Array Коллектив авторов - 75 лучших рассказов / 75 Best Short Stories

After that Captain showed us some of the curiosities he had brought back from foreign parts, and we were greatly amazed, though afterwards I couldn’t clearly remember what they were. And then I found myself walking across the turnips with parson, and I was telling him of the glories of the deep that I had seen through the window of the ship. He turned on me severely. ‘If I were you, John Simmons,’ he said, ‘I should go straight home to bed.’ He has a way of putting things that wouldn’t occur to an ordinary man, has parson, and I did as he told me.

Well, next day it came on to blow, and it blew harder and harder, till about eight o’clock at night I heard a noise and looked out into the garden. I dare say you won’t believe me, it seems a bit tall even to me, but the wind had lifted the thatch of my pigsty into the widow’s garden a second time. I thought I wouldn’t wait to hear what widow had to say about it, so I went across the green to the ‘Fox and Grapes’, and the wind was so strong that I danced along on tiptoe like a girl at the fair. When I got to the inn landlord had to help me shut the door; it seemed as though a dozen goats were pushing against it to come in out of the storm.

‘It’s a powerful tempest,’ he said, drawing the beer. ‘I hear there’s a chimney down at Dickory End.’

‘It’s a funny thing how these sailors know about the weather,’ I answered. ‘When Captain said he was going tonight, I was thinking it would take a capful of wind to carry the ship back to sea, but now here’s more than a capful.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said landlord, ‘it’s tonight he goes true enough, and, mind you, though he treated me handsome over the rent, I’m not sure it’s a loss to the village. I don’t hold with gentrice who fetch their drink from London instead of helping local traders to get their living.’

‘But you haven’t got any rum like his,’ I said, to draw him out.

His neck grew red above his collar, and I was afraid I’d gone too far; but after a while he got his breath with a grunt.

‘John Simmons,’ he said, ‘if you’ve come down here this windy night to talk a lot of fool’s talk, you’ve wasted a journey.’

Well, of course, then I had to smooth him down with praising his rum, and Heaven forgive me for swearing it was better than Captain’s. For the like of that rum no living lips have tasted save mine and parson’s. But somehow or other I brought landlord round, and presently we must have a glass of his best to prove its quality.

‘Beat that if you can!’ he cried, and we both raised our glasses to our mouths, only to stop half-way and look at each other in amaze. For the wind that had been howling outside like an outrageous dog had all of a sudden turned as melodious as the carol-boys of a Christmas Eve.

‘Surely that’s not my Martha,’ whispered landlord; Martha being his great-aunt that lived in the loft overhead.

We went to the door, and the wind burst it open so that the handle was driven clean into the plaster of the wall. But we didn’t think about that at the time; for over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars, was the ship that had passed the summer in landlord’s field. Her portholes and her bay-window were blazing with lights, and there was a noise of singing and fiddling on her decks. ‘He’s gone,’ shouted landlord above the storm, ‘and he’s taken half the village with him!’ I could only nod in answer, not having lungs like bellows of leather.

In the morning we were able to measure the strength of the storm, and over and above my pigsty there was damage enough wrought in the village to keep us busy. True it is that the children had to break down no branches for the firing that autumn, since the wind had strewn the woods with more than they could carry away. Many of our ghosts were scattered abroad, but this time very few came back, all the young men having sailed with Captain; and not only ghosts, for a poor half-witted lad was missing, and we reckoned that he had stowed himself away or perhaps shipped as cabin-boy, not knowing any better.

What with the lamentations of the ghost-girls and the grumbling of families who had lost an ancestor, the village was upset for a while, and the funny thing was that it was the folk who had complained most of the carryings-on of the youngsters, who made most noise now that they were gone. I hadn’t any sympathy with shoemaker or butcher, who ran about saying how much they missed their lads, but it made me grieve to hear the poor bereaved girls calling their lovers by name on the village green at nightfall. It didn’t seem fair to me that they should have lost their men a second time, after giving up life in order to join them, as like as not. Still, not even a spirit can be sorry for ever, and after a few months we made up our mind that the folk who had sailed in the ship were never coming back, and we didn’t talk about it anymore.

And then one day, I dare say it would be a couple of years after, when the whole business was quite forgotten, who should come trapesing along the road from Portsmouth but the daft lad who had gone away with the ship, without waiting till he was dead to become a ghost. You never saw such a boy as that in all your life. He had a great rusty cutlass hanging to a string at his waist, and he was tattooed all over in fine colours, so that even his face looked like a girl’s sampler. He had a handkerchief in his hand full of foreign shells and old-fashioned pieces of small money, very curious, and he walked up to the well outside his mother’s house and drew himself a drink as if he had been nowhere in particular.

The worst of it was that he had come back as soft-headed as he went, and try as we might we couldn’t get anything reasonable out of him. He talked a lot of gibberish about keel-hauling and walking the plank and crimson murders – things which a decent sailor should know nothing about, so that it seemed to me that for all his manners Captain had been more of a pirate than a gentleman mariner. But to draw sense out of that boy was as hard as picking cherries off a crab-tree. One silly tale he had that he kept on drifting back to, and to hear him you would have thought that it was the only thing that happened to him in his life. ‘We was at anchor,’ he would say, ‘off an island called the Basket of Flowers, and the sailors had caught a lot of parrots and we were teaching them to swear. Up and down the decks, up and down the decks, and the language they used was dreadful. Then we looked up and saw the masts of the Spanish ship outside the harbour. Outside the harbour they were, so we threw the parrots into the sea and sailed out to fight. And all the parrots were drownded in the sea and the language they used was dreadful.’ That’s the sort of boy he was, nothing but silly talk of parrots when we asked him about the fighting. And we never had a chance of teaching him better, for two days after he ran away again, and hasn’t been seen since.

That’s my story, and I assure you that things like that are happening at Fairfield all the time. The ship has never come back, but somehow as people grow older they seem to think that one of these windy nights she’ll come sailing in over the hedges with all the lost ghosts on board. Well, when she comes, she’ll be welcome. There’s one ghost-lass that has never grown tired of waiting for her lad to return. Every night you’ll see her out on the green, straining her poor eyes with looking for the mast-lights among the stars. A faithful lass you’d call her, and I’m thinking you’d be right.

Landlord’s field wasn’t a penny the worse for the visit, but they do say that since then the turnips that have been grown in it have tasted of rum.

A Mathematical Demonstration