THE DISCOVERY OF CANNED SHRIMPS AND HESPERIDES
On the morning when Milt Daggett had awakened to sunshine in the woods
north of Gopher Prairie, he had discovered the golden age. As mile on
mile he jogged over new hills, without having to worry about getting
back to his garage in time to repair somebody's car, he realized that
for the past two years he had forced himself to find contentment in
building up a business that had no future.
Now he laughed and whooped; he drove with one foot inelegantly and
enchantingly up on the edge of the cowl; he made Lady Vere de Vere bow
to astounded farmers; he went to the movies every evening--twice, in
Fargo; and when the chariot of the young prince swept to the brow of a
hill, he murmured, not in the manner of a bug-driver but with a stinging
awe, "All that big country! Ours to see, puss! We'll settle down some
day and be solid citizens and raise families and wheeze when we walk,
but---- All those hills to sail over and---- Come on! Lez sail!"
Milt attended the motion pictures every evening, and he saw them in a
new way. As recently as one week before he had preferred those earnest
depictions in which hard-working, moral actors shoot one another, or
ride the most uncomfortable horses up mountainsides. But now, with a
mental apology to that propagandist of lowbrowism, the absent Mac, he
chose the films in which the leading men wore evening clothes, and no
one ever did anything without being assisted by a "man." Aside from the
pictures Milt's best tutors were traveling men. Though he measured every
cent, and for his campfire dinners bought modest chuck steaks, he had at
least one meal a day at a hotel, to watch the traveling men.
To Claire, traveling men were merely commercial persons in hard-boiled
suits. She identified them with the writing-up of order-slips on long
littered writing-tables, and with hotels that reduced the delicate arts
of dining and sleeping to gray greasiness. But Milt knew traveling men.
He knew that not only were they the missionaries of business,
supplementing the taking of orders by telling merchants how to build up
trade, how to trim windows and treat customers like human beings; but
also that they, as much as the local ministers and doctors and teachers
and newspapermen, were the agents in spreading knowledge and justice. It
was they who showed the young men how to have their hair cut--and to
wash behind the ears and shave daily; they who encouraged villagers to
rise from scandal and gossip to a perception of the Great World, of
politics and sports, and some measure of art and science.
Claire, and indeed her father and Mr. Jeff Saxton as well, had vaguely
concluded that because drummers were always to be seen in soggy hotels
and badly connecting trains and the headachy waiting-rooms of stations,
they must like these places. Milt knew that the drummers were martyrs;
that for months of a trip, all the while thinking of the children back
home, they suffered from landlords and train schedules; that they were
Claire's best allies in fighting the Great American Frying Pan; that
they knew good things, and fought against the laziness and impositions
of people who "kept hotel" because they had failed as farmers; and that
when they did find a landlord who was cordial and efficient, they went
forth mightily advertising that glorious man. The traveling men, he
knew, were pioneers in spats.
Hence it was to the traveling men, not to supercilious tourists in
limousines, that Milt turned for suggestions as to how to perform the
miracle of changing from an ambitious boy into what Claire would
recognize as a charming man. He had not met enough traveling men at
Schoenstrom. They scooped up what little business there was, and escaped
from the Leipzig House to spend the night at St. Cloud or Sauk Centre.
In the larger towns in Minnesota and Dakota, after evening movies,
before slipping out to his roadside camp Milt inserted himself into a
circle of traveling men in large leather chairs, and ventured, "Saw a
Gomez-Dep with a New York license down the line today."
"Oh. You driving through?"
"Yes. Going to Seattle."
That distinguished Milt from the ordinary young-men-loafers, and he was
admitted as one of the assembly of men who traveled and saw things and
wondered about the ways of men. It was good talk he heard; too much of
hotels, and too many tight banal little phrases suggesting the solution
of all economic complexities by hanging "agitators," but with this, an
exciting accumulation of impressions of Vancouver and San Diego, Florida
and K. C.
"That's a wonderful work farm they have at Duluth," said one, and the
next, "speaking of that, I was in Chicago last week, and I saw a
play----"
Milt had, in his two years of high school in St. Cloud, and in his
boyhood under the genial but abstracted eye of the Old Doctor, learned
that it was not well thought of to use the knife as a hod and to plaster
mashed potatoes upon it, as was the custom in Mac's Old Home Lunch at
Schoenstrom. But the arts of courteously approaching oysters, salad, and
peas were rather unfamiliar to him. Now he studied forks as he had once
studied carburetors, and he gave spiritual devotion to the nice eating
of a canned-shrimp cocktail--a lost legion of shrimps, now two thousand
miles and two years away from their ocean home.
He peeped with equal earnestness at the socks and the shirts of the
traveling men. Socks had been to him not an article of faith but a
detail of economy. His attitude to socks had lacked in reverence and
technique. He had not perceived that socks may be as sound a symbol of
culture as the 'cello or even demountable rims. He had been able to
think with respect of ties and damp pique collars secured by gold
safety-pins; and to the belted fawn overcoat that the St. Klopstock
banker's son had brought back from St. Paul, he had given jealous
attention. But now he graduated into differential socks.
By his campfire, sighing to the rather somnolent Vere de Vere, he
scornfully yanked his extra pairs of thick, white-streaked, yellow
cotton socks from the wicker suitcase, and uttered anathema:
"Begone, ye unworthy and punk-looking raiment. I know ye! Ye werst a
bargain and two pairs for two bits. But even as Adolph Zolzac and an
agent for flivver accessories are ye become in my eyes, ye generation of
vipers, ye clumsy, bag-footed, wrinkle-sided gunny-sacking ye!"
Next day, in the woods, a happy hobo found that the manna-bringing
ravens had left him four pairs of good socks.
Five quite expensive pairs of silk and lisle socks Milt purchased--all
that the general merchant at Jeppe had in stock. What they lost in
suitability to touring and to private laundering at creeks, they gained
as symbols. Milt felt less shut out from the life of leisure. Now, in
Seattle, say, he could go into a good hotel with less fear of the
clerks.
He added attractive outing shirts, ties neither too blackly dull nor too
flashily crimson, and a vicious nail-brush which simply tore out the
motor grease that had grown into the lines of his hands. Also he added a
book.
The book was a rhetoric. Milt knew perfectly that there was an
impertinence called grammar, but it had never annoyed him much. He knew
that many persons preferred "They were" to "They was," and were nervous
in the presence of "ain't." One teacher in St. Cloud had buzzed
frightfully about these minutiae. But Milt discovered that grammar was
only the beginning of woes. He learned that there were such mental
mortgages as figures of speech and the choice of synonyms. He had always
known, but he had never passionately felt that the invariable use of
"hell," "doggone," and "You bet!" left certain subtleties unexpressed.
Now he was finding subtleties which he had to express.
As joyously adventurous as going on day after day was his
experimentation in voicing his new observations. He gave far more
eagerness to it than Claire Boltwood had. Gustily intoning to Vere de
Vere, who was the perfect audience, inasmuch as she never had anything
to say but "Mrwr," and didn't mind being interrupted in that, he
clamored, "The prairies are the sea. In the distance they are kind of
silvery--no--they are dim silver; and way off on the skyline are the
Islands of the--of the---- Now what the devil was them, were those,
islands in the mythology book in high school? Of the--Blessed? Great
snakes' boots, you're an ignorant cat, Vere! Hesperyds? No! Hesperides!
Yea, bo'! Now that man in the hotel: 'May I trouble you for the train
guide? Thanks so much!' But how much is so much?"
As Claire's days were set free by her consciousness of sun and brown
earth, so Milt's odyssey was only the more valorous in his endeavor to
criticize life. He saw that Mac's lunch room had not been an altogether
satisfactory home; that Mac's habit of saying to dissatisfied customers,
"If you don't like it, get out," had lacked something of courtesy.
Staring at towns along the way, Milt saw that houses were not merely
large and comfortable, or small and stingy; but that there was an
interesting thing he remembered hearing his teachers call "good taste."
He was not the preoccupied Milt of the garage but a gay-eyed gallant,
the evening when he gave a lift to the school-teacher and drove her from
the district school among the wild roses and the corn to her home in the
next town. She was a neat, tripping, trim-sided school-teacher of
nineteen or twenty.
"You're going out to Seattle? My! That's a wonderful trip. Don't you get
tired?" she adored.
"Oh, no. And I'm seeing things. I used to think everything worth while
was right near my own town."
"You're so wise to go places. Most of the boys I know don't think there
is any world beyond Jimtown and Fargo."
She glowed at him. Milt was saying to himself, "Am I a fool? I probably
could make this girl fall in love with me. And she's better than I am;
so darn neat and clean and gentle. We'd be happy. She's a nice comfy
fire, and here I go like a boob, chasing after a lone, cold star like
Miss Boltwood, and probably I'll fall into all the slews from hell to
breakfast on the way. But---- I'd get sleepy by a comfy fire."
"Are you thinking hard? You're frowning so," ventured the
school-teacher.
"Didn't mean to. 'Scuse!" he laughed. One hand off the steering wheel,
he took her hand--a fresh, cool, virginal hand, snuggling into his,
suddenly stirring him. He wanted to hold it tighter. The lamenting
historian of love's pilgrimage must set down the fact that the pilgrim
for at least a second forgot the divine tread of the goddess Claire, and
made rapid calculation that he could, in a pinch, drive from Schoenstrom
to the teacher's town in two days and a night; that therefore courtship,
and this sweet white hand resting in his, were not impossible. Milt
himself did not know what it was that made him lay down the hand and
say, so softly that he was but half audible through the rattle of the
engine:
"Isn't this a slick, mean to say glorious evening? Sky rose and then
that funny lavender. And that new moon---- Makes me think of--the girl
I'm in love with."
"You're engaged?" wistfully.
"Not exactly but---- Say, did you study rhetoric in Normal School? I
have a rhetoric that's got all kind of poetic extracts, you know, and
quotations and everything, from the big writers, Stevenson and all.
Always been so practical, making a garage pay, never thought much about
how I said things as long as I could say 'No!' and say it quick. 'Cept
maybe when I was talking to the prof there. But it's great sport to see
how musical you can make a thing sound. Words. Like Shenandoah. Gol-lee!
Isn't that a wonderful word? Makes you see old white mansion, and
mocking birds---- Wonder if a fellow could be a big engineer, you know,
build bridges and so on, and still talk about, oh, beautiful things?
What d' you think, girlie?"
"Oh, I'm sure you could!"
Her admiration, the proximity of her fragrant slightness, was pleasant
in the dusk, but he did not press her hand again, even when she
whispered, "Good night, and thank you--oh, thank you."
If Milt had been driving at the rate at which he usually made his
skipjack carom over the roads about Schoenstrom, he would by now have
been through Dakota, into Montana. But he was deliberately holding down
the speed. When he had been tempted by a smooth stretch to go too
breathlessly, he halted, teased Vere de Vere, climbed out and, sitting
on a hilltop, his hands about his knees, drenched his soul with the
vision of amber distances.
He tried so to time his progress that he might always be from three to
five miles behind Claire--distant enough to be unnoticed, near enough to
help in case of need. For behind poetic expression and the use of forks
was the fact that his purpose in life was to know Claire.
When he was caught, when Claire informed him that he "mustn't worry
about her"; when, slowly, he understood that she wasn't being neighborly
and interested in his making time, he wanted to escape, never to see her
again.
For thirty miles his cheeks were fiery. He, most considerate of roadmen,
crowded a woman in a flivver, passed a laboring car on an upgrade with
such a burst that the uneasy driver bumped off into a ditch. He hadn't
really seen them. Only mechanically had he got past them. He was
muttering:
"She thought I was trying to butt in! Stung again! Like a small boy in
love with teacher. And I thought I was so wise! Cussed out Mac--blamed
Mac--no, damn all the fine words--cussed out Mac for being the village
rumhound. Boozing is twice as sensible as me. See a girl, nice
dress--start for Seattle! Two thousand miles away! Of course she bawled
me out. She was dead right. Boob! Yahoo! Goat!"
He caught up Vere de Vere, rubbed her fur against his cheek while he
mourned, "Oh, puss, you got to be nice to me. I thought I'd do big
things. And then the alarm clock went off. I'm back in Schoenstrom. For
keeps, I guess. I didn't know I had feelings that could get hurt like
this. Thought I had a rhinoceros hide. But---- Oh, it isn't just feeling
ashamed over being a fool. It's that---- Won't ever see her again. Not
once. Way I saw her through the window, at that hotel, in that blue
silky dress--that funny long line of buttons, and her throat. Never have
dinner--lunch--with her by the road----"
In the reaction of anger he demanded of Vere de Vere, "What the deuce do
I care? If she's chump enough to chase away a crack garage man that's
gone batty and wants to work for nothing, let her go on and hit some
crook garage and get stuck for an entire overhauling. What do I care?
Had nice trip; that's all I wanted. Never did intend to go clear to
Seattle, anyway. Go on to Butte, then back home. No more fussing about
fool table-manners and books, and I certainly will cut out tagging
behind her! No, sir! Nev-er again!"
It was somewhat inconsistent to add, "There's a bully place--sneak in
and let her get past me again. But she won't catch me following next
time!"
While he tried to keep up his virtuous anger, he was steering into an
abandoned farmyard, parking the car behind cottonwoods and neglected
tall currant bushes which would conceal it from the road.
The windows of the deserted house stared at him; a splintered screen
door banged in every breeze. Lichens leered from the cracks of the
porch. The yard was filled with a litter of cottonwood twigs, and over
the flower garden hulked ragged weeds. In the rank grass about the slimy
green lip of the well, crickets piped derisively. The barn-door was
open. Stray kernels of wheat had sprouted between the spokes of a rusty
binder-wheel. A rat slipped across the edge of the shattered manger. As
dusk came on, gray things seemed to slither past the upper windows of
the house, and somewhere, under the roof, there was a moaning. Milt was
sure that it was the wind in a knothole. He told himself that he was
absolutely sure about it. And every time it came he stroked Vere de Vere
carefully, and once, when the moaning ended in the slamming of the
screen door, he said, "Jiminy!"
This boy of the unghostly cylinders and tangible magnetos had never
seen a haunted house. To toil of the harvest field and machine shop and
to trudging the sun-beaten road he was accustomed, but he had never
crouched watching the slinking spirits of old hopes and broken
aspirations; feeble phantoms of the first eager bridegroom who had come
to this place, and the mortgage-crushed, rust-wheat-ruined man who had
left it. He wanted to leap into the bug and go on. Yet the haunt of
murmurous memories dignified his unhappiness. In the soft, tree-dimmed
dooryard among dry, blazing plains it seemed indecent to go on growling
"Gee," and "Can you beat it?" It was a young poet, a poet rhymeless and
inarticulate, who huddled behind the shield of untrimmed currant bushes,
and thought of the girl he would never see again.
He was hungry, but he did not eat. He was cramped, but he did not move.
He picked up the books she had given him. He was quickened by the
powdery beauty of _Youth's Encounter_; by the vision of laughter and
dancing steps beneath a streaky gas-glow in the London fog; of youth not
"roughhousing" and wanting to "be a sport," yet in frail beauty and
faded crimson banners finding such exaltation as Schoenstrom had never
known. But every page suggested Claire, and he tucked the book away.
In Vachel Lindsay's _Congo_, in a poem called "The Santa Fe Trail," he
found his own modern pilgrimage from another point of view. Here was
the poet, disturbed by the honking hustle of passing cars. But Milt
belonged to the honking and the hustle, and it was not the soul of the
grass that he read in the poem, but his own sun-flickering flight:
Swiftly the brazen car comes on.
It burns in the East as the sunrise burns.
I see great flashes where the far trail turns.
Butting through the delicate mists of the morning,
It comes like lightning, goes past roaring,
It will hail all the windmills, taunting, ringing,
On through the ranges the prairie-dog tills--
Scooting past the cattle on the thousand hills.
Ho for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-horn,
Ho for the gay-horn, bark-horn, bay-horn.
Milt did not reflect that if the poet had watched the Teal bug go by, he
would not have recorded a scare-horn, a dare-horn, or anything mightier
than a yip-horn. Milt saw himself a cross-continent racer, with the
envious poet, left behind as a dot on the hill, celebrating his passing.
"Lord!" he cried. "I didn't know there were books like these! Thought
poetry was all like Longfellow and Byron. Old boys. Europe. And rhymed
bellyachin' about hard luck. But these books--they're me." Very
carefully: "No; they're I! And she gave 'em to me! I will see her again!
But she won't know it. Now be sensible, son! What do you expect?
Oh--nothing. I'll just go on, and sneak in one more glimpse of her to
take back with me where I belong."
Half an hour after Claire had innocently passed his ambush, he began to
follow her. But not for days was he careless. If he saw her on the
horizon he paused until she was out of sight. That he might not fail her
in need, he bought a ridiculously expensive pair of field glasses, and
watched her when she stopped by the road. Once, when both her right rear
tire and the spare were punctured before she could make a town, Milt
from afar saw her patch a tube, pump up the tire in the dust. He ached
to go to her aid--though it cannot be said that hand-pumping was his
favorite July afternoon sport.
Lest he encounter her in the streets, he always camped to the eastward
of the town at which she spent the night. After dusk, when she was
likely to end the day's drive in the first sizable place, he hid his bug
in an alley and, like a spy after the papers, sneaked into each garage
to see if her car was there.
He would stroll in, look about vacuously, and pipe to the suspicious
night attendant, "Seen a traveling man named Smith?" Usually the garage
man snarled, "No, I ain't seen nobody named Smith. An'thing else I can
do for you?" But once he was so unlucky as to find the long-missing Mr.
Smith!
Mr. Smith was surprised and insistent. Milt had to do some quick lying.
During that interview the cement floor felt very hard under his
fidgeting feet, and he thought he heard the garage man in the office
telephoning, "Don't think he knows Smith at all. I got a hunch he's that
auto thief that was through here last summer."
When Claire did not stop in the first town she reached after twilight,
but drove on by dark, he had to do some perilous galloping to catch up.
The lights of a Teal are excellent for adornment, but they have no
relation to illumination. They are dependent upon a magneto which is
dependent only upon faith.
Once, skittering along by dark, he realized that the halted car which he
had just passed was the Gomez. He thought he heard a shout behind him,
but in a panic he kept going.
To the burring motor he groaned, "Now I probably never will see her
again. Except that she thinks I'm such a pest that I dassn't let her
know I'm in the same state, I sure am one successful lover. As a Prince
Charming I win the Vanderbilt Cup. I'm going ahead backwards so fast
I'll probably drop off into the Atlantic over the next hill!"