When they had reached the edge of the town, Burkin asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“Kansas City, if it’s all right with you,” said Brush. “You see . . . I expect to get married Monday or Tuesday and I want to get there Sunday so as to talk it over.”
“You don’t say!”
“Yes, it’s a long story and I’d rather not tell it just yet.”
“That’s all right with me, but there are some other things I’d like to know. How did it happen the judge and the mayor had to come to the jail to see us off? What was all that diddling about? Are they all crazy in that town or did you infect’m?”
Brush gave him a detailed account of the trial.
“Well, well,” said Burkin, shaking his head, “such goings-on! You’d better look out, Brush. You can’t go about long with upsetting ideas like that and get away with it. One of these days you’ll be teasing the bourgeoisie one too many and they’ll crack down on you.”
Brush looked at him inquiringly, but said nothing. They decided to postpone their supper indefinitely and drove on for a time in silence over the plain. In the distance an occasional silo rose among some farm buildings. The first stars began to appear above a spiritless sunset.
“Stop!” cried Brush as they passed a man beside the road, his thumb extended for a hitch. “Stop for him!”
“Not on your life!”
“Stop, I say!” cried Brush, putting his hand on the wheel.
“You can’t do that in this country,” said Burkin. “It’s not safe.”
Brush pulled back the brake. “What are you afraid of everything for?” he said.
“He might be another hold-up man, y’fool! He’d take our car off us.”
“I’ll buy you another car,” said Brush. “Always stop for hitch-hikers. Always do it, if you’ve got room.”
Burkin gave in and began backing the car. He said: “Oh, you’re rich enough for anything, aren’t you? All right. He’s your responsibility.”
The man came running up.
“Get in, Pete,” said Burkin. “The car’s yours.”
Not until the newcomer had been bestowed in the back seat among the suitcases, and the car had gathered speed, did Brush recognize who it was. “It’s Mrs. Efrim’s hold-up man,” he said.
The man leaped for the door, but dared not jump out. “I gotta get outa here,” he cried in a throaty voice. “Lemme out.”
“Shut up and settle down,” said Burkin. “We won’t hand you over. Brush here saved you from the law once already, didn’t he? So pipe down and take a snooze. And as for you, Brush, don’t you lecture him. The poor geezer’s suffered enough from you already.”
“I don’t wanna stick around with you guys. Go on, lemme out,” the man repeated but receiving no answer, he relapsed into a brooding silence.
Brush said into Burkin’s ear: “I wish I knew what he was thinking. It would be very important to know. I think it’s one of the most important things in the world to know what goes on in a person’s mind when he’s been treated with ahimsa.”
“Nothing goes on in his mind,” said Burkin. “All he’s got is a few visceral reactions. He lives like a fox at the edge of a chicken farm.”
“You’re wrong,” said Brush. “He’s got a soul, a complicated soul like anybody else.”
“Lemme out, you guys. All I wanna do is get out and walk.”
“What’s your name?” asked Burkin.
“Hawkins.”
“Where do you want to go, Hawkins?” The man remained silent. Burkin continued: “What do you do? What’s your trade? Come on, tell us your story. We’ve got two or three hours ahead of us. Come on, out with it. How did it all happen?”
Hawkins refused to answer.
Brush said, in a low voice: “You see, he’s pretty uncomfortable, and that’s what I expected. It’s this way: The Bible says that if a man does something bad to you, you ought to give him the chance to do more bad to you, like giving him your other cheek to slap. That’s in the Sermon on the Mount. But I always thought that ought to be changed a little. If you do pure good to a man that’s harmed you that shames him too much. No man is so bad that you ought to shame him that way. Do you see? You ought to do just a little bit of bad in return, so he can keep his self-respect. Do you see what I mean?”
“Pretty subtle for me,” said Burkin.
Hawkins became violent. “If you don’t lemme outa here I’ll break every window in this car,” he cried, and smashed one of the side windows.
Brush leaned over the back of the seat and gave Hawkins a cuff on the side of the head. “Sit down there quiet, Hawkins,” he said.
“Brush, I don’t like that,” said Burkin. “Looks like you’re reneging on ahimsa for us.”
“I didn’t really hurt him,” whispered Brush. “I’m experimenting.”
There was silence for a time, when Brush felt a sudden blow on the back of his head.
“Hawkins, you mustn’t do that,” he said. To Burkin he said, confidentially: “Isn’t this interesting? You see what it means? It means that bad people can’t bear to be benefited by anyone. Now I’ll punish him a little so as to restore his self-respect.”
Brush turned and, keeling on the cushions of the front seat, grasped Hawkins’ shoulders and shook him violently.
The car was entering a village. Burkin said over his shoulder, “Have some eats with us, Hawkins?”
“No.”
“Aw, keep your chin up, Hawkins! What the hell’s the matter with you? Have some eats. We’ll pay for it.”
They stopped the car before a lunchroom. Hawkins leaped out and darted up an alley.
Brush smiled after him. “I think that proves everything,” he said.
Burkin did not answer. They sat down on the high stools and had a series of hamburger sandwiches, pouring scalding coffee down on top of them. At last Burkin said:
“How did they take that about voluntary poverty?”
“All right, I guess. They listened.”
“Did you ever gain any converts with it, Brush?”
“You never know. I think it works in people’s minds and perhaps they begin to practice long after.”
They ordered some pie, and Brush resumed:
“For instance, I once talked to some millionaires about it.”
“My God!”
“They were the only millionaires I ever met and naturally I was very interested in them. When I’m on a train I talk to everybody, and once on a train I fell into conversation with a young couple and somehow the conversation got around to voluntary poverty.”
Here Burkin began laughing and choking so that he had to be beaten on the back.
“I was telling you about this couple,” continued Brush. “It seems she’d been a schoolteacher in a small Oklahoma town and she’d married the baggage agent down to the depot. He still had a red neck and red wrists, as though he ought to have been in overalls still, but he was a good serious fellow; and she was a serious girl, too. She had on a brown dress and she was pretty and serious, and I liked them both. And I told them all about voluntary poverty. Well, after they had been out to lunch in the dining-car they came back to see me and by that time they were pretty excited. They had been talking it over, and so they told me their story. They both talked at once, almost, and while they were talking she kept her hand on his hand. It seems that oil had been found on their land and they were worth almost three million dollars and they didn’t know what to do about it.”
“I can’t wait for the end of this story,” said Burkin. “Tell me, how much did they give you?”
“Naturally, I wouldn’t take it,” said Brush.
“All right, go on.”
“They didn’t know what to do with it. They’d already given a hospital and a park to their home town and they began by giving baskets of groceries to all the poor people, but soon they saw that was foolish, just to give hundreds of baskets of groceries every week.”
“Well, what did you tell them to do?”
“You know what I told them? I told them they’d never be happy as long as they had it. I told them to go back to the schoolhouse and the baggage depot.”
“That’s great. Don’t you know that the townspeople would hate them?”
“The townspeople hated them already when they stopped giving groceries. But this couple didn’t want to live in any other town.”
“Tell them to go abroad for a while.”
“They did go abroad. They expected it would cost them a good deal of money, but when they got back it had only cost them two thousand dollars. They said they hadn’t missed a thing, either, but that they didn’t like doing foolish things that cost money.”
“What did they say when you tried to drive them back to poverty?”
“The girl cried.”
“So they tried to palm the money off on you?”
“You see, the reason they came back from the dining-car was because they wanted me to give away some of the money for them. They were Methodists and they had read the Bible and they believed you should give away one-tenth of your earnings every year. Only they couldn’t think of any real good ways of doing it. It was a kind of funny situation, because they were getting off at the next station and had to talk fast. There he sat with his fountain pen out, trying to write me a check up to two thousand dollars.”
“Didn’t you take it?”
“No, I couldn’t take it. Don’t you see that giving is a thing you can never do for anybody else? That’s a theory of mine. If you give without feeling your gift with every inch of yourself—”
“That’s all right. All I want’s the facts. You can keep the theories to yourself. So you sent the little millionaires off like that?”
“Yes.”
“Is the story over?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s get back to the car.” When they reached the pavement, Burkin added, “God! you’re a fool!”
They drove on in silence. Brush felt Burkin’s soured resentment. Finally Burkin said, in an even, leaden voice:
“It’s a good thing you haven’t got more stuff. Yep, you might cause a lot of harm, fooling around with people’s lives. You might start a new religion or something.”
“What do you mean, stuff?”
“Brains. Brains. Personality. Stuff.”
Brush was silent a moment. Then he said, “It’s not very nice to say things like that.”
“Take it or leave it.”
They drove on farther in silence. When they approached the lights of the next town, Brush began leaning over the back seat where the luggage was. “I think I’ll get out here,” he said, pulling at his suitcase.
“What’s the matter? Hell! What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t want to ride with you if you think that way about me.”
Burkin was all amazement. “What did I say?”
“What you said back there—that I hadn’t any . . . brains or personality. I don’t like what you said back in the jail-yard about the New Testament, either. And I don’t like the jokes you keep making about . . . well, about women. So I think I’d better get out here, if you’ll stop the car, please.”
“God damn it! get out and stay out!” cried Burkin, violently. “I’m not going to twa-twa like a sewing-circle for anybody. Get out before I kick you out. You’re the damnedest prig I ever saw. You’re a bag of wind. Get out of here.”
Brush was still leaning over the back of the seat, extracting his suitcase from Burkin’s extraordinary collection of goods. His confusion was increased by his need to fumble for a handkerchief.
Burkin stared at him sharply, then exclaimed: “Oh, you cry, too, do you?” Suddenly he burst out laughing. “You weep and blush and everything, don’t you? Brush, you’re wonderful! Say, put the suitcase back, put it back. I apologize. I won’t do it any more. I apologize for everything.” And again he went off into a violent fit of laughter.
Brush hesitated. “I can’t stay here . . . if you don’t take me seriously,” he said.
“Of course I do! What are you saying! You’re all right. Stick around. I wouldn’t dump you out in a forsaken hole like this for anything. I apologize, and of course I take you seriously. I don’t agree with you always . . . but, oh! I take you seriously, all right!”
“Well,” said Brush, relenting, “I’d have been sorry to have left you in the middle of a quarrel like that. It’s happened too often lately, just when I had begun to be friends with somebody. That’s why I did what you called ‘cry.’”
So Brush dried his eyes and the journey was resumed. From time to time Burkin was shaken by after-reflections of his fit of laughter. This made Brush uncomfortable, but finally he smiled a little sheepishly himself. At last he said in a low voice:
“I think I know what you meant by saying I was a prig—and you aren’t the first person that’s said it, either—but I don’t mean to be one. That’s the only way I can be and still hold on to my main ideas about life. Do you see what I mean?”
“All right. Let’s not talk about it,” said Burkin.
It was now a cold starlit night. The road ran smoothly over the prairie. Brush was commanded to talk in order to prevent the driver from falling asleep at the wheel, so he explained the business of selling textbooks. From there he went on to relate some of the adventures of the road—of how he had called on the great singer, Madame de Conti, at the Iowa City Musical Festival and of how she had taken a great fancy to him, even inscribing her picture “To my good friend, the true American George Busch, child of Walt Witmann’s hopes”; of how he had been offered thirty-five thousand dollars to marry Mississippi Corey; of how he had gone for four days without food in order to experience what Russian students had suffered, and to share some of the trial of the Mahatma; of how he had taken a bus from Abilene, Texas, to Los Angeles in order to look at an ocean.
Burkin listened with an even level of attention that finally had something ominous in it. After a pause he asked:
“How did all this start, anyway? Where’d you catch the religious bug in the first place? At home?”
“Oh no! My people don’t believe anything. They just live on from day to day. I didn’t use to think about such things, either. Through the first years in college I just lived on that way, too. I was only interested in athletic scores and collecting stamps. Then suddenly I was converted in the middle of my sophomore year at college.”
“What college was that?”
“Shiloh Baptist College, at Wallingkee, South Dakota, a very good college. I was president of the class, and I was very interested in politics, too—school politics, I mean. One day I saw a poster that a girl evangelist had come to town. She had set up a tent down by the railroad tracks and was holding meetings twice a day. Her name was Marian Truby. Her photograph was on the poster and it seemed like maybe her face was beautiful, so I went the first night just to look at her. Well, it turned out that she was not only a very beautiful girl, but a very wonderful speaker, too. I was converted that first night and I went forward to testify to it, and my life has been changed ever since. I went to every one of her meetings and after that I took every religion course there was in the college. Then the next most important thing in my life was when I began to read about Gandhi. I got hold of the life that he wrote of himself, and that gave me a lot more ideas—”
“Hold on here! Did you ever talk to the girl evangelist?”
“Only a minute or two,” said Brush, reluctantly.
“What happened?”
“I didn’t want to tell you about it . . . but since you’ve asked me . . . The last night of the meetings I went around to the back of the tent to tell her what a lot she’d done for me. She must have been pretty tired after preaching two sermons a day for a week and leading the hymns . . . and besides that she used to walk up and down the aisles and talk to people who were hesitating. . . . I don’t like to tell you this because you might not understand it like I do. . . . I waited until the rest of the people had gone so that I could make it a little more personal. There was no door to knock on so I went right in. She was sitting in a sort of dressing-room and she was sort of moaning—”
“Did you say moaning?”
“Yes, moaning and groaning. And an older woman was standing over her, sticking a hypodermic syringe into her arm.”
“You don’t say!”
“Now that I know more about life I know what that was. But even that doesn’t change my idea about all the good she did to me and hundreds of other people.”
“Did you speak to her?”
“Yes, but she didn’t look up. The older woman was mad and drove me right away.”
“Have you ever seen her since?”
“No. I wrote her a letter, but she never answered it. If you put on the flashlight I’ll show you her picture.” Brush took from his purse a discolored newspaper clipping with a picture of Marian Truby. “I ask about her everywhere,” he continued, “but I think she must have retired. Maybe she’s sick somewhere. If I find that’s so, I mean to support her for the rest of her life. You see, it says she was born in 1911 in Waco, Texas. I wrote the postmaster there, but he said there were no more Trubys there now.”
“So your big ideas about life were fed you by a sixteen-year-old girl while she was hopped up with drugs?”
Brush made no answer.
Burkin continued in a low tone, edged with contempt: “Think it over. It all goes together—voluntary poverty and Christmas baskets for burglars. It all goes together. You’ve got the gaseous ideas of a sick girl. It has nothing to do with life. You live in a foggy, unreal, narcotic dream. Think it over. Listen, benny, can’t you see that what you call religion is just the shiverings of the cowardly? It’s just what people tell themselves because they haven’t got the guts to look the facts of life and death in the face. If you’d gone to a respectable college you’d have had the chance to get wise to these things. You’ve lived all your life among the half-baked. You’ve probably never been exposed once in your whole life to anybody who really had any practice in thinking.”
“You’d better stop the car,” said Brush. “I’m going to get out.” Then he added, shouting: “I suppose you think nobody with brains ever felt any religion.”
“I could talk to you. I could show you things. But in two minutes you’d be squealing holy-murder and starting to jump out of the car. You don’t want to grow up, that’s the trouble with you. You haven’t read anything. You haven’t seen anything, except through the eyes of a girl in hysteria and some old dodo in Shiloh Baptist College. All right. Let’s talk about something else.”
Brush remained silent. At last he said, in a low voice, “Nothing that you could say would change my mind.”
“It’s now half-past eleven,” said Burkin, decisively. “Will you let me talk to you for one half-hour, without your interrupting me?”
Brush was staring darkly before him. “Where did you go to college?” he asked.
Burkin named an Eastern university, adding: “But that wouldn’t mean anything, except that I added a whole batch more education to it. I’ve worked on these things. I hung around the University of Berlin for a year. I lived half a year in Paris. I didn’t stick in the smoking-cars of Texas and read cheap paper pamphlets from a mail-order house. Give me half an hour.”
“I have a hard enough time with my own doubts without adding somebody else’s to them,” said Brush, in a low voice.
“What are you so afraid of doubts for? There’s one thing worse than doubts, and that’s evasions. You’re full of evasions. You don’t even want to look around. You don’t give a goddam for the truth.”
“I have the truth.”
“All right, if you have the truth, why not listen to my error for half an hour?”
Brush was very unhappy. He glanced sideways at Burkin’s face, then brought his wrist watch close to the dashboard light. “Go ahead,” he said.
Burkin plunged into primitive man and the jungle; he came down through the nature myths; he hung the earth in astronomical time. He then exposed the pretensions of subjective religious experience; the absurdity of conflicting prayers, man’s egotistic terror before extinction. At last he said: “If you’d read more I could show you the absurdity of the scholastic proofs of the existence of God and I could show you how the dependency complex begins. Is the half-hour up?”
Brush said, slowly: “When you began I thought you were going to say things that would stick in my mind and trouble me. You’ve talked three-quarters of an hour and you’ve only said one thing that had any point to it.” His voice rose and presently he was shouting: “I guess we’d better change the subject, because you haven’t thought enough about these things to make it worth my while. Why, can’t you see that you don’t know anything about religion until you start to live it?”
“Stop yelling, anyway.”
“All you’ve done is think about it as though it were . . . as though it were a fish a long ways off. Even your doubts aren’t the right doubts to have.”
“I’m not deaf, I tell you. Shut up and sit down.”
“You—”
“Oh, shut up!”
They drove in silence awhile. Finally they entered a village. All lights were out, save in a lunchwagon by the railroad tracks.
“I’m getting out here,” said Brush.
Burkin stopped the car. The nervous twitch on the left side of his face had returned. Brush put his suitcase on the curb.
“I owe you about three dollars for that broken window,” he said, “and another dollar for gas.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Here it is.”
“Good-by,” said Brush, extending his hand.
Burkin drove off without answering.