Английский для смелых. Истории о духах и привидениях

 He did not pass it. A small discovery, as he reached it, annoyed and disturbed him. His gardener, as careful and punctilious as himself, never failed to house all his tools at the end of a day’s work. Yet there, under the Ilex, standing upright in moonlight brilliant enough to cast a shadow of it, was a spade.

Mr Batchel’s second thought was one of relief. After his extraordinary experiences in the library (he hardly knew now whether they had been real or not) something quite commonplace would act sedatively, and he determined to carry the spade to the tool-house.

The soil was quite dry, and the surface even a little frozen, so Mr Batchel left the path, walked up to the spade, and would have drawn it towards him. But it was as if he had made the attempt upon the trunk of the Ilex itself. The spade would not be moved. Then, first with one hand, and then with both, he tried to raise it, and still it stood firm. Mr Batchel, of course, attributed this to the frost, slight as it was. Wondering at the spade’s being there, and annoyed at its being frozen, he was about to leave it and continue his walk, when the remaining words of ‘The Compleat Gard’ner’ seemed rather to utter themselves, than to await his will —

‘So dig, that ye may obtain.’

Mr Batchel’s power of independent action now deserted him (/тут/ способность принимать самостоятельные решения: «способность независимого действия» покинула мистера Бэтчела; power – сила, мощь; способность

). He took the spade, which no longer resisted, and began to dig (он взял лопату, которая более не сопротивлялась, и начал копать). ‘Five spadefuls and no more,’ he said aloud

(пять лопат и не больше, – сказал он вслух). ‘This is all foolishness (это все глупость).’