The short essay on “The Improbability of the
Infinite” which I was planning for you yesterday
will now never be written. Last night my brain
was crammed with lofty thoughts on the subject—and
for that matter, on every other subject. My mind
was never so fertile. Ten thousand words on any
theme from Tin-tacks to Tomatoes would have been easy
to me. That was last night. This morning
I have only one word in my brain, and I cannot get
rid of it. The word is “Teralbay.”
Teralbay is not a word which one uses much in ordinary
life. Rearrange the letters, however, and it
becomes such a word. A friend—no, I
can call him a friend no longer—a person
gave me this collection of letters as I was going
to bed and challenged me to make a proper word of
it. He added that Lord Melbourne—this,
he alleged, is a well-known historical fact—Lord
Melbourne had given this word to Queen Victoria once,
and it had kept her awake the whole night. After
this, one could not be so disloyal as to solve it
at once. For two hours or so, therefore, I merely
toyed with it. Whenever I seemed to be getting
warm I hurriedly thought of something else. This
quixotic loyalty has been the undoing of me; my chances
of a solution have slipped by, and I am beginning
to fear that they will never return. While this
is the case, the only word I can write about is Teralbay.
Teralbay—what does it make? There
are two ways of solving a problem of this sort.
The first is to waggle your eyes and see what you get.
If you do this, words like “alterably”
and “laboratory” emerge, which a little
thought shows you to be wrong. You may then waggle
your eyes again, look at it upside down or sideways,
or stalk it carefully from the southwest and plunge
upon it suddenly when it is not ready for you.
In this way it may be surprised into giving up its
secret. But if you find that it cannot be captured
by strategy or assault, then there is only one way
of taking it. It must be starved into surrender.
This will take a long time, but victory is certain.
There are eight letters in Teralbay and two of them
are the same, so that there must be 181,440 ways of
writing the letters out. This may not be obvious
to you at once; you may have thought that it was only
181,439; but you may take my word for it that I am
right. (Wait a moment while I work it out again....
Yes, that’s it.) Well, now suppose that you
put down a new order of letters—such as
“raytable”—every six seconds,
which is very easy going, and suppose that you can
spare an hour a day for it; then by the 303rd day—a
year hence, if you rest on Sundays—you
are bound to have reached a solution.
But perhaps this is not playing the game. This,
I am sure, is not what Queen Victoria did. And
now I think of it, history does not tell us what she
did do, beyond that she passed a sleepless night. (And
that she still liked Melbourne afterwards—which
is surprising.) Did she ever guess it? Or did
Lord Melbourne have to tell her in the morning, and
did she say, “Why, of course!” I
expect so. Or did Lord Melbourne say, “I’m
awfully sorry, madam, but I find I put a `y’
in too many?” But no—history could
not have remained silent over such a tragedy as that.
Besides, she went on liking him.
