XVI

While he couldn’t compare it with the Lafayette Theater of course, still Joshua Jones considered it a pretty good show. At least it would have been if the dumbbells hadn’t jumped up and down so often.

It began with music, a chorus singing far away behind the audience⁠—outside the church, it seemed. The singing came nearer and entered at the rear, and Shine obeyed the impulse to turn and look; but before he could determine what the trick in it was, Linda pinched his arm sharply and brought him about, puzzled and resentful, to see her shaking her bowed head with ill-concealed vigor. Thereupon he noticed that everyone else stood like Linda, motionless, with lowered head, as if it wasn’t proper to look; and he wondered what manner of performance this was, which one might attend, but on which one might not gaze.

Into his surreptitious sidewise vision first came two kids carrying enormous lighted candles. The kids wore black bordered white robes and seemed to have an awfully hard time waiting for the rest of the procession to catch up. Then came the leading man, distinguished by his sedate bearing and singular position, also in a flowing white robe; Shine saw the lean face with its sharp profile and pallid skin and concluded that this guy didn’t much enjoy his job.

There passed, following the leading man, a countless succession of increasingly taller couples, all in robes, all singing lustily without ever once consulting the books they carried before them: not much of a chorus, since the costumes made it almost impossible to distinguish the chorines from the chorats. Good singing though, funny, slow, no pep, but something about it⁠—

Eventually they all found their places up front. There followed fifteen minutes of many and mysterious diversions: The two kids playing a game with the candles⁠—lighting a lot more candles arched over the stage, seeing who could light the most. That ended in a draw. The leading man singing a solo with the whole chorus coming to his rescue every time he paused for breath or seemed to falter. The leading man was all right, but he sure couldn’t sing. More singing⁠—this was better⁠—with the audience joining tardily in. Much jumping up and down on the part of everybody. And now the taking up of admission⁠—Shine exhibited a quarter to Linda questioningly. She nodded and presently he dropped the coin into the proffered box, murmuring⁠—“Well, y’can’t go wrong for a quarter.”

This marked the end of the first act. The leading man rose in his place at one side of the stage and began to talk. His deep-set black eyes seemed to fasten themselves on Shine, who soon found himself watching and listening intently. If ever as a youngster he had heard this tale at the Orphanage Sunday School, it had been in so different a guise that now it appeared brand new.

He told it to Jinx and Bubber later, and told it with great accuracy:

“It was all about a bird named Joshua⁠—a great battler some years back. A general, see? Led his own army, and how! This bunch could lick anything that marked time, see?

“Well, this Joshua thought he was the owl’s bowels, till one day he run up against a town named Jericho. Town⁠—This place was a flock o’ towns. It was the same thing to that part o’ the country that New York is to this. It was the works. Without it the rest of the outfit jes’ simply couldn’t go ’round.

“But try and get in. This burg has walls around it so thick that the gals could have their jazz-houses on top⁠—not a bad idea at all: if a tight Oscar held out on ’em, they could jes’ let him out on the wrong side o’ the wall. And here this red hot papa, Joshua, who’s never had his damper turned down yet⁠—here he is up against that much wall⁠—and the damn thing don’t budge.

“Now comes the castor oil⁠—the part that’s hard to swaller but that does you good if y’ do. Joshua asks the Lord what the hell to do about this wall. And the Lord says, ‘Josh, you’re my boy, see? You do jes’ what I tell you and them walls’ll fall so hard they’ll make a hole in the ground.’ ‘Spill it,’ agrees Josh, and the schemes is un-schum.

“Take it or leave it, this crack army o’ Joshua’s don’t do a damn thing but walk around that wall once a day for a week⁠—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday too. Jes’ walk around, blowin’ horns. On Sunday they walk around seven times and on the last go ’round, the way they blow on them horns is too bad, Jim. Sounds like a flock of steamboats lost in a fog.

“Then every son-of-a-gun and his brother unhitches a hell of a whoop⁠—and⁠—take it or leave it⁠—that wall comes tumblin’ down same as if it was trained. Dynamite couldn’t a done it no better. The birds on the inside have been laffin’ at Joshua for a week⁠—damn fool tryin’ to blow a wall down, tootin’ a few horns. The brass-band army. Huh⁠—but now they ain’t even got time to pull up their pants, and what happens to their hinies is a sad, sad story, no lie.”

But Shine did not repeat what Tod Bruce said from this point on. Enough to admit that you’d been in a church, without further confessing a genuine interest in the meaning of a sermon⁠—especially if the meaning was a little too deep for you anyhow.

Bruce spoke quietly, without show but with impassioned conviction; and though many of his hearers no more grasped his message than did Shine, there was none who felt the same when Bruce ended as when he began. His honesty and sincerity were contagious and the very defects in his imperfect analogy revealed a convincing absence of artifice, a contempt for trifling disparities, an impressive disregard of minor obstacles in conveying a major idea.

“Many a man laughs,” said he, his voice penetrating like his eyes, “at the preposterousness of this Hebrew fairytale. Some of you perhaps are laughing now. For your sake I am going to say something that a minister of the Gospel is not expected to say. I am going to say this: that I don’t care the least little bit whether this thing ever happened or not. To us it does not matter. Consider it a Jewish legend⁠—a parable of Paradise, if you will⁠—a myth, without any basis of factual truth. Even so, the spiritual value of the story looms and remains tremendous.

“You, my friend, are Joshua. You have advanced through a life of battle. Your enemies have fallen before you. On you march till a certain day that sooner or later comes to us all. And then you find yourself face to face with a solid blank wall⁠—a wall beyond which lies the only goal that matters⁠—the land of promise.

“Do you know what that goal is? It is the knowledge of man’s own self. Do you know what that blank wall is? It is the self-illusion which circumstance has thrown around a man’s own self. And so he thinks himself a giant when in reality he is a child, or considers himself a weakling when truly he is strong, or more often judges himself the one or the other when he is actually both. There are still subtler contrasts: he may consider himself irreligious when at heart he is devout. Atheists and agnostics⁠—this may be heresy, but it’s true⁠—are likely to be the most profoundly religious of all men, and clergymen, with whom it is all so routine, the least. A man may think he is black when he is white; boast that he is evil and merciless and hard when all this is but a crust, shielding and hiding a spirit that is kindly, compassionate, and gentle; may pledge himself to a religion when he is by nature a pagan, thus robbing himself and his generation of all that might come out of honest self-expression.

“There is no better advice, I think, than that of the ruffian on the street, whose motto is ‘Don’t kid yourself.’ But we can’t help kidding ourselves sometimes, and we almost always kid ourselves about our Self. And what is our Self, our knowledge of ourself, if not Jericho⁠—chief city of every man’s spiritual Canaan? And how can we strip off illusion and take possession of our own soul save by battle? No man knows himself till he comes to an impasse; to some strange set of conditions that reveals to him his ignorance of the workings of his spirit; to some disrupting impact that shatters the wall of self-illusion. This, I believe, is the greatest spiritual battle of a man’s life, the battle with his own idea of himself.

“Far more incredible than this tale of the Israelite warrior are the circumstances under which you and I engage in a similar battle today. It is easier to believe, I think, that the blast of rams’ horns and the shouting of a mob could cause a stone wall to crumble than that you and I should hope to find ourselves⁠—to take our Jericho⁠—by some brief event that shatters in a moment what self-deception has built up only over the course of years. But it is true. It is not only possible⁠—it must happen to all who would see things as they are. Self-revelation is the supreme experience, the chief victory, of a man’s life. In all the realm of the spirit, in all the Canaan of the soul, no conquest yields so miraculous a reward.

“I urge you therefore to besiege yourselves; to take honest counsel with the little fraction of God, of Truth, that dwells in us all. To follow the counsel of that Truth and beset the wall of self-deception. So will towering illusion tumble. So will you straightway enter triumphant into the promised land.”