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.
