Scarlet Sails / Алые паруса. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Александр ГринЧитать онлайн книгу.
course! Here’s Heaven! It’s here, see?” Gray laughed softly and opened his small fist. His delicate but well-formed palm was lit up by the sun, and then the boy curled his fingers into a fist again. “Here it is!
It’s here, and now it’s gone again!”
As he spoke he kept clenching and unclenching his fist. At last, pleased with his joke, he ran out, ahead of Poldichoque, onto the dark stairway leading to the ground floor corridor. Gray was absolutely forbidden to enter the kitchen, but once, having discovered this wonderful world of flaming hearths and soot, this hissing and bubbling of boiling liquids, chopping of knives and mouth-watering smells, the boy became a diligent visitor to the great chamber. The chefs moved in stony silence like some high priests; their white hats etched against the soot-blackened walls lent an air of solemn ritual to their movements; the fat, jovial dishwashers at their barrels of water scrubbed the tableware, making the china and silver ring; boys came in, bent under the weight of baskets of fish, oysters, lobsters and fruit. Laid out on a long table were rainbow-hued pheasants, grey ducks and brightly-feathered chickens; farther on was the carcass of a suckling pig with a tiny tail and eyes shut like a babe’s; then there were turnips, cabbages, nuts, raisins and sun-burnished peaches.
Gray always quailed slightly in the kitchen: he felt that some strange force was in charge here, and that its power was the mainspring of life in the castle; the shouts sounded like orders and invocations; the movements of the kitchen staff after years of practice had acquired that precise, measured rhythm that seems like inspiration. Gray was not yet tall enough to peep into the largest cauldron which bubbled like Mt. Vesuvius, but he felt a special respect for it; he watched in awe as two serving women handled it; at such times steaming froth would splash out onto the top of the stove, and the steam that rose from the hissing stove lid would billow out into the kitchen. On one occasion so much liquid splashed out it scalded one of the kitchen maid’s hands. The skin immediately turned red from the rush of blood, and Betsy (for that was her name) wept as she rubbed oil into the burned skin. Tears coursed down her round, frightened face uncontrollably.
Gray was petrified. As the other women fussed about Betsy, he was suddenly gripped by the pain of another person’s suffering which he could not himself experience.
“Does it hurt very much?” he asked.
“Try it, and you’ll see,” Betsy replied, covering her hand with her apron.
The boy frowned and climbed up onto a stool, dipped a long-handled spoon into the hot liquid (in this case it was lamb soup) and splashed some onto his wrist. The sensation was not faint, but the faintness resulting from the sharp pain made him sway. He was as pale as flour when he went up to Betsy, hiding his scalded hand in his pants pocket.
“I think it hurts you awfully,” he murmured, saying nothing of his own experiment. “Come to the doctor, Betsy. Come on!”
He tugged at her skirt insistently, though all the while the believers in home remedies were giving the girl all sorts of advice for treating the burn. However, she was in very great pain, and so she followed Gray. The doctor relieved her pain by applying some medication. Not before Betsy was gone did Gray show him his own hand.
This insignificant episode made twenty-year-old Betsy and ten-year-old Gray bosom friends. She would fill his pockets with sweets and apples, and he would tell her fairy-tales and other stories he had read in his books.
One day he discovered that Betsy could not marry Jim, the groom, because they had no money to set themselves up in a home of their own. Gray used his fireplace tongs to crack his china piggy-bank and shook out the contents, which amounted to nearly a hundred pounds. He rose early, and when the dowerless girl went off to the kitchen, sneaked into her room and placed his gift in her chest, laying a note on top: “This is yours, Betsy. (Signed) Robin Hood.” The commotion this caused in the kitchen was so great that Gray had to confess to the deed. He did not take the money back and did not want to have another word said about it.
His mother was one of those people whom life pours into a ready mould. She lived in the dream-world of prosperity that provided for every wish of an ordinary soul; therefore, she had no other occupation save to order around her dressmakers, doctor and butler. However, her passionate and ail-but religious attachment for her strange child was, one might assume, the only vent for those of her inclinations, chloroformed by her upbringing and fate, which were no longer fully alive, but simmered faintly, leaving the will idle. The high-born dame resembled a peacock hen that had hatched a swan’s egg. She was quiveringly aware of the magnificent uniqueness of her son; sadness, love and constraint filled her being when she pressed the boy to her breast, and her heart spoke unlike her tongue, which habitually reflected the conventional types of relationships and ideas. Thus does a cloud effect, concocted so weirdly by the sun’s rays, penetrate the symmetrical interior of a public building, divesting it of its banal merits; the eye sees but does not recognize the chamber; the mysterious nuances of light amongst paltriness create a dazzling harmony.
The high-born dame, whose face and figure, it seemed, could respond but in icy silence to the fiery voices of life and whose delicate beauty repelled rather than attracted, since one sensed her haughty effort of will, devoid of feminine attraction – this same Lillian Gray, when alone with the boy, was transformed into an ordinary mother speaking in a loving, gentle voice those endearments which refuse to be committed to paper; their power lies in the emotions, not in their meaning. She was positively unable to refuse her son anything. She forgave him everything: his visits to the kitchen, his abhorrence of his lessons, his disobedience and his many eccentricities.
If he did not want the trees to be trimmed they were left untouched; if he asked that someone be pardoned or rewarded – the person in question knew that it would be so; he could ride any horse he wished, bring any dog he wished into the castle, go through the books in the library, run around barefoot and eat whatever he pleased.
His father tried to put a stop to this and finally yielded – not to the principle, but to his wife’s wishes. He merely had all the servants’ children moved out of the castle, fearing that by associating with low society the boy’s whims would become inclinations that would be difficult to eradicate. In general, he was completely taken up with endless family lawsuits whose origins went back to the era of the founding of the first paper mills and whose end perhaps lay in the death of the last caviller.
Besides, there were affairs of state, the running of his own estates, dictating his memoirs, fox-hunts, newspapers to be read and an extended correspondence to keep him at a certain distance inwardly from the rest of the family; he saw his son so infrequently that he would sometimes forget how old the boy was.
Thus, Gray lived in a world of his own. He played all by himself – usually in the back yards of the castle which had once, in times of yore, been of strategic use. These vast, empty lots with the remains of deep moats and moss-covered stone cellars were overgrown with weeds, nettles, briars, blackthorn and shy bright wildflowers. Gray would spend hours here, exploring mole burrows, battling weeds, stalking butterflies and building fortresses of broken bricks, which he then shelled with sticks and stones.
He was going on twelve when all the implications of his soul, all the separate traits of his spirit and shades of secret impulses were brought together in a single powerful surge and, having in this way acquired a harmonious expression, became an indomitable desire. Until then he seemed to have found but disparate parts of his garden – a sunny spot, shadow, a flower, a great dark trunk – in the many other gardens and suddenly saw them clearly, all – in magnificent, astonishing accord.
This happened in the library. The tall door topped by a murky fanlight was usually locked, but the latch fit the mortise loosely and when pressed hard, the door would give, buckle and open. When the spirit of adventure urged Gray to make his way into the library he was amazed at the dusty light, whose effect and peculiarity were created by the coloured design of the leaded fanlight. The stillness of desertion lay upon everything here as on water in a pond. Here and there dark rows of bookcases adjoined the windows, blocking them halfway; there were aisles between the bookcases which were piled high with volumes. Here was an open album from which the centre pages had slipped out; over there were some scrolls tied with gold cord, stacks of sombre-looking books, thick layers of manuscripts, a mound of miniature