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 piqué 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!"