Twelve Stories and a Dream (10 page)

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.

The scene amidst which Clayton told his last story comes back very
vividly to my mind. There he sat, for the greater part of the time,
in the corner of the authentic settle by the spacious open fire, and
Sanderson sat beside him smoking the Broseley clay that bore his name.
There was Evans, and that marvel among actors, Wish, who is also a
modest man. We had all come down to the Mermaid Club that Saturday
morning, except Clayton, who had slept there overnight—which indeed
gave him the opening of his story. We had golfed until golfing was
invisible; we had dined, and we were in that mood of tranquil kindliness
when men will suffer a story. When Clayton began to tell one, we
naturally supposed he was lying. It may be that indeed he was lying—of
that the reader will speedily be able to judge as well as I. He began,
it is true, with an air of matter-of-fact anecdote, but that we thought
was only the incurable artifice of the man.

"I say!" he remarked, after a long consideration of the upward rain of
sparks from the log that Sanderson had thumped, "you know I was alone
here last night?"

"Except for the domestics," said Wish.

"Who sleep in the other wing," said Clayton. "Yes. Well—" He pulled at
his cigar for some little time as though he still hesitated about his
confidence. Then he said, quite quietly, "I caught a ghost!"

"Caught a ghost, did you?" said Sanderson. "Where is it?"

And Evans, who admires Clayton immensely and has been four weeks in
America, shouted, "CAUGHT a ghost, did you, Clayton? I'm glad of it!
Tell us all about it right now."

Clayton said he would in a minute, and asked him to shut the door.

He looked apologetically at me. "There's no eavesdropping of course, but
we don't want to upset our very excellent service with any rumours of
ghosts in the place. There's too much shadow and oak panelling to trifle
with that. And this, you know, wasn't a regular ghost. I don't think it
will come again—ever."

"You mean to say you didn't keep it?" said Sanderson.

"I hadn't the heart to," said Clayton.

And Sanderson said he was surprised.

We laughed, and Clayton looked aggrieved. "I know," he said, with the
flicker of a smile, "but the fact is it really WAS a ghost, and I'm as
sure of it as I am that I am talking to you now. I'm not joking. I mean
what I say."

Sanderson drew deeply at his pipe, with one reddish eye on Clayton, and
then emitted a thin jet of smoke more eloquent than many words.

Clayton ignored the comment. "It is the strangest thing that has ever
happened in my life. You know, I never believed in ghosts or anything of
the sort, before, ever; and then, you know, I bag one in a corner; and
the whole business is in my hands."

He meditated still more profoundly, and produced and began to pierce a
second cigar with a curious little stabber he affected.

"You talked to it?" asked Wish.

"For the space, probably, of an hour."

"Chatty?" I said, joining the party of the sceptics.

"The poor devil was in trouble," said Clayton, bowed over his cigar-end
and with the very faintest note of reproof.

"Sobbing?" some one asked.

Clayton heaved a realistic sigh at the memory. "Good Lord!" he said;
"yes." And then, "Poor fellow! yes."

"Where did you strike it?" asked Evans, in his best American accent.

"I never realised," said Clayton, ignoring him, "the poor sort of thing
a ghost might be," and he hung us up again for a time, while he sought
for matches in his pocket and lit and warmed to his cigar.

"I took an advantage," he reflected at last.

We were none of us in a hurry. "A character," he said, "remains just the
same character for all that it's been disembodied. That's a thing we too
often forget. People with a certain strength or fixity of purpose may
have ghosts of a certain strength and fixity of purpose—most haunting
ghosts, you know, must be as one-idea'd as monomaniacs and as obstinate
as mules to come back again and again. This poor creature wasn't." He
suddenly looked up rather queerly, and his eye went round the room. "I
say it," he said, "in all kindliness, but that is the plain truth of the
case. Even at the first glance he struck me as weak."

He punctuated with the help of his cigar.

"I came upon him, you know, in the long passage. His back was towards
me and I saw him first. Right off I knew him for a ghost. He was
transparent and whitish; clean through his chest I could see the glimmer
of the little window at the end. And not only his physique but his
attitude struck me as being weak. He looked, you know, as though he
didn't know in the slightest whatever he meant to do. One hand was on
the panelling and the other fluttered to his mouth. Like—SO!"

"What sort of physique?" said Sanderson.

"Lean. You know that sort of young man's neck that has two great
flutings down the back, here and here—so! And a little, meanish head
with scrubby hair—And rather bad ears. Shoulders bad, narrower than the
hips; turn-down collar, ready-made short jacket, trousers baggy and a
little frayed at the heels. That's how he took me. I came very quietly
up the staircase. I did not carry a light, you know—the candles are on
the landing table and there is that lamp—and I was in my list slippers,
and I saw him as I came up. I stopped dead at that—taking him in. I
wasn't a bit afraid. I think that in most of these affairs one is
never nearly so afraid or excited as one imagines one would be. I was
surprised and interested. I thought, 'Good Lord! Here's a ghost at
last! And I haven't believed for a moment in ghosts during the last
five-and-twenty years.'"

"Um," said Wish.

"I suppose I wasn't on the landing a moment before he found out I was
there. He turned on me sharply, and I saw the face of an immature young
man, a weak nose, a scrubby little moustache, a feeble chin. So for an
instant we stood—he looking over his shoulder at me and regarded one
another. Then he seemed to remember his high calling. He turned round,
drew himself up, projected his face, raised his arms, spread his hands
in approved ghost fashion—came towards me. As he did so his little jaw
dropped, and he emitted a faint, drawn-out 'Boo.' No, it wasn't—not a
bit dreadful. I'd dined. I'd had a bottle of champagne, and being all
alone, perhaps two or three—perhaps even four or five—whiskies, so I
was as solid as rocks and no more frightened than if I'd been assailed
by a frog. 'Boo!' I said. 'Nonsense. You don't belong to THIS place.
What are you doing here?'