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

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