“What are you chunnering about?” and stuck a pin into Edwin’s leg.
“Can’t you do the beastly example?”
Then quite suddenly Edwin knew what he had to do. He made up an example
for himself. This was it.
“If 7,535 fairies were in my desk at school and I subtracted 710 and
added 1,006, and the rest flew away in 783 equal gangs, how many would
be left over in the desk?”
When he had worked it the answer was one. Very quickly he opened his
desk again, and there was the Arithmetic Fairy, looking more lovely
than ever in a rich gown of indices, lined with surds, that fell to
her feet in osculating curves. In her hand, like a sceptre, shone the
starry glory of the binomial theorem. But her eyes were starrier still.
She smiled, but her first words were severe.
“You careless boy,” she said. “Why can’t you learn to be accurate? It’s
the merest chance you got me. You should have stated your problem more
clearly, and you should have said seven thousand _Arithmetic_ Fairies.
Why suppose you had found one fairy in your desk, and it had been the
Grammar Fairy, or the Football Fairy—what would you have done then?”
“_Is_ there a Football Fairy?” Edwin asked.
“Of course. There’s a fairy for everything you have to learn. There’s a
Patience Fairy, and a Good-temper Fairy, and a Fairy to teach people to
make bread, and another to teach them to make love. Didn’t you really
know that?”
“No,” said Edwin, “but I say, look here——”
“I am looking,” she said, fixing her bright eyes on Edwin’s goggling
ones, exactly as at their first meeting.
“No—I mean—oh—I say—” he said.
“So I hear,” she said.
“No, but—no kid,” said he.
“Of course there isn’t any kid,” said she.
“Dear, kind, pretty Fairy,” Edwin began again.
“That’s better,” said the Fairy.
“Didn’t you hear all I was saying to you yesterday, when the water was
dripping from the ceiling all over the room?”
“From nineteen several spots. Of course I did.”
“Well then,” said Edwin.
“You mean that you’re tired of having things happen when you do your
sums correctly? You prefer the old way!”
“Yes, _please_,” said Edwin, “if you’re sure you don’t mind? I know you
meant it for kindness, but, oh, it is most beastly, when you get into
the thick of it.” He was thinking of the elephants, I fancy.
“I only did it to please you,” said the Fairy pouting. “I’ll make
everything as it was before. Does _that_ please you? And there’s your
third wish. You know we always give three wishes. It’s customary in the
profession. What would you like?”
Edwin had not attended properly to this speech, so he had only heard
“as it was before” and then “What would you like?”
So he said, “I should like to see you again some day.”
The Arithmetic Fairy smiled at him, and her beauty grew more and more
radiant. She had not expected this. “I made sure you would ask for a
pony or a cricket bat or a pair of white mice,” she said. “You _shall_
see me again, Edwin. Goodbye.”
And the bright vision faded away in a dim mist of rosy permutations.
When Edwin got home he heard that a model engine had been discovered in
the larder, and had been given to his younger brother. There are some
wrongs, some sorrows, to which even a pen like mine cannot hope to do
justice.
* * * * *
Edwin is now a quiet-looking grown-up person in a black frock coat; and
his hair is slowly withdrawing itself from the top of his learned head.
I suppose it feels itself unworthy to cover so great a brain. The fairy
has been with him, unseen, this many a year. The other day he saw her.
He had been Senior Wrangler, of course; that was nothing to Edwin. And
he was Astronomer Royal, but that, after all, he had a right to expect.
But it was when he took breath from his researches one day, and
suddenly found that he had invented a bran-new Hypernebular
Hypothesis—that he thought of the Fairy, and thinking of her, he beheld
her. She was lightly poised above a pile of books based on Newton’s
“Principia,” and topped with his own latest work, “The Fourth and
Further Dimensions.” He knew her at once, and now he appreciated, more
than ever in his youth, the radiance of her eyes and of her wings, for
now he understood it.
“Dear, beautiful Fairy,” he said, “how glad I am to see you again.”
“I’ve been with you all the time,” she said. “I wish I could do
something more for you. Is there anything you want?”
The great Mathematician who was Edwin ran his hand over his thin hair.
“No,” he said, “no.” And then he remembered the school and Simpkins
minor and the old desk he used to keep firework fusees in. “Unless,” he
added, “you could make me young again.”
She dropped a little tear, clear as a solved problem.
“I can’t do _that_,” she said. “You can’t have _everything_. The only
person who could do that for you is the Love Fairy. If you had found
her instead of me you would have been always young, but you wouldn’t
have invented the Hypernebular Hypothesis.”
“I suppose I shall never never find her now?” said Edwin, and as he
spoke he looked out of the window to the garden, where a girl was
gathering roses.
“I wonder!” said she. “The Love Fairy doesn’t live in schooldesks or
books on Fourth Dimensions.”
“I wonder!” said Edwin. “Does the Love Fairy live in gardens?”
“I wonder!” echoed the Arithmetic Fairy, a little sadly, and she spread
her bright wings and flew out of the open window and out of this story.
Edwin went out into the rose garden. And did he find the Love Fairy?