‘I know nothing about it,’ said the Doctor, ‘and I don’t _want_ to
know. I attended him for a broken finger--Married and Single cricket
match--and that’s when I struck the nonsense. That’s all. But it shows
you the sort of stuff I have to deal with, anyhow, eh? Nice to get
modern sanitary ideas into a people like this!’
‘Very,’ I said in a mildly sympathetic tone, and he went on to tell
me about 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 as sympathetic 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, I
believe, stiffer to write than it is to read--took me to Bignor. I
lodged at a farmhouse, and presently found myself outside that little
general shop again, in search of tobacco. ‘Skelmersdale,’ said I to
myself at the sight of it, and went in.
I was served by a short, but shapely, young man, with a fair downy
complexion, good, small teeth, blue eyes, and a languid manner.
I scrutinised him curiously. Except for a touch of melancholy in
his expression, he was nothing out of the common. He was in the
shirtsleeves and tucked-up apron of his trade, and a pencil was thrust
behind his inoffensive ear. Athwart his black waistcoat was a gold
chain, from which dangled a bent guinea.
‘Nothing more to-day, sir?’ he inquired. He leant forward over my bill
as 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 of
hostility, eye to eye, he went on adding up my bill. ‘Four, six and a
half,’ 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 toilsome
efforts. I picked him up again in the Village Room, where of a night
I went to play billiards after my supper, and mitigate the extreme
seclusion from my kind that was so helpful to work during the day. I
contrived to play with him and afterwards to talk with him. I found
the one subject to avoid was Fairyland. On everything else he was open
and amiable in a commonplace sort of way, but on that he had been
worried--it was a manifest taboo. Only once in the room did I hear the
slightest allusion to his experience in his presence, and that was
by a cross-grained farm hand who was losing to him. Skelmersdale had
run a break into double figures, which, by the Bignor standards, was
uncommonly good play. ‘Steady on!’ said his adversary. ‘None of your
fairy flukes!’
Skelmersdale stared at him for a moment, cue in hand, then flung it
down and walked out of the room.
‘Why can’t you leave ’im alone?’ said a respectable elder who had been
enjoying the game, and in the general murmur of disapproval, the grin
of satisfied wit faded from the ploughboy’s face.