trina rose and went fearfully to the window. The little court below
was bright with moonlight, and standing just on the edge of the shadow
thrown by one of the cherry trees was McTeague. A bunch of half-ripe
cherries was in his hand. He was eating them and throwing the pits at
the window. As he caught sight of her, he made an eager sign for her to
raise the sash. Reluctant and wondering, Trina obeyed, and the dentist
came quickly forward. He was wearing a pair of blue overalls;
a navy-blue flannel shirt without a cravat; an old coat, faded,
rain-washed, and ripped at the seams; and his woollen cap.
“Say, Trina,” he exclaimed, his heavy bass voice pitched just above
a whisper, “let me in, will you, huh? Say, will you? I'm regularly
starving, and I haven't slept in a Christian bed for two weeks.”
At sight at him standing there in the moonlight, Trina could only think
of him as the man who had beaten and bitten her, had deserted her and
stolen her money, had made her suffer as she had never suffered before
in all her life. Now that he had spent the money that he had stolen from
her, he was whining to come back--so that he might steal more, no doubt.
Once in her room he could not help but smell out her five thousand
dollars. Her indignation rose.
“No,” she whispered back at him. “No, I will not let you in.”
“But listen here, Trina, I tell you I am starving, regularly----”
“Hoh!” interrupted Trina scornfully. “A man can't starve with four
hundred dollars, I guess.”
“Well--well--I--well--” faltered the dentist. “Never mind now. Give me
something to eat, an' let me in an' sleep. I've been sleeping in the
Plaza for the last ten nights, and say, I--Damn it, Trina, I ain't had
anything to eat since--”
“Where's the four hundred dollars you robbed me of when you deserted
me?” returned Trina, coldly.
“Well, I've spent it,” growled the dentist. “But you CAN'T see me
starve, Trina, no matter what's happened. Give me a little money, then.”
“I'll see you starve before you get any more of MY money.”
The dentist stepped back a pace and stared up at her wonder-stricken.
His face was lean and pinched. Never had the jaw bone looked so
enormous, nor the square-cut head so huge. The moonlight made deep black
shadows in the shrunken cheeks.
“Huh?” asked the dentist, puzzled. “What did you say?”
“I won't give you any money--never again--not a cent.”
“But do you know that I'm hungry?”
“Well, I've been hungry myself. Besides, I DON'T believe you.”
“Trina, I ain't had a thing to eat since yesterday morning; that's God's
truth. Even if I did get off with your money, you CAN'T see me starve,
can you? You can't see me walk the streets all night because I ain't got
a place to sleep. Will you let me in? Say, will you? Huh?”
“No.”
“Well, will you give me some money then--just a little? Give me a
dollar. Give me half a dol--Say, give me a DIME, an' I can get a cup of
coffee.”
“No.”
The dentist paused and looked at her with curious intentness,
bewildered, nonplussed.
“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 to-morrow. 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 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 second-hand
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 second-hand 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 second-hand 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' I got to do this. I got to work like a dray horse while she sits at
home by her stove and counts her money--and sells my concertina.”
Six o'clock came. Instead of supper, McTeague drank some more whiskey,
five ponies in rapid succession. After supper he was obliged to go out
with the dray to deliver a concert grand at the Odd Fellows' Hall, where
a piano “recital” was to take place.
“Ain't you coming back with us?” asked one of the handlers as he climbed
upon the driver's seat after the piano had been put in place.
“No, no,” returned the dentist; “I got something else to do.” The
brilliant lights of a saloon near the City Hall caught his eye. He
decided he would have another drink of whiskey. It was about eight
o'clock.
The following day was to be a fete day at the kindergarten, the
Christmas and New Year festivals combined. All that afternoon the little
two-story building on Pacific Street had been filled with a number of
grand ladies of the Kindergarten Board, who were hanging up ropes of
evergreen and sprays of holly, and arranging a great Christmas tree that
stood in the centre of the ring in the schoolroom. The whole place was
pervaded with a pungent, piney odor. Trina had been very busy since the
early morning, coming and going at everybody's call, now running down
the street after another tack-hammer or a fresh supply of cranberries,
now tying together the ropes of evergreen and passing them up to one of
the grand ladies as she carefully balanced herself on a step-ladder. By
evening everything was in place. As the last grand lady left the school,
she gave Trina an extra dollar for her work, and said:
“Now, if you'll just tidy up here, Mrs. McTeague, I think that will
be all. Sweep up the pine needles here--you see they are all over the
floor--and look through all the rooms, and tidy up generally. Good
night--and a Happy New Year,” she cried pleasantly as she went out.
Trina put the dollar away in her trunk before she did anything else and
cooked herself a bit of supper. Then she came downstairs again.
The kindergarten was not large. On the lower floor were but two rooms,
the main schoolroom and another room, a cloakroom, very small, where the
children hung their hats and coats. This cloakroom opened off the back
of the main schoolroom. Trina cast a critical glance into both of these
rooms. There had been a great deal of going and coming in them during
the day, and she decided that the first thing to do would be to scrub
the floors. She went up again to her room overhead and heated some water
over her oil stove; then, re-descending, set to work vigorously.
By nine o'clock she had almost finished with the schoolroom. She was
down on her hands and knees in the midst of a steaming muck of soapy
water. On her feet were a pair of man's shoes fastened with buckles;
a dirty cotton gown, damp with the water, clung about her shapeless,
stunted figure. From time to time she sat back on her heels to ease the
strain of her position, and with one smoking hand, white and parboiled
with the hot water, brushed her hair, already streaked with gray, out of
her weazened, pale face and the corners of her mouth.
It was very quiet. A gas-jet without a globe lit up the place with a
crude, raw light. The cat who lived on the premises, preferring to be
dirty rather than to be wet, had got into the coal scuttle, and over its
rim watched her sleepily with a long, complacent purr.
All at once he stopped purring, leaving an abrupt silence in the air
like the sudden shutting off of a stream of water, while his eyes grew
wide, two lambent disks of yellow in the heap of black fur.
“Who is there?” cried Trina, sitting back on her heels. In the stillness
that succeeded, the water dripped from her hands with the steady tick of
a clock. Then a brutal fist swung open the street door of the schoolroom
and McTeague came in. He was drunk; not with that drunkenness which is
stupid, maudlin, wavering on its feet, but with that which is alert,
unnaturally intelligent, vicious, perfectly steady, deadly wicked. Trina
only had to look once at him, and in an instant, with some strange sixth
sense, born of the occasion, knew what she had to expect.
She jumped up and ran from him into the little cloakroom. She locked and
bolted the door after her, and leaned her weight against it, panting and
trembling, every nerve shrinking and quivering with the fear of him.
McTeague put his hand on the knob of the door outside and opened it,
tearing off the lock and bolt guard, and sending her staggering across
the room.
“Mac,” she cried to him, as he came in, speaking with horrid rapidity,
cringing and holding out her hands, “Mac, listen. Wait a minute--look
here--listen here. It wasn't my fault. I'll give you some money. You can
come back. I'll do ANYTHING you want. Won't you just LISTEN to me? Oh,
don't! I'll scream. I can't help it, you know. The people will hear.”
McTeague came towards her slowly, his immense feet dragging and grinding
on the floor; his enormous fists, hard as wooden mallets, swinging at
his sides. Trina backed from him to the corner of the room, cowering
before him, holding her elbow crooked in front of her face, watching him
with fearful intentness, ready to dodge.
“I want that money,” he said, pausing in front of her.
“What money?” cried Trina.
“I want that money. You got it--that five thousand dollars. I want every
nickel of it! You understand?”
“I haven't it. It isn't here. Uncle Oelbermann's got it.”
“That's a lie. He told me that you came and got it. You've had it long
enough; now I want it. Do you hear?”
“Mac, I can't give you that money. I--I WON'T give it to you,” Trina
cried, with sudden resolution.
“Yes, you will. You'll give me every nickel of it.”
“No, NO.”
“You ain't going to make small of me this time. Give me that money.”
“NO.”
“For the last time, will you give me that money?”
“No.”
“You won't, huh? You won't give me it? For the last time.”
“No, NO.”
Usually the dentist was slow in his movements, but now the alcohol had
awakened in him an ape-like agility. He kept his small eyes upon her,
and all at once sent his fist into the middle of her face with the
suddenness of a relaxed spring.
Beside herself with terror, Trina turned and fought him back; fought for
her miserable life with the exasperation and strength of a harassed cat;
and with such energy and such wild, unnatural force, that even McTeague
for the moment drew back from her. But her resistance was the one thing
to drive him to the top of his fury. He came back at her again, his eyes
drawn to two fine twinkling points, and his enormous fists, clenched
till the knuckles whitened, raised in the air.
Then it became abominable.
In the schoolroom outside, behind the coal scuttle, the cat listened to
the sounds of stamping and struggling and the muffled noise of blows,
wildly terrified, his eyes bulging like brass knobs. At last the sounds
stopped on a sudden; he heard nothing more. Then McTeague came out,
closing the door. The cat followed him with distended eyes as he crossed
the room and disappeared through the street door.
The dentist paused for a moment on the sidewalk, looking carefully up
and down the street. It was deserted and quiet. He turned sharply to the
right and went down a narrow passage that led into the little court yard
behind the school. A candle was burning in Trina's room. He went up by
the outside stairway and entered.
The trunk stood locked in one corner of the room. The dentist took the
lid-lifter from the little oil stove, put it underneath the lock-clasp
and wrenched it open. Groping beneath a pile of dresses he found the
chamois-skin bag, the little brass match-box, and, at the very bottom,
carefully thrust into one corner, the canvas sack crammed to the mouth
with twenty-dollar gold pieces. He emptied the chamois-skin bag and the
matchbox into the pockets of his trousers. But the canvas sack was too
bulky to hide about his clothes. “I guess I'll just naturally have to
carry YOU,” he muttered. He blew out the candle, closed the door, and
gained the street again.
The dentist crossed the city, going back to the music store. It was a
little after eleven o'clock. The night was moonless, filled with a gray
blur of faint light that seemed to come from all quarters of the horizon
at once. From time to time there were sudden explosions of a southeast
wind at the street corners. McTeague went on, slanting his head against
the gusts, to keep his cap from blowing off, carrying the sack close to
his side. Once he looked critically at the sky.
“I bet it'll rain to-morrow,” he muttered, “if this wind works round to
the south.”
Once in his little den behind the music store, he washed his hands and
forearms, and put on his working clothes, blue overalls and a
jumper, over cheap trousers and vest. Then he got together his small
belongings--an old campaign hat, a pair of boots, a tin of tobacco,
and a pinchbeck bracelet which he had found one Sunday in the Park, and
which he believed to be valuable. He stripped his blanket from his bed
and rolled up in it all these objects, together with the canvas sack,
fastening the roll with a half hitch such as miners use, the instincts
of the old-time car-boy coming back to him in his present confusion
of mind. He changed his pipe and his knife--a huge jackknife with a
yellowed bone handle--to the pockets of his overalls.
Then at last he stood with his hand on the door, holding up the lamp
before blowing it out, looking about to make sure he was ready to go.
The wavering light woke his canary. It stirred and began to chitter
feebly, very sleepy and cross at being awakened. McTeague started,
staring at it, and reflecting. He believed that it would be a long
time before anyone came into that room again. The canary would be days
without food; it was likely it would starve, would die there, hour by
hour, in its little gilt prison. McTeague resolved to take it with him.
He took down the cage, touching it gently with his enormous hands, and
tied a couple of sacks about it to shelter the little bird from the
sharp night wind.
Then he went out, locking all the doors behind him, and turned toward
the ferry slips. The boats had ceased running hours ago, but he told
himself that by waiting till four o'clock he could get across the bay on
the tug that took over the morning papers.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Trina lay unconscious, just as she had fallen under the last of
McTeague's blows, her body twitching with an occasional hiccough that
stirred the pool of blood in which she lay face downward. Towards
morning she died with a rapid series of hiccoughs that sounded like a
piece of clockwork running down.
The thing had been done in the cloakroom where the kindergarten children
hung their hats and coats. There was no other entrance except by going
through the main schoolroom. McTeague going out had shut the door of
the cloakroom, but had left the street door open; so when the children
arrived in the morning, they entered as usual.
About half-past eight, two or three five-year-olds, one a little colored
girl, came into the schoolroom of the kindergarten with a great chatter
of voices, going across to the cloakroom to hang up their hats and coats
as they had been taught.
Half way across the room one of them stopped and put her small nose
in the air, crying, “Um-o-o, what a funnee smell!” The others began to
sniff the air as well, and one, the daughter of a butcher, exclaimed,
“'Tsmells like my pa's shop,” adding in the next breath, “Look, what's
the matter with the kittee?”
In fact, the cat was acting strangely. He lay quite flat on the floor,
his nose pressed close to the crevice under the door of the little
cloakroom, winding his tail slowly back and forth, excited, very eager.
At times he would draw back and make a strange little clacking noise
down in his throat.
“Ain't he funnee?” said the little girl again. The cat slunk swiftly
away as the children came up. Then the tallest of the little girls swung
the door of the little cloakroom wide open and they all ran in.