McTeague, Frank Norris [polar express read aloud .txt] 📗

From noon to evening the population of the street was of a mixed character. The street was busiest at that time; a vast and prolonged murmur arose⁠—the mingled shuffling of feet, the rattle of wheels, the heavy trundling of cable cars. At four o’clock the school children once more swarmed the sidewalks, again disappearing with surprising suddenness. At six the great homeward march commenced; the cars were crowded, the laborers thronged the sidewalks, the newsboys chanted the evening papers. Then all at once the street fell quiet; hardly a soul was in sight; the sidewalks were deserted. It was supper hour. Evening began; and one by one a multitude of lights, from the demoniac glare of the druggists’ windows to the dazzling blue whiteness of the electric globes, grew thick from street corner to street corner. Once more the street was crowded. Now there was no thought but for amusement. The cable cars were loaded with theatregoers⁠—men in high hats and young girls in furred opera cloaks. On the sidewalks were groups and couples⁠—the plumbers’ apprentices, the girls of the ribbon counters, the little families that lived on the second stories over their shops, the dressmakers, the small doctors, the harness-makers⁠—all the various inhabitants of the street were abroad, strolling idly from shop window to shop window, taking the air after the day’s work. Groups of girls collected on the corners, talking and laughing very loud, making remarks upon the young men that passed them. The tamale men appeared. A band of Salvationists began to sing before a saloon.

Then, little by little, Polk Street dropped back to solitude. Eleven o’clock struck from the powerhouse clock. Lights were extinguished. At one o’clock the cable stopped, leaving an abrupt silence in the air. All at once it seemed very still. The ugly noises were the occasional footfalls of a policeman and the persistent calling of ducks and geese in the closed market. The street was asleep.

Day after day, McTeague saw the same panorama unroll itself. The bay window of his Dental Parlors was for him a point of vantage from which he watched the world go past.

On Sundays, however, all was changed. As he stood in the bay window, after finishing his beer, wiping his lips, and looking out into the street, McTeague was conscious of the difference. Nearly all the stores were closed. No wagons passed. A few people hurried up and down the sidewalks, dressed in cheap Sunday finery. A cable car went by; on the outside seats were a party of returning picnickers. The mother, the father, a young man, and a young girl, and three children. The two older people held empty lunch baskets in their laps, while the bands of the children’s hats were stuck full of oak leaves. The girl carried a huge bunch of wilting poppies and wild flowers.

As the car approached McTeague’s window the young man got up and swung himself off the platform, waving goodbye to the party. Suddenly McTeague recognized him.

“There’s Marcus Schouler,” he muttered behind his mustache.

Marcus Schouler was the dentist’s one intimate friend. The acquaintance had begun at the car conductors’ coffee-joint, where the two occupied the same table and met at every meal. Then they made the discovery that they both lived in the same flat, Marcus occupying a room on the floor above McTeague. On different occasions McTeague had treated Marcus for an ulcerated tooth and had refused to accept payment. Soon it came to be an understood thing between them. They were “pals.”

McTeague, listening, heard Marcus go upstairs to his room above. In a few minutes his door opened again. McTeague knew that he had come out into the hall and was leaning over the banisters.

“Oh, Mac!” he called. McTeague came to his door.

“Hullo! ’sthat you, Mark?”

“Sure,” answered Marcus. “Come on up.”

“You come on down.”

“No, come on up.”

“Oh, you come on down.”

“Oh, you lazy duck!” retorted Marcus, coming down the stairs.

“Been out to the Cliff House on a picnic,” he explained as he sat down on the bed-lounge, “with my uncle and his people⁠—the Sieppes, you know. By damn! it was hot,” he suddenly vociferated. “Just look at that! Just look at that!” he cried, dragging at his limp collar. “That’s the third one since morning; it is⁠—it is, for a fact⁠—and you got your stove going.” He began to tell about the picnic, talking very loud and fast, gesturing furiously, very excited over trivial details. Marcus could not talk without getting excited.

“You ought t’have seen, y’ought t’have seen. I tell you, it was outa sight. It was; it was, for a fact.”

“Yes, yes,” answered McTeague, bewildered, trying to follow. “Yes, that’s so.”

In recounting a certain dispute with an awkward bicyclist, in which it appeared he had become involved, Marcus quivered with rage. “ ‘Say that again,’ says I to um. ‘Just say that once more, and’ ”⁠—here a rolling explosion of oaths⁠—“ ‘you’ll go back to the city in the Morgue wagon. Ain’t I got a right to cross a street even, I’d like to know, without being run down⁠—what?’ I say it’s outrageous. I’d a knifed him in another minute. It was an outrage. I say it was an outrage.”

“Sure it was,” McTeague hastened to reply. “Sure, sure.”

“Oh, and we had an accident,” shouted the other, suddenly off on another tack. “It was awful. Trina was in the swing there⁠—that’s my cousin Trina, you know who I mean⁠—and she fell out. By damn! I thought she’d killed herself; struck her face on a rock and knocked out a front tooth. It’s a wonder she didn’t kill herself. It is a wonder; it is, for a fact. Ain’t it, now? Huh? Ain’t it? Y’ought t’have seen.”

McTeague had a vague idea that Marcus Schouler was stuck on his cousin Trina. They “kept company” a good deal; Marcus took dinner with the Sieppes every Saturday evening at their home at B Street station, across the bay, and Sunday afternoons he and the family usually made little excursions into