"There's a man in that shop," said the Doctor, "who has been in Fairyland."
"Nonsense!" I said, and stared back at the shop. It was the usual village shop, post-office, telegraph wire on its brow, zinc pans and brushes outside, boots, shirtings, and potted meats in the window.
"Tell me about it," I said, after a pause.
"_I_ don't know," said the Doctor. "He's an ordinary sort of lout--Skelmersdale is his name. But everybody about here believes it like Bible truth."
I reverted presently to the topic.
"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 shirt-sleeves 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.
I scented my opportunity. "What's this joke," said I, "about Fairyland?"
"'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;
