“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 Bingham,” Fainy heard him say as he went in the house.