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

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
cosy 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 indefinable 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