75 лучших рассказов / 75 Best Short Stories

Dull? Well, you might find it dull, but I assure you that I’ve listened to all the London yarns you have spun tonight, and they’re absolutely nothing to the things that happen at Fairfield. It’s because of our way of thinking and minding our own business. If one of your Londoners were set down on the green of a Saturday night when the ghosts of the lads who died in the war keep tryst with the lasses who lie in the church-yard, he couldn’t help being curious and interfering, and then the ghosts would go somewhere where it was quieter. But we just let them come and go and don’t make any fuss, and in consequence Fairfield is the ghostiest place in all England. Why, I’ve seen a headless man sitting on the edge of the well in broad daylight, and the children playing about his feet as if he were their father. Take my word for it, spirits know when they are well off as much as human beings.

Still, I must admit that the thing I’m going to tell you about was queer even for our part of the world, where three packs of ghost-hounds hunt regularly during the season, and blacksmith’s great-grandfather is busy all night shoeing the dead gentlemen’s horses. Now that’s a thing that wouldn’t happen in London, because of their interfering ways, but blacksmith he lies up aloft and sleeps as quiet as a lamb. Once when he had a bad head he shouted down to them not to make so much noise, and in the morning he found an old guinea left on the anvil as an apology. He wears it on his watch-chain now. But I must get on with my story; if I start telling you about the queer happenings at Fairfield I’ll never stop.

It all came of the great storm in the spring of ’97, the year that we had two great storms. This was the first one, and I remember it very well, because I found in the morning that it had lifted the thatch of my pigsty into the widow’s garden as clean as a boy’s kite. When I looked over the hedge, widow – Tom Lamport’s widow that was – was prodding for her nasturtiums with a daisy-grubber. After I had watched her for a little I went down to the ‘Fox and Grapes’ to tell landlord what she had said to me. Landlord he laughed, being a married man and at ease with the sex. ‘Come to that,’ he said, ‘the tempest has blowed something into my field. A kind of a ship I think it would be.’

I was surprised at that until he explained that it was only a ghost-ship and would do no hurt to the turnips. We argued that it had been blown up from the sea at Portsmouth [410] , and then we talked of something else. There were two slates down at the parsonage and a big tree in Lumley’s meadow. It was a rare storm.

I reckon the wind had blown our ghosts all over England. They were coming back for days afterwards with foundered horses and as footsore as possible, and they were so glad to get back to Fairfield that some of them walked up the street crying like little children. Squire said that his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather hadn’t looked so dead-beat since the battle of Naseby [411] , and he’s an educated man.

What with one thing and another, I should think it was a week before we got straight again, and then one afternoon I met the landlord on the green and he had a worried face. ‘I wish you’d come and have a look at that ship in my field,’ he said to me; ‘it seems to me it’s leaning real hard on the turnips. I can’t bear thinking what the missus will say when she sees it.’

I walked down the lane with him, and sure enough there was a ship in the middle of his field, but such a ship as no man had seen on the water for three hundred years, let alone in the middle of a turnip-field. It was all painted black and covered with carvings, and there was a great bay window in the stern for all the world like the Squire’s drawing-room. There was a crowd of little black cannon on deck and looking out of her port-holes, and she was anchored at each end to the hard ground. I have seen the wonders of the world on picture-postcards, but I have never seen anything to equal that.

‘She seems very solid for a ghost-ship,’ I said, seeing the landlord was bothered.

‘I should say it’s a betwixt and between,’ he answered, puzzling it over, ‘but it’s going to spoil a matter of fifty turnips, and missus she’ll want it moved.’ We went up to her and touched the side, and it was as hard as a real ship. ‘Now there’s folks in England would call that very curious,’ he said.

Now I don’t know much about ships, but I should think that that ghost-ship weighed a solid two hundred tons, and it seemed to me that she had come to stay, so that I felt sorry for landlord, who was a married man. ‘All the horses in Fairfield won’t move her out of my turnips,’ he said, frowning at her.