“Sure, I get you.”
When he reached the small room in the top of the Mohawk House, Doc Bingham was pacing the floor.
“Levy and Goldstein, sir,” said Fainy, keeping his face straight.
“My boy,” said Doc Bingham, “you’ll be an able assistant; I’m glad I picked you out. I’ll give you a dollar in advance on your wages.” While he talked he was taking clothes, papers, old books, out of a big trunk that stood in the middle of the floor. He packed them carefully in one of the cartons. In the other he put a furlined overcoat. “That coat cost two hundred dollars, Fenian, a remnant of former splendors . . . Ah, the autumn leaves at Vallombrosa . . . Et tu in Arcadia vixisti . . . That’s Latin, a language of scholars.”
“My Uncle Tim who ran the printing shop where I worked knew Latin fine.”
“Do you think you can carry these, Fenian . . . they’re not too heavy?”
“Sure I can carry ’em.” Fainy wanted to ask about the dollar.
“All right, you’d better run along . . . Wait for me at the office.”
In the office Fainy found a man sitting at the second rolltop desk. “Well, what’s your business?” he yelled out in a rasping voice. He was a sharpnosed waxyskinned young man with straight black hair standing straight up. Fainy was winded from running up the stairs. His arms were stiff from carrying the heavy cartons. “I suppose this is some more of Mannie’s tomfoolishness. Tell him he’s got to clear out of here; I’ve rented the other desk.”
“But Dr. Bingham has just hired me to work for the Truthseeker Literary Distributing Company.”
“The hell he has.”
“He’ll be here in a minute.”
“Well, sit down and shut up; can’t you see I’m busy?”
Fainy sat down glumly in the swivelchair by the window, the only chair in the office not piled high with small paper-covered books. Outside the window he could see a few dusty roofs and fire escapes. Through grimy windows he could see other offices, other rolltop desks. On the desk in front of him were paperwrapped packages of books. Between them were masses of loose booklets. His eye caught a title:
THE QUEEN OF THE WHITE SLAVES
Scandalous revelations of Milly Meecham stolen from her parents at the age of sixteen, tricked by her vile seducer into a life of infamy and shame.
He started reading the book. His tongue got dry and he felt sticky all over.
“Nobody said anything to you, eh?” Doc Bingham’s booming voice broke in on his reading. Before he could answer the voice of the man at the other desk snarled out: “Look here, Mannie, you’ve got to clear out of here . . . I’ve rented the desk.”
“Shake not thy gory locks at me, Samuel Epstein. My young friend and I are just preparing an expedition among the aborigines of darkest Michigan. We are leaving for Saginaw tonight. Within sixty days I’ll come back and take the office off your hands. This young man is coming with me to learn the business.”
“Business, hell,” growled the other man, and shoved his face back down among his papers again.
“Procrastination, Fenian, is the thief of time,” said Doc Bingham, putting one fat hand Napoleonfashion into his doublebreasted vest. “There is a tide in the affairs of men that taken at its full . . .” And for two hours Fainy sweated under his direction, packing booklets into brown paper packages, tying them and addressing them to Truthseeker Inc., Saginaw, Mich.
He begged off for an hour to go home to see his folks. Milly kissed him on the forehead with thin tight lips. Then she burst out crying. “You’re lucky; oh, I wish I was a boy,” she spluttered and ran upstairs. Mrs. O’Hara said to be a good boy and always live at the Y.M.C.A.—that kept a boy out of temptation, and to let his Uncle Tim be a lesson to him, with his boozin’ ways.
His throat was pretty tight when he went to look for his Uncle Tim. He found him in the back room at O’Grady’s. His eyes were a flat bright blue and his lower lip trembled when he spoke, “Have one drink with me, son, you’re on your own now.” Fainy drank down a beer without tasting it.
“Fainy, you’re a bright boy . . . I wish I could have helped you more; you’re an O’Hara every inch of you. You read Marx . . . study all you can, remember that you’re a rebel by birth and blood . . . Don’t blame people for things . . . Look at that terrible forktongued virago I’m married to; do I blame her? No, I blame the system. And don’t ever sell out to the sons of bitches, son; it’s women’ll make you sell out every time. You know what I mean. All right, go on . . . better cut along or you’ll miss your train.” “I’ll write you from Saginaw, Uncle Tim, honest I will.”
Uncle Tim’s lanky red face in the empty cigarsmoky room, the bar and its glint of brass and the pinkarmed barkeep leaning across it, the bottles and the mirrors and the portrait of Lincoln gave a misty half turn in his head and he was out in the shiny rainy street under the shiny clouds, hurrying for the Elevated station with his suitcase in his hand.
At the Illinois Central station he found Doc Bingham waiting for him, in the middle of a ring of brown paper parcels. Fen felt a little funny inside when he saw him, the greasy sallow jowls, the doublebreasted vest, the baggy black ministerial coat, the dusty black felt hat that made the hair stick out in a sudden fuzzycurl over the beefy ears. Anyway, it was a job.
“It must be admitted, Fenian,” began Doc Bingham as soon as Fainy had come up to him, “that confident as I am of my knowledge of human nature I was a little afraid you wouldn’t turn up. Where is it that the poet says that difficult is the first fluttering course of the fledgeling from the nest. Put these packages on the train while I go purchase tickets, and be sure it’s a smoker.”
After the train had started and the conductor had punched the tickets Doc Bingham leaned over and tapped Fainy on the knee with a chubby forefinger. “I’m glad you’re a neat dresser, my boy; you must never forget the importance of putting up a fine front to the world. Though the heart be as dust and ashes, yet must the outer man be sprightly and of good cheer. We will go sit for a while in the pullman smoker up ahead to get away from the yokels.”
It was raining hard and the windows of the train were striped with transverse beaded streaks against the darkness. Fainy felt uneasy as he followed Doc Bingham lurching through the greenplush parlor car to the small leather upholstered smokingcompartment at the end. There Doc Bingham drew a large cigar from his pocket and began blowing a magnificent series of smoke rings. Fainy sat beside him with his feet under the seat trying to take up as little room as possible.
Gradually the compartment filled up with silent men and crinkly spiralling cigarsmoke. Outside the rain beat against the windows with a gravelly sound. For a long time nobody said anything. Occasionally a man cleared his throat and let fly towards the cuspidor with a big gob of phlegm or a jet of tobacco juice.
“Well, sir,” a voice began, coming from nowhere in particular, addressed to nowhere in particular, “it was a great old inauguration even if we did freeze to death.”
“Were you in Washington?”
“Yessir, I was in Washington.”
“Most of the trains didn’t get in till the next day.”
“I know it; I was lucky, there was some of them snowed up for forty-eight hours.”
“Some blizzard all right.”
All day the gusty northwind bore
The lessening drift its breath before
Low circling through its southern zone
The sun through dazzling snowmist shone,
recited Doc Bingham coyly, with downcast eyes.
“You must have a good memory to be able to recite verses right off the reel like that.”
“Yessir, I have a memory that may I think, without undue violation of modesty, be called compendious. Were it a natural gift I should be forced to blush and remain silent, but since it is the result of forty years of study of what is best in the world’s epic lyric and dramatic literatures, I feel that to call attention to it may sometimes encourage some other whose feet are also bound on the paths of enli
ghtenment and selfeducation.” He turned suddenly to Fainy. “Young man, would you like to hear Othello’s address to the Venetian senate?”
“Sure I would,” said Fainy, blushing.
“Well, at last Teddy has a chance to carry out his word about fighting the trusts.” “I’m telling you the insurgent farmer vote of the great Northwest . . .” “Terrible thing the wreck of those inauguration specials.”
But Doc Bingham was off:
Most potent grave and reverend signiors,
My very noble and approved good masters,
That I have ta’en away this old man’s daughter
It is most true; true, I have married her . . .
“They won’t get away with those antitrust laws, believe me they won’t. You can’t curtail the liberty of the individual liberty in that way.” “It’s the liberty of the individual business man that the progressive wing of the Republican party is trying to protect.”
But Doc Bingham was on his feet, one hand was tucked into his doublebreasted vest, with the other he was making broad circular gestures:
Rude am I in speech
And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace,
For since these arms of mine had seven years pith
Till now some nine moons wasted they have used
Their dearest action in the tented field.
“The farmer vote,” the other man began shrilly, but nobody was listening. Doc Bingham had the floor.
And little of the great world can I speak
More than pertains to broils and battle
And therefore little shall I grace my cause
In speaking for myself.
The train began to slacken speed. Doc Bingham’s voice sounded oddly loud in the lessened noise. Fainy felt his back pushing into the back of the seat and then suddenly there was stillness and the sound of an engine bell in the distance and Doc Bingham’s voice in a queasy whisper:
“Gentlemen, I have here in pamphlet form a complete and unexpurgated edition of one of the world’s classics, the famous Decameron of Boccaccio, that for four centuries has been a byword for spicy wit and ribald humor . . .” He took a bundle of little books out of one of his sagging pockets and began dandling them in his hand. “Just as an act of friendship I would be willing to part with some if any of you gentlemen care for them . . . Here, Fenian, take these and see if anybody wants one; they’re two dollars apiece. My young friend here will attend to distribution . . . Goodnight, gentlemen.” And he went off and the train had started again and Fainy found himself standing with the little books in his hand in the middle of the lurching car with the suspicious eyes of all the smokers boring into him like so many gimlets.
“Let’s see one,” said a little man with protruding ears who sat in the corner. He opened the book and started reading greedily. Fainy stood in the center of the car, feeling pins and needles all over. He caught a white glint in the corner of an eyeball as the little man looked down the line of cigars through the crinkly smoke. A touch of pink came into the protruding ears.
“Hot stuff,” said the little man, “but two dollars is too much.”
Fainy found himself stuttering: “They’re nnnot mmmine, sir; I don’t know . . .”
“Oh, well, what the hell . . .” The little man dropped two dollar bills in Fainy’s hand and went back to his reading. Fainy had six dollars in his pocket and two books left when he started back to the daycoach. Half way down the car he met the conductor. His heart almost stopped beating. The conductor looked at him sharply but said nothing.
Doc Bingham was sitting in his seat with his head in his hand and his eyes closed as if he were dozing. Fainy slipped into the seat beside him.
“How many did they take?” asked Doc Bingham, talking out of the corner of his mouth without opening his eyes.
“I got six bucks . . . Golly, the conductor scared me, the way he looked at me.”
“You leave the conductor to me, and remember that it’s never a crime in the face of humanity and enlightenment to distribute the works of the great humanists among the merchants and moneychangers of this godforsaken country . . . You better slip me the dough.”
Fainy wanted to ask about the dollar he’d been promised, but Doc Bingham was off on Othello again:
If after every tempest there come such calms as this
Then may the laboring bark climb hills of seas
Olympus high.
They slept late at the Commercial House in Saginaw, and ate a large breakfast, during which Doc Bingham discoursed on the theory and practice of book salesmanship. “I am very much afraid that through the hinterland to which we are about to penetrate,” he said as he cut up three fried eggs and stuffed his mouth with bakingpowder biscuit, “that we will find the yokels still hankering after Maria Monk.”
Fainy didn’t know who Maria Monk was, but he didn’t like to ask. He went with Doc Bingham round to Hummer’s livery stable to hire a horse and wagon. There followed a long wrangle between the firm of Truthseeker Inc., and the management of Hummer’s Livery Stable as to the rent of a springwagon and an elderly piebald horse with cruppers you could hang a hat on, so that it was late afternoon before they drove out of Saginaw with their packages of books piled behind them, bound for the road.
It was a chilly spring day. Sagging clouds moved in a gray blur over a bluish silvery sky. The piebald kept slackening to a walk; Fainy clacked the reins continually on his caving rump and clucked with his tongue until his mouth was dry. At the first whack the piebald would go into a lope that would immediately degenerate into an irregular jogtrot and then into a walk. Fainy cursed and clucked, but he couldn’t get the horse to stay in the lope or the jogtrot. Meanwhile Doc Bingham sat beside him with his broad hat on the back of his head, smoking a cigar and discoursing: “Let me say right now, Fenian, that the attitude of a man of enlightened ideas, is, A plague on both your houses . . . I myself am a pantheist . . . but even a pantheist . . . must eat, hence Maria Monk.” A few drops of rain, icy and stinging as hail, had begun to drive in their faces. “I’ll get pneumonia at this rate, and it’ll be your fault, too; I thought you said you could drive a horse . . . Here, drive into that farmhouse on the left. Maybe they’ll let us put the horse and wagon in their barn.”
As they drove up the lane towards the gray house and the big gray barn that stood under a clump of pines a little off from the road, the piebald slowed to a walk and began reaching for the bright green clumps of grass at the edge of the ditch. Fainy beat at him with the ends of the reins, and even stuck his foot over the dashboard and kicked him, but he wouldn’t budge.
“Goddam it, give me the reins.”
Doc Bingham gave the horse’s head a terrible yank, but all that happened was that he turned his head and looked at them, a green foam of partly chewed grass between his long yellow teeth. To Fainy it looked as if he were laughing. The rain had come on hard. They put their coat collars up. Fainy soon had a little icy trickle down the back of his neck.
“Get out and walk; goddam it to hell, lead it if you can’t drive it,” sputtered Doc Bingham. Fainy jumped out and led the horse up to the back door of the farmhouse; the rain ran down his sleeve from the hand he held the horse by.
“Good afternoon, ma’am.” Doc Bingham was on his feet bowing to a little old woman who had come out of the door. He stood beside her on the stoop out of the rain. “Do you mind if I put my horse and wagon in your barn for a few moments? I have valuable perishable materials in the wagon and no waterproof covering . . .” The old woman nodded a stringy white head. “Well, that’s very kind of you, I must say . . . All right, Fenian, put the horse in the barn and come here and bring in that little package under the seat . . . I was just saying to my young friend here that I was sure that some good samaritan lived in this house who would take in two weary wayfarers.” “Come inside, mister . . . maybe you’d like to set beside the stove and dry yourself. Come inside, mister-er?” “Doc Bingham’s the name . . . the Reverend Doctor Bing
ham,” Fainy heard him say as he went in the house.
He was soaked and shivering when he went into the house himself, carrying a package of books under his arm. Doc Bingham was sitting large as life in a rocking chair in front of the kitchen stove. Beside him on the wellscrubbed deal table was a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. The kitchen had a warm cosy smell of apples and bacon grease and lamps. The old woman was leaning over the kitchen table listening intently to what Doc Bingham was saying. Another woman, a big scrawny woman with her scant sandy hair done up in a screw on top of her head, stood in the background with her red-knuckled hands on her hips. A black and white cat, back arched and tail in the air, was rubbing against Doc Bingham’s legs.
“Ah, Fenian, just in time,” he began in a voice that purred like the cat, “I was just telling . . . relating to your kind hostesses the contents of our very interesting and educational library, the prime of the world’s devotional and inspirational literature. They have been so kind to us during our little misfortune with the weather that I thought it would be only fair to let them see a few of our titles.”
The big woman was twisting her apron. “I like a mite o’ readin’ fine,” she said, shyly, “but I don’t git much chanct for it, not till wintertime.”
Benignly smiling, Doc Bingham untied the string and pulled the package open on his knees. A booklet dropped to the floor. Fainy saw that it was The Queen of the White Slaves. A shade of sourness went over Doc Bingham’s face. He put his foot on the dropped book. “These are Gospel Talks, my boy,” he said. “I wanted Doctor Spikenard’s Short Sermons for All Occasions.” He handed the halfopen package to Fainy, who snatched it to him. Then he stooped and picked the book up from under his foot with a slow sweeping gesture of the hand and slipped it in his pocket. “I suppose I’ll have to go find them myself,” he went on in his purringest voice. When the kitchen door closed behind them he snarled in Fainy’s ear, “Under the seat, you little rat . . . If you play a trick like that again I’ll break every goddam bone in your body.” And he brought his knee up so hard into the seat of Fainy’s pants that his teeth clacked together and he shot out into the rain towards the barn. “Honest, I didn’t do it on purpose,” Fainy whined. But Doc Bingham was already back in the house and his voice was burbling comfortably out into the rainy dusk with the first streak of lamplight.