V
Nathan walked back to The Morrison. It was still early evening. The wind off the lake was delightfully welcome. As he walked he carried his hat in his hand and let that night wind cool his hot forehead.
He had been shocked, shocked terribly. He felt as he had felt one night back over the years when he had asked his mother about the origin of infants and that mother had given him a terrifying delineation of the everlasting fires of hell instead. The rapier point of Bernie’s arraignment had cut through the armor of his philosophy, through his very vitals and almost punctured the sac of self-faith which wrapped his pulsing young soul.
He tried to analyze Bernie. She was irrational, a monomaniac, a neurotic, the full and final flower of her mother’s infirmities. There were ways in which Bernie was very like his own mother. Yet Bernie had never been weighed down and had her individuality twisted and perverted by the narrowness and mediocrity his mother had encountered. Bernie had been “out in the world.” She had been academically educated. She had met the world’s diverse types and temperaments. What, then, was wrong with Bernie?
Frankly, he gave it up. It was beyond him. If he could have analyzed Bernie he felt he could have analyzed himself. He decided that she was simply a small-town girl even as he was a small-town boy, only he was trying to put all his handicaps, vicissitudes and experiences to a constructive purpose, so far as he had the light, and Bernie was not and never had tried. There he had to let the matter rest, never realizing how near the truth he had stumbled.
Yet in all this hectic analysis business, in all this vicious contact with parental mediocrity, in all his heart-breaking experience with The Sex as he had known The Sex thus far, the boy had never once grasped an explanation as simple and obvious and plain as sunlight—and as common as mud.
He had lived for twenty-seven years among people of half-developed or deficient mentality. He had been surfeited with persons “who had no brains.”
Looking upon the men and women he had known, especially the women, he had observed that they possessed bodies, limbs, heads, faces. They moved about, they talked, they ate, they slept. To all outward intents and purposes, excepting perhaps for a certain vacancy across the eyes, they were no different than the most profound philosophers who had ever walked the earth. And because they possessed bodies, limbs, heads, faces, because they moved about at their daily activities, talked, ate, slept, he had subconsciously expected them to know all, see all, be all, and impart to him a birthright heritage of mental and spiritual nutrition for which his growing soul and spirit hungered. The nearest he had ever approximated this was when he said of his mother, “She can’t help it; she’s made that way.” It was not that his mother was “made that way” so much as it was that she had not been made anything better or finer or greater. And the same general hypothesis applied pretty well to all those who had surrounded him. Mediocrity was only mental limitation. It was not default of intelligence, as he had always assumed. It was boundary. Beyond a certain point, God seemed to have ordained that certain mortals should not pass.
Nathan had yet to learn that in the bodies of men and women, individually and severally, never collectively and rarely racially, and regardless of where they may discover themselves at birth, exist or do not exist chromosomes—vital, literal cells—of character, high quality, divine dissatisfaction, goal-winning discontent, beauty hunger, atonement with Perfection, which is God. It seems as though God had picked out certain persons throughout the human race, endowed them with the divine Order of Merit, favored them with the Cosmic Urge to approach Idealism. Those chromosomes might lie dormant through generations, to appear suddenly virulent as they had appeared in my friend. And this being a world in which like seeks like, Nathan was groping for fellowship with other immortals in that divine Legion of Honor and thus far had not found them and was miserable until at times he almost doubted himself.
People of no brains! Mediocrity! Small-townism! Self-satisfaction! Sordidness! Narrowness! Bigotry! Stagnation! Dross! Chaff! Nature segregating her human waste! Nathan was not yet sufficiently enlightened to sweep them all into the same great basket and discard them from his scheme of things forever.
And this was the thing that bothered most: He knew instinctively that in certain portions of her indictment, perhaps in its very fundamentals, Bernie had been right. But where to go to overcome those deficiencies she had excoriated, how to lift himself above them, perfect himself—who was there to show him, give him his cue, point a way? He had assumed his parents could do it. They had not done it. He had looked for Woman to do it,—The Sex. But thus far The Sex had not done it. Whence was the light and the help coming? For divine discontent with mediocrity and sordidness was now rampant in his heart and could never be eradicated. Fog! Fog! Fog!
Nathan finally turned into The Morrison. He passed through the crowded lobby. Every woman he saw raised a feeling of repulsion in his breast. In his heart was a blind impulse to smash and crush even the pretty little elevator operator who made a laughing remark about a fussy old man who wanted to alight on the fifth floor.
He reached the sanctuary of his own room and locked himself in. He threw off hat and coat and lighted a cigar. He sank full length on the bed, snapping the burned match angrily at the footboard.
He knew that culturally he was a provincial, a small-town “rube”, as Bernie had called it. He didn’t want to be told those things. What he wanted was to be shown how to correct his crudities and have them nursed out of him, not blasted out with a torch; helped in his great moments of self-doubt; he needed a knowing friend to face him in the right direction, be patient with him when he stumbled, believe in him, have confidence that he could win,—win with him!
There was no one,—yet!
Even his own philosophy as he had spoken it to Ted Thorne almost failed him that night in Chicago. Bernie had been too cruel.
What was he groping for? What was this thing for which he hungered so blindly? What was this “small-town” business, fundamentally? Why was there such execration in being a provincial? Why did it bother him so? Why the necessity for climbing out of it? When he had “climbed out of it”, what then?
He thought of Paris, Vermont, as he lay there on the bed. He thought of the view of Main Street from the Whitney House steps,—the same scene which Madelaine Theddon had found so depressing two years before. What was the matter with it? Why was it depressing? Why should it stand for all the things he was trying to shake from his fingers like sticky fly-paper? Was it lack of beauty in the place? No! Many parts of the town were beautiful. And hundreds of great cities were filled with sordid, depressing neighborhoods and quarters. It wasn’t a question of size. It wasn’t a question of beauty. What then?
“Mediocrity, provincialism, small-townism,” he reasoned to himself, when philosophy was beginning to win out and his hurt brain and consciousness could function again. “It must be nothing more or less than the embodiment of standing still! Backwaters of life, peopled by those who fear the great, rugged currents, living to a standard and never daring or attempting to raise that standard—seeing no reason why they should! Lethargy—abiosis—existing from week to week, month to month, year to year in the same fashion and speed and gait as the week, the month, the year before. It’s the hideousness of standing all one’s life in one set of tracks when something inside shrieks to go on, to move, to improve, to be bigger, better, broader next year than last.”
He arose and walked to his room. He wished he had old Caleb to talk it with.
“That must be what’s been the matter with me,” he argued to himself, as the hours slipped on toward midnight. “I wanted something better at home and father and mother couldn’t grasp it. I tried to get it in the business and in so far as I got it the business prospered and there was money and we approached some degree of happiness. I wanted to go on and up with Milly and she couldn’t appreciate it. And I’ve subconsciously hated everything and everyone about me because they gave me no approval or supplied no incentive or showed understanding of that urge to create, improve, Go Up. That hatred made for intoleration and I kept it repressed inside me. I’m not a hick! I won’t admit it. Nobody can be a hick so long as they’ve got the urge to go on up, to rise to better things, better ways of living, better ways of understanding one’s fellows, better ways of expressing the fine things of life in Art ideas,—up, up—toward God waiting at the Top. Perfection at last. The provincials are only those who hide in the backwaters, content to stay in the backwaters, to remain in their tracks, to be satisfied with little, inconsequential things, to see no reason for changing their standards. And I’m not!”
Torn and mangled of spirit as he was that night, emaciated with the great hunger of brain and heart for a birthright of sane, constructive, inspiring, encouraging, understanding parenthood which had been denied him, Nathan fought out his problem, step by step, for himself, and in the recesses of his own soul looked for the way, the truth and the light.
He would keep moving. To move meant enlightenment. It must mean enlightenment. He would hew at his niche and accomplish his task though a thousand millstones and anvils were loaded upon him. Somewhere were High Hilltops, peopled with soft voices and calm eyes, manifestations of elegant living because such was social efficiency—still another phase of omnipotent perfection toward which he groped blindly—Art waves in which the soul of him might bathe luxuriantly, somewhere were High Hill Tops. There was no disgrace being born in the valley so long as he had no choice in the matter and was consistently and sincerely hunting the evasive pathway up to those Hill Tops—up to the Dwelling Places of Light.
My friend had within him the gift of the Magi beyond rubies,—the great galvanism of Divinity—energizing, vitalizing, driving his young Soul Indomitable to cry from far up the heights “Excelsior!”—to battle forever toward the stars. Yet he knew it not.
To Abaddon with cloying, handicapping, misunderstanding parenthood! With fretting, abusive womanhood—with coarse environments—with petty twopenny handicaps! He would go on,—doing his duty as he saw it, taking advantage of the last iota of opportunities as they came, fighting as he went,—true to the Aryan that was in him.
And after that night, he set his face to the west and he went on, disregarding what the going cost him, little realizing that he was suddenly carrying his High Aspiration written large on his fighting face for the World and One Woman to see!