Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland
Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland is a short story by H. G. Wells. There is no irony or metaphor in the title: It concerns a shopkeeper, named Mr. Skelmersdale, who claims to have spent several days in a literal fairyland. I imagine most modern readers baulking at the very mention of fairies, anticipating either a tale for children or a trite allegory. But Wells’ story is neither of these things. The adventure in fairyland is unexpectedly believable while you are reading it but almost beside the point. The emotional and thematic heart of this story is the plight of the shopkeeper when he returns to our world.
Mr. Skelmersdale falls asleep on Aldington Knoll on a midsummer night and wakes up underground with the distinct impression that he has diminished in size. He does not precisely recall the appearance of the fairies, only their queen, who tells him that she has fallen in love with him and offers him anything his heart desires. She is clothed in filmy green and wears a coral necklace around her slender white throat. She is barefoot and has "the soft lines of a child in her cheeks." These are the details he remembers. Her brown eyes and stray curls, her girdled waist and naked legs. Her stupefying, otherworldly beauty he is unable to convey. Mr. Skelmersdale is an ordinary, perhaps rather mundane man, and being thrust into an extraordinary situation does nothing to alter this fact. He tells the fairy that he would like to open his own shop and wishes he had just enough money to do that. And then he carelessly mentions his fiancée, Millie. The fairy listens to all this with a certain tolerant surprise, "and asks him many questions, laughing all the while." They are sitting on the bank of a lake. “Whatever you want, you shall have,” she tells him. “And now, you must kiss me.” Mr. Skelmersdale thanks her and pretends not to hear the last part of her reply. But she comes suddenly quite close to him and whispers, “Kiss me.” "There are kisses and there are kisses," notes the narrator—but what the fairy does to Mr. Skelmersdale is something altogether different from Millie’s "resonant signals of regard." The fairy asks him to spend a few forbidden days and nights with her before returning, as he must, to Millie. And he is feverishly in love with the magical being now but the pure inertia of his mind keeps him the way he is going. When those eventful days and nights elapse, she takes him to a cave. Gnomes begin to fill his pockets with gold. She stands before him choked with emotion and he understands what is about to happen and feels a fainting sensation in his heart. But he stands there "like a stuffed calf" and says nothing. And then she is gone. Mr. Skelmersdale runs after her through the cave, through fernbrake, through a swamp calling her name at the top of his voice—but it is too late. He stumbles, falls, and comes to on Aldington Knoll all alone under the stars. It is possible that a man granted temporary admittance to paradise and then returned to earth would be enlightened. It is equally possible that the memory of divine bliss would make even the greatest pleasures of sublunary existence seem drab and unsatisfying by comparison and he would therefore be ruined for life. And so it is with Mr. Skelmersdale. Everyone he meets after his return seems large, loud and coarse. He runs into Millie at church on Sunday and finds himself "forgetting her even as she is standing there talking to him." Life has been bled of all its colour and happiness and so he withdraws from human company by day and spends his nights roaming over the knoll, shouting the name of the fairy, blubbering, sobbing. Time and time again he lies down on the grass and tries to fall asleep but he cannot. Whenever he is there, his mind is too busy, and his longing too great, and sleep cruelly eludes him. The reader who approaches literature with an open-mind is amply rewarded. I began reading this story with a wry smile which I did not allow to deter me. I finished it with a feeling of strangled sadness that I carried with me for several days. Perhaps this simple synopsis is an act of abreaction. |