Short Fiction by H. G. Wells (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

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. Larvae, 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 lovemaking, 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 glowworm 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