The Book of Dragons
the roadway, dragons basking on the front doorsteps of public buildings,
and dragons preening their wings on the roofs in the hot afternoon sun.
The town was quite green with them. Even when the children had gotten
out of the town and were walking in the lanes, they noticed that the
fields on each side were greener than usual with the scaly legs and
tails; and some of the smaller sizes had made themselves asbestos nests
in the flowering hawthorn hedges.
Effie held her brother's hand very tight, and once when a fat dragon
flopped against her ear she screamed out, and a whole flight of green
dragons rose from the field at the sound, and sprawled away across the
sky. The children could hear the rattle of their wings as they flew.
"Oh, I want to go home," said Effie.
"Don't be silly," said Harry. "Surely you haven't forgotten about the
Seven Champions and all the princes. People who are going to be their
country's deliverers never scream and say they want to go home."
"And are we," asked Effie--"deliverers, I mean?"
"You'll see," said her brother, and on they went.
When they came to St. George's Church they found the door open, and they
walked right in--but St. George was not there, so they walked around the
churchyard outside, and presently they found the great stone tomb of St.
George, with the figure of him carved in marble outside, in his armor
and helmet, and with his hands folded on his breast.
"How ever can we wake him?" they said. Then Harry spoke to St.
George--but he would not answer; and he called, but St. George did not
seem to hear; and then he actually tried to waken the great
dragon-slayer by shaking his marble shoulders. But St. George took no
notice.
Then Effie began to cry, and she put her arms around St. George's neck
as well as she could for the marble, which was very much in the way at
the back, and she kissed the marble face, and she said: "Oh, dear, good,
kind St. George, please wake up and help us."
And at that St. George opened his eyes sleepily, and stretched himself
and said: "What's the matter, little girl?"
So the children told him all about it; he turned over in his marble and
leaned on one elbow to listen. But when he heard that there were so many
dragons he shook his head.
"It's no good," he said, "they would be one too many for poor old
George. You should have waked me before. I was always for a fair
fight--one man one dragon, was my motto."
Just then a flight of dragons passed overhead, and St. George half drew
his sword.
But he shook his head again and pushed the sword back as the flight of
dragons grew small in the distance.
"I can't do anything," he said. "Things have changed since my time. St.
Andrew told me about it. They woke him up over the engineers' strike,
and he came to talk to me. He says everything is done by machinery now;
there must be some way of settling these dragons. By the way, what sort
of weather have you been having lately?"
This seemed so careless and unkind that Harry would not answer, but
Effie said patiently, "It has been very fine. Father says it is the
hottest weather there has ever been in this country."
"Ah, I guessed as much," said the Champion, thoughtfully. "Well, the
only thing would be ... dragons can't stand wet and cold, that's the
only thing. If you could find the taps."
St. George was beginning to settle down again on his stone slab.
"Good night, very sorry I can't help you," he said, yawning behind his
marble hand.
"Oh, but you can," cried Effie. "Tell us--what taps?"
"Oh, like in the bathroom," said St. George, still more sleepily. "And
there's a looking glass, too; shows you all the world and what's going
on. St. Denis told me about it; said it was a very pretty thing. I'm
sorry I can't--good night."
And he fell back into his marble and was fast asleep again in a moment.
"We shall never find the taps," said Harry. "I say, wouldn't it be awful
if St. George woke up when there was a dragon near, the size that eats
champions?"
Effie pulled off her dragonproof veil. "We didn't meet any the size of
the dining room as we came along," she said. "I daresay we shall be
quite safe."
So she covered St. George with the veil, and Harry rubbed off as much as
he could of the dragon poison onto St. George's armor, so as to make
everything quite safe for him.
"We might hide in the church till it is dark," he said, "and then--"
But at that moment a dark shadow fell on them, and they saw that it was
a dragon exactly the size of the dining room at home.
So then they knew that all was lost. The dragon swooped down and caught
the two children in his claws; he caught Effie by her green silk sash,
and Harry by the little point at the back of his Eton jacket--and then,
spreading his great yellow wings, he rose into the air, rattling like a
third-class carriage when the brake is hard on.
"Oh, Harry," said Effie, "I wonder when he will eat us!" The dragon was
flying across woods and fields with great flaps of his wings that
carried him a quarter of a mile at each flap.
Harry and Effie could see the country below, hedges and rivers and
churches and farmhouses flowing away from under them, much faster than
you see them running away from the sides of the fastest express train.
And still the dragon flew on. The children saw other dragons in the air
as they went, but the dragon who was as big as the dining room never
stopped to speak to any of them, but just flew on quite steadily.
"He knows where he wants to go," said Harry. "Oh, if he would only drop
us before he gets there!"
But the dragon held on tight, and he flew and flew and flew until at
last, when the children were quite giddy, he settled down, with a
rattling of all his scales, on the top of a mountain. And he lay there
on his great green scaly side, panting, and very much out of breath,
because he had come such a long way. But his claws were fast in Effie's
sash and the little point at the back of Harry's Eton jacket.
Then Effie took out the knife Harry had given her on her birthday. It
had cost only sixpence to begin with, and she had had it a month, and it
never could sharpen anything but slate-pencils; but somehow she managed
to make that knife cut her sash in front, and crept out of it, leaving
the dragon with only a green silk bow in one of his claws. That knife
would never have cut Harry's jacket-tail off, though, and when Effie had
tried for some time she saw that this was so and gave it up. But with
her help Harry managed to wriggle quietly out of his sleeves, so that
the dragon had only an Eton jacket in his other claw. Then the children
crept on tiptoe to a crack in the rocks and got in. It was much too
narrow for the dragon to get in also, so they stayed in there and waited
to make faces at the dragon when he felt rested enough to sit up and
begin to think about eating them. He was very angry, indeed, when they
made faces at him, and blew out fire and smoke at them, but they ran
farther into the cave so that he could not reach them, and when he was
tired of blowing he went away.
But they were afraid to come out of the cave, so they went farther in,
and presently the cave opened out and grew bigger, and the floor was
soft sand, and when they had come to the very end of the cave there was
a door, and on it was written: UNIVERSAL TAPROOM. PRIVATE. NO ONE
ALLOWED INSIDE.
So they opened the door at once just to peep in, and then they
remembered what St. George had said.
"We can't be worse off than we are," said Harry, "with a dragon waiting
for us outside. Let's go in."
They went boldly into the taproom, and shut the door behind them.
And now they were in a sort of room cut out of the solid rock, and all
along one side of the room were taps, and all the taps were labeled with
china labels like you see in baths. And as they could both read words of
two syllables or even three sometimes, they understood at once that they
had gotten to the place where the weather is turned on from. There were
six big taps labeled "Sunshine," "Wind," "Rain," "Snow," "Hail," "Ice,"
and a lot of little ones, labeled "Fair to moderate," "Showery," "South
breeze," "Nice growing weather for the crops," "Skating," "Good open
weather," "South wind," "East wind," and so on. And the big tap labeled
"Sunshine" was turned full on. They could not see any sunshine--the cave
was lighted by a skylight of blue glass--so they supposed the sunlight
was pouring out by some other way, as it does with the tap that washes
out the underneath parts of patent sinks in kitchens.
Then they saw that one side of the room was just a big looking glass,
and when you looked in it you could see everything that was going on in
the world--and all at once, too, which is not like most looking glasses.
They saw the carts delivering the dead dragons at the County Council
offices, and they saw St. George asleep under the dragonproof veil. And
they saw their mother at home crying because her children had gone out
in the dreadful, dangerous daylight, and she was afraid a dragon had
eaten them. And they saw the whole of England, like a great puzzle
map--green in the field parts and brown in the towns, and black in the
places where they make coal and crockery and cutlery and chemicals. All
over it, on the black parts, and on the brown, and on the green, there
was a network of green dragons. And they could see that it was still
broad daylight, and no dragons had gone to bed yet.
Effie said, "Dragons do not like cold." And she tried to turn off the
sunshine, but the tap was out of order, and that was why there had been
so much hot weather, and why the dragons had been able to be hatched. So
they left the sunshine tap alone, and they turned on the snow and left
the tap full on while they went to look in the glass. There they saw the
dragons running all sorts of ways like ants if you are cruel enough to
pour water into an ant-heap, which, of course, you never are. And the
snow fell more and more.
Then Effie turned the rain tap quite full on, and presently the dragons
began to wriggle less, and by-and-by some of them lay quite still, so
the children knew the water had put out the fires inside them, and they
were dead. So then they turned on the hail--only half on, for fear of
breaking people's windows--and after a while there were no more dragons
to be seen moving.
Then the children knew that they were indeed the deliverers of their
country.
"They will put up a monument to us," said Harry, "as high as Nelson's!
All the dragons are dead."
"I hope the one that was waiting outside for us is dead!" said Effie.
"And about the monument, Harry, I'm not so sure. What can they do with
such a lot of dead dragons? It would take years and years to bury them,
and they could never be burnt now they are so soaking wet. I wish the
rain would wash them off into the sea."
But this did not happen, and the children began to feel that they had
not been so frightfully clever after all.
"I wonder what this old thing's for," said Harry. He had found a rusty
old tap, which seemed as though it had not been used for ages. Its china
label was quite coated over with dirt and cobwebs. When Effie had
cleaned it with a bit of her skirt--for curiously enough both the
children had come out without pocket handkerchiefs--she found that the
label said "Waste."
"Let's turn it on," she said. "It might carry off the dragons."
The tap was very stiff from not having been used for such a long time,
but together they managed to turn it on, and then ran to the mirror to
see what happened.
Already a great, round black hole had opened in the very middle of the