THE CHILDHOOD OF ARTHUR GRAY

ARTHUR GRAY
A life-story by Aleksander Grin

Julius Caesar believed that it was better to be the first in a village than the second in Rome. Arthur Gray had no reason to envy Caesar’s wise decision. He was born to be a captain, he wanted to be a captain and became one.
The huge house, where Gray was born, was gloomy inside and grand from the outside. There was a flower garden and a part of a park adjoining the facade in front. The best varieties of tulips, silver-blue, violet and black ones with tints of pink, wound on the lawn like strings of necklaces thrown fancifully. The old trees of the park slumbered in scattered twilight above a twisting brook overgrown with sedge. The fence of the castle – since it was a real castle – consisted of twisted cast-iron pillars joined together with an iron design. Each pillar ended in a luxuriant cast-iron lily at the top. On solemn occasions those bowls were filled with oil, flaming in their long fiery rank in the dark of the night.
Gray’s father and mother were arrogant slaves of their own status, wealth and laws of the society that they reckoned themselves in. One part of their souls occupied with a gallery of ancestors is scarcely deserving description. The other part, an imaginary continuation of the gallery, began with little Gray. He was doomed to live and to die according to a certain plan drawn up beforehand so that his portrait could be hung on the wall without prejudice to the family honour. A small mistake had crept in that plan: Arthur Gray was born to have a lively spirit, quite undisposed to follow the course of the family outline.
That liveliness, those quite unnatural inclinations of the boy began to tell on him in the eighth year of his life. The type of a knight of whimsical impressions, a seeker and a wonder-worker, that is of a person who chose the most dangerous and touching role – the role of Providence – out of the countless variety of life roles, took shape in Gray still when he set a chair against a wall to reach a picture representing the Crucifixion and took the nails out of Christ’s bleeding hands. He simply painted them over with blue paint stolen from a house-painter. He found the picture looking like that more tolerable. Being carried away with his peculiar occupation, he already began to paint over the feet of the crucified man when his father took him by surprise. The old man took the boy off the chair by the ears and asked: “Why have you spoiled the picture?”
“I haven’t spoiled it.”
“This is the work of a famous painter.”
“I don’t care,” Gray said. “I cannot endure nails sticking out of hands and blood running. I do not want it.”
Concealing a smile in his moustache, Lionel Gray recognized himself in his son’s reply and did not punish him.
Gray explored the castle tirelessly making striking discoveries. Thus, in the garret, he found old and useless steel armour, books bound with iron and leather, rotten clothes, and lots of pigeons. In the cellar, where wine was kept, he got interesting knowledge concerning lafit, Madeira, and sherry. There, in the dull light of pointed windows weighed down under the slanting triangles of stone vaults, there were small and large barrels. The largest one, which was in the form of a flat circle, occupied the whole back wall of the cellar. The centenary dark oak of the barrel was glossy as if it was polished. Among the small barrels there were large paunchy bottles of green or dark blue glass in wicker baskets. Grey thin-stemmed mushrooms grew on the stones and on the earthen floor. Everywhere there was mould, moss, dampness and a sour, suffocating smell. A huge cobweb shone golden in the far corner when, towards evening, the last beam of the sun shone upon it. There were two barrels of the finest Alicante, which was popular in Cromwell's time, buried at a certain place. And, pointing at the empty corner to Gray, the cellarkeeper did not miss the opportunity of repeating his story of the famous “grave” and its “corpse” which was livelier than a pack of fox terriers. Beginning his tale, he did not forget to test if the tap of the large barrel worked properly. He seemed to step from it with a light heart, since the involuntary tears of too strong joy shone in his cheerful eyes.
“Well, now look here,” Poldychoke would say to Gray, as he seated himself on an empty box and stuffed his sharp nose with tobacco. “Do you see this place over there? There’s the wine, for which not a single drunkard would let his tongue be cut out if he were allowed to toss off a small glass of it. Each barrel contains one hundred litres of a substance that blows up your spirit and turns your body into motionless paste. Its colour is darker than cherry and it will not pour from a bottle. It’s as thick as good cream. It’s put into the barrels of ebony which is as strong as iron. They are bound with double hoops of red copper. There’s a Latin inscription engraved on the hoops: “Gray will drink me up when he is in paradise”. The inscription was interpreted in such diffuse and contradictory ways that your great-grandfather, high-blooded Simeon Gray, built a country-cottage and named it “Paradise”. So, by means of his ingenuous wit, he hoped to co-ordinate the enigmatic saying with reality. But what do you think? He died from rupture of the heart as soon as they began to bring down the hoops, – that was how much the little old gourmand was excited. Since then nobody has touched this barrel. It is believed that the precious wine will bring misfortune. Even the Egyptian sphinx did not set such a riddle, indeed. Though he asked a wise man: “Shall I eat you as I eat everybody? Tell me the truth and you will escape with your life.” But even then, it makes me think...”
“It seems the tap is leaking again,” Poldychoke would interrupt himself turning his indirect steps to the corner. Having fixed the tap he came back with a serene and brightened face. “Well. If he had thought thoroughly and above all deliberately, the wise man could have said to the sphinx: “Let’s go and have a drink, old chap, and you’ll forget about all this nonsense.” “Gray will drink me up when he is in paradise”! What does it mean? Will he drink it up when he dies, eh? It’s strange. Therefore he’s a saint and so he drinks neither wine nor even vodka. Let’s assume that “paradise” means happiness. But if that is the way it is, any happiness loses half of its bright feathering, when a lucky man asks himself frankly if it is really a paradise. That’s just the point. To have a drink from a barrel like this with a light heart and to laugh, my boy, to laugh well, one should have one foot on the ground and the other one in heaven. There’s also the third supposition: some day Gray will drink till all is blue and in this state of bliss he will dare to empty the pretty barrel. But this, son, would be not the prediction coming true but a drunken brawl in a tavern.”
Having made sure once again that the tap of the big barrel was in good working order, Poldychoke would finish his story with dismal concentration: “Those barrels were brought by your ancestor John Gray from Lisbon on the ship Beagle in 1793. Two thousand gold piastres were paid for the wine. The inscription on the barrels was engraved by a gunsmith, Benjamin Elyan from Pondicherry. The barrels were buried six feet deep in the ground and covered with ashes of grape vines. Nobody has drunk or tasted this wine and nobody will ever taste it.”
“I will drink it up,” Gray said once, stamping his foot.
“There’s a brave young man!” Poldychoke remarked. “Will you drink it up in paradise?”
“Certainly. Here’s paradise!.. I’ve got it, you see?” Gray laughed gently as he opened his small hand. His tender palm, which yet had firm contours, was lit up with the sun. The boy balled his fingers into a fist. “I’ve got it right here! Here it is and here it’s gone...”
Saying that he opened and clenched his hand, and finally, pleased with his joke, ran out ahead of Poldychoke up the gloomy staircase into the corridor of the ground floor.
It was strictly prohibited for Gray to come to the kitchen. But once he had discovered the astonishing world, blazing with fire of hearths, the world of steam, soot, sizzle and bubbling boiling liquids, of clattering knives and tasty odours, the boy used to visit the huge room quite often. There were cooks moving in strict silence like priests. Their white caps, seen against the background of blackened walls, gave their work the semblance of a solemn service. Jovial fat dish-washers washed up by the water barrels to the clinking of china and silver. Boys, bending under the weight of their burdens, carried in baskets full of fish, oysters, crawfish and fruit. There, on the long table, lay rainbowed pheasants, grey ducks and particoloured hens. There was a carcass of a pig with a short little tail and infantile closed eyes. There were turnips, cabbages, nuts, dark blue raisins and sunburnt peaches.
In the kitchen Gray was a little timid. It seemed to him that everything there was set in motion by dark forces, the power of which was the mainspring of the castle life. Peremptory shouts sounded like commands and spells. The movements of the working people, owing to long practice, had assumed the sort of distinct and stingy accuracy that seemed inspired. Gray was not yet as tall as to peep into the largest pan, which seethed like Vesuvius, but he felt a particular respect for it. With trepidation he watched it being moved by two servants. Smoky scum splashed out on the stove then, and the waves of steam, rising from the hissing stove, filled the kitchen. Once so much liquid splashed out that one maid scalded her hand. Her skin reddened in a moment, even her nails became red with the rush of blood. Betsy (that was the servant’s name) cried and rubbed the sore spots with oil. Tears gushed from her eyes down her round frightened face.
Gray stood stock-still. While the other women were bustling around Betsy, he went through a feeling of another’s acute suffering that he had not experienced himself.
“Does it hurt you much?” he asked.
“Try it and you will know,” Betsy answered, covering her hand with her apron.
Knitting his brows, the boy climbed up on a stool, ladled out some hot liquid with a long spoon (it was mutton soup, by the way) and splashed it on the bend of his hand. The impression proved to be not weak, though weakness from the strong pain made him stagger. Putting his burning hand into the pocket of his panties, Gray, who was white as flour, came up to Betsy.
“It seems to me that it hurts you very much,” he said holding back his experiment. “Let’s go to the doctor, Betsy. Come along!”
He pulled her persistently by the skirt while the supporters of domestic remedies vied with each other in giving saving recipes to the maid. But the girl, suffering much, came with Gray. The doctor alleviated the pain and bandaged her hand. Only after Betsy had left the boy showed his own one.
That small episode united twenty-year Betsy and ten-year Gray in true friendship. She would stuff his pockets with pasties and apples, and he would tell her fairy tales and other stories that he found in his books. Once he learnt that Betsy could not marry Jim, the stableman, for they had no money to start a home of their own. Gray broke his porcelain money-box with the fire-irons and shook out everything - that made about a hundred pounds. Having got up early, when the dowerless girl took herself off to the kitchen, he stole into her room and thrust the gift in the girl’s chest with a short note, saying: “Betsey, this is yours. Robin Hood, ringleader of a gang of robbers”. The alarm, that the story caused in the kitchen, assumed such great dimensions that Gray had to confess a forgery. He did not want either to take his money back or to discuss it any more.
His mother was one of those persons whom life casts in a ready mould. She lived half asleep in her well-being which provided for every wish of a mediocre soul. Therefore nothing else was left for her to do, but to consult her dressmakers, her doctor, and her butler. But her passionate, almost religious affection for her strange child was very likely the only outlet for her inclinations. Chloroformed by her education and destiny, they did not already live but stirred in her vaguely, leaving her will inactive. The noble lady resembled a peahen that had hatched an egg of a swan. She felt the beautiful unlikeness of her son oversensitively. Sadness, love and uneasiness filled her when she clasped the boy to her breast, and her heart said something different, not her tongue used to say, reflecting conventional forms of relations and thoughts. Thus a cloudy effect, whimsically produced with sunbeams, penetrates into symmetrical furnishings of an official building, depriving it of its commonplace virtues. You look and do not recognize the place: mysterious shades of the light turn its miserable interior into a dazzling harmony.
The noble lady, whose face and figure seemed to respond only with icy silence to the fiery calls of life; whose refined beauty was rather repulsive than attractive as it reflected an arrogant effort of the will, which had nothing to do with feminine attractiveness, – that Lilian Gray, when left alone with her little boy, became an ordinary mother. She would say in a loving and gentle tone those warm-hearted trifles that cannot be reproduced on paper as their power are not in themselves but in the feeling. She could deny absolutely nothing to her son, whatever it was. She forgave him everything: his visits to the kitchen, his aversion for lessons, his disobedience and his numerous whims.
If he did not want the trees to be clipped, the trees remained untouched. If he asked to forgive or to reward somebody, the person concerned knew that it would be so. He could ride any horse, bring any dog into the castle, burrow in the library, run barefoot and eat whatever he liked.
His father struggled against that for some time, but had to yield – not to the principle but to his wife’s wish. He came to nothing more than the following: he sent all the servants’ children away from the castle. He feared that the low society would turn the boy’s whimsies into inclinations that would be hard to eradicate. In general, he was entirely occupied with innumerable family lawsuits which seemed to have begun in the old times of the invention of paper-mills and to last till there is no one pettifogger left. In addition, state affairs, estate affairs, dictation of his memoirs, ceremonial riding to hounds, reading of newspapers, and complex correspondence kept him somehow away within the family. He saw his son so seldom that he sometimes forgot how old he was.
Thus, Gray lived in his own world. He played alone, usually in the castle back yards that had been used for defensive purposes in old times. Those vast waste plots of land, with remains of deep moats and stone powder magazines overgrown with moss, were thick with tall weeds, nettle, burdock, blackthorn and unpretentious motley wild flowers. Gray stayed there for hours, examining mole burrows, fighting the tall weeds, catching butterflies, building fortresses out of brick fragments and bombarding them with sticks and cobblestones.
He was already in his twelfth year when all the contours of his soul, all the un-co-ordinated features of his spirit and all the shades of his secret impulses joined in one strong moment. Since they got a harmonious way of expression, they became an indomitable desire. Up to then he seemed to have discovered only separate parts of his own garden – a clear space, a shadow, a flower, a thick and magnificent trunk – in a great number of others’ gardens. And suddenly he saw them clearly all together in their beautiful, striking accordance.
It happened in the library. Its high door with a translucent glass in the upper part was usually locked, but the catch of the lock was loose in the socket. If one pressed the door, it yielded a little and could with an effort be opened. When the spirit of exploration made Gray steal into the library, the dusty light struck him. The coloured ornament that decorated the upper part of the windowpanes explained the powerful and peculiar impression it made. The silence of desolation was there, as still as water in a pond. The dark rows of bookcases ajoined the windows here and there, half hiding them. Between the bookcases there were passages heaped up with books. There was an open album with its interleaves that had slipped out. There were rolls tied up with golden cord; piles of gloomy-looking books; thick layers of manuscripts; scattered miniature volumes that crackled like bark when they were opened. There were drawings and tables, lines of new editions, maps and the variety of bindings: coarse, soft, black, particoloured, dark blue, grey, thick, thin, rough and smooth ones. The bookcases were stuffed tightly with books. They looked like walls containing life in their very depths. In the reflection of the glass doors of the bookcases one could see other bookcases covered with shining colourless spots. A huge globe encircled in a copper spherical cross of the equator and the meridian stood on a round table.
Turning towards the way out, Gray saw an enormous picture hanging over the door. What was depicted there seemed to fill the stuffy and torpid atmosphere of the library right away. The picture represented a ship rising up the crest of a sea roller. Streams of foam flew along its sloping side. It was depicted at the very peak of its rise. The ship seemed to be sailing straight at the onlooker. The bowsprit risen high hid the bases of the masts. The crest of the roller, split with the ship keel, resembled the wings of a gigantic bird. The foam rushed into the air. The sails, seen hazily from behind the port side and above the bowsprit, were filled with the violent might of the storm. They fell backwards massively to get over the roller, become straight again and then, heeling over the abyss, whirl the ship along to new collapses. Torn clouds fluttered low over the ocean. The dim light fought hopelessly against the coming darkness of the night. But the most remarkable part of the picture was the figure of a man standing on the forecastle with his back to the onlooker. It personified the whole situation, even the very essence of the moment. In fact, the man’s pose (he stood with his legs apart and his arms flung up) indicated nothing about what he was doing. But it made one suppose him to be extremely concentrated upon something taking place on the deck, invisible for the onlooker. The flaps of his caftanwere turned up blown about with the wind. The white braid of his wig and his black sword stuck out into the air. The richness of his costume indicated he was a captain, his balancing posture pointed up the roller rising high. Wearing no hat, evidently all absorbed in the dangerous moment, he was shouting – but what? Did he see anybody falling overboard? Was he ordering to tack or calling a boatswain, trying to shout the wind down? Not the thoughts but echoes of these thoughts arose in Gray’s soul while he was looking at the picture. Suddenly it seemed to him that someone unknown and invisible came up to him from the left and stood by his side. If once he turned his head the queer feeling would disappear without a trace. Gray knew that. He did not suppress his imagination but listened to it instead. A soundless voice screamed out some abrupt phrases as incomprehensible as the Malayan language. He heard a roar as if of long drawn out landslips. An echo and a dark wind filled the library. Gray heard all that within himself. He looked about. At the same moment the silence fell dispelling the resounding web of fantasy. His connection with the gale was lost.
Gray came to look at the picture several times. It became the key word in the conversation between his soul and life, without which it would be hard for him to understand himself. Little by little the small boy took the enormous sea into his heart. He got used to it when he burrowed in the library, seeking out and reading eagerly the books beyond golden doors of which there was the dark blue radiance of the ocean. There, spreading foam behind their sterns, ships sailed. Some of them lost their sails and masts, and overflowed with waves, went down into the darkness of the deep, where the phosphorescent eyes of fish gleamed. Others, caught up by surf, knocked against reefs. The subsiding waves of the rough sea rocked their hulls ferociously. The deserted ships with their torn ropes suffered a long agony until a new storm smashed them to pieces. The third ones took a cargo safely in one port and unloaded in another. Their crew, sitting at the tavern table, glorified sailing and drank vodka enthusiastically. There were also piratic ships with their black ensign and frightful ship’s company brandishing their knives. There were ships-phantoms flashing with deathly light of their blue illumination. There were warships with soldiers, cannons and music. There were ships of scientific expeditions looking out for volcanoes, plants and animals. There were ships with their gloomy mysteries and riots. There were ships of discoveries and ships of adventures.
Naturally, the figure of a captain dominated all in that world. He was the fate, the spirit and the intellect of his ship. The crew’s leisure-time and work depended on his character. He selected the crew itself personally and it met his inclinations in many respects. He knew habits and family affairs of every seaman. In his subordinates’ eyes he possessed some magic knowledge, owing to which he sailed with confidence, let us say, from Lisbon to Shanghai through the vast water space. He repelled a storm with a system of complex counter-measures and put an end to panic with his short orders. He sailed and stopped wherever he liked. He made arrangements concerning departure and shipment, repair and rest. A more significant and reasonable authority in that stimulating work full of continuous motion was hard to imagine. That exclusive and total sort of power was equal to the power of Orpheus.
Such a notion of a captain, such an image and such a true interpretation of his position took up the main part in Gray’s sparkling consciousness by right of all emotional impulses. No other profession, except that one, could so successfully bring together all the treasures of life and at the same time keep inviolable the delicate design of each separate joy. There is danger, risk, the power of nature, the light of a distant land, the wonderful uncertainty and love flashing and blooming in meeting and parting; the enthralling kaleidoscope of people, faces and events; boundless diversity of life, whereas the Southern Cross or the Great Bear is high in the sky, and all the continents are reflected in your alert eyes. And yet your cabin is full of echoes of your homeland that never leaves you, with its books, pictures, letters and dried flowers tied up with a silky curl and kept in a shammy amulet on your firm chest.
In autumn, when he was in his fifteenth year, Arthur Gray secretly left his home to penetrate through the golden gates of the sea. Shortly after the schooner Anselm sailed from the port of Dubbelt for Marseilles, taking away a ship’s boy with small hands and the appearance of a disguised girl. That ship’s boy was Gray, who had an elegant travelling-bag, patent-leather boots as fine as a glove and lawny linen with crowns embroidered on it.
During a year, while the Anselm visited France, America and Spain, Gray wasted part of his property for pastry, in that way paying tribute to the past. The other part, in the name of the present and the future, was lost at cards. He wanted to be “an old salt”. He drank vodka, gasping for breath. When he swam, he jumped head first, with a sinking heart, into the water from a height of two sazhens. Little by little he lost everything except the main thing – his strange soaring spirit. He lost his fragility and became big-boned and sturdily-built. He replaced his paleness by a dark tan and changed the refined carelessness of his movements for the sure accuracy of the working hand. His thoughtful eyes reflected sparkles as if of somebody staring into a fire. His speech lost its uneven, haughty and shy fluency and became abrupt and exact like a swoop of a seagull diving into a stream for a fluttering silvery fish.
The captain of the Anselm was a kind man but a strict seaman, who had taken the boy aboard out of certain gloating delight. In Gray’s desperate desire he saw only an eccentric whim. He anticipated his triumph when he fancied how, in about two months, Gray would tell him without looking him in the face: “Captain Hop, I have grazed my elbows climbing the rigging up and down. My sides and my back ache, my fingers won’t bend, my head is ready to burst and my feet tremble. All these wet ropes weighing two poods I have to pull, all these leiers, shrouds, windlasses, hawsers, topmasts and cross-trees are made to torture my delicate body. I want to go back to my mother”. Having heard out that confession in his thoughts, captain Hop made the following imaginary speech: “You may go wherever you like, my little chick. If some tar has stuck to your tender winglets, you can wash it off at home with Rosa-Mimosa eau-de-Cologne. That eau-de-Cologne, invented by Hop, made the captain glad most of all. And so, as he finished his imaginary tirade, he would repeat aloud to himself: “Yes, go to 'Rosa-Mimosa'”.
Meanwhile the impressive dialogue came into the captain’s mind more and more seldom, since Gray went towards his aim with his teeth clenched and his face paled. He stood the restless labour with a firm effort of his will. He felt that it became easier and easier for him, as the severe life on the ship broke into his being and his lack of skill was replaced by habitual actions. Sometimes it happened that he was knocked down by a loop of an anchor chain and struck against the deck; that a rope not fastened to the bollard properly broke out from his hands and stripped the skin off his palms; that the wind struck him in the face with a loose end of a sail, which had an iron ring sewn into it. And so, to cut a long story short, all the work was a trial that demanded his concentrated attention. But however hard he breathed, straightening his back with difficulty, a smile of defiance never came off his face. He could bear sneers, mockery and unavoidable swearing without a word until he was quite “at home” in the new sphere of life. But since that time on he would always return a blow of his fist for any insult.
One day, as Captain Hop watched how skilfully he bound a sail to the yard, he said to himself: “The victory is on your side, rogue”. When Gray came down to the deck, Hop called him into his cabin, opened a frayed book and said: “Listen carefully! Give up smoking! I begin shaping this puppy into a captain.”
And he began to read, or rather to say and to scream out, from the book the ancient words of the sea. This was Gray’s first lesson. During a year he studied pilotage proper, practice, shipbuilding, maritime law, sailing directions and book-keeping. Captain Hop shook hands with him and treated him as an equal.
In Vancouver, Gray was caught by his mother’s letter full of tears and fears. He answered: “I know. But if only you could see everything as I do! Look around eye to eye with me. If only you could hear everything as I do! Put a shell to your ear, for it holds the sound of a perpetual wave. If only you could love everything as I do! Then in your letter I would have found a smile besides your love and a cheque...” And he kept on sailing until the Anselm brought its cargo to Dubbelt. From there, taking advantage of the stop, twenty-year-old Gray went to visit the castle.
Everything was the same all round there, as inviolable in details and in general impression as it had been five years before. Only the leafage of the young elms had become thicker. The ornament, it formed on the facade of the building, had grown denser and broader.
The servants, who gathered round, were glad to see him. They roused themselves and stood still in their usual deference, as though they had already met that new Gray no later than the day before. Somebody told him where he could find his mother. He passed into the high-ceilinged room, closed the door quietly behind him and stopped silently, looking at the woman dressed in black whose hair had grown grey. She stood in front of a crucifix. Her passionate whisper was sonorous like a full heartbeat. “For all sailing, travelling, ailing, suffering, and captured men,” Gray heard with bated breath. “And for my child...” she said after that.
Then he said: “I...” But he could not utter anything more. His mother turned round. She had grown thin: a new expression reflected in her arrogant delicate face, as if her youth had come back to her. She came up swiftly to her son. Then came a short deep laugh, a restrained exclamation and tears in her eyes – and that was all. But at that very moment she was living more intensely, more deeply than in all her previous life.
“I recognized you at once, oh, my sweetheart, my little one!” And Gray really felt he was not grown-up any more. He heard out her story about his father’s death and told her about himself. She listened without reproaches or objections. But in everything, which he declared as the truth of his life, she saw only toys that her little boy amused himself with. Such toys were continents, oceans and ships.
Gray stayed seven days in the castle. On the eighth day he took a large sum of money, came back to Dubbelt and said to Captain Hop: “Thank you. You were a good friend. Now farewell, my elder comrade”. At that point he strengthened the true meaning of his words with a handclasp as tight as a vice. “From now on I shall sail by myself, on my own ship.” Hop flushed, spat, pulled his hand out and walked away, but Gray came up with him and embraced him. And they seated themselves in the inn all together, that made twenty four men, the crew included. And they were drinking and shouting and singing. And they drank and ate everything they could find on the buffet and in the kitchen.
Some more time passed and in the port of Dubbelt the evening star flashed out over a black straight mast of a new ship. It was the Secret, a three-masted galliot of two hundred and sixty tons, which Gray had bought. Thus, as a captain and as an owner of his ship, Arthur Gray had sailed for another four years until his fate brought him to Liss. But he would always remember the short deep laugh, full of cordial music, with which he had been greeted at home. He would visit the castle about twice a year, providing the silver-haired woman with uncertain belief that a big boy like him would somehow cope with his toys.

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“Yes, I will.” And he kissed her so warmly after his iron “yes” that she laughed.
Now let us leave them alone, as we know that they need to be in private. There are many words in different languages and dialects. But even all of them cannot express, at least approximately, what they said to one another that day.
Meanwhile the whole of the crew had already gathered on the deck, at the mainmast, around the worm-eaten barrel with its bottom knocked out, revealing the centenary dark blessed liquid. Atwood was standing. Panten was sitting ceremoniously, beaming as if he celebrated his birthday. Gray came up on the deck, gave the signal to the orchestra and took off his service cap. He was the first to draw the sacred wine with his cut-glass tumbler to the strains of the golden trumpets.
“Well...” he said when he finished drinking and threw the tumbler down. “Now drink, everybody drink! Those who don’t drink are not my friends any more.”
He did not have to repeat his words. While the Secret moved away at full speed and in full sail from Kaperna, which was awe-stricken for ever, the crush around the barrel exceeded everything of that sort that could ever take place on great festive occasions.
“How did you like it?” Gray asked Wingy.
“Captain!” the sailor said, trying to find proper words. “I don’t know whether it liked me, but I must consider my impressions. It’s a hive and an orchard!”
“What?!”
“I mean that a hive of honey and an orchard seemed to have been stuffed into my mouth. I wish you happiness, captain. And may she, whom I would call the best “freight”, the best prize of the Secret, be happy too!”

When it was dawning the next day, the ship was a great distance away from Kaperna. Some of the crew were still lying on the deck, as they had fallen asleep, overcome by Gray’s wine. Those who kept on their legs were only the helmsman and the watch, and thoughtful, tipsy Zimmer, who was sitting in the stern-part with the finger-board of the cello at his chin. He sat, ran his bow slowly over the strings, making them talk in a magic, celestial voice, and thought about happiness...