Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,72
around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job.”
“I only—”
“No now let me finish. I’ve been in Mt. Judge twenty-seven years and you’ve been here two. I’ve listened to your story but I wasn’t listening to what it said about the people, I was listening to what it said about you. What I heard was this: the story of a minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf. What do you think now it looks like to God, one childish husband leaving one childish wife? Do you ever think any more what God sees? Or have you grown beyond that?”
“No, of course not. But it seems to me our role in a situation like this—”
“It seems to you our role is to be cops, cops without handcuffs, without guns, without anything but our human good nature. Isn’t it right? Don’t answer, just think if I’m not right. Well, I say that’s a Devil’s idea. I say, let the cops be cops and look after their laws that have nothing to do with us.”
“I agree, up to a point—”
“There is no up to a point! There is no reason or measure in what we must do.” His thick forefinger, woolly between the knuckles, has begun to tap emphasis on the back of a leather chair. “If Gott wants to end misery He’ll declare the Kingdom now.” Jack feels a blush begin to burn on his face. “How big do you think your little friends look among the billions that God sees? In Bombay now they die in the streets every minute. You say role. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer. There is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith. There is where comfort comes from: faith, not what little finagling a body can do here and there, stirring the bucket. In running back and forth you run from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful, so when the call comes you can go out and tell them, ‘Yes, he is dead, but you will see him again in Heaven. Yes, you suffer, but you must love your pain, because it is Christ’s pain.’ When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot”—he clenches his hairy fists—“with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. That is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do or say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that. It’s all in the Book—a thief with faith is worth all the Pharisees. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.”
“Fritz,” Mrs. Kruppenbach’s voice calls carefully up the stairs. “Supper.”
The red man in his undershirt looks down at Eccles and asks, “Will you kneel a moment with me and pray for Christ to come into this room?”
“No. No. I won’t. I’m too angry. It would be hypocritical.” The refusal, unthinkable from a layman, makes Kruppenbach, not softer, but stiller. “Hypocrisy,” he says mildly. “You have no seriousness. Don’t you believe in damnation? Didn’t you know when you put that collar on, what you risked?” In the brick skin of his face his eyes seem small imperfections, pink and glazed with water as if smarting in intense heat.
He turns without waiting for Jack to answer and goes downstairs for supper. Jack descends behind him and continues out the door. His heart is beating like a frightened child’s and his knees are weak with fury. He had come for an exchange of information and been flagellated with an insane spiel. Unctuous old thundering Hun had no conception of the ministry as a legacy of light and probably himself scrambled into it out of a butcher’s shop. Jack realizes that these are spiteful and unworthy thoughts but he can’t stop them. His depression is so deep that he tries to gouge it deeper by telling himself He’s right, he’s right and thus springing tears and purging himself, however absurdly, above the perfect green circle of the Buick steering wheel. But he can’t cry; he’s parched. His shame and failure hang downward in