The Ghost Ship | Page 8

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 Drama Of Youth
I
For some days school had seemed to me even more tedious than usual.
The long train journey in the morning, the walk through Farringdon
Meat Market, which æsthetic butchers made hideous with mosaics of
the intestines of animals, as if the horror of suety pavements and
bloody sawdust did not suffice, the weariness of inventing lies that no
one believed to account for my lateness and neglected homework, and
the monotonous lessons that held me from my dreams without ever for
a single instant capturing my interest--all these things made me ill with
repulsion. Worst of all was the society of my cheerful, contented
comrades, to avoid which I was compelled to mope in deserted
corridors, the prey of a sorrow that could not be enjoyed, a hatred that
was in no way stimulating. At the best of times the atmosphere of the
place disgusted me. Desks, windows, and floors, and even the grass in
the quadrangle, were greasy with London soot, and there was nowhere
any clean air to breathe or smell. I hated the gritty asphalt that gave no
peace to my feet and cut my knees when my clumsiness made me fall. I
hated the long stone corridors whose echoes seemed to me to mock my
hesitating footsteps when I passed from one dull class to another. I
hated the stuffy malodorous classrooms, with their whistling gas-jets
and noise of inharmonious life. I would have hated the yellow fogs had
they not sometimes shortened the hours of my bondage. That five
hundred boys shared this horrible environment with me did