Cup of Gold by Steinbeck, John

“You are the Red Saint?”

He was not prepared for this change of idea. He was staggered at such a revolt against his preconceptions. But, said his mind, twelve hundred men and more had broken their way through the jungle, had dashed on the city like a brutal wave. Hundreds of humans had died in the agony of wounds, hundreds were crippled, the Cup of Gold was a ruin; and all these things had been done that Henry Morgan might take La Santa Roja. With all this preparation, it must be certain that he loved her. He would not have come if he had not loved her. Whatever the shock of her appearance, he could not circumvent the logic that he loved her. It must be so. Always he had thought of the “Saint” in her name; and now he perceived the reason for the adjective. But a queer feeling was seeping in on him—no logical feeling at all. He remembered such sensa­tions from a time long gone; he was drawn, yet repelled by this woman, and he felt her power to embarrass him. Morgan closed his eyes, and the figure of a slender little girl with golden hair stood in the darkness of his brain.

“You are like Elizabeth,” he said, in the dull monotone of one dreaming. “You are like, and yet there is no like­ness. Perhaps you master the power she was just learn­ing to handle. I think I love you, but I do not know. I am not sure.”

His eyes had been half closed, and when he opened them there was a real woman before him, not the wraith-like Elizabeth. And she was gazing at him with curiosity, and perhaps, he thought, with some affection. It was queer that she had come to him when no one had forced her to come. She must be fascinated. He reached into his memory for the speeches he had built on his way across the isthmus.

“You must marry me, Elizabeth—Ysobel. I think I love you, Ysobel. You must come away with me and live with me and be my wife, under the protection of my name and of my hand.”

“But I am already married,” she interposed; “quite satisfactorily married.”

He had even foreseen this. During the nights of the march he had planned this campaign as carefully as he might have planned a battle.

“But is it right that two, meeting and flaming white fire, should go apart for stark eternity, should trudge off into bleak infinity; that each of these two should bear black embers of a flame that has not burned itself to death? Is there anything under heaven to forbid us this burning? Heaven has given the deathless oil; each of us carries a little torch for the other. Ah, Ysobel—deny it, or shrink from the intruding knowledge if you will. You would vibrate to my touch like the fine body of an old violin.

“You are afraid, I think. There is in your mind a bur­rowing apprehension of the world; the prying world, the spiteful world. But do you not be fearsome, for I say to you that this world is a blind, doddering worm, know­ing three passions only—jealousy, curiosity, and hate. It is easy to defeat the worm, so only you make the heart a universe to itself. The worm, having no heart, cannot conceive the workings of a heart. He lies confounded by the stars of this new system.

“Why do I tell you these things, Ysobel—knowing you will understand them? You must understand them. Per­haps I know by the dark, sweet music of your eyes. Perhaps I can read the throbbing heart-beats on your lips. Your beating heart is a little drum urging me to battle with your fears. Your lips are like twin petals of a red hibiscus.

“And if I find you lovely, am I to be put in fear by a dull circumstance? May I not speak my thought to you whom it most concerns next to myself? Do not let us go apart bearing black embers of a flame that has not burned itself to death.”

When he had started to speak she listened carefully to his words, and then a little pain had flitted across her face; but when he had done there was only amusement in her eyes—that and the lurking ridicule under their sur­faces. Ysobel laughed softly.

“You forget only one thing, sir,” she said. “I do not burn. I wonder if I shall ever burn again. You do not carry a torch for me—and I hoped you did. I came this morning to see if you did. And I have heard your words so often and so often in Paris and Cordova. I am tired of these words that never change. Is there some book with which aspiring lovers instruct themselves? The Span­ish men say the same things, but their gestures are more practiced, and so a little more convincing. You have much to learn.”

She was silent. Henry looked at the floor. His amaze­ment had raised a fog of dullness in his brain.

“I took Panama for you,” he said plaintively.

“Ah—yesterday I hoped you did. Yesterday I dreamed you had, but today— I am sorry.” She spoke softly and very sadly.

“When I heard of you and your blustering up and down the ocean, I thought of you, somehow, as the one realist on an earth of vacillation. I dreamed that you would come to me one day, armed with a transcendent, silent lust, and force my body with brutality. I craved a wordless, reasonless brutality. The long thought of it bore me up when I was paraded by my husband. He did not love me. He was flattered with the thought that I loved him. It gave him importance and charm in his own eyes, neither of which were his. He would take me through the streets and his eyes would say, ‘See what I have married! No ordinary man could marry such a woman; but then, I am not an ordinary man.’ He was afraid of me—a little man, and afraid of me. He would say, ‘With your permis­sion, my dear, I shall exercise the prerogative of a hus­band.’ Ah, the contempt I have for him!

“I wanted force—blind, unreasoning force—and love not for my soul or for some imagined beauty of my mind, but for the white fetish of my body. I do not want soft­ness. I am soft. My husband uses scented lotions on his hands before he touches me, and his fingers are like thick, damp snails. I want the crush of hard muscles, the delicious pain of little hurts.”

She searched his face closely, as though looking once more for a quality which had been lost.

“I thought richly of you once, you grew to be a brazen figure of the night. And now—I find you a babbler, a speaker of sweet, considered words, and rather clumsy about it. I find you are no realist at all, but only a bungling romancer. You want to marry me—to protect me. All men, save one, have wanted to protect me. In every way I am more able to protect myself than you are. From the morn­ing of my first memory I have been made sick with phrases. I have been dressed in epithets and fed endearments. These other men, like you, would not say what they wanted. They, like you, felt it necessary to justify their passion in their own eyes. They, like you, must convince themselves, as well as me, that they love me.”

Henry Morgan had sunk his head, seemingly in shame. Now he started toward her.

“But I will force you then,” he cried.

“It is too late—I would perforce think of you standing there, declaiming your considered words. While you wrenched at my clothing, I would picture you fawning before me, blurting out your words. And I should laugh, I’m afraid. I might even protect myself—and you, who should be somewhat an authority on rape, must know the consequence of that. No, you have failed—and I am sorry of your failure.”

“I love you,” he said miserably.

“You speak as though it were some new, tremendous thing. Many men have loved me; hundreds have said they did. But what are you going to do with me, Captain Mor­gan? My husband is in Peru, and my inheritance is there also.”

“I—I do not know.”

“But am I to be a slave—a prisoner?”

“Yes; I must take you away with me. The men would laugh at me, else. It would ruin discipline.”

“If I must be a slave,” she said, “if I must go away from my own country, I hope I shall be your slave—yours or the property of a charming young buccaneer I met last night. But I do not think you will take me, Captain Mor­gan. No; I do not think you will force me to go, for I will, perhaps, twist the knife I have already in your breast.”