Longren, a sailor of the Orion, a rugged, three-hundred ton brig on which he had served for ten years and to which he was attached more strongly than some sons are to their mothers, was finally forced to give up the sea.

This is how it came about. During one of his infrequent visits home he did not, as he always had, see his wife Mary from afar, standing on the doorstep, throwing up her hands and then running breathlessly towards him.

Instead, he found a distraught neighbour woman by the crib, a new piece of furniture in his small house.

“I tended her for three months, neighbour,” the woman said. “Here’s your daughter.”

Longren’s heart was numb with grief as he bent down and saw an eight-month-old mite peering intently at his long beard. Then he sat down, stared at the floor and began to twirl his moustache. It was wet as from the rain.

“When did Mary die?” he asked.

The woman recounted the sad tale, interrupting herself to coo fondly at the child and assure him that Mary was now in Heaven. When Longren learned the details, Heaven seemed to him not much brighter than the woodshed, and he felt that the light of a plain lamp, were the three of them together now, would have been a joy unsurpassed to the woman who had gone on to the unknown Beyond.

About three months previously the young mother’s finances had come to an abrupt end. At least half of the money Longren had left her was spent on doctors after her difficult confinement and on caring for the newborn infant; finally, the loss of a small but vital sum had forced Mary to appeal to Menners for a loan. Menners kept a tavern and shop and was considered a wealthy man. Mary went to see him at six o’clock in the evening. It was close to seven when the neighbour woman met her on the road to Liss. Mary had been weeping and was very upset. She said she was going to town to pawn her wedding ring. Then she added that Menners had agreed to lend her some money but had demanded her love in return. Mary had rejected him.

“There’s not a crumb in the house,” she had said to the neighbour.

“I’ll go into town. We’ll manage somehow until my husband returns.”

It was a cold, windy evening. In vain did the neighbour try to talk the young woman out of going to Liss when night was approaching. “You’ll get wet, Mary. It’s beginning to rain, and the wind looks as if it will bring on a storm.”

It was at least a three hours’ brisk walk from the seaside village to town, but Mary did not heed her neighbour’s advice. “I won’t be an eyesore to you any more,” she said. “As it is, there’s hardly a family I haven’t borrowed bread, tea or flour from. I’ll pawn my ring, and that will take care of everything.” She went into town, returned and the following day took to her bed with a fever and chills; the rain and the evening frost had brought on double pneumonia, as the doctor from town, called in by the kind-hearted neighbour, had said. A week later there was an empty place in Longren’s double bed, and the neighbour woman moved into his house to care for his daughter. She was a widow and all alone in the world, so this was not a difficult task. “Besides,” she added, “the baby fills my days.”

Longren went off to town, quit his job, said goodbye to his comrades and returned home to raise little Assol. The widow stayed on in the sailor’s house as a foster mother to the child until she had learned to walk well, but as soon as Assol stopped falling when she raised her foot to cross the threshold, Longren declared that from then on he intended to care for the child himself and, thanking the woman for her help and kindness, embarked on a lonely widower’s life, focusing all his thoughts, hopes, love and memories on the little girl.

Ten years of roaming the seas had not brought him much of a fortune. He began to work. Soon the shops in town were offering his toys for sale, finely-crafted small model boats, launches, one and two-deck sailing vessels, cruisers and steamboats; in a word, all that he knew so well and that, owing to the nature of the toys, partially made up for the hustle and bustle of the ports and the adventures of a life at sea. In this way Longren earned enough to keep them comfortable. He was not a sociable man, but now, after his wife’s death, he became something of a recluse. He was sometimes seen in a tavern of a holiday, but he would never join anyone and would down a glass of vodka at the bar and leave with a brief: “yes”, “no”, “hello”, “goodbye”, “getting along”, in reply to all his neighbours’ questions and greetings. He could not stand visitors and would get rid of them without resorting to force, yet firmly, by hints and excuses which left the former no choice but to invent a reason that prevented them from remaining further.

He, in turn, visited no one; thus, a wall of cold estrangement rose up between him and his fellow-villagers, and if Longren’s work, the toys he made, had depended in any way on village affairs, he would have felt most keenly the consequences of this relationship. He bought all his wares and provisions in town, and Menners could not even boast of a box of matches he had sold to Longren. Longren did all his own housework and patiently learned the difficult art, so unusual for a man, of rearing a girl.

Assol was now five, and her father was beginning to smile ever more gently as he looked upon her sensitive, kind little face when she sat in his lap and puzzled over the mystery of his buttoned waistcoat or sang sailors’ chants, those wild, wind-blown rhymes. When sung by a child, with a lisp here and there, the chants made one think of a dancing bear with a pale blue ribbon around its neck. At about this time something occurred that, casting its shadow upon the father, shrouded the daughter as well.

It was spring, an early spring as harsh as winter, but still unlike it. A biting North off-shore wind whipped across the cold earth for about three weeks.

The fishing boats, dragged up onto the beach, formed a long row of dark keels which seemed like the backbones of some monstrous fish on the white sand. No one dared to venture out to sea in such weather. The single village street was deserted; the cold whirlwind, racing down from the hills along the shore and off towards the vacant horizon, made the “open air” a terrible torture. All the chimneys of Kaperna smoked from dawn till dusk, shaking the smoke out over the steep roofs.

However, the days of the fierce North wind enticed Longren out of his cozy little house more often than did the sun, which cast its coverlets of spun gold over the sea and Kaperna on a clear day. Longren would go to the very end of the long wooden pier and there he would smoke his pipe at length, the wind carrying off the smoke, and watch the sandy bottom, bared near the shore when the waves retreated, foam up in grey froth that barely caught up with the waves whose rumbling progress towards the black, stormy horizon filled the space between with flocks of weird, long-maned creatures galloping off in wild abandon to their distant point of solace. The moaning and the noise, the crashing thunder of the huge, upthrusted masses of water and the seemingly visible currents of wind that whipped across the vicinity – for so forceful was its unhampered course – produced that dulling, deafening sensation in Longren’s tortured soul which, reducing grief to undefin-able sadness, is equal in its effect to deep slumber.

On one such day Menners’ twelve-year-old son Hin, noticing that his father’s boat was being buffeted against the piles under the pier and that its sides were becoming battered, went off to tell his father of this. The storm had but recently begun; Menners had forgotten to pull his boat up on the sand. He hurried to the beach where he saw Longren standing at the end of the pier with his back to him, smoking. There was not another soul in sight. Menners walked halfway along the pier, climbed down into the wildly splashing water and untied his boat; then, standing upright in it he began moving towards the shore, pulling himself along from one pile to the next.

He had forgotten his oars, and as he stumbled and missed his hold on the next pile, a strong gust of wind pulled the prow of his boat away from the pier and towards the ocean. Now Menners could not have reached the nearest pile even if he had stretched out to his full length. The wind and the waves, rocking the boat, were carrying it off into the distance and doom. Menners realized his predicament and wanted to dive into the water and swim ashore, but this decision was too late in coming, for the boat was now spinning about near the end of the pier where the considerable depth and raging waves promised imminent death. There were only about twenty metres between Longren and Menners, who was being swept off into the stormy distance, and a rescue was still possible, for a coiled rope with a weighted end hung on the pier beside Longren. The rope was there for any boat that might land during a storm and was thrown to the boat from the pier.

“Longren!” Menners cried in terror. “Don’t just stand there! Can’t you see I’m being carried away? Throw me the line!”

Longren said nothing as he gazed calmly upon the frantic man, although he puffed harder on his pipe and then, to have a better view of what was happening, removed it from his mouth.

“Longren!” Menners pleaded. “I know you can hear me. I’ll be drowned! Save me!”

But Longren said not a word; it seemed as though he had not heard the frantic wail. He did not even shift his weight until the boat had been carried so far out to sea that Menners’ word-cries were barely audible.

Menners sobbed in terror, he begged the sailor to run to the fishermen for help; he promised him a reward, he threatened and cursed him, but all Longren did was walk to the very edge of the pier so as not to loose the leaping, spinning boat from view too soon.

“Longren, save me!” The words came to him as they would to someone inside a house from someone on the roof.

Then, filling his lungs with air and taking a deep breath so that not a single word would be carried away by the wind, Longren shouted: “That’s how she pleaded with you! Think of it, Menners, while you’re still alive, and don’t forget!”

Then the cries stopped, and Longren went home. Assol awakened to see her father sitting lost in thought before the lamp that was now burning low.

Hearing the child’s voice calling to him, he went over to her, kissed her affectionately and fixed the tumbled blanket.

“Go to sleep, dear. It’s still a long way till morning,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve made a black toy, Assol. Now go to sleep.”

The next day the village buzzed with the news of Menners’ dissappearance. Five days later he was brought back, dying and full of malice. His story soon reached every village in the vicinity. Menners had been in the open sea until evening; he had been battered against the sides and bottom of the boat during his terrible battle with the crashing waves that constantly threatened to toss the raving shopkeeper into the sea and was picked up by the Lucretia, plying towards Kasset. Exposure and the nightmare he had experienced put an end to Menners’ days. He did not live a full forty-eight hours, calling down upon Longren every calamity possible on earth and in his imagination. Menners’ story of the sailor watching his doom, having refused him help, the more convincing since the dying man could barely breathe and kept moaning, astounded the people of Kaperna. To say nothing of the fact that hardly a one of them would remember an insult even greater than the one inflicted upon Longren or to grieve as he was to grieve for Mary till the end of his days – they were repulsed, puzzled and stunned by Longren’s silence. Longren had stood there in silence until those last words he had shouted to Menners; he had stood there without moving, sternly and silently, as a judge, expressing his utter contempt of Menners – there was something greater than hatred in his silence and they all sensed this. If he had shouted, expressed his gloating through gesture or bustling action, or had in any other way shown his triumph at the sight of Menners’ despair, the fishermen would have understood him, but he had acted differently than they would have – he had acted impressively and strangely and had thus placed himself above them – in a word, he had done that which is not forgiven. No longer did anyone salute him in the street or offer him his hand, or cast a friendly glance of recognition and greeting his way.

From now and to the end he was to remain aloof from the affairs of the village; boys catching sight of him in the street would shout after him:

“Longren drowned Menners!” He paid no attention to this. Nor did it seem that he noticed the fact that in the tavern or on the beach among the boats the fishermen would stop talking in his presence and would move away as from someone who had the plague. The Menners’ affair had served to strengthen their formerly partial alienation. Becoming complete, it created an unshakeable mutual hatred, the shadow of which fell upon Assol as well.

The little girl grew up without friends. The two or three dozen children of her age in the village, which was saturated like a sponge is with water with the crude law of family rule, the basis of which is the unquestioned authority of the parents, imitative like all children in the world, excluded little Assol once and for all from the circle of their protection and interest. Naturally, this came about gradually, through the admonitions and scolding of the adults, and assumed the nature of a terrible taboo which, increased by idle talk and rumour, burgeoned in the children’s minds to become a fear of the sailor’s house.

Besides, the secluded life Longren led now gave vent to the hysterical tongues of gossip; it was implied that the sailor had murdered someone somewhere and that, they said, was why he was no longer signed up on any ship, and he was so sullen and unsociable because he was “tormented by a criminal conscience”. When playing, the children would chase Assol away if she came near, they would sling mud at her and taunt her by saying that her father ate human flesh and was now a counterfeiter. One after another her naive attempts at making friends ended in bitter tears, bruises, scratches and other manifestations of public opinion; she finally stopped feeling affronted, but would still sometimes ask her father:

“Why don’t they like us? Tell me.”

“Ah, Assol, they don’t know how to like or love. One must be able to love, and that is something they cannot do.”

“What do you mean by ‘be able to’?”

“This!”

At which he would swing the child up and fondly kiss her sad eyes which she would shut tight with sweet pleasure.

Assol’s favourite pastime was to climb up on her father’s lap of an evening or on a holiday, when he had set aside his pots of glue, his tools and unfinished work and, having taken off his apron, sat down to rest, pipe clenched between his teeth. Twisting and turning within the protective circle of her father’s arm, she would finger the various parts of the tovs, questioning him as to the purpose of each. Thus would begin a peculiar, fantastic lecture on life and people – a lecture in which, due to Longren’s former way of life, all sorts of chance occurrences and chance in general, strange, amazing and unusual events, were given a major role. As Longren told his daughter the names of the various ropes, sails and rigging, he would gradually become carried away, progressing from simple explanations to various episodes in which now a windlass, now a rudder and now a mast, or this or the other type of craft and such like had played a part, and from these isolated illustrations he would go on to sweeping descriptions of nautical wanderings, interweaving superstition with reality and reality with images created by his imagination. Herein appeared the tiger cat, that herald of shipwreck, the talking flying fish which one had to obey on pain of losing one’s course, and the Flying Dutchman and his wild crew, signs, ghosts, mermaids and pirates – in a word, all the fables that help a sailor while away the time during a calm spell or in some favourite tavern. Longren also spoke of shipwrecked crews, of men who had become savages and had forgotten how to talk, of mysterious buried treasure, of convict mutinies, and of much else which the little girl listened to more raptly than did, perhaps, Columbus’ first audience to his tale of a new continent.

“Tell me more,” Assol pleaded when Longren, lost in thought, would fall silent, andshe would fall asleep on his breast with a head full of wonderful dreams.

The appearance of the clerk from the toy shop in town, which was glad to buy whatever Longren had made, was a great and always a materially important treat to her. In order to get into the father’s good graces and strike a good bargain, the clerk would bring along a couple of apples, a bun and a handfull of nuts for the girl. Longren usually asked for the true price of a toy, for he detested bargaining, but the clerk would lower the price. “Why,” Longren would say, “It was taken me a week to make this boat. (The boat was five inches long.) See how strong and trim it is, and mark the draught. Why, it’ll hold fifteen men in a storm.” In the end, the little girl’s soft murmurings and fussing with her apple would weaken Longren’s determination and desire to argue; he would give in, and the clerk, having filled his basket with well-made, excellent toys, would leave, laughing up his sleeve.

Longren did all the work about the house himself: he chopped wood, carried water, made the stove, cooked, washed clothes and ironed and, besides, found time to earn their keep. When Assol was eight years old her father taught her to read and write. He began taking her to town now and then, and after a while even sent her alone if he had to borrow some money from the shop or had some new toys to deliver. This did not happen often, although Liss was only four miles from Kaperna, but the road lay through the forest, and there is much in a forest that can frighten a child beside the actual physical danger which, it is true, one would hardly find in such close proximity to a town, but should still keep in mind. That was why Longren would let her go to town alone only on fine days, in the morning, when the woods along the road were filled with showers of sunshine, flowers and stillness, so that Assol’s impressionability was not threatened by any phantoms conjured up by her imagination.

One day, in the middle of such a journey to town, the child sat down by the roadside to have a bun she had brought along for her lunch. As she munched on the bun she picked up each toy in turn; two or three were new to her: Longren had made them during the night. One of the new toys was a miniature racing yacht; the little white craft had crimson sails made of scraps of silk which Longren used to cover the cabin walls in toys intended for wealthy customers. Here, however, having completed the yacht, he had not found any suitable cloth for the sails and had used what had come to hand – some scraps of crimson silk. Assol was delighted. The flaming, cheerful colour burned so brightly in her hand she fancied she was holding fire. A stream straddled by a little bridge of nailed poles crossed the road; to the right and left the stream flowed off into the forest. “If I put it in the water for just a little while it won’t get wet,” Assol was thinking, “and then I can wipe it dry.” She went off downstream into the forest a ways, and carefully placed the boat that had caught her fancy into the stream at the water’s edge; the clear water immediately reflected the crimson of the sails; the light streaming through the cloth lay as a shimmering pink glow upon the white stones of the bottom. “Where’d you come from, Captain?” Assol inquired in a most serious voice of an imaginary character and, answering her own question, replied, “I’ve come from… from… from China.” “And what have you brought?” “That’s something I shan’t tell you.” “Oh, so you won’t, Captain? Well then, back into the basket you go.” Just as the captain was about to repent and say he had only been teasing, and would gladly show her an elephant, the mild backlash of a wave that had washed against the bank turned the yacht’s bow into the stream and, like a real vessel, it left the bank at full speed and sailed off with the current. The scale of her surroundings changed instantly: the stream now seemed like a great river to the child, and the yacht a large, distant vessel towards which, nearly falling into the water, she stretched forth her hands in dumb terror. “The captain got frightened,” she decided and ran after the disappearing toy, hoping that it would be washed up on the bank farther on. As she hastened along, dragging the light but cumbersome basket, Assol kept repeating, “Goodness! How could it have happened? What an accident… ” Trying not to lose sight of the beautiful triangle of the sails that was drifting off so gracefully, she stumbled, fell, and ran on again.

Never before had Assol ventured so far into the woods. Being completely absorbed by an impatient desire to catch up with the toy, she paid no attention to her surroundings; there were more than enough obstacles on the bank to claim her attention as she scurried along. Mossy trunks of fallen trees, pits, tall-standing ferns, briar roses, jasmine and hazel bushes blocked her every step; in overcoming them she gradually tired, stopping ever more often to catch her breath or brush a wisp of clinging cobweb from her face. When, in the wider stretches, there appeared thickets of sedge and reeds, Assol nearly lost sight of the crimson-gleaming sails, but hurrying round a bend she would catch sight of them again, running with the wind so majestically and steadfastly. Once she looked back, and the great mass of the forest with its many hues, changing from the hazy columns of light in the leaves to the dark slashes of dense gloom, astounded her. For a moment she became frightened, but then recalled the toy and, letting out several deep “phew’s”, ran on as fast as she could.

Nearly an hour passed in this futile and frantic chase, and then Assol was surprised and relieved to see the trees part widely up ahead, letting in a blue expanse of sea, clouds and the edge of a sandy yellow bluff onto which she came running, nearly dropping from exhaustion. This was the mouth of the little river; spreading here, not broadly, and shallowly, so that the streaming blue of the rocks on the bottom could be seen, it disappeared into the oncoming waves of the sea. Standing at the edge of the low, root-gnarled bluff, Assol saw a man sitting on a large, flat stone by the stream with his back to her, holding the runaway yacht and turning it in his hands with the curiosity of an elephant that had caught a butterfly. Somewhat calmed by the sight of the rescued toy, Assol slid down the slope, came up beside the stranger and studied him closely while waiting for him to raise his head. However, the stranger was so absorbed in examining the forest’s surprise that the child had a chance to inspect him from head to toe, deciding that never before had she ever seen anyone like him.

The man was in fact Egle, the well-known collector of songs, legends and fairy-tales, who was on a walking tour. His grey locks fell in waves from under his straw hat; his grey blouse tucked into his blue trousers and his high boots made him look like a hunter; his white collar, tie, silver-studded belt, walking stick and leather pouch with the shiny, nickel-plated buckle showed him to be a city dweller. His face, if one can call a face a nose, lips and eyes that peep out of a bushy, spiked beard and luxuriant, fiercely twirled moustache, would have seemed flabbily translucent, if not for the eyes that were as grey as sand and as shiny as pure steel, with a gaze that was bold and powerful.

“Now give it back,” the little girl said timidly. “You’ve played with it long enough. How did you catch it?”

Egle looked up and dropped the yacht, for Assol’s excited voice had broken the stillness so unexpectedly. For a moment the old man gazed at her, smiling and slowly running his beard through his large, curled hand. An oft-washed little cotton dress just barely covered the girl’s skinny, sunburned knees. Her thick dark hair tied up in a lace kerchief had got undone and fell to her shoulders. Every one of Assol’s features was finely-chiselled and as delicate as a swallow’s flight. There was a sad, questioning look in her dark eyes which seemed older than her face; its irregular oval was touched with the lovely sunburn peculiar to a healthy whiteness of the skin. Her small parted lips were turned up in a gentle smile.

“I swear by the Brothers Grimm, Aesop and Andersen,” Egle said, looking from the girl to the yacht, “that there’s something very special here! Listen, you, flower! This is yours, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I ran all the way down along the stream after it; I thought I’d die. Did it come here?”

“Right to my feet. The shipwreck has made it possible for me, acting as an off-shore pirate, to present you with this prize. The yacht, abandoned by its crew, was tossed up on the beach by a three-inch wave – landing between my left heel and the tip of my stick.” He thumped his stick. “What’s your name, child?”

“Assol,” the girl replied, tucking the toy Egle had handed her into the basket.

“That’s fine.” The old man continued his obscure speech, never taking his eyes, in the depths of which a kindly, friendly chuckle glinted, from her. “Actually, I shouldn’t have asked you your name. I’m glad it’s such an unusual one, so sibilant and musical, like the whistle of an arrow or the whispering of a seashell; what would I have done if your name had been one of those pleasant but terribly common names which are so alien to Glorious Uncertainty? Still less do I care to know who you are, who your parents are, or what sort of life you lead. Why break the spell? I was sitting here on this stone comparing Finnish and Japanese story plots… when suddenly the stream washed up this yacht, and then you appeared. Just as you are. I’m a poet at heart, my dear, even though I’ve never written anything. What’s in your basket?”

“Boats,” Assol said, shaking the basket, “and a steamship, and three little houses with flags. Soldiers live in them.”

“Excellent. You’ve been sent to sell them. And on the way you stopped to play. You let the yacht sail about a bit, but it ran off instead. Am I right?”

“Were you watching?” Assol asked doubtfully as she tried to recall whether she had not told him about it herself. “Did somebody tell you? Or did you guess?”

“I knew it.”

“How?”

“Because I’m the greatest of all magicians.”

Assol was embarrassed; the tension she felt at these words of Egle’s overstepped fear. The deserted beach, the stillness, the tiring adventure of the yacht, the strange speech of the old man with the glittering eyes, the magnificence of his beard and hair now seemed to the child as a brew of the supernatural and reality. If Egle had grimaced or shouted now, the child would have raced off, weeping and faint from fear. However, upon noticing how wide her eyes had grown, Egle made a sharp turn.

“You’ve no reason to be afraid of me,” he said in a serious voice. “On the contrary, I want to have a heart-to-heart talk with you.”

Now at last did he see what it was in her face that had struck him so. “An unwitting expectation of the beautiful, of a blissful fate,” he decided. “Ah, why wasn’t I born a writer? What a wonderful theme for a story.”

“Now then,” Egle continued, trying to round off his original thesis (a penchant for myth-making – the result of his everyday work – was greater than the fear of tossing seeds of great dreams upon unknown soil), “now then, Assol, listen carefully. I’ve just been in the village you are probably coming from; in a word, in Kaperna. I like fairy-tales and songs, and I spent the whole day in that village hoping to hear something no one had heard before. But no one in these parts tells fairy-tales. No one here sings songs. And if they do tell stories and sing songs, you know, they are tales about conniving peasants and soldiers, with the eternal praise of roguery, they are as filthy as unwashed feet and as crude as a rumbling stomach, these short, four-line ditties sung to a terrible tune… Wait, I’ve got carried away. I’ll start again.”

He was silent for a while and then continued thus:

“I don’t know how many years will pass, but a fairy-tale will blossom in Kaperna and will remain in the minds of the people for long. You’ll be grown-up then, Assol. One morning a crimson sail will gleam in the sun on the far horizon. The shimmering pile of crimson sails on a white ship will head straight towards you, cutting through the waves. This wonderful ship will sail in silently; there will be no shouting or salvoes; a great crowd will gather on the beach. Everyone will be amazed and astounded; and you’ll be there, too. The ship will sail majestically up to the very shore to the strains of beautiful music; a swift boat decked out in rugs, flowers and gold will be lowered from the ship. ‘Why have you come? Whom are you searching for?’ the people on the beach will say. Then you’ll see a brave and handsome prince; he’ll be standing there and stretching forth his hands towards you. ‘Hello, Assol!’ he’ll say. ‘Far, far away from here I saw you in a dream and have come to take you away to my kingdom forever. You will live with me there in a deep rose valley. You shall have everything your heart desires; we shall be so happy together your soul will never know the meaning of tears or sadness.’ He’ll take you into his boat, bring you to the ship, and you’ll sail away forever to a glorious land where the sun comes up and where the stars will descend from the sky to greet you upon your arrival.”

“And will it all be for me?” the girl asked softly.

Her grave eyes became merry and shone trustingly. Obviously, no dangerous magician would ever speak thus; she came closer.

“Maybe it’s already come… that ship?”

“Not so fast,” Egle objected. “First, as I’ve said, you have to grow up. Then… what’s the use of talking? It will be, and that’s all there is to it. What will you do then?”

“Me?” She looked into the basket but apparently did not find anything there worthy of being a suitable reward. “I’d love him,” she said quickly and then added rather hesitantly, “if he won’t fight.”

“No, he won’t,” the magician said, winking at her mysteriously. “He won’t. I can vouch for it. Go, child, and don’t forget what I’ve told you between two sips of flavoured vodka and my musings over the songs of convicts. Go. And may there be peace for your fluffy head!”

Longren was working in his small garden, hilling the potato plants. Raising his head, he saw Assol, who was running towards him with a joyous, impatient look on her face.

“Listen…” she said, trying to control her rapid breathing and clutching her father’s apron with both hands. “Listen to what I’m going to tell you… On the beach there, far away, there’s a magician… ”

She began her tale by telling him of the magician and his wonderful prophesy. Her excitement made it hard for her to recount the events coherently. She then proceeded to describe the magician and, in reverse order, her chase after the runaway yacht.

Longren listened to her story without once interrupting and without a smile, and when she ended it his imagination quickly conjured up a picture of the stranger, an old man holding a flask of flavoured vodka in one hand and the toy in the other. He turned away, but recalling that at momentous times of a child’s life one had to be serious and amazed, nodded solemnly and uttered:

“I see… It looks like he really is a magician. I’d like to have a look at him… But when you go again, don’t turn off the road: it’s easy to get lost in the woods.”

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.

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.

“Now then,” Poldichoque would say to Gray, sitting down on an empty crate and putting a pinch of snuff up his sharp nose, “do you see that spot? The kind of wine that’s buried there would make many a drunkard agree to having his tongue cut off if he’d be given just a little glass of it. Each cask holds a hundred litres of a substance that makes your soul explode and your body turn into a blob of dough. It’s darker than a cherry, and it won’t pour out of a bottle. It’s as thick as heavy cream. It’s locked away in casks of black oak that’re as strong as iron. They have double rows of copper hoops. And the lettering on the hoops is in Latin and says, ‘A Gray will drink me when he’ll be in Heaven.’ There were so many opinions as to what it means that your greatgrandfather, Simeon Gray, had a country estate built and named it ‘Heaven’ and thought in that way he could reconcile the mysterious inscription and reality by means of some harmless wit. And what do you know? He died of a heart attack as soon as the first hoops were knocked off. That’s how excited the old gourmet was. Ever since then nobody’s as much as touched the cask. They say the precious wine will bring misfortune. Indeed, not even the Egyptian Sphinx asked such riddles. True, it did ask a sage: ‘Will I devour you like I devour everyone else? Tell me the truth, and you’ll live’, but only after giving it some concerted thought… ”

“I think the spigot’s leaking again,” Poldichoque would say, interrupting himself, and would head at a slant towards the corner from whence, having tightened the spigot, he would return with a bland, beaming face. “Yes. After giving it some thought and, most important, taking his time about it, the sage might have said to the Sphinx: ‘Let’s go and have a drink, my good fellow, and you’ll forget all about such nonsense.’ ‘A Gray will drink me when he’s in Heaven!’ How’s one to understand that? Does it mean he’ll drink it after he’s dead? That’s very strange. Which means he’s a saint, which means he doesn’t drink either wine or spirits. Let’s say that ‘Heaven’ means happiness. But if the question is posed like that, any joy will lose half of its shiny leathers when the happy fellow has to ask himself sincerely: is this Heaven? That’s the rub. In order to drink from this cask with an easy heart and laugh, my boy, really laugh, one has to have one foot on the ground and the other in the sky. There’s also a third theory: that one day a Gray will get heavenly drunk and will brazenly empty the little cask. However, this, my boy, would not be carrying out the prophesy, it would be a tavern row.”

Having checked once again on the working order of the spigot in the big cask, Poldichoque ended his story looking glum and intent:

“Your ancestor, John Gray, brought these casks over from Lisbon on the Beagle in 1793; he paid two thousand gold piasters for the wine. The gunsmith Benjamin Ellian from Pondisherry did the inscription on the casks. The casks are sunk six feet underground and covered with the ashes of grape vines. No one ever drank this wine, tasted it, or ever will.”

“I’ll drink it,” Gray said one day, stamping his foot. “What a brave young man!” Poldichoque said. “And will you drink it in Heaven?”

“Of course! Here’s Heaven! It’s here, see?” Gray laughed softly and opened his small fist. His delicate but well-formed palm was lit up by the sun, and then the boy curled his fingers into a fist again. “Here it is!

It’s here, and now it’s gone again!”

As he spoke he kept clenching and unclenching his fist. At last, pleased with his joke, he ran out, ahead of Poldichoque, onto the dark stairway leading to the ground floor corridor. Gray was absolutely forbidden to enter the kitchen, but once, having discovered this wonderful world of flaming hearths and soot, this hissing and bubbling of boiling liquids, chopping of knives and mouth-watering smells, the boy became a diligent visitor to the great chamber. The chefs moved in stony silence like some high priests; their white hats etched against the soot-blackened walls lent an air of solemn ritual to their movements; the fat, jovial dishwashers at their barrels of water scrubbed the tableware, making the china and silver ring; boys came in, bent under the weight of baskets of fish, oysters, lobsters and fruit. Laid out on a long table were rainbow-hued pheasants, grey ducks and brightly-feathered chickens; farther on was the carcass of a suckling pig with a tiny tail and eyes shut like a babe’s; then there were turnips, cabbages, nuts, raisins and sun-burnished peaches.

Gray always quailed slightly in the kitchen: he felt that some strange force was in charge here, and that its power was the mainspring of life in the castle; the shouts sounded like orders and invocations; the movements of the kitchen staff after years of practice had acquired that precise, measured rhythm that seems like inspiration. Gray was not yet tall enough to peep into the largest cauldron which bubbled like Mt. Vesuvius, but he felt a special respect for it; he watched in awe as two serving women handled it; at such times steaming froth would splash out onto the top of the stove, and the steam that rose from the hissing stove lid would billow out into the kitchen. On one occasion so much liquid splashed out it scalded one of the kitchen maid’s hands. The skin immediately turned red from the rush of blood, and Betsy (for that was her name) wept as she rubbed oil into the burned skin. Tears coursed down her round, frightened face uncontrollably.

Gray was petrified. As the other women fussed about Betsy, he was suddenly gripped by the pain of another person’s suffering which he could not himself experience.

“Does it hurt very much?” he asked.

“Try it, and you’ll see,” Betsy replied, covering her hand with her apron.

The boy frowned and climbed up onto a stool, dipped a long-handled spoon into the hot liquid (in this case it was lamb soup) and splashed some onto his wrist. The sensation was not faint, but the faintness resulting from the sharp pain made him sway. He was as pale as flour when he went up to Betsy, hiding his scalded hand in his pants pocket.

“I think it hurts you awfully,” he murmured, saying nothing of his own experiment. “Come to the doctor, Betsy. Come on!”

He tugged at her skirt insistently, though all the while the believers in home remedies were giving the girl all sorts of advice for treating the burn. However, she was in very great pain, and so she followed Gray. The doctor relieved her pain by applying some medication. Not before Betsy was gone did Gray show him his own hand.

This insignificant episode made twenty-year-old Betsy and ten-year-old Gray bosom friends. She would fill his pockets with sweets and apples, and he would tell her fairy-tales and other stories he had read in his books.

One day he discovered that Betsy could not marry Jim, the groom, because they had no money to set themselves up in a home of their own. Gray used his fireplace tongs to crack his china piggy-bank and shook out the contents, which amounted to nearly a hundred pounds. He rose early, and when the dowerless girl went off to the kitchen, sneaked into her room and placed his gift in her chest, laying a note on top: “This is yours, Betsy. (Signed) Robin Hood.” The commotion this caused in the kitchen was so great that Gray had to confess to the deed. He did not take the money back and did not want to have another word said about it.

His mother was one of those people whom life pours into a ready mould. She lived in the dream-world of prosperity that provided for every wish of an ordinary soul; therefore, she had no other occupation save to order around her dressmakers, doctor and butler. However, her passionate and ail-but religious attachment for her strange child was, one might assume, the only vent for those of her inclinations, chloroformed by her upbringing and fate, which were no longer fully alive, but simmered faintly, leaving the will idle. The high-born dame resembled a peacock hen that had hatched a swan’s egg. She was quiveringly aware of the magnificent uniqueness of her son; sadness, love and constraint filled her being when she pressed the boy to her breast, and her heart spoke unlike her tongue, which habitually reflected the conventional types of relationships and ideas. Thus does a cloud effect, concocted so weirdly by the sun’s rays, penetrate the symmetrical interior of a public building, divesting it of its banal merits; the eye sees but does not recognize the chamber; the mysterious nuances of light amongst paltriness create a dazzling harmony.

The high-born dame, whose face and figure, it seemed, could respond but in icy silence to the fiery voices of life and whose delicate beauty repelled rather than attracted, since one sensed her haughty effort of will, devoid of feminine attraction – this same Lillian Gray, when alone with the boy, was transformed into an ordinary mother speaking in a loving, gentle voice those endearments which refuse to be committed to paper; their power lies in the emotions, not in their meaning. She was positively unable to refuse her son anything. She forgave him everything: his visits to the kitchen, his abhorrence of his lessons, his disobedience and his many eccentricities.

If he did not want the trees to be trimmed they were left untouched; if he asked that someone be pardoned or rewarded – the person in question knew that it would be so; he could ride any horse he wished, bring any dog he wished into the castle, go through the books in the library, run around barefoot and eat whatever he pleased.

His father tried to put a stop to this and finally yielded – not to the principle, but to his wife’s wishes. He merely had all the servants’ children moved out of the castle, fearing that by associating with low society the boy’s whims would become inclinations that would be difficult to eradicate. In general, he was completely taken up with endless family lawsuits whose origins went back to the era of the founding of the first paper mills and whose end perhaps lay in the death of the last caviller.

Besides, there were affairs of state, the running of his own estates, dictating his memoirs, fox-hunts, newspapers to be read and an extended correspondence to keep him at a certain distance inwardly from the rest of the family; he saw his son so infrequently that he would sometimes forget how old the boy was.

Thus, Gray lived in a world of his own. He played all by himself – usually in the back yards of the castle which had once, in times of yore, been of strategic use. These vast, empty lots with the remains of deep moats and moss-covered stone cellars were overgrown with weeds, nettles, briars, blackthorn and shy bright wildflowers. Gray would spend hours here, exploring mole burrows, battling weeds, stalking butterflies and building fortresses of broken bricks, which he then shelled with sticks and stones.

He was going on twelve when all the implications of his soul, all the separate traits of his spirit and shades of secret impulses were brought together in a single powerful surge and, having in this way acquired a harmonious expression, became an indomitable desire. Until then he seemed to have found but disparate parts of his garden – a sunny spot, shadow, a flower, a great dark trunk – in the many other gardens and suddenly saw them clearly, all – in magnificent, astonishing accord.

This happened in the library. The tall door topped by a murky fanlight was usually locked, but the latch fit the mortise loosely and when pressed hard, the door would give, buckle and open. When the spirit of adventure urged Gray to make his way into the library he was amazed at the dusty light, whose effect and peculiarity were created by the coloured design of the leaded fanlight. The stillness of desertion lay upon everything here as on water in a pond. Here and there dark rows of bookcases adjoined the windows, blocking them halfway; there were aisles between the bookcases which were piled high with volumes. Here was an open album from which the centre pages had slipped out; over there were some scrolls tied with gold cord, stacks of sombre-looking books, thick layers of manuscripts, a mound of miniature volumes which cracked like bark if they were opened; here were charts and tables, rows of new editions, maps; a great variety of bindings, coarse, fine, black, mottled, blue, grey, thick, thin, rough and smooth. The bookcases were packed with books. They seemed like walls which had encompassed life itself within their bulk. The glass of the bookcases reflected other bookcases covered with colourless, shimmering spots. On a round table was a huge globe encased by a brass spherical cross formed by the equator and a meridian.

Turning to the exit, Gray saw a huge painting above the door whose images immediately filled the rigid silence of the library. The painting was of a clipper rising upon the crest of a tremendous wave. Foam coursed down its side. It was depicted at the very last moment of its upward flight. The ship was sailing straight at the viewer. The rearing bowsprit obscured the base of the masts. The crest of the great wave, rent by the keel, resembled the wings of a huge bird. Foam streaked off into the air. The sails, but vaguely discernible behind the forecastle deck and above the bowsprit, swollen by the raging force of the storm, were bearing back in their enormity, in order to, having gained the crest, righten themselves and then, tilting over the void, speed the vessel on towards new billows. Low, ragged clouds swirled over the ocean. The dim light struggled vainly against the approaching darkness of night. However, the most striking aspect of the painting was the figure of a man standing on the forecastle deck with his back to the viewer. It fully conveyed the situation and even the nature of the moment. The man’s pose (he had spread his legs far apart and flung out his arms) did not actually indicate what he was doing, but led one to assume attention strained to the extreme and directed towards something on deck invisible to the viewer. The hem of his coat was whipped back by the wind; his white pigtail and black sword were swept straight out into the air; the richness of his dress indicated him to be the captain; his dancing stance – the sweep of the wave; there was no hat; he was, apparently, completely absorbed by the dangerous moment and was shouting – but what? Did he see a man falling overboard, was he issuing an order to tack about or, shouting above the wind, was he calling to the boatswain? The shadows of these thoughts, not the thoughts themselves, took shape in Gray’s heart as he gazed at the painting. He suddenly felt that someone had approached him from the left and now stood beside him, unknown and unseen; he had only to turn his head to make the weird sensation disappear without a trace. Gray knew this. However, he did not snuff out his imagination, but harkened to it. A soundless voice shouted several curt phrases, as incomprehensible as if spoken in Malay; there followed the crash of extended avalanches; echoes and a grim wind filled the library. Gray heard all this within himself. He looked around; the stillness that was instantly re-established dispelled the ringing cobweb of his fantasy; his bond with the storm was broken.

Gray returned several times to look at the painting. It became to him that necessary word in the conversation between the soul and life without which it is difficult to understand one’s self. The great sea was gradually finding a place within the small boy. He became accustomed to it as he went through the books in the library, seeking out and avidly reading those behind whose golden door the blue glitter of the ocean could be seen. There, sowing spray behind the stern, the ships plied on. Some lost their sails and masts and, becoming engulfed by the waves, settled into the deep, where in the darkness gleam the phosphorescent eyes of fishes. Others, seized by the breakers, were battered against the reefs; the subsiding swell shook the hull dangerously; the deserted ship with its torn rigging was in protracted agony until a new storm shattered it to bits. Still others took on cargo uneventfully in one port and unloaded it in another; the crew, gathered around a tavern table, would sing the praises of a life at sea and down their drinks lovingly. There were also pirate ships that flew the Jolly Roger, manned by terrible, cutlass-swinging crews; there were phantom ships radiant in a deathly glow of blue illumination; there were naval ships with soldiers, cannons and brass bands; there were the ships of scientific expeditions, studying volcanoes, flora and fauna; there were ships enveloped in grim mystery and mutiny; there were ships of discovery and ships of adventure.

In this world, most naturally, the figure of the captain towered above all else. He was the fate, the soul and the brain of the ship. His character determined the work and the leisure of the crew. He selected his crew himself and it met his inclinations in many ways. He knew the habits and family life of each man. He possessed, in the eyes of his subordinates, magical knowledge, which enabled him to confidently plot a course from, say, Lisbon to Shanghai across the vast expanses. He repelled a storm by the counteraction of a system of complex efforts, squelching panic with curt orders; he sailed and stopped where he would; he was in command of the sailing and loading, repairs and leisure; it was difficult to imagine a greater and more sensible authority in a vital enterprise full of constant movement. This power, in its exclusiveness, and absoluteness, was equal to the power of Orpheus.

This notion of a captain, this image and this actual reality of his position occupied, by right of events of the spirit, the place of honour in Gray’s splendid imagination. No other profession save this could so successfully fuse into a single whole all the treasures of life, while preserving inviolable the most delicate design of each separate joy. Danger, risk, the forces of nature, the light of a distant land, the wondrous unknown, effervescent love, blossoming in rendezvous and parting; the fascinating turmoil of encounters, faces, events; the endless variety of life, while up above in the sky was now the Southern Cross, now the Big Dipper, and all the continents were in one’s keen eyes, though your cabin was replete with your ever-present homeland, with its books, pictures, letters and dried flowers entwined by a silken strand of hair in a suede locket on your manly chest.

In the autumn of his fifteenth year Arthur Gray ran away from home and passed through the golden gates of the sea. Soon after the schooner Anselm left Dubelt and set sail for Marseilles, with a ship’s boy aboard who had small hands and the face of a girl dressed in boy’s clothing. The ship’s boy was Gray, the owner of an elegant travelling-bag, patent leather boots as fine as kid gloves and batiste linen adorned with a crown crest.

In the course of a year, while the Anselm sailed from France to America and Spain, Gray squandered a part of his possessions on pastry-cakes, thus paying tribute to the past, and the rest, for the present and future, he lost at cards. He wanted to be a red-blooded sailor. He choked as he downed his liquor, and when bathing, his heart would falter as he dived from a height of twelve feet. He gradually lost everything except that which was most important – his strange, soaring spirit; he lost his frailty, becoming broad of bone and strong of muscle, his paleness gave way to a deep tan, he relinquished his refined carelessness of movement for the sure drive of a working hand, and there was a sparkle in his intelligent eyes as in a person’s who gazes into a fire. And his speech, having lost its uneven, haughtily shy fluidity, became brief and precise, as the thrust of a seagull at the quivering silver of a fish.

The captain of the Anselm was a kind man, but a stern seafarer who had taken the boy on out of maliciousness. He saw in Gray’s desperate desire but an eccentric whim and gloated in advance, imagining that in two months’ time Gray would say, avoiding his eyes: “Captain Hop, I’ve skinned my elbows climbing the rigging; my back and sides ache, my fingers don’t bend, my head is splitting and my legs are shaky. All these wet ropes weighing eighty pounds to balance in my hands; all these manropes, guy ropes, windlasses, cables, topmasts and cross-trees are killing my delicate body. I want to go home to my mamma.” After listening mentally to this speech, Captain Hop would deliver, also mentally, the following speech: “You can go wherever you want to, ducky. If any tar’s got stuck on your fine feathers you can wash it off at home – with Rose-Mimosa Cologne.”

This cologne that Captain Hop had invented pleased him most of all and, concluding his imaginary rebuke, he repeated aloud: “Yes. Run along to Rose-Mimosa.”

As time went by this impressive dialogue came to the captain’s mind less and less frequently, since Gray was advancing towards his goal with clenched teeth and a pale face. He bore the strenuous toil with a determined effort of will, feeling that it was becoming ever easier as the stern ship broke into his body and ineptitude was replaced by habit. On occasion the loop of the anchor chain would knock him off his feet, slamming him against the deck, or a rope that was not wound around the bitts would be torn out of his hands, taking the skin off his palms, or the wind would slap the wet corner of a sail with an iron ring sewn into it against his face; in a word, all his work was torture which demanded the utmost attention, yet, no matter how hard he breathed as he slowly straightened his back, a scornful smile never left his face. In silence did he endure all the scoffing, taunts and inevitable cursing until he became “one of the boys” in his new surroundings, but from then on he always countered an insult with his fists.

Once, when Captain Hop saw him skilfully tying a sail toll a yard, he said to himself: “Victory is on your side, you scoundrel.” When Gray climbed down to the deck Hop summoned him to his cabin and, opening a dog-eared book, said:

“Listen closely. Stop smoking! We’ll start fitting the pup out to be a captain.”

And he began to read or, rather, to enunciate and shout the ancient words of the sea. This was Gray’s first lesson. In the course of a year he got to know about navigation, shipbuilding, maritime law, sailing directions and bookkeeping. Captain Hop proffered him his hand and referred to the two of them as “we”.

His mother’s letter, full of tears and dread, caught up with Gray in Vancouver. He replied: “I know. But if you could only see as I do: look at things through my eyes. If you could only hear as I do: put a seashell to your ear – it carries the sound of an eternal wave; if you could only love as I do – everything, I would have found in your letter, besides love and a cheque, a smile.” And he went on sailing until the Anselm arrived with a cargo for Dubelt from whence, while the ship was docked, the twenty-year-old Gray set off to visit the castle.

Everything was as it had always been; as inviolable in detail and in general impression as five years before, although the crowns of the young elms were larger; the pattern they made on the facade of the building had moved and expanded.

The servants who came running were overjoyed, startled and froze as respectfully as if they had but yesterday greeted this Gray. He was told where his mother was; he entered the high chamber and, drawing the door shut softly, stopped soundlessly, gazing at the woman, now turned grey, in the black dress. She was standing before a crucifix; her fervent whisper was as audible as the pounding of a heart. “And bless those at sea, the wayfarers, the sick, the suffering and the imprisoned,” Gray heard the words as he breathed rapidly. There followed: “And my boy…” Then he said: “Here…”

But he could say no more. His mother turned. She had become thinner; a new expression lit up the haughtiness of her chiselled face, like the return of youth. She hurried towards her son; a burst of throaty laughter, a restrained exclamation and tears of her eyes – this was all. But in that moment she lived – more fully and happier than in the whole of her previous life.

“I recognized you instantly, my darling, my baby!”

And Gray indeed ceased being grown-up. He listened to her tale of his father’s death and then told her about himself. She heeded him without reproach or protestation, but to herself – in everything he contended was the essence of his life, – she saw but toys her boy was playing with. These playthings were the continents, oceans and ships.

Gray spent seven days in the castle; on the eighth day, having taken along a large sum of money, he returned to Dubelt and said to Captain Hop:

“I thank you. You’ve been a good friend. Farewell now, my mentor.” He sealed the word with a handshake as fierce as an iron vice. “From now on I’ll be sailing alone, on a ship of my own.”

The blood rushed to Hop’s head, he spat, yanked his hand away and stalked off, but Gray overtook him and put his arm around his shoulders. And so they went to a tavern all together, twenty-four of them, counting the crew, and drank, and shouted, and sang, and ate, and downed everything there was in the bar and in the kitchen.

But a short while later the evening star flashed above the black line of a new mast in the Port of Dubelt. It was the Secret, a two-hundred-and-sixty-ton, three-masted galliot Gray had purchased. Arthur Gray sailed it for four more years as the owner and captain until chance brought him to Liss. However, he had remembered for always that short burst of throaty laughter that had greeted him at home, and so twice a year he visited the castle, leaving the silver-haired woman with an uncertain conviction that such a big boy might perhaps be able to handle his toys after all.

The stream of foam cast off by the stern of Gray’s Secret crossed the ocean as a white streak and faded in the glow of the evening lights of Liss. The ship dropped anchor near the lighthouse.

For the next ten days the Secret unloaded tussore silk, coffee and tea; the crew spent the eleventh day ashore, relaxing in alcoholic fumes; on the twelfth day, for no good reason, Gray was blackly despondent and could not understand this despondency.

He had barely come awake in the morning when he felt that this day had begun in a black shroud. He dressed glumly, ate breakfast half-heartedly, forgot to read the newspaper and smoked for a long while, plunged into an inexpressible mood of futile tension; among the vaguely emerging words unacknowledged desires roamed, destroying each other through equal effort.

Then he got down to work.

Accompanied by the boatswain, Gray inspected the ship and ordered the guy ropes tightened, the tiller rope loosened, the hawse cleaned, the tack changed, the deck tarred, the compass wiped and the hold opened, aired and swept. However, this did not dispel his dark mood. Filled with an uneasy awareness of the gloom of the day, he spent it irritably and sadly: it was as if someone had called to him, but he had forgotten who it was and whence.

Towards evening he settled back in his cabin, picked up a book and argued with the author at length, making marginal notes of a paradoxical nature. For a while he was amused by this game, this conversation with a dead man holding sway from the grave. Then, lighting his pipe, he became immersed in the blue smoke, living among the spectral arabesques that appeared in its shifting planes.

Tobacco is very potent; as oil poured onto the surging rent between the waves allays their frenzy, so does tobacco soothe irritation and dull the emotions by several degrees; they become calmer and more musical. Therefore, after three pipes, Gray’s depression finally lost its aggressive nature and was transformed into thoughtful distraction. This state lasted for about another hour; when the fog lifted from his soul, Gray came to with a start, hungered for exercise and went up on deck. It was night; alongside, in the slumbering black water, there dozed the stars and the lights of the mast lanterns. The air, as warm as a cheek, brought in the smell of the sea. Gray raised his head and squinted at the gold coal of a star; instantly, through the dizzying distance, the fiery needle of a remote planet penetrated his pupils. The muted noise of the town at evening reached his ears from the depths of the bay; sometimes a phrase from the shore was wafted in across the sensitive surface of the water; it would sound clearly, as if spoken on deck and then be snuffed out by the creaking of the rigging; a match flared on the forecastle deck, lighting up a hand, a pair of round eyes and a moustache. Gray whistled; the lighted pipe moved and floated towards him; soon, in the dark, the captain made out the hands and face of the man on watch.

“Tell Letika he’s coming with me,” Gray said. “Tell him to take along the fishing tackle.”

He went down into the rowboat where he waited for Letika for about ten minutes; a nimble, shifty-eyed youth banged the oars against the side as he handed them down to Gray; then he climbed down himself, fitted them into the oarlocks and stuck a bag of provisions into the stern of the rowboat. Gray sat at the tiller.

“Where to, Captain?” Letika asked, rowing in a circle with the right oar alone.

The captain was silent. The sailor knew that one could not intrude upon this silence and, therefore, falling silent as well, he began rowing swiftly.

Gray set their course out to sea and then steered them along the left bank. He did not care where they were going. The tiller gurgled; the oars creaked and splashed; all else was sea and silence.

In the course of a day a person heeds to so many thoughts, impressions, speeches and words that together they would fill many a heavy tome. The face of a day takes on a definite expression, but today Gray searched this face in vain. Its obscure features glowed with one of those emotions of which there are many, but which have not been given a name. No matter what they are called, they will forever remain beyond the scope of words and even concepts, so like the effect of an aroma. Gray was now at the mercy of just such an emotion; true, he might have said: “I am waiting. I see. I shall soon know,”– but even these words were equal to no more than are the separate drawings in relation to an architectural conception. Yet, there was the power of radiant excitement in these ideas.

The bank appeared to the left like a wavy thickening of darkness.

Sparks from the chimneys danced above the red glass of the windows; this was Kaperna. Gray could hear shouting, wrangling and barking. The lights of the village resembled a firebox door that has burned through in tiny spots to let you see the flaming coal inside. To the right was the ocean, as real as the presence of a sleeping person. Having passed Kaperna, Gray steered towards the shore. The water lapped against it softly here; lighting his lantern, he saw the pits in the bluff and its upper, overhanging ledges; he liked the spot.

“We’ll fish here,” Gray said, tapping the oarsman on the shoulder.

The sailor harrumphed vaguely.

“This is the first time I’ve ever sailed with such a captain,” he muttered. “He’s a sensible captain, but no ordinary kind. A difficult captain. But I like him all the same.”

He stuck the oar into the silt and tied the boat to it and they both scrambled up the stones that rolled out from under their knees and elbows.

There was a thicket at the top of the bluff. The sound of an axe splitting a dry trunk followed; having felled the tree, Letika made a campfire on the bluff. Shadows moved, and the flames that were reflected in the water; in the receding gloom the grass and branches stood out; the air, mingled with smoke, shimmered and glowed above the fire.

Gray sat by the campfire.

“Here,” he said, proffering a bottle, “drink to all teetotallers, my friend Letika. And, by the way, the vodka you brought along is flavoured with ginger, not quinine.”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” the sailor replied, catching his breath. “If you don’t mind, I’ll eat it down with this… ” At which he bit off half a roast chicken and, extracting a wing from his mouth, continued: “I know you like quinine. But it was dark, and I was in a hurry. Ginger, you see, embitters a man. I always drink ginger vodka when I have to go. As the captain ate and drank, the sailor kept stealing glances at him and, finally, unable to contain himself any longer, he said:

“Is it true, Captain, what they say? That you come from a noble family?”

“That’s of no importance, Letika. Take your tackle and fish a while if you want to.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I don’t know. Maybe. But… later.” Letika unwound his line, chanting in rhyme, something he was a past master at, to the delight of the crew.

“From a string and piece of wood I made a very fine, long whip. Then I found a hook to fit it, and I whistled sharp and quick.” He poked about in a tin of worms. “This old worm lived in a burrow and was happy as could be, but I’ve got him hooked real good now, and the perch will all thank me.”

Finally, he walked off, singing: “Moonlight shines, the vodka’s perfect, fishes, harken, I draw near. Herrings, faint, and sturgeon skitter, Letika is fishing here!”

Gray lay down by the fire, gazing at the water and the reflection of the flames. He was thinking, but effortlessly; in this condition one’s mind, while observing one’s surroundings absently, comprehends them but dimly; it rushes on like a stallion in a jostling herd, crushing and shoving aside, and halting; emptiness, confusion and delay attend it in turn. It wanders within the souls of things; from bright agitation it hurries to secret intimations; passing from earth to sky, conversing on the subject of life with imaginary personages, snuffing out and embellishing one’s memories. In this cloudy movement all is live and palpable, and all is as loosely hung together as a hallucination. And one’s relaxing consciousness often smiles, seeing, for instance, one’s thoughts on life suddenly accosted by a most inopportune visitor: perhaps a twig broken two years before. Thus was Gray thinking by the fire, but he was “somewhere else”– not there.

The elbow he was leaning on, while supporting his head on his hand, became damp and numb. The stars shone faintly; the gloom was intensified by a tenseness preceding dawn. The captain was dozing off, but did not realize it. He felt like having a drink, and he put his hand out towards the sack, untying it in his sleep. Then he stopped dreaming; the next two hours were to him no longer than the seconds during which he had laid his head upon his arms. Meanwhile, Letika had appeared by the campfire twice, he had smoked and, out of curiosity, had looked into the mouths of the fish he had caught, wondering what might be there. But, quite naturally, nothing was.

Upon awakening, Gray forgot for a moment how he happened to be where he was. He gazed in astonishment at the cheerful shine of the morning, the bluff adorned by bright branches and the blazing blue distance. The leaves of a hazel bush hung over the horizon and also over his feet. At the bottom of the bluff – Gray felt it was right at his back – the tide lapped softly.

Falling from a leaf, a dewdrop spread over his sleepy face in a cold splatter. He rose. Light had triumphed everywhere. The cooling brands of the campfire clutched at life with a tendril of smoke. Its aroma imparted a wild headiness to the pleasure of breathing the air of the green woods.

Letika was nowhere in sight; he was oblivious to all; he sweated as he fished with the zeal of a true gambler. Gray left the woods for the bush-dotted slope. The grass smoked and flamed; the moist flowers resembled children who had been forcibly scrubbed with cold water. The green world breathed with myriad tiny mouths, blocking Gray’s way through its exultant cluster. The captain finally got to a clearing overgrown with grass and flowers, and here he saw a sleeping girl.

He cautiously moved aside a branch and stopped, feeling that he had made a dangerous discovery. But five steps away lay a tired Assol, curled up with one leg tucked under her and the other stretched out, and her head resting on her comfortably crossed arms. Her hair was mussed; a button had come undone at her collar, revealing a white hollow; her tumbled skirt had bared her knees; her lashes slept upon her cheek in the shadow of her delicately curved temple, half-covered by a dark lock; the pinky of her right hand, which was under her head, curled over the back of her head. Gray squatted and looked into the girl’s face from below, never suspecting that he resembled the Faun in Arnold Bocklin’s painting.

Perhaps, under other circumstances, he would have noticed the girl with his eyes alone, but now he saw her differently. Everything stirred, everything smiled within him. Naturally, he did not know her or her name, or, moreover, why she had fallen asleep on the shore; but he was very pleased by this. He liked pictures that were accompanied neither by an explanatory text nor by a caption. The impression such a picture makes is far more powerful; its content, unencumbered by words, becomes boundless, affirming all conjectures and thoughts.

The shadow cast by the leaves was approaching the trunks, but Gray still squatted there in that uncomfortable position. Everything about the girl was asleep: her dark hair slept, her dress slept, as did the pleats of her skirt; even the grass near her body, it seemed, was dozing out of sympathy. When the impression became complete, Gray entered its warm, engulfing waves and sailed off on it. Letika had been shouting for some time: “Captain! Where are you?”, but the captain heard him not.

When he finally rose, a predilection for the unusual caught him unawares with the determination and inspiration of an angered woman. Giving way to it pensively, he removed the treasured old ring from his finger, thinking, and not without reason, that perhaps, in this way, he was suggesting something essential to life, similar to orthography. He slipped the ring gently onto the pinky that showed white under the back of her head.

The pinky twitched in annoyance and curled up. Glancing once again at this resting face, Gray turned to see the sailor’s sharply-raised brows. Letika was gaping as he watched the captain’s movements with the kind of astonishment Jonah must have felt as he gazed down the maw of his furnished whale.

“Ah, it’s you, Letika! Look at her. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“A wondrous painting!” the sailor shouted in a whisper, for he liked bookish expressions. “There’s something prepossessing in the presentation of the circumstances. I caught four morays and another one, as round as a bladder.”

“Shh, Letika. Let’s get out of here.” They retreated into the bushes.

They should have turned back to the rowboat now, but Gray procrastinated, looking off into the distance at the low bank, where the morning smoke from the chimneys of Kaperna streamed over the greenery and the sand. In the smoke he once again saw the girl-Then he turned determinedly and went down the slope; the sailor did not question him about what had happened, but walked on behind; he sensed that once again a compulsory silence ensued.

When they reached the first houses Gray suddenly said:

“Can your practised eye tell us where the tavern is, Letika?”

“It must be that black roof,” Letika mused, “but then, again, maybe it isn’t.”

“What’s so special about that roof?”

“I really don’t know, Captain. Nothing more than the voice of my heart.”

They approached the house; it was indeed Menners’ tavern. Through the open window they could see a bottle on the table; beside it someone’s dirty hand was milking a steel-grey moustache.

Although it was still early in the day there were three men in the common room. The coalman, the owner of the drunken grey moustache already noted, was sitting by the window; two fishermen were lodged around some scrambled eggs and beer at a table set between the bar and an inner door.

Menners, a tall young man with a dull, freckled face and that peculiar expression of bold cunning in his near-sighted eyes that is a distinctive feature of tradesmen in general, was wiping plates behind the counter. The window frame was imprinted in the sunshine on the dirty floor.

No sooner had Gray stepped into the strip of smoky light than Menners, bowing respectfully, came out from behind his enclosure. He had immediately sensed a real captain in Gray – a type of client rarely to be seen there.

Gray ordered rum. Covering the table with a cloth become yellowed in the bustle of daily life, Menners brought over a bottle, but first licked the corner of the label that had come unstuck. Then he went back behind the counter to look intently now at Gray, now at the plate from which he was picking off a dry particle of food.

While Letika, having raised his glass between his hands, was whispering to it softly and glancing out the window, Gray summoned Hin Menners. Hin perched on the edge of a chair with a self-satisfied air, flattered at having been addressed, and especially flattered because this had been done by a simple crook of Gray’s finger.

“I assume you know all the local inhabitants,” Gray said in an even voice. “I would like to know the name of a girl in a kerchief, in a dress with pink flowers, auburn-haired, of medium height, between seventeen and twenty years of age. I came upon her not far from here. What is her name?”

He spoke with a firm simplicity of strength that made it impossible to evade his tone. Hin Menners squirmed inwardly and even smirked slightly, but outwardly he obeyed the nature of the address. However, he hesitated before replying – but only from a futile desire to guess what was up. “Hm!” he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “It must be Sailing-ship Assol. She’s a halfwit.”

“Indeed?” Gray said indifferently, taking a big sip. “Why is she like that?”

“If you really want to know, I’ll tell you.”

And Hin told Gray of the time, seven years before, when, on the seashore, the girl had spoken to a man who collected folk songs. Naturally, this story, in the years since the beggar had first affirmed its existence in the tavern, had taken the shape of a crude and ugly rumour, but the essence remained unchanged.

“And that’s what she’s been called ever since,” Menners said. “She’s called Sailing-ship Assol.”

Gray glanced automatically at Letika, who was still behaving quietly and modestly, then his eyes turned to the dusty road outside the tavern, and he felt as if he had been struck – a double blow to his heart and head.

Coming down the road towards him was the very same Sailing-ship Assol whom Menners had just described from a clinical point of view. Her striking features, which resembled the mystery of unforgettable, stirring, yet simple words, appeared to him now in the light of her gaze. The sailor and Menners both had their backs to the window and, in order that they not turn accidentally, Gray found the courage to shift his gaze to Hin’s ginger eyes. After he had seen Assol’s eyes, all the prejudice of Menners’ story was dispelled. Meanwhile, Hin continued unsuspectingly:

“I can also add that her father is a real bastard. He drowned my pater like he was a cat or something, God forgive me. He… ”

He was interrupted by an unexpected, wild howl coming from behind. The coalman, rolling his eyes fiercely and having cast off his drunken stupor, suddenly began bawling a song, but with such force that it made everyone jump:

“You’re roaring drunk again, you damn whaleboat!” Menners shouted. “Get out!”

The coalman bawled and then, as if nothing were amiss, he dunked his moustache into a slopping glass.

Hin Menners shrugged indignantly.

“He’s the scum of the earth,” he said with the sinister dignity of the miser. “It happens every time!”

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” Gray asked.

“Me? I just told you her father’s a bastard. On account of him, sir, I was orphaned, and while still a boy was forced to earn my bread by the sweat-of my brow.”

“You’re lying!” the coalman said unexpectedly. “You’re lying so foully and unnaturally that it’s sobered me up.”

Before Hin had a chance to open his mouth, the coalman addressed Gray:

“He’s lying. His father was a liar, too; as was his mother. It runs in the family. Rest assured, she’s as sane as you and me. I’ve spoken to her. She rode in my cart eighty-four times or a bit less. If a girl’s walking home from town and I’ve sold all my coal, I’ll always give her a lift. She might as well ride. I’m saying that she has a sane head on her shoulders. You can see that now. Naturally, she’d never talk to you, Hin Menners. But me, sir, in my free coal trade, I despise gossip and rumours. She talks like a grown-up, but her way of talking is strange. If you listen closely – it seems like just the same as you and me would say, and it is, but yet, it isn’t. For instance, we got to talking about her trade. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said, and her holding onto my shoulder like a fly to a bell-tower, ‘my work isn’t dull, but I keep wanting to think up something special. I want to find a way to make a boat that’ll sail by itself, with oarsmen that’ll really row; then, they’ll dock at the shore, tie up and sit down on the beach to have a bite, just exactly as if they were alive.’ I started laughing, see, cause I found it funny. So I said, ‘Well, Assol, it’s all because of the kind of work you do, that’s why you think like this, but look around; the way other people work, you’d think they were fighting.’

‘No,’ she says, ‘I know what I know. When a fisherman’s fishing he keeps thinking he’ll catch a big fish, bigger than anyone ever caught.’ ‘What about me?’ ‘You?’ She laughed. ‘Til bet that when you fill your basket with coal you think it’ll burst into bloom.’ That’s the words she used! That very moment, I confess, I don’t know what made me do it, I looked into the empty basket, and I really thought I was seeing buds coming out of the basket twigs; the buds burst and leaves splashed all over the basket and were gone.

I even sobered up a bit! But Hin Menners will lie in his teeth and never bat an eye – I know him!”

Finding the conversation to have taken an obviously insulting turn, Menners looked at the coalman scathingly and disappeared behind the counter, from where he asked bitterly: “Do you want to order anything else?”

“No,” said Gray, pulling out his purse. “We’re getting up and leaving. Letika, you stay here. Come back this evening and don’t say a word. Having discovered all you can, report to me. Understand?”

“My dear Captain,” Letika said with a familiarity brought on by the rum, “only a deaf-mute would not have understood this.”

“Fine. And don’t forget that not in a single instance of the many that may occur can you speak of me, or even mention my name. Goodbye!”

Gray left. From then on he was possessed by a consciousness of astonishing discoveries, like a spark in Berthold’s powder mortar, – one of those spiritual avalanches from under which fire escapes, blazing. He was possessed by a desire for immediate action. He came to his senses and was able to think clearly only when he got into the rowboat. Laughing, he held out his hand, palm up, to the scorching sun, as he had done once as a boy in the wine cellar; then he shoved off and began rowing swiftly towards the harbour.

On the eve of that day and seven years after Egle, the collector of folk songs, had told the little girl on the beach a fairy-tale about a ship with crimson sails, Assol returned home from her weekly visit to the toy shop feeling distressed and looking sad. She had brought back the toys that she had taken to be sold. She was so upset she could not speak at first, but after looking at Longren’s anxious face and seeing that he expected news that was much worse than what had actually happened, she began to speak, running her finger over the windowpane by which she stood, gazing out at the sea absently.

The owner of the toy shop had begun this time by opening his ledger and showing her how much they owed him. She felt faint at the sight of the impressive, three-digit figure.

“This is how much you’ve received since December,” the shopkeeper said, “and now we’ll see how much has been sold.” And he set his finger against another figure, but this one was a two-digit one.

“It’s a pity and a shame to look. I could see by looking at his face that he was rude and angry. I’d have gladly run away, but, honestly, I was so ashamed I had no strength to. And he went on to say: ‘There’s no profit in it for me any more, my dear girl. Imported goods are in demand now. All the shops are full of them, and nobody buys these kind.’ That’s what he said. He went on talking, but I’ve mixed up and forgotten what he said. He probably felt sorry for me, because he suggested I try the Children’s Bazaar and Alladin’s Lamp.”

Having unburdened herself of that which was most important, the girl turned her head and looked at the old man timidly. Longren sat hunched over, his fingers locked between his knees on which his elbows rested. Sensing her eyes on him, he raised his head and sighed. Overcoming her depression, she ran up to him, settled down beside him and, slipping her small hand under the leather sleeve of his jacket, laughing and looking up into her father’s face from below, she continued with feigned liveliness:

“Never mind, it’s not important. You listen, now. Anyway, I left. Well, I came to the big, awfully frightening store; it was terribly crowded.

People shoved me, but I made my way through and went over to a black-haired man in spectacles. I don’t remember a word of what I said to him; finally, he snickered, poked about in my basket, looked at some of the toys, then wrapped them up in the kerchief again and handed them back.”

Longren listened to her angrily. He seemed to be seeing his overawed daughter in the richly-dressed crowd at the counter piled high with fine goods. The neat man in the spectacles was explaining condescendingly that he would go bankrupt if he decided to offer Longren’s simple toys for sale. He had casually and expertly set up folding houses and railroad bridges on the counter before her; tiny, perfectly-made automobiles, electric sets, airplanes and motors. All of this smelled of paint and school. According to him, children nowadays only played games that imitated the occupations of their elders.

Then Assol had gone to Alladin’s Lamp and to two other shops, but all in vain.

As she finished her tale she laid out their supper; having eaten and downed a mug of strong coffee, Longren said:

“Since we’re out of luck, we’ll have to start looking for something else. Perhaps I’ll sign on a ship again – the Fitzroy or the Palermo. Of course, they’re right,” he continued thoughtfully, thinking of the toys. “Children don’t play nowadays, they study. They keep on studying and studying, and will never begin to live. This is so, but it’s a shame, it really is a shame. Will you be able to manage without me for one voyage? I can’t imagine leaving you alone.”

“I could sign up with you, too. Say, as a barmaid.”

“No!” Longren sealed the word with a smack of his palm on the shuddering table. “You won’t sign up as long as I’m alive. However, there’s time to think of something.”

He settled into a sullen silence. Assol sat down beside him on the edge of the stool; out of the corner of his eye, without turning his head, he could see that she was doing her best to console him and nearly smiled. No, if he smiled it would frighten her off and embarrass her. Mumbling to herself, she smoothed his tumbled grey hair, kissed his moustache and, covering her father’s bristly ears with her small, tapering fingers, said,

“There, now you can’t hear me say that I love you.” Longren had sat still while she had been making him pretty, as tense as a person afraid to inhale smoke, but hearing what she said, he laughed uproariously.

“You dear,” he said simply and, after patting her cheek, went down to the beach to have a look at his rowboat.

For a while Assol stood pensively in the middle of the room, hesitating between a desire to give herself up to wistful melancholy and the necessity of seeing to the chores; then, having washed the dishes, she took store of the remains of their provisions. She neither weighed nor measured, but saw that they would not have enough flour to last out the week, that the bottom of the sugar tin was now visible; the packets of coffee and tea were nearly empty and there was no butter; the only thing on which her eye rested ruefully, as it was the sole exception, was a sack of potatoes. Then she scrubbed the floor and sat down to stitch a ruffle on a skirt made over from something else, but recalling instantly that the scraps of material were tucked behind the mirror, she went over to it and took out the little bundle; then she glanced at her reflection.

Beyond the walnut frame in the clear void of the reflected room was a small, slim girl dressed in cheap, white, pink-flowered muslin. A grey silk kerchief covered her shoulders. The still childish, lightly-tanned face was lively and expressive; her beautiful eyes, somewhat serious for her age, looked out with the timid intentness peculiar to sensitive souls. Her irregular face was endearing in its delicate purity of line; each curve, each elevation might have been found in many a woman’s face, but taken all together the style was extremely original – originally sweet; we shall stop here. The rest cannot be expressed in words, save for one word: “enchantment”.

The reflected girl smiled as impulsively as Assol. The smile turned out rather sad; noticing this, she became disturbed, as if she were looking at a stranger. She pressed her cheek against the glass, closed her eyes and stroked the mirror softly over her reflection. A swarm of hazy, tender thoughts flashed through her; she straightened up, laughed and sat down to sew.

While she is sewing, let us have a closer look at her – a look into her. She was made of two girls, two Assols mixed up in happy, wonderful confusion. One was the daughter of a sailor, a craftsman, a toy-maker, the other was a living poem, with all the marvels of its harmonies and images, with a mysterious alignment of words, in the interaction of light and shadow, cast by one upon the other. She knew life within the limits of her own experience, but besides the generalities, she saw the reflected meaning of a different order. Thus, looking into objects, we observe them not with a linear perception, but through impression – which is definitely human and – as is all that is human – distinct. Something similar to that which (if we have succeeded) we have portrayed by this example, she saw above and beyond the visible. Without these modest victories all that was simply understandable was alien to her. She loved to read, but in each book she read mostly between the lines, as she lived. Unconsciously, through inspiration, she mack-countless ethereally-subtle discoveries at every step, inexpressible, but as important as cleanliness and warmth. Sometimes – and this continued for a number of days – she even became transformed; the physical opposition of life fell away, like the stillness in the sweep of a bow across the strings; and all that she saw, that was vital to her, that surrounded her, became a lace of mystery in the image of the mundane. Many a time, apprehensive and afraid, did she go to the beach at night where, waiting for dawn to break, she looked off most intently, searching for the ship with the Crimson Sails. These minutes were pure joy to her; it is difficult for us to give ourselves up thus to a fairy-tale; it would be no less difficult for her to escape from its power and enchantment.

On some other occasion, thinking back over all this, she would sincerely wonder at herself, not being able to believe that she had believed, forgiving the sea with a smile and sadly coming back to reality; as she now gathered the ruffle she thought about her past life. There had been much that was dull and simple. The two of them being lonely together had at times weighed heavily on her, but there had formed within her by then that fold of inner shyness, that suffering wrinkle which prevents one from bringing or receiving cheer. Others mocked her, saying: “She’s touched in the head”, “out of her mind” – she had become accustomed to this pain, too.

The girl had even suffered insults, after which her breast would ache as from a blow. She was not a popular girl in Kaperna, although many suspected that there was more to her than to others – but in a different tongue. The men of Kaperna adored stout, heavy-limbed women with oily skin on their large calves arid powerful arms; they courted them here by slapping them on the back and jostling them as they would in a crowded market place. The style of such emotion resembled the unsophisticated simplicity of a roar. Assol was as well suited to this determined milieu as the society of a ghost would be to extremely high-strung people, had it even possessed all the charm of Assunta or Aspasia; anything resembling love here was out of the question.

Thus, meeting the steady blast of a soldier’s bugle, the sweet sadness of a violin is powerless to bring the stern regiment out from under the influence of its straight planes. The girl stood with her back to all that has been said in these lines.

While she was humming a song of life, her small hands were working swiftly and adroitly; biting off a thread, she looked off, but this did not stop her from turning the hem evenly or stitching it with the accuracy of a sewing machine. Although Longren did not return, she was not worried about her father. Of late, he had often set out fishing in his boat at night or simply for some air. Fear did not gnaw at her: she knew that no ill would befall him. In this respect Assol was still the little girl that had prayed in her own way, lisping fondly, “Good morning, God!” in the morning and: “Goodbye, God!” in the evening.

In her opinion such a first-hand acquaintance with God was quite sufficient for Him to ward off any disaster. She imagined herself in His place: God was forever occupied with the affairs of millions of people and, therefore, she believed that one should regard the ordinary shadows of life with the polite patience of a guest who, discovering the house full of people, waits for the bustling host, finding food and shelter as best he can.

Having done with her sewing, Assol folded her work on the corner table, undressed and went to bed. The lamp had been turned off. She soon noticed that she was not sleepy; her mind was as clear as it was in the middle of the day, and even the darkness seemed artificial; her body, as her mind, felt carefree and dayish. Her heart beat as rapidly as a pocket watch; it seemed to be beating between the pillow and her ear. Assol was annoyed; she twisted and turned, now flinging off the blanket, now rolling up in it, pulling it over her head. At last she was able to bring on the familiar scene that helped her to fall asleep: she imagined herself tossing pebbles into clear water and watching the faint circles grow wider and wider. Sleep seemed to have been awaiting this handout; it came, whispered with Mary, who stood at the head of the bed and, obeying her smile, said “Shhh” to everything all around. Assol was asleep instantly. She dreamed her favourite dream: of blossoming trees, a yearning, enchantment, songs and strange scenes, of which, upon awakening, she could recall only the glitter of the blue water rising from her feet to her heart with a chill of delight. After dreaming of all this, she remained in that improbable world for a while longer and then awakened fully and sat up.

She was not at all sleepy, quite as if she had not fallen asleep at all. A feeling of novelty, of joy and a desire for action welled up in her. She looked around with the eyes of one examining a new room. Dawn seeped in – not with the complete lucidity of illumination, but with that faint effort through which one can comprehend one’s surroundings. The bottom of the window was black; the top had become light. Without, by the edge of the window frame, the morning star twinkled. Knowing that she would not fall asleep again, Assol dressed, went over to the window and, raising the hook, opened it. An attentive, clear silence reigned outside; it seemed to have only now descended. In the blue twilight the bushes shimmered; farther on the trees slept; the air was heavy and smelled of the earth.

Leaning her hand on the top of the frame, the girl looked out and smiled. Suddenly, something akin to a distant call stirred her both from within and without, and she seemed to awaken once again from obvious reality to that which was clearer still and still more doubtless. From that moment on she was caught up by an exultant richness of consciousness. Thus, comprehending them, we listen to words spoken by others, but if one were to repeat that which was said, we would come to understand them once again with a different, a new meaning. She, too, now experienced this.

Picking up an old but, when she wore it, ever fresh and new silk kerchief, she grasped it under her chin with one hand, locked the door and darted out onto the road barefoot. Although all was deserted and still, she imagined she resounded like an orchestra and could actually be heard. Everything pleased her, everything gladdened her eye. The warm dust tickled her bare feet; the air was clear and a joy to breathe. The rooftops and clouds were etched in black against the clearing twilight of the sky; the fences, briar roses, gardens, orchards and the faintly seen road all dozed. In everything there was noticeable a different order than during the day – the same, yet, in a conformity that had formerly evaded one. Everything slept with open eyes, furtively examining the passing girl.

She quickened her step as she got farther away, in a hurry to leave the village behind. There were meadows beyond Kaperna; beyond the meadows hazel bushes, poplars and chestnut trees dotted the slopes of the hills along the shore. At the spot where the road ended and continued as an overgrown path, a silky little black dog with a white chest and eyes tensed to speak circled gently by Assol’s feet. The dog, recognizing Assol, walked along beside her, squealing from time to time and wriggling its body coquettishly, silently agreeing with the girl about something as clear as “you” and “me”. Assol, glancing into its communicative eyes, was convinced that the dog could have spoken if it had not had a secret reason for not doing so. Glimpsing its companion’s smile, the dog crinkled its nose cheerfully, wagged its tail and trotted on ahead, but suddenly sat down indifferently, scratched its ear which had been bitten by its eternal enemy, and ran off.

Assol entered the tall meadow grass that splashed dew upon her; holding her hand out, palm-down, above its spikelets, she walked on, smiling at the streaming touch. Peering into the very special faces of the flowers, the confusion of stems, she could make out allusions – poses, efforts, movements, features and expressions that were nearly human; she would not now have been surprised at a procession of field mice, a gophers’ ball or the rough antics of a hedgehog, scaring a sleeping gnome with its huffing. Indeed, a grey ball of a hedgehog rolled across her path. “Humph-humph,” it snorted angrily, like a cabbie at a pedestrian. Assol spoke with those whom she saw and understood. “Hello, poor thing,” she said to a purple, worm-eaten iris.

“You’d better stay home for a while,”– this was said to a bush stranded in the middle of the path and, therefore, lacking leaves torn off by the clothes of passers-by. A large beetle was clutching a bluebell, pulling the flower down and slipping, but scrabbling up it stubbornly. “Shake off the fat passenger,” Assol advised it. True enough, the beetle lost its grip and flew off noisily. Thus, with pounding heart, trembling and flushed, she approached the slope of a hill and was concealed from the openness of the meadow in the thicket where she was surrounded by true friends who – and she knew this – spoke in deep bass voices.

These were the large old trees that grew amongst the honeysuckle and hazel bushes. Their drooping branches brushed the top leaves of the bushes.

White flower cones rose among the solemn gravity of the large chestnut leaves, their aroma blended with the scent of the dew and the sap. The path, criss-crossed by the slippery bulges of roots, now dipped, now clambered up the slope. Assol felt at home here; she greeted the trees as if they were people, that is, by pressing their broad leaves. She walked on, whispering to herself or aloud:

“Here you are, here’s another you. How many of you there are, my friends! I’m in a hurry, boys, let me pass! I recognize you all, I remember you and respect you.” Her “boys” patted her grandly as best they could – with their leaves – and creaked with an air of kindredness in reply. Feet muddied, she made her way out to the bluff above the sea and stood at the very edge, breathing hard after her fast walk. A deep, unconquerable faith rejoiced and bubbled exultantly inside of her. Her gaze cast it beyond the horizon, from whence it returned in the faint surge of the incoming waves, proud in its clean flight.

Meanwhile, the sea, stitched with a golden thread along the horizon, was still asleep; save at the foot of the bluff did the water rise and fall. The steel grey of the sleeping ocean at the shore became blue and then black farther off. Beyond the golden thread the sky, flaring up, glowed in a great fan of light; the white clouds were now touched with pink.

Delicate, heavenly tints shimmered within them. A quivering snow-whiteness spread across the distant blackness; the foam sparkled and the blood-red splash, flaring up along the golden thread, sent crimson ripples across the ocean to Assol’s feet.

She sat down and hugged her knees. She leaned towards the sea and gazed off at the horizon with eyes that had grown large and in which nothing grown-up remained at all – with the eyes of a child. Everything she had awaited so long and so fervently was taking place there, at the end of the world. In that land of distant abysses she imagined an undersea hill; streaming thongs of seaweed snaked upward from its slopes; amongst the round leaves pierced by a stem at the edge strange flowers shone. The upper leaves glistened on the surface of the ocean; he who knew not what Assol knew would see only a shimmering and glitter.

A ship rose from the seaweed; it surfaced and stopped in the very middle of the sunrise. From this great distance it was as clearly visible as the clouds. Radiating joy, it flamed like wine, a rose, blood, lips, red velvet and scarlet fire. The ship was heading straight towards Assol. Two wings of spray were cast up by the powerful thrust of its keel; rising, the girl pressed her hands to her breast, but the magic play of light became ripples: the sun rose, and a bright fullness of morning tore the covers from everything that still languished and stretched on the sleepy earth.

The girl sighed and looked around. The music had ended, but Assol was still under the spell of its ringing chorus. This impression gradually weakened, then became a memory and, finally, simply weariness. She lay down in the grass, yawned and, closing her eyes blissfully, fell asleep – a sleep as deep and sound as a young nut, without cares or dreams.

She was awakened by a fly crawling along her bare sole. Assol wriggled her foot impatiently and awoke; sitting up, she pinned back her dishevelled hair and, therefore, Gray’s ring made itself known, but believing it to be simply a blade of grass that had become caught between her fingers, she held them out. However, since the hindrance did not disappear, she raised her hand to her eyes impatiently and instantly jumped to her feet with the force of a shooting fountain.

Gray’s radiant ring sparkled on her finger as on someone else’s, for at this moment she could not claim it to be her own, she did not feel the finger to belong to her.

“Whose joke is this? Whose joke is this?” she cried. “Am I still sleeping? Maybe I found it and forgot about it?”

She gripped her right hand, on which the ring was placed, with her left, looked around in wonder, searching out the sea and the green thickets with her gaze; but no one moved, no one was hiding in the bushes, and there was no sign in the vastly illumined blue sea.

A flush consumed Assol, and the voices of her heart murmured the prophetic “yes”. There was no explanation for what had happened, but she found it without words of thoughts in her strange feeling, and the ring now became dear to her. She trembled as she pulled it off her finger and held it in her cupped hand like water as she examined it – with her soul, her heart, the boundless joy and clear superstition of youth – then, tucking it into her bodice, Assol buried her face in her hands from under which a smile strained to burst forth and, lowering her head, she slowly followed the road back home.

Thus – by chance, as people say who can read and write, – Gray and Assol found each other on a summer’s morning so full of inevitability.

After Gray returned to the deck of the Secret he stood there motionlessly for some minutes, running his hand over his head from back to front, which indicated a state of utter confusion. Absent-mindedness – a veiled movement of the emotions – was reflected in the senseless smile of the sleep-walker on his face. His mate, Panten, was at that moment coming along the quarter-deck, carrying a dish of fried fish; sighting Gray, he noted the captain’s strange state.

“You’re not hurt, are you, sir?” he inquired cautiously. “Where were you? What did you see? Actually, though, that’s none of my business. An agent has offerred us a profitable cargo with a bonus. But what’s the matter with you, sir?”

“Thank you,” Gray said with a sigh, as if he had been untied. “That was just what I needed, the sound of your simple, intelligent voice. It’s like a dash of cold water. Tell the crew we’re weighing anchor today, Panten, and moving into the mouth of the Liliana, about ten miles from here. The river bed is dotted with shoals. Come for the chart. We won’t need a pilot. That’s all for now… Oh, yes, I need that profitable cargo like I need last year’s snow. You can tell the agent that’s what I said. I’m going to town now, and I’ll be there till evening.“

“But what happened?”

“Nothing at all, Panten. I want you to bear in mind my desire to avoid all questions. When the time comes, I’ll tell you what it’s all about. Tell the crew that we’ll put up for repairs and that the local drydock is occupied.”

“Yes, sir,” Panten replied dazedly to Gray’s retreating back. “Aye, aye, sir.”

Although the captain’s orders were quite sensible, the mate was goggled-eyed and raced off to his own cabin, carrying the dish of fish and mumbling: “You’re puzzled, Panten. Is he thinking of trying his hand at smuggling? Will we be flying the Jolly Roger now?” At this Panten became confused by the wildest guesses. While he nervously wolfed down the fish, Gray went to his cabin, took out a sum of money and, crossing the bay, appeared in the shopping section of Liss. Now, however, he acted determinedly and calmly, knowing down to the last detail all that he would do on this wondrous journey. Each motion – thought, movement – warmed him as with the refined joy of creative work. His plan was formed instantly and vividly. His understanding of life had undergone that last attack of the chisel after which marble is serene in its magnificent glowing.

Gray visited three shops, placing especial stress on the accuracy of his choice, since he was quite sure of the exact shade and colour he wanted. In the first two shops he was shown silk of gaudy hues, intended to please an unsophisticated vanity; in the third he found samples of imaginative tints. The shopkeeper bustled about cheerfully, spreading out fabrics from his old stock, but Gray was as serious as an anatomist. He patiently unfolded parcels and bolts, laid them aside, moved them together, unrolled and brought up to the light so many crimson strips that the counter, piled high with them, seemed about to burst into flame. A scarlet wave fell upon the tip of Gray’s boot; a pink reflection shone on his hands and face. As he rummaged among the slight resistance of the silk he noted the colours: cerise, pink and old rose; the richly simmering cherry, orange and gloomy iron reds; here there were shades of all density and strength, as different in their imaginary kinship as are the words: “charming”, “wonderful”, “magnificent”, “exquisite”; in the folds there lurked allusions inaccessible to the language of the eyesight, but a true crimson tone evaded our captain for quite some time. The fabrics the shopkeeper brought out were good, but they did not evoke a clear, firm “yes”. At last, one colour attracted the disarmed attention of the buyer; he sat down in an armchair by the window, pulled a long strip from the rustling bolt, dropped it on his knees and, sitting back with his pipe clenched between his teeth, became contemplatively still.

This colour, as absolutely pure as a crimson ray of morning, full of noble joy and regality, was just exactly the proud colour Gray was searching for. It did not contain the mixed shades of fire, poppy petals, the play of lilac or purple tints; nor was there any blueness or shadow – nothing to raise any doubt. It glowed like a smile with the charm of spiritual reflection. Gray became so lost in thought that he forgot about the shopkeeper who stood at his elbow with the alertness of a hunting dog pointing. Tiring of waiting, the merchant called attention to himself by the crack of a piece of cloth being ripped.

“That’s enough samples,” Gray said, rising. “I’m taking this silk.”

“The whole bolt?” the merchant asked, politely doubting. But Gray stared at his forehead in silence, which prodded the shopkeeper to assume an undue familiarity. “How many metres, then?”

Gray nodded, as if telling the man to wait, and, with a pencil, figured the amount he needed on a slip of paper.

“Two thousand metres.” He inspected the shelves dubiously. “Not more than two thousand metres.”

“Two?” said the shopkeeper, jumping like a jack-in-the-box. “Thousand? Metres? Please sit down, Captain. Would you like to see our latest samples, Captain? As you wish. May I offer you a match, and some excellent tobacco? Two thousand… two thousand at…”

He named a price which had as much to do with the real price as a vow does with a simple “yes”, but Gray was satisfied, because he did not wish to bargain over anything. “A magnificent, excellent silk,” the shopkeeper was saying, “unexcelled in quality. You won’t find this anyplace else but here.”

When the man had finally run out of laudation, Gray arranged to have the silk delivered, paid his bill, including this service, and left. He was seen to the door by the shopkeeper with as much pomp as if he were a Chinese emperor. Meanwhile, somewhere nearby, a street musician, having tuned his cello, drew his bow gently across it, making it speak out sadly and wonderfully; his comrade, the flutist, showered the singing of the strings with a trilling of throaty whistling; the simple song with which they filled the sun-sleepy yard reached Gray’s ears, and he knew instantly what he had to do. Actually, all these days he had existed at that propitious height of spiritual vision from which he could clearly note every hint and prompt offered by reality. Upon hearing the sounds, drowned out by passing carriages, he entered into the very heart of the most important impressions and thoughts brought forth, in keeping with his nature, by this music, and could foresee why and how that which he had thought of would turn out well. Passing the lane, Gray entered the gate of the house from where the music was coming. By this time the musicians were getting ready to move on; the tall flutist, with an air of dignity brought low, waved his hat gratefully at those windows from which coins were tossed. The cello was locked under its owner’s arm again; he was mopping his wet brow and waiting for the flutist.

“Why, it’s you, Zimmer!” Gray said to him, recognizing the violinist who entertained the seamen in the evenings with his magnificent playing at the Money on the Barrel Inn. “Why have you forsaken your violin?”

“Dear Captain,” Zimmer objected smugly, “I play anything that makes sounds and rattles. In my youth I was a musical clown. I have now developed a passion for art, and I realize with a heavy heart that I’ve squandered away a real talent. That is why, from a feeling of late-come greed, I love two at once: the cello and the violin. I play the cello in the daytime and the violin in the evening, so that I seem to be weeping, to be sobbing over a lost talent. Will you offer me some wine? Hm? The cello is my Carmen, but the violin…”

“Is Assol,” Gray said.

Zimmer misunderstood.

“Yes,” he nodded, “a solo played on cymbals or brass pipes is something else again. However, what do I care? Let the clowns of art grimace and twitch – I know that fairies dwell within the violin and the cello.”

“And what dwells in my tur-i-loo?” the flutist asked as he walked up. He was a tall fellow with a sheep’s blue eyes and a curly blond beard. “Tell me that now.”

“It all depends on how much you’ve had to drink since morning. Sometimes it’s a bird, and sometimes it’s liquor fumes. Captain, may I present my partner Diiss? I told him about the way you throw your money around when you’re drinking, and he’s fallen in love with you, sight unseen.”

“Yes,” Diiss said, “I love a grand gesture and generosity. But I’m a sly fellow, so don’t trust my vile flattery.”

“Well, now,” Gray said and smiled, “I’m pressed for time, and the matter is urgent. I can offer you a chance to earn some good money. Put together an orchestra, but not one that’s made up of fops with funeral parlour faces who’ve forgotten in their musical pedantry or, – worse still – in their gastronomical soundings, all about the soul of music and are slowly spreading a pall over the stage with their intricate noises, – no.

Get together your friends who can make the simple hearts of cooks and butlers weep, get together your wandering tribe. The sea and love do not stand for pedants. I’d love to have a drink with you and polish off more than one bottle, but I must go. I’ve got a lot to attend to. Take this and drink to the letter A. If you accept my proposition, come to the Secret this evening. It’s moored near the first dam.”

“Right!” Zimmer cried, knowing that Gray paid like a king. “Bow, Diiss, say ‘yes’ and twirl your hat from joy! Captain Gray has decided to get married!”

“Yes,” Gray replied simply. “I’ll tell you the details on board the Secret. As for you… ”

“Here’s to A!” Diiss nudged Zimmer and winked at Gray. “But… there are so many letters in the alphabet! Won’t you give us something for Z, too?”

Gray gave them some more money. The musicians departed. He then went to a commission agent and placed a secret order for a rush job, to be completed in six day’s time, and costing an impressive amount. As Gray returned to his ship the agent was boarding a steamboat. Towards evening the silk was delivered; Letika had not yet returned, nor had the musicians arrived; Gray went off to talk to Panten.

It should be noted that in the course of several years Gray had been sailing with the same crew. At first, the captain had puzzled the sailors by the eccentric nature of his voyages and stops – which sometimes lasted for months – in the most trade-lacking, unpopulated places, but in time they were inspired by Gray’s “grayism”. Often he would sail with ballast alone, having refused to take on a profitable cargo for the sole reason that he did not like the freight offered. No one could ever talk him into taking on a load of soap, nails, machine parts or some such that would lie silently in the hold, evoking lifeless images of dull necessity. But he was always ready to take on fruit, china, animals, spices, tea, tobacco, coffee, silk and rare varieties of wood: ebony, sandalwood and teak. All this was in keeping with the aristocratism. of his imagination, creating a picturesque atmosphere; small wonder then that the crew of the Secret, having been nurtured thus in the spirit of originality, should look down somewhat upon all other ships, engulfed as they were in the smoke of plain, ordinary profit. Still and all, this time Gray noted their questioning looks: even the dumbest sailor knew that there was no need to put up for repairs in a forest river.

Panten had naturally passed Gray’s orders on to them. When Gray entered his mate was finishing his sixth cigar and pacing up and down the cabin, dizzy from so much smoke and stumbling over chairs. Evening was approaching; a golden shaft of light protruded through the open porthole, and in it the polished visor of the captain’s cap flashed.

“Everything’s shipshape,” Panten said sullenly. “We can weigh anchor now if you wish.”

“You should know me by now,” Gray said kindly. “There’s no mystery about what I’m doing. As soon as we drop anchor in the Liliana I’ll tell you all about it, and you won’t have to waste so many matches on cheap cigars. Go on and weigh anchor.”

Panten smiled uncomfortably and scratched an eyebrow.

“Yes, I know. Not that I… all right.”

After he was gone Gray sat very still for a while, looking out of the door that was slightly ajar, and then went to his own cabin. There he first sat, then lay down and then, listening to the clatter of the windlass pulling up the loud chain, was about to go up to the forecastle deck but fell to pondering and returned to the table where his finger drew a quick, straight line across the oilcloth. A fist struck against the door brought him out of his maniacal trance; he turned the key, letting in Letika. The sailor, panting loudly, stood there looking like a messenger who has averted an execution at the very last moment.

“Let’s go, Letika, I said to myself from where I stood on the pier,” he said, speaking rapidly, “when I saw the boys here dancing around the windlass and spitting on their hands. I have an eagle-eye. And I flew. I was breathing down the boatman’s back so hard he broke out in a nervous sweat. Did you want to leave me behind, Captain?”

“Letika,” Gray said, peering at his bloodshot eyes, “I expected you back no later than this morning. Did you pour cold water on the back of vour head?”

“Yes. Not as much as went down the hatch, but I did. I’ve done everything.”

“Let’s have it.”

“There’s no sense talking, Captain. It’s all written down here. Read it. I did my best. I’m leaving.”

“Where to?”

“I can see by the look on your face that I didn’t pour enough cold water on my head.”

He turned and exited with the strange movements of a blind man. Gray unfolded the slip of paper; the pencil must have been surprised as it produced the scrawl that resembled a crooked fence. This is what Letika had written:

“Following orders. I went down the street after 5 p. m. A house with a grey roof and two windows on either side; it has a vegetable garden. The person in question came out twice: once for water and once for kindling for the stove. After dark was able to look into the window, but saw nothing on account of the curtain.”

There followed several notations of a domestic nature which Letika had apparently gleaned in conversation over a bottle, since the memorandum ended rather abruptly with the words: “Had to add a bit of my own to square the bill.”

However, the gist of the report stated but that which we know of from the first chapter. Gray put the paper in his desk, whistled for the watch and sent the man for Panten, but the boatswain Atwood showed up instead, hastily pulling down his rolled-up sleeves.

“We’ve tied up at the dam. Panten sent me down to see what the orders are. He’s busy fighting off some men with horns, drums and other violins. Did you tell them to come aboard? Panten asked you to come up. He says his head’s spinning.”

“Yes, Atwood. I invited the musicians aboard. Tell them to go to the crew’s quarters meanwhile. We’ll see to them later. Tell them and the crew I’ll be up on deck in fifteen minutes, I want everyone in attendance. I presume you and Panten will also listen to what I have to say.”

Atwood cocked his left brow. He stood by the door for a few moments and then sidled out.

Gray spent the next ten minutes with his face buried in his hands; he was not preparing himself for anything, nor was he calculating. He simply wished to be silent for a while. In the meantime, everyone awaited him anxiously and with a curiosity full of surmise. He emerged and saw in their faces an expectation of improbable things, but since he considered that which was taking place to be quite natural, the tenseness of these other people’s souls was reflected in his own as a slight annoyance.

“It’s nothing out of the ordinary,” said Gray, sitting down on the bridge ladder. “We’ll lie to in the river till we change the rigging. You’ve all seen the red silk that’s been delivered. The sailmaker Blent will be in charge of making new sails from it for the Secret. We’ll then set sail, but I can’t say where to. At any rate, it won’t be far from here. I am going for my wife. She’s not my wife yet, but she will be. I must have red sails on my ship so that, according to the agreement, she can spot us from afar. That is all. As you see, there’s nothing mysterious in all this. And we’ll say no more about it.”

“Indeed,” said Atwood, sensing from the crew’s smiling faces that they were pleasantly surprised but did not venture to speak. “So that’s it, Captain… It’s not for us to judge. We can only obey. Everything’ll be as you wish. May I offer my congratulations.”

“Thank you!” Gray gripped the boatswain’s hand, but the latter, through superhuman effort, returned the handshake so firmly the captain yielded. Then the crew came up, mumbling words of congratulations with one man’s warm smile replacing another’s. No one shouted, no one cheered – for the men had sensed something very special in the captain’s short speech. Panten heaved a sigh of relief and brightened visibly – the weight that had lay on his heart melted away. The ship’s carpenter was the only one who seemed displeased. He shook Gray’s hand listlessly and said morosely:

“How’d you ever think of it, Captain?”

“It was like a blow of your axe. Zimmer! Let’s see your boys.”

The violinist, slapping the musicians on the back, pushed seven sloppily dressed men out of the crowd.

“Here,” Zimmer said. “This is the trombone. He doesn’t play, he blasts. These two beardless boys are trumpeters; when they start playing, everybody feels like going off to war. Then there’s the clarinet, the cornet and the second fiddle. All of them are past masters at accompanying the lively prima, meaning me. And here’s the headmaster of our merry band – Fritz, the drummer. You know, drummers usually look disappointed, but this one plays with dignity and fervour. There’s something open-hearted and as straight as his drumsticks about his playing. Will there be anything else, Captain Gray?”

“Magnificent. A place has been set aside for you in the hold, which this time, apparently, will be filled with all sorts of scherzos, adagios and fortissimos. To your places, men. Cast off and head out, Panten! I’ll relieve you in two hours.”

He did not notice the passing of these two hours, as they slipped by to the accompaniment of the same inner music that never abandoned his consciousness, as the pulse does not abandon the arteries. He had but one thought, one wish, one goal. Being a man of action, in his mind’s eye he anticipated the events, regretting only that they could not be manipulated as quickly and easily as chequers on a board. Nothing about his calm exterior bespoke the inner tension whose booming, like the clanging of a great bell overhead, reverberated through his body as a deafening, nervous moan. It finally caused him to begin counting to himself: “One… two… thirty…”—and so on, until he said: “One thousand.” This mental exercise had its effect; he was finally able to take a detached view of the project. He was somewhat surprised at not being able to imagine what Assol was like as a person, for he had never even spoken to her. He had once read that one could, though incompletely, understand a person if, imaging one’s self to be that person, one imitated the expression of his face. Gray’s eyes had already begun to assume a strange expression that was alien to them, and his lips under his moustache were curling up into a faint, timid smile, when he suddenly came to his senses, burst out laughing and went up to relieve Panten.

It was dark. Panten had raised the collar of his jacket and was pacing back and forth by the compass, saying to the helmsman:

“Port, one quarter point. Port. Stop. A quarter point more.”

The Secret was sailing free at half tack.

“You know,” Panten said to Gray, “I’m pleased.”

“What by?”

“The same thing you are. Now I know. It came to me right here on the bridge.” He winked slyly as the fire of his pipe lighted his smile.

“You don’t say?” Gray replied, suddenly understanding what he was getting at. “And what do you know?”

“It’s the best way to smuggle it in. Anybody can have whatever kind of sails he wants to. You’re a genius, Gray!”

“Poor old Panten!” the captain said, not knowing whether to be angry or to laugh. “Your guess is a clever one, but it lacks any basis in fact. Go to bed. You have my word for it that you’re wrong. I’m doing exactly as I said.”

He sent him down to sleep, checked their course and sat down. We shall leave him now, for he needs to be by himself.

Longren spent the night at sea; he neither slept nor fished, but sailed along without any definite course, listening to the lapping of the water, gazing into the blackness, holding his face up to the wind and thinking. At the most difficult times of his life nothing so restored his soul as these lonely wanderings. Stillness, stillness and solitude were what he needed in order to make the faintest, most obscure voices of his inner world sound clearly. This night his thoughts were of the future, of poverty and of Assol. It was unbearably difficult for him to leave her, if only for a short while; besides, he was afraid of resurrecting the abated pain. Perhaps, after signing up on a ship, he would again imagine that waiting for him in Kaperna was his beloved who had never died – and, returning, he would approach the house with the grief of lifeless expectation. Mary would never again come through the door. But he wanted to provide for Assol and, therefore, decided to do what his concern for her demanded he do.

When Longren returned the girl was not yet at home. Her early walks did not worry her father; this time, however, there was a trace of anxiety in his expectation. Pacing up and down, he turned to suddenly see Assol; having entered swiftly and soundlessly, she came up to him without a word and nearly frightened him by the brightness of her expression, which mirrored her excitement. It seemed that her second being had come to light – true being to which a person’s eyes alone usually attest. She was silent and looked into Longren’s face so strangely that he quickly inquired:

“Are you ill?”

She did not immediately reply. When the meaning of his words finally reached her inner ear Assol started, as a twig touched by a hand, and laughed a long, even peal of quietly triumphant laughter. She had to say something but, as always, she did not have to think of what it would be. She said:

“No. I’m well… Why are you looking at me like that? I’m happy. Really, I am, but it’s because it’s such a lovely day. What have you thought of? I can see by your look that you’ve thought of something.”

“Whatever I may have thought of,” Longren said, taking her on his lap, “I know you’ll understand why I’m doing it. We’ve nothing to live on. I won’t go on a long voyage again, but I’ll sign on the mailboat that plies between Kasset and Liss.”

“Yes,” she said from afar, making an effort to share his cares and worries, but aghast at being unable to stop feeling so gay. “That’s awful. I’ll be very lonely. Come back soon.” Saying this, she blossomed out in an irrepressible smile. “And hurry, dear. I’ll be waiting for you.”

“Assol!” Longren said, cupping her face and turning it towards himself.

“Tell me what’s happened.”

She felt she had to dispel his fears and, overcoming her jubilation, became gravely attentive, all save her eyes, which still sparkled with a new life.

“You’re funny. Nothing at all. I was gathering nuts.”

Longren would not have really believed this had he not been so taken up by his own thoughts. Their conversation then became matter-of-fact and detailed. The sailor told his daughter to pack his bag, enumerated all he would need and had some instructions for her:

“I’ll be back in about ten days. You pawn my gun and stay at home. If anyone annoys you, say: ‘Longren will be back soon.’ Don’t think or worry about me: nothing will happen to me.”

He then had his dinner, kissed her soundly and, slinging the bag over his shoulder, went out to the road that led to town. Assol looked after him until he turned the bend and then went back into the house. She had many chores to do, but forgot all about them. She looked around with the interest of slight surprise, as if she were already astrangerto this house, so much a part of her for as far back as she could recall that it seemed she had always carried its image within her, and which now appeared like one’s native parts do when revisited after a lapse of time and from a different kind of life. But she felt there was something unbecoming in this rebuff of hers, something wrong. She sat down at the table at which Longren made his toys and tried to glue a rudder to a stern; as she looked at these objects she unwittingly imagined them in their true sizes, and real. All that had happened that morning once again rose up within her in trembling excitement, and a golden ring as large as the sun fell to her feet from across the sea.

She could not remain indoors, left the house and set out for Liss. She had no errand there at all, and did not know why she was going, yet could not but go. She met a man on the way who asked for directions; she explained all in detail to him, and the incident was immediately forgotten.

The long road slipped by as if she had been carrying a bird that had completely absorbed her tender attention. Approaching the town, she was distracted somewhat by the noise given off by its great circle, but it had no power over her as before, when, frightening and cowing her, it had made her a silent coward. She stood up to it. She passed along the circle of the boulevard leisurely, crossing the blue shadows of the trees, glancing up at the faces of passers-by trustingly and unselfconsciously, walking slowly and confidently. The observant had occassion during the day to note the stranger here, an unusual-looking girl who had passed through the motley crowd, lost in thought. In the square she held her hand out to the stream of water in the fountain, fingering the sparkling spray; then she sat down, rested a while and returned to the forest road. She traversed it in refreshed spirits, in a mood as peaceful and clear as a stream in evening that had finally exchanged the flashing mirrors of the day for the calm glow of the shadows.

Approaching the village, she saw the selfsame coalman who had imagined his basket sprouting blossoms; he was standing beside his cart with two strange, sullen men who were covered with soot and dirt. Assol was very pleased.

“Hello, Phillip. What are you doing here?”

“Nothing, Midge. A wheel got loose. I fixed it, and now I’m having a smoke and talking to my friends. Where were you?”

Assol did not reply.

“You know, Phillip, I like you very much, and that’s why you’re the only one I’m telling this to. I’ll be leaving soon. I’ll probably be going away for good. Don’t tell anyone, though.”

“You mean you want to go away? Where to?” The coalman was so surprised he gaped, which made his beard still longer than it was.

“I don’t know.” Slowly, she took in the clearing, the elm under which the cart stood, the grass that was so green in the pink twilight, the silent, grimy coalmen and added after a pause: “I don’t know. I don’t know the day or the hour, or even where it’ll be. I can’t tell you any more. That’s why I want to say goodbye, just in case. You’ve often given me a lift.”

She took his huge, soot-blackened hand and more or less managed to give it a shake. The worker’s face cracked in a stiff smile. The girl nodded, turned and walked off. She disappeared even before Phillip and his friends had a chance to turn their heads.

“Ain’t it a wonder?” the coalman said. “How’s a body to understand that? There’s something about her today… funny, like, I mean.”

“You’re right,” the second man agreed. “You can’t tell whether she was just saying that or trying to make us believe her. It’s none of our business.”

“It’s none of our business,” said the third and sighed.

Then the three of them got into the cart and, as the wheels clattered over the rocky road, disappeared in a cloud of dust.

It was a white hour of morning; a faint mist crowded with strange phantoms filled the great forest. An unnamed hunter, having just left his campfire, was making his way parallel to the river; the light of its airy emptiness glimmered through the trees, but the cautious hunter did not approach the river as he examined the fresh tracks of a bear that was heading for the mountains.

A sudden sound rushed through the trees with the unexpectedness of an alarming chase; it was the clarinet bursting into song. The musician, having come up on deck, played a passage full of sad and mournful repetition. The sound trembled like a voice concealing grief; it rose, smiled in a sad trill and ended abruptly. A distant echo hummed the same melody faintly.

The hunter, marking the tracks with a broken twig, made his way to the water. The fog had not yet lifted; it obscured the silhouette of a large ship turning slowly out of the river. Its furled sails came to life, hanging down in festoons, coming unfurled and covering the masts with the helpless shields of their huge folds; he could hear voices and the sound of steps. The off-shore wind, attempting to blow, picked at the sails lazily; finally, the sun’s warmth had the desired effect; the pressure of the wind increased, lifted the fog and streamed along the yards into the light crimson shapes so full of roses. Rosy shadows slipped along the white of the masts and rigging, and everything was white except the unfurled, full-blown sails which were the colour of true joy.

The hunter, staring from the bank, rubbed his eyes hard until he was finally convinced that what he was seeing was indeed so and not otherwise. The ship disappeared around a bend, but he still stood there, staring; then, shrugging, he went after his bear.

While the Secret sailed along the river, Gray stood at the helm, not trusting it to the helmsman, for he was afraid of shoals. Panten sat beside him, freshly-shaven and sulking resignedly, and wearing a new worsted suit and a shiny new cap. As before, he saw no connection between the crimson magnificence and Gray’s intentions.

“Now,” said Gray, “when my sails are glowing, the wind is fair and my heart is overflowing with joy that is greater than what an elephant experiences at the sight of a small bun, I shall try to attune you to my thoughts as I promised back in Liss. Please bear in mind that I don’t consider you dull-witted or stubborn, no; you are an exemplary seaman and this means a lot. But you, as the great majority of others, hear the voices of all the simple truths through the thick glass of life; they shout, but you will not hear them. What I’m doing exists as an old-fashioned belief in the beautiful and unattainable, and what, actually, is as attainable and possible as a picnic. You will soon see a girl who cannot, who must not marry otherwise than in the manner I am following and which you are witnessing.”

He related in short that which we know so well, concluding thus:

“You see how closely entwined here are fate, will and human nature; I’m going to the one who is waiting and can wait for me alone, while I do not want any other but her, perhaps just because, thanks to her, I’ve come to understand a simple truth, namely: you must make so-called miracles come true yourself. When a person places the most importance on getting a treasured copper it’s not hard to give him that copper, but when the soul cherishes the seed of an ardent plant – a miracle, make this miracle come true for it if you can. This person’s soul will change and yours will, too. When the chief warden releases a prisoner of his own free will, when a billionaire gives his scribe a villa, a chorus girl and a safe, and when a jockey holds back his horse just once to let an unlucky horse pass him, – then everyone will understand how pleasant this is, how inexpressibly wonderful. But there are miracles of no less magnitude: a smile, merriment, forgiveness and… the right word spoken opportunely. If one possesses this – one possesses all. As for me, our beginning – Assol’s and mine – will forever remain to us in a crimson glow of sails, created by the depths of a heart that knows what love is. Have you understood me?”

“Yes, Captain.” Panten cleared his throat and wiped his moustache with a neatly-folded, clean handkerchief. “I understand everything. You’ve touched my heart. I’ll go below and tell Nicks I’m sorry I cursed him for sinking a pail yesterday. And I’ll give him some tobacco – he lost his at cards yesterday.”

Before Gray, who was somewhat surprised at the quick practical effect his words had had, was able to reply, Panten had clattered down the ladder and heaved a sigh in the distance. Gray looked up over his shoulder; the crimson sails billowed silently above him; the sun in their seams shone as a purple mist. The Secret was heading out to sea, moving away from the shore. There was no doubt in Gray’s ringing soul – no dull pounding of anxiety, no bustle of small worries; as calmly as a sail was he straining towards a heavenly goal, his mind full of those thoughts which forestall words.

The puffs of smoke of a naval cruiser appeared on the horizon. The cruiser changed its course and, from a distance of half a mile, raised the signal that stood for “lie to”.

“They won’t shell us, boys,” Gray said. “Don’t worry! They simply can’t believe their eyes.”

He gave the order to lie to. Panten, shouting as if there were a fire, brought the Secret out of the wind; the ship stopped, while a steam launch manned by a crew and lieutenant in white gloves sped towards them from the cruiser; the lieutenant, stepping aboard the ship, looked around in amazement and followed Gray to his cabin, from which he emerged an hour later, smiling as if he had just been promoted and, with an awkward wave of his hand, headed back to his blue cruiser. This time Gray had apparently been more successful than he had with the unsophisticated Panten, since the cruiser, pausing shortly, blasted the horizon with a mighty salvo whose swift bursts of smoke, ripping through the air in great, flashing balls, furled away over the still waters. All day long there was an air of half-festive bewilderment on board the cruiser; the mood was definitely not official, it was one of awe – under the sign of love, of which there was talk everywhere, – from the officers’ mess to the engine room; the watch on duty in the torpedo section asked a passing sailor:

“How’d you get married, Tom?”

“I caught her by the skirt when she tried to escape through the window,” Tom said and twirled his moustache proudly.

For some time after the Secret plied the empty sea, out of sight of the shore; towards noon they sighted the distant shore. Gray lifted his telescope and trained it on Kaperna. If not for a row of roofs, he would have spotted Assol sitting over a book by the window in one of the houses. She was reading; a small greenish beetle was crawling along the page, stopping and rising up on its front legs, looking very independent and tame. It had already been blown peevishly onto the window-sill twice, from whence it had reappeared as trustingly and unafraid as if it had had something to say. This time it managed to get nearly as far as the girl’s hand which was holding the corner of the page; here it got stuck on the word “look”, hesitated as if awaiting a new squall and, indeed, barely escaped trouble, since Assol had already exclaimed: “Oh! That… silly bug!” – and was about to blow the visitor right into the grass when a chance shifting of her eyes from one rooftop to another revealed to her in the blue strip of sea at the end of the street a white ship with crimson sails.

She started visibly, leaned back and froze; then she jumped up, her heart sinking dizzily, and burst into uncontrollable tears of inspired shock. Meanwhile, the Secret was rounding a small cape, its port side towards the shore; soft music wafted over the light-blue hollow, coming from the white deck beneath the crimson silk; the music of a lilting melody expressed not too successfully by the well-known words: “Fill, fill up your glasses – and let us drink to love… ” In its simplicity, exulting, excitement unfurled and rumbled.

Unmindful of how she had left the house, Assol ran towards the sea, caught up by the irresistible wind of events; she stopped at the very first corner, nearly bereft of strength; her knees buckled, her breath came in gasps and consciousness hung by a thread. Beside herself from fear of losing her determination, she stamped her foot and ran on. Every now and then a roof or a fence would hide the crimson sails from view; then, fearful lest they had disappeared like some ordinary mirage, she would hurry to pass the tormenting obstacle and, sighting the ship once again, would stop to heave a sigh of relief.

Meanwhile, there was such commotion, such an uproar and such excitement in Kaperna as was comparable to the effect of the famous earthquakes. Never before had a large ship approached this shore; the ship had the very same sails whose colour sounded like a taunt; now they were blazing brightly and incontestably with the innocence of a fact that refutes all the laws of being and common sense. Men, women and children were racing helter-skelter towards the shore; the inhabitants shouted to each other over their fences, bumped into each other, howled and tumbled; soon a crowd had gathered at the water’s edge, and into the crowd Assol rushed.

As long as she was not there her name was tossed around with a nervous and sullen tenseness, with hateful fear. The men did most of the talking; the thunderstruck women sobbed in a choked, snake-like hissing, but if one did begin to rattle – the poison rose to her head. The moment Assol appeared everyone became silent, everyone moved away from her in fear, and she remained alone on the empty stretch of hot sand, at a loss, shamed and happy, with a face no less crimson than her miracle, helplessly stretching her hands towards the tall ship.

A rowboat manned by bronzed oarsmen detached itself from the ship; among them stood he whom she now felt she had known, had dimly recalled since childhood. He was looking at her with a smile which warmed and beckoned. But thousands of last-stand, silly fears gripped Assol; deathly afraid of everything – an error, misunderstanding, some mysterious or evil hindrance – she plunged waist-deep into the warm undulation of the waves, shouting: “I’m here, I’m here! It’s me!”

Then Zimmer raised his bow – and the very same melody struck the nerves of the crowd, but this time it was a full-voiced, triumphant choir. From excitement, the motion of the clouds and waves, the glitter of the water and the distance the girl was hardly able to discern what was moving: she herself, the ship or the rowboat, – everything was moving, spinning and falling.

But an oar slashed the water next to her; she raised her head. Gray bent down, and her hands gripped his belt.

Assol shut her eyes tight; then she opened them quickly, smiled boldly into his beaming face and said breathlessly:

“Just as I imagined you.”

“And you, too, my dear!” Gray said, lifting his wet treasure from the water. “I’ve come at last. Do you recognize me?”

She nodded, holding onto his belt, trembling with a reborn soul and eyes shut quiveringly tight. Happiness was as a soft kitten curled up inside of her. When Assol decided to open her eyes the rocking of the rowboat, the sparkle of the waves, the huge, approaching, moving side of the Secret – all was a dream, where the light and the water bobbed and spun like sun-sports cavorting on a sunshine-streaked wall. She did not remember how she was carried up the gangplank in Gray’s strong arms. The deck, covered and draped with rugs, engulfed by the crimson splashing of the sails, was like a heavenly garden. And soon Assol saw that she was in a cabin – in a room than which nothing could be better.

Then from above, rending and absorbing the heart in its triumphant cry, once again the thunderous music crashed. Once again Assol shut her eyes, fearful lest all this disappear if she were to look. Gray took her hands and, knowing now where safety lay, she buried her tear-stained face on the breast of her beloved, who had appeared so miraculously. Gently, but with a smile, for he, too, was overwhelmed and amazed by the coming of the inexpressible, precious minute, inaccessible to anyone else, Gray tilted up this face that had haunted him for so long, and the eyes of the girl finally opened wide. All that was best in a person was in them.

“Will you take my Longren with us?” she said.

“Yes.” And he kissed her so passionately after saying this firm “yes” that she laughed delightedly.

We shall leave them now, knowing that they should be alone. There are many words in the many languages and dialects of the world, but none of them can even faintly convey that which they said to each other that day.

Meanwhile, up on deck, by the mainmast the entire crew waited at the worm-eaten cask with the top knocked off to reveal the hundred-year old dark magnificence. Atwood stood by; Panten sat as primly blissful as a newborn babe. Gray came up on deck, signalled to the orchestra and, removing his cap, was the first to dip a glass, to the accompaniment of the golden horns, into the sacred wine.

“There…” he said, when he had drunk and then tossed down his glass.

“Now drink. Everybody, drink! Anyone who doesn’t drink is my enemy.”

He did not have to repeat his words. As the Secret proceeded at full speed, under full sail, away from Kaperna, which had been struck dumb forever, the jostling around the cask was greater than anything in this manner that occurs at great fetes.

“How did you like it?” Gray asked Letika.

“Captain,” the sailor said, searching for the right words, “I don’t know whether it liked me, but I’ll have to think over my impressions. Beehive and orchard!”

“What?”

“I mean it’s like having a beehive and an orchard put into my mouth. Be happy, Captain. And may she whom I will call ‘the best cargo’, the Secrets best prize, be happy, too!”

When dawn broke the following morning the ship was far from Kaperna. Part of the crew were asleep where they had stretched out on deck, overcome by Gray’s wine; only the helmsman, the watch and a thoughtful and tipsy Zimmer who sat near the prow with his chin resting on the finger-board of his cello were up. He sat there, drawing his bow across the strings softly, making them speak in a magic, heavenly voice, and was thinking of happiness.

The traveller Ammon Root returned to his native land after an absence of several years. He stayed with Tonar, an old friend of his, who was the director of a joint-stock company and a person with a shady past-but also a fanatic for decorum and probity. On the very day of his arrival Ammon quarrelled with Tonar over a newspaper editorial, called his friend a minion of the minister, and stepped outside for a walk.

Ammon Root was one of those people who are more serious than they appear at first glance. His travels were not mentioned by the newspapers, nor did they cause a single map to make the slightest change in its depiction of the continents, but they were still absolutely necessary for him.

“To live means to travel,” he would say to those people who were attached to life just on the side of it that is most warm and steamy, like a hot pie. Ammon’s eyes – two eternally greedy abysses – ransacked heaven and earth in their search for new spoils; abysses – everything he saw plunged headlong into them and was packed away once and for all in the fearful crush at the bottom of his memory, to be kept for his own use. In contrast to tourists Ammon saw far more than the museums and churches where the viewers, pretending to be experts, seek ethereal beauty in poorly-executed paintings.

Out of curiosity Ammon Root stopped in at a cafeteria that served vegetarian food. About a hundred people were sitting in the large rooms, which smelled of varnish, paint, freshly-dried wall-paper, and some other particularly abstinent odour. Ammon noticed the absence of any old people.

An extraordinary silence, which was out of keeping with even the concept of food, inspired the appetite of anyone coming in to be prayerfully delicate and bodiless, like the very idea of herbivority. The pious but ruddy faces of the health fanatics cast indifferent glances at Ammon. He sat down. The dinner, served to him with a ceremonial and somewhat accentuated solemnity, consisted of a repulsive gruel called “Hercules”, fried potatoes, cucumbers, and some insipid cabbage. Ammon poked around with his fork in this gastronomical paltriness, ate a piece of bread and a cucumber, and drank a glass of water; then he snapped open his cigarette case, but he remembered that smoking was prohibited and looked around gloomily. At the tables mouths were chewing sedately and delicately in a death-like silence. Ammon was hungry and sensed opposition welling up within him. He well knew that he could just as easily have not stopped in here – nobody had asked him to do so – but’ it was hard for him to resist his chance whims. Staring at his plate, Ammon said in a low voice, as though to himself, but clearly enough so that he could be heard:

“What garbage. I’d love to have some meat now!” At the word “meat” many people gave a start, and several dropped their forks; all pricked up their ears and looked at the impudent visitor.

“I’d really like some meat!” Ammon repeated with a sigh.

Somebody coughed emphatically, and another person began to breathe noisily in the corner.

Ammon grew bored and went out into the foyer. A servant handed him his coat.

“I’ll send you a turkey,” said Ammon, “eat to your heart’s content.”

“Oh, sir!” objected the emaciated old servant, sadly shaking his head.

“If only you were used to our regimen… ”

Ammon went out without listening to him. “Now the day’s been spoiled,” he thought, as he walked along the shady side of the street. “That cucumber has stuck in my throat.” He wanted to return home and did so. Tonar was sitting in the living room at the open piano; he had finished playing his favourite bravura pieces but was still under the spell of their great liveliness. Tonar liked everything that was definite, absolute, and clear: for example, milk and money.

“Admit that the article is stupid!” said Ammon as he entered. “I’d like to give that minister of yours my boot in the… but the police inspector is an efficient fellow.”

“We,” retorted Tonar without turning around, “we businessmen look at things differently. Loafers like you, corrupted by travels and a romantic outlook, admire anyone who plays at being a Harun-al-Rashid. To be sure, instead of harassing the speculators who finagle us on the stock market, it is much easier to don a false beard, hang around various dens, and booze it up with petty thieves.”

“But if somebody’s an interesting person,” said Ammon, “then I appreciate him for that alone. You have to appreciate truly interesting people. I’ve known a lot of them. One, a hermaphrodite, was wed to a man and then, after getting divorced, married a woman. A second, who was once a priest, invented a machine that sang bass; he grew rich, killed a circus snake with his teeth on a bet, kept a harem in Cairo, and now is a cheese merchant. A third is remarkable for being a true phenomenon. He possessed a startling ability to concentrate the attention of all those around him exclusively on himself; everyone was silent in his presence, and only he spoke-a little more intelligence, and he could have done whatever he pleased. A fourth blinded himself of his own volition, so as not to see people. A fifth was a sincere, forty-year-old fool; when people asked him what he was, he answered that he was a fool and laughed. Interestingly, he was neither a madman nor an idiot, but simply a classical fool. A sixth… the sixth… is myself.”

“Yes?” Tonar asked ironically.

“Yes. I’m against false humility. I have seen a lot during the forty-five years of my life; I have experienced a lot, and I have participated a lot in others’ lives.”

“But… No!” said Tonar after a silence. “I know a truly interesting person. You bundles of nerves live in want. You always have too little of everything. I know a person who leads an ideally beautiful normal life, who is perfectly well-bred and possesses outstanding principles, and who lives in the healthy atmosphere of farm work and nature. By the way, that is my ideal. But I am not a person of one piece. You ought to have a look at him, Ammon. His life is to yours as that of a juicy red apple is to a rotten banana.”

“For God’s sake!” exclaimed Ammon. “Show me this monster!”

“As you wish. He’s from our circle.”

Ammon laughed when he tried to imagine a peaceful and healthy life.

Eccentric, hot-tempered, and brusque – at times he felt vaguely attracted to such an existence, but only in his imagination; monotony crushed him. There was so much appetizing mental lip-smacking in Tonar’s account that Ammon became interested.

“If it’s not ideal,” he said, “I won’t go, but if you assure… ”

“I guarantee that the most immoderate claims…”

“I’ve never yet seen such a person,” interrupted Ammon. “Please write me a letter of recommendation by tomorrow. Is it very far?”

“A four-hour ride.”

Ammon, who was pacing up and down the room, stopped behind Tonar’s back; carried away by the impressions that were in store, he put his hand on his friend’s bald spot, as though on a lectern, and recited:

“Are you really forty-five years old?” asked Tonar, settling heavily into his armchair.

“Forty-five.” Ammon approached the mirror. “Who is there to pull out my grey hairs for me? And will I indeed be travelling, travelling, travelling for a long time yet – perhaps forever?”

Early in the morning Ammon saw the blue and white snow of mountains from his train window; their jagged thrust stretched in a semicircle around a hilly plain. A sunny stripe of the sea was shining in the distance.

The white station-building, with wild grape vines entwined about its walls, cordially came running up to the train. Emitting puffs of exhaust steam, the engine came to a halt; the cars clanged, and Ammon disembarked.

He saw that Liliana was a truly beautiful place. The streets along which Ammon drove, in the carriage that he had hired to go to Dogger’s, were not impeccably straight; their gentle winding caused the eye to constantly expect extensive vistas. Meanwhile Ammon was quite diverted by the buildings’ gradually unfolding diversity. The houses were dotted with little balconies and stucco moulding, or they displayed semi-circular towers; grey arches against a white facade and roofs turned up or down, like the brim of a hat, provided diverse welcomes to the onlooker. All of this had quite an attractive appearance, immersed as it was in the majestically blooming gardens, the flower-beds, the sunlight, and the sky. The streets were lined with palms; their umbrella – like tops cast blue shadows onto the yellow midday earth. Now and then in the middle of a square there would be a fountain, as ancient as a granddad and full of water that rippled from the falling spray; in places a winding stone staircase rose in a side-street, and above it, shaped like an eyebrow, would arc a small bridge, as light as the arm of a girl held akimbo.

When he had ridden through the town Ammon caught sight of a garden and a tiled roof in the distance. The gravel-covered road led along an avenue of trees to a simple entrance that was in keeping with the entire house, which was built of light-coloured, unpainted wood. Ammon walked up to the house. It was a one-storey log building with two projections on the sides and a terrace. The climbing greenery filled the facade’s piers with flowers and leaves; there were many flowers everywhere – carnations, tulips, anemones, holly-hocks, asters, and gilly-flowers.

Dogger, who had been standing by a tree, approached Ammon with the relaxed, effortless steps of a powerful man. He was hatless; his strong neck, pink from sunburn, was hidden by his curly blond hair. Dogger was as powerful as a broad-chested statue of Hercules that had come to life, and he produced an impression of indestructible health. Ammon very much liked the bold features of his hearty face, his warm grey eyes, and his small beard and moustache. Dogger’s outfit consisted of a canvas shirt and pants, a leather belt, and high boots of soft leather. His handshake was firm but quick, while his deep voice rang out clearly and freely.

“I’m Ammon Koot,” said Ammon, bowing, “if you’ve received Tonar’s letter, I’ll have the honour of explaining to you the reason why I came.”

“I received his letter, and you are first and foremost my guest,” said Dogger with a courteous smile. “Let’s go in; I’ll introduce you to my wife. Then we’ll talk about everything you wish to discuss.”

Ammon followed him into a very simple living room with high windows and modest furniture. Nothing stuck out; on the contrary, everything was designed for subtle comfort. Here and in the other rooms that Ammon visited the furnishings were forgotten, as the body forgets pieces of clothing that have long since become familiar. There were no paintings or prints on the walls. Ammon did not notice this at first: the piers’ emptiness seemed to be casually draped with the folds of the window curtains. The tidiness, cleanliness, and light imparted a nuance of tender solicitude for the things with which, like with old friends, people live their entire lives.

“Elma!” said Dogger, opening the hall door. “Come here.”

Ammon was impatient to meet Dogger’s wife. He was interested in seeing them as a couple. Before a minute had gone by a beautiful smiling woman in a smart open-sleeved house-dress emerged from the dim light of the hall. Her every movement spoke of overflowing good health. A blonde of about twenty-two, she sparkled with the refreshing calm of contented young blood, with the gaiety of a well-rested body, and with the majestic good nature of enduring happiness. Ammon thought that everything must be just as harmonious, beautiful, and joyful on the inside, where her body worked in mysterious ways: her heart of steel meticulously pumped scarlet blood through her blue veins, while her pink lungs vigorously inhaled air to refresh the blood, warmed amidst white ribs beneath the white breast.

Dogger, without ceasing to smile – which seemed to be more of a need than an effort for him – introduced Root to his wife; she began to speak freely and lustily, as though she had known Ammon for a long time.

“Being a traveller, you will be a little bored at our place, but that will only be good for you… yes, good.”

“I’m touched,” said Ammon, bowing.

Everyone sat down. Dogger, like Elma, sat in silence, smiling ingenuously, and gazing directly into Ammon’s face; their expressions said:

“We see that you are also a very homely person; it is an easy matter to sit silently with you and not be bored.” Despite the winning simplicity of his hosts and the furnishings, Ammon did not trust what he saw.

“I very much want to explain the purpose of my visit to you,” he said, getting down to the necessary lie. “In the course of my travels I have become a zealous photographer. In my opinion this pastime can involve quite a bit of artistry.”

“Artistry,” Dogger nodded.

“Yes. Every landscape passes through hundreds of phases every day. Each time the sun, the time of day, the moon, the stars, or a human figure make it different: they either add to it or take something away. Tonar tempted me with his description of Liliana’s charms: the city itself, the surroundings, and your marvelous estate. I feel that my camera is stirring impatiently in my suitcase and that the shutter is snapping by itself from impatience. Have you known Tonar for long, Dogger?”

“For a very long time. We became acquainted while we were both negotiating to buy this estate, but I outbid him. We’re on most excellent terms, and sometimes he drops by. He likes country life very much.”

“It’s strange that he doesn’t live like this himself,” said Ammon.

“You know,” rejoined Elma, putting her head onto her arms and her arms onto the back of the chair, “to do that you have to be born a person like myself and my husband. Am I right, dear?”

“You’re right,” said Dogger pensively. “But, Ammon, I’ll show you the farm while dinner is being perepared. Will you come along, Elma?”

“No,” the young woman refused with a laugh, “I’m the hostess, and I must look after things.”

“In that case…” Dogger stood up. Ammon did so as well. “In that case we’ll set off on our trip.”

“A true seeker of adventure,” Ammon said to himself as he walked alongside Dogger, “differs from a tritely curious person in that he thoroughly explores any obscure situation. Now I have to look into everything. I don’t believe Dogger.” Without further introspection he surrendered himself to his impressions. Dogger led Ammon along the garden’s vaulted avenues to the backyard. Their conversation touched on nature, and Dogger, with a subtlety that one would not expect from his appearance, penetrated to the very core of the chaotic and contradictory feelings – as slight as the flicker of an eyelash – produced by natural phenomena. He spoke rather phlegmatically, and yet any general concept of nature suddenly ceased to exist for Ammon. Nature, like a house made of blocks, collapsed before his very eyes into its constituent parts. Then, just as carefully and imperceptibly, as though playing, Dogger restored what had been destroyed; he harmoniously and methodically fused the disintegrated concept back into its original form, and Ammon again saw the momentarily lost aggregate of the world’s beauty.

“You are an artist, or you ought to be one,” said Ammon.

“Now I’ll show you the cow,” said Dogger animatedly, “it’s of a good breed and a healthy specimen.”

They emerged into the cheery, spacious yard, where a lot of poultry was wandering about: variegated hens, fiery roosters, motley ducks, irritable turkeys, baby chickens as yellow as dandelions, and several pairs of pheasants. A huge chained dog was lying in a green kennel with his tongue hanging out. Pigs that looked like pink logs glittered within an enclosure; a donkey flapped its ears and cast a good-natured sidelong look at a rooster, which was rummaging with his claw in some manure under the donkey’s very hoof; and flocks of blue and white pigeons flew through the air – this bucolic sight indicated so much peaceful joy that Ammon smiled. Dogger surveyed the yard with a satisfied air and said:

“I very much like animals that are of a congenial nature. Tigers, boa constrictors, snakes, chameleons, and other anarchists are unpleasant to me. Now let’s look at the cow.”

Ammon saw four giant cows in the barn, where small but clear windows let in plenty of light. Dogger approached one of the cows, which had crescent-shaped horns and was the colour of yellow soap; the beast exuded strength, fat, and milk; the huge, pink, black-spotted udder hung almost to the ground. The cow, as though realising that she was being inspected, turned her heavy, thick muzzle towards the men and flicked her tail.

Dogger stood with arms akimbo – which made him look like a peasant – and looked at Ammon, the cow, and again at Ammon; then he gave the cow a solid slap on the rump with the palm of his hand.

“A beauty! I call her Diana. She’s the best specimen in the district.”

“Yes, she’s impressive,” Ammon affirmed.

Dogger took down a red copper bucket that was hanging in a row with some others and began to roll up his sleeves.

“Watch me do the milking, Ammon. Then try the milk.”

Suppressing a smile, Ammon put on an expression of keen attention.

Dogger squatted, placed the bucket beneath the cow, and by skillfully squeezing the teats caused streams of milk to strike forcefully against the resonant copper. Very soon the bucket contained a couple of inches of milk, all frothy from the spray. Dogger’s serious face, his motherly treatment of the cow, and the sight of a man doing the milking so convulsed Ammon that he could not restrain himself and began to roar with laughter. Dogger stopped milking, looked at him with amazement, and finally burst out laughing himself.

“I can tell you’re a city-dweller,” he said. “You don’t find it ridiculous when morbidly excited people jump about in front of each other and lift their feet in time to music. But healthy pursuits directly related to nature make you laugh.”

“Excuse me,” said Ammon, “I imagined myself in your place and… And I’ll always be ashamed of myself for this.”

“Forget it,” Dogger calmly rejoined, “it’s just nerves. Try some.”

He brought an earthenware mug from the depths of the barn and poured out some of the thick, almost hot milk for Ammon.

“Ah,” said Ammon when he had drunk it, “your cow has nothing to be ashamed of. I positively envy you. You’ve discovered life’s simple wisdom.”

“Yes,” Dogger nodded.

“Are you very happy?”

“Yes,” Dogger nodded.

“I couldn’t be wrong, could I?”

“No.”

Dogger unhurriedly took the empty mug from Ammon and unhurriedly took it back to its former place.

“It’s ridiculous,” he said when he returned, “it’s ridiculous to boast, but my life is truly filled with joyful peace.”

Ammon offered him his hand.

“I salute you with all my heart,” he uttered slowly, in order that he might detain Dogger’s hand a while longer. But Dogger, smiling ingenuously, likewise pressed Ammon’s hand and did so without a trace of impatience – even willingly.

“Now let’s go have lunch,” said Dogger, as he walked out of the shed.

“We’ll be able to look at the rest this evening, if you’re interested: the meadow, the kitchen-garden, the greenhouse, and the seedbeds.”

They returned along the same road. On the way Dogger said:

“Those who seek ugliness and disease in nature, rather than health and beauty, lose a great deal.”

No words could have been more appropriate than these amidst the sweetbriar and jasmine that lined the fragrant pathways, along which Ammon Root walked and observed Dogger out of the corner of his eye.

Ammon Root had rarely experienced so robust and pure and simple a life as that with which fate had brought him into contact at Dogger’s estate. A remnant of suspiciousness stayed with him until the end of lunch, but the Doggers’ affable manner and the natural simplicity of their movements, smiles, and glances enveloped Root with a winning aroma of happiness. The hearty lunch consisted of butter, milk, cheese, ham, and eggs. Ammon also liked the servant who brought in and cleared away the food; she was a sedate woman and, like everyone in the house, healthy.

At Elma’s request Ammon spoke a little about his travels. Through a sense of inner opposition that a born city person characteristically experiences in the country, where he is somewhat of an alien, he then began to speak of the season’s novelties.

“There’s a new operetta by Rastrelli – The Pink Gnome – which is worse than his last piece. Rastrelli is repeating himself. But Sedir’s concerts are enchanting. His violin-playing is powerful, and I think that a violinist like Sedir could rule an entire kingdom with the help of his bow.”

“I don’t like music,” said Dogger, breaking an egg. “May I offer you some goat’s-milk cheese?”

Ammon bowed.

“And you, madam?” he said.

“My tastes coincide with those of my husband,” Elma answered, reddening a little. “I don’t like music either; I’m indifferent to it.”

Ammon did not immediately find anything to say in reply, since he believed what he had heard. These calm and self-possessed people had no reason to pose for effect. But Ammon began to feel a little like he did when he was sitting in the cafeteria that served vegetarian food.

“Well, there’s no point in arguing the matter,” he said. “A small painting by Alar, ‘The Dragon with a Splinter in His Paw’, fascinated me at an exhibition in the spring. The efforts which the dragon makes while rolling on his back like a dog in order to get rid of the wood sliver are very convincing. It is impossible to doubt that dragons exist after you look at this painting depicting their everyday life. However, my friend found that even if this dragon had been drinking milk and licking its chops… ”

“I don’t like art,” Dogger remarked curtly.

Elma looked at him, then at Ammon, and smiled.

“That’s enough of that,” she said. “When were you last in the tropics?”

“No, I want to explain,” Dogger softly interrupted. “Art is a great evil – I’m speaking, of course, about real art. The theme of art is beauty, but nothing causes so much suffering as beauty. Imagine the most perfect work of art. There is more cruelty lurking in it than a person could bear.”

“But there is also beauty in life,” Ammon rejoined.

“The beauty of art is more hurtful than the beauty of life.”

“What is your conclusion, then?”

“I feel a loathing for art. I have, as they say, the soul of a philistine. I stand for order in politics, for constancy in love, and for inconspicuous but useful work in society. And on the whole for industriousness, honesty, responsibility, serenity, and moderate self-esteem in one’s personal life.”

“I cannot disagree with you,” Ammon said guardedly. Dogger’s assured tone had finally persuaded him that Tonar was right. Dogger was a rare example of a person who had created a special world of indestructible normalcy.

Suddenly Dogger laughed merrily.

“There’s nothing to discuss,” he said. “I’m a cheerful and simple person. Elma, will you come for a ride with us? I want to show our guest the kitchen-garden, the meadows, and the surroundings.”

“Yes.”

Except for the pit in the forest Ammon did not learn anything new from the ride. Dogger rode on the right-hand side of Elma, and Ammon on the left; Ammon did not make any further mention of Dogger’s conviction and spoke about himself, his meetings, and his observations. He sat in a simple black saddle atop a beautiful, well-fed, and gentle horse. They came across several people who were engaged in clearing ditches and in digging the earth up around the young trees; these were Dogger’s workers, stocky young fellows who took off their hats respectfully. “A beautiful couple,” Ammon thought, looking at his hosts. “Adam and Eve were probably like this before the Fall.” Impressionable, like all wanderers, he began to be imbued with their austerely indulgent attitude towards everything that was not part of their own lives. The inspection of Dogger’s holdings compelled him to utter several compliments: the kitchen-garden, like the entire estate, was a model. The lush meadow, sown with choice grasses, was a joy to behold.

A forest stretched beyond the meadow, which abutted a mountain-side, and when the riders had reached the edge of the woods they came to a halt.

From this high spot Dogger serenely examined his holdings. He said:

“I like property, Ammon. And now, have a look at the pit.”

Dogger rode into the forest and stopped next to a dark damp pit beneath a canopy formed by the thick foliage of old trees. Light percolated through to this place with reluctance; it was chilly here – as in a well – and hushed. Wind-fallen branches filled the pit; roots extended into it; and a tree trunk, snapped off by a storm, had been tossed over the chaos of forest litter and ferns. A pungent odour of mushrooms, mould, and earth came from the vast hollow, and Dogger said:

“You can feel the presence of mysterious creatures and beasts here. I sense the wary steps of polecats, the swishing of snakes, and the protruding eyes of toads that look like a person with dropsy. Bats circle about here in the moonlight, and the round eyes of owls glitter in the darkness. It seems to be some sort of a night club.”

“He’s dissembling,” thought Ammon, and his distrust of Dogger flared up anew, “but what’s at the bottom of it?”

“I want to go home,” said Elma. “I don’t like the forest.”

Dogger looked at his wife tenderly.

“She objects to the dark,” he told Ammon, “and so do I. Let’s return. I feel good only at home.”

At eleven-thirty Ammon took leave of his hospitable hosts and headed for the room which he had been assigned in the house’s left wing; the room’s windows looked out into the yard, which was separated from the house by a narrow garden filled with flowers. The furnishings exuded the same health and fresh coziness as the entire house: a metal washstand; furniture made out of unpainted light wood; clean curtains, sheets, and pillows; a warm grey blanket; a mirror in a simple frame and flowers on the window-sill; a massive desk and a cast-iron lamp. There was nothing superfluous; everything was necessary and purely functional.

«So this is the kind of place I have landed in!» said Ammon, taking off his vest. «Rousseau would have envied Dogger. The speeches by Dogger about nature and the pit in the forest were beautiful; they run counter to the abominable triviality in the rest of what he says. There’s nothing else for me to do here. I’m convinced that it’s possible to vegetate sensibly. However, let’s have a bit more of a look.»

He sat down on the bed and fell to thinking. The steel table-clock struck twelve. Dampness from the meadows and the smell of flowers wafted in through the wide-open window. Everything slept; the stars were shining above the black roofs like the lights of a distant city. Ammon grew sadly troubled as he thought about people’s constant dreams of a good, joyous, and healthy life; he could not understand why the most impressive efforts of this sort-like, for instance, Dogger’s life – lacked the wings of enchantment. Everything was admirable, tasty, and clean; delicate and useful; beautiful and honest-but insignificant, and one felt like saying: “Ah, I was at an exhibition again! There’s an exemplary person on view there…”

Then he mentally began to sketch the possibilities of another order. He imagined a fire, the crackling of beams, the fire’s tempestuousness, Elma’s love for a worker, and Dogger’s becoming a drunkard, a lunatic, a drug addict; he fancied him a religious fanatic, an antiquary, a bigamist, and a writer, but none of this fitted the owners of the estate in Liliana. The trepidation of a nervous, destructive, or creative life was out of character for them. The house was so well-equipped that the possibility of a fire was, of course, completely out of the question, and Dogger was fated never to experience the fear and chaos of a burning building. Two young lives, the acme of creation, pass through year after year, hand in hand – sensibly, intelligently, carefully, and happily.

“And so,” said Ammon, “I’m going to bed.” He had folded back the blanket and was about to turn out the light, when he suddenly heard a man’s quiet steps in the corridor; someone was walking past his room and was walking as people usually do when everyone in the house is asleep at night: tautly and lightly. Ammon listened attentively. The steps faded away at the end of the corridor; five, ten minutes passed, but no one returned, and Ammon carefully opened the door.

A fixture suspended from the ceiling illuminated the corridor with an even nocturnal light. There were three doors in the passageway: one, closer to the centre of the house, led to the servants’ quarters and was opposite Ammon’s room; a second was directly to the left of Ammon’s and, judging from the padlock on it, was the door to a pantry or an uninhabited room. To the right, at the end of the wing, there were no doors at all – it was a dead end with a high closed window looking out onto the garden; yet that was precisely where the steps had died away.

“He couldn’t have vanished into thin air!” said Ammon. “And it could hardly have been Dogger: he said that he sleeps as soundly as a soldier after battle. There’s no reason for a worker to enter the house. The window at the end of the corridor leads into the garden; even if Dogger, for reasons beyond my knowledge, had taken it into his head to go for a walk, there are three doors at his service that all lead outside, and besides, I would have heard the frame slam, but I didn’t.”

Ammon turned around and closed the door.

He half believed the steps to be significant and half did not. His thoughts wandered in the realm of wonderful superstitions and legends about human life, whose purpose is to glorify the name of man and raise it from the swamp of the everyday into the world of mysterious fascination, where the soul obeys its own laws, like God. Ammon again made himself imagine the sound of steps. Suddenly it seemed to him that an unknown ‘someone’ could peer into his open window; he quickly put out the light and pricked up his ears.

“Oh, how stupid I am!” said Ammon when he did not hear anything else.

“Any number of people could be walking about in the night for whatever reason!… I’m simply a narrow professional, a seeker of adventure, and nothing more. What kind of secret could there be amidst the scent of hay and hyacinths? One has only to look at Elma’s homey beauty to discard these stupidities.”

Nevertheless, instinct took issue with logic. For half an hour Ammon stood by the door and peered through the keyhole, waiting for new sounds as a person in love awaits a rendezvous. Through this small opening, which looked like a boot-sole stood on end, he saw the pine panelling on the wall and nothing more. His spirits fell; he yawned and was about to go to bed, when the same steps again resounded clearly. Ammon held his breath, like a swimmer who has dived beneath the water, and looked through the keyhole.

Dogger was coming from the dead end and was walking past Ammon’s door on tiptoe. His head was above Ammon’s field of vision; he had on trousers and a shirt with unbuttoned sleeves – he was not wearing a jacket. The steps faded away, there was the muffled sound of an inside door closing and Ammon straightened up; despite the situation’s logic, irrepressible suspicions churned within him. Too prudent to assign them any specific form, for the time being he was satisfied to keep on repeating one and the same question:

“Where could Dogger have kept himself at the end of the corridor?” Ammon circled about the room, now grinning and now pondering; he ran through all the possibilities: a love intrigue, somnambulism, insomnia, and a walk, but everything was left up in the air owing to the closed window and the dead end; and although the window, of course, could be opened, it seemed inexcusably flippant to think that a solid and respectable person like Dogger would use it as a means of exit into the garden.

Ammon decided to examine the hall thoroughly; he put on felt slippers and went out of his room, but he left his revolver, since he saw no need for it. The tranquil silence of the brightly lit corridor had a sobering effect on him; he felt ashamed and wanted to return, but the past day, which had been filled to excess with the humdrum simplicity that waries a lively soul, nudged Ammon towards artificial invigoration of his unsatisfied fantasies.

He quickly walked to the end of the corridor and up to the window, making certain that it was closed tightly and fastened by solid upper and lower bolts; he looked around and saw a small door that lacked posts and was flush with the wall – this small door, knocked together from thin boards, was apparently cut out and installed after the house had been built. Looking at the door, Ammon thought that it probably led to some steps that had been constructed in order to enter the garden next to the house from inside the corridor. Now that he had found out where Dogger had disappeared, Ammon quietly reached out, flipped the latch and opened it.

It opened into a corridor. It was dark beyond the door, although several steep steps, leading up and not down, were visible. The staircase was bordered by the narrow walls; in order to enter, it was necessary to bend low. “Is it worth it?” thought Ammon. “This is probably the passage to an attic where clothes are dried or pigeons live… However, Dogger is not a pigeon fancier, and he obviously does not take in laundry. Why did he come here? Oh, Ammon, Ammon, instinct tells me that there is game about. So what if I just fire a blank-if I go up, then at least it will be all over, and I’ll sleep until tomorrow’s yoghurt with a conscience as clear as a calf’s. If for whatever reason Dogger takes it into his head to visit the attic and finds me, I’ll pretend that I heard steps there; after all, thieves are always an excellent pretext in cases like this.”

Ammon took a look around, closed the door tightly behind himself, and, illuminating the staircase with a match, began to ascend. At a small landing the staircase turned left; on the upper end there proved to be a somewhat more spacious landing, where, beneath the roof’s steep pitch, was a door leading to the attic. Like the lower door, it was not locked. Ammon listened in order to make sure that there was nobody behind the door. The silence reassured him. He boldly lifted the latch, and the match was extinguished by a rush of air. Ammon stepped over the threshold into darkness; the rather stuffy air of a habitable room frightened him. In a hurry to make sure that he had not ended up in a worker’ or a servant’s cubbyhole, Ammon lit a second match, and the shadows raced away from its yellow light into the corners, making the surroundings distinct.

The first thing Ammon saw was a candle on a huge table in the centre of the room, he lit it, and as he looked around retreated to the door. A white curtain on the back wall hung down to the floor; similar curtains were hanging on the walls to the right and the left of the entrance. A screen window in the slanted ceiling let in the light of distant stars. Ammon hastily examined the corners without further scrutinizing the table, which was piled high with a miltitude of various objects. He found only neglected litter, crumpled paper, and broken pencils. Ammon straightened up, walked to the back wall where the cords for the curtain were hanging on a nail, and pulled them. The curtain rose.

Ammon stepped back at a sudden flash of daylight – the ground rose to the level of the attic, and the wall disappeared. Three paces from the traveller a woman with small bare feet was standing on a path that led to some hills and had her back turned to him. A simple black dress, which inexplicably laced any hint of mourning, emphasised the whiteness of her bare neck and arms. All the lines of her young body were distinguishable beneath the thin fabric. A thick bun of bronze hair covered the back of her neck.

The picture’s supernatural, painful veracity went beyond the bounds of the human; a live woman stood before him in the wondrous void of the distant prospect; any moment, Ammon felt, she would turn and look at him over her shoulder. He smiled in perplexity.

But at this point the brilliant brush’s triumph was terminated and at the same time intensified. The woman’s pose, her slightly drawn back left hand, her temple, the cheek’s shape, the fleeting exertion of her neck in turning, and numerous mute traits that were beyond analysis gripped the viewer with the expectation of a miracle. The artist had fixed the instant for eternity; it lasted and remained the same as ever – as if time had disappeared but at each following instant would resume its flight, and the woman would glance over her shoulder at the shaken viewer. In overpowering expectation Ammon looked at the head, which was fearful in its readiness to reveal its mysterious features; his heart was pounding like that of a child who had been left in a dark room; and with an unpleasant feeling of impotence before an unrealisable but clear threat, he let go of the cords. The curtain fell, but it still seemed to him that if he reached out he would encounter a warm, live shoulder beyond the canvas.

“Genius knows neither moderation nor limits!” he said excitedly. “So, Dogger, this is where you leave to milk the cows? My powerful instinct has guided my discovery. I’ll shout it to the whole world; I’m ill from ecstasy and fear! But what’s over there?”

He rushed to the curtain which hung to the left of the entrance. His hand became tangled in the cords; he impatiently tore at them, pulled them down, and raised the candle over his head. The same woman-in the same charming vivacity that was deepened still further by her face’s radiance-stood before him having fulfilled her exquisite threat. She had turned around. The artist had put into this face the total essence of maternal tenderness and feminine caress. The fire of pure, proud youth shone in the tender but resolute eyes; the bronze silk of her hair above her finely etched eyebrows appeared to be a diadem. Her mouth, with its noble and youthful features, exuded love and intelligence. She stood half-turned but had revealed her entire face, and she sparkled with the youthful strength of life and with a joy as disturbing as sleep filled with passionate tears.

Ammon looked at the picture mutely. It seemed to him that he had only to utter a single word in order to break the paints’ silence, and then the woman would approach him with lowered eyelashes, still more beautiful in her movements than in the distressing immobility of the miraculously created living body. He saw the dust on her legs, which were ready to move on, and the individual hairs behind her little ear were like the radiant attire on heads of grain. Joy and yearning held him in tender captivity.

“Dogger, you’re a despot!” said Ammon. “Could anyone strike a more painful blow to the heart?” He stamped his foot. “I must be delirious,” cried Ammon. “To paint like that is impossible; no one on earth could or would dare to do this!”

And the actual eyes of a woman gazed at him still more expressively, more intently, and more deeply.

Ammon was almost frightened, and with his heart beating violently he pulled the curtain over the painting. Something held him to the spot; he could not bring himself to pace up and down, as he usually did when he was disturbed. He was afraid to stir or to look around; the silence, in which only his breathing and the crackling of the burning candle were audible, was as unpleasant as the smell of fumes. Finally, overcoming his numbness, Ammon walked up to the third canvas, uncovered the painting… and the hair on his head bristled.

What had Dogger done in order to produce a nightmarish effect that could rekindle superstitions? The woman stood before Ammon in the same pose, with her head turned around while she continued walking; but her face was unaccountably transformed, and yet it was the same – down to the last feature – as the one at which Ammon had just looked. The mocking eyes met his with an inscrutable vividness, and the effect was fearsome. Now, at a closer range, their gaze was sombre; the pupils glittered differently; the mouth, which had an evil and base expression, was prepared to bestow a loathsome smile of madness; and the beauty of her wondrous face had become repulsive: it exuded a ferocious, greedy fire and was capable of strangling a person or of sucking someone’s blood; a reptile’s lust and a demon’s passion illuminated its vile oval, which was full of aroused voluptuousness, gloom, and frenzy; and an infinite agony seized Ammon when he looked closely and discerned in this face a readiness to begin speaking. The half-opened lips, between which her teeth shone repulsively, seemed to be whispering; the figure’s former soft femininity emphasised still further the horrible aliveness of the head, which all but nodded from the frame. Ammon sighed deeply and let go of the cord; the curtain rustled as it sped down, and he fancied that a diabolical face had winked at him and hidden itself beneath the falling folds.

Ammon turned around. A large and thick folder lying on the table drew his distracted attention; when he opened it, he found it full of drawings. But they were strange and wild… Ammon examined one after the other and was struck by the superhuman skill of fantasy evidenced in them. He saw flocks of ravens flying over fields of roses; hills that were covered, as though by grass, with electric lights; a river, dammed up by green corpses; hirsute, interlaced hands that were gripping bloodied knives; an inn, full to overflowing with drunk fish and lobsters; a garden in which gallows with executed men had taken strong root; the huge tongues of execution victims hung to the ground and children were swinging on them and laughing; corpses, which were reading yellowed tomes in their graves by the light of luminescent pieces of rotten wood; a swimming pool, full of bearded women; scenes of depravity, such as a feast of cannibals who were skinning a fat man; in the same drawing, a hand jutted out of a cauldron which hung over the fire; weirdly hideous figures, who had red whiskers and blue heads of hair, and who were one-eyed, three-eyed, and blind, paraded before him one after the other-one was eating a snake, another was playing dice with a tiger, a third cried, and jewels fell from his eyes. In almost all the drawings gold sequins were strewn over the clothes of the figures; they had been done with care, as in general any beloved work is done. Ammon leafed through the drawings with a terrible curiosity. The door slammed; he jumped away from the table and saw Dogger.

Even at the most dangerous moments Ammon never lost his self-possession; however, taken unawares, he experienced momentary confusion. Dogger had apparently not expected to see Ammon; he stopped at the door irresolutely and looked around, but soon he grew pale and then flared up so that his bare neck reddened with anger.

“By what right did you come here?” he shouted, striding over to Ammon.

“How am I to regard this? I didn’t expect such a thing! Eh? Ammon!”

“You’re right,” answered Ammon calmly, without lowering his eyes. “I had no right to enter. But I would have felt guilty only if I hadn’t found anything; now that I’ve seen something here, I dare think that I’ve thus acquired the right to reject the charge of impudence. I’ll say more: had I found out after I left what I would have seen if I had gone upstairs, and had I not done so – then I would have never forgiven myself for such an omission. My motives were the following… I’m sorry, but the matter demands frankness, whether you like it or not. I had vague doubts about your cows, Dogger, and about the turnips and the well-fed pheasant hens; when I accidentally came upon the true path to your soul, I attained my goal. The fearful power of a genius guided your brush. Yes, my eyes stole your secret, but I am no less proud of this thievery than Columbus was of the Western Hemisphere, since my calling is to seek, to pursue, to make discoveries!”

“Shut up!” cried Dogger. His face did not contain a trace of placid equanimity, but nor did it show any malice, which is out of place in people of lofty character; it expressed distressed indignation and pain. “You still dare… Oh, Ammon, you, with your conversations about that accursed art, caused me to lose sleep owing to agonies that are beyond your comprehension, and now, bursting into here, you want me to believe that your deed is praiseworthy. What makes you think you can take such liberties?”

“I am a seeker, a seeker of adventure,” Ammon coldly retorted. “I have a different set of morals. There would be no merit in dealing with people’s hearts and souls and never being cursed for these experiments. What good is a soul that lays itself servilely open to view?”

“However,” said Dogger, “you are daring! I don’t like people who are too daring. Leave. Return to your room and pack. You’ll be given a horse at once; there’s a night train.”

“Fine!” Ammon walked towards the door. “Farewell!”

He was at the door when suddenly both of Dogger’s hands seized him by the shoulders and spun him around. Ammon saw the pathetic face of a coward; he sensed Dogger’s boundless fright and, not knowing what was the matter, grew pale with alarm.

“Not a word,” said Dogger, “absolutely not a word to anyone! For my sake, for God’s sake, have mercy – say nothing to anyone!”

“I give you my word; yes, I give you my word. Calm down.”

Dogger let go of Ammon. His gaze, filled with hatred, stopped on each of the paintings in turn. Ammon walked out, descended the staircase, went into his own room, and prepared to go. Half an hour later, accompanied by a servant and without encountering Dogger again, he went out through the dark entrance from the garden side, where a carriage stood; he climbed in and rode off.

The starry dew of the sky, the agitation, the limitless, fragrant darkness, and the breath of roadside thickets intensified his enchanted exultation. The earth’s huge, blind heart beat muffledly in time to Ammon’s exultant heart, greeting its son the seeker. Ammon groped uncertainly but tenaciously for the true nature of Dogger’s soul.

“No, you can’t get away from yourself, Dogger, no,” he said, remembering the drawings.

The coachman, who was racking his brains over the guest’s sudden departure, timidly turned around and asked:

“Is there some urgent matter, sir?”

“Matter? Yes, precisely – a matter. I must go to India at once. My relatives there have come down with the plague-my grandmother, sister-in-law, and three first cousins.”

“Is that so!” the peasant said in suprise. “Goodness me!”

“My friend,” Tonar said to Ammon upon opening a letter, “Dogger, whom you visited four years ago, requests that you go to him immediately. Since he does not know your address, he’s transmitting his request through me. But what could have happened there?”

Ammon, without concealing his surprise, quickly walked up to his friend.

“He’s asking me over? How does he express himself?”

“As they used to do at the end of the eighteenth century. ‘I shall be greatly indebted to you,’” read Tonar, ‘”if you inform Mr. Ammon Koot that I would be most grateful to him if he would meet with me at once… ‘ Won’t you explain what this is about?”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Really? You’re a sly one, Ammon!”

“I can only promise to tell you afterwards, if things go all right.”

“Very well. My curiosity’s been aroused. What, are you already looking at the clock? Take a look at the train schedule.”

“There’s a train at four,” said Ammon, pressing the buzzer. A servant appeared in the doorway. “Hert! High boots, a revolver, a laprobe, and a small travelling-bag. Farewell, Tonar. I’m going to Liliana’s cheery meadows!”

Not without trepidation did Ammon heed the strange man’s summons. He still remembered the painful blow that the two-faced woman in the wondrous paintings had dealt to his soul, and he involuntarily connected the paintings with Dogger’s invitation. But it was pointless to try and guess what Dogger wanted from him. Undoubtedly, something serious was in store. Deep in thought, Ammon stood at the train window. With the thoroughness of a blind man who gropes for something that he needs, he mused upon all his knowledge of people, of all the complex junctures of their souls, and all the possibilities that followed from what he had seen four years ago; but, dissatisfied, he finally refused to predict the future.

At eight o’clock in the evening Ammon stood before the quiet house, in the garden where flowers prayed vividly, luxuriantly, and joyfully, to the sun setting amidst silvery clouds. Elma met Ammon; the musical clarity was missing from her movements and expression; a grieving, nervous, suffering woman stood before Ammon and softly said:

“He wants to speak with you. You don’t know – he’s dying, but, he still hopes he’ll get well; please make believe that you consider his disease to be nothing at all.”

“We must save Dogger,” said Ammon after a moment’s thought. “Has he kept anything secret from you?”

He looked Elma straight in the eye and imparted a cautiously significant tone to the question.

“No, nothing. And from you?”

This was said gropingly, but they understood each other.

“Probably,” said Ammon inquisitively, “you were not left in the dark regarding the haste of my previous departure.”

“You must excuse Dogger and… yourself.”

“Yes. For the sake of that which you know well, Dogger must not die.”

“The doctors are deceiving him, but I know everything. He won’t live out the month.”

“It’s absurd,” said Ammon, walking after Elma, “I know a person who’s a watchman in a garden and is one hundred and four years old. But he, to be sure, understands nothing of paints.”

When they came into the sick-room, Dogger was in bed. The early twilight shaded his transparent face like a light, airy fabric; the sick man’s hands were under his head. He was hirsute, thin, and morose; his eyes, which glittered expressively, rested on Ammon.

“Elma, leave us alone,” wheezed Dogger, “don’t be offended.”

The woman smiled at him sadly and left. Ammon sat down.

“Here’s still one more adventure, Ammon,” Dogger began to speak weakly.

“Enter it in the column for extremely distant journeys. Yes, I’m dying.”

“You must be a hypochondriac,” said Ammon lightheart-edly. “Come now, that’s just a weakness.”

“Yes, yes. We practise lying. Elma says the same as you, while I pretend that I don’t believe death is near, and she is satisfied with that. She doesn’t want me to believe what she herself believes.”

“What’s wrong with you, Dogger?”

“What?” Dogger closed his eyes and smiled grimly. “You see, I drank some cold spring water. I must tell you that for the past eleven years all the water I drink has been neither too hot nor too cold. Two years ago, in the spring, I was walking in the nearby hills. The snow runoffs rushed along sparkling stone channels among vivid greenery, pounding on every side. Blue cascades whipped up snowy foam and leaped from ledge to ledge; they jostled one another like frightened herd of sheep which streams through a tight gate in a living wave of white backs. Oh, Ammon, I acted unwisely, but the stifling hot day tortured me with thirst. The sky’s oppressive heat beat down on my head from the precipitous heights, and the profusion of water foaming about increased my sufferings. I was far from home, and I felt an uncontrollable urge to drink this savage, cold, carefree water that had not been defiled by a thermometer. An underground spring was not far away; I bent down and drank – the icy fire scorched my lips. The tasty water smelled of grass and fizzed like sparkling wine. Rarely does one have occasion to quench his thirst so blissfully. I drank for a long time and then… I became ill. Sick people, you know, often have very keen hearing, and I, albeit not without making an effort, overheard Elma and the doctor behind the doors. He did a good job of beating around the bush for a while, but all the same he gave me grace for not longer than the end of the month.”

“You acted unnaturally,” said Ammon with a smile.

“Partly. But I’m becoming tired of speaking. Those two pictures in which she turned around… where do you think they are?” Dogger grew agitated. “There’s a box on the table; open the little grave.”

Ammon got up and slightly raised the lid of a beautiful casket; from the rush of air a bit of white ash flew up and landed on his sleeve. The box, which was filled to the top with fluffy ash, explained to him the fate of the brilliant creations.

“You burned them!”

Dogger’s eyes motioned assent.

“If this isn’t madness, then it’s barbarity,” said Ammon.

“Why?” retorted Dogger meekly. “One of them was evil, while the other was falsehood. I’ll tell you their story. The task to which I dedicated my entire life was to paint three pictures that would be more perfect and more powerful than anything that exists in art. No one even knew that I was an artist; no one, except for you and my wife, has seen these paintings. The grievous good fortune that befell me was to depict Life by separating what is essentially inseparable. This was more difficult than sorting out, kernel by kernel, a wagonload of grain that has been mixed with a wagonload of poppy seeds. But I did it, and you, Ammon, saw Life’s two faces, each in the full splendour of its might. When I had committed this sin, I felt that my whole body, my thoughts and my dreams, were drawing me irresistibly toward darkness; before me I saw its complete embodiment… and I could not resist. Only I know how I lived then, no one else. But it was a dismal and morbid existence of horror and decay!

“The things that now surround me, Ammon – nature, farm work, air, a vegetable – like happiness – represent nothing but a hurried flight from myself. I couldn’t show people my fearful pictures, since they would have extolled me, and I, urged on by vanity, would have used my art in accordance with my soul’s bent-on behalf of evil – and that would have destroyed me. All my soul’s dark instincts pushed me towards evil art and an evil life. As you see, in the house I honestly eliminated every temptation: there are no pictures, drawings, or statuettes. Thus I destroyed my memory of myself as an artist, but it was beyond my power to destroy those two, who fought between themselves to possess me. For whatever you may say, they really were not so badly done! But life’s diabolical face at times tempted me; I shut myself up, buried myself in my fantasies – the drawings – and became intoxicated with nightmarish delirium… that folder no longer exists either. You kept your promise to be silent, and since I trust you, I ask that after my death you exhibit my third painting anonymously; it is truthful and good. Art was my curse; I renounce my name.”

He was silent for a while and then began to cry, but his tears did not arouse any offensive sensation of pity in Ammon, who saw that no person could commit a greater act of violence against himself. “The man has burned himself out,” Ammon thought. “Fate has given him an unbearable burden. But soon he will have peace…”

“And so, Ammon,” said Dogger, growing calm, “will you do this?”

“Yes, it’s my duty, Dogger; I truly admire you,” said Ammon, who, contrary to his own expectations, became more upset than he wanted to be. “I admire your talent, your struggle, and… your ultimate staunchness.”

“Give me your hand!” Dogger requested with a smile. His hand-shake was firm and brusque.

“You see, I’m not completely weak yet,” he said. “Farewell, restless, thieving soul. Elma will give you the painting. I think,” Dogger added naively, “that people will write about it.”

Ammon and his friend, a thin brunette with a face as mobile as a monkey’s, slowly made their way through the dense crowd that had filled the hall to overflowing. Amidst the other frames and portrayals, above their heads, stood a woman who was about to turn around and who seemed alive to troubled eyes; she was standing on a road that led towards some hills. The crowd was silent. The most perfect work of art in the world displayed its power.

“It’s almost unbearable,” said Ammon’s friend. “Why, she really will turn around.”

“Oh, no,” Ammon disagreed, “fortunately, that’s only a threat.”

“Fortunately? I want to see her face!”

“It’s better this way, my dear,” he sighed, “let each person imagine for himself what that face is like.”

There are people who remind you of an old-fashioned snuffbox. When you pick up such an object, you ponder it fruitfully. It is an entire generation, and we are alien to it. The snuffbox is placed among other appropriate little objects and is shown to guests, but rarely does its owner use it as an everyday item. Why? Do the centuries daunt him? Or are the forms of another time, so deceptively similar to modern forms geometrically, so different in essence that to see them constantly, to be in constant contact with them, means to live imperceptibly in the past? Is this perhaps a shallow thought about a complex disparity? Hard to tell. But, as I began to say, there are people who remind you of an ancient everyday item, and the spiritual essence of these people is as alien to the manner of life around them as the above-mentioned snuffbox to a price gouger from the Hotel Lisbon. Whether in childhood, or at one of those turning points in life when the developing character seems to be like a liquid saturated with a mineral solution – disturb it just a little and it will all irreversibly congeal into crystals that form with the speed of lightning – maybe at such a turning point, thanks to a chance impression or something else, their soul adopts a steadfast form once and for all. Its needs are naive and poetic: the integrity, completeness, and the charm of the habitual, where daydreams dwell so serenely and comfortably, free of the moment’s cavils. Such a person prefers horses to trains, candles to electric bulbs, the downy plait of a girl to her artful coiffure with its smell of burning and musk, roses to chrysanthemums, and the ungainly sailing vessel with its lofty mass of white sails that reminds you of a jawly face with a clear brow above blue eyes, to th steamship pretty as a toy. His inner life is of necessity guarded, while his external life consists of mutual repulsions.

Just as there are such people, so are there families houses, and even cities and harbours that are guided by a spirit all their own.

There is no port more disorderly and marvellous than Liss, except of course Zurbagan. The international, multilingual city strongly reminds one of a tramp who has finally decided to bury himself in the fog of a settled life. The homes straggle helter-skelter along the vague suggestions of streets, but streets in the proper sense of the word could not exist in Liss, if only because the city emerged on the sides of cliffs and hills, connected by steps, bridges, and spiral-shaped pathways. All of this is covered by a solid mass of tropical greenery, in the fan-shaped shadow of which glitter the childlike, blazing eyes of women. A yellow rock, a blue shadow, and picturesque cracks in old walls; in some kno.ll-shaped yard a huge boat is being repaired by a barefoot, unsociable person smoking a pipe; there is distant singing and its echo in a ravine; a market on piles beneath tents and huge umbrellas; a weapon’s gleam, bright frocks, the fragrance of flowers and greenery that gives rise to a dull yearning, as in a dream, for love and trysts; the harbour, as filthy as a young chimney sweep; sails furled in sleep and a winged morning, green water, coves, and the ocean’s expanse; at night, the magnetic conflagration of stars and boats with laughing voices – such is Liss. There are two hotels here: the Prickly Pillow and the Heaven Help Us. The sailors naturally crowded more thickly in the one that was nearer at hand. It is hard to say which was nearer in the beginning, but as a result of their competition these venerable institutions began to skip towards the harbour – in the literal sense of the word. They moved, rented new quarters, and even built them. The Heaven Help Us won. A deft move on its part left the Prickly Pillow rooted amidst some barely negotiable ravines, while the triumphant Heaven Help Us, after a ten-year struggle and having been the ruin of three eating houses, settled down to reign right beside the harbour.

Liss’s population consists of adventurers, smugglers, and sailors. The women are divided into angels and shrews; the angels of course are young, searingly beautiful and tender, while the shrews are old – but one must not forget that even a shrew can be useful. Take for instance a happy wedding during which a shrew who had previously concocted infernal machinations repents and begins a better life.

We will not investigate the reasons why Liss was and is visited exclusively by sailing vessels. These reasons are of a geographic and hydrographic nature; altogether, everything in this town produced on us precisely that impression of independence and poetic rhythm that we tried to elucidate through the example of a person with pure and clear needs.

At the time our story begins four people were sitting at a table on the top floor of the hotel Heaven Help Us before a window with a picturesque view of Liss’s harbour. They were Captain Duke, a quite corpulent and effusive individual; Captain Robert Est& Captain Renior; and a captain better known by the nickname “I know you”, because he greeted everybody, even strangers, with just this phrase if the person evinced an inclination to go on a spree. His name, though, was Chinchar.

Such a glittering, even aristocratic company could not, naturally enough, be gathered round an empty table. On it were standing various festive bottles brought out by the proprietor of the hotel on special occasions – namely those like the present one, when captains, who generally had no love lost for each other for reasons of professional swashbuckling, got together to do some heavy drinking. Estamp was an elderly, very pale, grey-eyed, taciturn man with reddish eyebrows; Renior, with long black hair and bulging eyes, looked like a disguised monk; Chinchar, a one-eyed, agile old man with black teeth and a mournful blue eye, was notable for his scathing tongue.

The inn was full; people were singing at one table and arguing noisily at another; from time to time some merry-maker, who had reached the stage of complete oblivion, would head for the exit knocking over the chairs in his path; the plates and dishes were rattling; all in amidst this noise Duke twice caught the name “Bitt-Boy”. Evidently someone was recalling this glorious person. The name came up apropos, for a difficult situation was under discussion.

“Now with Bitt-Boy,” Duke exclaimed, “I wouldn’t be afraid of an entire squadron! But he’s not around. My dear captains, I’m loaded with vile explosives – a terrible thing! That is, not I, but the Marianne. However, the Marianne is I and I’m the Marianne, therefore I’m loaded. It’s an irony of fate: I – with a cargo of grapeshot and powder! Let God be my witness, my dear captains,” Duke continued in a gloomily animated voice, “after that knock-out dish they treated me to in the commissariat I would have even agreed to carry seltzer and soda water!”

“A privateer showed up again the day before yesterday,” put in Estamp.

“I don’t know what he’s looking for in these waters,” said Chinchar, “but one’s afraid to weigh anchor.”

“What’s burdening you now?” asked Renior.

“Utter rubbish, captain. I’m transporting tinware and perfume. But I’ve been promised a bonus!”

Chinchar was lying, however. He was “burdened” not with tinplate, but with an insurance policy, and was seeking a suitable time and place to sink his Hermit for a large sum. Such dirty tricks are no rarity, although they require great circumspection. The privateer was bad news; Chinchar had received information that his insurance company was on the brink of ruin, and so he had to hurry.

“I know what that pirate’s looking for,” declared Duke. “Did you see the brigantine that cast anchor at the very entrance? The Felicity. They say it’s loaded with gold.”

“I don’t know that vessel,” said Renior. “I saw her, of course. Who is her captain?”

Nobody knew. Nobody had seen him. He had not made a single call and had not come to the hotel. Just once three sailors from the Felicity, middle-aged and decorous people pursued by curious glances, came from the ship into Liss, bought some tobacco, and did not appear again.

“A pup,” grumbled Estamp. “A lout. Stay in your cabin, lout,” he suddenly flushed and turned towards the window, “maybe you’ll grow a moustache.”

The captains broke into guffaws. When the laughter had died down, Renior said:

“There’s nothing to be done, we’re locked in. I’d give up my cargo with pleasure – after all, what do I care about someone else’s lemons? But to give up the President…”

“Or the Marianne,” interrupted Duke. “What if she were blown up?” He grew pale and drank down a double shot. “Don’t speak to me about such terrible and fateful things, Renior!”

“I’m so sick of hearing about your Marianne,” shouted Renior, “that I would even welcome an explosion!”

“And may your President sink!”

“Wha-a-at?”

“Captains, don’t quarrel,” said Estamp.

“I know you!” cried out Chinchar to a very surprised visitor. “Come here, treat an old fellow!”

But the visitor turned his back. The captains sank into thought. Each had his own reasons for wishing to leave Liss as quickly as possible. A distant fortress was expecting Duke. Chinchar was in a hurry to play out his little swindle. Renior thirsted for a reunion with his family after a two-year’s absence, while Estamp was afraid that his crew, which was a loose assemblage, would leave him. Two of them had already run off and were now at the Prickly Pillow bragging about fantastic adventures in New Guinea.

These vessels – the Marianne, the President, Chinchar’s Hermit, and Estamp’s Aramea – had taken refuge in Liss from the pursuit of hostile privateers. The high-speed Marianne had been the first to fly in, the next day the Hermit had come crawling, and two days later the Aramea and the President dropped anchor, panting. Including the mysterious Felicity, there were in all five ships in Liss, not counting barges and small coastal vessels.

“Therefore I say that I want Bitt-Boy,” the tipsy Duke began to speak again. “I’ll tell you a little something about him. Of course, you all know that milksop, Beppo Malastino. Well, there was Malastino staying in Zurbagan, drinking ‘Good God’[1], and holding his Butuzka on his lap. In walks Bitt-Boy. ‘Malastino, weigh anchor, I’ll pilot your vessel through Kasset. You’ll be in Akhuan Skap before everyone else this season.’ What do you think, captains? Many a time I’d sail through Kasset with a full cargo, and that idiot Malastino would have done well to heed Bitt-Boy blindly. But Beppo thought it over for two days. ‘Oh a storm belt… oh, blah blah, the buoys’ve been torn off…’ But the crux of it, lads, wasn’t in buoys. Ali the Turk, Beppo’s ex-boatswain, made a hole in his brig directly across from the mizzen and sealed it with pitch. A wave would have quickly washed it away. Finally the swooning Beppo sailed through the infernal strait with Bitt-Boy; he was late, of course, and the money in Akhuan Skap had come to like others more than that wop, but… isn’t Bitt-Boy a lucky-chap! In Kasset they were hurled against the reefs… Now, several barrels of honey that stood near the Turk’s hole had begun to ferment, most likely back in Zurbagan. These barrels burst, and about four tons of honey battened down the hole with such a collision mat that the planking never gave way. Beppo turned cold when he discovered it during the unloading in Akhuan Skap.

“Bitt-Boy… I would have begged him to come to me,” remarked Estamp.

“Some day, Duke, they’ll hang you for the powder anyway, but I have children.”

“I’ll tell you another story about Bitt-Boy,” Chinchar began. “This affair…”

A dreadful, jolly racket interrupted the old swindler. Everyone turned towards the door, many began to wave their hats, and some rushed to greet the newcomer. A collective roar raced like the wind through the vast hall, while individual shouts burst through the enthusiastic uproar:

“Bitt-Boy! Bitt-Boy! Bitt-Boy, bearer of good fortune!”

The person greeted by such a meaningful and delightful appellation reddened deeply, stopped at the entrance, laughed, waved a greeting, and went to the captains’ table. He was a well-built person of no more than thirty, not tall, and with a pleasant, open face that expressed tenderness and strength. There was a calm liveliness in his eyes, while his facial features, his figure, and all his movements were notable for their dignity, which was more a reflection of an inner calm than an habitual assertion of character. His thoughtful voice was extremely distinct but not loud.

Bitt-Boy wore a pilot’s cap, a brown jersey, a blue belt, and heavy-looking shoes; a raincoat was thrown over his arm.

Bitt-Boy shook dozens and hundreds of hands… His smiling glance moved freely about the circle of friendly grins; wreaths of pipe smoke, the white glitter of teeth in coffee-coloured faces, and a multi-hued fog of eyes surrounded him for several minutes – the vibrant cloud of a cordial meeting. He finally disentangled himself and fell into Duke’s embrace. Even Chinchar’s mournful eye cheered up, as did his caustic jaw. The stolid, ox-like Renior softened, and the tough, egotistical Estamp gave a slight but childlike smile. Bitt-Boy was everyone’s favourite.

“You, fortune’s drummer!” said Duke. “Haven’t seen hide nor hair of you! You weren’t perhaps some modern Jonah in the belly of a nasty whale? Where did you disappear to? What d’you know? Take your pick: the whole damn fleet’s on hand. But we’re stuck, like a wedge driven into some blockhead. Save the Marianne.”

“You mean the privateer, do you?” asked Bitt-Boy. “I saw him. A short tale, lads, is better than long interrogations. Here’s the story; yesterday I took a yawl in Zurbagan and sailed to Liss; it was a dark night. I’d heard about the privateers; therefore I stole along the shore behind the rocks, where the cliffs are overgrown with moss. I was protected by their colour. Twice the search light of an unfriendly cruiser passed by me; the third time something made me lower the sail. In an instant… the yawl and I were illuminated like a fly on a plate. Because of the rocks, the shadows, the moss, and the clefts, I couldn’t be distinguished from the emptiness, but had I not lowered the sail… And so Bitt-Boy got here safe and sound. Renior, do you remember the firm Heaven and Co.? It sells tight shoes with nails driven right through; I bought a pair yesterday, and now my heels are all bloody.”

“Aye-aye, Bitt-Boy,” said Renior, “but you’re a courageous person. Bitt-Boy, pilot my President, if you were married… ”

“No, the Hermit,” declared Chinchar. “I know you, Bitt-Boy. I’m rich now.”

“Why not the Aramea?” asked the stern Estamp. “I’m prepared to defend my right to leave with a knife. With Bitt-Boy it’s a sure thing.”

The young pilot was about to say something else when he suddenly became grimly serious. With his chin propped on his small hand he looked at the captains, quietly smiled with his eyes, and, out of consideration for the mood of others, got control over himself. He took a drink, tossed up the empty glass, caught it, lit a cigarette, and said:

“I thank you; I thank you for your kind words, for your confidence in my luck… I do not seek it. I can’t give you my answer now; that is, a definite one. There is a certain circumstance.”

“Although I’ve already spent all the money I earned in the spring, nonetheless… Besides, how can I choose among you? Duke?… Oh, dear old fellow! One would have to be near-sighted not to see your secret tears for wide-open space and your desire to tell everyone: ‘Watch me do it!’ The sea agrees with you, old fellow, as it does with me; I like you, Duke. And you, Estamp? Who hid me from the foolish Sepoys in Bombay when I saved the rajah’s pearls? I also like Est& he has a warm spot in his heart. Renior lived at my place for two months, and when I broke a leg his wife fed me for half a year. And you, ‘I know you’, Chinchar, you inveterate sinner, how you cried in church over a meeting with an old woman… You had been separated by twenty years and unintentional bloodshed. I’ve had a drink and I’m jabbering, captains; I like all of you. The privateer, to be sure, is no joking matter, but how can I make a choice? I can’t even imagine.”

“Lots,” said Estamp.

“Lots! Lots!” the table began to shout. Bitt-Boy looked around. People had long since moved in from the corners and were following the conversation; many elbows rested on the table, and behind those who were close others stood and listened. Then Bitt-Boy’s glance passed to the window, beyond which the harbour was shining serenely. The evening, giving off vapours, descended on the water. With a glance Bitt-Boy asked the mysterious Felicity about something comprehensible only to himself and said:

“That’s quite an imposing brigantine, Estamp. Who’s commanding it?”

“Some lout of an ignoramus. Only nobody’s seen him.”

“And its cargo?”

“Gold, gold, gold,” Chinchar began to mutter, “sweet gold…”

And several people on the side corroborated this:

“That’s what they say.”

“A vessel with gold was supposed to pass by here. That must be the one.”

“The watch on board is scrupulous.”

“They don’t let anyone on board.”

“It’s quiet on it… ”

“Captains!” Bitt-Boy began to speak. “I’m embarrassed by my strange reputation, and the hopes placed in me throw my heart into confusion, really and truly. Listen: cast lots provisionally. You don’t have to roll scraps of paper into little tubes. In a lively matter something living will watch over us. I’ll go with whoever wins out, if a certain circumstance doesn’t change.”

“Let them have it, Bitt-Boy!” cried out someone who had just woken up in the corner.

Bitt-Boy laughed. He would have liked to have already been far from Liss by now. The noise and jokes amused him. He started up the “lots” business in order to drag out the time so that he could imbibe as much as possible of the strange, bustling influences and diffusions of this crush of sailors and their affairs. However, he would have religiously kept his word should a “certain circumstance” have changed. But now, while he looked at the Felicity, this circumstance was still too vague to himself and in mentioning it he was guided only by his amazing instinct. Thus a sensitive person, expecting a friend, is reading or working, and then suddenly stands up, goes to the door and opens it: the friend is coming, but the person who opened the door has already shaken off his absentmindedness and is surprised at the correctness of his action.

“Blast your circumstance!” said Duke. “All right – we’ll draw lots! But you didn’t finish what you were saying, Bitt-Boy.”

“Yes. Evening’s falling,” Bitt-Boy continued, “the person who wins me, a paltry pilot, will not have long to wait. At midnight I’ll send a lad with tidings to the boat of the one with whom it falls to my lot to travel. The fact of the matter is that I might refuse outright. But all the same, for the time being, go ahead.”

Everyone turned towards the window into whose variegated distance Bitt-Boy was peering intently, apparently seeking some natural sign, indication, or chance portent. All the ships were clearly visible, as plain as on the palm of one’s hand: the graceful Marianne; the long President with its tall bowsprit; the bulldog-like gloomy Hermit with the figure of a monk on its prow; the tall, light Aramea; and that nobly imposing Felicity with its powerful, well-proportioned body that had the neatness of a yacht, an elongated stern, and jute rigging, that Felicity about which they had argued in the tavern as to whether it had a cargo of gold on board.

How sad are summer evenings! Their regular penumbra that has embraced the weary sun wanders over the hushed land; their echo is drawn-out and sadly delayed; their distant vistas wane in silent melancholy. To the eye everything around is still brisk and full of life and activity, but the rhythm of an elegy already holds sway over a saddened heart. Whom do you pity? Yourself? Do you hear a previously inaudible moaning from the earth? Are the dead clustering around us at that perspicacious hour? Are memories subconsciously straining in some lonely soul and seeking an expressive song?

…But you are overwhelmed by pity, as for someone who is lost in the wilderness… And many moments of decision fall in the untranquil circle of these evenings.

“Look, a cormorant’s flying,” said Bitt-Boy, “soon it will land on the water. Let’s see which ship it lands closest to. Is that all right, captains? Now,” he continued after receiving the approval of all, “that’s how we’ll decide. This very night I’ll pilot whichever one it lands closest to, if… as I’ve said. Well, well, my thick-winged one!”

At this our four captains exchanged glances, and not even the devil himself, the father of fire and torment, could have sat at the intersection of those glances without being burned through. One has to know how superstitious sailors are in order to understand them at that moment.

Meanwhile the cormorant, ignorant of this, described several ponderous figure-eights among the ships and landed right between the President and the Marianne, so close to the middle of the distance that Bitt-Boy and everyone else grinned.

“The bird is taking us both in tow,” said Duke. “So well? We’ll weave floormats together, Renior my friend, eh?”

“Wait!” Chinchar shouted. “The cormorant can swim, can’t it? Where will he swim now? An excellent question!”

“All right, the one to which it swims,” agreed Estamp.

Duke covered his face with his hand, as though he were dozing; however, secretly he watched the cormorant malevolently. The Aramea was lying ahead of the others, closer to the Felicity. The cormorant headed that way, diving now and then and staying somewhat closer to the brigantine. Estamp straightened up and his eyes glittered defiantly.

“There!” was his concise judgment. “Did everyone see?”

“Yes, yes, Estamp, everyone!”

“I’m going,” said Bitt-Boy, “goodbye for now; I’m expected. My dear captains! The cormorant is a stupid bird, but I swear to you that if I could have torn myself into four I would have done so. And so, farewell! Well then, Estamp, you’ll hear from me. We’ll sail together or… we’ll part ‘once and for all’, lads.”

He uttered the last words under his breath – and was not clearly heard or understood. Three of the captains were sunk morosely into their chagrin.

Estamp had bent over to pick up his pipe, and thus no one caught the moment of parting. Bitt-Boy stood up, waved his cap, and walked quickly to the exit.

“Bitt-Boy!” they began to shout after him.

The pilot did not turn around and hurriedly ran down the steps.

Now it is time to explain why this person served as a living talisman for people whose profession was, so to speak, “organised risk”.

Contrary to minds that are logical and miserly in their attitude towards life, to minds that have displayed their tiny, grey flag over the majestic mass of the world, full of unresolved mysteries – in the faint – hearted and absurd hope that everyone who came, astounded, would direct his steps towards this flag-contrary to that, we say, there are lives that seem to have assumed the task of making others notice the stirrings and mysterious whispers of the unexplored. There are people who move in a black ring of pernicious coincidences. Their presence is depressing; their speech is filled with foreboding; their proximity brings on misfortune. On the other hand, there are certain expressions that are in everyday use among us to indicate a different, bright type of soul. We hear “a sunny person”, or “he brings luck”. However, let us not draw hasty conclusions or discuss the trustworthiness of our own conjectures. The fact is that in the company of lucky people the mood is lighter and brighter; they alter the course of our personal events through the slightest remark, a gesture, or a hint; their initiative in our affair indeed insures success. Sometimes these people are absentminded and carefree, but more often they are lively and serious. They bear one sure mark: simple laughter – laughter because something is funny and for no other reason; laughter that is not directed at those present.

The pilot Bitt-Boy, with his inexplicable and unerring power, was such a person. Everything that he undertook for others invariably came out well, no matter how difficult the circumstances, and sometimes even with an unexpected bonus. No vessel was wrecked on a voyage when he piloted it out of the harbour. The incident that Duke related about Beppo was no invention.

A ship given his personal counsel at parting was never subjected to epidemics, attacks, or other dangers; nobody on it fell overboard or committed any crimes. Bitt-Boy had a wonderful knowledge of Zurbagan, Liss, and Kasset, and of the peninsula’s entire coastline, but he did not get lost even in little-known channels. He had occasion to pilot ships through dangerous places in far-off countries where he had found himself only by chance and under his hand the rudder always turned in the right direction, as if Bitt-Boy could see the entire bottom with his own eyes. People trusted him blindly, and he blindly trusted himself. Let us call it keen instinct-what’s the difference? “Bitt-Boy, bearer of good fortune” – he was known by this name everywhere that he had been and worked.

Bitt-Boy walked across several ravines, skirted the Prickly ‘Pillow Hotel and set out along a path that wound among mighty gardens to a short, stony street. All the while he walked with his head lowered in deep reverie and at times would suddenly grow pale under the impact of his thoughts. He stopped beneath the shade of trees, near a small house with windows looking out into the yard, he sighed, straightened up, and walked through a gate in the low stone fence.

Apparently he was expected. No sooner had he, rustling through the grass, crossed the garden and begun to approach the windows, peering at the light glowing in their shadowy depths, than a young girl appeared at one of the windows brushing the opened curtain with her shoulder. The sight of the familiar figure did not deceive her expectations. She was about to run off to the doorway, but after impatiently measuring the two distances, she returned to the window, jumped through it, and ran to meet Bitt-Boy. She was about eighteen; two dark braids under a yellow and violet scarf fell along her graceful neck and almost her entire body, which was so lithe that in moving and turning it looked like a restless ray of light. Her irregular, childlike face with shyly proud eyes held the fascinating charm of budding feminine life.

“Regie, the Queen of Eyelashes,” said Bitt-Boy between kisses. “If you don’t smother me, I’ll have something to remember our evening by.”

“Ours, ours, my dear, my own dear!” said the girl. “Tonight I didn’t go to bed; after your letter I thought you’d come rushing yourself a minute later.”

“A girl should eat and sleep a lot,” Bitt-Boy absentmindedly objected.

But he shook off his depression at once. “Did I kiss both eyes?”

“You didn’t kiss either of them, you miser!”

“No, I think I kissed the left one… So the right eye must be offended. Let me have that little eye…” And he was given it along with its radiance.

But the essence of such conversations is not in our poor words, and we well know that. Try to listen in on such a conversation – you will feel sorry, envious, and sad: you will see two souls struggling, trying to transmit their aroma to each other through sounds. Regie and Bitt-Boy, however, continued this conversation to their heart’s content. Now they were sitting on a small garden settee. It grew dark.

As often happens, silence fell: hearts are full and it is a signal for decisions, should they be urgent. Bitt-Boy felt it was convenient to begin speaking about the most important thing, without delay.

The girl unconsciously helped him.

“Arrange our wedding, Bitt-Boy. I’m going to have a baby.”

Bitt-Boy roared with laughter. His awareness of the situation poisoned it, and he shut it off with a short sigh.

“Now then,” he said in a different tone, “don’t interrupt me, Regie.”

He sensed her growing alarm and began to hurry. “I asked and went everywhere… there is no doubt… – I can’t be your husband, dear. Oh, don’t start crying right away! Wait, hear me out! Can’t we be friends? Regie… silly, you’re the very best! How could I make you unhappy? I’ll tell you more: I only came to say good-bye! I love you so much that even a giant’s heart would burst! My heart’s been killed, it’s already been killed, Regie! And besides, am I the only man on earth? There are lots of good and honest men! No, no, Regie; listen to me, try to understand everything, agree… how could it be otherwise?”

He continued to speak for a long time in the same vein, grinding with clenched teeth the painful tears that had been driven far away, until his agitation finally wrought complete confusion in his thoughts.

He fell silent, worn out physically and morally – he fell silent, and kissed the little hands that he forcibly pulled away from her eyes.

“Bitt-Boy…,” the sobbing girl began to speak. “Bitt-Boy, you’re a fool, a silly chatterer! Why, you don’t know me at all. I wouldn’t surrender you to either misfortune or fear. You see…” she continued, becoming more and more impassioned, “you’re upset… but I’ll calm you… now, now!” She took his head and pressed it to her breast. “Lie here calmly, my little one. Listen-if things are bad for you, I want them to be bad for me too. If things are good for you, let them be good for me. If you hang yourself, I’ll also hang myself. We’ll go halves in all that’s bitter, but give me the larger half. To me you will always be like porcelain, pure… I don’t know how to convince you: perhaps by dying?”

She straightened up and thrust her hand behind her bodice, where, according to the local custom, girls carried a stiletto or small dagger.

Bitt-Boy restrained her. He was silent, overwhelmed by his new awareness of a heart close to his own. Now his decision, which was still inexorable, took another form.

“Bitt-Boy,” continued the girl, under the spell of her own words and deceived by the unhappy man’s depression, “it’s wise of you to keep quiet and listen to me.”

She nestled against his shoulder and continued:

“Everything will be all right, believe me. Here’s what I think sometimes when I daydream or get angry at your absences. We’ll have a riding horse named Bitt-Boy; a dog, Wise; and a cat, Regie. You will have no reason to leave Liss any more. You will buy me new copper kitchenware. I’ll smile at you absolutely everywhere: in the company of enemies, friends, of all who come; let everyone see how you are loved. We’ll play at being bride and groom – how you wanted to slip away, you bad boy-but I won’t cry any more. Then, when you have your own brig we’ll sail around the world thirty-three times… ”

Her voice sounded sleepy and nervous, while her eyes kept opening and closing. For several minutes she drew a picture of the imaginary journey in confused images, then she pulled her legs underneath her to make herself comfortable and yawned gently. Now they were sailing in a starlit garden above bright underwater flowers.

“And there are many seals there, Bitt-Boy. People say that these seals are nice. They have human eyes. Don’t move, please, it’s more peaceful that way. You wouldn’t drown me, would you, Bitt-Boy, because of some… I don’t know… Turkish girl perhaps? You said that I’m the Queen of Eyelashes… Take them for yourself, dear, take them all, all… ”

The even breathing of sleep reached Bitt-Boy’s ear. The moon was shining. Bitt-Boy took a sidelong glance; the eyelashes were resting softly on her pale cheeks. Bitt-Boy smiled awkwardly, and then, concentrating all his movements in an effort at imperceptible smoothness, he freed himself, stood up, and lowered the girl’s head onto the settee’s oilcloth cushion. He felt neither dead nor alive. However, time was slipping by; the moon had risen higher… Bitt-Boy silently kissed Regie’s feet and went out into the street; in his heart was a stifled scream.

On his way to the harbour he dropped in at the Prickly Pillow for several minutes.

It was about 10:00 p. m. when a boat approached the Felicity and gently bumped against its side. A lone person was rowing it.

“Hey, on the brigantine!” rang out the restrained hallo.

The sailor on watch came to the side. “Whom do you want?” he asked sleepily, peering into the darkness.

“Judging by the voice I’d say it’s you, Reksen. Here’s Bitt-Boy.”

“Bitt-Boy! Is it really… ” The sailor raised his lantern to see into the boat. “What an undreamed of surprise! Have you been in Liss long?”

“We’ll talk later, Reksen. Who’s the captain?”

“You would hardly know him, Bitt-Boy. It’s Exquiros, from Columbia.”

“No, I don’t know him.” While the sailor hastily unwound a ladder, Bitt-Boy stood in the middle of the boat deep in reverie. “So, you’re gadding about with gold?”

The sailor laughed.

“Oh, no – we’re loaded with edibles, our own provisions, and a little incidental freight for the island of Sandy.”

He lowered the ladder.

“But as I understand it… you must have some gold,” muttered Bitt-Boy as he came up onto the deck.

“We decided on something else, pilot.”

“And you’re agreeable?”

“Yes, things will probably be good this way, I think.”

“Excellent. Is the captain sleeping?”

“No.”

“Well, take me to him.”

A light was shining through a chink in the captain’s cabin. Bitt-Boy knocked, opened the door, and strode in rapidly and purposefully.

He was dead drunk and as pale as though he were facing a firing squad, but he had complete control of himself and held himself amazingly steadily.

Esquiros left his chart, walked up to him, and squinted at the stranger. The captain was a middle-aged, tired-looking person, with a slight stoop and a sickly yet open and pleasant face.

“Who are you? What brought you here?” he asked without raising his voice.

“I’m Bitt-Boy, Captain,” began the pilot. “Perhaps you’ve heard of me, I’m here…”

Esquiros interrupted him:

“You? Bitt-Boy, ‘bearer of good fortune’? People turn around at these words. I know all about you. Sit down, my friend, here’s a cigar and a glass of wine; and here’s’ my hand and my gratitude.”

Bitt-Boy sat down, having forgotten for a moment what he wanted to say.

He gradually returned to his senses. He took a swallow, lit up, and gave a forced laugh.

“Where will the Felicity be touching shore?” he asked. “What is its goal in life? Tell me that, Captain.”

Esquiros was not particularly surprised by the direct question. Goals – or more precisely, intentions-like those set by him sometimes induce frankness. However, before beginning to speak the captain walked back and forth in order to concentrate.

“Well, all right… let’s talk,” he began. “The sea sometimes nourishes strange dispositions, my dear pilot. My disposition will, I think, seem strange to you. In the past I experienced misfortunes. They couldn’t break me, but thanks to them new and unfamiliar desires were revealed to me, my outlook was broadened, and the world became nearer and more accessible. It lures me to go visiting. I’m a loner. I’ve done all kinds of maritime work, my dear pilot, and was an honest labourer. The past is well known. Moreover I have, and always had, a great need for movement. Thus I have now conceived my own journey. We will deliver thirty barrels of someone else’s corned beef to Rock Sandy; after that we’ll lovingly and attentively sail around land and sea without any specific plan. To look in on others’ lives, seek important and significant meetings, never hurry, sometimes save a fugitive or take on board those who’ve been shipwrecked; to stop in the flowering gardens of huge rivers, perhaps to put down roots temporarily in a foreign land, letting the anchor become encrusted with salt, and then, getting bored, to tear away once again and set your sails to the wind – that’s quite nice, isn’t it, Bitt-Boy?”

“I’m listening,” said the pilot.

“My crew is completely new. I did not rush in assembling it. After I paid off the old one, I sought out congenial meetings, talked with people, and one by one I collected the men who suited me. A crew of thoughtful people! The privateer is keeping us in Liss. I eluded him the other day, but only because of the port’s proximity. Stay with us, Bitt-Boy, and I’ll give the order to raise anchor at once! You said that you knew Reksen…”

“I know him through the Radius,” Bitt-Boy said with surprise, “but I haven’t yet said so. I… was thinking about it.”

Esquiros did not insist and explained the little disagreement to himself as resulting from his interlocutor’s absentmindedness.

“So you have confidence in Bitt-Boy?”

“Perhaps I was unconsciously expecting you, my friend.”

Silence fell.

“On the way then, Captain!” Bitt-Boy said suddenly in a clear and hearty voice. “Send a boy over to the Arameawith a note for Estamp.”

He got the note ready and gave it to Esquiros.

It said:

“I’m as stupid as the cormorant, my dear Estamp. The ‘circumstance’ has occurred. Farewell to everyone: you, Duke, Renior, and Chinchar. From now on this coast will not see me.”

When he had sent the note, Esquiros shook hands with Bitt-Boy.

“Let’s get under way!” he shouted in a ringing voice, and his presence had already become businesslike and commanding. They went out onto the deck.

In each of their hearts a different wind was blowing and singing: the wind of the grave in Bitt-Boy’s, the wind of movement in Esquiros! The captain whistled to the boatswain. Before ten minutes had passed, the deck was covered with trampling and the silhouettes of shadows cast by the lanterns on the stays. The vessel awoke in the dark and the sails flapped; fewer and fewer stars glittered among the yards; the windlass creaked as it turned in circles, and the anchor hawser, slowly hauling the ship to, freed the anchor from the silt.

Bitt-Boy took the helm and for the last time turned towards where the Queen of Eyelashes had fallen asleep.

The Felicity departed with its lights out. Silence and quiet reigned on the ship. When he had left the port’s rocky entrance, Bitt-Boy turned the helm sharply to the left and steered the vessel that way for about a mile, then he set course directly for the east by making virtually a right-angle turn; next he turned to the right, obeying his instincts. At that point, not seeing the unfriendly vessel nearby, he again headed east.

Then something strange happened: there seemed to be a soundless cry over his shoulder. He glanced back, as did the captain, who was standing near the compass. Behind them a huge blue beam from the coal-black towers of the cruiser fell on the cliffs of Liss.

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” said Bitt-Boy. “Better add some sails, though, Esquiros.”

That and an increase in the wind quickly took the brigantine, which was sailing at a speed of twenty knots, about five miles off. Soon they rounded the cape.

Bitt-Boy handed the helm over to the sailor on watch and went below to the captain. They uncorked a bottle. On deck the sailors, who had also had a drink to their “safe dash”, were now singing unrestrainedly, and the sound carried into the cabin. They were singing the song of “John Dickey”.

When the cabin boy, who had gone to Estamp with the note, came in for some reason, Bitt-Boy asked him:

“Did he badger you for a long time, lad?”

“I didn’t say where you were. He stamped his feet and shouted that he’d hang me from the yardarm, and I ran away.”

Esquiros was lively and cheerful.

“Bitt-Boy!” he said. “I thought of how happy you must be if someone else’s luck means nothing at all to you.”

Sometimes a word has a deadly effect. Bitt-Boy slowly turned pale; his face became pathetically distorted. The shadow of an inner convulsion passed over it. He put his glass on the table, rolled his jersey up to his chin, and unbuttoned his shirt.

Esquiros shuddered. An ugly, ulcerous tumour protruded against the white skin.

“Cancer…” he said, sobering.

Bitt-Boy nodded and, turning away, began to put his bandage and clothing in order. His hands shook.

Above they were still singing the same song, but already for the last time. A gust of wind dispersed the words of the last part; all that they could catch below was:

“Far off glitters the Southern Cross…” and, after a vague echo, there came through the door that had been slammed shut from the rolling:

“…have mercy on us all!”

The pilot Bitt-Boy, “bearer of good fortune”, made out these five words better and more clearly than anyone else.