Chapter 13
One morning about a week after Marcus had left for the southern part
of the State, McTeague found an oblong letter thrust through the
letter-drop of the door of his "Parlors." The address was typewritten. He opened it. The letter had been sent from the City Hall and was stamped in one corner with the seal of the State of California, very official; the form and file numbers superscribed.
McTeague had been making fillings when this letter arrived. He was in
his "Parlors," pottering over his movable rack underneath the bird cage
in the bay window. He was making "blocks" to be used in large proximal
cavities and "cylinders" for commencing fillings. He heard the postman's
step in the hall and saw the envelopes begin to shuttle themselves
through the slit of his letter-drop. Then came the fat oblong envelope, with its official seal, that dropped flatwise to the floor with a sodden, dull impact.
The dentist put down the broach and scissors and gathered up his mail. There were four letters altogether. One was for Trina, in Selina's "elegant" handwriting; another was an advertisement of a new kind of operating chair for dentists; the third was a card from a milliner on the next block, announcing an opening; and the fourth, contained in the fat oblong envelope, was a printed form with blanks left for names and dates, and addressed to McTeague, from an office in the City Hall. McTeague read it through laboriously. "I don' know, I don' know," he muttered, looking stupidly at the rifle manufacturer's calendar. Then he heard Trina, from the kitchen, singing as she made a clattering noise with the breakfast dishes. "I guess I'll ask Trina about it," he muttered.
He went through the suite, by the sitting-room, where the sun was
pouring in through the looped backed Nottingham curtains upon the clean
white matting and the varnished surface of the melodeon, passed on
through the bedroom, with its framed lithographs of round-cheeked
English babies and alert fox terriers, and came out into the brick-paved
kitchen. The kitchen was clean as a new whistle; the freshly blackened
cook stove glowed like a negro's hide; the tins and porcelain-lined
stew-pans might have been of silver and of ivory. Trina was in the
centre of the room, wiping off, with a damp sponge, the oilcloth
table-cover, on which they had breakfasted. Never had she looked so
pretty. Early though it was, her enormous tiara of swarthy hair was
neatly combed and coiled, not a pin was so much as loose. She wore a
blue calico skirt with a white figure, and a belt of imitation alligator
skin clasped around her small, firmly-corseted waist; her shirt
waist was of pink linen, so new and crisp that it crackled with every
movement, while around the collar, tied in a neat knot, was one of
McTeague's lawn ties which she had appropriated. Her sleeves were
carefully rolled up almost to her shoulders, and nothing could have been
more delicious than the sight of her small round arms, white as milk, moving back and forth as she sponged the table-cover, a faint touch of pink coming and going at the elbows as they bent and straightened. She looked up quickly as her husband entered, her narrow eyes alight, her adorable little chin in the air; her lips rounded and opened with the last words of her song, so that one could catch a glint of gold in the fillings of her upper teeth.
The whole scene--the clean kitchen and its clean brick floor; the smell
of coffee that lingered in the air; Trina herself, fresh as if from
a bath, and singing at her work; the morning sun, striking obliquely
through the white muslin half-curtain of the window and spanning the
little kitchen with a bridge of golden mist--gave off, as it were, a
note of gayety that was not to be resisted. Through the opened top of
the window came the noises of Polk Street, already long awake. One heard
the chanting of street cries, the shrill calling of children on their
way to school, the merry rattle of a butcher's cart, the brisk noise
of hammering, or the occasional prolonged roll of a cable car trundling
heavily past, with a vibrant whirring of its jostled glass and the
joyous clanging of its bells.
"What is it, Mac, dear?" said Trina.