"Valentin Katayev. The Cottage in the Steppe (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

the Italian flag at the stern, and Petya thought wistfully of the long ends
of his St. George ribbon which might have been streaming in the wind.
The fresh sea breeze was already ruffling his blouse. It caught at its
collar, it billowed it out on his back and puffed out the wide sleeves that
were fastened tightly at the wrists. Perhaps it was even nicer to have a
ciap without a ribbon, for now, by a slight stretch of imagination, it could
be taken for the beret of the Boy Captain, the hero of Jules Verne's famous
book, with the .added advantage that there was la letter under its lining.
It was almost as if fate had decided to make this an even more
memorable day for Petya and it presented him with another unforgettable
impression.
"Look, look! He's flying!" Pavlik shouted.
"Who's flying? Where?"
"There, it's Utochkin!"
It had completely slipped Petya's mind that this was the day of
Utochkin's long-awaited flight from Odessa to Dofinovka. The fearless
aviator had been waiting for good flying weather to take off from the Fair
grounds in his Farman, fly eleven miles straight across the bay, and land in
Dofinovka. It was not every boy that had the luck to see this spectacle, not
from the shore, but from the sea.
Petya and the passengers who poured out of their cabins saw Utochkin's
plane flying low over the water. It had just taken off and was now
approaching the ship. It flew so close to the stern that the rays of the
setting sun caught at the clearly visible bicycle wheels of the flying
machine, the copper fuel tank, and the bent figure of the pilot, his feet
dangling as he sat between the semi-transparent yellow wings.
As he came abreast of the ship the daredevil aviator doffed his leather
helmet and waved.
"Hurrah!" Petya yelled and was ready to pull his cap off too, but
suddenly remembering the letter, clapped it on tighter instead.
"Hurrah!" the passengers shouted as they waved frantically. The flying
machine was getting smaller as it headed towards Dofinovka, a stream of blue
petrol smoke trailing in its wake.
Up till then Petya's travels had consisted of two visits to Grandma at
Yekaterinoslav and their yearly trips to Budaki, on the sea-shore near
Akkerman, where they spent their summer holidays. They made the journey to
Yekaterinoslav by train, and travelled to Akkerman by sea on the Turgenev,
which they considered the latest thing in technical wonders. Now they were
sailing from Odessa to Naples on an ocean liner. To tell the truth, the
Palermo wasn't that at all. But, since she had made several transatlantic
voyages, Petya, by a slight stretch of imagination, convinced himself and
tried hard to convince the others that the Palermo was really an ocean
liner.
The journey was to take two weeks, which seemed quite a long time for
such a swift ship as the prospectuses and advertisements would have one
believe she was.
The point was that when the signer in the grey morning coat sold the
steamship tickets to Vasily Petrovich he innocently failed to mention that
the Palermo was not exactly a passenger ship, but was, rather, a freighter
that took on passengers, and that it was to make fairly long calls at a