Hence it is that the consciousness of this mystery, resolved into the
form of art, expresses itself usually (or always) by symbols, by the
part put for the whole. Now and then, as in the case of Dante, as it
was with the great romance-cycle of the Holy Graal, we have a sense
of completeness. With the vision of the Angelic Rose and the sentence
concerning that Love which moves the sun and the other stars there is
the shadow of a catholic survey of all things; and so in a less
degree it is as we read of the translation of Galahad. Still, the
Rose and the Graal are but symbols of the eternal verities, not those
verities themselves in their essences; and in these later days when
we have become clever--with the cleverness of the Performing Pig--it
is a great thing to find the most obscure and broken indications of
the things which really are. There is the true enchantment of true
romance in the Don Quixote--for those who can understand--but it is
delivered in the mode of parody and burlesque; and so it is with the
extraordinary fantasy, "The Ghost-Ship," which gives its name to this
collection of tales. Take this story to bits, as it were; analyse it;
you will be astonished at its frantic absurdity: the ghostly galleon
blown in by a great tempest to a turnip-patch in Fairfield, a little
village lying near the Portsmouth Road about half-way between London
and the sea; the farmer grumbling at the loss of so many turnips; the
captain of the weird vessel acknowledging the justice of the claim
and tossing a great gold brooch to the landlord by way of satisfying
the debt; the deplorable fact that all the decent village ghosts
learned to riot with Captain Bartholomew Roberts; the visit of the
parson and his godly admonitions to the Captain on the evil work he
was doing; mere craziness, you will say? Yes; but the strange thing is that as, in spite of all jocose tricks
and low-comedy misadventures, Don Quixote departs from us with a
great light shining upon him; so this ghost-ship of Richard
Middleton's, somehow or other, sails and anchors and re-sails in an
unearthly glow; and Captain Bartholomew's rum that was like hot oil
and honey and fire in the veins of the mortals who drank of it, has
become for me one of the _nobilium poculorum_ of story. And thus did
the ship put forth from the village and sail away in a great tempest
of wind--to what unimaginable seas of the spirit! 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. 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
    much of 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. I declare I would not exchange this short, crazy, enchanting fantasy
for a whole wilderness of seemly novels, proclaiming in decorous
accents the undoubted truth that there are milestones on the
Portsmouth Road. Arthur Machen. The Ghost-Ship

Fairfield is a little village lying near the Portsmouth Road about
half-way between London and the sea. Strangers who find it by
accident now and then, call it a pretty, old-fashioned place; we who
live in it and call it home don't find anything very pretty about it,
but we should be sorry to live anywhere else. Our minds have taken
the shape of the inn and the church and the green, I suppose. At all
events we never feel comfortable out of Fairfield. Of course the Cockneys, with their vasty houses and noise-ridden
streets, can call us rustics if they choose, but for all that
Fairfield is a better place to live in than London. Doctor says that
when he goes to London his mind is bruised with the weight of the
houses, and he was a Cockney born. He had to live there himself when
he was a little chap, but he knows better now. You gentlemen may
laugh--perhaps some of you come from London way--but it seems to me
that a witness like that is worth a gallon of arguments. 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, and then we
talked of something else. There were two slates down at the
parsonage and a big tree in Lumley's meadow.