Twelve Stories and a Dream (8 page)

"It's all right," I said, "she's gone."

But for a long time the door didn't open.

I heard the key turn. Then Pyecraft's voice said, "Come in."

I turned the handle and opened the door. Naturally I expected to see
Pyecraft.

Well, you know, he wasn't there!

I never had such a shock in my life. There was his sitting-room in a
state of untidy disorder, plates and dishes among the books and writing
things, and several chairs overturned, but Pyecraft—

"It's all right, o' man; shut the door," he said, and then I discovered
him.

There he was right up close to the cornice in the corner by the door, as
though some one had glued him to the ceiling. His face was anxious and
angry. He panted and gesticulated. "Shut the door," he said. "If that
woman gets hold of it—"

I shut the door, and went and stood away from him and stared.

"If anything gives way and you tumble down," I said, "you'll break your
neck, Pyecraft."

"I wish I could," he wheezed.

"A man of your age and weight getting up to kiddish gymnastics—"

"Don't," he said, and looked agonised.

"I'll tell you," he said, and gesticulated.

"How the deuce," said I, "are you holding on up there?"

And then abruptly I realised that he was not holding on at all, that he
was floating up there—just as a gas-filled bladder might have floated
in the same position. He began a struggle to thrust himself away
from the ceiling and to clamber down the wall to me. "It's that
prescription," he panted, as he did so. "Your great-gran—"

He took hold of a framed engraving rather carelessly as he spoke and
it gave way, and he flew back to the ceiling again, while the picture
smashed onto the sofa. Bump he went against the ceiling, and I knew then
why he was all over white on the more salient curves and angles of his
person. He tried again more carefully, coming down by way of the mantel.

It was really a most extraordinary spectacle, that great, fat,
apoplectic-looking man upside down and trying to get from the ceiling to
the floor. "That prescription," he said. "Too successful."

"How?"

"Loss of weight—almost complete."

And then, of course, I understood.

"By Jove, Pyecraft," said I, "what you wanted was a cure for fatness!
But you always called it weight. You would call it weight."

Somehow I was extremely delighted. I quite liked Pyecraft for the time.
"Let me help you!" I said, and took his hand and pulled him down. He
kicked about, trying to get a foothold somewhere. It was very like
holding a flag on a windy day.

"That table," he said, pointing, "is solid mahogany and very heavy. If
you can put me under that—"

I did, and there he wallowed about like a captive balloon, while I stood
on his hearthrug and talked to him.

I lit a cigar. "Tell me," I said, "what happened?"

"I took it," he said.

"How did it taste?"

"Oh, BEASTLY!"

I should fancy they all did. Whether one regards the ingredients or
the probable compound or the possible results, almost all of my
great-grandmother's remedies appear to me at least to be extraordinarily
uninviting. For my own part—

"I took a little sip first."

"Yes?"

"And as I felt lighter and better after an hour, I decided to take the
draught."

"My dear Pyecraft!"

"I held my nose," he explained. "And then I kept on getting lighter and
lighter—and helpless, you know."

He gave way to a sudden burst of passion. "What the goodness am I to
DO?" he said.

"There's one thing pretty evident," I said, "that you mustn't do. If you
go out of doors, you'll go up and up." I waved an arm upward. "They'd
have to send Santos-Dumont after you to bring you down again."

"I suppose it will wear off?"

I shook my head. "I don't think you can count on that," I said.

And then there was another burst of passion, and he kicked out at
adjacent chairs and banged the floor. He behaved just as I should
have expected a great, fat, self-indulgent man to behave under trying
circumstances—that is to say, very badly. He spoke of me and my
great-grandmother with an utter want of discretion.

"I never asked you to take the stuff," I said.

And generously disregarding the insults he was putting upon me, I sat
down in his armchair and began to talk to him in a sober, friendly
fashion.

I pointed out to him that this was a trouble he had brought upon
himself, and that it had almost an air of poetical justice. He had eaten
too much. This he disputed, and for a time we argued the point.

He became noisy and violent, so I desisted from this aspect of his
lesson. "And then," said I, "you committed the sin of euphuism. You
called it not Fat, which is just and inglorious, but Weight. You—"

He interrupted to say he recognised all that. What was he to DO?

I suggested he should adapt himself to his new conditions. So we came to
the really sensible part of the business. I suggested that it would
not be difficult for him to learn to walk about on the ceiling with his
hands—

"I can't sleep," he said.

But that was no great difficulty. It was quite possible, I pointed out,
to make a shake-up under a wire mattress, fasten the under things on
with tapes, and have a blanket, sheet, and coverlet to button at the
side. He would have to confide in his housekeeper, I said; and after
some squabbling he agreed to that. (Afterwards it was quite delightful
to see the beautifully matter-of-fact way with which the good lady took
all these amazing inversions.) He could have a library ladder in his
room, and all his meals could be laid on the top of his bookcase. We
also hit on an ingenious device by which he could get to the floor
whenever he wanted, which was simply to put the British Encyclopaedia
(tenth edition) on the top of his open shelves. He just pulled out a
couple of volumes and held on, and down he came. And we agreed there
must be iron staples along the skirting, so that he could cling to those
whenever he wanted to get about the room on the lower level.

As we got on with the thing I found myself almost keenly interested. It
was I who called in the housekeeper and broke matters to her, and it was
I chiefly who fixed up the inverted bed. In fact, I spent two whole days
at his flat. I am a handy, interfering sort of man with a screw-driver,
and I made all sorts of ingenious adaptations for him—ran a wire to
bring his bells within reach, turned all his electric lights up
instead of down, and so on. The whole affair was extremely curious and
interesting to me, and it was delightful to think of Pyecraft like some
great, fat blow-fly, crawling about on his ceiling and clambering round
the lintels of his doors from one room to another, and never, never,
never coming to the club any more....

Then, you know, my fatal ingenuity got the better of me. I was sitting
by his fire drinking his whisky, and he was up in his favourite corner
by the cornice, tacking a Turkey carpet to the ceiling, when the
idea struck me. "By Jove, Pyecraft!" I said, "all this is totally
unnecessary."

And before I could calculate the complete consequences of my notion I
blurted it out. "Lead underclothing," said I, and the mischief was done.

Pyecraft received the thing almost in tears. "To be right ways up
again—" he said. I gave him the whole secret before I saw where it
would take me. "Buy sheet lead," I said, "stamp it into discs. Sew 'em
all over your underclothes until you have enough. Have lead-soled boots,
carry a bag of solid lead, and the thing is done! Instead of being a
prisoner here you may go abroad again, Pyecraft; you may travel—"

A still happier idea came to me. "You need never fear a shipwreck.
All you need do is just slip off some or all of your clothes, take the
necessary amount of luggage in your hand, and float up in the air—"

In his emotion he dropped the tack-hammer within an ace of my head. "By
Jove!" he said, "I shall be able to come back to the club again."

The thing pulled me up short. "By Jove!" I said faintly. "Yes. Of
course—you will."

He did. He does. There he sits behind me now, stuffing—as I
live!—a third go of buttered tea-cake. And no one in the whole world
knows—except his housekeeper and me—that he weighs practically
nothing; that he is a mere boring mass of assimilatory matter, mere
clouds in clothing, niente, nefas, the most inconsiderable of men. There
he sits watching until I have done this writing. Then, if he can, he
will waylay me. He will come billowing up to me....

He will tell me over again all about it, how it feels, how it doesn't
feel, how he sometimes hopes it is passing off a little. And always
somewhere in that fat, abundant discourse he will say, "The secret's
keeping, eh? If any one knew of it—I should be so ashamed.... Makes a
fellow look such a fool, you know. Crawling about on a ceiling and all
that...."

And now to elude Pyecraft, occupying, as he does, an admirable strategic
position between me and the door.

"There's a man in that shop," said the Doctor, "who has been in
Fairyland."

"Nonsense!" I said, and stared back at the shop. It was the usual
village shop, post-office, telegraph wire on its brow, zinc pans and
brushes outside, boots, shirtings, and potted meats in the window. "Tell
me about it," I said, after a pause.

"
I
don't know," said the Doctor. "He's an ordinary sort of
lout—Skelmersdale is his name. But everybody about here believes it
like Bible truth."

I reverted presently to the topic.

"I know nothing about it," said the Doctor, "and I don't WANT to know. I
attended him for a broken finger—Married and Single cricket match—and
that's when I struck the nonsense. That's all. But it shows you the sort
of stuff I have to deal with, anyhow, eh? Nice to get modern sanitary
ideas into a people like this!"

"Very," I said in a mildly sympathetic tone, and he went on to tell me
about that business of the Bonham drain. Things of that kind, I observe,
are apt to weigh on the minds of Medical Officers of Health. I was as
sympathetic as I knew how, and when he called the Bonham people "asses,"
I said they were "thundering asses," but even that did not allay him.

Afterwards, later in the summer, an urgent desire to seclude myself,
while finishing my chapter on Spiritual Pathology—it was really, I
believe, stiffer to write than it is to read—took me to Bignor. I
lodged at a farmhouse, and presently found myself outside that little
general shop again, in search of tobacco. "Skelmersdale," said I to
myself at the sight of it, and went in.

I was served by a short, but shapely, young man, with a fair downy
complexion, good, small teeth, blue eyes, and a languid manner. I
scrutinised him curiously. Except for a touch of melancholy in
his expression, he was nothing out of the common. He was in the
shirt-sleeves and tucked-up apron of his trade, and a pencil was thrust
behind his inoffensive ear. Athwart his black waistcoat was a gold
chain, from which dangled a bent guinea.

"Nothing more to-day, sir?" he inquired. He leant forward over my bill
as he spoke.

"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. A little man with rosy cheeks was more
communicative. "They DO say, sir," he said, "that they took him into
Aldington Knoll an' kep' him there a matter of three weeks."

And with that the gathering was well under weigh. Once one sheep had
started, others were ready enough to follow, and in a little time I
had at least the exterior aspect of the Skelmersdale affair. Formerly,
before he came to Bignor, he had been in that very similar little shop
at Aldington Corner, and there whatever it was did happen had taken
place. The story was clear that he had stayed out late one night on
the Knoll and vanished for three weeks from the sight of 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.