"Bradbury, Ray - In A Season Of Calm Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

"We'll never have five thousand dollars."
"I know," he said quietly. "But it's nice thinking we might bring it
off someday. Wouldn't it be great to just step up to him, say 'Pablo, here's
five thousand! Give us the sea, the sand, that sky, or any old thing you want,
we'll be happy...'"
After a moment his wife touched his arm.
"I think you'd better go in the water now," she said.
"Yes," he said. "I'd better do just that."
White fire showered up when he cut the water.
During the afternoon George Smith came out and went into the ocean with
the vast spilling motions of now warm, now cool people who at last, with the
sun's decline, theirs bodies all lobster colors and colors of broiled squab and
guinea hen, trudged for their wedding-cake hotels.
The beach lay deserted for endless mile on mile save for two people.
One was George Smith, towel over shoulder, out for a last devotional.
Far along the shore another shorter, square-cut man walked alone in the
tranquil weather. He was deeper-tanned, his close-shaven head dyed almost
mahogany by the sun, and his eyes were clear and bright as water in his face.
So the shore-line stage was set, and in a few minutes the two men would
meet. And once again Fate fixed the scales for shocks and surprises, arrivals
and departures. And all the while these two solitary strollers did not for a
moment think on coincidence, that unswum stream which lingers at man's elbow
with every crowd in every town. Nor did they ponder the fact that if man dares
dip into that stream he grabs a wonder in each hand. Like most, they shrugged
at such folly and stayed well up the bank lest Fate should shove them in.
The stranger stood alone. Glancing about, he saw his aloneness, saw the
waters of the lovely bay, saw the sun sliding down the late colors of the day,
and then, half turning, spied a small wooden object on the sand. It was no more
than the slender stick from a lime ice cream delicacy long since melted away.
Smiling, he picked the stick up. With another glance around to reinsure his
solitude, the man stooped again and, holding the stick gently, with light
sweeps of his hand began to do the one thing in all the world he know best how
to do.
He began to draw incredible figures along the sand.
He sketched one figure and then moved over and, still looking down,
completely focused on his work now, drew a second and a third figure, and after
that a fourth and a fifth and a sixth.
George Smith, printing the shore line with his feet, gazed here, gazed
there, and then saw the man ahead. George Smith, drawing nearer, saw that the
man, deeply tanned, was bending down. Nearer yet, and it was obvious what the
man was up to. George Smith chuckled. Of course, of course... Alone on the
beach this man - how old? Sixty-five? Seventy? - was scribbling and doodling
away. How the sand flew! How the wild portraits flung themselves out there on
the shore! How...
George Smith took one more step and stopped, very still.
The stranger was drawing and drawing and did not seem to sense that
anyone stood immediately behind him and the world of his drawings in the sand.
By now he was so deeply enchanted with his solitudinous creation that depth
bombs set off in the bay might not have stopped his flying hand nor turned him
round.