The Fairy Ring (9 page)

AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY

A. CONAN DOYLE

Inside were the photos of Elsie and the gnome and Frances and the dancing fairies. They were “the two most astounding photographs ever published,” the article said.

Cover of
The Strand Magazine,
December 1920

“Should the incidents here narrated, and the photographs attached, hold their own against the criticism which they will excite, it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought,” Sir Arthur wrote. “I put them and all the evidence before the public for examination and judgment.” Sir Arthur added that there was no “final and absolute proof” that the photographs were genuine. But he himself considered the case to be very strong.

Sir Arthur admitted that at one point, he and Mr. Gardner had suspected that Elsie might have painted the fairies. “Mr. Gardner, however, tested her powers of drawing, and found that, while she could do landscapes cleverly, the fairy figures which she had attempted in imitation of those she had seen were entirely uninspired, and bore no possible resemblance to those in the photograph.”

Entirely uninspired.

Elsie remembered those words for the rest of her life.

“They threw cold water over the one thing I thought I was good at,” she wrote many years later, “my drawing and paintings that hung in our house.”

Elsie couldn’t say
she
drew the fairies in the photographs, for that would have given everything away. She could only keep reading as Sir Arthur raved about the beauty of the little dancing figures. “There is an ornamental rim to the pipe of the elves which shows that the graces of art are not unknown among them. And what joy is in the complete abandon of their little graceful figures as they let themselves go in the dance!” he wrote.

But
Elsie,
of course, could not have drawn them. Oh, indeed not.

For Elsie was a country girl. Elsie was an artisan’s child.

And Elsie was not a good enough artist.

Sir Arthur hadn’t wanted tour buses packed with people coming to Cottingley to see the fairies, so he had made up a false name for the village. He gave Frances and Elsie fake names, too: Alice and Iris Carpenter.

Alice and Iris Carpenter, the mysterious fairy girls . . .

In a portrait taken that summer in Cottingley, Frances/Alice is standing in the back garden of 31 Main Street in front of a big clump of daisies. She’s smiling shyly, wearing her white lace dress and big hair ribbon. She does not look at all mysterious.

But, in her portrait, also taken that summer, Elsie/Iris leans against a tree in the woods, near the spot where the gnome picture was taken. She’s dressed in something an artist or a person in a play might wear: a peaked fur cap and a dark, folktale kind of dress. She stands at a distance from the camera, so it’s hard to see her expression. Her long hands are hidden in her pockets.

Reporters soon figured out who Iris and Alice Carpenter really were and where they lived.

In Scarborough, Frances hated it when the newspapermen tried to interview her.

To avoid them, she snuck to school by cutting through a back lane toward the sea, then taking a roundabout way through the streets. After school, she would walk in a crowd of other girls and hide her face by pulling her scarf up and letting her braids swing forward. When reporters did find her, she’d tell them it was nice up the beck, and yes, she did see fairies.

And after that, they didn’t seem much interested in what she had to say.

Elsie was working in the upper room at the Christmas-card factory when a message came from the front office: a reporter was asking to see her. He was from a London newspaper, the
Westminster Gazette.

Elsie sent a message back saying she didn’t want to be interviewed. But the reporter sent another message, asking again.

So Elsie went down to the front office and stood behind the low counter. She was tall and slender and very pretty. Her thick auburn hair was tied back with a narrow gold band that went all around her head.

She told the reporter she was “fed up” with the fairies and didn’t want to talk, but he began to question her anyway.

He asked her where the fairies came from, and she said she didn’t know.

Did she see them coming?

“Yes.”

Then, the reporter said, she must have seen where they came from.

Elsie hesitated, then laughed and said she couldn’t say.

Where did they go after dancing near her?

Elsie said she couldn’t say.

After that, Elsie didn’t want to answer any more questions, but the reporter wouldn’t leave. Perhaps, he suggested, the fairies “simply vanished into the air.”

“Yes,” said Elsie.

Elsie told him the fairies didn’t speak to her, and she didn’t speak to them. She and Frances were the only ones who saw them. “If anybody else were there,” she said, “the fairies would not come out.”

The reporter seemed puzzled. He asked her to explain further, but all she would do was smile and say, “You don’t understand.”

Elsie told him that these days, it was getting harder to see fairies. The fairies’ shapes were more “transparent” now. Before, they were “rather hard.”

“You see,” Elsie explained, “we were young then.”

The reporter didn’t seem to understand, but Elsie wouldn’t add anything more.

When the article came out in the newspaper, the headline said:

DO FAIRIES EXIST?

INVESTIGATION IN A YORKSHIRE VALLEY

COTTINGLEY’S MYSTERY

STORY OF THE GIRL WHO TOOK THE SNAPSHOT

“My mission to Yorkshire was to secure evidence, if possible, which would prove or disprove the claim that fairies existed. I frankly confess that I failed,” the reporter wrote.

Elsie the school-leaver, Elsie the best-of-the-worst-or-the-worst-of-the-best, had outwitted the man from the London newspaper.

After that, reporters thought Elsie might have used trick photography to fake the fairies. So they went to Gunston’s Photography Studio and asked Mr. Gunston about her.

Mr. Gunston didn’t even know who she was. After a while, he got mad that reporters kept coming around and asking about some little nobody who used to work in his basement.

When Elsie found out, she wished she could have seen Mr. Gunston’s face.

T
he newspapers didn’t come right out and call Elsie a liar, but they came close.

“I would suggest to Miss Elsie that she has carried her little joke quite far enough, and that she should tell the public what the ‘fairies’ really are,” proclaimed the
Times
of London.

“I know children,” someone wrote in a London magazine. “And knowing children, and knowing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has legs, I decide that the Miss Carpenters have pulled one of them.”

It never seemed to occur to the newspaper writers that if Elsie and Frances said it was all a joke now, their parents wouldn’t think it was one bit funny — and Elsie and Frances would be in deep, deep trouble.

Mr. Gardner was sorry, he wrote to Elsie’s mother, that the reporters had been coming around and pestering, but “with your help in Cottingley we will bring everything through quite all right yet. And none of you shall have the least cause to regret letting the photographs become public if I can help it. We will win through and Elsie and Frances shall be justified everywhere.”

Elsie’s mother wrote back, of course, as she always did. Her letters to Mr. Gardner were longer now, and friendlier. Elsie’s mother believed in the fairies now, just the way Mr. Gardner did. For surely, her daughter would never lie to her!

She believed Mr. Gardner when he said that soon the truth would come out, and that after that, no one would say Elsie and Frances were lying, ever again.

Mr. Gardner wrote to Elsie’s father, too, informing him that he, Mr. Gardner, had a secret weapon in the fight: the latest fairy photos. “I am keeping them back for the present because I want to keep them in reserve to sweep the board at the proper moment!” he wrote.

Elsie’s father wasn’t happy at all. And no matter how many times he asked Elsie what the trick was, she wouldn’t tell him.

Mr. Gardner wrote both Elsie and Frances, telling them to lock any copies of the newest fairy photos away in a secret place and tell no one outside the family.

But why would Elsie and Frances want anyone to know there were
more
fairy photographs? Things were bad enough with just the first two!

And besides, they had only taken the blue-flower fairy and the leaping fairy photos because the grown-ups made them.

And as for the last one . . . it was only shadows and tangles of grass. Why should they tell anybody about
that
?

Winter began to fade. Spring approached.

In bookstores and shop windows across England, the
Strand
’s Christmas issue had been replaced by the January issue, and then the February issue.

Then came the March issue.

“The Evidence for Fairies by A. Conan Doyle With New Fairy Photographs” said the headline on the front cover.

Inside were the pictures of the leaping fairy and the flower-bearing fairy. But the most exciting photograph of all, according to Mr. Gardner, was the third one. Mr. Gardner called it the “fairy’s bower.”

In the photograph, one fairy, her wings showing clearly, was “apparently considering whether it is time to get up. An early riser of more mature age is seen on the right possessing abundant hair and wonderful wings,” Mr. Gardner had written to Sir Arthur.

“We have now succeeded in bringing this print out splendidly,” Mr. Gardner wrote. “Never before, or otherwhere, surely, has a fairy’s bower been photographed!”

He didn’t say exactly what he meant by “bringing out” the print.

But now, there were fairy outlines in it that neither Elsie nor Frances had noticed before.

One afternoon, just as school ended, Frances and the other girls in her class were packing up their satchels to go home when the Headmaster came into the classroom.

He called Frances up to the teacher’s desk, and there, in front of all the other girls, he began to ask her questions about fairies.

“Well,” he said after a few minutes, “it would be interesting to have a few here in the classrooms.” Then he walked out.

The other girls all stared at her, and Frances felt like a “perfect fool.” Afterward, the other girls teased her about it. “Thinking about fairies, then?” they’d say if Frances didn’t answer a question right away.

“This is what I hated for years,” she wrote in her autobiography, “when people looked at me as though I weren’t normal and treated me as someone different from any other schoolgirl. . . . I was a normal ordinary girl and no one was going to look big-eyed at me or ask questions I didn’t want to answer.”

Frances promised herself she would never take another photograph.

Ever.

Mr. Gardner didn’t think Frances was a normal, ordinary girl at all.

He believed she had the power to see things that were invisible to most people.

He’d thought so from the very first time he met her — Frances was “mediumistic.” There was something about her that seemed to float outside her body, he noticed. He believed that airy, floating substance, which he called “subtle ectoplasmic or etheric material,” was what attracted nature spirits to her. It also made the nature spirits themselves solidify a bit, so that a camera could take their picture.

And yet . . . Frances didn’t seem to want to take photographs at all — even when he’d sent her her own camera in Scarborough and her own six dozen plates. All he’d gotten back was a polite note.

Still, Frances wasn’t the only one in the world who could see things that other people couldn’t.

Mr. Gardner had a friend named Mr. Hodson, who was quite well known as a “clairvoyant,” or seer of hidden things. Why not bring
him
to the fairy glen?

Mr. Hodson might be able to take some photographs, and not just ordinary still photos. Perhaps Mr. Hodson could even take some
moving
pictures, with a cinema camera!

So Mr. Gardner invited the clairvoyant (and his wife) to come spend a few days in Cottingley.