Death Be Not Proud by John J. Gunther Read Free Book Online

getting back to school. He was terrified to think of what class work he had missed, and how he was going to manage to catch up. School!—we did not dare tell him that it would be a miracle if he ever saw a school again. How he fooled us on this!—as these pages will soon tell. Hoping with such vehemence to recover, yearning with such desperation to be all right again, refusing stalwartly to admit that his left hand, too, was showing a little weakness now, he became heartbreakingly dutiful about everything the doctors asked. He was still limited as to fluids; drop by drop, he would measure the exact amount of water he was permitted. All he wanted was to obey, to obey, and so get back to school.
    Once, however, he had an outburst. In a frightening and intense moment, with his blue eyes glowing and burning under the white turban of bandage like Savonarola’s, he protested with the utmost violence against his regime at Deerfield. He said that his schoolwork “went against the grain,” that he couldn’t stand being held back by his class any more, that he must get on to Harvard right away because he was being “held back,” that he was perfectly competent to do college physics now but that he had to waste all his time and energy on “stultifying” texts and experiments that he had long since passed by. “ I feel a moral conviction about this,” he exclaimed to Frances, “a religious conviction Ã
    He began to show great curiosity now about what caused the tumor, and he even suggested that the strain of “holding himself back” at Deerfield could have caused it. What did cause it? Patiently Dr. Mount and the others traced back through Johnny’s whole history for any evidence of a shock, blow, or other clue. Once Johnny said triumphantly, “ I know what caused it!” “I f you do, you’ll have revolutionized medicine,” Mount replied with his grave, friendly voice. Johnny’s theory was that he had been sitting far back in a chair playing chess and then slipped and banged his head on the iron radiator. But this blow had not even left a bump or bruise, and nothing so slight could possibly have put into motion any growth so deadly. The plain fact is, of course, that nobody knows what causes a malignant tumor. The origin of life itself is not more mysterious. The causation of cancer is the greatest and most formidable of all the unknowns of modern science.
    One grayish afternoon Johnny showed this prayer to Frances:
     
    Almighty God
    forgive me for my agnosticism;
    For I shall try to keep it gentle, not cynical,
    nor a bad influence.
     
    And O!
    if thou art truly in the heavens,
    accept my gratitude
    for all Thy gifts
    and I shall try
    to fight the good fight. Amen.
     
    The story behind the prayer is this. He called it an “Unbeliever’s Prayer.” Johnny had never prayed; perhaps this was a reaction from his dislike of chapel at Riverdale and his resentment at having been obliged to spend a good deal of time listening to organized religious exhortation. To counteract this tendency, Frances began to read him prayers of various kinds—Hindu, Chinese, and so on, as well as Jewish and Christian. He was interested in all this, but it did not mean very much to him at first. Then she started him on Aldous Huxley’s anthology of prayer, The Perennial Philosophy, and told him how intimate and very personal prayer could be. Once she suggested that if it should ever occur to him to think of a prayer himself, of his own special kind, he should tell her. So, very casually, with an “Oh, by the way . . .” expression, he said, “Speaking of prayers, I did think one up.” He recited it and only disclosed later that he had previously written it down and memorized it.
    At about this time he became fascinated by the Book of Job. He asked Frances to read it to him several times—which she did while barely able to face doing so. “It will teach me patience,” Johnny said.
    He was cheerful again that evening. “Pop,” he