He laid aside his hoe, sat down by the low wattle fence and took the child onto his lap. She was terribly tired and tried to add a few more details, but the heat, excitement and exhaustion made her drowsy. Her lids drooped, her head leaned against her father’s hard shoulder, and in another instant she would have been carried off to the Land of Nod, when abruptly, perturbed by sudden doubt, Assol sat up straight with her eyes still shut and, thrusting her little fists at Longren’s waistcoat, exclaimed:
“Do you think the magical ship will really come for me?”
“It’ll come,” the sailor replied calmly. “If you’ve been told it will, it means it will.”
“She’ll forget all about it by the time she grows up,” he said to himself, “and, meanwhile… one should not take such a toy from you. You will see so many sails in the future, and they will not be crimson, but filthy and treacherous: from afar they’ll seem gleaming and white, but from close-up they’ll be ragged and brazen. A traveller chose to jest with my girl. So what? It was a kindly jest! It was a good jest! My, how tired you are, – half a day spent in the woods, in the heart of the forest. As for the crimson sails, think of them as I do: you will have your crimson sails.”
Assol slept. Longren took out his pipe with his free hand, lit it, and the wind carried the smoke off through the fence into a bush that grew outside the garden. Sitting by the bush with his back to the fence and chewing on a slice of meat pie was a young beggar. The overheard conversation between the father and daughter had put him in a cheerful mood, and the smell of good tobacco had awakened the sponger in him.
“Give a poor man a smoke, sir,” he said, speaking through the fence.
“Compared to yours, my tobacco is pure poison.”
“I’d certainly give you some,” Longren replied in an undertone, “but my pouch is in my other pocket. And I don’t want to waken my daughter.”
“What a disaster, indeed! She’ll wake up and go right back to sleep again, but you’ll have given a wayfarer a smoke.”
“It’s not as if you were all out of tobacco,” Longren retorted, “and the child’s exhausted. Come by later, if you wish.”
The beggar spat in disgust, hung his sack on his stick and sneered:
“Naturally, she’s a princess. Filling her head with all sorts of fairy-tale ships! You really are a queer fish, and you a man of property!”
“Listen,” Longren whispered, “I think I will waken her, but it’ll only be because I’ll be bashing your face in. Now get going!”
Half an hour later the beggar was seated in a tavern in the company of a dozen fishermen. Sitting behind them, now tugging at a husband’s sleeve, now stretching a hand over a shoulder to reach for a glass of vodka – for themselves, naturally – were some buxom women with shaggy brows. The muscles of their arms were as big as paving stones. The beggar, fuming from the affront, was relating his tale:
“…and he wouldn’t give me a smoke. ‘Now when you get to be of age,’ he says, ‘a special red ship’ll come for you. That’s on account of how you’re fated to marry a prince. And,’ he says, ‘you mind what that magician said.’ But I say, ‘Go on, wake her up, so’s you can reach over and get your pouch.’ And, you know, he chased me halfway down the road.”
“What? Who? What’s he talking about?” the women’s curious voices demanded.
The fishermen turned their heads slightly to tell them what it was all about, smiling wryly as they did:
“Longren and his daughter have become wild as animals, and maybe they’re even touched in the head, that’s what the man here’s saying. A sorcerer came to see them, he says. And now they’re waiting – ladies, see you don’t miss your chance! – for a prince from some foreign land, and he’ll be sailing under crimson sails to boot!”
Three days later, as Assol was returning home from the toy shop in town, she first heard the taunts:
“Hey, you gallows-bird! Assol! Look over here! See the crimson sails coming in!”
The child started and involuntarily shielded her eyes as she gazed off towards the sea. Then she turned back to where the shouting had come from; twenty feet away she saw a group of children; they were making faces and sticking their tongues out at her. The little girl sighed and hurried off home.
II. Gray
If Caesar considered that it was better to be the first in a village than the second in Rome, Arthur Gray did not have to envy Caesar as far as his sagacious wish was concerned. He was born a captain, desired to be one, and became one.
The great manor in which Gray was born was sombre inside and magnificent without. The manor looked on flower gardens and a part of the park. The very best imaginable tulips – silver-blue, lavender and black with a brush of pink – snaked through the garden like strings of carelessly-strewn beads. The old trees in the park slumbered in the sifting gloom above the sedge of a meandering stream. The castle fence, for the manor was actually a castle, was made of spiral cast-iron posts connected by iron grillwork. Each post was crowned by a cast-iron lily blossom; on festive occasions the cups were filled with oil and burned brightly into the night as a far-stretching, fiery line.
Gray’s parents were arrogant slaves of their social position, wealth and the laws of that society, referring to which they could say “we”. The part of their souls that was centred on the gallery of their ancestors is not really worth describing, while the other part – an imaginary continuation of the gallery – began with little Gray, who was preordained to live out his life and die in such a manner as to have his portrait hung on the wall without detriment to the family honour. A small error had crept into the plan, however: Arthur Gray was born with a lively spirit, and was in no way disposed to continue the line of the family tracing.
This liveliness, this complete unorthodoxy in the boy became most evident in his eighth year; a knightly type affected by strange impressions, a seeker and miracle worker, that is, a person who had chosen from amongst the countless roles in life the most dangerous and touching one – the role of Providence, became apparent in Gray from the time he pushed a chair up against the wall to reach a painting of the Crucifixion and removed the nails from Christ’s bloody hands, that is, he simply covered them over with blue paint he had stolen from a house painter. Thus altered, he found the painting to be more bearable. Carried away by this strange occupation, he had begun covering over Christ’s feet as well, but was surprised by his father. The old man jerked the boy off the chair by his ears and asked:
“Why have you ruined the painting?”
“I haven’t ruined it.”
“It is the work of a famous painter.”
“I don’t care. I can’t allow nails to be sticking out of someone’s hands, making them bleed. I don’t want it to be.”
Hiding his smile in his moustache, Lionel Gray recognized himself in his son’s reply and did not punish him.
Gray diligently went about studying the castle, and his discoveries were amazing. Thus, in the attic he came upon a knight’s steel armour-junk, books bound in iron and leather, crumbling vestments and flocks of pigeons.
In the cellar, where the wine was kept, he gleaned interesting information about Laffitte, Madeira and sherry. Here in the murky light of the lancet windows that were squeezed in between the slanting triangles of the stone vaults there were large and small casks; the largest, in the shape of a flat circle, took up all of the shorter wall of the cellar; the hundred-year-old black oak of the cask gleamed like highly-polished wood. Paunchy green and dark-blue bottles rested in wicker baskets among the casks. Grey fungi’ on spindly stalks grew on the stones and on the earthen floor; everywhere – there was mould, moss dampness and a sour, stuffy smell. A great cobweb glittered like gold in a far corner when, towards evening, the sun’s last ray searched it out. Two casks of the finest Alicant that existed in the days of Cromwell were sunk into the ground in one spot, and the cellar-keeper, pointing out a vacant corner to Gray, did not miss the chance to recount the story of the famous grave in which lay a dead man more live than a pack of fox terriers. As he began his tale, the story-teller would never forget to check on the spigot of the large cask and would walk away from it apparently with an easier heart, since unwonted tears of too-strong joy glistened in his suddenly merry eyes.