‘Finally,’ the King was saying, ‘the envelope with the prize cheque, you may pick up in the morning. Once more, I congratulate you, Mr. Craig.’ The ruler’s eyes twinkled. ‘And do not forget you have promised me your next work of fiction when it is done.’
Craig smiled. ‘That will be sooner than you think, Your Majesty, and thank you.’
He almost forgot, so many eyes upon him, and then he remembered what was expected. Bowing, he backed off from the King, and moving sideways but still facing the King and somehow Emily, he went backwards up the steps to his chair, as the audience rose en masse and clapped.
Craig handed his three awards to Jacobsson, and then, slowly, thoughtfully, he made his way to the lectern.
After applause overwhelmed him once more, a silence fell. He had no speech, but glancing up at the loge, he knew what he must say.
‘Your Royal Highnesses, ladies and gentlemen. On this most memorable day of my thirty-nine years on earth, I do not wish to speak of creativity, of man the creator or man the politican, but rather, of man the individual. Not many years ago, a great countryman of mine, in my field, Mr. William Faulkner, spoke to you about the immortality of man, because man has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice, endurance. I wish to address you tonight on another factor of man—the obligation of man to his time on earth.’
He paused, thinking about it, and realized that he was not speaking to the audience at all, not to these two thousand nor the thousands who were watching television, not to the millions who might ever read his words. He was speaking to himself, clarifying it all for himself, himself and Emily who were one, and thus, perhaps, secondarily to all humankind.
In each one of us, he reflected to himself in these fleeting moments, there were, like unused muscles and organs, resources of the spirit—courage and energy and responsibility—never employed in our time in the world. The blessed one was he who, confronted with a crisis in his life (as was all humanity this day), was driven to call upon these resources, to use them to survive, even triumph, over life itself. One so challenged and so triumphant had won the only prize that counted—the prize of the Maker of the spirit, the rebirth of a withering soul and, as such, a Homeric victory over life’s disasters. In a lesser way, he had been so challenged, and had discovered the resources he had not known that he possessed, and was therefore, now at last, an entire man. This, indeed, was his prize. He wondered if all the others, before him, everywhere, could understand this victory and its honour. He must make them understand it. They must know the supreme value of challenge, and the eternal necessity to meet it as an individual and grow to fullest life.
‘This is the foremost of earthly honours that you have offered me,’ he found himself saying aloud. ‘I am moved and grateful beyond inadequate words. But I believe Alfred Nobel would have understood what I will say next. It is this—that all man’s honours to man are small beside the greatest prize to which he may and must aspire—the finding of his soul, his spirit, his divine strength and worth—the knowledge that he can and must live in freedom and dignity—the final realization that life is not a daily dying, not a pointless end, not an ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust, but a soaring and blinding gift snatched from eternity. The ultimate prize is to know that each new day’s challenge is meaningful and offered for use, that it must be taken to the bosom, and it must be used—and to know this, to understand this, is the one prize worthy as man’s goal and all mankind’s summit.’
He paused. He scanned the intent faces, the sea of faces, beneath him, and they came distinct, this one and that, as faces like his own, and at once he knew that they understood the urgency of his self-revelation, and that they waited to welcome him back to Ithaca.
Never, never in all his life, had he felt more reassured and more content. He knew where he was going. And so, at last, at last, he could go on. . . .
THE END
THE
PRIZE
* * *
‘THE NOBEL FOUNDATION OF STOCKHOLM IS PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE TODAY BEEN VOTED THIS YEARS NOBEL PRIZE STOP THE AWARD CEREMONY WILL TAKE PLACE IN STOCKHOLM’ . . . Six people receive the cable of notification; men and women for whom the only common factor is the Nobel citation—‘for researches in support of humanitarian ideals’.
These are the major actors in Irving Wallace’s exciting, behind-the-headlines story of the Nobel Prize, five men and a woman elected to receive the supreme palm of mankind’s honours, to be fêted as almost superhuman beings, their achievements to be discussed and applauded, their private lives to be spotlighted in the blinding glare of international publicity. As they converge on Stockholm, The Prize evolves into an explosive evocation of the maze of political intrigue and personal conflict that surrounds and seeks to influence the awards; of the pressures brought to bear on the juries that decide the awards; of international ploy and counter-ploy for prestige in the Cold War; of men and women with their own private stakes in the greatest prize of all.
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Copyright © 1961, 1962 by Irving Wallace
Copyright @ 1961, 1961, 2000 by the Rowena Co., Inc.
Copyright @ 2000 by the Estate or Irving Wallace
eISBN: 1-588-24137-8
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(1961) The Prize Page 94