The Lavender Dragon

by Eden Phillpotts

  “What may that be?” enquired Sir Jasper.

  “My inability to strike the right note of humour for L.D.,” replied Dicky Gollop. “It is not my fault, for I really can be funny when in good form. Others will tell you of my jokes and quips, my quirks and quiddities. I am an excellent wag and make men, and even women, lose themselves in hurricanes of laughter. My repartee is rapier-like, my badinage bewilders with its lightning flashes. For a jeu de mot, a quibble, a conundrum, or a double entendre, there is nobody to approach me, and yet I lack the power to make my revered master enjoy the luxury of a hearty roar.”

  “Perhaps that is as well from all I hear,” replied the knight; but Dicky would not allow it.

  “No, my mission, so far as he is concerned, is a failure. And he knows it. He is as sorry for me as I am for myself. He tries to make me happy by laughing at my jocularity; but jesters are not deceived. Nobody knows quicker than tomfool if his tomfoolery is touching the spot; and in the ordinary high-class establishments, where jesters form part of the retinue, if we don’t give our employers sore sides, we soon receive them. But L.D. never shows any impatience at my failure. He observes that I entertain other people, and since the happiness of others is the only thing he cares a brass button about, in this vicarious sense I please him too. As a man, therefore, I am content; as an artist I shall ever harbour a sense of disappointment.”

  But Dicky’s trouble did not interest Sir Jasper. He was himself devoid of humour, and he could not find it in his heart to blame the Lavender Dragon’s indifference.

  “Many,” he said, “derive no great entertainment from the glib tongues and often questionable drolleries of your class. If you do not actually irritate your master, you should be content.”

  “You are not an artist then,” ventured Dicky.

  “No,” replied Sir Jasper. “I am a serious man engaged in making the world better than I find it.”

  “To be merrier is also to be better,” declared the mirth-provoker. “Man is the only laughing animal, and laughter is too little respected. Every child should be taught to laugh—like a gentleman; since there are horrid forms of laughter, which might be cured in youth, but not afterwards. Those who help the world to laugh, Sir Knight, are worthy of respect as great as the mighty ones, and the lovers of bloodshed and battle, who help it to cry. At least that is L.D.’s opinion, and I shall make him laugh yet if I break my heart a-trying.”

  With that they entered the draconian presence together.

  VI

  THE DRAGON GOES ON EXPLAINING

  SIR JASPER’S host reclined amid a chaos of woollen cushions each as large as a haystack. They were coloured amber and blue, jade green and orange. Thus they chimed pleasantly with the rose and delicate shades of lilac which played in sparkling iridescence over the vast body of the Lavender Dragon. He had eaten his hay and was now toying with a little mountain of sugared kidney beans piled up upon a plate of gold, while beside it stood an enormous silver goblet, containing fifty gallons of cider.

  A girl sat on an ivory chair beside L.D.; and when the knight appeared, she put her little hand on the dragon’s paw as he extended his mighty claws to the sweetmeats in the golden dish.

  “No,” she said, “you must not eat any more. They are horribly bad for you, and you know that Doctor Doncaster has told you these sugared beans should be taken far more sparingly.”

  The dragon drew back his paw.

  “Let me present Sir Jasper de Pomeroy, my dear Lilian,” he said, and then turned to the visitor.

  “This is Mistress Lilian Lovenot—so to call her. But she and I have reason to think that her real name is otherwise. However, time will show.”

  The knight bowed and the lady curtseyed, and while they became acquainted, L.D. stealthily helped himself to some more beans. Indeed he tossed a peck into his mighty mouth and munched them quickly, his opal eyes on Lilian.

  She was a fair maiden with rich, auburn locks, braided into two heavy bands that descended below her knees. She wore cloth of gold, that fitted close to her sturdy but beautifully modelled body; and the bright fabric was ornamented with emeralds only. Her face was strangely beautiful and winsome, and when her lips parted in a smile, a dimple of the most distracting charm twinkled upon her left cheek. Her eyes especially fascinated Sir Jasper, for they were in lustre and colour like aquamarines.

  She spoke in a soprano voice and gave him her hand, which he kissed with courtly respect. They made a striking pair and the dragon gazed upon them benevolently; but he presently interrupted their discourse and bade Lilian leave him with his visitor.

  “Depart, dear chuck,” he said. “You shall become better acquainted with Sir Jasper anon; for the present he listens to me, and we have some ground to traverse. All that I must say cannot be spoken at a sitting, but if he is so disposed, we will make a beginning this afternoon.”

  The maiden turned to the knight.

  “Do not let him eat too many beans, or drink too much cider,” she said. And then she departed, while Sir Jasper had leisure to note the grace of her deportment and progression.

  “A blessed girl,” said the dragon after Lilian had disappeared. “Beautiful both without, as you perceive, and within, as you shall find. Of her and her mystery more at another time. Now I will proceed with my own story where I left off this morning. When my dear wife died, a great darkness descended upon me and for the space of five-and-twenty years life held no interest or consolation. Do you see yonder mound beside the fountain—the tumulus bowered in hawthorns?”

  He pointed out of a lofty window, where shone brilliant displays of blossom, crimson and white, upon a little hill. Sir Jasper nodded.

  “There she lies, and there, ere long, I shall lie beside her,” said L.D. He heaved a sigh, like the breath of a sinking storm, and one or two tears, each representing a quart of the purest lavender water, splashed upon the cushions.

  “Pardon me,” said the dragon. He then cleared his throat and proceeded.

  “I even contemplated self-slaughter during the full brunt of my bereavement, but a moderate intellect and a good conscience came to my aid. I strove to create fresh interests and immerse myself in such enterprises as should justify existence and be an excuse for my long life. And then I made the astounding discovery that has taken shape in this little republic. I found that the only happiness worthy of being so called is that which we are able to bring to other creatures; and since my own race was beyond the reach of my ambitions in this direction, I turned attention to man—to Homo Sapiens, as he so humorously calls himself—and studied him with immense application for two whole centuries.

  “Man, Sir Jasper, viewed as it were from the outside, is a difficult customer, and I was more than once minded to abandon my studies in despair; but I persisted and at length arrived at some general conclusions concerning him. What did I find? I discovered, first, that the thing your species chiefly lacked was humility. Man is far the vainest of created things, and his gift of reason, instead of balancing this defect, and helping him to see himself in a juster perspective with regard to his place in the cosmos, tends as a rule to increase his unfortunate arrogance and insensate pride. Rather than employ his wonderful wits to fathom and accept Nature’s law of life, he abuses his best gift, reason, and behaves in a way to put himself below lesser creatures that lack it. Nothing in the world that goes on two feet, or four, or six—that swims, walks, or flies—is ridiculous and immodest save only mankind; and everything that is unseemly and unworthy on earth arises from him alone. Yet he vaunts himself as a being supreme and in a category apart, for ever denying the one touch of Nature that should make our whole world kin. Man, in fact, is far too pleased with himself and, bogged in his inordinate vanity, fails to make the progress that Nature has a right to expect from him. He is falling behind her time-table; he is loitering by the way to admire his own features in every pool; his values and opinions, his hopes and fears, his interests and activities are all far too elementary for his age.”


  The Lavender Dragon gulped a gallon of cider and proceeded.

  “And why has he not travelled further on his appointed road? The answer is a melancholy one. He has doubled back upon his own high-water mark; his tides actually ebb rather than flow. The world contains evidence of a higher civilisation and worthier humanity than exist in it at this moment; for man has fouled the lustral waters of his reason and substituted for pure thinking and higher principles, a degraded and reactionary rule of conduct founded on superstitions so gross that even a simple dragon like myself, coming to their examination with unbiased mind, stands aghast before such a retrograde era.

  “It is summed up in an aphorism, my friend. Faith took the wrong turning; Faith—that vital principle of progress—instead of founding her vanes upon the rock of reason and building on those mighty foundations laid by your ancient thinkers, sought otherwhere for her inspiration, set back the clock and lost many centuries by so doing. How much more time your race will be content to squander, I cannot say; how, many more generations of you will still grope in the night of superstition and suffer it to discolour your thought and retard your progress I know not. Only by persisting in your vanity and by blinding yourselves and your children can it be done.

  “Your rights and wrongs are all your concern, never your obligations and errors. You are the most ungrateful of created things, and even that dim sense of gratitude, lying in hope of favours to come and represented by early man’s first prayer to beings greater than himself—even that was soon lost. Your religion, that might have been a fair and reasonable addition to life, became foul and more foul, because it sprang from fear instead of love, from suspicion instead of trust; and the poison that polluted its beginnings is with it yet. But given loyalty to the laws that made you, and reverence for the things you might become, rather than foolish pride in the things that you are, then the spectacle you present should lead to impatience instead of self-satisfaction, and create a great will and purpose to give reason a chance, that you may learn whereto she is willing to lead you.”

  Sir Jasper concealed a yawn, for these affairs did not interest him at all. He tried a sugared bean, but found it far too tough a matter for his teeth.

  “A few words more and we will proceed from theory to practice,” said L.D. “I say, then, that if man but grasped how much he owed to Nature, how little to his own ill-used gifts, he would be more disposed to humility, more inclined to develop his immense static possibilities in dynamic action. What you have done, and are still busily engaged in doing, is merely to postpone what you might do and should do. You shudder at the base instincts you discover—in your neighbours; you blame your primitive ancestors for these savage survivals; but when distinction, altruism and greatness appear, you give no praise to Nature then. No, you praise your noble selves and take all the credit. But I am boring you?”

  “Far from it,” replied Sir Jasper. “I hate conceit. We are vain popinjays no doubt.”

  “Possibly you do not live long enough to be otherwise,” reflected the dragon. “Your lives are too brief to attain the long view and the balanced vision which I, for example, enjoy. You are still children for a quarter of existence, and often for the whole of it. But you will be more interested in the results of my discoveries. Briefly, our little community and township is the result. I began, in quite a small way, with half a dozen old and disconsolate people, who knew but too well their room was more wanted than their company. One by one I snapped them up and conveyed them hither. I explained my idea and put it into practice by devoting myself to the pleasure and satisfaction of these lonely individuals. They supplied me with the names of others, and were in a position to assure me that I should wrong nobody by increasing my collection. They also declared that amid the superfluity of children, I might, without causing inconvenience, help myself as generously as I pleased; and this fact gave me particular satisfaction, for it is the children I was after. Comparatively little can be done for the aged, and even middle-aged, but make them comfortable and fairly contented. Their minds are set and they repose upon a body of fossil opinions, rather than seek the adventure of new ideas. But how different with youth! The present population of Dragonsville, save certain notable exceptions, was generally caught young; and the result has been that my theories, such as they are, win their opportunity. You must, of course, prove for yourself whether the results satisfy you. It is possible that you stand on other ground and mistrust reason; but be that as it may, you will please understand that this little experiment is conducted on lines of reason alone.”

  “I saw a very nice church, however,” murmured Sir Jasper.

  “It is a very nice church. I am coming to that,” replied the dragon. “But first a few more general precepts. Success has nearly always attended my transplantations. Men and women, removed from the anxieties and perils of modern civilisation, soon find a new sense of security growing within them and come to discover that the simplicity of this self-supporting state is worth the loss of much that the greater world can promise. For the greater world, as you may already be aware, promises so much and performs so little. The promisers are among the mighty of the earth, but the performers for the most go unrecognised and unrewarded. Here we do not promise much, yet surprise ourselves daily by the beauty of our modest achievement, and that without stifling the unconquerable spirit of hope, which enables humanity to keep going, in face of so many temptations to stop going. These temptations arise from man’s own false values and acquired defects of superstition and selfishness, and that most dreadful of all disabilities known as patriotism. But without, I say, quenching hope, I yet seek to modify that illusory quality of the human mind and re-establish it upon surer ground. The result is patience and a growing conviction that things won’t happen because we want them to do so, or think that they should happen. The prayer to pray, Sir Jasper, is the prayer you can answer yourself, and the way to pray it is upon your feet, not your knees. This, however, shocks you. I see it in your face.”

  “I am not sure that I understand,” pleaded the knight.

  “You should do so, for it is your own rule and ordinance. You held me better dead this morning; but I am sure you did not pray for my destruction: you set out with sword and lance to compass it.”

  “Let us not return to that,” begged the other.

  “You may still think it best, when you have heard and seen all. I am at your service as you know. But ‘hope’—I was speaking of this great faculty. Hope may simply breed restlessness, and so destroy a man’s present content and mar enjoyment of what he has for desire of what he has not. Again hope, which after all is a sort of dreaming, may prevent a man from what he can do, for thinking on what he would like to do. Your Guilds illustrate this inconvenience, for I observe when wages interest the workman so much more than his work, that both work and wages suffer, to the disappointment of everybody concerned.”

  “You cannot banish hope from the human heart,” declared Sir Jasper.

  “I would as soon banish sunshine from the earth,” replied his companion. “Hope is of the essence of progress. Hope is a precious adjunct of all reason. But the really hopeful thing about your lives is manifest in a great fact that you have yet to grasp. The very gold mine and treasury of human hope, confounding your pessimists and people with weak knees and little faith in your own destiny, lies in this: that reason, like everything else, is subject to change, and that the change, despite occasional and enormous relapses, none the less makes steady progress in well-doing. Reason’s natural growth and motion is upward, not downward; forward, not backward; and they who flout reason terribly err, because they will not permit her to do that vital work which lies within her power. At present you are on the crest of a receding wave and far beneath the high-water mark that earlier generations of men have attained; but despair not: the tide is coming in, because it is a part of the great order of things that it should do so. You must judge what man can do by the best that he has done, not from the worst; you must admit that
the best can be bettered, and you must turn your faces to the dawn, rather than bury your noses in night and cry that the darkness thickens. You cannot stand still, and while men slip back, man goes onward under the impulsion of reason, that makes for righteousness despite the cross-currents of greed and superstition, vice and folly that seem to hide the fact. Herein lies the most valuable function of hope: to trust man and to trust his future.”

  “And, meanwhile, what must we do?” asked Sir Jasper.

  “Be humble,” replied the Lavender Dragon, “and instead of seeking supernatural guides, bend your glances to earth and learn that creatures far beneath you in the scale of existence can teach you exactly those things you most need to know. Instead of demanding assistance from higher beings, whose purpose is obscure, whose friendship is doubtful, whose very existence is merely a matter of opinion, how far better to turn attention upon humble fellow creatures, whose manners and customs are plain to be observed and whose lives command our admiration. Note yonder swarm of bees collecting in the foliage upon my wife’s tomb. The unconscious altruism of the honeybee, who does with her might what best becomes her during the short weeks of her existence, is an example so lofty that if it were practised by man the face of this world would be entirely changed. You, my friend, have an ambition to leave the earth sweeter and richer than you find it; and that is exactly what the bee achieves in her own sphere, and what I strive to accomplish in mine. And where reason rules, such an ambition reacts most favourably upon those who persist therein. For it is the solvent of selfishness, the test and touchstone of character. As time passes and the emotion becomes a part of yourself, humility appears; you are emptied of any love for fame, power or pelf; room for happiness is created, and you find, in a negation of personal good, the truest happiness that man may enjoy; for only by individual self-denial can the sum total of happiness be increased. Such a protagonist is on the right road to justify his own existence and help the flowing tide to new high levels, as yet beyond the reach, but not beyond the hope of reason.”