McTeague | Page 6

got up and
swung himself off the platform, waving goodby 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 up-stairs 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 the suburbs. McTeague began to
wonder dimly how it was that on this occasion Marcus had not gone
home with his cousin. As sometimes happens, Marcus furnished the
explanation upon the instant.
"I promised a duck up here on the avenue I'd call for his dog at four this
afternoon."
Marcus was Old Grannis's assistant in a little dog hospital that the latter
had opened in a sort of alley just off Polk Street, some four blocks
above Old Grannis lived in one of the back rooms of McTeague's flat.
He was an Englishman and an expert dog surgeon, but Marcus
Schouler was a bungler in the profession. His father had been a
veterinary surgeon who had kept a livery stable near by, on California
Street, and Marcus's knowledge of the diseases of domestic animals
had been picked up in a haphazard way, much after the manner of
McTeague's education. Somehow he managed to impress Old Grannis,
a gentle, simple-minded old man, with a sense of his fitness,
bewildering him with a torrent of empty phrases that he delivered with
fierce gestures and with a manner of the greatest conviction.
"You'd better come along with me, Mac," observed Marcus. "We'll get
the duck's dog, and then we'll take a little walk, huh? You got nothun to
do. Come along."
McTeague went out with him, and the two friends proceeded up to the
avenue to the house where the dog was to be found. It was a huge
mansion-like place, set in an enormous garden that occupied a whole
third of the block; and while Marcus tramped up the front