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 any more. 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 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 not abate my sufferings a jot; for
it was clear that they did not find it distasteful, and they
therefore became as unsympathetic for me as the smell and noise and
rotting stones of the school itself. The masters moved as it were in another world, and, as the classes
were large, they understood me as little as I understood them. They
knew that I was idle and untruthful, and they could not know that I
was as full of nerves as a girl, and that the mere task of getting to
school every morning made me physically sick. They punished me
repeatedly and in vain, for I found every hour I passed within the
walls of the school an overwhelming punishment in itself, and nothing
I made any difference to me.