«Дракула» и другие лучшие мистические истории на английском. Коллектив авторовЧитать онлайн книгу.
they were only duty calls, I did not go.
– I came up here an hour ago with Lucy, and we had a most interesting talk with my old friend and the two others who always come and join him. He is evidently the Sir Oracle of them, and I should think must have been in his time a most dictatorial person.
He will not admit anything, and down faces everybody. If he can’t out-argue them he bullies them, and then takes their silence for agreement with his views.
Lucy was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock. She has got a beautiful colour since she has been here.
I noticed that the old men did not lose any time in coming and sitting near her when we sat down. She is so sweet with old people, I think they all fell in love with her on the spot. Even my old man succumbed and did not contradict her, but gave me double share instead. I got him on the subject of the legends, and he went off at once into a sort of sermon. I must try to remember it and put it down.
‘It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel[15], that’s what it be and nowt else. These bans an’ wafts an’ boh-ghosts an’ bar-guests an’ bogles an’ all anent them is only fit to set bairns[16] an’ dizzy women a’belderin’[17]. They be nowt but air-blebs. They, an’ all grims an’ signs an’ warnin’s, be all invented by parsons an’ illsome berk-bodies an’ railway touters[18] to skeer[19] an’ scunner hafflin’s[20], an’ to get folks to do somethin’ that they don’t other incline to. It makes me ireful to think o’ them. Why, it’s them that, not content with printin’ lies on paper an’ preachin’ them out of pulpits, does want to be cuttin’ them on the tombstones. Look here all around you in what airt ye will. All them steans[21], holdin’ up their heads as well as they can out of their pride, is acant[22], simply tumblin’ down with the weight o’ the lies wrote on them, ‘Here lies the body’ or ‘Sacred to the memory’ wrote on all of them, an’ yet in nigh half of them there bean’t no bodies at all, an’ the memories of them bean’t cared a pinch of snuff about, much less sacred. Lies all of them, nothin’ but lies of one kind or another! My gog, but it’ll be a quare scowderment[23] at the Day of Judgment when they come tumblin’ up in their death-sarks, all jouped[24] together an’ trying’ to drag their tombsteans with them to prove how good they was, some of them trimmlin’ an’ dithering, with their hands that dozzened an’ slippery from lyin’ in the sea that they can’t even keep their gurp o’ them.’
I could see from the old fellow’s self-satisfied air and the way in which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was ‘showing off,’ so I put in a word to keep him going.
‘Oh, Mr. Swales, you can’t be serious. Surely these tombstones are not all wrong?’
‘Yabblins[25]! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin’ where they make out the people too good, for there be folk that do think a balm-bowl[26] be like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing be only lies. Now look you here. You come here a stranger, an’ you see this kirkgarth.[27]’
I nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not quite understand his dialect. I knew it had something to do with the church.
He went on, ‘And you consate[28] that all these steans be aboon folk that be haped here[29], snod an’ snog?’[30] I assented again. ‘Then that be just where the lie comes in. Why, there be scores of these laybeds that be toom[31] as old Dun’s ‘baccabox[32] on Friday night.’
He nudged one of his companions, and they all laughed. ‘And, my gog! How could they be otherwise? Look at that one, the aftest abaft[33] the bier-bank[34], read it!’
I went over and read, ‘Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by pirates off the coast of Andres, April, 1854, age 30.’ When I came back Mr. Swales went on,
‘Who brought him home, I wonder, to hap him here? Murdered off the coast of Andres! An’ you consated his body lay under! Why, I could name ye a dozen whose bones lie in the Greenland seas above,’ he pointed northwards, ‘or where the currants may have drifted them. There be the steans around ye. Ye can, with your young eyes, read the small print of the lies from here. This Braithwaite Lowery, I knew his father, lost in the Lively off Greenland in ’20, or Andrew Woodhouse, drowned in the same seas in 1777, or John Paxton, drowned off Cape Farewell a year later, or old John Rawlings, whose grandfather sailed with me, drowned in the Gulf of Finland in ’50. Do ye think that all these men will have to make a rush to Whitby when the trumpet sounds? I have me antherums[35] aboot it! I tell ye that when they got here they’d be jommlin’ and jostlin’[36] one another that way that it ’ud be like a fight up on the ice in the old days, when we’d be at one another from daylight to dark, an’ tryin’ to tie up our cuts by the aurora borealis.’ This was evidently local pleasantry, for the old man cackled over it, and his cronies joined in with gusto.
‘But,’ I said, ‘surely you are not quite correct, for you start on the assumption that all the poor people, or their
lock, stock, and barrel – everything, all of it
bairns – children
a’belderin’ – crying
touters – here: crooks
skeer = scare
hafflin – youth
steans – tombstones
acant – crooked
scowderment – chaos, confusion
jouped – jumbled
Yabblins — possibly
balm-bowl – chamber pot
kirkgarth – churchyard
consate — imagine
be happed here – are buried here
snod an’ snog – smooth and compact
toom – empty
baccabox – mouth
aftest abaft – near stern
bier-bank – churchyard path
antherums – doubts
jommling and jostling – jamming and pushing