observation. In some things she was difficult, in others very easy to
teach. For instance, I got her to learn in no time that she ought to
wear her clothes, such as they were, when I was with her. She
certainly preferred to go without them, especially in the sunshine;
but by leaving her the moment she slipped her frock off I soon made
her understand that if she wanted me she must behave herself according
to my notions of behaviour. She got that fixed in her little head, but
even so she used to do her best to hoodwink me. She would slip out one
shoulder when she thought I wasn't looking, and before I knew where I
was half of her would be gleaming in the sun like satin. Directly I
noticed it I used to frown, and then she would pretend to be ashamed
of herself, hang her head, and wriggle her frock up to its place
again. However, I never could teach her to keep her skirts about her
knees. She was as innocent as a baby about that sort of thing.
"I taught her some English words, and a sentence or two. That was
toward the end of her confinement to the kennel, about March. I used
to touch parts of her, or of myself, or Bran, and peg away at the
names of them. Mouth, eyes, ears, hands, chest, tail, back, front: she
learned all those and more. Eat, drink, laugh, cry, love, kiss, those
also. As for kissing (apart from the word) she proved herself to be an
expert. She kissed me, Florrie, Bran, Strap indifferently, one as soon
as another, and any rather than none, and all four for choice.
"I learned some things myself, more than a thing or two. I don't mind
owning that one thing was to value my wife's steady and tried
affection far above the wild love of this unbalanced, unearthly little
creature, who seemed to be like nothing so much as a woman with the
conscience left out. The conscience, we believe, is the still small
voice of the Deity crying to us in the dark recesses of the body;
pointing out the path of duty; teaching respect for the opinion of the
world, for tradition, decency and order. It is thanks to conscience
that a man is true and a woman modest. Not that Thumbeline could be
called immodest, unless a baby can be so described, or an animal. But
could I be called 'true'? I greatly fear that I could not--in fact, I
know it too well. I meant no harm; I was greatly interested; and
there was always before me the real difficulty of making Mary
understand that something was in the kennel which she couldn't see. It
would have led to great complications, even if I had persuaded her of
the fact. No doubt she would have insisted on my getting rid of
Thumbeline--but how on earth could I have done that if Thumbeline had
not chosen to go? But for all that I know very well that I ought to
have told her, cost what it might. If I had done it I should have
spared myself lifelong regret, and should only have gone without a few
weeks of extraordinary interest which I now see clearly could not have
been good for me, as not being founded upon any revealed Christian
principle, and most certainly were not worth the price I had to pay
for them.
"I learned one more curious fact which I must not forget. Nothing
would induce Thumbeline to touch or pass over anything made of
zinc.[6] I don't know the reason of it; but gardeners will tell you
that the way to keep a plant from slugs is to put a zinc collar round
it. It is due to that I was able to keep her in Bran's run without
difficulty. To have got out she would have had to pass zinc. The wire
was all galvanised.
[Footnote 6: This is a curious thing, unsupported by any other
evidence known to me. I asked Despoina about it, but she would not, or
she did not, answer. She appeared not to understand what zinc was, and
I had none handy.]
"She showed her dislike of it in numerous ways: one was her care to
avoid touching the sides or top of the enclosure when she was at her
gambols. At such times, when she was at her wildest, she was all over
the place, skipping high like a lamb, twisting like a leveret,
wheeling round and round in circles like a young dog, or skimming,
like a swallow on the wing, above ground. But she never made a
mistake; she turned in a moment or flung herself backward if there was
the least risk of contact. When Florrie used to converse with her from
outside, in that curious silent way the two had, it would always be
the child that put its hands through the wire, never Thumbeline. I
once tried to put her against the roof when I was playing with her.
She screamed like a shot hare and would not come out of the kennel all
day. There was no doubt at all about her feelings for zinc. All other
metals seemed indifferent to her.
"With the advent of spring weather Thumbeline became not only more
beautiful, but wilder, and exceedingly restless. She now coaxed me to
let her out, and against my judgment I did it; she had to be carried
over the entry; for when I had set the gate wide open and pointed her
the way into the garden she squatted down in her usual attitude of
attention, with her legs crossed, and watched me, waiting. I wanted to
see how she would get through the hateful wire, so went away and hid
myself, leaving her alone with Bran. I saw her creep to the entry and
peer at the wire. What followed was curious. Bran came up wagging his
tail and stood close to her, his side against her head; he looked
down, inviting her to go out with him. Long looks passed between them,
and then Bran stooped his head, she put her arms around his neck,
twined her feet about his foreleg, and was carried out. Then she
became a mad thing, now bird, now moth; high and low, round and round,
flashing about the place for all the world like a humming-bird moth,
perfectly beautiful in her motions (whose ease always surprised me),
and equally so in her colouring of soft grey and dusky-rose flesh.
Bran grew a puppy again and whipped about after her in great circles
round the meadow. But though he was famous at coursing, and has killed
his hares single-handed, he was never once near Thumbeline. It was a
wonderful sight and made me late for business.
"By degrees she got to be very bold, and taught me boldness too, and
(I am ashamed to say) greater degrees of deceit. She came freely into
the house and played with Florrie up and down stairs; she got on my
knee at meal-times, or evenings when my wife and I were together. Fine
tricks she played me, I must own. She spilled my tea for me, broke
cups and saucers, scattered my Patience cards, caught poor Mary's
knitting wool and rolled it about the room. The cunning little
creature knew that I dared not scold her or make any kind of fuss. She
used to beseech me for forgiveness occasionally when I looked very
glum, and would touch my cheek to make me look at her imploring eyes,
and keep me looking at her till I smiled. Then she would put her arms
round my neck and pull herself up to my level and kiss me, and then
nestle down in my arms and pretend to sleep. By-and-by, when my
attention was called off her, she would pinch me, or tweak my necktie,
and make me look again at her wicked eye peeping out from under my
arm. I had to kiss her again, of course, and at last she might go to
sleep in earnest. She seemed able to sleep at any hour or in any
place, just like an animal.
"I had some difficulty in arranging for the night when once she had
made herself free of the house. She saw no reason whatever for our
being separated; but I circumvented her by nailing a strip of zinc all
round the door; and I put one round Florrie's too. I pretended to my
wife that it was to keep out draughts. Thumbeline was furious when she
found out how she had been tricked. I think she never quite forgave me
for it. Where she hid herself at night I am not sure. I think on the
sitting-room sofa; but on mild mornings I used to find her out-doors,
playing round Bran's kennel.
"Strap, our fox-terrier, picked up some rat poison towards the end of
April and died in the night. Thumbeline's way of taking that was very
curious. It shocked me a good deal. She had never been so friendly
with him as with Bran, though certainly more at ease in his company
than in mine. The night before he died I remember that she and Bran
and he had been having high games in the meadow, which had ended by
their all lying down together in a heap, Thumbeline's head on Bran's
flank, and her legs between his. Her arm had been round Strap's neck
in a most loving way. They made quite a picture for a Royal
Academician; 'Tired of Play,' or 'The End of a Romp,' I can fancy he
would call it. Next morning I found poor old Strap stiff and staring,
and Thumbeline and Bran at their games just the same. She actually
jumped over him and all about him as if he had been a lump of earth or
a stone. Just some such thing he was to her; she did not seem able to
realise that there was the cold body of her friend. Bran just sniffed
him over and left him, but Thumbeline showed no consciousness that he
was there at all. I wondered, was this heartlessness or obliquity? But
I have never found the answer to my question.[7]
[Footnote 7: I have observed this frequently for myself, and can
answer Beckwith's question for him. I would refer the reader in the
first place to my early experience of the boy (to call him so) with
the rabbit in the wood. There was an act of shocking cruelty, done
idly, almost unconsciously. I was not shocked at all, child as I was,
and quickly moved to pity and terror, because I knew that the creature
was not to be judged by our standards. From this and other things of
the sort which I have observed, and from this tale of Beckwith's, I
judge, that, to the fairy kind, directly life ceases to be lived at
the full, the object, be it fairy, or animal, or vegetable, is not
perceived by the other to exist. Thus, if a fairy should die, the
others would not know that its accidents were there; if a rabbit (as
in the case cited) should be caught it would therefore cease to be
rabbit. We ourselves have very much the same habit of regard toward
plant life. Our attitude to a tree or a growing plant ceases the
moment that plant is out of the ground. It is then, as we say,
_dead_--that is, it ceases to be a plant. So also we never scruple to
pluck the flowers, or the whole flower-scape from a plant, to put it
in our buttonhole or in the bosom of our friend, and thereafter to
cease our interest in the plant as such. It now becomes a memory, a
_gage d'amour_, a token or a sudden glory--what you will. This is the
habit of mankind; but I know of rare ones, both men and women, who
never allow dead flowers to be thrown into the draught, but always
give them decent burial, either cremation or earth to earth. I find
that admirable, yet don't condemn their neighbours, nor consider
fairies cruel who torture the living and disregard the maimed or the
dead.]
"Now I come to the tragical part of my story, and wish with all my
heart that I could leave it out. But beyond the full confession I have
made to my wife, the County Police and the newspapers, I feel that I
should not shrink from any admission that may be called for of how
much I have been to blame. In May, on the 13th of May, Thumbeline,
Bran, and our only child, Florrie, disappeared.
"It was a day, I remember well, of wonderful beauty. I had left them
all three together in the water meadow, little thinking of what was in
store for us before many hours. Thumbeline had been crowning Florrie
with a wreath of flowers. She had gathered cuckoo-pint and marsh
marigolds and woven them together, far more deftly than any of us
could have done, into a chaplet. I remember the curious winding,
wandering air she had been singing (without any words, as usual) over
her business, and how she touched each flower first with her lips, and
then brushed it lightly across her bosom before she wove it in. She
had kept her eyes on me as she did it, looking up from under her
brows, as if to see whether I knew what she was about.
"I don't doubt now but that she was bewitching Florrie by this curious
performance, which every flower had to undergo separately; but, fool
that I was, I thought nothing of it at the time, and bicycled off to
Salisbury leaving them there.
"At noon my poor wife came to me at the Bank distracted with anxiety
and fatigue. She had run most of the way, she gave me to understand.
Her news was that Florrie and Bran could not be found anywhere. She
said that she had gone to the gate of the meadow to call the child in,
and not seeing her, or getting any answer, she had gone down to the
river at the bottom. Here she had found a few picked wild flowers, but
no other traces. There were no footprints in the mud, either of child
or dog. Having spent the morning with some of the neighbours in a
fruitless search, she had now come to me.
"My heart was like lead, and shame prevented me from telling her the
truth as I was sure it must be. But my own conviction of it clogged
all my efforts. Of what avail could it be to inform the police or
organise search-parties, knowing what I knew only too well? However, I
did put Gulliver in communication with the head-office in Sarum, and
everything possible was done. We explored a circuit of six miles about
Wishford; every fold of the hills, every spinney, every hedgerow was
thoroughly examined. But that first night of grief had broken down my
shame: I told my wife the whole truth in the presence of Reverend
Richard Walsh, the Congregational minister, and in spite of her
absolute incredulity, and, I may add, scorn, next morning I repeated
it to Chief Inspector Notcutt of Salisbury. Particulars got into the
local papers by the following Saturday; and next I had to face the
ordeal of the _Daily Chronicle_, _Daily News_, _Daily Graphic_,
_Star_, and other London journals. Most of these newspapers sent
representatives to lodge in the village, many of them with
photographic cameras. All this hateful notoriety I had brought upon
myself, and did my best to bear like the humble, contrite Christian
which I hope I may say I have become. We found no trace of our dear
one, and never have to this day. Bran, too, had completely vanished. I
have not cared to keep a dog since.
"Whether my dear wife ever believed my account I cannot be sure. She
has never reproached me for wicked thoughtlessness, that's certain.
Mr. Walsh, our respected pastor, who has been so kind as to read this
paper, told me more than once that he could hardly doubt it. The
Salisbury police made no comments upon it one way or another. My
colleagues at the Bank, out of respect for my grief and sincere
repentance, treated me with a forbearance for which I can never be too
grateful. I need not add that every word of this is absolutely true. I
made notes of the most remarkable characteristics of the being I
called Thumbeline _at the time of remarking them_, and those notes are
still in my possession."
* * * * *
Here, with the exception of a few general reflections which are of
little value, Mr. Beckwith's paper ends. It was read, I ought to say,
by the Rev. Richard Walsh at the meeting of the South Wilts Folk-lore
Society and Field Club held at Amesbury in June 1892, and is to be
found in the published transactions of that body (Vol. IV. New Series,
pp. 305 _seq._).
THE FAIRY WIFE
There is nothing surprising in that story, to my mind, but the
reprobation with which Beckwith visits himself. What could he have
done that he did not? How could he have refrained from doing what he
did? Yet there are curious things about it, and one of those is the
partiality of the manifestation. The fairy was visible to him, his
child and his dogs but to no one else. So, in my own experience, had
she been whom I saw in K---- Park, whom Harkness, my companion, did
not see. My explanation of it does not carry me over all the
difficulties. I say, or will repeat if I have said it before, that the
fairy kind are really the spirit, essence, substance (what you will)
of certain sensible things, such as trees, flowers, wind, water,
hills, woods, marshes and the like, that their normal appearance to us
is that of these natural phenomena; but that in certain states of
mind, perhaps in certain conditions of body, there is a relation
established by which we are able to see them on our own terms, as it
were, or in our own idiom, and they also to treat with us to some
extent, to a large extent, on the same plane or standing-ground. That
there are limitations to this relationship is plain already; for
instance, Beckwith was not able to get his fairy prisoner to speak,
and I myself have never had speech with more than one in my life. But
as to that I shall have a very curious case to report shortly, where a
man taught his fairy-wife to speak.
The mentioning of that undoubted marriage brings me to the question of
sex. There is, of course, not the slightest doubt about it. Mrs.
Ventris was a fairy wife. Mrs. Ventris was a puzzle to me for a good
many years--in fact until Despoina explained to me many things. For
Mrs. Ventris had a permanent human shape, and spoke as freely as you
or I. I thought at one time that she might be the offspring of a mixed
marriage, like Elsie Marks (whose mother, by the way, was another case
of the sort); but in fact Mrs. Ventris and Mrs. Marks were both fairy
wives, and the wood-girl, Mabilla King, whose case I am going to deal
with was another. But this particular relationship is one which my
explanation of fairy apparitions does not really cover: for marriage
implies a permanent accessibility (to put it so) of two normally
inaccessible natures; and parentage implies very much more. That,
indeed, implies what the Christians call Miracle; but it is quite
beyond dispute. I have a great number of cases ready to my hand, and
shall deal at large with all of them in the course of this essay, in
which fairies have had intercourse with mortals. It is by no means the
fact that the wife is always of the fairy-kind. My own experience at
C---- shall prove that. But I must content myself with mentioning the
well-known case of Mary Wellwood who was wife to a carpenter near
Ashby de la Zouche, and was twice taken by a fairy and twice
recovered. She had children in each of her states of being, and on one
recorded occasion her two families met. It appears to be a law that
the wife takes the nature of the husband, or as much of it as she can,
and it is important to remark that _in all cases_ the children are of
the husband's nature, fairy or mortal as he may happen to be.
"Nature," Despoina told me, "follows the male." So far as fairies are
concerned it seems certain that union with mortals runs in families or
clans, if one may so describe their curious relationships to each
other. There were five sisters of the wood in one of the Western
departments of France (Lot-et-Garonne, I think), who all married men:
two of them married two brothers. Apart they led the decorous lives of
the French middle class, but when they were together it was a sight to
see! A curious one, and to us, with our strong associations of ideas,
that tremendous hand which memory has upon our heart-strings, a
poignant one. For they had lost their powers, but not their impulses.
It was a case of _si vieillesse pouvait_. I suppose they may have
appeared to some chance wayfarer, getting a glimpse of them at their
gambols between the poplar stems of the road, or in the vistas of the
hazel-brakes, as a company of sprightly matrons on a frolic. To the
Greeks foolishness! And be sure that such an observer would shrug them
out of mind. My own impression is that these ladies were perfectly
happy, that they had nothing of that _maggior' dolore_ which we
mortals know, and for which our joys have so often to pay. Let us hope
so at any rate, for about a fairy or a growing boy conscious of the
prison-shades could Poe have spun his horrors.
"To the Greeks foolishness," I said in my haste; but in very truth it
was far from being so. To the Greeks there was nothing extraordinary
in the parentage of a river or the love of a God for a mortal. Nor
should there be to a Christian who accepts the orthodox account of the
foundation of his faith. So far as we know, the generative process of
every created thing is the same; it is, therefore, an allowable
inference that the same process obtains with the created things which
are not sensible to ourselves. If flowers mate and beget as we do, why
not winds and waters, why not gods and nymphs, fauns and fairies? It
is the creative urgency that imports more than the creative matter. To
my mind, _magna componere parvis_, it is my fixed belief that all
created nature known to us is the issue of the mighty love of God for
his first-made creature the Earth. I accept the Greek mythology as the
nearest account of the truth we are likely to get. I have never had
the least difficulty in accepting it; and all I have since found out
of the relations of men with their fellow-creatures of other genera
confirms me in the belief that the urgency is the paramount necessity.
If I am to deal with a case of a mixed marriage, where the wife was a
fairy, the spirit of a tree, I shall ask leave to set down first a
plain proposition, which is that all Natural Facts (as wind, hills,
lakes, trees, animals, rain, rivers, flowers) have an underlying Idea
or Soul whereby they really are what they appear, to which they owe
the beauty, majesty, pity, terror, love, which they excite in us; and
that this Idea, or Soul, having a real existence of its own in
community with its companions of the same nature, can be discerned by
mortal men in forms which best explain to human intelligence the
passions which they excite in human breasts. This is how I explain the
fact, for instance, that the austerity of a lonely rock at sea will
take the form and semblance, and much more than that, assume the
prerogatives of a brooding man, or that the swift freedom of a river
will pass by, as in a flash, in the coursing limbs of a youth, or that
at dusk, out of a reed-encircled mountain-tarn, silvery under the hush
of the grey hour, there will rise, and gleam, and sink again, the pale
face, the shoulders and breast of the Spirit of the Pool; that,
finally, the grace of a tree, and its panic of fury when lashed by
storm, very capable in either case of inspiring love or horror, will
be revealed rarely in the form of a nymph. There may be a more
rational explanation of these curious things, but I don't know of one:
_Fortunatus et ille, Deos qui novit agrestes!_
Happy may one be in the fairies of our own country. Happy, even yet,
are they who can find the Oreads of the hill, Dryads of the wood,
nymphs of river, marsh, plough-land, pasture, and heath. Now, leaving
to Greece the things that are Greek, here for an apologue follows a
plain recital of facts within the knowledge of every man of the
Cheviots.
I
There is in that country, not far from Otterburn--between Otterburn
and the Scottish border--a remote hamlet consisting of a few white
cottages, farm buildings and a shingle-spired church. It is called
Dryhope, and lies in a close valley, which is watered by a beck or
burn, known as the Dryhope Burn. It is deeply buried in the hills.
Spurs of the Cheviots as these are, they rise to a considerable
elevation, but are pasturable nearly to the top. There, however, where
the heather begins, peat-hags and morasses make dangerous provision,
from which the flocks are carefully guarded. It is the practice of the
country for the shepherds to be within touch of them all night, lest
some, feeding upward (as sheep always do) should reach the summits and
be lost or mired inextricably. These upland stretches, consequently,
are among the most desolate spots to be found in our islands. I have
walked over them myself within recent years and met not a human soul,
nor beast of man's taming. Ravens, curlews, peewits, a lagging fox or
limping hare; such, with the unsensed Spirits of the Earth, will be
your company. In particular I traversed (in 1902) the great upland
called Limmer Fell, and saw the tarn--Silent Water--and the trees
called The Seven Sisters. They are silver birches of remarkable size
and beauty. One of them is fallen. Standing there, looking north-west,
the Knapp may be seen easily, some five miles away; and the extent of
the forest with which it is covered can be estimated. A great and
solemn wood that is, which no borderer will ever enter if he can help
it.
There was--and may be still--a family of shepherds living in Dryhope
of the name of King. When these things occurred there were alive
George King, a patriarch of seventy-five years, Miranda King, his
daughter-in-law, widow of his son, who was supposed to be a
middle-aged woman, and a young man, Andrew King, her only son. That
was the family; and there was a girl, Bessie Prawle, daughter of a
neighbour, very much in and out of the house, and held by common
report to be betrothed to Andrew. She used to help the widow in
domestic matters, see to the poultry, milk the cow, churn the butter,
press the cheeses. The Kings were independent people, like the
dalesmen of Cumberland, and stood, as the saying is, upon their own
foot-soles. Old King had a tenant-right upon the fell, and owed no man
anything.