“'Tain't no joke about Fairyland, not to young Skelmersdale,” said the
respectable elder, drinking. A little man with rosy cheeks was more
communicative. “They DO say, sir,” he said, “that they took him into
Aldington Knoll an' kep' him there a matter of three weeks.”
And with that the gathering was well under weigh. Once one sheep had
started, others were ready enough to follow, and in a little time I
had at least the exterior aspect of the Skelmersdale affair. Formerly,
before he came to Bignor, he had been in that very similar little shop
at Aldington Corner, and there whatever it was did happen had taken
place. The story was clear that he had stayed out late one night on
the Knoll and vanished for three weeks from the sight of men, and had
returned with “his cuffs as clean as when he started,” and his pockets
full of dust and ashes. He returned in a state of moody wretchedness
that only slowly passed away, and for many days he would give no account
of where it was he had been. The girl he was engaged to at Clapton
Hill tried to get it out of him, and threw him over partly because he
refused, 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 that
he had been in Fairyland and wanted to go back, and when the thing
spread and the simple badinage of the countryside came into play, he
threw up his situation abruptly, and came to Bignor to get out of the
fuss. But as to what had happened in Fairyland none of these people
knew. There the gathering in the Village Room went to pieces like a pack
at fault. One said this, and another said that.
Their air in dealing with this marvel was ostensibly critical and
sceptical, but I could see a considerable amount of belief showing
through their guarded qualifications. I took a line of intelligent
interest, tinged with a reasonable doubt of the whole story.
“If Fairyland's inside Aldington Knoll,” I said, “why don't you dig it
out?”
“That's what I says,” said the young ploughboy.
“There's a-many have tried to dig on Aldington Knoll,” said the
respectable elder, solemnly, “one time and another. But there's none as
goes 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 the
case was distinctly whetted. If these real facts were to be got from any
one, they were to be got from Skelmersdale himself; and I set myself,
therefore, still more assiduously to efface the first bad impression
I had made and win his confidence to the pitch of voluntary speech. In
that endeavour I had a social advantage. Being a person of affability
and no apparent employment, and wearing tweeds and knickerbockers, I was
naturally classed as an artist in Bignor, and in the remarkable code
of social precedence prevalent in Bignor an artist ranks considerably
higher than a grocer's assistant. Skelmersdale, like too many of his
class, is something of a snob; he had told me to “shut it,” only under
sudden, excessive provocation, and with, I am certain, a subsequent
repentance; he was, I knew, quite glad to be seen walking about the
village with me. In due course, he accepted the proposal of a pipe and
whisky in my rooms readily enough, and there, scenting by some happy
instinct that there was trouble of the heart in this, and knowing that
confidences beget confidences, I plied him with much of interest and
suggestion from my real and fictitious past. And it was after the third
whisky of the third visit of that sort, if I remember rightly, that a
propos of some artless expansion of a little affair that had touched
and left me in my teens, that he did at last, of his own free will and
motion, break the ice. “It was like that with me,” he said, “over there
at Aldington. It's just that that's so rum. First I didn't care a bit
and it was all her, and afterwards, when it was too late, it was, in a
manner of speaking, all me.”
I forbore to jump upon this allusion, and so he presently threw out
another, and in a little while he was making it as plain as daylight
that the one thing he wanted to talk about now was this Fairyland
adventure he had sat tight upon for so long. You see, I'd done the
trick with him, and from being just another half-incredulous, would-be
facetious stranger, I had, by all my wealth of shameless self-exposure,
become the possible confidant. He had been bitten by the desire to show
that he, too, had lived and felt many things, and the fever was upon
him.
He was certainly confoundedly allusive at first, and my eagerness
to clear him up with a few precise questions was only equalled and
controlled by my anxiety not to get to this sort of thing too soon. But
in another meeting or so the basis of confidence was complete; and from
first to last I think I got most of the items and aspects--indeed, I got
quite 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 together
again. Whether it really happened, whether he imagined it or dreamt it,
or fell upon it in some strange hallucinatory trance, I do not profess
to 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 it
happened; he is transparently incapable of any lie so elaborate
and sustained, and in the belief of the simple, yet often keenly
penetrating, rustic minds about him I find a very strong confirmation of
his sincerity. He believes--and nobody can produce any positive fact to
falsify his belief. As for me, with this much of endorsement, I transmit
his story--I am a little old now to justify or explain.
He says he went to sleep on Aldington Knoll about ten o'clock one
night--it was quite possibly Midsummer night, though he has never
thought of the date, and he cannot be sure within a week or so--and it
was a fine night and windless, with a rising moon. I have been at
the pains to visit this Knoll thrice since his story grew up under my
persuasions, and once I went there in the twilight summer moonrise on
what was, perhaps, a similar night to that of his adventure. Jupiter was
great and splendid above the moon, and in the north and northwest the
sky was green and vividly bright over the sunken sun. The Knoll stands
out bare and bleak under the sky, but surrounded at a little distance by
dark thickets, and as I went up towards it there was a mighty starting
and scampering of ghostly or quite invisible rabbits. Just over
the crown of the Knoll, but nowhere else, was a multitudinous thin
trumpeting of midges. The Knoll is, I believe, an artificial mound,
the tumulus of some great prehistoric chieftain, and surely no man ever
chose a more spacious prospect for a sepulchre. Eastward one sees along
the hills to Hythe, and thence across the Channel to where, thirty miles
and more perhaps, away, the great white lights by Gris Nez and Boulogne
wink and pass and shine. Westward lies the whole tumbled valley of the
Weald, visible as far as Hindhead and Leith Hill, and the valley of the
Stour opens the Downs in the north to interminable hills beyond Wye.
All Romney Marsh lies southward at one's feet, Dymchurch and Romney and
Lydd, Hastings and its hill are in the middle distance, and the hills
multiply vaguely far beyond where Eastbourne rolls up to Beachy Head.
And out upon all this it was that Skelmersdale wandered, being troubled
in 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 between
himself and the girl at Clapton Hill to whom he was engaged. She was
a farmer's daughter, said Skelmersdale, and “very respectable,” and
no doubt an excellent match for him; but both girl and lover were very
young and with just that mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen edge of
criticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection, that
life and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull. What the precise
matter of quarrel was I have no idea. She may have said she liked men in
gaiters when he hadn't any gaiters on, or he may have said he liked her
better in a different sort of hat, but however it began, it got by
a series of clumsy stages to bitterness and tears. She no doubt got
tearful and smeary, and he grew dusty and drooping, and she parted with
invidious comparisons, grave doubts whether she ever had REALLY cared
for him, and a clear certainty she would never care again. And with this
sort of thing upon his mind he came out upon Aldington Knoll grieving,
and presently, after a long interval, perhaps, quite inexplicably, fell
asleep.
He woke to find himself on a softer turf than ever he had slept on
before, and under the shade of very dark trees that completely hid the
sky. Always, indeed, in Fairyland the sky is hidden, it seems. Except
for one night when the fairies were dancing, Mr. Skelmersdale, during
all his time with them, never saw a star. And of that night I am in
doubt whether he was in Fairyland proper or out where the rings and
rushes 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 and
amidst the turf shone a multitude of glow-worms, very bright and fine.
Mr. Skelmersdale's first impression was that he was SMALL, and the next
that quite a number of people still smaller were standing all about him.
For some reason, he says, he was neither surprised nor frightened, but
sat up quite deliberately and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. And
there all about him stood the smiling elves who had caught him sleeping
under their privileges and had brought him into Fairyland.
What these elves were like I have failed to gather, so vague and
imperfect is his vocabulary, and so unobservant of all minor detail
does he seem to have been. They were clothed in something very light and
beautiful, that was neither wool, nor silk, nor leaves, nor the petals
of flowers. They stood all about him as he sat and waked, and down the
glade towards him, down a glow-worm avenue and fronted by a star, came
at once that Fairy Lady who is the chief personage of his memory and
tale. Of her I gathered more. She was clothed in filmy green, and about
her little waist was a broad silver girdle. Her hair waved back from
her forehead on either side; there were curls not too wayward and yet
astray, and on her brow was a little tiara, set with a single star. Her
sleeves were some sort of open sleeves that gave little glimpses of her
arms; her throat, I think, was a little displayed, because he speaks of
the beauty of her neck and chin. There was a necklace of coral about
her white throat, and in her breast a coral-coloured flower. She had the
soft lines of a little child in her chin and cheeks and throat. And
her eyes, I gather, were of a kindled brown, very soft and straight and
sweet under her level brows. You see by these particulars how greatly
this lady must have loomed in Mr. Skelmersdale's picture. Certain things
he tried to express and could not express; “the way she moved,” he said
several times; and I fancy a sort of demure joyousness radiated from
this Lady.
And it was in the company of this delightful person, as the guest and
chosen companion of this delightful person, that Mr. Skelmersdale set
out to be taken into the intimacies of Fairyland. She welcomed him
gladly and a little warmly--I suspect a pressure of his hand in both of
hers and a lit face to his. After all, ten years ago young Skelmersdale
may 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-worms
lit.
Just how things chanced and happened there is no telling from Mr.
Skelmersdale's disarticulated skeleton of description. He gives little
unsatisfactory glimpses of strange corners and doings, of places where
there were many fairies together, of “toadstool things that shone pink,”
of fairy food, of which he could only say “you should have tasted
it!” and of fairy music, “like a little musical box,” that came out of
nodding flowers. There was a great open place where fairies rode and
raced on “things,” but what Mr. Skelmersdale meant by “these here things
they rode,” there is no telling. Larvae, perhaps, or crickets, or the
little beetles that elude us so abundantly. There was a place where
water splashed and gigantic king-cups grew, and there in the hotter
times the fairies bathed together. There were games being played and
dancing and much elvish love-making, too, I think, among the moss-branch
thickets. There can be no doubt that the Fairy Lady made love to Mr.
Skelmersdale, and no doubt either that this young man set himself to
resist her. A time came, indeed, when she sat on a bank beside him, in
a quiet, secluded place “all smelling of vi'lets,” and talked to him of
love.
“When her voice went low and she whispered,” said Mr. Skelmersdale, “and
laid 'er 'and on my 'and, you know, and came close with a soft, warm
friendly 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. He
saw “'ow the wind was blowing,” he says, and so, sitting there in a
place all smelling of violets, with the touch of this lovely Fairy Lady
about 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 for
her, and whatever he would ask of her he should have--even his heart's
desire.
And Mr. Skelmersdale, who, I fancy, tried hard to avoid looking at her
little lips as they just dropped apart and came together, led up to the
more intimate question by saying he would like enough capital to start a
little shop. He'd just like to feel, he said, he had money enough to do
that. I imagine a little surprise in those brown eyes he talked
about, but she seemed sympathetic for all that, and she asked him many
questions about the little shop, “laughing like” all the time. So he got
to the complete statement of his affianced position, and told her all
about Millie.
“All?” said I.
“Everything,” said Mr. Skelmersdale, “just who she was, and where she
lived, and everything about her. I sort of felt I 'ad to all the time, I
did.”
“'Whatever you want you shall have,' said the Fairy Lady. 'That's as
good as done. You SHALL feel you have the money just as you wish. And
now, you know--YOU MUST KISS ME.'”
And Mr. Skelmersdale pretended not to hear the latter part of her
remark, and said she was very kind. That he really didn't deserve she
should be so kind. And--
The Fairy Lady suddenly came quite close to him and whispered, “Kiss
me!”
“And,” said Mr. Skelmersdale, “like a fool, I did.”
There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite
the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard. There was
something magic in that kiss; assuredly it marked a turning point.
At any rate, this is one of the passages that he thought sufficiently
important to describe most at length. I have tried to get it right, I
have tried to disentangle it from the hints and gestures through which
it came to me, but I have no doubt that it was all different from my
telling and far finer and sweeter, in the soft filtered light and the
subtly stirring silences of the fairy glades. The Fairy Lady asked him
more about Millie, and was she very lovely, and so on--a great many
times. 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 him
she had fallen in love with him as he slept in the moonlight, and so
he had been brought into Fairyland, and she had thought, not knowing of
Millie, that perhaps he might chance to love her. “But now you know you
can't,” she said, “so you must stop with me just a little while, and
then you must go back to Millie.” She told him that, and you know
Skelmersdale was already in love with her, but the pure inertia of his
mind kept him in the way he was going. I imagine him sitting in a sort
of stupefaction amidst all these glowing beautiful things, answering
about his Millie and the little shop he projected and the need of a
horse and cart.... And that absurd state of affairs must have gone on
for days and days. I see this little lady, hovering about him and trying
to amuse him, too dainty to understand his complexity and too tender
to let him go. And he, you know, hypnotised as it were by his earthly
position, went his way with her hither and thither, blind to everything
in Fairyland but this wonderful intimacy that had come to him. It is
hard, it is impossible, to give in print the effect of her radiant
sweetness shining through the jungle of poor Skelmersdale's rough and
broken sentences. To me, at least, she shone clear amidst the muddle of
his story like a glow-worm in a tangle of weeds.
There must have been many days of things while all this was
happening--and once, I say, they danced under the moonlight in the fairy
rings that stud the meadows near Smeeth--but at last it all came to an
end. She led him into a great cavernous place, lit by a red nightlight
sort of thing, where there were coffers piled on coffers, and cups
and golden boxes, and a great heap of what certainly seemed to all Mr.
Skelmersdale's senses--coined gold. There were little gnomes amidst this
wealth, who saluted her at her coming, and stood aside. And suddenly she
turned on him there with brightly shining eyes.
“And now,” she said, “you have been kind to stay with me so long, and it
is time I let you go. You must go back to your Millie. You must go back
to your Millie, and here--just as I promised you--they will give you
gold.”
“She choked like,” said Mr. Skelmersdale. “At that, I had a sort of
feeling--” (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 to
say.”
He paused. “Yes,” I said.
The scene was beyond his describing. But I know that she kissed him
good-bye.
“And you said nothing?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I stood like a stuffed calf. She just looked back
once, you know, and stood smiling like and crying--I could see the
shine of her eyes--and then she was gone, and there was all these little
fellows bustling about me, stuffing my 'ands and my pockets and the back
of my collar and everywhere with gold.”
And then it was, when the Fairy Lady had vanished, that Mr. Skelmersdale
really understood and knew. He suddenly began plucking out the gold
they were thrusting upon him, and shouting out at them to prevent their
giving 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 off
to go after her and they held me back. Yes, stuck their little 'ands
against my middle and shoved me back. They kept giving me more and more
gold until it was running all down my trouser legs and dropping out of
my 'ands. 'I don't WANT yer gold,' I says to them, 'I want just to speak
to 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 be
seen.”
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 place
athwart which a swarm of will-o'-the-wisps were flying to and fro. And
about him elves were dancing in derision, and the little gnomes came out
of the cave after him, carrying gold in handfuls and casting it after
him, 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 suddenly
set himself to run down the slope from the mouth of the cavern, through
a place of thorns and briers, calling after her very loudly and often.
The elves danced about him unheeded, pinching him and pricking him, and
the will-o'-the-wisps circled round him and dashed into his face, and
the gnomes pursued him shouting and pelting him with fairy gold. As he
ran with all this strange rout about him and distracting him, suddenly
he was knee-deep in a swamp, and suddenly he was amidst thick twisted
roots, and he caught his foot in one and stumbled and fell....
He fell and he rolled over, and in that instant he found himself
sprawling upon Aldington Knoll, all lonely under the stars.
He sat up sharply at once, he says, and found he was very stiff and
cold, and his clothes were damp with dew. The first pallor of dawn and
a chilly wind were coming up together. He could have believed the whole
thing a strangely vivid dream until he thrust his hand into his side
pocket and found it stuffed with ashes. Then he knew for certain it
was fairy gold they had given him. He could feel all their pinches and
pricks still, though there was never a bruise upon him. And in that
manner, and so suddenly, Mr. Skelmersdale came out of Fairyland back
into this world of men. Even then he fancied the thing was but the
matter of a night until he returned to the shop at Aldington Corner and
discovered 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 this
person 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, you
know, and coarse. And their voices seemed loud. Why, the sun, when it
rose 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. I
seemed to forget about her even while she was there a-talking to me. She
was 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 did
get back a little, but never when she was there. Then it was always the
other 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 the
pattern of the tablecloth for a space.
When he spoke again it was clear that his former sweetheart had clean
vanished from his mind, and that the talk had brought back the Fairy
Lady triumphant in his heart. He talked of her--soon he was letting out
the oddest things, queer love secrets it would be treachery to repeat. I
think, indeed, that was the queerest thing in the whole affair, to hear
that neat little grocer man after his story was done, with a glass of
whisky beside him and a cigar between his fingers, witnessing, with
sorrow still, though now, indeed, with a time-blunted anguish, of
the inappeasable hunger of the heart that presently came upon him. “I
couldn't eat,” he said, “I couldn't sleep. I made mistakes in orders
and got mixed with change. There she was day and night, drawing me and
drawing 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. I
used to walk over the Knoll and round it and round it, calling for them
to let me in. Shouting. Near blubbering I was at times. Daft I was
and miserable. I kept on saying it was all a mistake. And every Sunday
afternoon I went up there, wet and fine, though I knew as well as you do
it 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 lips
trembled. “I've tried to go to sleep there, often and often. And, you
know, 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, and
I couldn't--not for thinking and longing. It's the longing.... I've
tried--”
He blew, drank up the rest of his whisky spasmodically, stood up
suddenly and buttoned his jacket, staring closely and critically at the
cheap oleographs beside the mantel meanwhile. The little black notebook
in which he recorded the orders of his daily round projected stiffly
from his breast pocket. When all the buttons were quite done, he patted
his 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 for
him to express in words. “One gets talking,” he said at last at the
door, and smiled wanly, and so vanished from my eyes. And that is the
tale of Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland just as he told it to me.