It so happened that one afternoon Leo put the axe in his hands, and tried more persistently than ever to teach him how to use it. Conrad had been only half attending; he swung the axe clumsily, and it glanced off the tree on to his foot, making a deep gash in his boot. Leo spoke sharply to him for his awkwardness, and Conrad, without waiting to hear what Rudolph might say in his defence, dropped the axe and ran away, crying, nor did he pause for breath until the sounds that came from the clearing had ceased altogether.
Here the forest was very thick and silent, and though there seemed to be plenty of little paths going hither and thither, a stranger to the wood would have found that they led nowhere in particular, to an abandoned clearing, perhaps, or just into the undergrowth. But Conrad, who knew this part of the wood by heart, was not at all alarmed. He was feeling too hurt and angry with his brothers to be sorry that he had damaged his boot, though it would mean his father buying another pair; what he dreaded was that the axe might have cut his foot, in which case he would have to swallow his pride and go back to his brothers to beg a ride, for he was a long way from home.
He examined the gash as well as the dim light permitted, but there was no sign of blood; and when he took off his boot to look closer he found that the stocking was lightly cut, but the skin below it was unharmed. What a lucky escape! It must be magic, Conrad thought, white magic, much rarer than the black kind which he had been warned against, and which was all too common in this part of the world. How nice if he could meet, in some dell or coppice, the good fairy who, at the critical moment, had turned the axe’s edge! He peered about; he kissed the air, hoping to attract her; but if she was there she remained invisible. But Conrad, encouraged by the discovery that he was unhurt, felt twice the boy he was; so far from running back to his brothers, he would prove to them that he did not need their protection; he would press on through the forest further than he had ever gone before, and would not be home till nightfall. He had some food in his satchel and, as it was early autumn, there were plenty of berries on the trees. He started off.
Soon the wood changed its character. Instead of being flat, it turned into a succession of narrow valleys which Conrad always seemed to have to cross at their deepest point, scrambling up and down as best he could, for path there was none. He began to feel tired, and the sharp, hard leather of his damaged boot stuck into him and hurt him. He kept on meaning to turn back, but whenever he reached the crest of a ridge, it looked such a little way to the next that he always decided to cross just one more valley. They were long and empty, lit up their whole length by the sun which, away on Conrad’s right, was now so low that he could see it without lifting his eyes. It would soon be night. Suddenly he lost heart and made up his mind to stop at the next hilltop. It was only a few yards’ climb.
But once there, what a sight met his eyes —worth the whole journey, worth far, far more than all the efforts he had made. An immense valley, like the others, only larger, and flooded with orange light, stretched away to the left; and blocking the end a huge square rock, almost a mountain, with a castle built into its summit, so cunningly you could not tell where rock ended and stone began. Conrad strained his eyes. In the clear air of that country, of course, it was possible to sec an immense distance; the castle might be five miles away, might be ten, might be twenty. But there was a picture of it in the kitchen at home, and he recognized it at once. It was the royal castle, the palace of the King.
Clearly there was a ceremony in progress, for the castle was gaily decorated with large and little flags; bright-coloured rugs and tapestries hung from the windows, and scarlet streamers attached to the pinnacles flapped and floated in the breeze. Where the valley narrowed to a gorge in front of the castle was a huge black mass, divided by a white road; this mass Conrad presently made out to be a great crowd of people ranged on either side of the highway; soldiers on horseback posted at the comers and at regular intervals along the track were keeping the road clear, while along it in fours marched heralds blowing trumpets, and moving so slowly they scarcely seemed to move at all.
All at once the trumpeters halted, turned, stepped back and lined the road, their trumpets still extended. There was a pause in which nothing seemed to move; the breeze held its breath, the flags, hanging straight down, looked little thicker than their poles. Then, in the mouth of the long white channel appeared four men on horseback, followed at some distance by a single horseman, whose uniform glittered as though with jewels and on whose helmet was a great white plume. His head was slightly bent, whether in pride or humility, Conrad could not tell; perhaps he was acknowledging the cheers of the spectators, who had broken into frenzied movement, waving their arms and flinging their hats into the air.
So, in the heart of a welcome he could never have known before, he proceeded, until the whole crowd, and Conrad with it, had stared their fill at him, and the first flight of steps seemed only a few yards away. Exactly what happened then Conrad never remembered. There was a movement in the face of the living rock, a wrinkling and crumbling, and a drift of powdery smoke flung up into the air. A hole appeared in the hillside, and out of it came a head —a snake-like head, blacker than the hole it issued from, solid as ebony, large as the shadow of a cloud.
It writhed this way and that on its thick round neck, then suddenly darted forward. The crowd gave way on either hand, leaving in the centre a bulging space like an egg. Conrad saw the plumed horseman look back over his shoulder. That way lay safety; but he preferred not to save himself. Conrad did not wait to see him ride to his death; his last impression of the scene, before he took to his heels, was of a sudden hurricane that caught the face of the castle and stripped it bare of every flag, carpet and tapestry that emblazoned it.
Ill news travels fast, and thus it was that when night fell, Conrad’s absence from home was scarcely noticed. ‘What can have happened to the boy?' his mother asked more than once, but nobody took the matter up; they were too busy, the brothers and their friends, discussing the awful fate that had overtaken Princess Hermione’s suitor. As they all talked at once, I had better give the substance of what they said. The Princess was to have been betrothed that day to the heir of a neighbouring monarch. He was a handsome young man, gallant and brave, an excellent match in every way.
‘Had the Princess ever seen him?’ asked Conrad’s mother.
‘How does that affect the matter?’ exclaimed her husband. ‘The alliance would have made us the strongest nation upon earth. Who will want to marry her now?’
‘There will be plenty,’ said Leo promptly. ‘The Princess is but seventeen, and the most beautiful woman in the world.’
Nobody denied this, for it was known to be true. The Princess’s beauty was so great it had already become a proverb. The men of other countries, when they wanted to describe a beautiful woman, said she was as lovely as a rose, or as the day, or as a star; but the people of this country, if they wanted to praise something, said it was as beautiful as Princess Hermione. She was so beautiful that anything she did, even speaking, made her less lovely, ruffled her beauty, as it were; so she did little and spoke seldom. Also she rarely went about in public, it was unfair to people, they could not help falling in love with her. So retiring was her nature that ordinary folk like Conrad and his brothers knew little about her except that she was lovely.
‘Of course,’ said Leo, ‘someone will have to go properly armed to fight this dragon. That poor fellow didn’t have a chance in his fine clothes. The king may call out the militia; or perhaps they’ll just stop its hole up and starve it out.’
‘I’m afraid it will be a great shock to the Princess,’ their mother said.
Thereupon they fell to arguing as to where the Princess could have been when the Dragon burst out from the cliff and devoured her luckless suitor. One said she had been seen at a window; another that she was praying in the chapel. Of course it was all hearsay, but they defended their versions with great vigour. At last their father, tired of the fruitless argument, observed
:
‘I don’t suppose she was anywhere in particular.’
‘Why, she must have been somewhere,’ they protested.
‘Well, I’ve told you what I think,’ said he; and at that moment Conrad came in.
He expected a beating for being so late, and at any other time he might have got it. But tonight, so great was the excitement, his tardy arrival was treated as something of a joke. To turn their attention away from his lateness he meant to tell them, at once, the story of what he had seen in the wood—he had got it by heart. But no sooner had he begun than, partly from exhaustion but more from sickness as the details came up before his mind, he turned faint and had to stop. His brothers laughed at him, and returned to their own pet theories of what happened at the castle. Conrad felt disappointed. Though coming home had taken him twice as long as going, it had all been a marvellous adventure, which he thought his parents and brothers would clamour to hear about! Whereas Leo hardly took any interest in his story, and even Rudolph said that from such a position he couldn’t have seen anything with certainty. Just because they were grown up they did not believe his experiences could matter to anyone. They went on discussing how many people besides the Prince the Dragon had eaten, and what had happened to the torrent of black blood it was supposed to have emitted—things they knew nothing about. What a tame ending to an exciting day!
Of course, the court went into mourning, and a general fast was proclaimed, for it was rightly decided to neglect nothing that might lead to the Dragon’s destruction. But from the first the Prince’s would-be avengers were faced by an almost insuperable obstacle. The Dragon had utterly disappeared, leaving no trace; even the hole by which it came out had closed up; and professional mountaineers tied to ropes searched the face of the rock with pickaxes and even microscopes, to fmd an opening, without success. The very wall-flowers that the Princess was reported to be so fond of, bloomed there just as before; and popular opinion became irritated against the experts who, it said, were looking in the wrong place and deliberately prolonging their job. Short of blasting the rock, which would have endangered the castle, every means was tried to make the Dragon come out.
A herald was sent, quaking with fright, to ask it to state its terms; because those learned in dragonology declared that in the past dragons had been appeased by an annual sacrifice of men and maidens. When the Dragon made no reply the herald was instructed to play upon its vanity, and issue a formal challenge on behalf of one or other of the most redoubtable champions in the country: let it name a day and settle the matter by single combat. Still the Dragon made no sign, and the herald, emboldened by this display of cowardice, said that since it was such a poor spirited thing he was ready to fight it himself, or get his little brother to do so. But the Dragon took no notice at all.
As the weeks lengthened into months without any demonstration by the Dragon, public confidence grew apace. One circumstance especially fostered this. It was feared that the neighbouring monarch who had so unluckily lost his eldest son would demand compensation, possibly with threats. But his attitude proved unexpectedly conciliatory. He absolved them of all negligence, he said; no one could be forearmed against a Dragon; and his son had met a gallant death on behalf (as it were) of the most beautiful lady in the world. After this handsome declaration it was hoped that he himself might come forward as a candidate for Princess Hermione’s hand, for he was a widower.
But he did not.
Suitors were not lacking, however; indeed, since the appearance of the Dragon they had multiplied enormously. The fame of that event went aboard, carrying the Princess’s name into remote countries where even the rumour of her beauty had failed to penetrate. Now she was not only beautiful, she was unfortunate: the Dragon, some said, was the price she had paid for her beauty. All this, combined with the secrecy which made her way of life a matter of speculation, invested the Princess with an extraordinary glamour. Everyone in the land, even the humblest, wanted to do something for her, they knew not what. Daily she received sackfuls of letters, all telling the same tale: that she was the most wonderful of women, that the writer adored her and wished that he, not the Prince, had had the honour of dying for her. A few even expressed the hope that the Dragon would reappear, so that they might put their devotion to the test.
But of course no one believed that it really would. Some who had not been eyewitnesses declared that the Dragon was an hallucination; that the Prince had just died of joy upon finding himself at last so near the Princess, and that the spectators, drunk with excitement, had imagined the rest. The majority felt confident for a different reason. Dragons, like comets and earthquakes, were things of rare occurrence. We know little about them, they argued, but at any rate we can be sure of this: if we have seen one dragon in our lives, we arc not likely to see another. Many carried this argument a step further, and maintained that the kingdom had never been so safe from visitation by dragons as it was now; it had got the Dragon over, so to speak.
Before eighteen months were up the Dragon had passed into a joke. In effigy it was dragged round at fairs and processions, and made to perform laughable antics. Writers in the newspapers, when they wanted to describe a groundless fear, or a blessing in disguise, referred to it as ‘Princess Hermione’s Dragon’. Such as gave the monster serious thought congratulated themselves that it had come and gone without doing them any personal harm. Factories sprang up and business flourished, and in the tide of national prosperity, a decent period having elasped, another suitor presented himself for the honour of winning Princess Hermione’s hand.
He came of a royal house scarcely less distinguished (the newspapers said more distinguished) than his predecessor’s. Preparations for his reception were made on a grander scale than before, to illustrate the growing resources of the country, and they were made on a completely different plan, so that there might be no question of comparison with the former ceremony. One alteration was this: at the instance of the Minister of War, who said it would stimulate recruiting, a detachment of machine-gunners, armed with a new type of gun and carrying many rounds of blank ammunition, was posted on a convenient ledge commanding the spot where the Dragon had broken out. And there was to be one further change. The Princess’s first suitor, when he realized his danger and turned to face the Dragon, had cried out ‘Dearest Hcr-mione!’ or something to that effect, some protestation of loyalty and love; he had not time to say much, but nobody could recollect his exact words. The new pretendant proposed, and his idea was universally applauded, that he should kneel at the foot of the steps and make a little speech, half a prayer, amplifying the sentiments of adoration and devotion that imminent death had wrung from the lips of his predecessor.
And so, when the day came, the people assembled to enjoy the spectacle in greater numbers than before. They were in the highest spirits, for the ceremony had a double appeal: it was to celebrate the betrothal of their beloved Princess, and her deliverance from the Dragon. Salvoes from the machine-gun emplacements above their heads, mingling with the strains of martial music and the caterwauling of private instruments, raised their excitement to frenzy. The silence in which the Prince kneeled down to do homage to his bride-to-be was painful in its intensity. But no sooner had the last words passed his lips than there came a rumbling roar, a convulsion in the cliff, and the poor w'retch was whirled aloft between the Dragon’s jaws, to disappear in the mysterious recesses of the hillside.
The scene that followed was indescribable, and for a week, throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom, panic reigned. Frantic efforts were made to explain the causes of the calamity in the wickedness of individuals or in the mismanagement of the country. Impostors appeared and won a short hour of notoriety and influence by declaring that so-and-so was the culprit; and many innocent persons whose only fault was that they were uglier or richer or somehow different from the rest, perished at the hands of the mob. The government, more composed, arranged a few judicial executions, among the sufferers being the officers who
had served the machine-gunners with blank ammunition. Even the King was covertly censured, and not allowed to contribute to the enormous indemnity which the Prime Minister, in the name of the country, handed over to the dead Prince’s father: a sum so large that it had to be raised by a wholesale increase of taxation.
Only the Princess escaped blame. As before, she was alone, no one knew exactly where, at the precise moment of the catastrophe; but when she was found, a few minutes later, half-swooning in her room, her courage impressed everyone. She was soon able to write with her own hand a letter of condolence to the man who had so nearly been her father-in-law'; when published in the newspapers, its eloquent phrases touched all hearts. Most miserable of women, she said, she had been the means of bringing death to two brave men—the second perhaps even more promising than the first. But w'hat raised such a fury of protest was her concluding sentence—that she thought she must retire from the world. From all quarters of the country came letters begging her not to, so numerous that special mail-trains had to be run.