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

discovery; all the women folk of the flat were yet vibrant with it. Old Grannis came home from his work at four o’clock, and between that time and six Miss Baker would sit in her room, her hands idle in her lap, doing nothing, listening, waiting. Old Grannis did the same, drawing his armchair near to the wall, knowing that Miss Baker was upon the other side, conscious, perhaps, that she was thinking of him; and there the two would sit through the hours of the afternoon, listening and waiting, they did not know exactly for what, but near to each other, separated only by the thin partition of their rooms. They had come to know each other’s habits. Old Grannis knew that at quarter of five precisely Miss Baker made a cup of tea over the oil stove on the stand between the bureau and the window. Miss Baker felt instinctively the exact moment when Old Grannis took down his little binding apparatus from the second shelf of his clothes closet and began his favorite occupation of binding pamphlets⁠—pamphlets that he never read, for all that.

In his Parlors McTeague began his week’s work. He glanced in the glass saucer in which he kept his sponge-gold, and noticing that he had used up all his pellets, set about making some more. In examining Miss Baker’s teeth at the preliminary sitting he had found a cavity in one of the incisors. Miss Baker had decided to have it filled with gold. McTeague remembered now that it was what is called a “proximate case,” where there is not sufficient room to fill with large pieces of gold. He told himself that he should have to use “mats” in the filling. He made some dozen of these “mats” from his tape of non-cohesive gold, cutting it transversely into small pieces that could be inserted edgewise between the teeth and consolidated by packing. After he had made his “mats” he continued with the other kind of gold fillings, such as he would have occasion to use during the week; “blocks” to be used in large proximal cavities, made by folding the tape on itself a number of times and then shaping it with the soldering pliers; “cylinders” for commencing fillings, which he formed by rolling the tape around a needle called a “broach,” cutting it afterwards into different lengths. He worked slowly, mechanically, turning the foil between his fingers with the manual dexterity that one sometimes sees in stupid persons. His head was quite empty of all thought, and he did not whistle over his work as another man might have done. The canary made up for his silence, trilling and chittering continually, splashing about in its morning bath, keeping up an incessant noise and movement that would have been maddening to anyone but McTeague, who seemed to have no nerves at all.

After he had finished his fillings, he made a hook broach from a bit of piano wire to replace an old one that he had lost. It was time for his dinner then, and when he returned from the car conductors’ coffee-joint, he found Miss Baker waiting for him.

The ancient little dressmaker was at all times willing to talk of Old Grannis to anybody that would listen, quite unconscious of the gossip of the flat. McTeague found her all aflutter with excitement. Something extraordinary had happened. She had found out that the wallpaper in Old Grannis’s room was the same as that in hers.

“It has led me to thinking, Doctor McTeague,” she exclaimed, shaking her little false curls at him. “You know my room is so small, anyhow, and the wallpaper being the same⁠—the pattern from my room continues right into his⁠—I declare, I believe at one time that was all one room. Think of it, do you suppose it was? It almost amounts to our occupying the same room. I don’t know⁠—why, really⁠—do you think I should speak to the landlady about it? He bound pamphlets last night until half-past nine. They say that he’s the younger son of a baronet; that there are reasons for his not coming to the title; his stepfather wronged him cruelly.”

No one had ever said such a thing. It was preposterous to imagine any mystery connected with Old Grannis. Miss Baker had chosen to invent the little fiction, had created the title and the unjust stepfather from some dim memories of the novels of her girlhood.

She took her place in the operating chair. McTeague began the filling. There was a long silence. It was impossible for McTeague to work and talk at the same time.

He was just burnishing the last “mat” in Miss Baker’s tooth, when the door of the Parlors opened, jangling the bell which he had hung over it, and which was absolutely unnecessary. McTeague turned, one foot on the pedal of his dental engine, the corundum disk whirling between his fingers.

It was Marcus Schouler who came in, ushering a young girl of about twenty.

“Hello, Mac,” exclaimed Marcus; “busy? Brought my cousin round about that broken tooth.”

McTeague nodded his head gravely.

“In a minute,” he answered.

Marcus and his cousin Trina sat down in the rigid chairs underneath the steel engraving of the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici. They began talking in low tones. The girl looked about the room, noticing the stone pug dog, the rifle manufacturer’s calendar, the canary in its little gilt prison, and the tumbled blankets on the unmade bed-lounge against the wall. Marcus began telling her about McTeague. “We’re pals,” he explained, just above a whisper. “Ah, Mac’s all right, you bet. Say, Trina, he’s the strongest duck you ever saw. What do you suppose? He can pull out your teeth with his fingers; yes, he can. What do you think of that? With his fingers, mind you; he can, for a fact. Get on to the size of him, anyhow. Ah, Mac’s all right!”

Maria Macapa had come into the room while he had been speaking. She was making up