Part 1

[Illustration: Thia and Thol--B.C. 39,000.]

THE DREADFUL DRAGON OF HAY HILL

MAX BEERBOHM

[Illustration]

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.

_First published in “A Variety of Things”_ (_Volume ten of the Limited Edition of Max Beerbohm’s Works_).

_First published separately in book form, November, 1928._

_New impression, January, 1929._

_Printed in Great Britain_

THE DREADFUL DRAGON OF HAY HILL

In the faint early dawn of a day in the midst of a golden summer, a column of smoke was seen rising from Hay Hill, rising thickly, not without sparks in it. Danger to the lives of the dressmakers in Dover Street was not apprehended. The fire-brigade was not called out. The fire-brigade had not been called into existence. Dover Street had not yet been built. I tell of a time that was thirty-nine thousand years before the birth of Christ.

To imagine Hay Hill as it then was, you must forget much of what, as you approach it from Berkeley Square or from Piccadilly, it is now. You knew it in better days, as I did?--days when its seemly old Georgian charm had not vanished under the superimposition of two vast high barracks for the wealthier sort of bachelors to live in? You remember how, in frosty weather, the horse of your hansom used to skate hopelessly down the slope of it and collapse, pitching you out, at the foot of it? Such memories will not serve. They are far too recent. You must imagine just a green hill with some trees and bushes on it. You must imagine it far higher than it is nowadays, tapering to a summit not yet planed off for the purpose of Dover Street; and steeper; and with two caves aloft in it; and bright, bright green.

And conceive that its smiling wildness made no contrast with aught that was around. Berkeley Square smiled wildly too. Berkeley Square had no squareness. It was but a green valley that went, uninterrupted by any Piccadilly, into the Green Park. And through the midst of it a clear stream went babbling and meandering, making all manner of queer twists and turns on its off-hand way to the marshlands of Pimlico down yonder. Modern engineers have driven this stream ignominiously underground; but at that time there it still was, visible, playful, fringed with reeds, darted about in by small fishes, licensed to reflect sky. And it had tributaries! The landscape that I speak of, the great rolling landscape that comprised all Mayfair, was everywhere intersected by tiny brooks, whose waters, for what they were worth, sooner or later trickled brightly into that main stream. Here and there, quite fortuitously, in groups or singly, stood willows and silver birches, full of that wistful grace which we regard as peculiarly modern. But not till the landscape reached Hyde Park did trees exert a strong influence over it. Then they exerted a very strong influence indeed. They hemmed the whole thing in. Hyde Park, which was a dense and immemorial forest, did not pause where the Marble Arch is, but swept on to envelop all Paddington and Marylebone and most of Bloomsbury, and then, skirting Soho, over-ran everything from Covent Garden to Fetter Lane, and in a rush southward was brought up sharp only by the edge of the sheer cliffs that banked this part of the Thames.

The Thames, wherever it was not thus sharply opposed, was as tyrannous as the very forest. It knew no mercy for the lowly. Westminster, like Pimlico, was a mere swamp, miasmal, malarial, frequented by frogs only, whose croaks, no other sound intervening, made hideous to the ear a district now nobly and forever resonant with the silver voices of choristers and the golden voices of senators. Westminster is firm underfoot nowadays; yet, even so, as you come away from it up the Duke of York’s steps, you feel that you are mounting into a drier, brisker air; and this sensation is powerfully repeated when anon you climb St. James’s Street. Not lower, you feel, not lower than Piccadilly would you have your home. And this, it would seem, was just what the average man felt forty-one thousand years ago. Nature had placed in the steep chalky slopes from the marshes a fair number of commodious caves; but these were almost always vacant. Only on the higher levels did human creatures abound.

And scant enough, by our present standards, that abundance was. In all the space which the forest had left free--not merely all Mayfair, remember: all Soho, too, and all that lies between them--the population was hardly more than three hundred souls. So low a figure is hard to grasp. So few people, in a place so teeming now, are almost beneath our notice. Almost, but not quite. What there was of them was not bad.

Nature, as a Roman truly said, does not work by leaps. What we call Evolution is a quite exasperatingly slow process. We should like to compare favourably with even the latest of our predecessors. We wince whenever we read a declaration by some eminent biologist that the skull of the prehistoric man whose bones have just been unearthed in this or that district differs but slightly from the skull of the average man in the twentieth century. I hate having to tell you that the persons in this narrative had well-shaped heads, and that if their jaws were more prominent, their teeth sharper, their backs less upright, their arms longer and hairier, and their feet suppler than our own, the difference in each case was so faint as to be almost negligible.

Of course they were a simpler folk than we are. They knew far less than we know. They did not, for example, know they were living thirty-nine thousand years before Christ; and ‘protopalaeolithic’ was a term they _never_ used. They regarded themselves as very modern and very greatly enlightened. They marvelled at their ingenuities in the use of flint and stone. They held that their ancestors had been crude in thought and in mode of life, but not unblest with a certain vigour and nobility of character which they themselves lacked. They thought that their descendants would be a rather feeble, peevish race, yet that somehow in the far future, a state of general goodness and felicity would set in, to abide forever. But I seem to be failing in my effort to stress the difference between these people and ourselves. Let us hold fast to the pleasing fact that they really were less well-educated.

They could neither read nor write, and were so weak in their arithmetic that not a shepherd among them could count his sheep correctly, nor a goat-herd his goats. And their pitiful geography! Glancing northward above their forest, they saw the mountainous gaunt region that is Hampstead, that is Highgate; southward, across the river and its wide fens, the ridges of a nameless Surrey; but as to how the land lay beyond those barriers they had only the haziest notion. That there was land they knew. For, though they themselves never ventured further than the edge of the marshes, or than the fringe of the tangled forest that bounded the rest of their domain, certain other people were more venturesome: often enough it would happen that some stranger, some dark-haired and dark-eyed nomad, passed this way, blinking from the forest or soaked from the river; and glad always was such an one to rest awhile here, and tell to his good hosts tales of the outlying world. Tales very marvellous to the dwellers in this sleek safe homeland!--tales of rugged places where no men are, or few, and these in peril by night and by day; tales of the lion, a creature with yellow eyes and a great mop of yellow hair to his head, a swift and strong creature, without pity; and of the tusked mastodon, taller than the oldest oak, and shaking the ground he walks on; and of the winged dragon, that huge beast, poising so high in the air that he looks no bigger than a hawk, yet reaching his prey on earth as instantly as a hawk his; and of the huge crawling dragon, that breathes fire through his nostrils and scorches black the grass as he goes hunting, hunting; of the elephant, who fears nothing but mastodons and dragons; of the hyena and the tiger, and of beasts beside whom these seem not dreadful.

Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, the homelanders would sit listening. ‘O wanderer,’ would say one, ‘tell us more of the mastodon, that is taller than the oldest oak.’ And another would say, ‘Make again for us, O wanderer, the noise that a lion makes.’ And another, ‘Tell us more of the dragon that scorches black the grass as he goes hunting, hunting.’ And another, ‘O you that have so much wandered, surely you will abide here always? Here is not hardship nor danger. We go not in fear of the beasts whose roast flesh you have tasted and have praised. Rather go they in great fear of us. The savoury deer flees from us, and has swifter feet than we have, yet escapes not the point of the thrown spear, and falls, and is ours. The hare is not often luckier, such is our skill. Our goats and our sheep would flee from us, but dare not, fearing the teeth of certain dogs who love us. We slay what we will for food. For us all there is plenty in all seasons. You have drunk of the water of our stream. Is it not fresh and cold? Have you cracked in your wanderings better nuts than ours? or bitten juicier apples? Surely you will abide here always.’

And to the wanderer it would seem no bad thing that he should do so. Yet he did not so. When the sun had sunk and risen a few times he would stretch his arms, maybe gazing round at the landscape with a rather sardonic smile, and be gone through the forest or across the water. And the homelanders, nettled, would shrug their shoulders, and thank their gods for having rid them of a fool.

Their gods were many, including the sun and moon, their clear stream, apple-trees and cherry-trees and fig-trees and trees that gave nuts, rose-bushes in summer, rain, and also fire--fire, the god that themselves had learnt to make from flint, fire that made meat itself godlike. But they prayed to no god, not being aware that they needed anything. And they had no priesthood. When a youth lost his heart to a maid he approached her, and laid his hands gently upon her shoulders, and then, if she did not turn away from him, he put his hands about her waist and lifted her three times from the ground. This sufficed: they were now man and wife, and lived happily, or not so, ever after. Nor was it needful that the rite should be only thus. If a maid lost her heart to a youth, the laid hands could be hers, and the shoulders his, and if he turned not away from her, if thrice he lifted her from the ground, this too was wedlock.

If there were no good cave for them to take as their own, bride and bridegroom built them a hut of clay and wattles. Such huts were already numerous, dotted about in all directions. Elder folk thought them very ugly, and said that they spoilt the landscape. Yet what was to be done? It is well that a people should multiply. Though these homelanders now deemed themselves very many indeed (their number, you see, being so much higher than they ever could count up to, even incorrectly), yet not even the eldest of them denied that there was plenty of room and plenty of food for more. And plenty of employment, you ask? They did not worry about that. The more babies there were, the more children and grown folk would there be anon to take turns in minding the ample flocks and herds, and the more leisure for all to walk or sit around, talking about the weather or about one another. They made no fetish of employment.

I have said that they were not bad. Had you heard them talked about by one another, you might rather doubt this estimate. You would have heard little good of any one. No family seemed to approve of its neighbours. Even between brothers and sisters mutual trust was rare. Even husbands and wives bickered. To strangers, as you have seen, these people could be charming. I do not say they were ever violent among themselves. That was not their way. But they lacked kindness.

Happiness is said to beget kindness. Were these people not happy? They deemed themselves so. Nay, there was to come a time when, looking back, they felt that they had been marvellously happy. This time began on the day in whose dawn smoke was seen rising from Hay Hill.

* * * * *

The title of my tale has enabled you to guess the source of that smoke: the nostrils of some dreadful dragon. But had you been the little girl named Thia, by whom first that smoke was seen, you would not have come upon the truth so quickly.

Thia had slept out under the stars, and, waking as they faded, had risen, brushed the dew from her arms and legs, shaken it off her little goatskin tunic, and gone with no glance around or upward to look for mushrooms. Presently, as there seemed to be no mushrooms this morning anywhere, she let her eyes rove from the ground (ground that is now Lord Lansdowne’s courtyard) and, looking up, saw the thick smoke above the hill. She saw that it came from the cave where dwelt the widow Gra with her four children. How could Gra, how could any one, want a fire just now? Thia’s dark eyes filled with wonder. On wintry nights it was proper that there should be a fire at the mouth of every cave, proper that in wintry dawns these should still be smouldering. But--such smoke as this on such a morning! Heavier, thicker smoke than Thia had ever seen in all the ten years of her existence! Of course fire was a god. But surely he would not have us worship him to-day? Why then had Gra lit him? Thia gave it up, and moved away with eyes downcast in renewed hope of mushrooms.

She had not gone far before she stared back again, hearing a piteous shrill scream from the hill. She saw a little boy flying headlong down the slope--Thol, the little red-haired boy who lived in the other cave up there. Thol slipped, tumbled head over heels, rolled, picked himself up, saw Thia, and rushed weeping towards her.

‘What ails you, O child?’ asked Thia, than whom Thol was indeed a year younger and much smaller.

‘O!’ was all that the child vouchsafed between his sobs, ‘O!’

Thia thought ill of tears. Scorn for Thol fought the maternal instinct in her. But scorn had the worst of it. She put her arms about Thol. Quaveringly he told her what he had just seen, and what he believed it to be, and how it lay there asleep, with just its head and tail outside Gra’s cave, snoring. Then he broke down utterly. Thia looked at the hill. Maternal instinct was now worsted by wonder and curiosity and the desire to be very brave--to show how much braver than boys girls are. Thia went to the hill, shaking off Thol’s wild clutches and leaving him behind. Thia went up the hill quickly but warily, on tiptoe, wide-eyed, with her tongue out upon her underlip. She took a sidelong course, and she noticed a sort of black path through the grass, winding from the mouth of Gra’s cave, down one side of the hill, and away, away till it was lost in the white mists over the marshes. She climbed nearly level with the cave’s mouth, and then, peering through a bush which hid her, saw what lay behind the veil of smoke.

Much worse the sleeping thing was than she had feared it would be, much huger and more hideous. Its face was as long as a man’s body, and lay flat out along the ground. Had Thia ever seen a crocodile’s face, that is of what she would have been reminded--a crocodile, but with great pricked-up ears, and snuffling forth fiery murk in deep, rhythmic, luxurious exhalations. The tip of the creature’s tail, sticking out from the further side of the cave’s mouth, looked to her very like an arrow-head of flint--green flint! She could awfully imagine the rest of the beast, curled around in the wide deep cave. And she shuddered with a great hatred, and tears started to her eyes, as she thought of Gra and of those others.

When she reached the valley, it was clear to Thol that she had been crying. And she, resenting his scrutiny, made haste to say, ‘I wept for Gra and for her children; but you, O child, because you are a coward.’

At these words the boy made within him a great resolve. This was, that he would slay the dragon.

* * * * *

How? He had not thought of that. When? Not to-day, he felt, nor to-morrow. But some day, somehow. He knew himself to be small, even for his age, and the dragon big for whatever its age might be. He knew he was not very clever; he was sure the dragon was very clever indeed. So he said nothing to Thia of his great resolve that she should be sorry.

Meanwhile, the sun had risen over the hills beyond the water, and the birds been interrupted in their songs by the bleating of penned sheep. This sound recalled Thol from his dreams of future glory.

For he was a shepherd’s lad. It was the custom that children, as they ceased to toddle, should begin to join in whatever work their parents were by way of doing for the common good. Indeed it was felt that work was especially a thing for the young. Thol had no parents to help; for his mother had died in giving him birth; and one day, when he was but seven years old, his father, who was a shepherd, had been attacked and killed by an angry ram. In the sleek safe homeland this death by violence had made a very painful impression. There was a general desire to hush it up, to forget it. Thol was a reminder of it. Thol was ignored, as much as possible. He was allowed to have the cave that had been his father’s, but even the widow Gra, in the cave so near to his, disregarded him, and forbade her children to play with him. However, there dwelt hard by in the valley a certain shepherd, named Brud, and he, being childless, saw use for Thol as helping-boy, and to that use put him. Every morning, it was Thol’s first duty to wake his master. It was easy for Thol himself to wake early, for his cave faced eastwards. To-day in his great excitement about the dragon he had forgotten his duty to Brud. He went running now to perform it.

Brud and his dog, awakened, came out and listened to Thol’s tale. Truthfulness was regarded by all the homelanders as a very important thing, especially for the young. Brud took his staff, and ‘Now, O Thol,’ he said, ‘will I beat you for saying the thing that is not.’ But the boy protested that there was indeed a dragon in Gra’s cave; so Brud said sagely, ‘Choose then one of two things: either to run hence into Gra’s cave, or to be beaten.’ Thol so unhesitatingly chose to be beaten that it was clear he did believe his own story. Thia, moreover, came running up to say that there truly was a dragon. So Brud did not beat Thol very much, and went away with his dog towards the hill, curious to know what really was amiss up there.

Perhaps Thia was already sorry she had called Thol a coward, for, though he was now crying again loudly, she did but try to comfort him. His response to her effort was not worthy of a future hero: he complained through his tears that she had not been beaten, too, for saying there was a dragon. Thia’s eyes flashed fiercely. She told Thol he was ugly and puny and freckle-faced, and that nobody loved him. All this was true, and it came with the more crushing force from pretty Thia, whom every one petted.

No one ever made Thia work, though she was strong and agile, and did wondrously well whatever task she might do for the fun of it. She could milk a goat, or light a fire, or drive a flock of geese, or find mushrooms if there were any, as quickly and surely as though she had practised hard for years. But the homelanders preferred to see her go flitting freely all the day long, dancing and carolling, with flowers in her hair.

Thia’s hair was as dark as her eyes. Thia was no daughter of the homeland. She was the daughter of two wanderers who, seven years ago, had sojourned here for a few days. Their child had then attained just that age which was always a crisis in the lives of wanderers’ children: she had grown enough to be heavy in her parents’ arms, and not enough to foot it beside them. So they had left her here, promising the homelanders that in time they would come back for her; and she, who had had no home, had one now. Although (a relic, this, of primitive days) no homelander ever on any account went near to the mouth of another’s dwelling, Thia would go near and go in, and be always welcome. The homelanders seldom praised one another’s children; but about Thia there was no cause for jealousy: they all praised her strange beauty, her fearless and bright ways. And withal she was very good. You must not blame her for lack of filial sense. How should she love parents whom she did not remember? She was full of love for the homelanders; and naturally she hated the thought they hated: that some day two wanderers might come and whisk her away.[A] She loved this people and this place the more deeply perhaps because she was not of them. Forget the harsh things she has just said to Thol. He surely was to blame. And belike she would even have begged his pardon had she not been preoccupied with thoughts for the whole homeland, with great fears of what the dreadful dragon might be going to do when he woke up.

* * * * *

And a wonder it was that he did not wake forthwith, so loud a bellow of terror did Brud and his dog utter at the glimpse they had of him. The glimpse sufficed them: both bounded to the foot of the hill with incredible speed, still howling. From the mouths of caves and huts people darted and stood agape. Responsive sheep, goats, geese, what not, made great noises of their own. Brud stood waving his arms wildly towards the hill. People stared from him to the column of smoke, and from it to him. They were still heavy with sleep. Unusual behaviour at any time annoyed them; they deeply resented behaviour so unusual as this so early in the morning. Little by little, disapproval merged into anxiety. Brud became the centre of a circle. But he did not radiate conviction. A dragon? A dragon in the homeland? Brud must be mad!