Джон Стейнбек - Cup of Gold [Золотая чаша]

Elizabethstood over him in a darkened room.

"Are you hurt badly, father?"

"Yes, quite badly. I shall die presently."

"Nonsense, papa; you are only joking to excite me."

"Elizabeth, does it sound like nonsense-and have you ever heard me joke? I have several things to speak of, and the time is very short. What will you do? There is little money left. We have been living on my salary ever since the King made his last general suggestion for a loan."

"But what are you talking about, papa! You cannot die and leave me here alone and lost in the colonies.

You cannot, cannot do it!"

"Whether I can or not, I shall die presently. Now let us discuss this matter while we can. Perhaps your cousin who has come to such fame through robbery will care for you, Elizabeth. I am pained at the thought, but-but-it is necessary to live-very necessary. And after all, he is your cousin."

"I will not believe it. I simply will not believe it. You cannot die!"

"You must stay with the Governor until you can meet your cousin. Tell him the exact standing of the matter; no fawning-but do not be too proud. Remember he is your own blood cousin, even though he is a robber. " His heavy breathing filled the room. Elizabeth had begun to cry softly, like a child who cannot quite tell whether or not it is hurt. Finally words were forced from Sir Edward's lips.

"I have heard that you can tell a gentleman by the way he dies-but I should like to groan. Robert would have groaned if he had wished. Of course, Robert was queer-but then-he was my own brother-he would have shrieked if he had felt like it. Elizabeth, will you-please-leave the room. I am sorry-but I must groan. Never speak of it-Elizabeth-you promise-never-never to speak of it?"

And when she came again, Sir Edward Morgan was dead.

Spring had come to Cambria, welling up out of the Indies and out of the hot, dry heart of Africa, and this the fifteenth Spring since Henry went away. Old Robert liked to think, and then came curiously to believe, that his son sent the Spring to Cambria out of the tropic places. There was a green fur climbing up the hills, and the trees were testing new, fragile leaves in the winds.

Old Robert's face had grown more set. Around his mouth lived less a smile and more a grimace, as though some ancient, anguished smile had frozen there. Ah! the years had been lonely, barren things, with nothing left in their arms for him. He knew the meaning, now, of Gwenliana's words-that age brought nothing with it save a cold, restless waiting; a dull expectancy of a state that might not be imagined with any assurance. Perhaps he waited for the time when Henry would come to him again. But that could scarcely be so. He was not at all sure that he wanted to see Henry any more. It would be disturbing.

When one is old, one hates disturbing things.

For a long time he had wondered, "What is Henry doing now? what seeing now?" And then the boy had faded slightly, had come to be like people in old books-not quite real, yet real enough to be remembered. But Robert thought often of this abstract person, his son, of whom he heard wavering rumors now and again.

With waking on the fine morning of the Spring, Robert had said, "I will climb up to see Merlin today.

Strange how that old man lives under the growing pressure of his years. There must be more than a hundred of them now. His body is a thin wisp-nothing more than a suggestion that here was once a body. But William says, if you can be picking thought out of William's speaking, that his voice is golden and strong as always, and that he still talks tremendous nonsense that would not be tolerated at London.

It is amazing how this road-mender has his whole life curled like a kitten around four days in London. But I must be going to Merlin. It is not likely that I shall go again."

The steep, rocky path was a thing of torture to him; more a cruel thing because of his memory of lithe, powerful legs, and lungs as tireless as bellows. Once he had led all comers in the mountain race, but now he climbed a bit, then rested on a stone, and climbed again-up and up into the cleft and over the rock shoulder. It wasnoon when he came at last to Crag-top.

Merlin met him at the door before he had time to knock, and Merlin had no more changed than the harps and spear-heads hanging to his walls. He seemed to have discarded time like a garment. Merlin came to Robert with no surprise. It was as though he had known of this slow pilgrimage a thousand years before the day had happened.

"It is very long, Robert, since you climbed the path to me, and long since I went down it." And "down, down" sang the harps. He spoke the language of the strings, and they responded like a distant choir in high mass of the mountains.

"But it's an old man who climbs to you now, Merlin. The trail is a beast enemy to wrestle with. You seem no older. I wonder when you will come to die. Do not your years sometimes argue that question with you?"

"Why, to speak truthfully, Robert, I have taken it in my mind several times-but always there were too many things to think about. I could not take the time to die. If I did, I might not be able to think ever again.

"For up here, Robert, that furtive hope the valley men call faith becomes a questionable thing. Oh, without doubt, if there were a great many about me, and they all intoning endlessly the chant, 'There is a wise, kind God; surely we shall go on living after death,' then I might be preparing for the coming life. But here, alone, halfway up the sky, I am afraid that death would interrupt my musing. The mountains are a kind of poultice for a man's abstract pain. Among them he laughs-oh, far more often than he cries."

"You know," said Robert, "my mother, the old Gwenliana, made a last, curious prophecy before she died. 'This night the world ends,' she said, 'and there will be no more earth to walk upon.' "

"Robert, I think she spoke truth. I think her dying words were truth, whatever may have been her other auguries. This gnawing thought comes visiting, sometimes, and because of it I am afraid to die-horribly afraid. If by my living I give life to you, and fresh existence to the fields and trees and all the long green world, it would be an unutterable deed to wipe them all out like a chalk drawing. I must not-yet awhile.

"But enough of these foreboding things. There is no laughter in them. You, Robert, have been too long in the valley of men. Your lips laugh, but there is no amusement in your heart. I think you place your lips so, like twigs over a trap, to conceal your pain from God. Once you tried to laugh with all your soul, but you did not make the satirist's concession-that of buying with a little amusement at yourself the privilege of laughing a great deal at others."

"I know that I am defeated, Merlin, and there seems to be no help for it. Victory, or luck, or whatever you wish to call it, appears to lie hidden in a chosen few as babies' teeth hide under the gums. Of late years this God has a hard, calculating game with me. There have been moments when I thought he cheated."

Merlin spoke slowly: "Once I played against a dear young god with goat's feet, and that game was the reason for my coming here. But then, I made the great concession and signed with sad laughter. Robert, did I not hear a long time past that you were roving in your mind? Surely William stopped by and told me you had grown insane. Did you not do reprehensible things in your rose garden?"

Robert smiled bitterly. "That was one of this God's tricks," he said. "I will tell you how it was. One day, when I was pulling the dead leaves from my roses, it came upon me to make a symbol. This is no unusual thing. How often do men stand on hill tops with their arms outstretched, how often kneel in prayer and cross themselves. I pulled a bloom and threw it into the air, and the petals showered down about me. It seemed that this act gathered up and told the whole story of my life in a gesture. Then the loveliness of white petals on black earth absorbed me, and I forgot my symbol. I threw another and another, until the ground was snowed with rose leaves. Suddenly I looked up and saw a dozen men standing about laughing at me. They had come by from church. 'Hee!' they said, 'Robert has lost his mind. Hee! his sense is slipping out of him. Ho! he is a child again, throwing rose petals.' It seemed a crazed God who could allow this thing."