‘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.