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

simultaneous talk. He could not make out what it was all about. Could he have offended Marcus again?

“What? What? Huh? What is it?” he exclaimed in perplexity, looking from one to the other.

“Come on, you must rastle me again,” shouted Marcus.

“Sure, sure,” cried the dentist. “I’ll rastle you again. I’ll rastle everybody,” he cried, suddenly struck with an idea. Trina looked on in some apprehension.

“Mark gets so mad,” she said, half aloud.

“Yes,” admitted Selina. “Mister Schouler’s got an awful quick temper, but he ain’t afraid of anything.”

“All ready!” shouted Ryer.

This time Marcus was more careful. Twice, as McTeague rushed at him, he slipped cleverly away. But as the dentist came in a third time, with his head bowed, Marcus, raising himself to his full height, caught him with both arms around the neck. The dentist gripped at him and rent away the sleeve of his shirt. There was a great laugh.

“Keep your shirt on,” cried Mrs. Ryer.

The two men were grappling at each other wildly. The party could hear them panting and grunting as they labored and struggled. Their boots tore up great clods of turf. Suddenly they came to the ground with a tremendous shock. But even as they were in the act of falling, Marcus, like a very eel, writhed in the dentist’s clasp and fell upon his side. McTeague crashed down upon him like the collapse of a felled ox.

“Now, you gotta turn him on his back,” shouted Heise to the dentist. “He ain’t down if you don’t.”

With his huge salient chin digging into Marcus’s shoulder, the dentist heaved and tugged. His face was flaming, his huge shock of yellow hair fell over his forehead, matted with sweat. Marcus began to yield despite his frantic efforts. One shoulder was down, now the other began to go; gradually, gradually it was forced over. The little audience held its breath in the suspense of the moment. Selina broke the silence, calling out shrilly:

“Ain’t Doctor McTeague just that strong!”

Marcus heard it, and his fury came instantly to a head. Rage at his defeat at the hands of the dentist and before Selina’s eyes, the hate he still bore his old-time “pal” and the impotent wrath of his own powerlessness were suddenly unleashed.

“God damn you! get off of me,” he cried under his breath, spitting the words as a snake spits its venom. The little audience uttered a cry. With the oath Marcus had twisted his head and had bitten through the lobe of the dentist’s ear. There was a sudden flash of bright-red blood.

Then followed a terrible scene. The brute that in McTeague lay so close to the surface leaped instantly to life, monstrous, not to be resisted. He sprang to his feet with a shrill and meaningless clamor, totally unlike the ordinary bass of his speaking tones. It was the hideous yelling of a hurt beast, the squealing of a wounded elephant. He framed no words; in the rush of high-pitched sound that issued from his wide-open mouth there was nothing articulate. It was something no longer human; it was rather an echo from the jungle.

Sluggish enough and slow to anger on ordinary occasions, McTeague when finally aroused became another man. His rage was a kind of obsession, an evil mania, the drunkenness of passion, the exalted and perverted fury of the Berserker, blind and deaf, a thing insensate.

As he rose he caught Marcus’s wrist in both his hands. He did not strike, he did not know what he was doing. His only idea was to batter the life out of the man before him, to crush and annihilate him upon the instant. Gripping his enemy in his enormous hands, hard and knotted, and covered with a stiff fell of yellow hair⁠—the hands of the old-time carboy⁠—he swung him wide, as a hammer-thrower swings his hammer. Marcus’s feet flipped from the ground, he spun through the air about McTeague as helpless as a bundle of clothes. All at once there was a sharp snap, almost like the report of a small pistol. Then Marcus rolled over and over upon the ground as McTeague released his grip; his arm, the one the dentist had seized, bending suddenly, as though a third joint had formed between wrist and elbow. The arm was broken.

But by this time every one was crying out at once. Heise and Ryan ran in between the two men. Selina turned her head away. Trina was wringing her hands and crying in an agony of dread:

“Oh, stop them, stop them! Don’t let them fight. Oh, it’s too awful.”

“Here, here, Doc, quit. Don’t make a fool of yourself,” cried Heise, clinging to the dentist. “That’s enough now. Listen to me, will you?”

“Oh, Mac, Mac,” cried Trina, running to her husband. “Mac, dear, listen; it’s me, it’s Trina, look at me, you⁠—”

“Get hold of his other arm, will you, Ryer?” panted Heise. “Quick!”

“Mac, Mac,” cried Trina, her arms about his neck.

“For God’s sake, hold up, Doc, will you?” shouted the harness-maker. “You don’t want to kill him, do you?”

Mrs. Ryer and Heise’s lame wife were filling the air with their outcries. Selina was giggling with hysteria. Marcus, terrified, but too brave to run, had picked up a jagged stone with his left hand and stood on the defensive. His swollen right arm, from which the shirt sleeve had been torn, dangled at his side, the back of the hand twisted where the palm should have been. The shirt itself was a mass of grass stains and was spotted with the dentist’s blood.

But McTeague, in the centre of the group that struggled to hold him, was nigh to madness. The side of his face, his neck, and all the shoulder and breast of his shirt were covered with blood. He had ceased to cry out, but kept muttering between his gripped jaws, as he labored to tear himself free of the retaining hands:

“Ah, I’ll kill him! Ah, I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him! Damn you, Heise,” he exclaimed suddenly, trying to strike the