Sinclair Lewis Premium Collection: 7 Novels by Sinclair Lewis

Author:Sinclair Lewis [Lewis, Sinclair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bundle, Classics, Fiction, Literary, Retail
Publisher: Business and Leadership Publishing
Published: 2014-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

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

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