Asole

ASOLE

I. THE PROPHECY

Longren had been sailing as a seaman on the tight three-hundred-ton brig, „The Orion“, for ten years. He’d become more attached to her than many a son to his mother. Then he had been forced to give up the sea.

Here is how it happened. He had returned from a cruise-such visits home were infrequent. When he had walked to within sight of his small house in the fishing village of Caperna, he expected as always, when still a good distance away, to see his wife Mary on the threshold, waving to him, and as he came closer, running breathlessly to meet him. But this time she wasn’t there. Instead, when he reached his cottage, he found an excited woman, their neighbor, standing beside a child’s crib which had not been there before.

„Look at your daughter, my friend!“ said the woman. „I’ve been taking care of her the past three months.“

Longren grew pale. He bent down to look at the tiny creature not yet eight months old, who was staring fixedly at his long beard. Then he sat down, cast his eyes to the floor, and began fingering his mustache, still wet from the rain. „When did Mary die?“ he asked.

The woman told her story, interrupting herself to murmur tenderly to the baby and to assert again and again that Mary was in paradise. Longren, once he had learned the details, could only feel that such a paradise was as dank and dark as the inside of a woodshed, that for the woman who had departed into that unknown country, true paradise would have been merely to sit beneath the light of a lamp with her baby daughter and her husband, returned from the sea.

Three months before Longren came home, the young mother had run out of money. She had been forced to spend more than half the amount he had left her on doctor’s bills for herself and for the newborn baby after her difficult delivery. Unfortunately she had also lost the remainder, which, though not a large sum, was all she had to live on. She had tried to borrow money from the local innkeeper and shopkeeper, Manners, who was known to be well-to-do.

Mary had been to see him at six in the evening. The neighbor had met her at seven on the road to the nearby town of Lisse. Tearful and desperate, Mary had told her that she was going to town to pawn her wedding ring. Manners had agreed to a loan, but only in return for her love.

„We’ve not a crumb to eat in the house. I must pawn my ring so that the baby and I can somehow get along till my husband comes home.“

It was cold and windy out. The neighbor had tried in vain to persuade the young woman not to walk to Lisse after dark.

„You’ll be soaked through to the skin, Mary! It’s drizzling already, and with this wind, there’s bound to be a downpour soon.“

From the seaside village to the town and back was a good three hours walk, but Mary refused to listen to the woman’s advice.

„I’ve been enough trouble as it is,“ she said. „There is hardly a family to which I don’t owe bread or tea or flour. I must go. That’s all there is to it. She walked to town, returned, and the next day came down with a fever. Exposure to the bad weather and the night rain had resulted in pneumonia in both lungs, according to the doctor called to her bedside by their good neighbor. A week later Mary’s bed was empty, and the woman had moved in to take care of the baby girl. She was a widow and alone, and it had posed no great problem for her. „Anyway,“ she added, „I’d be bored stiff with-out the little one.“

Longer went off to town, collected his pay, said farewell to his comrades, and returned home to bring up his little Asole, as he had named her. As long as the baby could not walk by herself, the widow continued to live at the sailor’s home acting as foster mother. But as soon as Asole learned not to fall when she stepped across the threshold, Longren announced that he himself would look after her. He thanked the woman for her help and sympathy and took up the lonely life of a widower, centering all his plans, hopes, love, and memories on his child.

Ten years of wanderings hadn’t left him any the richer. He set to work. Soon his little toys began to appear in the stores in town. They were beautifully made models of rowboats and sail-boats, speedboats, one-masted and two-masted schooners, cruisers, and steamers. In short, he made what he knew about at first hand. And what he made replaced for him, at least in part, the bustle of seaports and the picturesque life of the sea, and he earned enough to live a modest, frugal life. He had always been taciturn. After his wife’s death he became even more unsocial and reserved. True, on holidays he sometimes could be seen at the local tavern. But he never sat down. Standing at the bar, he quickly gulped down his drink and took his departure, muttering brusquely to the right and left, „Yes,“ „No,“ „Hello,“ „Good-bye,“ or „Just a little,“ in reply to the greetings and queries of his neighbors. He couldn’t stand entertaining guests. When people came to see him, he cut their visits short with such broad hints that they themselves soon thought up some excuse to leave. He never called on anyone. It was not surprising that an air of estrangement soon separated him from his fellow-villagers. If in his work Longren had been more dependent on local people, he would quickly have been made to feel the consequences of such bad relations. But he had almost nothing to do with the village. He bought all his food and goods in town. Manners had never sold him so much as a box of matches. Longren even did his own housework and patiently taught himself the complexities of the unmasculine art of raising a daughter.

Asole was five. Her father had begun to smile ever more softly when he looked at her nervous, yet gentle, little face as she sat on his knees and worked at unbuttoning his vest, or sang wild and rollicking sailors‘ chanties. The songs, delivered in her childish voice which sometimes missed the letter „R,“ had about the same effect as a dancing bear wearing a light-blue ribbon.

It was at this time that an incident took place, the shadow of which fell on Longren and also darkened the childhood of Asole.

It was early spring and just as cruel and severe as winter though in a different way. For three weeks a sharp offshore north wind had been pressing against the cold earth.

The long row of keels of the fishing boats, which were pulled, bottoms up, onto the beach, looked, silhouetted against the sand, like the fins of an enormous fish. No one was foolhardy enough to go out fishing in such weather. One hardly saw a single person on the one and only street of the hamlet. The icy blast driving out from the hillocks of the shore to the empty horizon made the open air a torture. All the chimneys of Caperna worked from morning to evening, tumbling their smoke down the steep rooftops.

But these days of the north wind drew Longren from his warm cottage more often than did the sun and the sheets of airy gold it cast over the sea and Caperna whenever it came out in clear weather. Longren would go out on a wharf built along rows of pilings. He would stand for hours at the end of the plank pier, smoking his pipe, fanned by the wind, watching the sea floor, laid bare at the shoreline, grow smoky with gray foam on the heels of the waves. The water’s thundering course to the black and stormy horizon filled the whole expanse with herds of fantastic, maned creatures driving in wild, uncontrolled despair to some distant consolation. The groans and moans, the roaring cannonades of enormous torrents, and the almost visible rush of wind which bathed the entire scene in its current had a deadening, deafening effect which helped dull Longren’s grief. His tortured face relaxed as if in the troubled sadness of a deep sleep.

On one such day, twelve-year-old Hin, Manners‘ son, discovered his father’s boat being beaten against the pilings beneath the pier and ran to tell him. The storm had only just begun. Manners had forgotten to pull the boat up on the beach. He went down to the water. Longren was standing at the end of the pier smoking, his back to him. No one else was out. Manners hurried to the middle of the pier, let himself down toward the churning water, got into the boat, and untied the moorings. He remained standing, and since he had no oars, began to pull the boat to shore by grasping one piling after the other. He stumbled momentarily and missed a pile. At that instant a strong gust of wind caught the prow of the boat, tearing it away from the pier toward the open sea. Stretching out as far as he could. Manners now could no longer reach the nearest piling. The wind and the waves rocked and drove the boat out into the water’s fatal expanse. Realizing the danger, Manners was about to jump into the water to swim to shore, but he was too late. The boat was already turning and twisting beyond the end of the pier where the might and fury of the waves promised certain death. The distance between Longren and Manners, who was being carried out into the stormy deep, was no more than seventy feet. Not an impossible distance, since right under Longren’s hand on the pier hung a coil of rope with a weight at its end—rope usually thrown from the pier to help boats dock in stormy weather.

„Longren!“ screamed the terrified Manners. „Why are you standing there like a lump? I’m being carried away! Throw me the rope!“

Longren was silent. He watched Manners in the boat bobbing up and down. His pipe burned brightly, and taking his time, he removed it from his mouth to get a better view of what was happening.
„Longren!“ Manners cried. „You hear me! I’m perishing! Save me!“

Longren said nothing. It was as if he had not heard the desperate call at all. He did not even shift from one foot to another until the boat had been carried out so far that Manners could hardly be heard. Manners screamed in terror. He begged the sailor to run for help. He promised him money. He threatened and cursed, but Longren only edged a bit closer to the tip of the pier to keep the struggling boat in sight as long as possible.

„Longren!“ he heard dimly, as if listening indoors to the muffled shouting of someone on the roof. „Save me!“ At that moment, drawing in his breath deeply so that not a word would be lost in the wind, Longren shouted: „That’s what she asked you to do! Think about that while you’re still alive, Manners, and don’t forget it.“

The cries faded away and Longren went home. Asole, when she awoke, saw her father in deep thought, sitting before the guttering lamp. At the sound of his daughter’s voice he went over to her, kissed her fervently, and pulled her blanket up over her shoulders.

„Sleep, darling,“ he said. „The morning’s still far away.“
„What are you doing?“

„I’ve spoiled a toy. Asole. Go back to sleep.“

The next day the missing Manners was the only topic of conversation in Caperna. After five days he was brought home, dying and furious. The story he told quickly flew through Caperna and the surrounding villages. Manners had been carried out to sea till nightfall. He was beaten against the side and bottom of the boat as it struggled through the wild waves which ceaselessly threatened to toss the crazed shopkeeper into the sea. He was that same night picked up by the steamer Lucretia on its way to Cassette. Influenza and shock killed Manners. He lived only forty-eight hours after his return, during which time he called down on Longren all the misfortunes and catastrophes that he could think of. Moaning and breathing with difficulty, the dying man told how Longren had watched him being carried out to sea and had not lifted a finger. Longren’s deed naturally astounded the people of Caperna. For one thing, few among them had ever experienced so terrible a hurt as Longren had suffered or could grieve so intensely as he grieved for Mary to the very last day of his life. But what was most repulsive, incomprehensible, and utterly astonishing to them was that Longren had kept his silence. He had not uttered a sound until those last shouted words. He had stood there watching, unmoving, severe and calm, like a judge. He had shown his profound contempt for Manners. In his silence there had been so much more than mere hate. And not a person failed to sense this. If he had only screamed, expressed his joy at Manners‘ plight in gestures, or shown pride in his own maliciousness, the fishermen might have understood. But he had acted differently from the way any of them would have acted. His conduct was utterly incomprehensible. He had set himself above everyone else, and by so doing had committed the unforgivable.

From then on no one nodded to him, reached out to shake his hand, or even cast a glance of recognition or greeting in his direction. Once and for all he was excluded from the affairs of the village. Little boys when they saw him would cry. „Longren drowned Manners!“ He paid no attention. It was as if he didn’t even notice that in the tavern or on shore, among their boats, the fishermen kept silence in his presence, avoiding him as if he had the plague. The Manners affair completed his estrangement from the village. Once total, it created a mutual hatred whose shadow fell on little Asole.

The small girl grew up without friends among the village children. There were only two or three dozen children near her age in Caperna. Like sponges, they soaked up the prejudices of their parents. Little Asole was soon placed beyond the pale of their interest. It did not happen all at once, but came about gradually, as a result of repeated scoldings and prohibitions. Finally there developed an awesome taboo, which gossip and malice magnified in the minds of the children into a dreadful fear of the sailor’s cottage.

Longren’s now totally secluded way of life helped to feed the tongues of gossip. It was rumored that the sailor had murdered someone somewhere, and that was why he no longer went to sea. Longren, they said, was gloomy and antisocial because he was „torn by the pangs of a guilty conscience.“ When Asole came near the village children at play, they chased her away, or threw mud at her, and taunted her by calling her father a „cannibal“ and a „counterfeiter.“ Her efforts to make friends with the other children all ended in bitter tears, in black and blue marks, scratches, and other manifestations of „public opinion.“ In the end she ceased to take offense, but now and then she would ask her father: „Why don’t they love us?“

„Oh, Asole,“ her father would say, „do you think that people like that can really love? One has to be able to love, and that’s beyond them.“ „What do you mean—be able to love?“ „Like this!“ And he would take the little girl into his arms and tenderly kiss her sad eyes, which squinted in satisfaction.

Asole’s favorite amusement were the stories her father told her. Evenings or on holidays when her father had put away his glue cans, his tools, and his incompleted toys, had taken off his apron and seated himself, relaxing with pipe in mouth, she would climb up on his lap. And there, encircled by his arms, she would point to the different parts of the toys he was making and ask what they were for. In this way there began Longren’s fantastic talks to his daughter on life and people—talks in which Longren’s former way of life, accident, luck, and fortune, surprising and unusual events, played a principal role. Longren, as he taught Asole the names of ropes and rigging, of sails and ship’s tackle, would become inspired by his subject. The uses of windlass, wheel, or mast, the type of ship they were discussing, would remind him of some incident or anecdote. From them he would branch out into seafaring adventures in which superstition was interwoven with reality and reality with his own fantasy. In these stories he told her of the „tiger cat“ who was the herald of a shipwreck; the flying fish who talked and whom one heeded or else went off course; of the Flying Dutchman and his violent crew; and of omens and ghosts, mermaids and pirates; all the fables and fairy stories with which sailors whiled away the time when their ships were becalmed or as they sat in their favorite taverns. Longren told also of shipwrecks and their victims, of people who had grown wild and forgotten how to speak, of hidden treasures, of the mutinies of galley slaves, and much more. The little girl listened to all of this perhaps even more attentively than those people who first heard about Christopher Columbus‘ discovery of a new continent. „Tell me more, please,“ Asole would beg when Longren fell silent. She would fall asleep right there on his breast, full of wonderful dreams.

For a more practical reason, it also made her very happy when the storekeeper came from town, eager for Longren’s toys. So as to flatter her father and get his price down, he always brought some apples, a bit of pastry, and a fistful of walnuts for the little girl. Longren hated to bargain and usually asked only the going price for his work, but the buyer tried to get the toys even cheaper.

„Look here,“ Longren would say, „I’ve worked a whole week over this ship’s launch. „The model was nearly ten inches long. „Just look at its strength, its draft, its quality. It’s a boat that will carry fifteen men in any kind of weather.“ And then it all ended with the quiet humming of the little girl over her apple. The sound undermined Longren’s determination, and he accepted the buyer’s price. The shopkeeper, after filling his basket with beautiful, high-quality toys which he had bought at a bargain price, departed, laughing up his sleeve.

Longren did all his own housework. He split the wood, carried the water, fired the stove. He did the cooking and the laundry and the ironing. Besides all this he managed to earn money. When Asole was eight years old, her father taught her to read and write and now and then began to take her to town. Finally he sent her by herself, when there was need to collect money for toys that had been sold or to deliver new ones. This did not happen often, though Lisse was only a few miles from Capema. The road led through the woods and there was much there that could frighten a child. True, it was not so much physical danger that was to be feared so close to a town, but even that was possible. Therefore it was only on lovely mornings when the roadside was bathed in a sea of sunlight, calm, and flowers, at a time when Asole was least likely to be threatened by the phantoms of her lively imagination, that Longren let her make the trip alone.

Once, about halfway to town, the little girl sat down beside the roadway to eat a piece of meat pie placed in her basket for lunch. While she ate, she examined the toys. Two or three were new to her. Longren had made them at night while she was asleep. One of the new pieces was a miniature racing sloop. The white craft bore scarlet sails made from pieces of silk which Longren ordinarily used only for finishing the insides of cabins in steamers in the toys for rich customers. But, having made the sloop, he had found no suitable material for the sails and had simply used what he had, pieces of the scarlet silk. The sloop delighted Asole. The blazing, jolly color burned in her hands as brightly as a flame. The road at this point was intersected by a stream crossed by a narrow log bridge. „What if I put it in the water to sail a bit?“ thought Asole to herself. „After all it won’t get wet through and I can wipe it off.“

Following the woods downstream a way, beyond the bridge, the little girl placed the sloop which so enthralled her into the water. The gleaming scarlet of the sails was immediately reflected in the transparent water. The sunlight shining through the fabric cast a trembling rosy light on the white stones of the river bed.

„Where do you hail from. Captain?“ Asole asked in a commanding voice, and then replied for him:

„I’ve come . . . I’ve come from China.“
„And what have you brought?“
„That I won’t tell you.“ „So that’s the kind of captain you are! I’ll put you right back in the basket.“

The captain was about to reply submissively that he had only been joking and was prepared to speak when a light but sudden offshore breeze turned the prow of the sloop toward the center of the stream. And like a real sloop taking off from shore, it floated at full speed down the current. Suddenly the scale of everything in front of the little girl changed. The little stream now seemed like a mighty river and the model sloop a big, distant ship. And toward it, fright- ened, almost tumbling into the water, she reached out both arms and hastened along the stream. „The captain got frightened,“ she thought to herself, hurrying after the toy which was floating away, in the hope that it would come to shore somewhere. Dragging the basket, which kept getting in the way. Asole exclaimed, „Oh, my heavens, what have I done!“ And she kept trying not to lose sight of the lovely triangle of sail smoothly moving off into the distance. She stumbled, fell, got up, and ran on.

Asole had never been so deep into the forest. Absorbed in her eagerness to catch the toy, she had not looked about as she ran. There were many obstacles along the way: mossy trunks of fallen trees, holes, tall ferns, bushes such as sweetbrier and jasmine. These barred her way at every step. She gradually tired and stopped more and more often to catch her breath or to wipe sticky spider webs from her face. At times thickets of rushes and reeds completely hid the scarlet gleam of the sails, and Asole only caught sight of them again when she rounded a bend in the stream. Once she looked around and the face of the dense, many-colored forest, from the smoky pillars of light which penetrated the foliage to dark fissures of slumbering gloom, astonished the little girl. Awed for a moment, she quickly remembered the toy and ran on with all her strength.

An entire hour had passed in this seemingly futile, anxious pursuit when with surprise and relief Asole saw that the trees ahead were thinning out to reveal an expanse of the sea, white clouds, and a stretch of yellow sand onto which she ran, nearly stumbling with fatigue. Here was the mouth of the stream. Spreading out not very broadly and so shallow one could see through the streaming azure to the stones on its bed, it melted into the oncoming ocean waves. From the low bluff, pockmarked with roots. Asole saw that at the stream’s edge, on a big flat stone, with his back to her, there sat a man holding the toy sloop in his hands. He was looking it over carefully from all sides with the same curiosity that an elephant might show toward a butterfly. Partially reassured by the fact that the toy was still in one piece. Asole clambered down the bluff. Coming up close behind the stranger, she studied him carefully, waiting for him to look up. But the stranger was so absorbed in contemplation of the surprise that had come from out of nowhere that the little girl had time to inspect him carefully and to decide that he was unlike anyone she had ever seen.

Before her was none other than Egl, the famous wandering collector of songs, legends, traditions, and folk stories. Gray curls dangled from under his straw hat. A gray blouse, tucked into dark blue trousers, and high boots gave him the look of a hunter. A white collar, a necktie, a buckle studded with silver, a cane, and a pouch with a new nickel lock, all these indicated a city dweller. A nose, lips, and eyes peered from a luxuriant growth of beard and a handlebar mustache. A kind of faded pallor would have dominated his features had it not been for eyes as gray as sand and as bright as shining steel which looked out at one with a bold, firm gaze.

„All right, now you can give it back to me,“ exclaimed the little girl bravely. „You’ve played with it enough. How did you manage to catch it?“

Egl raised his head and at once dropped the litde boat, so surprised was he by the unexpected voice. The old chap studied her for a minute, smiled, and slowly ran his large hand, marked by heavy veins, through his beard. The calico dress she wore was faded from many washings, and it didn’t even reach the lmees of her thin, sunbumed legs.

Her thick dark locks, which had been tied up in a lace kerchief, had tumbled down over her shoulders. The expression of her face was as airy and clean-cut as the flight of a swallow. The touch of sad questioning in her dark eyes made them somewhat older than the rest of her face. Its slightly asymmetrical oval had the kind of lovely sun-flush that comes only to a healthy, fair skin. Her tiny, half-open mouth shone with a gentle smile.

„I swear by the Brothers Grimm, Aesop, and Hans Christian Andersen,“ proclaimed Egl, with his eyes darting back and forth from the little girl to the toy sloop, „this is something special! Listen here, you little weed! Is this yours?“

„I ran after it all the way down the stream, till I thought I would die. It was right here?“ „At my very feet. A shipwreck which gives me, as beach pirate, the chance to offer you my booty. This sloop, abandoned by its crew, was cast up on the sand by a five-inch wave between my left heel and the tip of my walking stick.“ He thumped the ground with his cane. „And what’s your name, little one?“ „Asole,“ she said, placing the toy Egl handed her back into her basket.

„Very good,“ continued the old man in his strange manner, without taking his eyes from her. In their depths gleamed a smile of friendliness. „There was no real reason to ask your name. I like it because it is so unusual, so musical, and also all in one tone like the whistle of an arrow, or the roar of a sea shell. Wouldn’t it have been awful if you had told me you had one of those fine-sounding but intolerably ordinary names so out-of-tune with the Beautiful Unknown? I have no wish to know who you are, who your parents are, or where you live. Why disturb enchantment? Here I was sitting on this rock comparing Finnish and Japanese folk themes. And out of nowhere the stream cast up this toy sloop, and right after it you appeared. Just as you are. And I, my dear,am a poet at heart, even if I have never written any poetry of my own. What do you have there in your basket?“

„Toy boats,“ said Asole, shaking her basket. „There is also a steamer and three little houses with flags, where soldiers live.“ „Very good. You were sent to sell them. On the way you began to play. You put the sloop into the water to sail a bit and it sailed away. Is that right?“ „How could you have seen?“ Asole asked doubtingly, trying to remember whether she hadn’t told him herself, „Did someone tell you? Or did you guess?“ „I knew.“ „How?“ „Because I am-the chief of all the sorcerers.“

Asole started. Her uneasiness, when she heard Egl’s words, bordered on fright. The deserted seashore, the absolute quiet, the exhausting chase for the sailboat, the strange words of the old man with sparlding eyes, his majestic beard and hair were beginning to create a confusion between reality and the supernatural in the mind of the small girl. If even for one second Egl had made a face or raised his voice, she would have fled in tears and panic. But Egl had already noticed how wide her eyes were. „Don’t be afraid of me,“ he said seriously. „In fact I want to speak to you frankly.“

He had just defined to his own satisfaction exactly what there was in the girl’s face that had so insistently etched itself on his mind. It was the unconscious expectation of a beautiful, a blessed destiny, he had decided. Oh why had he not been born a writer? What a glorious theme!

In Egl the instinct for the creation of legends, a result of his profession, was stronger than the need for caution in casting onto unknown soil the seeds of a great day-dream. Having begun, he had to continue:

„Come here. Asole, and listen to me with care. I have just come from that village in which you no doubt live, Caperna. I love folk tales and songs and I sat there a whole day in that village waiting to hear something new, a story I had not heard before. But there in your village they tell no legends, and they sing no songs. And if they do relate anything at all, it’s, as one might ex- pect, one of those familiar anecdotes about shrewd peasants and soldiers, glorifying cheating and thievery. If they sing anything at all, they chant silly ditties as dirty as unwashed feet and as crude as stomach rumblings, with awful tunes. But I’ve gone off the track. I’ll have to begin again.“

Pausing a moment, he continued: „I really don’t know how many years will go by, but in Capema a legend will come to flower that will be remembered a long time. You will be grown. Asole. And one day, far out to sea, the sun will shine upon a white ship with scarlet sails. The white ship will slice through the waves and move right toward you. The miracle ship will sail silently forward without shouts or shots. On the shore many people will be gathered, exclaiming in astonishment. You will be there too. The ship will approach majestically amidst the sounds of beautiful music. A fast sldff, gilded and decorated as for a holiday, with oriental rugs and flowers will be lowered from it. ‚Why have you come? Whom do you want?‘ the people on the shore will ask. Just then you will see a bold and handsome prince. He will reach out his arms to you. ‚Hello, Asole!‘ he will say. „ln a faraway land I saw you in my dreams and I have come to take you away with me forever to my kingdom. You will live there with me in a deep valley of roses. You will have everything you wish for. We will live together, you and I, in such friendship and joy that you will never know tears or sadness.‘ Then he will help you into the skiff, take you to his ship, and you will leave forever for a splendid country where the sun will rise and the stars will descend from the heavens to greet you when you come.“

„All this will happen to me?“ the little girl asked quietly.

Her serious eyes grew gay and shone with faith. If the sorcerer were dangerous he wouldn’t talk like that. This was clear. She drew closer to him.

„Perhaps it’s already here-that ship?“

„Oh no, not yet,“ Egl said. „First, as I told you, you must grow up. And only then . . . How shall I say it? It will happen. That’s all there is to it. And what will you do then?“ „I?“ and she looked down into her basket but evidently she found nothing there which she considered a good enough gift for Egl. „I would love him,“ she declared quickly and added hesitating slightly, „that is, if he doesn’t fight.“ „No, he won’t fight,“ declared the sorcerer, winking in a knowing way. „That he won’t do that I’ll guarantee. Run along, little girl, and don’t you forget what I’ve told you. Run along and peace be on your tender head!“
* * * Longren was working in his vegetable patch, digging trenches for his potato plants. Lifting his head, he saw Asole running toward him with a glad and eager face. „Oh, please,“ she panted, and took hold of her father’s work apron with both hands. „Lis- ten to what happened. Over there on the seashore there’s a sorcerer.“

The rush of thoughts made it difficult for her to tell her story from the beginning. She began with the sorcerer and his wonderful prophecy. Then she described his appearance, and having reversed the whole order of things, finally got to the toy sloop which had sailed away from her.

Longren listened to the little girl without interrupting her and without smiling. By the time she had finished, his imagination had swiftly drawn for him a picture of an unknown old man with a bottle in one hand and the toy sloop in the other. He was about to turn away but remembered in time that events as important as this in the life of a child must be treated seriously. He nodded his head solemnly and declared: „Well, well! It would certainly seem that this man could only have been a sorcerer.I wish I could have had a look at him myself. But when you go to town again, don’t stray from the road. You might get lost in the forest.“

Throwing aside his spade, he seated himself on a low wooden fence and put the girl on his lap. Despite her tiredness, she tried to round out the details of her story, but the heat, excitement, and fatigue had made her sleepy. Her eyelids drooped. Her head slipped down on her father’s strong shoulder. One second more and she would have been carried off into the Land of Nod, when suddenly, alarmed by a sudden doubt. Asole sat bolt upright, eyes closed, her small hands tightly gripping Longren’s waistcoat. She exclaimed, „Will the sorcerer’s ship really come for me?“

„It will come,“ the sailor answered quietly. „Since it’s been promised you, it will come.“ „She’ll grow up and forget all about it,“ he thought to himself. „And for now she shouldn’t have such a toy tafcen away from her. After all, little girl, the future will show you many a sail, not scarlet, but dirty and evil. From a distance they’ll look grand and white but close by they will be torn and coarse. A passerby had his joke with my little daughter. Oh, well! A fine joke! Quite a joke! See how exhausted you are, half a day in the woods, in the heart of the forest. You’ll have your scarlet sails.“

Asole slept. Longren, pulling out his pipe with his free hand, lit up, and the breeze carried the smoke through the wattle fence at the end of the garden into a bush on the other side of it. Be- side the bush with his back to the fence sat a young beggar chewing on a roll. He was in a jolly mood, having been amused by the conversation between father and daughter, and the tobacco smell aroused his greed.

„Give a poor man something to smoke,“ he said through the fence. „My tobacco compared to yours is simply poison.“ „I’d be glad to,“ Longren answered in a halfwhisper, „but my tobacco is in my pocket and I don’t want to wake up my daughter to get it.“

„Big to-do! So she’ll wake up and go back to sleep again and a passerby will have a smoke.“ „No,“ said Longren. „It isn’t as if you have no tobacco at all. The child is tired out. Come back, if you like, later on.“

The beggar spat contemptuously. He took up his bag and hung it on his stick: „Some princess she is! You’ve sure got those foreign ships stuck in her head! Cranky crank and big boss too!“ „Listen, you!“ whispered Longren. „I will wake her up, and just in order to break your big neck. Get out!“

Half an hour later the beggar sat in the local tavern at a table with a dozen fishermen. Be- hind them, pulling at their husbands‘ drinking arms and sometimes even grabbing the mugs for a drink themselves, sat great, buxom women, as rounded as cobblestones, with bushy brows and arms thick as logs. The beggar was boiling with outrage as he spoke.

„So he refused me tobacco. ‚When you come of age,‘ he tells her, ‚then there’ll come a special red ship. For you. It’s your lot to marry a prince.So just believe in that sorcerer.‘ And I say: ‚Wake her up, wake her up, and get me some tobacco.‘ And then he chased me half the way here.““Who? What? What’s he talking about?“ questioned the curious women.

The fishermen, hardly turning their heads, gabbled, half laughing, „Longren and his daughter have really gone wild. Maybe they’re soft in the head. The man says that apparently some magician was at their place. They’re waiting-listen, you old girls, here’s one for you- for a foreign prince and a ship with red sails.“

Three days later on the way back from the shop in Lisse, Asole heard for the first time: „Hey you, you witch! Asole! Look over there! See the red sails!“ The trembling little girl involuntarily shaded her eyes with her palm and peered out at the ocean. Then she turned in the direction of the taunts. Twenty steps away from her stood a pack of urchins. They made faces and stuck out their tongues at her. Sobbing, she ran home.

2. GREY

Julius Caesar believed it was better to be first in a small Iberian village than second in Rome. And Arthur Grey took Caesar at his word. He wanted to be a sea captain, and became a sea captain.

The enormous house in which Arthur was born was gloomy indoors and majestic outside. It was surrounded by a flower garden and a private park. In whimsical strings, tulips of the rarest shades, silver blue, violet, and touched with rose, wound through the well-kept lawn. Ancient trees slumbered in diffused half-light i above the rushes of a winding stream. The castle fence—for this was a real castle—consisted of twisting cast-iron pillars joined together by iron grillwork. Each pillar was topped by a luxuriant cast-iron lily, and on holidays the lily cups were filled with oil and served as lamps which blazed out into the darkness in a long and fiery array.

Grey’s father and mother were the haughty prisoners of their position, wealth, and the laws of the society to which they belonged. One part of their beings was occupied by a gallery of ancestors, little worthy of having had their portraits painted, and the other was filled with the hoped-for continuation of the gallery beginning with little Arthur. He was thus predestined to live out his life according to a fixed plan and to die in such a way that his portrait could hang on the wall without offense to family honor. There was one small hitch to this plan. Arthur Grey was born with a lively mind of his own and was not in the least inclined to continue along the lines of family precedent.

This vitality and the contrariness of the boy began to be apparent when he was eight. The knight-errant of whimsy, the explorer and the miracle-worker, in other words that person who chooses from among the infinite variety of roles in life, the most dangerous—that of the hero— came to the fore in Grey on the day he pushed a chair up against a wall so as to be able to reach up to a painting showing the crucifixion. He removed the nails driven through Christ’s bleeding hands by covering them over with blue paint pilfered from a house painter. He found the painting more bearable in this condition. He was about to paint over the nails in the feet when his father took him by surprise. The old man helped him off the chair by the ear and asked, „Why did you spoil the painting?“

„I didn’t spoil it.“
„It’s the work of a famous artist.“
„I don’t care,“ said young Grey. „I won’t have nails sticking out of hands and blood running. I don’t want it.“

In his son’s reply Lionel Grey recognized him- self. He hid his smile behind his mustache and did not punish him.

Young Grey searched the castle incessantly and made astonishing discoveries. In the garret he found discarded knights‘ armor, books bound in iron and leather, rotted clothing, and a big flock of doves. In the cellar he acquired an interesting knowledge of Madeira, sherry, and other wines. Here in the dim light of sharppointed windows, resting beneath the weight of the slanting triangles of stone archways, stood large and small barrels. The largest, with its flat end against the back of the cellar, took up the entire wall. The century-old dark oak of the barrel shone as if polished. Among the smaller casks stood fat-bellied bottles of green or dark blue glass in woven covers. On the earthen floor between the stones grew gray mushrooms on thin stalks. Everywhere there was mold, moss, dampness, and a sour, stifling odor. An enormous spider web glistened gold in the far corner when, just before twilight, the sun brightened it with a last ray. There was also the spot where two casks of the finest Alicante of the times of Cromwell were buried. The wine keeper, Poldychoke, as he pointed out the corner to Grey, took the opportunity of repeating the story of this famous wine. Before beginning his account, Poldychoke did not fail to make sure that the spigot of the big barrel was functioning properly. And, indeed, as he continued his story, he went back to check again and again. One could see when he returned, from the involuntary tears of satisfaction that moistened his merry eyes, that his heart was obviously lighter.

„Well, here’s the way it is,“ Poldychoke said to Grey, as he seated himself on an empty box and shoved snuff up his sharp nose. „Look over there. Just for one little glass of the wine buried there, many a drinker would let his tongue be cut out. Each of the barrels contains one hundred quarts of a substance that can make the soul explode and turn the body into stiff dough. Its color is darker than cherry. It is as thick as the thickest cream, so thick it will not pour from a bottle. It is encased in casks of ebony that are as strong as iron, and they are banded by double hoops of red copper. Engraved on the hoops in Latin are the words, „Grey will drink me down when he is in paradise.‘ This legend has been interpreted in many ways. Your great-grandfather, Simeon Grey, tried to trick fate by building himself a country residence and calling it Paradise. But guess what happened? The old gourmet got so excited he died of a heart attack just as they started to remove the hoops. Since then no one has touched the casks, and it is believed that to drink the precious wine will bring unhappi- ness.

„These casks were brought here by your ancestor, John Grey of Lisbon, on the good ship ‚Beagle‘ in 1793. Two thousand gold piasters were paid for them. The legend on the casks was inscribed by the master annorer, Benjamin Elyan, of Pondicherry. The casks are buried in the earth to a depth of six feet and covered over with the ashes of grape vines. This wine has never been drunk, and never will be drunk. „I will drink it,“ said Grey, stamping his foot.
„That’s a bold chap!“ exclaimed Poldychoke. „Are you going to drink it in paradise?“

„Of course. This is paradise! I have it right here, see?“ And Grey laughed quietly, opening his palm. The tender yet firm lines were lit up by the sun, and the small boy closed his fingers into a fist. „Here it is right in here! Now it’s here and now it’s gone.“

As he spoke, he opened and closed his hand, and finally, pleased with his joke, ran out ahead of Poldychoke and up the dark stairway into the corridor of the ground floor.

The kitchen was strictly forbidden territory to Grey. But once he had discovered its world of blazing hearth, fires, of steam, soot, and sizzle, of bubbling and boiling liquids, of clattering knives, of delicious smells, the boy went often to the enormous room. The cooks moved about in silence like oracles. Their white kitchen bonnets outlined against the background of blackened walls endowed their work with the solemnity of a religious service. The merry fat dishwashers at the water barrels rinsed the dishes to the ringing of china and Silver. Small boys, bending beneath their heavy iloads, carried in full baskets of fish, oysters, .crabs, and fruits. On the long table lay rainbow-colored pheasants, gray ducks, colorful chickens, and a pig’s carcass with a short little tail and eyes shut like those of an infant. There were also turnips, cabbages, walnuts, black raisins, and suntanned peaches.

In the kitchen young Grey was a bit shy. It seemed to him as if here everything were ruled by dark, powerful forces, the mamspring of the life of the castle. Shouts sounded like commands and invocations. The movements of those working, thanks to long habit, had acquired a precision that seemed inspired. Grey was not yet tall enough to peer into the biggest pot of all, which seethed like Vesuvius, but he felt a special respect for it. With trepidation he watched it being stirred by two servants. Smoky foam splashed out on the hot stove, and steam, rising from it in waves, filled the kitchen. One time so much liquid splashed out that one of the kitchen maids scalded her arm. Her skin grew bright red immediately. Even her fingernails became crimson with the accumulation of blood, and Betsy, as she was called, wept and rubbed the burn with oil at the same time. The tears poured relentlessly down her round and frightened face.

Grey froze. While the women were bustling around Betsy, he felt for her suffering and wanted to understand her pain.

„Does it hurt a lot?“ he asked.
„You just try it and you’ll see,“ Betsy had replied, covering her arm with her apron.

The boy, frowning, climbed up on a stool, reached into the pot with a long spoon for some of the hot liquid—it was mutton soup—and dripped it on his hand. The sharp pain made him reel. White as flour. Grey went up to Betsy, sticking his stinging hand into his trouser pocket. „I’m sure it hurts a lot,“ he said, saying nothing of his own experiment. „Let’s go to the doctor, Betsy. Let’s go!“

He pulled her energetically by the skirt, at the same time as the proponents of home remedies vied with each other in preparing recipes for her salvation. But the girl, in great torjment, went along with Grey. The physician iid ease the pain and dress the burn. Only after Betsy had left did Grey show his own hand.

This minor episode made twenty-year-old Betsy and ten-year-old Grey the best of friends. She kept stuffing his pockets with dumplings and apples. And he repeated to her fairy tales and other stories that he read in his books. When he discovered that Betsy could not marry the stableboy, Jim, because they had no money to set up housekeeping, Grey broke open his porcelain piggy bank with the fireplace tongs and took out his savings amounting to about one hundred pounds. Rising early and waiting till dowryless Betsy had gone to work in the kitchen, he crept into her room and hid his gift in the girl’s trunk. With it he left a note which said: „Betsy, this is for you. From the Chief of the Brigands, Robin Hood.“ There was a big fuss in the kitchen over the incident. Finally Grey had to come forward and confess. But he refused either to take the money back or to say anything more about it.

His mother was one of those persons whom life casts in a ready-made mold. She lived in a semi-slumber, lulled by a security that provided for every wish of her rather mediocre person. She had nothing to do at all, except consult her seamstress, her doctor, and her butler. But her passionate, almost religious, attachment to her strange child was, it would seem, the one outlet for good instincts otherwise so anaesthetized by her upbringing and fate that they were no longer really active, leaving her without any real will of her own. She resembled a hen who had hatched a swan’s egg. She was pained by the beautiful strangeness of her son. Sadness, love, and constraint welled up in her when she pressed the boy to her breast. Her heart did not speak the same language as her conventional tongue.

This lady of high society, who could respond ii only with icy silence to the fiery appeals of life, whose delicate beauty repelled rather than attracted because it reflected a haughty constraint which was totally laddng in femininity, when left alone with her son became an ordinary mama who spoke in loving, gentle tones those heartfelt trivialities which cannot be put down on paper. She could not say No to her son at all. She forgave him everything: his visits to the kitchen, his dislike for his lessons, his disobedience, and his innumerable whims.

If he didn’t want the trees pruned, they remained unpruned. If he asked that someone be forgiven or rewarded, it was done. He could ride any horse he wanted to, bring into the castle any stray dog, rummage about in the library, run barefoot, and eat whatever he felt like eating.

For a time his father fought against this, but in the end he gave in to his wife’s wishes. He did, however, take one precautionary measure. The servants‘ children were removed from the castle because he feared that association with them might change what were a boy’s caprices into permanent tastes that would be hard to uproot. He was, in general, occupied to the exclusion of everything else with innumerable family lawsuits whose origin dated back to the discovery of paper, and which would probably continue until the death of all pettifoggers and intriguers. In addition, affairs of state, business dealings in connection with his inheritance, the dictation of his memoirs, formal hunts, the reading of newspapers, and complex correspondence kept him away from his family. He saw his son so rarely that he sometimes forgot how old he was.

Thus young Arthur Grey lived in his own world. He played alone, usually in the rear courtyards of the castle which in olden times had been used for military purposes. These broad vacant lots, with remnants of deep moats and stone powder magazines overgrown with moss, were now fields of tall weeds, nettles, burdock, thorn bushes, and modest, varicolored flowers. Grey spent hours investigating mole holes, fighting the tall weeds, catching butterflies, and building fortresses out of broken brick, which he then bombarded with sticks and cobblestones.

He was twelve when in one supreme moment all the inner urgings of his spirit, all the undirected traits of his character, his secret aspirations, became fused into one unconquerable desire.

It hannened m the library. Its high door, the uper part of which was made of translucent glass, was usually kept locked. But the bolt was loose, and if one pressed hard enough, it would shift a bit and could, with an effort, be forced open. When the spirit of adventure pushed Arthur Grey into invading the library, he was astonished by the dusty light which reflected the glowing pattern of the stained glass that adorned the upper part of the windows. The silence of solitude lay here. Some of the dark rows of bookcases were joined onto the windows, half cutting off their light. In the aisles between the bookcases were piles of books: an open album, with loose pages scattered about; scrolls tied with gold cord; stacks of gloomylooking volumes; thick layers of manuscripts; an embankment of miniature books that crackled crisply when opened. There were drawings on tables, rows of new editions, maps; a variety of bindings, crude, soft, black, many-hued, dark blue, gray, thick, thin, rough, and smooth. The shelves were tightly packed with books. They seemed like walls enclosing life itself in their thickness. In the reflection of the glassenclosed bookcases, one saw other shelves which seemed to be splattered with colorless, shining spots. An enormous globe encircled in a spherical brass cross of the equator and meridian stood on a round table.

When he turned to leave. Grey saw hanging over the door an enormous painting whose power immediately permeated the mustiness of the library. It showed a ship, streams of foam flowing along its sides. It was at the very peak of rise on the crest of a mighty wave and seemed be coming straight at the onlooker. Its bowsprit, lifted high, hid the base of the mast. The crest of the wave, sliced by the keel, resembled the wings of a giant bird. Foam hung in the air. The sails, partly hidden behind the forecastle and bowsprit, were filled with the furious force of a storm. They lay backwards, in their full expanse, readying themselves to top the wave, straighten, and go forward, over the chasm ahead, driving the ship into new maelstroms. Tatters of clouds hovered over the ocean. The dim light of evening struggled hopelessly to stem the onrushing darkness of the night. But the most remarkable thing of all in this picture was the figure of a man standing on the forecastle, his back to the onlooker. In him was personified not only the entire situation, but the essence of that exact moment. Although in itself the man’s pose—feet astride and arms waving – did not explain what he was doing, it conveyed an intense concentration directed at something on the deck, invisible to the viewer. The turned-up flaps of his long kaftan shook in the wind. His white braid and a black sword were flung back into the air. The lavishness of his uniform indicated he was the captain, and the balancing stance of his body pointed up the force of the wave. He wore no cap, and evidently completely absorbed in the danger of the moment, he was shouting—but what? Had he seen someone go overboard and given the order to come about? Or was he calling to the boatswain and trying to outshout the wind? Not actual thoughts but echoes of thoughts invaded Grey’s mind as he looked at the painting. Suddenly he felt as if someone unknown and invisible had come up to him on his left and was standing beside him. All he had to do was to turn his head and the sensation would disappear. Grey knew this, but instead of silencing his imagination he listened to it. A soundless voice shouted some phrases, incomprehensible, as if in Malayan. He heard the rolling roar of long, drawn-out avalanches. An echo and a dark wind filled the library. All of this young Grey heard within himself. He looked around. Instantly the quiet silenced the noisy maze of fantasy. Communication with the storm was lost.

Several times Grey came back to look at the painting. It became for him the key word in the dialogue between his dreams and life and helped him to understand himself. The broad sea became a part of the small boy. He rummaged in the library, searching for and reading greedily those books behind whose golden doors there stretched the blue sheen of the ocean. In this sea, foam running astern, ships sailed. Some of them lost their sails, their masts, and devoured by the waves, descended into the darloiess of the deep amidst the twinkling phosphorescent eyes of fish. Others, in the grip of breakers, broke on reefs. The subsiding forse of the waves dangerously tossed a wrecked hull back and forth. The abandoned ship, with torn and broken rigging, lived through a long agony until a new storm broke it into bits. Others loaded successfully in one port and unloaded in another. The crew, at the tavern table, praised the life of the sea and gaily gulped down their drinks. There were pirate ships flying a Jolly Roger and with an awesome knife-bearing crew; ghost ships gleaming with deathly blue light; navy ships with soldiers, cannons, and music; ships of scientific expeditions looking for volcanoes, for marine plants and animals; ships with dark secrets and mutinies; ships of discovery and ships of adventure.

In this world of the sea, naturally the figure of the captain rose high above everyone else. He was the fate, the heart, the brain of his ship. He determined the crew’s play and work. He picked the crew himself and he answered largely for its shortcomings. He knew the habits and family affairs of the ship’s men. In the eyes of his subordinates he was the possessor of magic knowledge, thanks to which he could sail with assurance through boundless expanses from Lisbon to Shanghai. He coped with a storm by a complex system of countermeasures and quieted panic with bis curt orders. He sailed and he stopped where he wished. He directed departures and loadings, repairs and rest time. His enormous and wisely applied power, employed as it was in work full of incessant movement, was hard to imagine. Such authority, self-contained and total, was equaled only by the power of a God.

Such was the mental picture of a captain, such the image of his position that took hold of Grey’s consciousness, his spiritual life. There is no other profession that can so perfectly fuse into a whole all of the treasures of life and at the same time keep inviolate the highly delicate pattern of each separate joy. Danger, risk, the power of nature, the light of a far country, the wonderful unknown, love budding and flowering in meeting and parting, the fascination of encounters, persons, events, immeasurable variety, and rising on the horizon the Southern Cross, the Big Dipper, and all the continents – all these are within range of a captain’s sharp eyes. And yet his cabin is full of the homeland which never leaves him, with its books, pictures, letters, and dried flowers tied with a silken curl and resting in a suede pouch on a firm chest.

In the fall of his fifteenth year, young Grey ran away to sea. The schooner Anselm sailed from the port of Dubelt for Marseille, carrying on board a ship’s boy with small hands and the soft features of a girl. The ship’s boy was Grey, who had come aboard wearing patent leather boots as thin as gloves, cambric linens embroidered with the sign of a crown, and a fine traveling bag.

During a year while the ‚Anselm‘ visited France, America, and Spain, young Grey squandered part of his assets on pastry, by this token paying tribute to the past. The remainder, in the name of the present and the future, he lost at cards. He wanted to be a real devil of a seafaring man. He drank down liquor, nearly choking. When he swam, he dove, head first, into the water, with a sinking heart, from a fifteen foot height. Little by htde he lost everything he had brought with him—except his strange, soaring spirit. He lost his frailty and became broad of bone and strong of muscle. A dark tan replaced his pallor. The once refined carelessness of his movements took on the precision of the working hand. In his thoughtful eyes there appeared a gleam like that of a person staring into a fire. His manner of speaking, after it lost its uneven, haughty, shy fluidity, became curt and exact.
The captain of the ‚Anselm‘ was a good man but a strict sailor, who had taken the boy aboard out of caprice. He saw in young Grey’s desperate desire to go to sea only an eccentric wish and gloated when he imagined how, in a month or so, the boy would say to him, without being able to look him in the eye: „Captain Hopp, l’ve scratched my elbows climbing about on the rigging. My side and my back ache. My fingers won’t bend any longer. My head is splitting, and my legs are shaking. All of those wet ships‘ cables that weigh almost a hundred-weight suspended in one’s hands, those jackstays, shrouds, windlasses, hawsers, topmasts, and crosstrees, the whole lot of them were created solely to torture my tender body. I want to go home to my mother.“

Listening in his mind to this speech. Captain Hopp imagined how he would reply: „You just go wherever you please, my little chick. If your tender little wings have got a little tar on them, you can wash it off at home with Rosa-Mimosa Eau-de-Cologne.“
The name for the eau-de-cologne, which Hopp had thought up himself, made him laugh in his thoughts louder than anything else, and when he had delivered his fare-thee-well, he would repeat out loud to himself: „Yes, yes, run along to your ‚Rosa-Mimosa.'“

As time went on, this dialogue came to the mind of the captain less and less. Grey worked steadily toward his goal, with teeth gritted and face pale. He bore the nerve-wracking labor with a determined exertion of will, knowing that the more the severity of life on the ship penetrated his being, the easier things would become for him, and his awkwardness would be replaced by skill. It happened now and then that he was knocked down by a loop in the anchor chain and driven against the deck, that a ship’s cable which slipped off the bollard tore out of his hands and burned the flesh from his palms, that he was hit in the face with a corner of a wet sail that had iron cables sewn into it. To sum it up, at first all the work was I trial and torture which demanded the sharpest of attention. But no matter how hard he breathed and how difficult it was to bend, a smile of contempt never left his lips. He bore in silence the laughter, mockery, and inevitable cursing until he became a „native“ in this new orbit of life. And from then on he rephed to each insult with a blow of the fist.
Once when Captain Hopp observed how skillfully Grey had tied a sail to the yardarm, he said to himself: „Well, you rogue, you’ve won.“ When Grey returned to the deck, Hopp called him into his cabin and, opening a wellworn book, said: „Listen carefully. Stop smoklltig! We’re going to turn this puppy into a captain.“

And he began to read, rather one should say shout, from the book the ancient terminology of the sea. This was Grey’s first lesson. Over the period of a year he learned navigation, shipbuilding, admiralty law, how to read sailing directions, and bookkeeping. Captain Hopp shook his hand and addressed him as an equal.

In Vancouver, Grey found a letter waiting from his mother. It abounded in tears and worry. He replied: „I understand. But if you were only to look at things as I do! Try to see them with my eyes. If you could only hear things as I do! Take a sea shell and put it to your ear, for it holds the roar of an eternal wave. If only you could love a smile as I do – for there is everything in your letter except love and a human being.“

He sailed with the Anselm until it arrived with a cargo at Dubelt. Taking advantage of the stop, the twenty-year-old Grey went ashore to visit the castle.

All was the same as it had been five years before. Only the foliage of the young elms had become more lush, and the pattern which their shadow cast on the facade of the castle had grown denser and broader.

The servants who ran out to meet him were happy but startled. They froze into the same attitude of respect with which what seemed no longer ago than yesterday they had greeted the other Grey, his father.

They told him where to find his mother. He entered her high-ceilinged room and closed the lefoor quietly behind him. He stopped motionless, looking at the woman in a black dress whose hair had turned gray. She stood before a crucifix. Her passionate whisper resounded like a heartbeat. „Oh, for those at sea, for travelers, for those ill, and for those suffering and for those in prison,“ Grey heard, holding his breath. „And for my son . . .“
„I am here,“ and he could say nothing more. His mother turned. She had become thin. The haughtiness of her narrow face gave way to a new expression which seemed to bring back her youth. She walked swiftly to her son. A short laugh came from deep within her. There was a restrained exclamation, and the tears welled in her eyes. That was all. But in that moment she lived more intensely, more deeply, than at any time in her entire life. „I recognized you at once! Oh my darling, my little one!“ And Grey ceased to be an adult.
She told him about his father’s death, and then he told her about himself. She listened without reproach. But in what he had found to be the meaning of his life, the truth of his being, she saw only toys with which her little boy was amusing himself. Such toys as con- tinents, oceans, ships.

Grey spent seven days at the castle. On the eighth he took a large sum of money and re- turned to Dubelt, where he met Captain Hopp. „Thank you,“ he said to the captain. „You have been a real friend. Farewell, my elder comrade.“ And he underscored the meaning of the word with a handshake as tight as a vise. „From now on I must sail on my own, on my own ship.“
Hopp spat in a temper, pulled his hand free, and went off. But Grey caught up with him and embraced him. Then they went together to a tavern where they were joined by the entire twenty-four-man crew of the Anselm. They drank and ate everything on the buffet and in the kitchen as well.

In a short time the evening star shone down on a dream fulfilled in the port of Dubelt— ‚The Secret‘, a three-masted galiot of 260 tons, which had been purchased by Grey. And so, captain of his own ship, Arthur Grey sailed the seas for four years more before fate took him to the port of Lisse. But he never forgot how his mother had greeted him, and twice each year he visited the castle.

3. DAWN

Foam steaming astern. The Secret crossed the ocean, leaving a white wake bebind it, and came to rest in the glow of the evening lights of Lisse. The ship was anchored in the harbor not far from the lighthouse. Ten days were spent unloading silk, coffee, and tea, and on the eleventh the crew went to relax at the tavern. On the twelfth day, for no reason at all. Grey fell into a deep melancholy.

In the morning, hardly awake, he already felt that the day had begun badly. He dressed gloomily, breakfasted without appetite, even forgot to read his newspaper, and sat smoking for a long time. His vague thoughts, nebulous desires, led nowhere. Finally he got down to business.

With the boatswain. Grey inspected the ship, ordered the shrouds tightened, the steering chain loosened a bit, the hawser-holes cleaned, the jib changed, the deck tarred, the compass polished, and the cabins opened, aired, and swept out. But his work failed to distract him. He could not rid himself of his uneasy gloom and went through the day glumly and irritably. It seemed as if someone had invited him out somewhere, but he had forgotten who had asked him and where he was to go.

In the evening he seated himself in his cabin, picked up a book, and spent a long time contradicting the writer and making paradoxical notes in the margins. This game, this argument with a dead author, amused him for a time. Then he picked up his pipe, and submerging himself in purple smoke, wandered among the ghostly images of his fancy.
Tobacco is a powerful thing. It can be like oil which is poured on troubled waters to pacify their fury. It mellows irritation. Under its influence disturbed feelings regain their harmony. After three pipefuls. Grey’s melancholy finally lost its edge and was transformed into a meditative absorption. He remained in this state for about an hour more. When the fog of his mood had lifted and Grey returned to full consciousness, he felt like moving about a bit and went up on deck. It was the middle of the night. Over the si