Fairies

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

IT was, perhaps, the pair of green rompers that began it. They were not entirely green, but a crinkly line of green ran through the material. ‘Fairy green,’ I said to Spriggins as I held it up to him.

‘F-f-fairy green’; he caught me up quickly. ‘Wh-wh-why fairy green?’

‘Because it’s the fairies’ color. The fairies love green — they always wear it.’ Then I recited to him, —

Just as I finished, Miss Kitten came up and had to hear it all over again. Her blue eyes grew very serious. Not so Spriggins’s; in his an impish light danced.

‘I w-w-want the g-green rompers! I want the green rompers!’ he shouted, waving the stuff.

‘But if you have them, the fairies may get you. When people wear green, it gives the fairies power over them.’

‘I d-d-don’t care! I w-want the fairies to g-get me! I want the f-fairies to get me!’

He danced off across the grass, in wild glee, whirling round and round, and finally tumbling in a heap on the grass and rolling over and over, his copper-colored hair swishing about his face.

The rompers ware made, watched over by the would-be changeling with restless eagerness. When they were put on, one golden day in July, and little Spriggins raced off down the bright roadside, shouting, ‘The f-fairies are g-g-going to get me!’ it seemed to me that the fairies would show singular blindness to their opportunities if they let this one pass. It would, I thought, almost prove that there really were no fairies.

Spriggins’s birthday was coming. ‘Have a play,’the children begged; ‘let’s have a play!’

‘What play?’

‘Oh, just a play—any kind of a play! You can plan it.’

So I planned it. The children had a quaint way of coming to me now and then and saying, ‘Mother, we’re playing a game; will you make believe that you ’re our mother? ’ I was always willing to do this, and having had such practice, I framed the play along the same lines: I made believe I was Spriggins’s mother. I made believe that I had to go away and leave him for a little while, and before I went I slipped on him a little tunic, of pale bright green — the fairies’ color. I warned him not to wander away, and left him playing in the grass.

As soon as I had gone, out came a crowd of fairies, all dressed in green too; and when they saw a little greenclad mortal all alone, of course they danced round and round him, and sang to him, and begged him to join their band and be a fairy too. And of course he wanted to; so they put a flowerwreath on his head and took his hand, and whisked him away — away off into fairyland, which was the tall grass and weeds of the orchard.

Then, still making believe that I was his mother, I returned and found my boy gone. An old witch, hobbling by, told me what had happened. But at twilight, she said, the fairies became visible, and if I could hide and lie in wait for them, I might seize one and hold it until they gave me back the stolen child.

I hid, the fairies trooped by, and I snatched one of the littlest to wit, our Miss Kitten, very willing and cuddly and laughing softly all the time — and held her fast while I drove my bargain with her comrades. They disappeared into the orchard, brought back my Spriggins, received their own hostage, and with a last song melted away again among the tall grass and the long afternoon shadows of the orchard.

Now Spriggins himself, by reason of this play, — though his kidnappers were known to him as brothers and sisters and cousins and friends, — still felt himself ever afterwards, in a peculiar way, allied to those fairy bands of the woods and fields that he had never quite seen but always hoped to see. Not to have seen fairies proved nothing, of course. By the very terms of their being were they not invisible, save at certain magic hours? And those hours, as it happened, were always the ones when mortal children had fixed engagements with the sandman, which their mother would not encourage them to break.

Gradually there grew up among the younger children a certain tradition of fairy lore — how elaborate I do not know. Do we ever fully know the lore that is being woven by the children about us? We are lucky if we even catch a glimpse of some of its bright fringes!

Each child had his own fairy, a friend and protector, who came at night after he was asleep, and led him away to all manner of adventure. Among these guardian fairies there arose a certain rivalry, sometimes friendly, sometimes tricksy, as appeared when stories of the night were interchanged.

One of these stories I overheard. Spriggins began it.

‘Stubbins,’ he said, hugging his knees and rocking back and forth in an ecstasy of gleeful invention, ‘do you know what a t-t-trick my fairy and I p-p-playcd on you last night?’

‘What?’ said Stubbins cautiously. Stubbins was over a year younger, and had need of caution.

‘Why, after you were asleep, my fairy and I came over to your crib and pulled the bed-clothes off you — all the bedclothes.’

Stubbins was quiet a moment, thinking hard. Then he said calmly, — ‘Dat was n’t any twick.’

‘Wh-why not? Why was n’t it?’

‘ Because — do you know where I was? I was n’t dere at all.’

‘Weren’t you?’ said Spriggins, too surprised and interested to see what was coming.

‘No, ob course I was n’t. I and my fair-wy were sitting way up high on de corner ob de porch, and we were watching you and your fair-wy all de time.’

With other children, who had not helped to create the tradition, they had occasional trouble.

‘Mother,’ said Spriggins one day, ‘John Harrison says there are n’t any fairies, and I’ve p-proved that there are, b-but still he says there are n’t.’ ‘When was this, Spriggins?’

‘ Wh-when we c-came home from school.’

‘And how did you prove it?’ ‘Wh-wh-why, I told him all the queer things that have happened — you know — how I lost my f-five cents and then found it again in that f-funny place, and nobody but a f-fairy could have p-put it there — and lots of things.’

‘And what does he say?’

He says somebody else m-might have done it — and I can’t make him b-believe — I just can’t, mother.’

Sometimes I have wondered whether I ought to have let the fairy-lore go on weaving itself in those active little brains. And yet, I am not at all sure that I could have helped it if I had tried. For, if I set out to prove to them that it is not true — well, what is proof anyway? The cumulative weight of my experience. But the child has his experience, too, and already he has learned that it is very different from mine and tells him a different story. He knows that the world is big, and that life is indeed full of a number of things. Each turn in the road he is traveling brings so much that is new — why should he be surprised at anything? How can he tell what not to expect? When he is so often mistaken about what can happen, how is he, or anybody, to be sure what cannot happen?

I remember in my own childhood being told by other children that if we looked at a certain chair long enough, and wished hard enough, it would turn into a pony. Did I quite believe this? I cannot say, but I found it a pleasant thought to hold in the mind, and I remember spending many minutes gazing at the chair. And if the pony never came, what did that prove? Only that we lacked concentration.

To the children fairies stand for all the wonderful and unpredictable possibilities of life, for all the magic of it, its charm of unexpectedness. A child is a bit puzzled by the inevitable; in the fairy world it does not exist. In that world he slips away from the world of grown-ups, with its endless consequences remorselessly hounding the gay, irresponsible little-child doings. He loves the grown-ups and it is not from them that he wishes to escape, but from their world, their difficult, unyielding world.

‘To-night,’ says Spriggins, with those impish lights in his blue eyes, ‘ to-night my fairy is coming for me, and I’m going away — away — away off, and m-maybe I w-won’t come back, and m-maybe I will. I don’t know, but I think I w-will.’

He has always been impressed by the big happy chances in life. His favorite rejoinder is, ’But it m-m-might, you know,’ meaning that all wonderful things are always possible, and that we are nearer the pleasantly miraculous than my superior wisdom can quite realize.

Of course he makes regarding it no such cool generalization as this. His is a warm feeling, pricking through his myriad activities. His mind, birdlike in its movement and its swift precision of clutch, perches on now this and now that tangible twig of symbol. The fairies are such symbols, the ‘magic stick is another, and then there is the moon.

‘Mother,’ he said one night, in a rare and swiftly passing mood of depression, ‘I am sad all my days because I don’t have a magic stick — y-y-you know — a m-magic stick, that will turn anything into anything else.’

’I see, but I have n’t any, so I can’t give you one.’

‘But y-you m-might find one — you m-might, you know.’

‘If I find one I’ll give it to you.’

‘Mother, I know where they come from. They come from the sun. The sun is full of m-magic sticks, and it whirls round and round, and it t-tries not to let the magic sticks whirl off, but it can ’t, help it, and they wh-whirl away, and f-fall down on the earth, and the f-fairies f-find them. And some day I’m going to find one. And th-then I can turn y-you into a m-monkey if I want to.’

' But you won’t want to. You would n’t want a monkey for a mother.’

‘No’ (with a delighted chuckle). ‘I would n’t want a m-monkey for a m-mother. Only I m-might — only I guess I would n’t.’

Yes, I think the children may safely be left to their own bright imagining. About them, ahead of them, lies the world of hard fact, of hard convention. They are marching into it, with their fairy banners flying, their white owl-feathers a-cock. Later on they may choose other banners and other plumes; but banners and plumes we must all have, or how could we march at all?

Once only Spriggins urged me further than I was willing to go. A new plan had occurred to him, and he raced to me to share it, hair a little redder, eyes a little bluer, cheeks a little pinker than usual.

‘O, m-mother! I’ve j-just thought of something! W-w-won’t you make me a pair of g-g-green pyjamas? And then the f-fairies, wh-when they see me at night will surely steal me away! G-green pyjamas, mother! M-make me some green pyjamas!’

But there I have been quite firm. I will not make him green pyjamas. The risk seems to me too great.