‘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 _apropos_ 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 north-west
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. Larvæ, perhaps, or
crickets, or the little beetles that elude us so abundantly. There was
a place where water splashed and gigantic kingcups 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 hadn’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 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.... Any’ow, 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 abruptly 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.