Free Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells Page B

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 a
propos 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