Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a refractory tooth with his thumb and finger. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with a fell of stiff yellow hair they were hard as wooden mallets, strong as vises, the hands of the old-time car-boy. 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. Polk Street called him the Doctor and spoke of his enormous strength. Here he had slowly collected a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks, and car conductors. 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. He had read many of the necessary books, but he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from them. He had learnt it after a fashion, mostly by watching the charlatan operate. McTeague's ambition, and young McTeague went away with him to learn his profession. He was more or less of a charlatan, but he fired Mrs. Two or three years later a travelling dentist visited the mine and put up his tent near the bunk-house. The chance had come at last when the father died, corroded with alcohol, collapsing in a few hours. 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. McTeague remembered his mother, too, who, with the help of the Chinaman, cooked for forty miners. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady, hard-working shift-boss of the mine. 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. 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. These were his only pleasures-to eat, to smoke, to sleep, and to play upon his concertina. He invariably spent them in the same fashion. McTeague looked forward to these Sunday afternoons as a period of relaxation and enjoyment. 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. Late in the afternoon his canary bird, in its gilt cage just over his head, began to sing. 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. 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. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna's saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. 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. 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. Published by Good Press, 4057664097613 Table of Contents
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