The Fairy Ring (10 page)

Mr. Gardner picked the last week of Frances’s summer holidays. That way, Frances and Elsie and Mr. and Mrs. Hodson could all go out to the beck together to look for fairies.

You probably know how Frances felt when she found out.

This time, she had to miss
Cricket Week,
when all the cricket stars came to Scarborough.

She and Elsie would have to tromp through the beck with a bunch of strangers. And as if that weren’t bad enough, they’d have to sit there, hour after hour, waiting for fairies.

Frances decided that even if she did see any, she wouldn’t say a word. If Mr. Hodson wanted fairies, fine. He could just see one for himself.

F
rances, Elsie, Mr. Hodson, and Mrs. Hodson sat in the woods, next to the basket of sandwiches they’d packed for lunch. It was August, but they all wore coats, for it had been drizzling rain when they set off that morning.

Mr. Hodson had brought a still camera, a cinema camera, and a field notebook. Mrs. Hodson took out her knitting.

Mr. Hodson turned out to be the kind of person who is forever bringing up the names of important people he just happens to know. His wife was older than he was, and he was always turning to her and saying things like “Happy, darling?” then giving her a little smile.

The sun moved slowly through the gray, dull sky. Mrs. Hodson’s knitting needles clicked.

After a while, Mr. Hodson began to speak in half whispers about his Experiences in the Occult World.

Frances listened carefully to the pompous, flowery way he talked so that she’d be able to imitate it later to amuse her friends. But after a while even that was boring.

Finally, after what seemed like hours and hours and
hours,
Elsie said she saw a fairy.

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Hodson eagerly. He added that the fairy was materializing.

Elsie said she saw one nearly six feet tall, standing by a tree.

Mr. Hodson said he saw it, too — it was chained to the tree. It was the spirit of the tree. . . .

He began scribbling in his notebook.

And then — they couldn’t seem to help it — both Elsie and Frances started pretending they saw fairies. “Our normal selves came to the surface,” Frances admitted later.

And it
was
funny, though they didn’t dare laugh.

Mr. Hodson wrote:

G
NOMES AND
F
AIRIES
.
In the field we saw figures about the size of the gnome. They were making weird faces and grotesque contortions at the group. One in particular took great delight in knocking his knees together. These forms appeared to Elsie singly — one dissolving and another appearing in its place. I, however, saw them in a group with one figure more prominently visible than the rest. Elsie saw also a gnome like the one in the photograph, but not so bright and not coloured. . . .

W
ATER
N
YMPH
.
In the beck itself, near the large rock, at a slight fall in the water, I saw a water sprite. It was an entirely nude female figure with long fair hair, which it appeared to be combing or passing through its fingers. . . . Its form was of a dazzling rosy whiteness, and its face very beautiful. . . . It showed no consciousness of my presence, and, though I waited with the camera in the hope of taking it, it did not detach itself from the surroundings in which it was in some way merged. . . .

W
OOD
E
LVES
.
(Under the old beeches in the wood, Cottingley, August 12, 1921.) Two tiny wood elves came racing over the ground past us as we sat on a fallen tree trunk. Seeing us, they pulled up short about five feet away, and stood regarding us with considerable amusement but no fear. . . . As Frances came up and sat within a foot of them they withdrew, as if in alarm, a distance of eight feet or so, where they remained apparently regarding us and comparing notes of their impressions. . . .

W
ATER
F
AIRY
.
(August 14, 1921.) This creature hung poised . . . much as a seagull supports itself against the wind. . . . I did not notice any wings.

F
AIRY
, E
LVES
, G
NOMES, AND
B
ROWNIE
.
(Sunday, August 14, 9 p.m. In the field.) Lovely still moonlit evening. The field appears to be densely populated with native spirits of various kinds. . . . Frances sees tiny fairies dancing in a circle, the figures gradually expanding in size till they reached eighteen inches, the ring widening in proportion. Elsie sees a vertical circle of dancing fairies flying slowly round. . . . (Written by the light of the moon.) I see couples a foot high . . . dancing in a slow waltz-like motion in the middle of the field. . . . Elsie sees a small imp.

On the afternoon of Thursday, August 18, Mr. Hodson was overcome by an especially beautiful creature who moved her arms, fluttered her butterfly wings, and then smiled at him, placing her finger on her lips. Her body appeared to be clothed only in “iridescent shimmering golden light.”

Honestly.

What could Elsie and Frances say to
that
one?

Elsie made a pencil sketch that showed Elsie and Frances dancing together to a ragtime tune. “When we two one step,” she wrote underneath.

It was a funny sketch, quick and laughing, like Elsie herself. Frances in the picture is mock serious, clowning around. They looked, dancing together, as though they shared a joke that only the two of them understood.

One day when they went out in the fields with Mr. Hodson, Elsie took a photograph of his plump, tweed-clad bottom as he crouched in the long grass, waiting for fairies.

Mr. Hodson looking for fairies. Photo by Elsie.

A few times that August, Elsie and Frances’s little cousin Marjorie came along. After a while she said she saw fairies, too. Elsie took a picture of her dancing in the woods. Later, Elsie colored it in, so that Marjorie almost looked like a fairy herself.

Cousin Marjorie in the woods

Still, it was a long week.

In one photograph taken then, Elsie, Frances, and Mr. Hodson stand uneasily in front of a window, its dark surface reflecting shadows and sky.

Frances wears a cautious smile. Elsie’s expression is guarded, her eyes slightly narrowed, her head turned to the side.

She looks like a person who is getting very, very tired of fairies.

Mr. Gardner came to visit for part of the week and gazed unhappily into the camera as he had his picture taken with Elsie, Frances, and Mrs. Hodson. In the photograph, Elsie and Frances are each wearing their cameras. Yet they have not taken a single photo of a fairy.

Mr. Hodson, too, has for some reason failed to take any, with either the still camera or the cinema camera.

When Sir Arthur heard what had happened, it seemed to him that the “change in the girls” was the main reason why they couldn’t take any more pictures of fairies. It was too late now. Like the rabbit in a magician’s trick,
Hey, presto!
The girls’ simplicity and innocence had vanished. It was just as Mr. Gardner had feared, in the letter he had sent to Sir Arthur long ago.

Now when the fairies came near Frances and Elsie, the bright, airy substance of which fairies were made no longer became solid. It wouldn’t show up on a photograph.

It was a pity, really, but that was the way fairies were.

E
lsie said it, too: the fairies were gone.

“When the last fairy pictures were taken . . . they were doing a gentle see-through fade-out on us, especially that last mixed-up one. . . . ,” she once wrote in a letter. “No more fairies appeared so it was just a waste snapping away at nothing, for definitely that was the end of it all.”

Neither Elsie nor Frances ever took another fairy photograph.

Six years later, Mr. Gardner stood on the deck of an ocean liner bound for America. In his luggage were lantern slides of the five Cottingley Fairy Photographs, as they were now known.

“Briton in U.S. to Prove Fairies Exist,” a New York newspaper announced. “Champion of Elfs Struts His Stuff,” read the mocking headline in another. “A Bit of Britain’s Gnome-land,” commented the caption above the photograph of Elsie and the flower-bearing fairy — as though anyone could see how ridiculous it all was.

In California, the
Los Angeles Examiner
ran the photograph of Frances and the fairy ring with a caption that simpered, “Really, Truly They’re Fairies.”

Still, Mr. Gardner toured all over America. Everywhere he went, he showed slides of Elsie and Frances and the fairies.

He knew what he believed in.

Sir Arthur wrote a book about Elsie and Frances’s pictures. He called it
The Coming of the Fairies.

Science, Sir Arthur now believed, was like a harsh light that left the world hard and bare, “like a landscape in the moon.” And surely, there was more to life than that! Just knowing that fairies were out there, even if you never got to see one, added charm and romance to the world.

Sir Arthur didn’t say this in his book, but a part of him had longed for fairies ever since he was a boy. His uncle Richard painted wonderful pictures of fairies: little creatures who lived in a world of soft sunlight and bright flowers. They hid under leaves, and you could see them if you just knew where to look.

Sir Arthur’s father drew fairies, too. One of his watercolors showed a fairy band streaming down from a starlit sky to alight in the grim, gray courtyard of an insane asylum.

Sir Arthur’s father lived in that insane asylum. He’d gone away, never to return, when Sir Arthur was seventeen. In the asylum, Sir Arthur’s father drew pictures of tiny people holding leaves as big as umbrellas or lurking in flowerpots or riding on the backs of birds.

Sir Arthur didn’t mention any of that in
The Coming of the Fairies.
But if fairies were
real,
Sir Arthur’s father wasn’t crazy after all.

If fairies were
real,
the world was a happier place.

As he drew toward the end of his life, Sir Arthur had statues of gnomes set out in his garden, hoping that fairies would be drawn to them. He even had his gardener’s little girl sit next to the statues to increase the chances.