© КАРО, 2019

Scarlet Sails
A Fantasy
(translated by Fainna Glagoleva)

Presented and dedicated to Nina Nikolayevna Grin

by the AUTHOR

November 23,’ 1922 Petrograd

I. The Prophesy

Longren, a sailor of the Orion, a rugged, three-hundred ton brig on which he had served for ten years and to which he was attached more strongly than some sons are to their mothers, was finally forced to give up the sea.

This is how it came about. During one of his infrequent visits home he did not, as he always had, see his wife Mary from afar, standing on the doorstep, throwing up her hands and then running breathlessly towards him.

Instead, he found a distraught neighbour woman by the crib, a new piece of furniture in his small house.

“I tended her for three months, neighbour,” the woman said. “Here’s your daughter.”

Longren’s heart was numb with grief as he bent down and saw an eight-month-old mite peering intently at his long beard. Then he sat down, stared at the floor and began to twirl his moustache. It was wet as from the rain.

“When did Mary die?” he asked.

The woman recounted the sad tale, interrupting herself to coo fondly at the child and assure him that Mary was now in Heaven. When Longren learned the details, Heaven seemed to him not much brighter than the woodshed, and he felt that the light of a plain lamp, were the three of them together now, would have been a joy unsurpassed to the woman who had gone on to the unknown Beyond.

About three months previously the young mother’s finances had come to an abrupt end. At least half of the money Longren had left her was spent on doctors after her difficult confinement and on caring for the newborn infant; finally, the loss of a small but vital sum had forced Mary to appeal to Menners for a loan. Menners kept a tavern and shop and was considered a wealthy man. Mary went to see him at six o’clock in the evening. It was close to seven when the neighbour woman met her on the road to Liss. Mary had been weeping and was very upset. She said she was going to town to pawn her wedding ring. Then she added that Menners had agreed to lend her some money but had demanded her love in return. Mary had rejected him.

“There’s not a crumb in the house,” she had said to the neighbour.

“I’ll go into town. We’ll manage somehow until my husband returns.”

It was a cold, windy evening. In vain did the neighbour try to talk the young woman out of going to Liss when night was approaching. “You’ll get wet, Mary. It’s beginning to rain, and the wind looks as if it will bring on a storm.”

It was at least a three hours’ brisk walk from the seaside village to town, but Mary did not heed her neighbour’s advice. “I won’t be an eyesore to you any more,” she said. “As it is, there’s hardly a family I haven’t borrowed bread, tea or flour from. I’ll pawn my ring, and that will take care of everything.” She went into town, returned and the following day took to her bed with a fever and chills; the rain and the evening frost had brought on double pneumonia, as the doctor from town, called in by the kind-hearted neighbour, had said. A week later there was an empty place in Longren’s double bed, and the neighbour woman moved into his house to care for his daughter. She was a widow and all alone in the world, so this was not a difficult task. “Besides,” she added, “the baby fills my days.”

Longren went off to town, quit his job, said goodbye to his comrades and returned home to raise little Assol. The widow stayed on in the sailor’s house as a foster mother to the child until she had learned to walk well, but as soon as Assol stopped falling when she raised her foot to cross the threshold, Longren declared that from then on he intended to care for the child himself and, thanking the woman for her help and kindness, embarked on a lonely widower’s life, focusing all his thoughts, hopes, love and memories on the little girl.

Ten years of roaming the seas had not brought him much of a fortune. He began to work. Soon the shops in town were offering his toys for sale, finely-crafted small model boats, launches, one and two-deck sailing vessels, cruisers and steamboats; in a word, all that he knew so well and that, owing to the nature of the toys, partially made up for the hustle and bustle of the ports and the adventures of a life at sea. In this way Longren earned enough to keep them comfortable. He was not a sociable man, but now, after his wife’s death, he became something of a recluse. He was sometimes seen in a tavern of a holiday, but he would never join anyone and would down a glass of vodka at the bar and leave with a brief: “yes”, “no”, “hello”, “goodbye”, “getting along”, in reply to all his neighbours’ 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 cozy 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 undefin-able 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 the wildly splashing water and untied his boat; then, standing upright in it he began moving towards the shore, pulling himself along from one pile to the next.

He had forgotten his oars, and as he stumbled and missed his hold on the next pile, a strong gust of wind pulled the prow of his boat away from the pier and towards the ocean. Now Menners could not have reached the nearest pile even if he had stretched out to his full length. The wind and the waves, rocking the boat, were carrying it off into the distance and doom. Menners realized his predicament and wanted to dive into the water and swim ashore, but this decision was too late in coming, for the boat was now spinning about near the end of the pier where the considerable depth and raging waves promised imminent death. There were only about twenty metres between Longren and Menners, who was being swept off into the stormy distance, and a rescue was still possible, for a coiled rope with a weighted end hung on the pier beside Longren. The rope was there for any boat that might land during a storm and was thrown to the boat from the pier.

“Longren!” Menners cried in terror. “Don’t just stand there! Can’t you see I’m being carried away? Throw me the line!”

Longren said nothing as he gazed calmly upon the frantic man, although he puffed harder on his pipe and then, to have a better view of what was happening, removed it from his mouth.

“Longren!” Menners pleaded. “I know you can hear me. I’ll be drowned! Save me!”

But Longren said not a word; it seemed as though he had not heard the frantic wail. He did not even shift his weight until the boat had been carried so far out to sea that Menners’ word-cries were barely audible.

Menners sobbed in terror, he begged the sailor to run to the fishermen for help; he promised him a reward, he threatened and cursed him, but all Longren did was walk to the very edge of the pier so as not to loose the leaping, spinning boat from view too soon.

“Longren, save me!” The words came to him as they would to someone inside a house from someone on the roof.

Then, filling his lungs with air and taking a deep breath so that not a single word would be carried away by the wind, Longren shouted: “That’s how she pleaded with you! Think of it, Menners, while you’re still alive, and don’t forget!”

Then the cries stopped, and Longren went home. Assol awakened to see her father sitting lost in thought before the lamp that was now burning low.

Hearing the child’s voice calling to him, he went over to her, kissed her affectionately and fixed the tumbled blanket.

“Go to sleep, dear. It’s still a long way till morning,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve made a black toy, Assol. Now go to sleep.”

The next day the village buzzed with the news of Menners’ dissappearance. Five days later he was brought back, dying and full of malice. His story soon reached every village in the vicinity. Menners had been in the open sea until evening; he had been battered against the sides and bottom of the boat during his terrible battle with the crashing waves that constantly threatened to toss the raving shopkeeper into the sea and was picked up by the Lucretia, plying towards Kasset. Exposure and the nightmare he had experienced put an end to Menners’ days. He did not live a full forty-eight hours, calling down upon Longren every calamity possible on earth and in his imagination. Menners’ story of the sailor watching his doom, having refused him help, the more convincing since the dying man could barely breathe and kept moaning, astounded the people of Kaperna. To say nothing of the fact that hardly a one of them would remember an insult even greater than the one inflicted upon Longren or to grieve as he was to grieve for Mary till the end of his days – they were repulsed, puzzled and stunned by Longren’s silence. Longren had stood there in silence until those last words he had shouted to Menners; he had stood there without moving, sternly and silently, as a judge, expressing his utter contempt of Menners – there was something greater than hatred in his silence and they all sensed this. If he had shouted, expressed his gloating through gesture or bustling action, or had in any other way shown his triumph at the sight of Menners’ despair, the fishermen would have understood him, but he had acted differently than they would have – he had acted impressively and strangely and had thus placed himself above them – in a word, he had done that which is not forgiven. No longer did anyone salute him in the street or offer him his hand, or cast a friendly glance of recognition and greeting his way.

From now and to the end he was to remain aloof from the affairs of the village; boys catching sight of him in the street would shout after him:

“Longren drowned Menners!” He paid no attention to this. Nor did it seem that he noticed the fact that in the tavern or on the beach among the boats the fishermen would stop talking in his presence and would move away as from someone who had the plague. The Menners’ affair had served to strengthen their formerly partial alienation. Becoming complete, it created an unshakeable mutual hatred, the shadow of which fell upon Assol as well.

The little girl grew up without friends. The two or three dozen children of her age in the village, which was saturated like a sponge is with water with the crude law of family rule, the basis of which is the unquestioned authority of the parents, imitative like all children in the world, excluded little Assol once and for all from the circle of their protection and interest. Naturally, this came about gradually, through the admonitions and scolding of the adults, and assumed the nature of a terrible taboo which, increased by idle talk and rumour, burgeoned in the children’s minds to become a fear of the sailor’s house.

Besides, the secluded life Longren led now gave vent to the hysterical tongues of gossip; it was implied that the sailor had murdered someone somewhere and that, they said, was why he was no longer signed up on any ship, and he was so sullen and unsociable because he was “tormented by a criminal conscience”. When playing, the children would chase Assol away if she came near, they would sling mud at her and taunt her by saying that her father ate human flesh and was now a counterfeiter. One after another her naive attempts at making friends ended in bitter tears, bruises, scratches and other manifestations of public opinion; she finally stopped feeling affronted, but would still sometimes ask her father:

“Why don’t they like us? Tell me.”

“Ah, Assol, they don’t know how to like or love. One must be able to love, and that is something they cannot do.”

“What do you mean by ‘be able to’?”

“This!”

At which he would swing the child up and fondly kiss her sad eyes which she would shut tight with sweet pleasure.

Assol’s favourite pastime was to climb up on her father’s lap of an evening or on a holiday, when he had set aside his pots of glue, his tools and unfinished work and, having taken off his apron, sat down to rest, pipe clenched between his teeth. Twisting and turning within the protective circle of her father’s arm, she would finger the various parts of the tovs, questioning him as to the purpose of each. Thus would begin a peculiar, fantastic lecture on life and people – a lecture in which, due to Longren’s former way of life, all sorts of chance occurrences and chance in general, strange, amazing and unusual events, were given a major role. As Longren told his daughter the names of the various ropes, sails and rigging, he would gradually become carried away, progressing from simple explanations to various episodes in which now a windlass, now a rudder and now a mast, or this or the other type of craft and such like had played a part, and from these isolated illustrations he would go on to sweeping descriptions of nautical wanderings, interweaving superstition with reality and reality with images created by his imagination. Herein appeared the tiger cat, that herald of shipwreck, the talking flying fish which one had to obey on pain of losing one’s course, and the Flying Dutchman and his wild crew, signs, ghosts, mermaids and pirates – in a word, all the fables that help a sailor while away the time during a calm spell or in some favourite tavern. Longren also spoke of shipwrecked crews, of men who had become savages and had forgotten how to talk, of mysterious buried treasure, of convict mutinies, and of much else which the little girl listened to more raptly than did, perhaps, Columbus’ first audience to his tale of a new continent.

“Tell me more,” Assol pleaded when Longren, lost in thought, would fall silent, andshe would fall asleep on his breast with a head full of wonderful dreams.

The appearance of the clerk from the toy shop in town, which was glad to buy whatever Longren had made, was a great and always a materially important treat to her. In order to get into the father’s good graces and strike a good bargain, the clerk would bring along a couple of apples, a bun and a handfull of nuts for the girl. Longren usually asked for the true price of a toy, for he detested bargaining, but the clerk would lower the price. “Why,” Longren would say, “It was taken me a week to make this boat. (The boat was five inches long.) See how strong and trim it is, and mark the draught. Why, it’ll hold fifteen men in a storm.” In the end, the little girl’s soft murmurings and fussing with her apple would weaken Longren’s determination and desire to argue; he would give in, and the clerk, having filled his basket with well-made, excellent toys, would leave, laughing up his sleeve.