Leslie Hartley - The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

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 see 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 corners 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 to-night, 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 find 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.