"Brenchley, Chaz - The Keys To D'esperance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benchley Chaz)

The Keys to D'Espщrance
a short story by
Chaz Brenchley

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Actually, by the time the keys came, he no longer believed in the house.

It was like God, he thought; they oversold it. Say too often that a thing
is so, and how can people help but doubt? Most facts prove not to be the
case after all, under any serious examination. Even the Earth isn't round.

One day, they said, D'Espщrance will be yours. You will receive it in
sorrow, they said, and pass it on in joy. That is as it is, they said, as
it always is, as it should be.

But they said it when he was five and he thought they meant for Christmas,
they'd never make him wait to be six.

When he was six they said it, and when he was seven and eight and nine.

At ten, he asked if he could visit.

Visit D'Espщrance? they said, laughing at him. Of course you can't, you
haven't been invited. You can't just visit. You can't call at D'Espщrance.
In passing, looking at each other, laughing. You can't pass D'Espщrance.

But if it was going to be his, he said at twelve, wasn't he entitled?
Didn't he have a right to know? He'd never seen a painting, even, never
seen a photograph...

There are none, they said, and, Be patient. And, No, don't be foolish, of
course you're not entitled. Title to D'Espщrance does not vest in you, they
said. Yet, they said.

And somewhere round about fifteen he stopped believing. The guns still
thundered across the Channel, and he believed in those; he believed in his
own death to come, glorious and dreadful; he believed in Rupert Brooke and
Euclidean geometry and the sweet breath of a girl, her name whispered into
his bolster but never to be uttered aloud, never in hearing; and no, he did
not believe in D'Espщrance.

-------------------

Two years later the girl was dead and his parents also, and none of them in
glory. His school would have no more of him, and the war was over; and that
last was the cruellest touch in a long and savage peal, because it took
from him the chance of an unremarked death, a way to follow quietly.

Now it must needs be the river, rocks in his pockets and thank God he had