by Losure, Mary
He did have a good hide. He had to, for he was famous all over England, and even in America and Australia. His name was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Most people knew him as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world’s most famous detective.
Sherlock Holmes was a keen-eyed, hawk-nosed man who had made detective work into a precise and rational science. Sherlock Holmes could put the tiniest clues together to find the truth. He was almost impossible to fool.
So it might seem surprising that his creator, Sir Arthur, believed in fairies. But he did.
To Sir Arthur, fairies were part of a spirit world that coexisted with the everyday world he saw all around him. The spirit world was invisible, though. Only special people could see it or hear the voices of the spirits who lived in it. Those spirits included the ghosts of dead people, Sir Arthur believed. His own son, who had died of sickness after being wounded in the Great War, was one of them.
These days, Sir Arthur went to what were called séances, where he believed people called mediums might be able to give him messages from his son in the spirit world.
Sir Arthur had many friends who, like him, were interested in the invisible world. One day, Sir Arthur happened to be talking to a friend who asked him, had he heard the talk about some actual photographs of fairies? The friend hadn’t actually seen them, but he had a friend who might know about it.
Sir Arthur talked to the friend, and then wrote a letter to a friend of that friend, and so on. He followed the trail of friends and relations until someone gave him Mr. Gardner’s name.
When the two men met, Sir Arthur was relieved to see that Mr. Gardner seemed quite rational and respectable — not wild-eyed at all.
Sir Arthur and Mr. Gardner agreed that, together, they would conduct a step-by-step investigation of the matter of the fairy photographs.
Sir Arthur would handle the London end of the detective work.
Then the plan was that Mr. Gardner would take the train up to Cottingley, visit Elsie and her family, and see what kind of people they were.
If there was any sort of fraud involved, the two men thought, it would be best to uncover it right away.
Sir Arthur went to his men’s club, the Athenaeum, and showed the fairy pictures to a friend of his, Sir Oliver Lodge, an expert in “psychic matters.” Sir Oliver was skeptical: he suspected the ring of dancers had been somehow superimposed on a different background.
Sir Arthur didn’t agree. “I argued that we had certainly traced the pictures to two children of the artisan [working] class, and that such photographic tricks would be entirely beyond them,” he wrote. Working-class children, surely, would not be able to pull off such a sophisticated trick.
Sir Arthur also took the two glass plates to Kingsway, a broad London boulevard where an American firm, the George Eastman Kodak Company, had built one of London’s most modern buildings. There, Sir Arthur talked with two of Kodak’s experts. “They examined the plates carefully, and neither of them could find any evidence of superposition, or other trick,” Sir Arthur wrote.
The experts were not convinced the fairies were real — they thought that if a person had the right resources and knowledge, it was certainly possible to fake them.
Sir Arthur thought about this.
That meant that the only way to tell if the photographs were fake was to find out more about the girls who had taken them. Were they honest? Were they open?
What kind of girls were they?
In Cottingley, at about that same time, Elsie picked up a paintbrush. In front of her on the white paper lay the penciled outlines of a mysterious young woman.
She wore a gown of spiderwebs. A spider dangled from her belt. A curious headdress, like a chambered seashell, framed the young woman’s solemn face.
Elsie swirled her brush in color and began to paint.
She painted a golden band across the young woman’s forehead. She painted golden snakes, with flickering tongues, curled at either end. She painted a green gargoyle sitting in the band, peering down.
She painted a tiny bat, its wings outstretched, hanging from the young woman’s necklace.
Elsie finished the painting, and now a young woman stared back at her from the page, her green eyes narrowed.
Painting by Elsie, done the year she turned 19
The young woman had dark hair, like Elsie.
But Elsie’s eyes were not green; they were a clear, bright blue. And all her life, Elsie had been deathly afraid of spiders.
What she was thinking when she painted that picture, no one would ever know.
For Elsie was a person with a secret she hadn’t told her mother, or her father, or the man from London. And inside her, the secret was growing.
The matter of actually going to see the girls had to be approached very carefully, Sir Arthur and Mr. Gardner agreed.
According to what Mr. Gardner had heard from various people, the girls were “very shy and reserved indeed,” he informed Sir Arthur. “They are of a mechanic’s family in Yorkshire, and the children are said to have played with fairies and elves in the woods near their village since babyhood.”
The investigation couldn’t be delayed too long, though. Mr. Gardner feared that, soon, the girls might not be able to see fairies anymore because they’d be too grown up. “Two children such as these are, are rare, and I fear now that we are late because almost certainly the inevitable will shortly happen, one of them will ‘fall in love’ and then — hey presto!!” Mr. Gardner wrote to Sir Arthur. Like something in a magician’s trick, the girl’s childhood would vanish.
Poof ! And the chance to find out more about fairies would be gone.
So in June of 1920, Mr. Gardner wrote another letter to Elsie’s mother. He mentioned that he’d had lantern slides made of the two photographs and was showing them to audiences in London. “Everyone who saw them was greatly interested. Indeed to say that many were excited about them would be understating the case,” he wrote. Lots of people were asking for copies, he explained, and he thought it best to ask her (and perhaps she would also ask Miss Elsie, he added) about copyright issues. He offered to get the photos copyrighted himself, and he offered Miss Elsie a percentage if she wanted it.
This time, Elsie wrote back herself.
31 Main St.
Cottingley Bingley
Yoks [Yorkshire]
June 14, 1920
Dear Mr. Gardner
Please do just as you think best about the fairies, it is all right to me, I’m glad the lantern slides have come out so well, Mrs. Wright [a neighbor, not a relative, who happened to have the same last name] told me how clear they had come out on the screen. Please excuse this bad paper its the best I could get in the village
Sincerely Yours
Elsie Wright
She signed her name with a flourish.
Elsie
At the end of June, two more letters dropped through the mail slot at 31 Main Street. Both were from London, addressed to Miss Elsie Wright. One was from Mr. Gardner. The other, in neat, rounded handwriting, was on the stationery of a place called the Athenaeum.
June 30 [1920]
Dear Miss Elsie Wright
I have seen the wonderful pictures of the fairies which you and your cousin Frances have taken, and I have not been so interested for a long time. I will send you tomorrow one of my little books for I am sure you are not too old to enjoy adventures. I am going to Australia soon, but I only wish before I go that I could get to Bradford and have half an hours chat with you, for I should like to hear all about it. With best wishes
Yours sincerely
Arthur Conan Doyle
Elsie read the letter and the signature, and maybe she stared at it for a long moment.
For Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of her father’s great heroes.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, according to her father, was more than just smart. Sir Arthur was Brilliant. Elsie’s father had read all the Sherlock Holmes stories and Sir Arthur’s other bo
oks, too, thrilling adventure tales, such as The Lost World.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a very famous, very important, very high-class person.
When Elsie’s father found out about the letter, he told her he was deeply worried. Their family was putting Important People’s reputations on the line, he said. Her little joke had gone far enough! She should tell him what the trick was and be done with the whole silly business.
But Elsie didn’t.
Elsie wouldn’t.
Elsie never answered Sir Arthur’s letter (or if she did, the letter has since been lost).
Instead, she wrote a letter to Mr. Gardner.
31 Main Street
Cottingley Bingley
July 1st [1920]
Dear Mr. Gardner
The photo of the fairies was taken instantaneous with a very good light. I received a letter this morning from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle witch was a great surprise. I had no idea when I took the photo what a sensation it would cause.
I remain
Yours Sincerely
Elsie Wright
(Flourish.)
After that, Elsie and her family went to the seaside for a holiday, and when they got back, a package was waiting. When Elsie unwrapped it, she found the book Sir Arthur had promised to send. On a sky-blue cover, gilt letters said: THE LOST WORLD.
The inside cover showed a flat-topped mountain rising from a jungle. Waterfalls poured down from a mysterious world, high above. The title page was inscribed: Yours sincerely, Arthur Conan Doyle, July 1920. Underneath, it said:
THE LOST WORLD
Being an account of the recent amazing adventures of Professor George E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Professor Summerlee, and Mr. E. D. Malone of the “Daily Gazette.”
A photograph captioned “The Members of the Exploring Party” showed four mustached and bearded men staring grimly at the camera. They did not look like the kind of people it was easy to fool. They looked like Important Men Who Got to the Bottom of Things.
“The Members of the Exploring Party.” Photograph from Elsie’s copy of The Lost World.
But if Elsie felt a qualm, she didn’t tell anybody.
Explorers aren’t the only ones who can be brave. And besides, the Lost World was an interesting place. Anyone could see that just by paging through the illustrations.
One picture was “The Swamp of the Pterodactyls,” another the “Glade of the Iguanodons.” “The Central Lake” showed a sea monster’s head and coils rising above the waves.
The book was two and a half inches thick and 319 pages long. A slow reader would require quite a bit of time to get through it. Still, it was nice of Sir Arthur to send it to her.
He had a vivid imagination — that much was clear.
Elsie’s father, too, got a letter from Sir Arthur.
“I have seen the very interesting photos which your little girl took,” it said. “They are certainly amazing. I was writing a little article for the Strand upon the evidence for the existence of fairies, so that I was very much interested. I should naturally like to use the photos, along with other material.”
“I heard him moan to my Mother,” Elsie wrote in a letter years later, “‘How could a brilliant man like him believe such a thing?’” How could Sir Arthur Conan Doyle be fooled?
And to think, her father said, that the great man had been bamboozled by “our Elsie, and she at the bottom of her class.”
Elsie’s father wrote Sir Arthur back.
31 Main Street
Cottingley, Bingley
July 12, 1920
Dear Sir,
I hope you will forgive us for not answering your letter sooner and thanking you for the beautiful book you so kindly sent to Elsie. She is delighted with it. I can assure you we do appreciate the honour you have done her. The book came last Saturday morning an hour after we had left for the seaside for our holidays, so we did not receive it until last night. We received a letter from Mr. Gardner at the same time, and he proposes coming to see us at the end of July. Would it be too long to wait until then, when we could explain what we know about it?
Yours very gratefully,
Arthur Wright
In his letter, Sir Arthur had asked if he or Mr. Gardner might run up to Cottingley and have a little chat with the girls. Elsie’s father’s reply —“Mr. Gardner . . . proposes coming to see us at the end of July. Would it be too long to wait until then?”— very politely hinted that it would be best if Sir Arthur didn’t come.
So Elsie’s father never met his hero.
But one afternoon in late July, Elsie’s mother opened their front door to a quiet middle-aged man in a brown suit and a bow tie.
Elsie’s mother showed Mr. Gardner into the parlor and introduced Elsie. (Mr. Gardner remembered her later as “a shy, pretty girl of about sixteen.”) The three of them made conversation until Elsie’s father came home from work and they all had tea.
Mr. Gardner asked Elsie’s father to tell his part of the story. Elsie’s father said he’d put just one plate in the camera, given it to Elsie and Frances, and then developed the pictures as soon as they came back.
Elsie’s mother told Mr. Gardner she remembered quite well that the two girls were gone from the house only a short time.
Mr. Gardner examined Elsie’s hand — some critics of the gnome picture had said Elsie’s hand looked suspiciously large. “She laughingly made me promise not to say much about it, it is so very long!” he wrote later. Mr. Gardner traced the outline of Elsie’s hand on a piece of paper, for evidence.
And then, after tea, Elsie and Mr. Gardner went down to the beck. “I was glad of the opportunity of questioning the elder girl quietly by herself and of talking things over,” Mr. Gardner wrote later.
Mr. Gardner looked at the waterfall and the nearby toadstools. He took his own photographs of the exact spots where the fairy photos were taken. He asked Elsie what color the fairies were.
Elsie told him they were “the palest of green, pink, mauve,” he wrote later. “Much more in the wings than in the bodies, which are very pale to white.” The gnome, she told him, seemed to be wearing black tights, a reddish-brown jersey, and a red pointed cap.
Elsie explained that she couldn’t entice them in, since she had no power of her own over the fairies. The way to get them to come close, she said, was to just sit quietly and think about fairies. Then, when you heard a faint rustling or saw something moving in the distance, you just waved to them, to show them they were welcome.
Mr. Gardner asked Elsie about the gnome’s wings. Both he and Sir Arthur thought that the markings seemed to look like those on a moth’s wing.
Elsie explained that they weren’t wing markings but musical pipes. She added that on days when there wasn’t too much rustling in the wood, you could hear the faint, high sound of gnome music.
Mr. Gardner’s visit lasted two days. Before he left, Elsie told him she’d very much like to send him a picture of a fairy flying. There seemed little chance of that happening, though, since Elsie said she couldn’t take pictures of fairies unless Frances was with her. And of course, Frances was far away in Scarborough.
Mr. Gardner said perhaps Frances could come and spend her summer holidays in Cottingley? Then the two girls could take pictures of fairies together? He could just run up to Scarborough and see Frances’s parents about it.
And what could Elsie say then? She’d already gone and told Mr. Gardner she wanted to take a picture of a fairy flying!
The grown-ups seemed to think Frances would be happy to visit. And of course she’d want to take pictures of fairies. . . .
Nobody asked Frances, of course. The next thing she knew, it had all been worked out.
There was Mr. Gardner, sitting at the dinner table: a boring man in brown with nothing at all interesting to say. And now, because of him, she had to go to Cottingley and take pictures of fairies. The grown-ups had it all worked out.
Frances couldn’t call Elsie on the telephone and a
sk her what to do: neither of them had a telephone.
She couldn’t write. What if somebody found the letter?
August came, and in Scarborough the ocean was as warm as it would get all year. Frances’s friends were no doubt out swimming and running barefoot on the sand. And Frances? Frances was on her way to Cottingley, watching the Yorkshire countryside roll past.
Green hills. Stone fences. Sheep.
When Frances finally got to Cottingley, Aunt Polly did not seem to be her usual cheerful self, at least when it came to fairies.
“If Elsie takes one flying as she said she would, I will be quite satisfied about them,” she had written to Mr. Gardner. “And yet to doubt is worse, for then I must think they are not trouthfull, not a very happy state of mind to be in, is it, and yet I have never found either Elsie or Frances tell a lie. Please don’t blame me for feeling like that, it’s because the whole thing is so strange.”
Frances didn’t need to see the letter to tell that something had changed. She felt “horribly uncomfortable,” she wrote later. “It wasn’t a joke anymore. People were taking it too seriously and it had all got out of hand.”
Aunt Polly was even keeping Elsie home from work so the girls could go out to the beck together and take plenty of pictures.
After all, Mr. Gardner had sent Elsie an expensive new camera and six dozen glass plates.
When they were alone, Elsie told Frances she had painted two fairies, one for herself and one for Frances. She said they’d take two pictures and be done with it. The fairies were both cut out and ready.
Elsie’s fairy wore an evening dress and a fashionable bob haircut. In one hand, she held a bouquet of bell-shaped blue flowers. Harebells, they were called.
Frances’s fairy wasn’t wearing much of anything but some tights and wisp of gauze. Elsie had drawn her leaping into the air, her arms outstretched and her toes pointed. Frances didn’t think Elsie had gotten the back leg right, but it would have to do.