Alexander Grin - CRIMSON SAILS

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.