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.