He stopped abruptly and decided to drink some whisky.
‘I’ve tried to go to sleep there,’ he said, and I could swear his lips trembled. ‘I’ve tried to go to sleep there often and often. And, you know, I couldn’t, sir—never. I’ve thought if I could go to sleep there, there might be something.... But I’ve sat up there and laid up there, and I couldn’t—not for thinking and longing. It’s the longing.... I’ve tried——’
He blew, drank up the rest of his whisky spasmodically, stood up suddenly and buttoned his jacket, staring closely and critically at the cheap oleographs beside the mantel meanwhile. The little black notebook in which he recorded the orders of his daily round projected stiffly from his breast pocket. When all the buttons were quite done, he patted his chest and turned on me suddenly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I must be going.’
There was something in his eyes and manner that was too difficult for him to express in words. ‘One gets talking,’ he said at last at the door, and smiled wanly, and so vanished from my eyes. And that is the tale of Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland just as he told it to me.
THE STORY OF THE INEXPERIENCED GHOST
The scene amidst which Clayton told his last story comes back very vividly to my mind. There he sat, for the greater part of the time, in the corner of the authentic settle by the spacious open fire, and Sanderson sat beside him smoking the Broseley clay that bore his name. There was Evans, and that marvel among actors, Wish, who is also a modest man. We had all come down to the Mermaid Club that Saturday morning, except Clayton, who had slept there overnight—which indeed gave him the opening of his story. We had golfed until golfing was invisible; we had dined, and we were in that mood of tranquil kindliness when men will suffer a story. When Clayton began to tell one, we naturally supposed he was lying. It may be that indeed he was lying—of that the reader will speedily be able to judge as well as I. He began, it is true, with an air of matter-of-fact anecdote, but that we thought was only the incurable artifice of the man.
‘I say!’ he remarked, after a long consideration of the upward rain of sparks from the log that Sanderson had thumped, ‘you know I was alone here last night?’
‘Except for the domestics,’ said Wish.