McTeague | Page 3

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McTeague A Story of San Francisco
by Frank Norris

CHAPTER 1
It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague
took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors'
coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone
meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of
suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his
office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna's saloon and bought a
pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his
way to dinner.
Once in his office, or, as he called it on his signboard, "Dental Parlors,"
he took off his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and, having
crammed his little stove full of coke, lay back in his operating chair at
the bay window, reading the paper, drinking his beer, and smoking his

huge porcelain pipe while his food digested; crop-full, stupid, and
warm. By and by, gorged with steam beer, and overcome by the heat of
the room, the cheap tobacco, and the effects of his heavy meal, he
dropped off to sleep. Late in the afternoon his canary bird, in its gilt
cage just over his head, began to sing. He woke slowly, finished the
rest of his beer--very flat and stale by this time--and taking down his
concertina from the bookcase, where in week days it kept the company
of seven volumes of "Allen's Practical Dentist," played upon it some
half-dozen very mournful airs.
McTeague looked forward to these Sunday afternoons as a period of
relaxation and enjoyment. He invariably spent them in the same fashion.
These were his only pleasures--to eat, to smoke, to sleep, and to play
upon his concertina.
The six lugubrious airs that he knew, always carried him back to the
time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County,
ten years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling
the heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his
father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady,
hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an
irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.
McTeague remembered his mother, too, who, with the help of the
Chinaman, cooked for forty miners. She was an overworked drudge,
fiery and energetic for all that, filled with the one idea of having her
son rise in life and enter a profession. The chance had come at last
when the father died, corroded with alcohol, collapsing in a few hours.
Two or three years later a travelling dentist visited the mine and put up
his tent near the bunk-house. He was more or less of a charlatan, but he
fired Mrs. McTeague's ambition, and young McTeague went away with
him to learn his profession. He had learnt it after a fashion, mostly by
watching the charlatan operate. He had read many of the necessary
books, but he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from them.
Then one day at San Francisco had come the news of his mother's death;
she had left him some money--not much, but enough to set him up in
business; so he had cut loose from the charlatan and had opened his

"Dental Parlors" on Polk Street, an "accommodation street" of small
shops in the residence quarter of the town. Here he had slowly collected
a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks, and car conductors.
He made but few acquaintances. Polk Street called him the "Doctor"
and spoke of his enormous strength. For McTeague was a young giant,
carrying his huge shock of blond hair six feet three inches from the
ground; moving his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle,
slowly, ponderously. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with
a fell of stiff yellow hair; they were hard