OPUS 21 by Philip Wylie Read Free Book Online Page A

five-story fall onto a cement sidewalk.

    What matter?

    Ted was dead.

    I sent the cables.

    And the second phase of my illness began. The swelling joints, the atrophy of muscles, the inflammation of nerves, the--why go into it? They sent to the largest institute for the best specialist in whatever this sequel might be.

    And there was G. T. Death again.

    The specialist seemed seven feet tall--a skinny man--who wore such a mustache as only the Poles can grow. He sat on my bed after the torturesome examination and told me about it, in French.

    "I am afraid, my American friend, that I have bad news for you. You are a man.
    You will want the truth. It is a progressive malady. Your foot--your arm--already crippled. When it reaches the heart--"

    He went away.

    My nurse wept.

    Ted was the one we counted on to be the great man. The strong, the good-humored, the precocious, the gifted, the good, the young Paul Bunyan of the family.
    Dead.

    And now I had a tum at it.

    I, the elder brother.

    I, who had taken Ted on his first trip abroad.

    I, who had led him to miserable accident, to foul execution, or to horrible impulse--bred, perhaps, in the vile durances of the vast nation we had traversed. Abrupt hate of life. I lay in that hotel bedroom--they had told me that a Warsaw hospital was to be avoided--and rehearsed the placid, polite syllables of the specialist. He had been interested, as one foreigner inspecting another, to observe reactions. I had therefore been careful to exhibit none.

    Alone, I could react.

    As now, I thought of my wife and my daughter and the insurance and the banks.

    And having finished with that, I turned to rue.

    Feeble fool. Wretched clot!

    How little of what you felt and thought did you take the trouble to express!

    When your corpse follows your brother's to the crematory in Gdynia, what epitaph?

    Here lies a minor author--an excessive curiosity and a penchant for investigation--
    who never bothered to write up his reports.

    So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase.

    I knew: I never got it said.

    Isn't it true of you, also?

    Didn't you know--and weren't you always on the verge of saying so--when you had to go to the movies, lunch, the bathroom, bed, or the jute mill in quest of new shoes for baby?

    Yanh-yanh.

    Each generation learns enough too late to pass it to the next, for when the learning's accomplished the newcomers have always been educated ahead of the achievement--in ignorance.

    So when will cradles be rocked by wise men and good women?

    They never know it will take a thousand years, and perhaps a thousand times a thousand years; they think it will be tomorrow; that is the trouble with them--it is the trouble with them all.

    I lay in the Palace Polonia, with the European cars blatting in the sacrificial street and the trains hooting across the moribund way and it vividly occurred to me that in a few more years Hitler's men would blow down these corridors and blow up those cobblestones. I lay in Jericho.

    I thought, finally, about a palm frond.

    There was a day in Florida when, in a mood of black despair, I stretched out beside the sea with all the cabanas of the Roney Plaza and all the dollars lying round about, reciting to myself the abhorrent antics of my compatriots and my own repulsive participation. The beach boys laughed; the handsome harlots splashed; and the purple sea came meaninglessly ashore. My eye, tired of the drenched blue firmament, came to rest on the frond of a coconut. It was a young leaf, very green, and it glistened in the sun like lacquered metal.

    While I regarded it, the leaf had a sudden meaning--the meaning of life and growth and Evolution. Not the idea--but the felt significance. (You would say, doctor, that some biochemical process completed itself in that instant--a change came in the endocrines. Or you, doctor, that the individual unit shares with the group the Toynbean shift-to-the-opposite--the yin-yang--and hence,