‘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.
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 are 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 nourished, and in the tide of national prosperity, a decent period having elapsed, 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 Hermione!’ 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.