“They can’t change, my dear. When a Prince has picked a gold apple that
has a Princess in it, and has kissed it till she comes out, no other
Princess will ever do for him, any more than any other Prince will ever
do for her.”
While she was speaking the old woman got younger and younger and
younger, till as she spoke the last words she was quite young, not more
than fifty-five. And it was Miss Fitzroy Robinson!
Her pupils stepped forward one by one with respectful curtsies,
and she allowed them to kiss her on the cheek, just as if it was
breaking-up day.
Then, all together, and very happily, they went down to the furnished
villa that had once been the Select School, and when the half-professor
had promised on his honour as a Magician to give up Magic and take to
a respectable trade, they took his legs out of the starry sphere, and
gave them back to him; and he joined himself together, and went off
full of earnest resolve to live and die an honest plumber.
“My talents won’t be quite wasted,” said he; “a little hanky-panky is
useful in most trades.”
When the King asked Miss Fitzroy Robinson to name her own reward for
restoring the Princesses, she said—
“Make the land green again, your Majesty.”
So Fortunatus Rex & Co. devoted themselves to pulling down and carting
off the yellow streets they had built. And now the country there is
almost as green and pretty as it was before Princess Daisy and the six
parlour-boarders were turned into gold apples.
“It was very clever of dear Miss Fitzroy Robinson to shut up that
Professor in those two globes,” said the Queen; “it shows the
advantage of having lessons from the best Masters.”
“Yes,” said the King, “I always say that you cannot go far wrong if you
insist on the highest references!”
_THE SUMS THAT CAME RIGHT_
“IF twenty-seven barrelsful of apples cost £25 13_s._ 3_d._, what
would the same barrels be worth if they had been packed by a dishonest
person, who only put in 7/9ths of apples in each barrel and the rest
sawdust?”
This was the sum.
It does not look very hard, perhaps, to you who have studied ardently
for years at a Board School, or a High School, or a Preparatory School
for the sons of gentlemen; but to Edwin it looked as hard as a ship’s
biscuit. But he went for it like a man, and presently produced an
Answer and his Master wrote a big curly R across the sum. Perhaps you
do not know that a big curly R means Right? As for the answer to the
sum, I will try to get a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (who is
a very terrible person), to work it out for you, and if he can do it I
will put the answer at the end of this story. I cannot work it myself.
Edwin was glad to see the large curly R. He saw it so seldom that to
meet it was a real pleasure.
“But what’s the use?” he said. “Everything else leads to something
else, except lessons. If you put seeds in the garden they come up
flowers, unless they’re rotten seeds or you forget where you put them.
And if you buy a rabbit—well, there it is, unless it dies. And if you
eat your dinner—well, you’re not hungry any more for an hour or two.
But lessons!”
He bit his penholder angrily and put his head into his desk to look for
nibs to play Simpkins minor with. You know the game of nibs, of course?
He held up the lid of the desk on his head, as I daresay you have often
done, and the inside of the desk was darkish, so that the sudden light
at the very back of the desk showed quite brightly and unmistakably.
“Those firework fusees, O Crikey!” was Edwin’s first thought.
But it was no firework fusee. It was like glow-worms, only a thousand
times more bright and white. For it was the light of pure reason, and
it glowed from the glorious eyes of the Arithmetic Fairy. You did not
know that there was an Arithmetic Fairy? If you knew as much as I do,
it would be simply silly for me to try to tell you stories, wouldn’t it?
Her wonderful eyes gleamed and flashed straight into the round goggling
eyes of the amazed Edwin.
“Upon my word!” she said.
Edwin said nothing.
“Did no one ever tell you?” the fairy went on, shaking out her dress,
which was woven of the integral calculus, and trimmed with a dazzling
fringe of logarithms. “Did no one ever tell you that the things that
happen when you’ve done your sums right, happen when you’re grown up?”
“I don’t care what happens then,” Edwin dared to say, for the flashing
eyes were kind eyes. “I shall be a pirate, or a bushranger, or
something.”
The fairy drew herself up, and her graceful garland of simple equations
trembled as Edwin breathed heavily.
“A Pirate,” said she, “a nice sort of pirate who can’t calculate his
men’s share of the plunder to three-seventeenths of a gold link of the
dead captain’s chain! A fine bushranger who can’t arrange the forty-two
bullets from the revolvers of his seven dauntless followers so that
each of the fifteen enemies gets his fair share! Go along with you!”
said the Arithmetic Fairy.
But Edwin’s eyes were, as I said, wide open, goggling.
“I say,” he suddenly remarked, “how jolly pretty you are.”
The Arithmetic Fairy has but one weakness—a feminine weakness.
She loves a pretty speech. If blunt, so much the worse; yet even
bluntness....
She looked down and played shyly with the bunch of miscellaneous
examples in vulgar fractions which adorned her waistband.
“I suppose you can’t be expected to understand, yet,” she said, and she
said it very gently.
Edwin took courage.
“When I do things I want something to happen at once. ‘I want a white
rabbit and I want it _now_.’”
She did not recognise the quotation.
“Get your Master to set you a little simple multiplication sum in white
rabbits,” she said. “Goodbye, my child. You’ll know me better in time,
and as you know me better you’ll love me more.”
“I ... you’re lovely now,” said Edwin.
The Fairy laughed, and spread her dazzling wings glistening with all
the glories of the higher mathematics.
Edwin closed dazzled eyes, and opened them as the desk lid shut down on
his head, swayed by no uncertain hand. It was the mathematical master’s
hand, in fact.
A new example was set. And, curiously enough, white rabbits were in it.
“If seven thousand five hundred and sixty-three white rabbits,” it
began. Edwin, his brain in a whirl, worked it correctly, by a sort of
inspiration, like an ancient prophet or a calculating machine.
When he returned, with his books in a strap, to the red villa whose
gables meant home for him, he found an excited crowd dancing round the
white-painted gates.
The whole of the front garden, as well as most of the back garden,
was a seething mass of white rabbits. Seven thousand five hundred and
sixty-three there were, to be exact. I alone know this. The joyous
Edwin and his distracted parents were never able to count them.
“What a lot of hutches we shall want,” Edwin thought gaily. But when
his father came home from the Stock Exchange, where he spent his days
in considering 7⅝ and 10-3/32—no doubt under the direct guidance of the
Arithmetic Fairy, he said at once—
“Send for the poulterer.”
This was done. Only one pair of white rabbits remained the property of
Edwin, but these, by the power of the Arithmetic Fairy, became ten by
Christmas.
The rabbits disposed of, peace spread a longing wing over the villa,
but was not allowed to settle.
“Oh, please ’m,” the startled cook, cap all crooked, exclaimed in the
hall, “the cellar is choke-full of apples—most of ’em bad ’m—_I_ never
see no one deliver them, nor yet give no receipt.”
The cook, for once in a lurid career, spoke truth. The cellar _was_
full of apples. Nineteen pounds nineteen and twopence and one-third of
a pennyworth—to be accurate.
Edwin went to bed, feeling now quite sure that he had _not_ dreamed the
Arithmetic Fairy, and anxiously wondering what to-morrow’s sums would
be about. Not, he trusted, about snakes, or Sunday School teachers.
The next day’s sum was about oranges. Edwin did it correctly, and
went home a prey to the most golden apprehensions. Nor were these
unfounded. The whole of the dining-room and most of the hall—up to the
seventh step of the neatly carpeted stairs, was golden with oranges.
Edwin’s father said some severe things about practical jokers, and sent
for the greengrocer. Edwin ate nine 3/7th oranges, and went to bed
yellow, but not absolutely unhappy.
But now he was quite sure.
On the following day his sum dealt with elephants, and in such numbers
that his father, on returning from business, yielded to a very natural
annoyance, and gave notice to his landlord that he should, at Lady Day,
leave a villa where elephants and oranges occurred to such an extent.
No one suspected Edwin of having anything to do with these happenings.
And indeed, it was not his fault, so how and why could or should he
have owned up to it?
I wish I had time to tell you of the events that occurred when Edwin’s
sums were set in buttered muffins. Of the seventy-five pigs travelling
in a circle at varying rates, I can only say that part of this circle
ran through Edwin’s mother’s drawing-room. Nor can I here relate the
tale of the three hundred lightning conductors which were suddenly
found to be attached to the once happy villa-home. Edwin’s mother cried
all day when she was not laughing, and people came from far and near to
see the haunted house. For when it came to four thousand white owls and
a church steeple every one felt that it was more than a mere accident.
Edwin’s master had a pretty taste in sums, and about once a term he
used to set a sum about canes. Edwin worked that sum wrong on purpose,
so I suppose it served him right that the canes should be at home
before he was, just as they would have been if he had worked the sum
properly, and as he had borrowed his father’s razor that morning to
sharpen a slate-pencil, the fifty-seven canes were not all thrown away.
But it was the sum about the cistern that convinced Edwin of the
desperate need of finding the Arithmetic Fairy, and begging her to
take back the present she had made him. It is not polite to ask this,
but Edwin had to do it. You see in the sum the cistern had to leak
three pints in thirteen minutes and a quarter, but the cistern at home
happened to have a little leak of its own already, where Edwin had
tried his new drill on it, and the two leaks together managed so well
that when Edwin got home he found water dripping from all the top
bedroom ceilings and the staircase was a sort of Niagara. It was very
exciting—but when the plumber came he let Edwin’s father know all about
the little drilled hole, and Edwin got the credit of the leak in the
sum, which was much larger and most unfair. His father spoke to Edwin
about this matter in his study, and it was then that Edwin saw that he
must put an end to the sums that came true.
So he went up to his bedroom with his candle and his arithmetic book.
Directly he put the candle on the chest of drawers a big splash of
water from the ceiling fell right on the flame and it went out. He had
to go right down stairs to get another light. Then he put the candle on
the dressing table—splash—out it went. Chair. Splash! Out! At last he
got the candle to stay alight on the washhand-stand, which was, by some
curious accident, the only dry place in the room.
Then he opened his book. Somewhere in the book he knew there must be
something that would fetch the fairy. He said the Multiplication Table
up to nine times-after that, as you know, the worst is over. But no
fairy appeared.
Then he read aloud the instructions for working the different rules,
including the examples given. There was no result.
Then he called to the Fairy—but she did not come.
Then he tried counting. Then counting and calling mixed with other
things. Like this:
“Oh, good Fairy! One-two-three-four-five-six-seven; do come and help
me! Eight-nine-ten-eleven! Beautiful, dear, kind, lovely fairy! Nine
nines are eighty-one! Dear fairy, do come! Seven million two hundred
thousand six hundred and fifty-nine! I will always love you if you
will come to me now. Three-sevenths of five-ninths of five-twelfths
of sixteen-fiftieths. You were so kind the other day. Two and two are
four, and three are seven! Do come now—you’ve no idea what an awful
mess you’ve got me into. Seven nines are sixty-three—though I know
you meant it kindly. Dear Fairy. Thirteen from thirty-seven leaves
twenty-four. Do come and see what a hole I’m in—do come—and the product
will give you the desired result!”
Edwin stopped, out of breath. He looked round him for the Fairy. But
his room, with the water dripping from the roof and the wet towels and
basins on the floor, was not a fairy-like place. Edwin saw, with a
sigh, that it was no go.
“I’ll have another go in prep to-morrow,” he said. This he did.
The Mathematical Master was pleased with himself that day because
he had succeeded in preventing his best boy from yielding to the
allurements of the Head-master and the Classical side.
Of course his class knew at once what kind of temper the Mathematical
Master was in—you know we always know that—and Edwin ventured to ask
that the examples that day might be about a model steam engine.
“Only _one_, sir, please,” he was careful to explain. The Master kindly
consented, and by great good fortune the example did not deal with a
faulty boiler, nor with any other defect—but concerned itself solely
with the model engine’s speed. So Edwin knew, when he had worked his
sum, exactly what pace the model engine he would find at home would be
good for. He worked the sum right.
Then he put his head into his desk and began again.
“Oh, good Fairy, if a sum of £4,700 is to be divided between A, B, and
C,—do, do come and help me. Three-tenths of a pound is six shillings,
dear Fairy—eleven—twelve—thirteen—fourteen—oh, lovely Fairy—” and so on.