5. MR. SKELMERSDALE IN FAIRYLAND
"There's a man in that shop," said the Doctor, "who has been inFairyland."
"Nonsense!" I said, and stared back at the shop. It was the usualvillage shop, post-office, telegraph wire on its brow, zinc pans andbrushes outside, boots, shirtings, and potted meats in the window. "Tellme about it," I said, after a pause.
"_I_ don't know," said the Doctor. "He's an ordinary sort oflout--Skelmersdale is his name. But everybody about here believes itlike Bible truth."
I reverted presently to the topic.
"I know nothing about it," said the Doctor, "and I don't WANT to know. Iattended him for a broken finger--Married and Single cricket match--andthat's when I struck the nonsense. That's all. But it shows you the sortof stuff I have to deal with, anyhow, eh? Nice to get modern sanitaryideas into a people like this!"
"Very," I said in a mildly sympathetic tone, and he went on to tell meabout that business of the Bonham drain. Things of that kind, I observe,are apt to weigh on the minds of Medical Officers of Health. I was assympathetic as I knew how, and when he called the Bonham people "asses,"I said they were "thundering asses," but even that did not allay him.
Afterwards, later in the summer, an urgent desire to seclude myself,while finishing my chapter on Spiritual Pathology--it was really, Ibelieve, stiffer to write than it is to read--took me to Bignor. Ilodged at a farmhouse, and presently found myself outside that littlegeneral shop again, in search of tobacco. "Skelmersdale," said I tomyself at the sight of it, and went in.
I was served by a short, but shapely, young man, with a fair downycomplexion, good, small teeth, blue eyes, and a languid manner. Iscrutinised him curiously. Except for a touch of melancholy inhis expression, he was nothing out of the common. He was in theshirt-sleeves and tucked-up apron of his trade, and a pencil was thrustbehind his inoffensive ear. Athwart his black waistcoat was a goldchain, from which dangled a bent guinea.
"Nothing more to-day, sir?" he inquired. He leant forward over my billas he spoke.
"Are you Mr. Skelmersdale?" said I.
"I am, sir," he said, without looking up.
"Is it true that you have been in Fairyland?"
He looked up at me for a moment with wrinkled brows, with an aggrieved,exasperated face. "O SHUT it!" he said, and, after a moment ofhostility, eye to eye, he went on adding up my bill. "Four, six and ahalf," he said, after a pause. "Thank you, Sir."
So, unpropitiously, my acquaintance with Mr. Skelmersdale began.
Well, I got from that to confidence--through a series of toilsomeefforts. I picked him up again in the Village Room, where of a nightI went to play billiards after my supper, and mitigate the extremeseclusion from my kind that was so helpful to work during the day. Icontrived to play with him and afterwards to talk with him. I found theone subject to avoid was Fairyland. On everything else he was openand amiable in a commonplace sort of way, but on that he had beenworried--it was a manifest taboo. Only once in the room did I hear theslightest allusion to his experience in his presence, and that was bya cross-grained farm hand who was losing to him. Skelmersdale had runa break into double figures, which, by the Bignor standards, wasuncommonly good play. "Steady on!" said his adversary. "None of yourfairy flukes!"
Skelmersdale stared at him for a moment, cue in hand, then flung it downand walked out of the room.
"Why can't you leave 'im alone?" said a respectable elder who had beenenjoying the game, and in the general murmur of disapproval the grin ofsatisfied wit faded from the ploughboy's face.
I scented my opportunity. "What's this joke," said I, "about Fairyland?"
"'Tain't no joke about Fairyland, not to young Skelmersdale," said therespectable elder, drinking. A little man with rosy cheeks was morecommunicative. "They DO say, sir," he said, "that they took him intoAldington Knoll an' kep' him there a matter of three weeks."
And with that the gathering was well under weigh. Once one sheep hadstarted, others were ready enough to follow, and in a little time Ihad at least the exterior aspect of the Skelmersdale affair. Formerly,before he came to Bignor, he had been in that very similar little shopat Aldington Corner, and there whatever it was did happen had takenplace. The story was clear that he had stayed out late one night onthe Knoll and vanished for three weeks from the sight of men, and hadreturned with "his cuffs as clean as when he started," and his pocketsfull of dust and ashes. He returned in a state of moody wretchednessthat only slowly passed away, and for many days he would give no accountof where it was he had been. The girl he was engaged to at ClaptonHill tried to get it out of him, and threw him over partly because herefused, and partly because, as she said, he fairly gave her the "'ump."And then when, some time after, he let out to some one carelessly thathe had been in Fairyland and wanted to go back, and when the thingspread and the simple badinage of the countryside came into play, hethrew up his situation abruptly, and came to Bignor to get out of thefuss. But as to what had happened in Fairyland none of these peopleknew. There the gathering in the Village Room went to pieces like a packat fault. One said this, and another said that.
Their air in dealing with this marvel was ostensibly critical andsceptical, but I could see a considerable amount of belief showingthrough their guarded qualifications. I took a line of intelligentinterest, tinged with a reasonable doubt of the whole story.
"If Fairyland's inside Aldington Knoll," I said, "why don't you dig itout?"
"That's what I says," said the young ploughboy.
"There's a-many have tried to dig on Aldington Knoll," said therespectable elder, solemnly, "one time and another. But there's none asgoes about to-day to tell what they got by digging."
The unanimity of vague belief that surrounded me was rather impressive;I felt there must surely be SOMETHING at the root of so much conviction,and the already pretty keen curiosity I felt about the real facts of thecase was distinctly whetted. If these real facts were to be got from anyone, they were to be got from Skelmersdale himself; and I set myself,therefore, still more assiduously to efface the first bad impressionI had made and win his confidence to the pitch of voluntary speech. Inthat endeavour I had a social advantage. Being a person of affabilityand no apparent employment, and wearing tweeds and knickerbockers, I wasnaturally classed as an artist in Bignor, and in the remarkable codeof social precedence prevalent in Bignor an artist ranks considerablyhigher than a grocer's assistant. Skelmersdale, like too many of hisclass, is something of a snob; he had told me to "shut it," only undersudden, excessive provocation, and with, I am certain, a subsequentrepentance; he was, I knew, quite glad to be seen walking about thevillage with me. In due course, he accepted the proposal of a pipe andwhisky in my rooms readily enough, and there, scenting by some happyinstinct that there was trouble of the heart in this, and knowing thatconfidences beget confidences, I plied him with much of interest andsuggestion from my real and fictitious past. And it was after the thirdwhisky of the third visit of that sort, if I remember rightly, that apropos of some artless expansion of a little affair that had touchedand left me in my teens, that he did at last, of his own free will andmotion, break the ice. "It was like that with me," he said, "over thereat Aldington. It's just that that's so rum. First I didn't care a bitand it was all her, and afterwards, when it was too late, it was, in amanner of speaking, all me."
I forbore to jump upon this allusion, and so he presently threw outanother, and in a little while he was making it as plain as daylightthat the one thing he wanted to talk about now was this Fairylandadventure he had sat tight upon for so long. You see, I'd done thetrick with him, and from being just another half-incredulous, would-befacetious stranger, I had, by all my wealth of shameless self-exposure,become the possible confidant. He had been bitten by the desire to showthat he, too, had lived and felt many things, and the fever was uponhim.
He was certainly confoundedly allusive at first, and my eagernessto clear him up with a few precise questions was only equalled andcontrolled by my anxiety not to get to
this sort of thing too soon. Butin another meeting or so the basis of confidence was complete; and fromfirst to last I think I got most of the items and aspects--indeed, I gotquite a number of times over almost everything that Mr. Skelmersdale,with his very limited powers of narration, will ever be able to tell.And so I come to the story of his adventure, and I piece it all togetheragain. Whether it really happened, whether he imagined it or dreamt it,or fell upon it in some strange hallucinatory trance, I do not professto say. But that he invented it I will not for one moment entertain.The man simply and honestly believes the thing happened as he says ithappened; he is transparently incapable of any lie so elaborateand sustained, and in the belief of the simple, yet often keenlypenetrating, rustic minds about him I find a very strong confirmation ofhis sincerity. He believes--and nobody can produce any positive fact tofalsify his belief. As for me, with this much of endorsement, I transmithis story--I am a little old now to justify or explain.
He says he went to sleep on Aldington Knoll about ten o'clock onenight--it was quite possibly Midsummer night, though he has neverthought of the date, and he cannot be sure within a week or so--and itwas a fine night and windless, with a rising moon. I have been atthe pains to visit this Knoll thrice since his story grew up under mypersuasions, and once I went there in the twilight summer moonrise onwhat was, perhaps, a similar night to that of his adventure. Jupiter wasgreat and splendid above the moon, and in the north and northwest thesky was green and vividly bright over the sunken sun. The Knoll standsout bare and bleak under the sky, but surrounded at a little distance bydark thickets, and as I went up towards it there was a mighty startingand scampering of ghostly or quite invisible rabbits. Just overthe crown of the Knoll, but nowhere else, was a multitudinous thintrumpeting of midges. The Knoll is, I believe, an artificial mound,the tumulus of some great prehistoric chieftain, and surely no man everchose a more spacious prospect for a sepulchre. Eastward one sees alongthe hills to Hythe, and thence across the Channel to where, thirty milesand more perhaps, away, the great white lights by Gris Nez and Boulognewink and pass and shine. Westward lies the whole tumbled valley of theWeald, visible as far as Hindhead and Leith Hill, and the valley of theStour opens the Downs in the north to interminable hills beyond Wye.All Romney Marsh lies southward at one's feet, Dymchurch and Romney andLydd, Hastings and its hill are in the middle distance, and the hillsmultiply vaguely far beyond where Eastbourne rolls up to Beachy Head.
And out upon all this it was that Skelmersdale wandered, being troubledin his earlier love affair, and as he says, "not caring WHERE he went."And there he sat down to think it over, and so, sulking and grieving,was overtaken by sleep. And so he fell into the fairies' power.
The quarrel that had upset him was some trivial matter enough betweenhimself and the girl at Clapton Hill to whom he was engaged. She wasa farmer's daughter, said Skelmersdale, and "very respectable," andno doubt an excellent match for him; but both girl and lover were veryyoung and with just that mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen edge ofcriticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection, thatlife and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull. What the precisematter of quarrel was I have no idea. She may have said she liked men ingaiters when he hadn't any gaiters on, or he may have said he liked herbetter in a different sort of hat, but however it began, it got bya series of clumsy stages to bitterness and tears. She no doubt gottearful and smeary, and he grew dusty and drooping, and she parted withinvidious comparisons, grave doubts whether she ever had REALLY caredfor him, and a clear certainty she would never care again. And with thissort of thing upon his mind he came out upon Aldington Knoll grieving,and presently, after a long interval, perhaps, quite inexplicably, fellasleep.
He woke to find himself on a softer turf than ever he had slept onbefore, and under the shade of very dark trees that completely hid thesky. Always, indeed, in Fairyland the sky is hidden, it seems. Exceptfor one night when the fairies were dancing, Mr. Skelmersdale, duringall his time with them, never saw a star. And of that night I am indoubt whether he was in Fairyland proper or out where the rings andrushes are, in those low meadows near the railway line at Smeeth.
But it was light under these trees for all that, and on the leaves andamidst the turf shone a multitude of glow-worms, very bright and fine.Mr. Skelmersdale's first impression was that he was SMALL, and the nextthat quite a number of people still smaller were standing all about him.For some reason, he says, he was neither surprised nor frightened, butsat up quite deliberately and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Andthere all about him stood the smiling elves who had caught him sleepingunder their privileges and had brought him into Fairyland.
What these elves were like I have failed to gather, so vague andimperfect is his vocabulary, and so unobservant of all minor detaildoes he seem to have been. They were clothed in something very light andbeautiful, that was neither wool, nor silk, nor leaves, nor the petalsof flowers. They stood all about him as he sat and waked, and down theglade towards him, down a glow-worm avenue and fronted by a star, cameat once that Fairy Lady who is the chief personage of his memory andtale. Of her I gathered more. She was clothed in filmy green, and abouther little waist was a broad silver girdle. Her hair waved back fromher forehead on either side; there were curls not too wayward and yetastray, and on her brow was a little tiara, set with a single star. Hersleeves were some sort of open sleeves that gave little glimpses of herarms; her throat, I think, was a little displayed, because he speaks ofthe beauty of her neck and chin. There was a necklace of coral abouther white throat, and in her breast a coral-coloured flower. She had thesoft lines of a little child in her chin and cheeks and throat. Andher eyes, I gather, were of a kindled brown, very soft and straight andsweet under her level brows. You see by these particulars how greatlythis lady must have loomed in Mr. Skelmersdale's picture. Certain thingshe tried to express and could not express; "the way she moved," he saidseveral times; and I fancy a sort of demure joyousness radiated fromthis Lady.
And it was in the company of this delightful person, as the guest andchosen companion of this delightful person, that Mr. Skelmersdale setout to be taken into the intimacies of Fairyland. She welcomed himgladly and a little warmly--I suspect a pressure of his hand in both ofhers and a lit face to his. After all, ten years ago young Skelmersdalemay have been a very comely youth. And once she took his arm, and once,I think, she led him by the hand adown the glade that the glow-wormslit.
Just how things chanced and happened there is no telling from Mr.Skelmersdale's disarticulated skeleton of description. He gives littleunsatisfactory glimpses of strange corners and doings, of places wherethere were many fairies together, of "toadstool things that shone pink,"of fairy food, of which he could only say "you should have tastedit!" and of fairy music, "like a little musical box," that came out ofnodding flowers. There was a great open place where fairies rode andraced on "things," but what Mr. Skelmersdale meant by "these here thingsthey rode," there is no telling. Larvae, perhaps, or crickets, or thelittle beetles that elude us so abundantly. There was a place wherewater splashed and gigantic king-cups grew, and there in the hottertimes the fairies bathed together. There were games being played anddancing and much elvish love-making, too, I think, among the moss-branchthickets. There can be no doubt that the Fairy Lady made love to Mr.Skelmersdale, and no doubt either that this young man set himself toresist her. A time came, indeed, when she sat on a bank beside him, ina quiet, secluded place "all smelling of vi'lets," and talked to him oflove.
"When her voice went low and she whispered," said Mr. Skelmersdale, "andlaid 'er 'and on my 'and, you know, and came close with a soft, warmfriendly way she 'ad, it was as much as I could do to keep my 'ead."
It seems he kept his head to a certain limited unfortunate extent. Hesaw "'ow the wind was blowing," he says, and so, sitting there in aplace all smelling of violets, with the touch of this lovely Fairy Ladyabout him, Mr. Skelmersdale broke it to her gently--that he was engaged!
She had told him she loved
him dearly, that he was a sweet human lad forher, and whatever he would ask of her he should have--even his heart'sdesire.
And Mr. Skelmersdale, who, I fancy, tried hard to avoid looking at herlittle lips as they just dropped apart and came together, led up to themore intimate question by saying he would like enough capital to start alittle shop. He'd just like to feel, he said, he had money enough to dothat. I imagine a little surprise in those brown eyes he talkedabout, but she seemed sympathetic for all that, and she asked him manyquestions about the little shop, "laughing like" all the time. So he gotto the complete statement of his affianced position, and told her allabout Millie.
"All?" said I.
"Everything," said Mr. Skelmersdale, "just who she was, and where shelived, and everything about her. I sort of felt I 'ad to all the time, Idid."
"'Whatever you want you shall have,' said the Fairy Lady. 'That's asgood as done. You SHALL feel you have the money just as you wish. Andnow, you know--YOU MUST KISS ME.'"
And Mr. Skelmersdale pretended not to hear the latter part of herremark, and said she was very kind. That he really didn't deserve sheshould be so kind. And--
The Fairy Lady suddenly came quite close to him and whispered, "Kissme!"
"And," said Mr. Skelmersdale, "like a fool, I did."
There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quitethe other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard. There wassomething magic in that kiss; assuredly it marked a turning point.At any rate, this is one of the passages that he thought sufficientlyimportant to describe most at length. I have tried to get it right, Ihave tried to disentangle it from the hints and gestures through whichit came to me, but I have no doubt that it was all different from mytelling and far finer and sweeter, in the soft filtered light and thesubtly stirring silences of the fairy glades. The Fairy Lady asked himmore about Millie, and was she very lovely, and so on--a great manytimes. As to Millie's loveliness, I conceive him answering that she was"all right." And then, or on some such occasion, the Fairy Lady told himshe had fallen in love with him as he slept in the moonlight, and sohe had been brought into Fairyland, and she had thought, not knowing ofMillie, that perhaps he might chance to love her. "But now you know youcan't," she said, "so you must stop with me just a little while, andthen you must go back to Millie." She told him that, and you knowSkelmersdale was already in love with her, but the pure inertia of hismind kept him in the way he was going. I imagine him sitting in a sortof stupefaction amidst all these glowing beautiful things, answeringabout his Millie and the little shop he projected and the need of ahorse and cart.... And that absurd state of affairs must have gone onfor days and days. I see this little lady, hovering about him and tryingto amuse him, too dainty to understand his complexity and too tenderto let him go. And he, you know, hypnotised as it were by his earthlyposition, went his way with her hither and thither, blind to everythingin Fairyland but this wonderful intimacy that had come to him. It ishard, it is impossible, to give in print the effect of her radiantsweetness shining through the jungle of poor Skelmersdale's rough andbroken sentences. To me, at least, she shone clear amidst the muddle ofhis story like a glow-worm in a tangle of weeds.
There must have been many days of things while all this washappening--and once, I say, they danced under the moonlight in the fairyrings that stud the meadows near Smeeth--but at last it all came to anend. She led him into a great cavernous place, lit by a red nightlightsort of thing, where there were coffers piled on coffers, and cupsand golden boxes, and a great heap of what certainly seemed to all Mr.Skelmersdale's senses--coined gold. There were little gnomes amidst thiswealth, who saluted her at her coming, and stood aside. And suddenly sheturned on him there with brightly shining eyes.
"And now," she said, "you have been kind to stay with me so long, and itis time I let you go. You must go back to your Millie. You must go backto your Millie, and here--just as I promised you--they will give yougold."
"She choked like," said Mr. Skelmersdale. "At that, I had a sort offeeling--" (he touched his breastbone) "as though I was fainting here.I felt pale, you know, and shivering, and even then--I 'adn't a thing tosay."
He paused. "Yes," I said.
The scene was beyond his describing. But I know that she kissed himgood-bye.
"And you said nothing?"
"Nothing," he said. "I stood like a stuffed calf. She just looked backonce, you know, and stood smiling like and crying--I could see theshine of her eyes--and then she was gone, and there was all these littlefellows bustling about me, stuffing my 'ands and my pockets and the backof my collar and everywhere with gold."
And then it was, when the Fairy Lady had vanished, that Mr. Skelmersdalereally understood and knew. He suddenly began plucking out the goldthey were thrusting upon him, and shouting out at them to prevent theirgiving him more. "'I don't WANT yer gold,' I said. 'I 'aven't done yet.I'm not going. I want to speak to that Fairy Lady again.' I started offto go after her and they held me back. Yes, stuck their little 'andsagainst my middle and shoved me back. They kept giving me more and moregold until it was running all down my trouser legs and dropping out ofmy 'ands. 'I don't WANT yer gold,' I says to them, 'I want just to speakto the Fairy Lady again.'"
"And did you?"
"It came to a tussle."
"Before you saw her?"
"I didn't see her. When I got out from them she wasn't anywhere to beseen."
So he ran in search of her out of this red-lit cave, down a long grotto,seeking her, and thence he came out in a great and desolate placeathwart which a swarm of will-o'-the-wisps were flying to and fro. Andabout him elves were dancing in derision, and the little gnomes came outof the cave after him, carrying gold in handfuls and casting it afterhim, shouting, "Fairy love and fairy gold! Fairy love and fairy gold!"
And when he heard these words, came a great fear that it was all over,and he lifted up his voice and called to her by her name, and suddenlyset himself to run down the slope from the mouth of the cavern, througha place of thorns and briers, calling after her very loudly and often.The elves danced about him unheeded, pinching him and pricking him, andthe will-o'-the-wisps circled round him and dashed into his face, andthe gnomes pursued him shouting and pelting him with fairy gold. As heran with all this strange rout about him and distracting him, suddenlyhe was knee-deep in a swamp, and suddenly he was amidst thick twistedroots, and he caught his foot in one and stumbled and fell....
He fell and he rolled over, and in that instant he found himselfsprawling upon Aldington Knoll, all lonely under the stars.
He sat up sharply at once, he says, and found he was very stiff andcold, and his clothes were damp with dew. The first pallor of dawn anda chilly wind were coming up together. He could have believed the wholething a strangely vivid dream until he thrust his hand into his sidepocket and found it stuffed with ashes. Then he knew for certain itwas fairy gold they had given him. He could feel all their pinches andpricks still, though there was never a bruise upon him. And in thatmanner, and so suddenly, Mr. Skelmersdale came out of Fairyland backinto this world of men. Even then he fancied the thing was but thematter of a night until he returned to the shop at Aldington Corner anddiscovered amidst their astonishment that he had been away three weeks.
"Lor'! the trouble I 'ad!" said Mr. Skelmersdale.
"How?"
"Explaining. I suppose you've never had anything like that to explain."
"Never," I said, and he expatiated for a time on the behaviour of thisperson and that. One name he avoided for a space.
"And Millie?" said I at last.
"I didn't seem to care a bit for seeing Millie," he said.
"I expect she seemed changed?"
"Every one was changed. Changed for good. Every one seemed big, youknow, and coarse. And their voices seemed loud. Why, the sun, when itrose in the morning, fair hit me in the eye!"
"And Millie?"
"I didn't want to see Millie."
"And when you did?"
"I
came up against her Sunday, coming out of church. 'Where you been?'she said, and I saw there was a row. _I_ didn't care if there was. Iseemed to forget about her even while she was there a-talking to me. Shewas just nothing. I couldn't make out whatever I 'ad seen in 'er ever,or what there could 'ave been. Sometimes when she wasn't about, I didget back a little, but never when she was there. Then it was always theother came up and blotted her out.... Anyow, it didn't break her heart."
"Married?" I asked.
"Married 'er cousin," said Mr. Skelmersdale, and reflected on thepattern of the tablecloth for a space.
When he spoke again it was clear that his former sweetheart had cleanvanished from his mind, and that the talk had brought back the FairyLady triumphant in his heart. He talked of her--soon he was letting outthe oddest things, queer love secrets it would be treachery to repeat. Ithink, indeed, that was the queerest thing in the whole affair, to hearthat neat little grocer man after his story was done, with a glass ofwhisky beside him and a cigar between his fingers, witnessing, withsorrow still, though now, indeed, with a time-blunted anguish, ofthe inappeasable hunger of the heart that presently came upon him. "Icouldn't eat," he said, "I couldn't sleep. I made mistakes in ordersand got mixed with change. There she was day and night, drawing me anddrawing me. Oh, I wanted her. Lord! how I wanted her! I was up there,most evenings I was up there on the Knoll, often even when it rained. Iused to walk over the Knoll and round it and round it, calling for themto let me in. Shouting. Near blubbering I was at times. Daft I wasand miserable. I kept on saying it was all a mistake. And every Sundayafternoon I went up there, wet and fine, though I knew as well as you doit wasn't no good by day. And I've tried to go to sleep there."
He stopped sharply and decided to drink some whisky.
"I've tried to go to sleep there," he said, and I could swear his lipstrembled. "I've tried to go to sleep there, often and often. And, youknow, I couldn't, sir--never. I've thought if I could go to sleep there,there might be something. But I've sat up there and laid up there, andI couldn't--not for thinking and longing. It's the longing.... I'vetried--"
He blew, drank up the rest of his whisky spasmodically, stood upsuddenly and buttoned his jacket, staring closely and critically at thecheap oleographs beside the mantel meanwhile. The little black notebookin which he recorded the orders of his daily round projected stifflyfrom his breast pocket. When all the buttons were quite done, he pattedhis chest and turned on me suddenly. "Well," he said, "I must be going."
There was something in his eyes and manner that was too difficult forhim to express in words. "One gets talking," he said at last at thedoor, and smiled wanly, and so vanished from my eyes. And that is thetale of Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland just as he told it to me.