75 лучших рассказов / 75 Best Short Stories

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.

The Tachypomp (Edward Page Mitchell)

A Mathematical Demonstration