Cup of Gold

by John Steinbeck

  “I am sorry, Lady Morgan. There is nothing to do now. I do not even know what is the matter with him. Some old jungle fever, perhaps. I could bleed him again, I suppose, but we have taken a great deal of blood already, and it seems to do no good. However, if he begins to sink, I shall try it again.”

  “Then he will die?” Lady Morgan asked. Henry thought she showed more curiosity than sorrow.

  “Yes, he will die unless God intervenes. Only God can be sure of his patients.”

  And then the room was cleared of people. Henry knew that his wife was sitting near the bed. He could hear her crying softly beside him. “What a pity it is,” he thought, “that I cannot go to death in a ship so she might pack my bag for me. It would give her so much satisfaction to know that I was entering heaven with a decent supply of clean linen.”

  “Oh, my husband— Oh, Henry, my husband.”

  He turned his head and looked at her curiously, and his gaze went deep into her eyes. Suddenly he was seized with despair.

  “This woman loves me,” he said to himself. “This woman loves me, and I have never known it. I cannot know this kind of love. Her eyes—her eyes—this is something far beyond my comprehension. Can she have loved me always?” He looked again. “She is very near to God. I think women are nearer to God than men. They cannot talk about it, but, Christ! how it shines in their eyes. And she loves me. During all her hectoring and badgering and brow-beating, she has loved me—and I have never known it. But what would I have done if I had known it?” He turned away. This sorrow was too great, too burning and awful to regard. It is terrifying to see a woman’s soul shining through her eyes.

  So he was to die. It was rather pleasant if death was like this. He was warm and very tired. Presently he would fall asleep, and that would be death—Brother Death.

  He knew that some other person had come into the room. His wife leaned over until she came within his upstaring vision. She would be annoyed if she knew he could turn his head if he wished.

  “The Vicar, dear,” his wife said. “Do be nice to him. Oh, do listen to him! It may help you—afterwards.” Ah, she was practical! She was going to see that some compact was made with the Almighty if she could. Her affection was an efficient thing, but her love—that which glittered in her wet eyes—was frightful.

  Henry felt a warm, soft hand take his. A soothing voice was talking to him. But it was difficult to listen. The ceiling was swaying dangerously.

  “God is Love,” the voice was saying. “You must put your faith in God.”

  “God is Love,” Henry repeated mechanically.

  “Let us pray,” said the voice.

  Suddenly Henry remembered a moment of his childhood. He was being tortured with an ear-ache, and his mother was holding him in her arms. She stroked his wrist with her fingertips. “This is all nonsense,” she was saying. He remembered how she said it. “This is all nonsense. God is Love. He will not let little boys suffer. Now repeat after me—‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.’ ’’ It was as though she administered a medicine. In the same tone she would have commanded, “Come, take this oil!”

  Henry felt the warm fingers of the Vicar creep to his wrist and begin a stroking movement.

  “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want,” Henry droned sleepily. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures—” The stroking continued, but more harshly. The Vicar’s voice became more loud and authoritative. It was as though, after years of patient waiting, the Church had at last got Henry Morgan within its power. There was something almost gloating about the voice.

  “Have you repented your sins, Sir Henry?”

  “My sins? No, I had not thought of them. Shall I repent Panama?”

  The Vicar was embarrassed. “Well, Panama was a patriotic conquest. The King approved. Besides, the people were Papists.”

  “But what are my sins, then?” Henry went on. “I remember only the most pleasant and the most painful among them. Somehow I do not wish to repent the pleasant ones. It would be like breaking faith with them; they were charming. And the painful sins carried atonement with them like concealed knives. How may I repent, sir? I might go over my whole life, naming and repenting every act from the shattering of my first teething ring to my last visit to a brothel. I might repent everything I could remember, but if I forgot one single sin, the whole process would be wasted.”

  “Have you repented your sins, Sir Henry?”

  He realized, then, that he had not been talking at all. It was difficult to talk. His tongue had become lazy and sluggish. “No,” he said. “I can’t remember them very well.”

  “You must search in your heart for greed and lust and spite. You must drive wickedness from your heart.”

  “But, sir, I don’t remember ever having been consciously wicked. I have done things which seemed wicked afterwards, but while I was doing them I always had some rather good end in view.” Again he was conscious that he wasn’t really speaking.

  “Let us pray,” the voice said.

  Henry made a violent effort with his tongue. “No!” he cried.

  “But you prayed before.”

  “Yes, I prayed before—because my mother would have liked it. She would have wanted me to pray at least once, more as a proof of her training than for any other reason, a reassurance to her that she had done her duty by me.”

  “Would you die heretic, Sir Henry? Aren’t you afraid of death?”

  “I am too tired, sir, or too lazy, to consider problems of heresy. And I am not afraid of death. I have seen much violence, and no man whom I have admired was afraid of death, but only of dying. You see, sir, death is an intellectual matter, but dying is pure pain. And this death of mine is very pleasant so far. No, sir; I am not afraid even of dying. It is comfortable, and it would be quiet if I could only be left alone. It is as though I were about to sleep after a great effort.”

  He heard the Vicar’s voice again; but, though the warm hand still stroked his wrist, the voice came from a mighty distance.

  “He will not answer me,” the Vicar was saying. “I am perplexed for his soul.”

  Then he heard his wife speaking to him. “You must pray, dear. Every one does. How can you get to heaven if you do not pray?”

  There she was again, intent on making a contract with God. But Henry did not want to look at her. Naïve though her philosophy was, her eyes were as deep and as sad as the limitless sky. He wanted to say, “I won’t want to get to heaven once I am dead. I won’t want them to disturb me.” They made such a commotion about this death.

  The doctor had come back into the room. “He is unconscious, ” the booming voice proclaimed. “I think I will bleed him again.”

  Henry felt the scalpel cut into his arm. It was pleasant. He hoped they would cut him again and again. But the illusion was contradictory. Rather than feeling the blood leaving him, he sensed a curious warmth slipping through his body. His breast and arms tingled as though some robust, ancient wine were singing in his veins.

  Now a queer change began to take place. He found that he could see through his eyelids, could see all about him without moving his head. The doctor and his wife and the Vicar and even the room were sliding away from him.

  “They are moving,” he thought. “I am not moving. I am fixed. I am the center of all things and cannot move. I am as heavy as the universe. Perhaps I am the universe.”

  A low, sweet tone was flowing into his consciousness; a vibrant, rich organ tone, which filled him, seemed to emanate from his brain, to flood his body, and from it to surge out over the world. He saw with a little surprise that the room had gone. He was lying in an immeasurable dark grotto along the sides of which were rows of thick, squat columns made of some green, glittering crystal. He was still in a reclining position, and the long grotto was sliding past him. Of a sudden, the movement stopped. He was surrounded by strange beings, having the bodies of children, and bulbous, heavy heads, but no faces. The flesh where their faces should have been was solid and
unbroken. These beings were talking and chattering in dry, raucous voices. Henry was puzzled that they could talk without mouths.

  Slowly the knowledge grew in him that these were his deeds and his thoughts which were living with Brother Death. Each one had gone immediately to live with Brother Death as soon as it was born. When he knew their identity, the faceless little creatures turned on him and clustered thickly about his couch.

  “Why did you do me?” one cried.

  “I do not know; I do not remember you.”

  “Why did you think me?”

  “I do not know. I must have known, but I have forgotten. My memory is slipping away from me here in this grotto.”

  Still insistently they questioned him, and their voices were becoming more and more strident and harsh, so that they overwhelmed the great Tone.

  “Me! answer me!”

  “No; me!”

  “Oh, leave me! Let me rest,” Henry said wearily. “I am tired, and I cannot tell you anything anyway.”

  Then he saw that the little beings were crouching before an approaching form. They turned toward the form and cowered, and at length fell on their knees before it and raised trembling arms in gestures of supplication.

  Henry strained his attention toward the figure. Why, it was Elizabeth coming toward him—little Elizabeth, with golden hair and a wise young look on her face. She was girdled with cornflowers, and her eyes were strangely puzzled and bright. With a little start of surprise she noticed Henry.

  “I am Elizabeth,” she said. “You did not come to see me before you went away.”

  “I know. I think I was afraid to talk with you. But I stood in the darkness before your window, and I whistled.”

  “Did you?” She smiled at him gladly. “That was nice of you. I cannot see, though, why you should have been afraid of me— of such a little girl. It was silly of you.”

  “I do not know why,” he said. “I ran away. I was motivated by a power that is slipping out of all the worlds. My memories are leaving me one by one like a colony of aged swans flying off to some lonely island in the sea to die. But you became a princess, did you not?” he questioned anxiously.

  “Yes, perhaps I did. I hope I did. I, too, forget. Tell me, did you really stand there in the dark?”

  Henry had noticed a peculiar thing. If he looked steadily at one of the crouched, faceless beings, it disappeared. He amused himself by staring first at one and then at another until all of them were gone.

  “Did you really stand there in the dark?”

  “I do not know. Perhaps I only thought I did.” He looked for Elizabeth, but she, too, had disappeared. In her place there was a red smoldering ember, and the light was dying out of it.

  “Wait, Elizabeth— Wait. Tell me where my father is. I want to see my father.”

  The dying ember answered him.

  “Your father is happily dead. He was afraid to test even death.”

  “But Merlin, then— Where is Merlin? If I could only find him.”

  “Merlin? You should know of him. Merlin is herding dreams in Avalon.”

  The fire went out of the ember with a dry, hard snap. There was no light anywhere. For a moment, Henry was conscious of the deep, mellow pulsation of the Tone.