CHAPTER XIV
CONSIDER THE WORM
I
By the time he had reached seventeen Nathan had attained what it too often requires discouraging years for older persons to negotiate.
He had lifted his handicapped, browbeaten young shoulders above the drab-colored dead level of village mediocrity.
Fourteen of his poems had been printed intermittently as “boxed” features on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.
The village, therefore, had been forced to admit—grudgingly to be sure, but nevertheless to admit—that if he kept it up long enough, and nothing stopped him, and the quality of his verse showed improvement instead of deterioration, and no one surpassed him, and the Telegraph kept out of bankruptcy, and the Federal constitution wasn’t amended so as to prohibit poetry altogether—somewhere down long vistas of future years he might possibly be expected to approach a fair-to-middlin’ resemblance to a near-celebrity.
These qualifying adverbs and adjectives constitute an attempt at faithful reproduction of the community’s attitude toward budding talent. Paris, like all Vermont, like all New England, like small towns all over the planet, was doggedly determined that a loophole should be left, in fact several loopholes, so that in case of failure and fizzle it might be in that crushing position to retort, “I told you so!”
To bet on a local son’s ability to rise above the common herd’s tenor of nothing-in-particular and have the wager turn out a loss was more to be deplored than a failure of the nation’s credit system. The grocery-store and barbershop economists could blame the prevailing administration for the latter, but for the former there would be no one to take the ignominy but themselves.
It was only natural that there should be those in town who had no patience whatever with the tone of Nathan’s verse. It was sickly, sloppy, moon-sighing stuff, that suggested “dying calves with their mouths full of mush.”
Another element, chiefly recruited from the young, unmarried set, or Raveled Ends of Might-Have-Been Romances, clipped out the boy’s verses and mailed them to sweethearts. Or they pasted them in scrapbooks alongside clippings from the Poet’s Corner in the Boston Sunday Globe.