"Alexander Green - Crimson Sails" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Alexander)

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: