McTeague | Page 4

as wooden mallets, strong as
vises, the hands of the old-time car-boy. Often he dispensed with
forceps and extracted a refractory tooth with his thumb and finger. His
head was square-cut, angular; the jaw salient, like that of the carnivora.
McTeague's mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish. Yet
there was nothing vicious about the man. Altogether he suggested the
draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient.
When he opened his "Dental Parlors," he felt that his life was a success,
that he could hope for nothing better. In spite of the name, there was
but one room. It was a corner room on the second floor over the branch
post-office, and faced the street. McTeague made it do for a bedroom
as well, sleeping on the big bed-lounge against the wall opposite the
window. There was a washstand behind the screen in the corner where
he manufactured his moulds. In the round bay window were his
operating chair, his dental engine, and the movable rack on which he
laid out his instruments. Three chairs, a bargain at the second-hand
store, ranged themselves against the wall with military precision
underneath a steel engraving of the court of Lorenzo de' Medici, which
he had bought because there were a great many figures in it for the
money. Over the bed-lounge hung a rifle manufacturer's advertisement
calendar which he never used. The other ornaments were a small
marble-topped centre table covered with back numbers of "The
American System of Dentistry," a stone pug dog sitting before the little
stove, and a thermometer. A stand of shelves occupied one corner,
filled with the seven volumes of "Allen's Practical Dentist." On the top
shelf McTeague kept his concertina and a bag of bird seed for the
canary. The whole place exhaled a mingled odor of bedding, creosote,

and ether.
But for one thing, McTeague would have been perfectly contented. Just
outside his window was his signboard--a modest affair--that read:
"Doctor McTeague. Dental Parlors. Gas Given"; but that was all. It was
his ambition, his dream, to have projecting from that corner window a
huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous
and attractive. He would have it some day, on that he was resolved; but
as yet such a thing was far beyond his means.
When he had finished the last of his beer, McTeague slowly wiped his
lips and huge yellow mustache with the side of his hand. Bull-like, he
heaved himself laboriously up, and, going to the window, stood looking
down into the street.
The street never failed to interest him. It was one of those cross streets
peculiar to Western cities, situated in the heart of the residence quarter,
but occupied by small tradespeople who lived in the rooms above their
shops. There were corner drug stores with huge jars of red, yellow, and
green liquids in their windows, very brave and gay; stationers' stores,
where illustrated weeklies were tacked upon bulletin boards; barber
shops with cigar stands in their vestibules; sad-looking plumbers'
offices; cheap restaurants, in whose windows one saw piles of
unopened oysters weighted down by cubes of ice, and china pigs and
cows knee deep in layers of white beans. At one end of the street
McTeague could see the huge power-house of the cable line.
Immediately opposite him was a great market; while farther on, over
the chimney stacks of the intervening houses, the glass roof of some
huge public baths glittered like crystal in the afternoon sun. Underneath
him the branch post-office was opening its doors, as was its custom
between two and three o'clock on Sunday afternoons. An acrid odor of
ink rose upward to him. Occasionally a cable car passed, trundling
heavily, with a strident whirring of jostled glass windows.
On week days the street was very lively. It woke to its work about
seven o'clock, at the time when the newsboys made their appearance
together with the day laborers. The laborers went trudging past in a
straggling file--plumbers' apprentices, their pockets stuffed with

sections of lead pipe, tweezers, and pliers; carpenters, carrying nothing
but their little pasteboard lunch baskets painted to imitate leather; gangs
of street workers, their overalls soiled with yellow clay, their picks and
long-handled shovels over their shoulders; plasterers, spotted with lime
from head to foot. This little army of workers, tramping steadily in one
direction, met and mingled with other toilers of a different
description--conductors and "swing men" of the cable company going
on duty; heavy-eyed night clerks from the drug stores on their way
home to sleep; roundsmen returning to the precinct police station to
make their night report, and Chinese market gardeners teetering past
under their heavy baskets. The cable cars began to fill up; all along the
street could be seen the shopkeepers