OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  Perhaps, I thought, we may understand in time, or be lucky, and get back a brighter version of the lost principle of freedom. And if not, the quicker we are slaves the better--for the necessity of freedom shall become plain that much the sooner.

  I could see the exultant marching of the fifteen million defenders of the indefensible. The burial squads of the Atomic Age are forming. Soon it will be fashionable for women to knit Geiger counters. Two-minute speakers, hastily instructed at the Y.M.C.A. will explain the need for volunteers and tell us what must be done when it is too late to do anything. Boy Scouts will learn to decontaminate the same, old, innocent surfaces. And the prizes at ladies' bridge will have the shape of guided missiles.

  A great age to be alive in

  while it lasts.

  And that is how I began to laugh again.

  For God is in His Heaven and all is well with Him.

  Now the sun thrust a raffish beam through the clouds and gave to the room a curious, amber glow. All of us sitting there shared this discrete cube of light as fish share the water in an aquarium. And all of us, or nearly all, failed like the fish to penetrate the dimensions of our environs. Whichever way we looked we saw, not the great world outside, but only the image of ourselves. It was the nature of the place, we said; we never noticed that it was our failure to look anywhere save at our side of the glass walls.

  This extra light also disclosed a fresh secret of the Knight's Bar. I had thought that the mural horsemen were on their way to Elaine's tower in Astolat. It seems not. Over the weekend the artist had fixed to the wall his final composition, a painting of the Grail, silk-muffled and centered in a rosy halo. It occupied a circular place directly over the bar.

  How apt!

  The very effort of questing leads most but to a deeper unconsciousness.

  This is the moral of Faith-so far.

  And the moral of Research--so far.

  Why is that so?

  Because they go in conceited search of salvation for themselves, or in search of knowledge for what is pompously called its own sake.

  Now the Musak took up a suitable accompaniment for my mirth.

  Ja-da

  Ja-da

  Ja-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jing!

  Segue into silence, fade-out, and fast iron curtain.

  THE END

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE: Scherzo

  PART TWO

  PART THREE: Andante

  PART FOUR: Rondo

  PART FIVE: Coda