He looked up with a sudden smile.
‘Did you ever play North-West Passage with me?... No, of course you didn’t come my way!’
‘It was the sort of game,’ he went on, ‘that every imaginative child plays all day. The idea was the discovery of a North-West Passage to school. The way to school was plain enough; the game consisted in finding some way that wasn’t plain, starting off ten minutes early in some almost hopeless direction, and working my way round through unaccustomed streets to my goal. And one day I got entangled among some rather low-class streets on the other side of Campden Hill, and I began to think that for once the game would be against me and that I should get to school late. I tried rather desperately a street that seemed acul-de-sac, and found a passage at the end. I hurried through that with renewed hope. “I shall do it yet,” I said, and passed a row of frowsy little shops that were inexplicably familiar to me, and behold! there was my long white wall and the green door that led to the enchanted garden!
‘The thing whacked upon me suddenly. Then, after all, that garden, that wonderful garden, wasn’t a dream!’
He paused.
‘I suppose my second experience with the green door marks the world of difference there is between the busy life of a schoolboy and the infinite leisure of a child.Anyhow, this second time I didn’t for a moment think of going in straight away. You see—— For one thing, my mind was full of the idea of getting to school in time—set on not breaking my record for punctuality. I must surely have feltsomelittle desire at least to try the door—yes. I must have felt that.... But I seem to remember the attraction of the door mainly as another obstacle to my overmastering determination to get to school. I was immensely interested by this discovery I had made, of course—I went on with my mind full of it—but I went on. It didn’t check me. I ran past, tugging out my watch, found I had ten minutes still to spare, and then I was going downhill into familiar surroundings. I got to school, breathless, it is true, and wet with perspiration, but in time. I can remember hanging up my coat and hat.... Went right by it and left it behind me. Odd, eh?’
He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Of course I didn’t know then that it wouldn’t always be there. Schoolboys have limited imaginations. I suppose I thought it was an awfully jolly thing to have it there, to know my way back to it, but there was the school tugging at me. I expect I was a good deal distraught and inattentive that morning, recalling what I could of the beautiful strange people I should presently see again. Oddly enough I had no doubt in my mind that they would be glad to see me.... Yes, I must have thought of the garden that morning just as a jolly sort of place to which one might resort in the interludes of a strenuous scholastic career.
‘I didn’t go that day at all. The next day was a half holiday, and that may have weighed with me. Perhaps, too, my state of inattention brought down impositions upon me, and docked the margin of time necessary for the detour. I don’t know. What I do know is that in the meantime the enchanted garden wasso much upon my mind that I could not keep it to myself.
‘I told. What was his name?—a ferrety-looking youngster we used to call Squiff.’
‘Young Hopkins,’ said I.
‘Hopkins it was. I did not like telling him. I had a feeling that in some way it was against the rules to tell him, but I did. He was walking part of the way home with me; he was talkative, and if we had not talked about the enchanted garden we should have talked of something else, and it was intolerable to me to think about any other subject. So I blabbed.
‘Well, he told my secret. The next day in the play interval I found myself surrounded by half a dozen bigger boys, half teasing, and wholly curious to hear more of the enchanted garden. There was that big Fawcett—you remember him?—and Carnaby and Morley Reynolds. You weren’t there by any chance? No, I think I should have remembered if you were....
‘A boy is a creature of odd feelings. I was, I really believe, in spite of my secret self-disgust, a little flattered to have the attention of these big fellows. I remember particularly a moment of pleasure caused by the praise of Crawshaw—you remember Crawshaw major, the son of Crawshaw the composer?—who said it was the best lie he had ever heard. But at the same time there was a really painful undertow of shame at telling what I felt was indeed a sacred secret. That beast Fawcett made a joke about the girl in green——’
Wallace’s voice sank with the keen memory of that shame. ‘I pretended not to hear,’ he said. ‘Well, then Carnaby suddenly called me a young liar, and disputed with me when I said the thing was true. I said I knew where to find the green door, could lead them all there in ten minutes. Carnaby became outrageously virtuous, and said I’d have to—and bear outmy words or suffer. Did you ever have Carnaby twist your arm? Then perhaps you’ll understand how it went with me. I swore my story was true. There was nobody in the school then to save a chap from Carnaby, though Crawshaw put in a word or so. Carnaby had got his game. I grew excited and red-eared, and a little frightened. I behaved altogether like a silly little chap, and the outcome of it all was that instead of starting alone for my enchanted garden, I led the way presently—cheeks flushed, ears hot, eyes smarting, and my soul one burning misery and shame—for a party of six mocking, curious, and threatening schoolfellows.
‘We never found the white wall and the green door....’
‘You mean——?’
‘I mean I couldn’t find it. I would have found it if I could.
‘And afterwards when I could go alone I couldn’t find it. I never found it. I seem now to have been always looking for it through my schoolboy days, but I never came upon it—never.’
‘Did the fellows—make it disagreeable?’
‘Beastly.... Carnaby held a council over me for wanton lying. I remember how I sneaked home and upstairs to hide the marks of my blubbering. But when I cried myself to sleep at last it wasn’t for Carnaby, but for the garden, for the beautiful afternoon I had hoped for, for the sweet friendly women and the waiting playfellows, and the game I had hoped to learn again, that beautiful forgotten game....
‘I believed firmly that if I had not told—.... I had bad times after that—crying at night and wool-gathering by day. For two terms I slackened and had bad reports. Do you remember? Of course you would! It wasyou—your beating me in mathematics that brought me back to the grind again.’
For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire. Then he said: ‘I never saw it again until I was seventeen.
‘It leapt upon me for the third time—as I was driving to Paddington on my way to Oxford and a scholarship I had just one momentary glimpse. I was leaning over the apron of my hansom smoking a cigarette, and no doubt thinking myself no end of a man of the world, and suddenly there was the door, the wall, the dear sense of unforgettable and still attainable things.
‘We clattered by—I too taken by surprise to stop my cab until we were well past and round a corner. Then I had a queer moment, a double and divergent movement of my will: I tapped the little door in the roof of the cab, and brought my arm down to pull out my watch. “Yes, sir!” said the cabman, smartly. “Er—well—it’s nothing,” I cried. “Mymistake! We haven’t much time! Go on!” And he went on....
‘I got my scholarship. And the night after I was told of that I sat over my fire in my little upper room, my study, in my father’s house, with his praise—his rare praise—and his sound counsels ringing in my ears, and I smoked my favourite pipe—the formidable bulldog of adolescence—and thought of that door in the long white wall. “If I had stopped,” I thought, “I should have missed my scholarship, I should have missed Oxford—muddled all the fine career before me! I begin to see things better!” I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then this career of mine was a thing that merited sacrifice.
‘Those dear friends and that clear atmosphere seemed very sweet to me, very fine but remote. My grip wasfixing now upon the world. I saw another door opening—the door of my career.’
He stared again into the fire. Its red light picked out a stubborn strength in his face for just one flickering moment, and then it vanished again.
‘Well,’ he said and sighed, ‘I have served that career. I have done—much work, much hard work. But I have dreamt of the enchanted garden a thousand dreams, and seen its door, or at least glimpsed its door, four times since then. Yes—four times. For a while this world was so bright and interesting, seemed so full of meaning and opportunity, that the half-effaced charm of the garden was by comparison gentle and remote. Who wants to pat panthers on the way to dinner with pretty women and distinguished men? I came down to London from Oxford, a man of bold promise that I have done something to redeem. Something—and yet there have been disappointments....
‘Twice I have been in love—I will not dwell on that—but once, as I went to some one who, I knew, doubted whether I dared to come, I took a short cut at a venture through an unfrequented road near Earl’s Court, and so happened on a white wall and a familiar green door. “Odd!” said I to myself, “but I thought this place was on Campden Hill. It’s the place I never could find somehow—like counting Stonehenge—the place of that queer daydream of mine.” And I went by it intent upon my purpose. It had no appeal to me that afternoon.
‘I had just a moment’s impulse to try the door, three steps aside were needed at the most—though I was sure enough in my heart that it would open to me—and then I thought that doing so might delay me on the way to that appointment in which I thought my honour was involved. Afterwards I was sorry for my punctuality—I might at least have peeped in, I thought, and waved a hand to those panthers, but I knew enough by this timenot to seek again belatedly that which is not found by seeking. Yes, that time made me very sorry....
‘Years of hard work after that, and never a sight of the door. It’s only recently it has come back to me. With it there has come a sense as though some thin tarnish had spread itself over my world. I began to think of it as a sorrowful and bitter thing that I should never see that door again. Perhaps I was suffering a little from overwork—perhaps it was what I’ve heard spoken of as the feeling of forty. I don’t know. But certainly the keen brightness that makes effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just at a time—with all these new political developments—when I ought to be working. Odd, isn’t it? But I do begin to find life toilsome, its rewards, as I come near them, cheap. I began a little while ago to want the garden quite badly. Yes—and I’ve seen it three times.’
‘The garden?’
‘No—the door! And I haven’t gone in!’
He leant over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his voice as he spoke. ‘Thrice I have had my chance—thrice!If ever that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in, out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will stay.... I swore it, and when the time came—I didn’t go.
‘Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to enter. Three times in the last year.
‘The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the Tenants’ Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a majority of three. You remember? No one on our side—perhaps very few on the opposite side—expected the end that night. Then the debate collapsed like eggshells. I and Hotchkiss were dining with his cousin at Brentford; we were both unpaired,and we were called up by telephone, and set off at once in his cousin’s motor. We got in barely in time, and on the way we passed my wall and door—livid in the moonlight, blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it, but unmistakable. “My God!” cried I. “What?” said Hotchkiss, “Nothing!” I answered, and the moment passed.
‘“I’ve made a great sacrifice,” I told the whip as I got in. “They all have,” he said, and hurried by.
‘I do not see how I could have done otherwise then. And the next occasion was as I rushed to my father’s bedside to bid that stern old man farewell. Then, too, the claims of life were imperative. But the third time was different; it happened a week ago. It fills me with hot remorse to recall it. I was with Gurker and Ralphs—it’s no secret now, you know, that I’ve had my talk with Gurker. We had been dining at Frobisher’s, and the talk had become intimate between us. The question of my place in the reconstructed Ministry lay always just over the boundary of the discussion. Yes—yes. That’s all settled. It needn’t be talked about yet, but there’s no reason to keep a secret from you.... Yes—thanks! thanks! But let me tell you my story.
‘Then, on that night things were very much in the air. My position was a very delicate one. I was keenly anxious to get some definite word from Gurker, but was hampered by Ralphs’ presence. I was using the best power of my brain to keep that light and careless talk not too obviously directed to the point that concerned me. I had to. Ralphs’ behaviour since has more than justified my caution.... Ralphs, I knew, would leave us beyond the Kensington High Street, and then I could surprise Gurker by a sudden frankness. One has sometimes to resort to these little devices.... And then it was that in the margin of my field of vision I becameaware once more of the white wall, the green door before us down the road.
‘We passed it talking. I passed it. I can still see the shadow of Gurker’s marked profile, his opera hat tilted forward over his prominent nose, the many folds of his neck wrap going before my shadow and Ralphs’ as we sauntered past.
‘I passed within twenty inches of the door. “If I say good-night to them, and go in,” I asked myself, “what will happen?” And I was all a-tingle for that word with Gurker.
‘I could not answer that question in the tangle of my other problems. “They will think me mad,” I thought. “And suppose I vanish now!—Amazing disappearance of a prominent politician!” That weighed with me. A thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that crisis.’
Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking slowly, ‘Here I am!’ he said.
‘Here I am!’ he repeated, ‘and my chance has gone from me. Three times in one year the door has been offered me—the door that goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know. And I have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone——’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know. I know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to the tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came. You say I have success—this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have it.’ He had a walnut in his big hand. ‘If that was my success,’ he said, and crushed it, and held it out for me to see.
‘Let me tell you something, Redmond. This loss is destroying me. For two months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work at all, except the most necessary and urgent duties. My soul is full ofinappeasable regrets. At nights—when it is less likely I shall be recognised—I go out. I wander. Yes. I wonder what people would think of that if they knew. A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that most vital of all departments, wandering alone—grieving—sometimes near audibly lamenting—for a door, for a garden!’
I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire that had come into his eyes. I see him very vividly to-night. I sit recalling his words, his tones, and last evening’sWestminster Gazettestill lies on my sofa, containing the notice of his death. At lunch to-day the club was busy with his death. We talked of nothing else.
They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation near East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been made in connection with an extension of the railway southward. It is protected from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high road, in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of some of the workmen who live in that direction. The doorway was left unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through it he made his way....
My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.
It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night—he has frequently walked home during the past Session—and so it is I figure his dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up, intent. And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?
Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?
I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You may think me superstitious, if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had, in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something—I know not what—that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger, and death.
But did he see like that?
‘I must get rid of it,’ said the man in the corner of the carriage, abruptly breaking the silence.
Mr Hinchcliff looked up, hearing imperfectly. He had been lost in the rapt contemplation of the college cap tied by a string to his portmanteau handles—the outward and visible sign of his newly-gained pedagogic position—in the rapt appreciation of the college cap and the pleasant anticipations it excited. For Mr Hinchcliff had just matriculated at London University, and was going to be junior assistant at the Holmwood Grammar School—a very enviable position. He stared across the carriage at his fellow-traveller.
‘Why not give it away?’ said this person. ‘Give it away! Why not?’
He was a tall, dark, sunburnt man with a pale face. His arms were folded tightly, and his feet were on the seat in front of him. He was pulling at a lank black moustache. He stared hard at his toes.
‘Why not?’ he said.
Mr Hinchcliff coughed.
The stranger lifted his eyes—they were curious, dark-gray eyes—and stared blankly at Mr Hinchcliff for the best part of a minute, perhaps. His expression grew to interest.
‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘Why not? And end it.’
‘I don’t quite follow you, I’m afraid,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, with another cough.
‘You don’t quite follow me?’ said the stranger quitemechanically, his singular eyes wandering from Mr Hinchcliff to the bag with its ostentatiously displayed cap, and back to Mr Hinchcliff’s downy face.
‘You’re so abrupt, you know,’ apologised Mr Hinchcliff.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ said the stranger, following his thoughts. ‘You are a student?’ he said, addressing Mr Hinchcliff.
‘I am—by Correspondence—of the London University said Mr Hinchcliff, with irrepressible pride, and feeling nervously at his tie.
‘In pursuit of knowledge,’ said the stranger, and suddenly took his feet off the seat, put his fist on his knees, and stared at Mr Hinchcliff as though he had never seen a student before. ‘Yes,’ he said, and flung out an index finger. Then he rose, took a bag from the hat-rack, and unlocked it. Quite silently he drew out something round and wrapped in a quantity of silver-paper, and unfolded this carefully. He held it out towards Mr Hinchcliff—a small, very smooth, golden-yellow fruit.
Mr Hinchcliff’s eyes and mouth were open. He did not offer to take this object—if he was intended to take it.
‘That,’ said this fantastic stranger, speaking very slowly, ‘is the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Look at it—small, and bright, and wonderful—Knowledge—and I am going to give it to you.’
Mr Hinchcliff’s mind worked painfully for a minute, and then the sufficient explanation, ‘Mad!’ flashed across his brain, and illuminated the whole situation. One humoured madmen. He put his head a little on one side.
‘The Apple of the Tree of Knowledge, eh!’ said Mr Hinchcliff, regarding it with a finely assumed air of interest, and then looking at the interlocutor. ‘Butdon’t you want to eat it yourself? And besides—how did you come by it?’
‘It never fades. I have had it now three months. And it is ever bright and smooth and ripe and desirable, as you see it.’ He laid his hand on his knee and regarded the fruit musingly. Then he began to wrap it again in the papers, as though he had abandoned his intention of giving it away.
‘But how did you come by it?’ said Mr Hinchcliff, who had his argumentative side. ‘And how do you know that itisthe Fruit of the Tree?’
‘I bought this fruit,’ said the stranger, ‘three months ago—for a drink of water and a crust of bread. The man who gave it to me—because I kept the life in him—was an Armenian. Armenia! that wonderful country, the first of all countries, where the ark of the Flood remains to this day, buried in the glaciers of Mount Ararat. This man, I say, fleeing with others from the Kurds who had come upon them, went up into desolate places among the mountains—places beyond the common knowledge of men. And fleeing from imminent pursuit, they came to a slope high among the mountain-peaks, green with a grass like knife-blades, that cut and slashed most pitilessly at any one who went into it. The Kurds were close behind, and there was nothing for it but to plunge in, and the worst of it was that the paths they made through it at the price of their blood served for the Kurds to follow. Every one of the fugitives was killed save this Armenian and another. He heard the screams and cries of his friends, and the swish of the grass about those who were pursuing them—it was tall grass rising overhead. And then a shouting and answers, and when presently he paused, everything was still. He pushed out again, not understanding, cut and bleeding, until he came out on a steep slope of rocks below a precipice, and then he saw the grass wasall on fire, and the smoke of it rose like a veil between him and his enemies.’
The stranger paused. ‘Yes?’ said Mr Hinchcliff. ‘Yes?’
‘There he was, all torn and bloody from the knife-blades of the grass, the rocks blazing under the afternoon sun—the sky molten brass—and the smoke of the fire driving towards him. He dared not stay there. Death he did not mind, but torture! Far away beyond the smoke he heard shouts and cries. Women screaming. So he went clambering up a gorge in the rocks—everywhere were bushes with dry branches that stuck out like thorns among the leaves—until he clambered over the brow of a ridge that hid him. And then he met his companion, a shepherd, who had also escaped. And, counting cold and famine and thirst as nothing against the Kurds, they went on into the heights, and among the snow and ice. They wandered three whole days.
‘The third day came the vision. I suppose hungry men often do see visions, but then there is this fruit.’ He lifted the wrapped globe in his hand. ‘And I have heard it, too, from other mountaineers who have known something of the legend. It was in the evening time, when the stars were increasing, that they came down a slope of polished rock into a huge dark valley all set about with strange, contorted trees, and in these trees hung little globes like glow-worm spheres, strange round yellow lights.
‘Suddenly this valley was lit far away, many miles away, far down it, with a golden flame marching slowly athwart it, that made the stunted trees against it black as night, and turned the slopes all about them and their figures to the likeness of fiery gold. And at the vision they, knowing the legends of the mountains, instantly knew that it was Eden they saw, or the sentinel of Eden, and they fell upon their faces like men struck dead.
‘When they dared to look again the valley was dark for a space, and then the light came again—returning, a burning amber.
‘At that the shepherd sprang to his feet, and with a shout began to run down towards the light, but the other man was too fearful to follow him. He stood stunned, amazed, and terrified, watching his companion recede towards the marching glare. And hardly had the shepherd set out when there came a noise like thunder, the beating of invisible wings hurrying up the valley, and a great and terrible fear; and at that the man who gave me the fruit turned—if he might still escape. And hurrying headlong up the slope again, with that tumult sweeping after him, he stumbled against one of these stunted bushes, and a ripe fruit came off it into his hand. This fruit. Forthwith, the wings and the thunder rolled all about him. He fell and fainted, and when he came to his senses, he was back among the blackened ruins of his own village, and I and the others were attending to the wounded. A vision? But the golden fruit of the tree was still clutched in his hand. There were others there who knew the legend, knew what that strange fruit might be.’ He paused. ‘And this is it,’ he said.
It was a most extraordinary story to be told in a third-class carriage on a Sussex railway. It was as if the real was a mere veil to the fantastic, and here was the fantastic poking through. ‘Is it?’ was all Mr Hinchcliff could say.
‘The legend,’ said the stranger, ‘tells that those thickets of dwarfed trees growing about the garden sprang from the apple that Adam carried in his hand when he and Eve were driven forth. He felt something in his hand, saw the half-eaten apple, and flung it petulantly aside. And there they grow, in that desolate valley, girdled round with the everlasting snows, andthere the fiery swords keep war against the Judgment Day.’
‘But I thought these things were’—Mr Hinchcliff paused—‘fables—parables rather. Do you mean to tell me that there in Armenia——’
The stranger answered the unfinished question with the fruit in his open hand.
‘But you don’t know,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, ‘that thatisthe fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The man may have had—a sort of mirage, say. Suppose——’
‘Look at it,’ said the stranger.
It was certainly a strange-looking globe, not really an apple, Mr Hinchcliff saw, and a curious glowing golden colour, almost as though light itself was wrought into its substance. As he looked at it, he began to see more vividly the desolate valley among the mountains, the guarding swords of fire, the strange antiquities of the story he had just heard. He rubbed a knuckle into his eye. ‘But’—said he.
‘It has kept like that, smooth and full, three months. Longer than that it is now by some days. No drying, no withering, no decay.’
‘And you yourself,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, ‘really believe that——’
‘Is the Forbidden Fruit.’
There was no mistaking the earnestness of the man’s manner and his perfect sanity. ‘The Fruit of Knowledge,’ he said.
‘Suppose it was?’ said Mr Hinchcliff, after a pause, still staring at it. ‘But after all,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, ‘it’s not my kind of knowledge—not the sort of knowledge. I mean, Adam and Eve have eaten it already.’
‘We inherit their sins—not their knowledge,’ said the stranger. ‘That would make it all clear and bright again. We should see into everything, through everything, into the deepest meaning of everything——’
‘Why don’t you eat it, then?’ said Mr Hinchcliff, with an inspiration.
‘I took it intending to eat it,’ said the stranger. ‘Man has fallen. Merely to eat again could scarcely——’
‘Knowledge is power,’ said Mr Hinchcliff.
‘But is it happiness? I am older than you—more than twice as old. Time after time I have held this in my hand, and my heart has failed me at the thought of all that one might know, that terrible lucidity—Suppose suddenly all the world became pitilessly clear?’
‘That, I think, would be a great advantage,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, ‘on the whole.’
‘Suppose you saw into the hearts and minds of every one about you, into their most secret recesses—people you loved, whose love you valued?’
‘You’d soon find out the humbugs,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, greatly struck by the idea.
‘And worse—to know yourself, bare of your most intimate illusions. To see yourself in your place. All that your lusts and weaknesses prevented your doing. No merciful perspective.’
‘That might be an excellent thing too. “Know thyself,” you know.’
‘You are young,’ said the stranger.
‘If you don’t care to eat it, and it bothers you, why don’t you throw it away?’
‘There again, perhaps, you will not understand me. To me, how could one throw away a thing like that, glowing, wonderful? Once one has it, one is bound. But, on the other hand, togiveit away! To give it away to some one who thirsted after knowledge, who found no terror in the thought of that clear perception——’
‘Of course,’ said Mr Hinchcliff thoughtfully, ‘it might be some sort of poisonous fruit.
And then his eye caught something motionless, theend of a white board black-lettered outside the carriage window. ‘—MWOOD,’ he saw. He started convulsively. ‘Gracious!’ said Mr Hinchcliff. ‘Holmwood!’—and the practical present blotted out the mystic realisations that had been stealing upon him.
In another moment he was opening the carriage-door, portmanteau in hand. The guard was already fluttering his green flag. Mr Hinchcliff jumped out. ‘Here!’ said a voice behind him, and he saw the dark eyes of the stranger shining and the golden fruit, bright and bare, held out of the open carriage-door. He took it instinctively, the train was already moving.
‘No!’ shouted the stranger, and made a snatch at it as if to take it back.
‘Stand away,’ cried a country porter, thrusting forward to close the door. The stranger shouted something Mr Hinchcliff did not catch, head and arm thrust excitedly out of the window, and then the shadow of the bridge fell on him, and in a trice he was hidden. Mr Hinchcliff stood astonished, staring at the end of the last wagon receding round the bend, and with the wonderful fruit in his hand. For the fraction of a minute his mind was confused, and then he became aware that two or three people on the platform were regarding him with interest. Was he not the new Grammar School master making his debut? It occurred to him that, so far as they could tell, the fruit might very well be the naïve refreshment of an orange. He flushed at the thought, and thrust the fruit into his side pocket, where it bulged undesirably. But there was no help for it, so he went towards them, awkwardly concealing his sense of awkwardness, to ask the way to the Grammar School, and the means of getting his portmanteau and the two tin boxes which lay up the platform thither. Of all the odd and fantastic yarns to tell a fellow!
His luggage could be taken on a truck for sixpence,he found, and he could precede it on foot. He fancied an ironical note in the voices. He was painfully aware of his contour.
The curious earnestness of the man in the train, and the glamour of the story he told, had, for a time, diverted the current of Mr Hinchcliff’s thoughts. It drove a mist before his immediate concerns. Fires that went to and fro! But the preoccupation of his new position, and the impression he was to produce upon Holmwood generally, and the school people in particular, returned upon him with reinvigorating power before he left the station and cleared his mental atmosphere. But it is extraordinary what an inconvenient thing the addition of a soft and rather brightly-golden fruit, not three inches in diameter, may prove to a sensitive youth on his best appearance. In the pocket of his black jacket it bulged dreadfully, spoilt the lines altogether. He passed a little old lady in black, and he felt her eye drop upon the excrescence at once. He was wearing one glove and carrying the other, together with his stick, so that to bear the fruit openly was impossible. In one place, where the road into the town seemed suitably secluded, he took his encumbrance out of his pocket and tried it in his hat. It was just too large, the hat wobbled ludicrously, and just as he was taking it out again, a butcher’s boy came driving round the corner.
‘Confound it!’ said Mr Hinchcliff.
He would have eaten the thing, and attained omniscience there and then, but it would seem so silly to go into the town sucking a juicy fruit—and it certainly felt juicy. If one of the boys should come by, it might do him a serious injury with his discipline so to be seen. And the juice might make his face sticky and get upon his cuffs—or it might be an acid juice as potent as lemon, and take all the colour out of his clothes.
Then round a bend in the lane came two pleasantsunlit girlish figures. They were walking slowly towards the town and chattering—at any moment they might look round and see a hot-faced young man behind them carrying a kind of phosphorescent yellow tomato! They would be sure to laugh.
‘Hang!’ said Mr Hinchcliff, and with a swift jerk sent the encumbrance flying over the stone wall of an orchard that there abutted on the road. As it vanished, he felt a faint twinge of loss that lasted scarcely a moment. He adjusted the stick and glove in his hand, and walked on, erect and self-conscious, to pass the girls.
But in the darkness of the night Mr Hinchcliff had a dream, and saw the valley, and the flaming swords; and the contorted trees, and knew that it really was the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge that he had thrown regardlessly away. And he awoke very unhappy.
In the morning his regret had passed, but afterwards it returned and troubled him; never, however, when he was happy or busily occupied. At last, one moonlight night about eleven, when all Holmwood was quiet, his regrets returned with redoubled force, and therewith an impulse to adventure. He slipped out of the house and over the playground wall, went through the silent town to Station Lane, and climbed into the orchard where he had thrown the fruit. But nothing was to be found of it there among the dewy grass and the faint intangible globes of dandelion down.
It is quite impossible to say whether this thing really happened. It depends entirely on the word of R. M. Harringay, who is an artist.
Following his version of the affair, the narrative deposes that Harringay went into his studio about ten o’clock to see what he could make of the head that he had been working at the day before. The head in question was that of an Italian organ-grinder, and Harringay thought—but was not quite sure—that the title would be the ‘Vigil.’ So far he is frank, and his narrative bears the stamp of truth. He had seen the man expectant for pennies, and with a promptness that suggested genius, had had him in at once.
‘Kneel. Look up at that bracket,’ said Harringay. ‘As if you expected pennies.’
‘Don’tgrin!’ said Harringay. ‘I don’t want to paint your gums. Look as though you were unhappy.’
Now, after a night’s rest, the picture proved decidedly unsatisfactory. ‘It’s good work,’ said Harringay. ‘That little bit in the neck.... But.’
He walked about the studio and looked at the thing from this point and from that. Then he said a wicked word. In the original the word is given.
‘Painting,’ he says he said. ‘Just a painting of an organ-grinder—a mere portrait. If it was a live organ-grinder I wouldn’t mind. But somehow I never make things alive. I wonder if my imagination is wrong.’ This, too, has a truthful air. His imaginationiswrong.
‘That creative touch! To take canvas and pigment and make a man—as Adam was made of red ochre! But this thing! If you met it walking about the streets you would know it was only a studio production. The little boys would tell it to “Garnome and git frimed.” Some little touch.... Well—it won’t do as it is.’
He went to the blinds and began to pull them down. They were made of blue holland with the rollers at the bottom of the window, so that you pull them down to get more light. He gathered his palette, brushes, and mahl stick from his table. Then he turned to the picture and put a speck of brown in the corner of the mouth; and shifted his attention thence to the pupil of the eye. Then he decided that the chin was a trifle too impassive for a vigil.
Presently he put down his impedimenta, and lighting a pipe surveyed the progress of his work. ‘I’m hanged if the thing isn’t sneering at me,’ said Harringay, and he still believes it sneered.
The animation of the figure had certainly increased, but scarcely in the direction he wished. There was no mistake about the sneer. ‘Vigil of the Unbeliever,’ said Harringay. ‘Rather subtle and clever that! But the left eyebrow isn’t cynical enough.’
He went and dabbed at the eyebrow, and added a little to the lobe of the ear to suggest materialism. Further consideration ensued. ‘Vigil’s off, I’m afraid,’ said Harringay. ‘Why not Mephistopheles? But that’s a bittoocommon. “A Friend of the Doge,”—not so seedy. The armour won’t do, though. Too Camelot. How about a scarlet robe and call him “One of the Sacred College”? Humour in that, and an appreciation of Middle Italian History.’
‘There’s always Benvenuto Cellini,’ said Harringay; ‘with a clever suggestion of a gold cup in one corner. But that would scarcely suit the complexion.’
He describes himself as babbling in this way in order to keep down an unaccountably unpleasant sensation of fear. The thing was certainly acquiring anything but a pleasing expression. Yet it was as certainly becoming far more of a living thing than it had been—if a sinister one—far more alive than anything he had ever painted before. ‘Call it “Portrait of a Gentleman,”’ said Harringay—‘A Certain Gentleman.’
‘Won’t do,’ said Harringay, still keeping up his courage. ‘Kind of thing they call Bad Taste. That sneer will have to come out. That gone, and a little more fire in the eye—never noticed how warm his eye was before—and he might do for—? What price Passionate Pilgrim? But that devilish face won’t do—thisside of the Channel.
‘Some little inaccuracy does it,’ he said; ‘eyebrows probably too oblique,’—therewith pulling the blind lower to get a better light, and resuming palette and brushes.
The face on the canvas seemed animated by a spirit of its own. Where the expression of diablerie came in he found impossible to discover—Experiment was necessary. The eyebrows—it could scarcely be the eyebrows? But he altered them. No, that was no better; in fact, if anything, a trifle more satanic. The corner of the mouth? Pah! more than ever a leer—and now, retouched, it was ominously grim. The eye, then? Catastrophe! he had filled his brush with vermilion instead of brown, and yet he had felt sure it was brown! The eye seemed now to have rolled in its socket, and was glaring at him an eye of fire. In a flash of passion, possibly with something of the courage of panic, he struck the brush full of bright red athwart the picture; and then a very curious thing, a very strange thing indeed, occurred—if itdidoccur.
The diabolified Italian before him shut both his eyes,pursed his mouth, and wiped the colour off his face with his hand.
Then thered eyeopened again, with a sound like the opening of lips, and the face smiled. ‘That was rather hasty of you,’ said the picture.
Harringay states that, now that the worst had happened, his self-possession returned. He had a saving persuasion that devils were reasonable creatures.
‘Why do you keep moving about then,’ he said, ‘making faces and all that—sneering and squinting, while I am painting you?’
‘I don’t,’ said the picture.
‘Youdo,’ said Harringay.
‘It’s yourself,’ said the picture.
‘It’snotmyself,’ said Harringay.
‘Itisyourself,’ said the picture. ‘No! don’t go hitting me with paint again, because it’s true. You have been trying to fluke an expression on my face all the morning. Really, you haven’t an idea what your picture ought to look like.’
‘I have,’ said Harringay.
‘You havenot,’ said the picture: ‘Youneverhave with your pictures. You always start with the vaguest presentiment of what you are going to do; it is to be something beautiful—you are sure of that—and devout, perhaps, or tragic; but beyond that it is all experiment and chance. My dear fellow! you don’t think you can paint a picture like that?’
Now it must be remembered that for what follows we have only Harringay’s word.
‘I shall paint a picture exactly as I like,’ said Harringay calmly.
This seemed to disconcert the picture a little. ‘You can’t paint a picture without an inspiration,’ it remarked.
‘But Ihadan inspiration—for this.’
‘Inspiration!’ sneered the sardonic figure; ‘a fancythat came from your seeing an organ-grinder looking up at a window! Vigil! Ha, ha! You just started painting on the chance of something coming—that’s what you did. And when I saw you at it I came. I want a talk with you!’
‘Art, with you,’ said the picture—‘it’s a poor business. You potter. I don’t know how it is, but you don’t seem able to throw your soul into it. You know too much. It hampers you. In the midst of your enthusiasms you ask yourself whether something like this has not been done before. And ...’
‘Look here,’ said Harringay, who had expected something better than criticism from the devil. ‘Are you going to talk studio to me?’ He filled his number twelve hoghair with red paint.
‘The true artist,’ said the picture, ‘is always an ignorant man. An artist who theorises about his work is no longer artist but critic. Wagner ... I say!—What’s that red paint for?’
‘I’m going to paint you out,’ said Harringay. ‘I don’t want to hear all that Tommy Rot. If you think just because I’m an artist by trade I’m going to talk studio to you, you make a precious mistake.’
‘One minute,’ said the picture, evidently alarmed. ‘I want to make you an offer—a genuine offer. It’s right what I’m saying. You lack inspirations. Well. No doubt you’ve heard of the Cathedral of Cologne, and the Devil’s Bridge, and——’
‘Rubbish,’ said Harringay. ‘Do you think I want to go to perdition simply for the pleasure of painting a good picture, and getting it slated. Take that.’
His blood was up. His danger only nerved him to action, so he says. So he planted a dab of vermilion in his creature’s mouth. The Italian spluttered and tried to wipe it off—evidently horribly surprised. And then—according to Harringay—there began a very remarkable struggle, Harringay splashing away with the red paint, and the picture wriggling about and wiping it off as fast as he put it on. ‘Twomasterpieces,’ said the demon. ‘Two indubitable masterpieces for a Chelsea artist’s soul. It’s a bargain?’ Harringay replied with the paint brush.
For a few minutes nothing could be heard but the brush going and the spluttering and ejaculations of the Italian. A lot of the strokes he caught on his arm and hand, though Harringay got over his guard often enough. Presently the paint on the palette gave out and the two antagonists stood breathless, regarding each other. The picture was so smeared with red that it looked as if it had been rolling about a slaughterhouse, and it was painfully out of breath and very uncomfortable with the wet paint trickling down its neck. Still, the first round was in its favour on the whole. ‘Think,’ it said, sticking pluckily to its point, ‘two supreme masterpieces—in different styles. Each equivalent to the Cathedral....’
‘Iknow,’ said Harringay, and rushed out of the studio and along the passage towards his wife’s boudoir.
In another minute he was back with a large tin of enamel—Hedge Sparrow’s Egg Tint, it was, and a brush. At the sight of that the artistic devil with the red eye began to scream. ‘Threemasterpieces—culminating masterpieces.’
Harringay delivered cut two across the demon, and followed with a thrust in the eye. There was an indistinct rumbling. ‘Fourmasterpieces,’ and a spitting sound.
But Harringay had the upper hand now and meant to keep it. With rapid, bold strokes he continued to paint over the writhing canvas, until at last it was a uniform field of shining Hedge Sparrow tint. Once the mouth reappeared and got as far as ‘Five master—’ before he filled it with enamel; and near the end the red eyeopened and glared at him indignantly. But at last nothing remained save a gleaming panel of drying enamel. For a little while a faint stirring beneath the surface puckered it slightly here and there, but presently even that died away and the thing was perfectly still.
Then Harringay—according to Harringay’s account—lit his pipe and sat down and stared at the enamelled canvas, and tried to make out clearly what had happened. Then he walked round behind it, to see if the back of it was at all remarkable. Then it was he began to regret he had not photographed the Devil before he painted him out.
This is Harringays’ story—not mine. He supports it by a small canvas (24 by 20) enamelled a pale green, and by violent asseverations. It is also true that he never has produced a masterpiece, and in the opinion of his intimate friends probably never will.
‘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.
‘Idon’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’twantto 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 thanit 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.
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. ‘Theydosay, 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 becauseas 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 besomethingat 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 artistranks considerably higher than a grocer’s assistant. Skelmersdale, like too many of his class, is something of a snob; he had told me to ‘SHUTit’ 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, thataproposof 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 meetingor 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 ofmidges. 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 caringwherehe 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 dustyand drooping, and she parted with invidious comparisons, grave doubts whether she ever hadreallycared 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 wassmall, 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 wasclothed 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 sympatheticfor 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. Youshallfeel 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 intoFairyland, 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.