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.