Kitabı oku: «McTeague: A Story of San Francisco», sayfa 16

“Why, hello, Doc. Is that you?” exclaimed Heise, opening the door of the harness shop behind him. “Come in out of the wet. Why, you’re soaked through,” he added as he and McTeague came back into the shop, that reeked of oiled leather. “Didn’t you have any umbrella? Ought to have taken a car.”

“I guess so—I guess so,” murmured the dentist, confused. His teeth were chattering.

“YOU’RE going to catch your death-a-cold,” exclaimed Heise. “Tell you what,” he said, reaching for his hat, “come in next door to Frenna’s and have something to warm you up. I’ll get the old lady to mind the shop.” He called Mrs. Heise down from the floor above and took McTeague into Joe Frenna’s saloon, which was two doors above his harness shop.

“Whiskey and gum twice, Joe,” said he to the barkeeper as he and the dentist approached the bar.

“Huh? What?” said McTeague. “Whiskey? No, I can’t drink whiskey. It kind of disagrees with me.”

“Oh, the hell!” returned Heise, easily. “Take it as medicine. You’ll get your death-a-cold if you stand round soaked like that. Two whiskey and gum, Joe.”

McTeague emptied the pony glass at a single enormous gulp.

“That’s the way,” said Heise, approvingly. “Do you good.” He drank his off slowly.

“I’d—I’d ask you to have a drink with me, Heise,” said the dentist, who had an indistinct idea of the amenities of the barroom, “only,” he added shamefacedly, “only—you see, I don’t believe I got any change.” His anger against Trina, heated by the whiskey he had drank, flamed up afresh. What a humiliating position for Trina to place him in, not to leave him the price of a drink with a friend, she who had five thousand dollars!

“Sha! That’s all right, Doc,” returned Heise, nibbling on a grain of coffee. “Want another? Hey? This my treat. Two more of the same, Joe.”

McTeague hesitated. It was lamentably true that whiskey did not agree with him; he knew it well enough. However, by this time he felt very comfortably warm at the pit of his stomach. The blood was beginning to circulate in his chilled finger-tips and in his soggy, wet feet. He had had a hard day of it; in fact, the last week, the last month, the last three or four months, had been hard. He deserved a little consolation. Nor could Trina object to this. It wasn’t costing a cent. He drank again with Heise.

“Get up here to the stove and warm yourself,” urged Heise, drawing up a couple of chairs and cocking his feet upon the guard. The two fell to talking while McTeague’s draggled coat and trousers smoked.

“What a dirty turn that was that Marcus Schouler did you!” said Heise, wagging his head. “You ought to have fought that, Doc, sure. You’d been practising too long.” They discussed this question some ten or fifteen minutes and then Heise rose.

“Well, this ain’t earning any money. I got to get back to the shop.” McTeague got up as well, and the pair started for the door. Just as they were going out Ryer met them.

“Hello, hello,” he cried. “Lord, what a wet day! You two are going the wrong way. You’re going to have a drink with me. Three whiskey punches, Joe.”

“No, no,” answered McTeague, shaking his head. “I’m going back home. I’ve had two glasses of whiskey already.”

“Sha!” cried Heise, catching his arm. “A strapping big chap like you ain’t afraid of a little whiskey.”

“Well, I—I—I got to go right afterwards,” protested McTeague.

About half an hour after the dentist had left to go down town, Maria Macapa had come in to see Trina. Occasionally Maria dropped in on Trina in this fashion and spent an hour or so chatting with her while she worked. At first Trina had been inclined to resent these intrusions of the Mexican woman, but of late she had begun to tolerate them. Her day was long and cheerless at the best, and there was no one to talk to. Trina even fancied that old Miss Baker had come to be less cordial since their misfortune. Maria retailed to her all the gossip of the flat and the neighborhood, and, which was much more interesting, told her of her troubles with Zerkow.

Trina said to herself that Maria was common and vulgar, but one had to have some diversion, and Trina could talk and listen without interrupting her work. On this particular occasion Maria was much excited over Zerkow’s demeanor of late.

“He’s gettun worse an’ worse,” she informed Trina as she sat on the edge of the bed, her chin in her hand. “He says he knows I got the dishes and am hidun them from him. The other day I thought he’d gone off with his wagon, and I was doin’ a bit of ir’ning, an’ by an’ by all of a sudden I saw him peeping at me through the crack of the door. I never let on that I saw him, and, honest, he stayed there over two hours, watchun everything I did. I could just feel his eyes on the back of my neck all the time. Last Sunday he took down part of the wall, ‘cause he said he’d seen me making figures on it. Well, I was, but it was just the wash list. All the time he says he’ll kill me if I don’t tell.”

“Why, what do you stay with him for?” exclaimed Trina. “I’d be deathly ‘fraid of a man like that; and he did take a knife to you once.”

“Hoh! HE won’t kill me, never fear. If he’d kill me he’d never know where the dishes were; that’s what HE thinks.”

“But I can’t understand, Maria; you told him about those gold dishes yourself.”

“Never, never! I never saw such a lot of crazy folks as you are.”

“But you say he hits you sometimes.”

“Ah!” said Maria, tossing her head scornfully, “I ain’t afraid of him. He takes his horsewhip to me now and then, but I can always manage. I say, ‘If you touch me with that, then I’ll NEVER tell you.’ Just pretending, you know, and he drops it as though it was red hot. Say, Mrs. McTeague, have you got any tea? Let’s make a cup of tea over the stove.”

“No, no,” cried Trina, with niggardly apprehension; “no, I haven’t got a bit of tea.” Trina’s stinginess had increased to such an extent that it had gone beyond the mere hoarding of money. She grudged even the food that she and McTeague ate, and even brought away half loaves of bread, lumps of sugar, and fruit from the car conductors’ coffee-joint. She hid these pilferings away on the shelf by the window, and often managed to make a very creditable lunch from them, enjoying the meal with the greater relish because it cost her nothing.

“No, Maria, I haven’t got a bit of tea,” she said, shaking her head decisively. “Hark, ain’t that Mac?” she added, her chin in the air. “That’s his step, sure.”

“Well, I’m going to skip,” said Maria. She left hurriedly, passing the dentist in the hall just outside the door. “Well?” said Trina interrogatively as her husband entered. McTeague did not answer. He hung his hat on the hook behind the door and dropped heavily into a chair.

“Well,” asked Trina, anxiously, “how did you make out, Mac?”

Still the dentist pretended not to hear, scowling fiercely at his muddy boots.

“Tell me, Mac, I want to know. Did you get a place? Did you get caught in the rain?”

“Did I? Did I?” cried the dentist, sharply, an alacrity in his manner and voice that Trina had never observed before.

“Look at me. Look at me,” he went on, speaking with an unwonted rapidity, his wits sharp, his ideas succeeding each other quickly. “Look at me, drenched through, shivering cold. I’ve walked the city over. Caught in the rain! Yes, I guess I did get caught in the rain, and it ain’t your fault I didn’t catch my death-a-cold; wouldn’t even let me have a nickel for car fare.”

“But, Mac,” protested Trina, “I didn’t know it was going to rain.”

The dentist put back his head and laughed scornfully. His face was very red, and his small eyes twinkled. “Hoh! no, you didn’t know it was going to rain. Didn’t I TELL you it was?” he exclaimed, suddenly angry again. “Oh, you’re a DAISY, you are. Think I’m going to put up with your foolishness ALL the time? Who’s the boss, you or I?”

“Why, Mac, I never saw you this way before. You talk like a different man.”

“Well, I AM a different man,” retorted the dentist, savagely. “You can’t make small of me ALWAYS.”

“Well, never mind that. You know I’m not trying to make small of you. But never mind that. Did you get a place?”

“Give me my money,” exclaimed McTeague, jumping up briskly. There was an activity, a positive nimbleness about the huge blond giant that had never been his before; also his stupidity, the sluggishness of his brain, seemed to be unusually stimulated.

“Give me my money, the money I gave you as I was going away.”

“I can’t,” exclaimed Trina. “I paid the grocer’s bill with it while you were gone.”

“Don’t believe you.”

“Truly, truly, Mac. Do you think I’d lie to you? Do you think I’d lower myself to do that?”

“Well, the next time I earn any money I’ll keep it myself.”

“But tell me, Mac, DID you get a place?”

McTeague turned his back on her.

“Tell me, Mac, please, did you?”

The dentist jumped up and thrust his face close to hers, his heavy jaw protruding, his little eyes twinkling meanly.

“No,” he shouted. “No, no, NO. Do you hear? NO.”

Trina cowered before him. Then suddenly she began to sob aloud, weeping partly at his strange brutality, partly at the disappointment of his failure to find employment.

McTeague cast a contemptuous glance about him, a glance that embraced the dingy, cheerless room, the rain streaming down the panes of the one window, and the figure of his weeping wife.

“Oh, ain’t this all FINE?” he exclaimed. “Ain’t it lovely?”

“It’s not my fault,” sobbed Trina.

“It is too,” vociferated McTeague. “It is too. We could live like Christians and decent people if you wanted to. You got more’n five thousand dollars, and you’re so damned stingy that you’d rather live in a rat hole—and make me live there too—before you’d part with a nickel of it. I tell you I’m sick and tired of the whole business.”

An allusion to her lottery money never failed to rouse Trina.

“And I’ll tell you this much too,” she cried, winking back the tears. “Now that you’re out of a job, we can’t afford even to live in your rat hole, as you call it. We’ve got to find a cheaper place than THIS even.”

“What!” exclaimed the dentist, purple with rage. “What, get into a worse hole in the wall than this? Well, we’ll SEE if we will. We’ll just see about that. You’re going to do just as I tell you after this, Trina McTeague,” and once more he thrust his face close to hers.

“I know what’s the matter,” cried Trina, with a half sob; “I know, I can smell it on your breath. You’ve been drinking whiskey.”

“Yes, I’ve been drinking whiskey,” retorted her husband. “I’ve been drinking whiskey. Have you got anything to say about it? Ah, yes, you’re RIGHT, I’ve been drinking whiskey. What have YOU got to say about my drinking whiskey? Let’s hear it.”

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” sobbed Trina, covering her face with her hands. McTeague caught her wrists in one palm and pulled them down. Trina’s pale face was streaming with tears; her long, narrow blue eyes were swimming; her adorable little chin upraised and quivering.

“Let’s hear what you got to say,” exclaimed McTeague.

“Nothing, nothing,” said Trina, between her sobs.

“Then stop that noise. Stop it, do you hear me? Stop it.” He threw up his open hand threateningly. “STOP!” he exclaimed.

Trina looked at him fearfully, half blinded with weeping. Her husband’s thick mane of yellow hair was disordered and rumpled upon his great square-cut head; his big red ears were redder than ever; his face was purple; the thick eyebrows were knotted over the small, twinkling eyes; the heavy yellow mustache, that smelt of alcohol, drooped over the massive, protruding chin, salient, like that of the carnivora; the veins were swollen and throbbing on his thick red neck; while over her head Trina saw his upraised palm, callused, enormous.

“Stop!” he exclaimed. And Trina, watching fearfully, saw the palm suddenly contract into a fist, a fist that was hard as a wooden mallet, the fist of the old-time car-boy. And then her ancient terror of him, the intuitive fear of the male, leaped to life again. She was afraid of him. Every nerve of her quailed and shrank from him. She choked back her sobs, catching her breath.

“There,” growled the dentist, releasing her, “that’s more like. Now,” he went on, fixing her with his little eyes, “now listen to me. I’m beat out. I’ve walked the city over—ten miles, I guess—an’ I’m going to bed, an’ I don’t want to be bothered. You understand? I want to be let alone.” Trina was silent.

“Do you HEAR?” he snarled.

“Yes, Mac.”

The dentist took off his coat, his collar and necktie, unbuttoned his vest, and slipped his heavy-soled boots from his big feet. Then he stretched himself upon the bed and rolled over towards the wall. In a few minutes the sound of his snoring filled the room.

Trina craned her neck and looked at her husband over the footboard of the bed. She saw his red, congested face; the huge mouth wide open; his unclean shirt, with its frayed wristbands; and his huge feet encased in thick woollen socks. Then her grief and the sense of her unhappiness returned more poignant than ever. She stretched her arms out in front of her on her work-table, and, burying her face in them, cried and sobbed as though her heart would break.

The rain continued. The panes of the single window ran with sheets of water; the eaves dripped incessantly. It grew darker. The tiny, grimy room, full of the smells of cooking and of “non-poisonous” paint, took on an aspect of desolation and cheerlessness lamentable beyond words. The canary in its little gilt prison chittered feebly from time to time. Sprawled at full length upon the bed, the dentist snored and snored, stupefied, inert, his legs wide apart, his hands lying palm upward at his sides.

At last Trina raised her head, with a long, trembling breath. She rose, and going over to the washstand, poured some water from the pitcher into the basin, and washed her face and swollen eyelids, and rearranged her hair. Suddenly, as she was about to return to her work, she was struck with an idea.

“I wonder,” she said to herself, “I wonder where he got the money to buy his whiskey.” She searched the pockets of his coat, which he had flung into a corner of the room, and even came up to him as he lay upon the bed and went through the pockets of his vest and trousers. She found nothing.

“I wonder,” she murmured, “I wonder if he’s got any money he don’t tell me about. I’ll have to look out for that.”

CHAPTER 16

A week passed, then a fortnight, then a month. It was a month of the greatest anxiety and unquietude for Trina. McTeague was out of a job, could find nothing to do; and Trina, who saw the impossibility of saving as much money as usual out of her earnings under the present conditions, was on the lookout for cheaper quarters. In spite of his outcries and sulky resistance Trina had induced her husband to consent to such a move, bewildering him with a torrent of phrases and marvellous columns of figures by which she proved conclusively that they were in a condition but one remove from downright destitution.

The dentist continued idle. Since his ill success with the manufacturers of surgical instruments he had made but two attempts to secure a job. Trina had gone to see Uncle Oelbermann and had obtained for McTeague a position in the shipping department of the wholesale toy store. However, it was a position that involved a certain amount of ciphering, and McTeague had been obliged to throw it up in two days.

Then for a time they had entertained a wild idea that a place on the police force could be secured for McTeague. He could pass the physical examination with flying colors, and Ryer, who had become the secretary of the Polk Street Improvement Club, promised the requisite political “pull.” If McTeague had shown a certain energy in the matter the attempt might have been successful; but he was too stupid, or of late had become too listless to exert himself greatly, and the affair resulted only in a violent quarrel with Ryer.

McTeague had lost his ambition. He did not care to better his situation. All he wanted was a warm place to sleep and three good meals a day. At the first—at the very first—he had chafed at his idleness and had spent the days with his wife in their one narrow room, walking back and forth with the restlessness of a caged brute, or sitting motionless for hours, watching Trina at her work, feeling a dull glow of shame at the idea that she was supporting him. This feeling had worn off quickly, however. Trina’s work was only hard when she chose to make it so, and as a rule she supported their misfortunes with a silent fortitude.

Then, wearied at his inaction and feeling the need of movement and exercise, McTeague would light his pipe and take a turn upon the great avenue one block above Polk Street. A gang of laborers were digging the foundations for a large brownstone house, and McTeague found interest and amusement in leaning over the barrier that surrounded the excavations and watching the progress of the work. He came to see it every afternoon; by and by he even got to know the foreman who superintended the job, and the two had long talks together. Then McTeague would return to Polk Street and find Heise in the back room of the harness shop, and occasionally the day ended with some half dozen drinks of whiskey at Joe Frenna’s saloon.

It was curious to note the effect of the alcohol upon the dentist. It did not make him drunk, it made him vicious. So far from being stupefied, he became, after the fourth glass, active, alert, quick-witted, even talkative; a certain wickedness stirred in him then; he was intractable, mean; and when he had drunk a little more heavily than usual, he found a certain pleasure in annoying and exasperating Trina, even in abusing and hurting her.

It had begun on the evening of Thanksgiving Day, when Heise had taken McTeague out to dinner with him. The dentist on this occasion had drunk very freely. He and Heise had returned to Polk Street towards ten o’clock, and Heise at once suggested a couple of drinks at Frenna’s.

“All right, all right,” said McTeague. “Drinks, that’s the word. I’ll go home and get some money and meet you at Joe’s.”

Trina was awakened by her husband pinching her arm.

“Oh, Mac,” she cried, jumping up in bed with a little scream, “how you hurt! Oh, that hurt me dreadfully.”

“Give me a little money,” answered the dentist, grinning, and pinching her again.

“I haven’t a cent. There’s not a—oh, MAC, will you stop? I won’t have you pinch me that way.”

“Hurry up,” answered her husband, calmly, nipping the flesh of her shoulder between his thumb and finger. “Heise’s waiting for me.” Trina wrenched from him with a sharp intake of breath, frowning with pain, and caressing her shoulder.

“Mac, you’ve no idea how that hurts. Mac, STOP!”

“Give me some money, then.”

In the end Trina had to comply. She gave him half a dollar from her dress pocket, protesting that it was the only piece of money she had.

“One more, just for luck,” said McTeague, pinching her again; “and another.”

“How can you—how CAN you hurt a woman so!” exclaimed Trina, beginning to cry with the pain.

“Ah, now, CRY,” retorted the dentist. “That’s right, CRY. I never saw such a little fool.” He went out, slamming the door in disgust.

But McTeague never became a drunkard in the generally received sense of the term. He did not drink to excess more than two or three times in a month, and never upon any occasion did he become maudlin or staggering. Perhaps his nerves were naturally too dull to admit of any excitation; perhaps he did not really care for the whiskey, and only drank because Heise and the other men at Frenna’s did. Trina could often reproach him with drinking too much; she never could say that he was drunk. The alcohol had its effect for all that. It roused the man, or rather the brute in the man, and now not only roused it, but goaded it to evil. McTeague’s nature changed. It was not only the alcohol, it was idleness and a general throwing off of the good influence his wife had had over him in the days of their prosperity. McTeague disliked Trina. She was a perpetual irritation to him. She annoyed him because she was so small, so prettily made, so invariably correct and precise. Her avarice incessantly harassed him. Her industry was a constant reproach to him. She seemed to flaunt her work defiantly in his face. It was the red flag in the eyes of the bull. One time when he had just come back from Frenna’s and had been sitting in the chair near her, silently watching her at her work, he exclaimed all of a sudden:

“Stop working. Stop it, I tell you. Put ‘em away. Put ‘em all away, or I’ll pinch you.”

“But why—why?” Trina protested.

The dentist cuffed her ears. “I won’t have you work.” He took her knife and her paint-pots away, and made her sit idly in the window the rest of the afternoon.

It was, however, only when his wits had been stirred with alcohol that the dentist was brutal to his wife. At other times, say three weeks of every month, she was merely an incumbrance to him. They often quarrelled about Trina’s money, her savings. The dentist was bent upon having at least a part of them. What he would do with the money once he had it, he did not precisely know. He would spend it in royal fashion, no doubt, feasting continually, buying himself wonderful clothes. The miner’s idea of money quickly gained and lavishly squandered, persisted in his mind. As for Trina, the more her husband stormed, the tighter she drew the strings of the little chamois-skin bag that she hid at the bottom of her trunk underneath her bridal dress. Her five thousand dollars invested in Uncle Oelbermann’s business was a glittering, splendid dream which came to her almost every hour of the day as a solace and a compensation for all her unhappiness.

At times, when she knew that McTeague was far from home, she would lock her door, open her trunk, and pile all her little hoard on her table. By now it was four hundred and seven dollars and fifty cents. Trina would play with this money by the hour, piling it, and repiling it, or gathering it all into one heap, and drawing back to the farthest corner of the room to note the effect, her head on one side. She polished the gold pieces with a mixture of soap and ashes until they shone, wiping them carefully on her apron. Or, again, she would draw the heap lovingly toward her and bury her face in it, delighted at the smell of it and the feel of the smooth, cool metal on her cheeks. She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth, and jingled them there. She loved her money with an intensity that she could hardly express. She would plunge her small fingers into the pile with little murmurs of affection, her long, narrow eyes half closed and shining, her breath coming in long sighs.

“Ah, the dear money, the dear money,” she would whisper. “I love you so! All mine, every penny of it. No one shall ever, ever get you. How I’ve worked for you! How I’ve slaved and saved for you! And I’m going to get more; I’m going to get more, more, more; a little every day.”

She was still looking for cheaper quarters. Whenever she could spare a moment from her work, she would put on her hat and range up and down the entire neighborhood from Sutter to Sacramento Streets, going into all the alleys and bystreets, her head in the air, looking for the “Rooms-to-let” sign. But she was in despair. All the cheaper tenements were occupied. She could find no room more reasonable than the one she and the dentist now occupied.

As time went on, McTeague’s idleness became habitual. He drank no more whiskey than at first, but his dislike for Trina increased with every day of their poverty, with every day of Trina’s persistent stinginess. At times—fortunately rare he was more than ever brutal to her. He would box her ears or hit her a great blow with the back of a hair-brush, or even with his closed fist. His old-time affection for his “little woman,” unable to stand the test of privation, had lapsed by degrees, and what little of it was left was changed, distorted, and made monstrous by the alcohol.

The people about the house and the clerks at the provision stores often remarked that Trina’s fingertips were swollen and the nails purple as though they had been shut in a door. Indeed, this was the explanation she gave. The fact of the matter was that McTeague, when he had been drinking, used to bite them, crunching and grinding them with his immense teeth, always ingenious enough to remember which were the sorest. Sometimes he extorted money from her by this means, but as often as not he did it for his own satisfaction.

And in some strange, inexplicable way this brutality made Trina all the more affectionate; aroused in her a morbid, unwholesome love of submission, a strange, unnatural pleasure in yielding, in surrendering herself to the will of an irresistible, virile power.

Trina’s emotions had narrowed with the narrowing of her daily life. They reduced themselves at last to but two, her passion for her money and her perverted love for her husband when he was brutal. She was a strange woman during these days.

Trina had come to be on very intimate terms with Maria Macapa, and in the end the dentist’s wife and the maid of all work became great friends. Maria was constantly in and out of Trina’s room, and, whenever she could, Trina threw a shawl over her head and returned Maria’s calls. Trina could reach Zerkow’s dirty house without going into the street. The back yard of the flat had a gate that opened into a little inclosure where Zerkow kept his decrepit horse and ramshackle wagon, and from thence Trina could enter directly into Maria’s kitchen. Trina made long visits to Maria during the morning in her dressing-gown and curl papers, and the two talked at great length over a cup of tea served on the edge of the sink or a corner of the laundry table. The talk was all of their husbands and of what to do when they came home in aggressive moods.

“You never ought to fight um,” advised Maria. “It only makes um worse. Just hump your back, and it’s soonest over.”

They told each other of their husbands’ brutalities, taking a strange sort of pride in recounting some particularly savage blow, each trying to make out that her own husband was the most cruel. They critically compared each other’s bruises, each one glad when she could exhibit the worst. They exaggerated, they invented details, and, as if proud of their beatings, as if glorying in their husbands’ mishandling, lied to each other, magnifying their own maltreatment. They had long and excited arguments as to which were the most effective means of punishment, the rope’s ends and cart whips such as Zerkow used, or the fists and backs of hair-brushes affected by McTeague. Maria contended that the lash of the whip hurt the most; Trina, that the butt did the most injury.

Maria showed Trina the holes in the walls and the loosened boards in the flooring where Zerkow had been searching for the gold plate. Of late he had been digging in the back yard and had ransacked the hay in his horse-shed for the concealed leather chest he imagined he would find. But he was becoming impatient, evidently.

“The way he goes on,” Maria told Trina, “is somethun dreadful. He’s gettun regularly sick with it—got a fever every night—don’t sleep, and when he does, talks to himself. Says ‘More’n a hundred pieces, an’ every one of ‘em gold. More’n a hundred pieces, an’ every one of ‘em gold.’ Then he’ll whale me with his whip, and shout, ‘You know where it is. Tell me, tell me, you swine, or I’ll do for you.’ An’ then he’ll get down on his knees and whimper, and beg me to tell um where I’ve hid it. He’s just gone plum crazy. Sometimes he has regular fits, he gets so mad, and rolls on the floor and scratches himself.”

One morning in November, about ten o’clock, Trina pasted a “Made in France” label on the bottom of a Noah’s ark, and leaned back in her chair with a long sigh of relief. She had just finished a large Christmas order for Uncle Oelbermann, and there was nothing else she could do that morning. The bed had not yet been made, nor had the breakfast things been washed. Trina hesitated for a moment, then put her chin in the air indifferently.

“Bah!” she said, “let them go till this afternoon. I don’t care WHEN the room is put to rights, and I know Mac don’t.” She determined that instead of making the bed or washing the dishes she would go and call on Miss Baker on the floor below. The little dressmaker might ask her to stay to lunch, and that would be something saved, as the dentist had announced his intention that morning of taking a long walk out to the Presidio to be gone all day.

But Trina rapped on Miss Baker’s door in vain that morning. She was out. Perhaps she was gone to the florist’s to buy some geranium seeds. However, Old Grannis’s door stood a little ajar, and on hearing Trina at Miss Baker’s room, the old Englishman came out into the hall.

“She’s gone out,” he said, uncertainly, and in a half whisper, “went out about half an hour ago. I—I think she went to the drug store to get some wafers for the goldfish.”

“Don’t you go to your dog hospital any more, Mister Grannis?” said Trina, leaning against the balustrade in the hall, willing to talk a moment.

Old Grannis stood in the doorway of his room, in his carpet slippers and faded corduroy jacket that he wore when at home.

“Why—why,” he said, hesitating, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “You see I’m thinking of giving up the little hospital.”

“Giving it up?”

“You see, the people at the book store where I buy my pamphlets have found out—I told them of my contrivance for binding books, and one of the members of the firm came up to look at it. He offered me quite a sum if I would sell him the right of it—the—patent of it—quite a sum. In fact—in fact—yes, quite a sum, quite.” He rubbed his chin tremulously and looked about him on the floor.

“Why, isn’t that fine?” said Trina, good-naturedly. “I’m very glad, Mister Grannis. Is it a good price?”

“Quite a sum—quite. In fact, I never dreamed of having so much money.”