The Fairy and the Waif
Summary
A Edwardian fever-dream in which childhood itself is mortgaged: Major Drayton, transatlantic carpetbagger with the moustache of empire, absconds across the Atlantic, leaving his moon-eyed daughter Viola marooned in a gilded New York parlour that smells of camphor and unpaid bills. War blooms like poppy-smoke; Drayton enlists, wires thirty-thousand Yankee dollars to his lawyer Nevinson—blood-money masquerading as trust—then is promptly deleted from the rosters of the living. The market devours the cash in one voracious gulp; Viola’s protectors become her jailers, their brownstone a debtor’s ark crammed with gouty colonels and clacking typewriters. She flees into the sulphur footlights of Broadway, trading servitude for servitude, her shoulder-blades still stinging from the Nevinson’s carpet-beater. Costumed as a phosphorescent Tinkerbell, she is hoisted on invisible wires above a drunken orchestra pit, panic blooming like wet paper; she plummets into the alley snow, where a guttersnipe urchin—ragged as a half-smoked cigarette—mistakes her tinsel wings for beatitude. Together they haunt coal-bins and ferries while cablegrams ricochet: Drayton lives, broke but breathing. Mrs. Nevinson hocks her last garnet brooch to repay the ghost, and the Major returns to reclaim not merely his progeny but the stray child who believes in fairies because hunger is less lethal than disillusion.
Synopsis
Major Drayton, an Englishman living in America with his daughter Viola, goes to England on business leaving his attorney Nevinson to look after Viola. When war is declared, Drayton joins his regiment and sends Nevinson $30,000 to invest for Viola. After learning that Drayton has been killed, the Nevinsons lose the money in speculation and must take in boarders. Viola, who dreams of being a fairy on the stage, runs away from the drudgery and harsh treatment and joins the chorus of a musical comedy, but again she is treated brutally. Terrified when, dressed as a fairy she is lifted into a cloud, she runs away and meets a waif sleeping in a barrel; the waif thinks that Viola is a real fairy and saves her from freezing. When word arrives that Drayton is alive, the Nevinsons offer a reward for Viola's recovery. After a policeman finds the children, Mrs. Nevinson sells her possessions to repay Drayton, who returns to raise Viola and the waif.
