The King of Schnorrers (Collection)/The Semi-Sentimental Dragon
Once upon a time, as the good old chronicler, Richard Johnson, relateth, Egypt was oppressed by a Dragon who made a plaguy to-do unless given a virgin daily for dinner. For twenty-four years the menu was practicable; then the supply gave out. There was absolutely no virgin left in the realm save Sabra, the king's daughter. As 365 x 24 only = 8760, I suspect that the girls were anxious to dodge the Dragon by marrying in haste. The government of the day seems to have been quite unworthy of confidence and utterly unable to grapple with the situation, and poor Ptolemy was reduced to parting with the Princess, though even so destruction was only staved off for a day, as virgins would be altogether "off" on the morrow. So short-sighted was the Egyptian policy that this does not appear to have occurred to anybody. At the last moment an English tourist from Coventry, known as George (and afterwards sainted by an outgoing administration sent to his native borough by the country), resolved to tackle the monster. The chivalrous Englishman came to grief in the encounter, but by rolling under an orange tree he was safe from the Dragon so long as he chose to stay there, and so in the end had no difficulty in despatching the creature; which suggests that the soothsayers and the magicians would have been much better occupied in planting orange trees than in sacrificing virgins. Thus far the story, which is improbable enough to be an allegory.
Now many centuries after these events did not happen, a certain worthy citizen, an illiterate fellow, but none the worse for that, made them into a pantomime—to wit, St. George and the Dragon; or, Harlequin Tom Thumb. And the same was duly played at a provincial theatre, with a lightly clad chorus of Egyptian lasses, in glaring contradiction of the dearth of such in the fable, and a Sabra who sang to them a topical song about the County Council.
Curiously enough, in private life, Sabra, although her name was Miss on the posters, was really a Miss. She was quite as young and pretty as she looked, too, and only rouged herself for the sake of stage perspective. I don't mean to say she was as beautiful as the Egyptian princess, who was as straight as a cedar and wore her auburn hair in wanton ringlets, but she was a sprightly little body with sparkling eyes and a complexion that would have been a good advertisement to any soap on earth. But better than Sabra's skin was Sabra's heart, which though as yet untouched by man was full of love and tenderness, and did not faint under the burden of supporting her mother and the household. For instead of having a king for a sire, Sabra had a drunken scene-shifter for a father. Everybody
about the theatre liked Sabra, from the actor-manager (who played St. George) to the stage door-keeper (who played St. Peter). Even her under-study did not wish her ill. Needless, therefore, to say it was Sabra who made the Dragon semi-sentimental. Not in the "book," of course, where his desire to eat her remained purely literal. Real Dragons keep themselves aloof from sentiment, but a stage Dragon is only human. Such a one may be entirely the slave of sentiment, and it was perhaps to the credit of our Dragon that only half of him was in the bonds. The other half—and that the better half—was saturnine and teetotal, and answered to the name of Davie Brigg.
Davie was the head man on the Dragon. He played the anterior parts, waggled the head and flapped the wings and sent gruesome grunts and penny squibs through the "fire-breathing" jaws. He was a dour middle-aged, but stage-struck. Scot, very proud of his rapid rise in the profession, for he had begun as a dramatist.
The rear of the Dragon was simply known as Jimmy.
Jimmy was a wreck. His past was a mystery. His face was a brief record of baleful experiences, and he had the aspirates of a gentleman. He had gone on the stage to be out of the snow and the rain. Not knowing this, the actor-manager paid him ninepence a night. His wages just kept him in beer-money. The original Sabra tamed two lions, but perhaps it was a greater feat to tame this half of a Dragon.
Jimmy's tenderness for Sabra began at rehearsal, when he saw a good deal of her, and felicitated himself on the fact that they were on in the same scenes. After a while, however, he perceived this to be a doleful drawback, for whereas at rehearsal he could jump out of his skin and breathe himself and feast his eyes on Sabra when the Dragon was disengaged, on the stage he was forced to remain cramped in darkness while Ptolemy was clowning or St. George executing a step dance. Sabra was invisible, except for an odd moment or so between the scenes when he caught sight of her gliding to her dressing-room like a streak of discreet sunshine. Still he had his compensations; her dulcet notes reached his darkness (mellowed by the painted canvas and the tin scales sewn over it), as the chant of the unseen cuckoo reaches the woodland wanderer. Sometimes, when she sang that song about the County Council, he forgot to wag his tail.
Thus was Love blind, while Indifference in the person of Davie Brigg looked its full through the mask that stood for the monster's head. After a bit Jimmy conceived a mad envy of his superior's privileges; he longed to see Sabra through the Dragon's mouth. He was so weary of the little strip of stage under the Dragon's belly, which, even if he peered through the breathing-holes in the patch of paint-disguised gauze let into its paunch, was the most he could see. One night he asked Davie to change places with him. Davie's look of surprise and consternation was beautiful to see.
"Do I hear aricht?" he asked.
"Just for a night," said Jimmy, abashed.
"But d'ye no ken this is a speakin' part?"
"I did—not—know—that," faltered Jimmy.
"Where's your ears, mon?" inquired Davie sternly. "Dinna ye hear me growlin' and grizzlin' and squealin' and skirlin'?"
"Y—e—s," said Jimmy. "But I thought you did it at random."
"Thocht I did it at random!" cried Davie, holding up his hands in horror. "And mebbe also ye thocht onybody could do't!"
Jimmy's shamed silence gave consent also to this unflinching interpretation of his thought.
"Ah weel!" said Davie, with melancholy resignation, "this is the artist's reward for his sweat and labour. Why, mon, let me tell ye, ilka note is not ainly timed but modulatit to the dramatic eenterest o' the moment, and that I hae practised the squeak hours at a time wi' a bagpiper. Tak' my place, indeed! Are ye fou again, or hae ye tint your senses?"
"But you could do the words all the same. I only want to see for once."
"And how d'ye think the words should sound, coming from the creature's belly? And what should ye see! You should nae ken where to go, I warrant. Come, I'll spier ye. Where d'ye come in for the fight with St. George—is it R 2 E or LUE?"
"L U E," replied Jimmy feebly.
"Ye donnered auld runt!" cried Davie triumphantly. "'Tis neither one nor t'other. Tis R C. Why, ye're capable of deein' up stage instead of down! Ye'd spoil my great scene. And ye are to remember I wad bear the wyte for 't, for naebody but our two sel's should ken the truth. Nay, nay, my mon. I hae my responsibeelities to the management. Ye're all verra weel in a subordinate position, but dinna ye aspire to more than beseems your abeelities. I am 
"'but d'ye no ken this is a speakin' part?'" richt glad ye spoke me. Eh, but it would be an awfu' thing if I was taken bad and naebody to play the part. I'll warn the manager to put on an under-study betimes."
"Oh, but let me be the under-study, then," pleaded Jimmy.
Davie sniffed scornfully.
"Tis a braw thing, ambeetion," he said, "but there's a proverb about it ye ken, mebbee."
"But I'll notice everything you do, and exactly how you do it!"
Davie relented a little.
"Ah, weel," he said cautiously, "I'll bide a wee before speaking to the manager."
But Davie remained doggedly robust, and so Jimmy still walked in darkness. He often argued the matter out with his superior, maintaining that they ought to toss for the position—head or tail. Failing to convince Davie, he offered him fourpence a night for the accommodation, but Davie saw in this extravagance evidence of a determined design to supplant him. In despair Jimmy watched for a chance of slipping into the wire framework before Davie, but the conscientious artist was always at his post first. They held dialogues on the subject, while with pantomimic license the chorus of Egyptian lasses was dancing round the Dragon as if it were a maypole. Their angry messages to each other vibrated along the wires of their prison-house, rending the Dragon with intestinal war. Weave your cloud-wrought Utopias, O social reformer, but wherever men inhabit, there jealousy and disunion shall creep in, and this gaudy canvas tent with its tin roofing was a hotbed of envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness. Yet Love was there, too —a stranger, purer passion than the battered Jimmy had ever known; for it had the unselfishness of a love that can never be more than a dream, that the beloved can never even know of. Perhaps, if Jimmy had met Sabra before he left off being a gentleman—!
The silent, hopeless longing, the chivalrous devotion yearning dumbly within him, did not stop his beer; he drank more to drown his thoughts. Every night he entered into his part gladly, knowing himself elevated in the zoological scale, not degraded, by an assumption that made him only half a beast. It was kind of Providence to hide him wholly away from her vision, so that her bright eyes might not be sullied by the sight of his foulness. None of the grinning audience suspected the tragedy of the hind legs of the Dragon, as blindly following their leader, they went "galumphing" about the stage. The innocent children marvelled at the monster, in wide-eyed excitement, unsuspecting even its humanity, much less its double nature; only Davie knew that in that Dragon there were the ruins of a man and the makings of a great actor!
"Why are ye sae anxious to stand in my shoon?" he would ask, when the hind legs became too obstreperous.
"I don't want to be in your shoes; I only want to see the stage for once."
But Davie would shake his head incredulously, making the Dragon's mask wobble at the wrong cues. At last, once when Sabra was singing, poor Jimmy, driven to extremities, confessed the truth, and had the mortification of feeling the wires vibrate with the Scotchman's silent laughter. He blushed unseen.
But it transpired that Davie's amusement was not so much scornful as sceptical. He still suspected the tail of a sinister intention to wag the Dragon.
"Nae, nae," he said, "ye shallna get me to swallow that. Ye're an unco puir creature, but ye're no sa daft as to want the moon. She's a bonnie lassie, and I willna be surprised if she catches a coronet in the end, when she makes a name in Lunnon; for the swells here, though I see a wheen foolish faces nicht after nicht in the stalls, are but a puir lot. Eh, but it's a gey grand tocher is a pretty face. In the mean- whiles, like a canny girl, she's settin' her cap at the chief."
"Hold your tongue! " hissed the hind legs. "She's as pure as an angel."
"Hoot-toot!" answered the head. "Dinna leebel the angels. It's no an angel that lets her manager give her sly squeezes and saft kisses that are nae in the stage directions."
"Then she can't know he's a married man," said the hind legs hoarsely.
"Dinna fash yoursel'—she kens that full weel and a thocht or two more. Dod! Ye should just see how she and St. George carry on after my death scene, when he's supposit to ha' rescued her and they fall a-cuddlin'."
"You're a liar!" said the hind legs.
Davie roared and breathed burning squibs and capered about, and Jimmy had to prance after him in involuntary pursuit. He felt choking in his stuffy hot black rollicking dungeon. The thought of this bloated sexagenarian faked up as a jeune premier, pawing that sweet little girl, sickened him.
"Dom'd leear yersel!" resumed Davie, coming to a standstill. "I maun believe my own eyes, what they tell me nicht after nicht."
"Then let me see for myself, and I'll believe you."
"Ye dinna catch me like that," said Davie, chuckling.
After that poor Jimmy's anxiety to see the stage became feverish. He even meditated malingering and going in front of the house, but could only have got a distant view, and at the risk of losing his place in an overcrowded profession. His opportunity came at length, but not till the pantomime was half run out and the actor-manager sought to galvanise it by a "second edition," which in sum meant a new lot of the variety entertainers who came on and played copophones before Ptolemy, did card-tricks in the desert, and exhibited trained poodles to the palm-trees. But Davie, determined to rise to the occasion, thought out a fresh conception of his part, involving three new grunts, and was so busy rehearsing them at home that he forgot the flight of the hours and arrived at the theatre only in time to take second place in the Dragon that was just waiting, half-manned, at the wing. He was so flustered that he did not even think of protesting for the first few minutes. When he did protest, Jimmy said, "What are you jawing about? This is a second edition, isn't it? " and caracoled around, dragging the unhappy Davie in his train.
"I'll tell the chief," groaned the hind legs.
"All right, let him know you were late," answered the head cheerfully.
"Eh, but it's pit-mirk, here. I canna see onything."
"You see I'm no liar. Shall I send a squib your way?"
"Nay, nay, nae larking. Mind the business or you'll ruin my reputation."
"Mind my business, I'll mind yours," replied Jimmy joyously, for the lovely Sabra was smiling right in his eyes. A Dragon divided against itself cannot stand, so Davie had to wait till the beast came off. To his horror Jimmy refused to budge from his shell. He begged for just one "keek" at the stage, but Jimmy replied: "You don't catch me like that." Davie said little more, but he matured a crafty plan, and in the next scene he whispered:—
"Jimmy!"
"Shut up, Davie; I'm busy."
"I've got a pin, and if ye shallna promise to restore me my richts after the next exit, ye shall feel the taste of it."
"You'll just stay where you are," came back the peremptory reply.
Deep went the pin in Jimmy's rear, and the Dragon gave such a howl that Davie's blood ran cold. Too late he remembered that it was not the Dragon's cue, and that he was making havoc of his own professional reputation. Through the canvas he felt the stern gaze of the actor-manager. He thought of pricking Jimmy only at the howling cues, but then the howl thus produced was so superior to his own, that if Jimmy chose to claim it, he might be at once engaged to replace him in the part. What a dilemma!
Poor Davie! As if it was not enough to be cut off from all the brilliant spectacle, pent in pitchy gloom and robbed of all his "fat" and his painfully rehearsed "second edition" touches. He felt like one of those fallen archangels of the footlights who live to bear Ophelia's bier on boards where they once played Hamlet.
Far different emotions were felt at the Dragon's head, where Jimmy's joy faded gradually away, replaced by a passion of indignation, as with love-sharpened eyes he ascertained for himself the true relations of the actor-manager with his "principal girl." He saw from his coign of vantage the poor modest little thing shrinking before the cowardly advances of her employer, who took every possible advantage of the stage potentialities, in ways the audience could not discriminate from the acting. Alas! what could the gentle little bread-winner do? But Jimmy's blood was boiling. Davie's great scene arrived: the battle royal between St. George and the Dragon. Sabra, bewitchingly radiant in white Arabian silk, stood under the orange-tree where the pendent fruit was labelled three a penny. Here St. George, in knightly armour clad, retired between the rounds, to be sponged by the fair Sabra, from whose lips he took the opportunity of drinking encouragement. When the umpire cried "Time!" Jimmy uttered inarticulate cries of real rage and malediction, vomiting his squibs straight at the champion's eyes with intent to do him grievous bodily injury. But squibs have their own ways of jumping, and the actor-manager's face was protected by his glittering burgonet.
At last Jimmy and Davie were duly despatched by St. George's trusty sword, Ascalon, which passed right between them and stuck out on the other side amid the frantic applause of the house. The Dragon reeled cumbrously sideways and bit the dust, of which there was plenty. Then Sabra rushed forward from under the orange-tree and encircled her hero's hauberk with a stage embrace, while St. George, lifting up his visor, rained kiss after kiss on Sabra's scarlet face, and the "gods" went hoarse with joy.
"Oh, sir!" Jimmy heard the still small voice of the bread-winner protest feebly again and again amid the thunder, as she tried to withdraw herself from her employer's grasp. This was the last straw. Anger and the foul air of his prison wrought up Jimmy to asphyxiation point. What wonder if the Dragon lost his head completely?Davie will never forget the horror of that moment when he felt himself dragged upwards as by an irresistible tornado, and knew himself for a ruined actor. Mechanically he essayed to cling to the ground, but in vain. The dead Dragon was on its feet in a moment; in another, Jimmy had thrown off the mask, showing a shock of hair and a blotched crimson face, spotted with great beads of perspiration. Unconscious of this culminating outrage, Davie made desperate prods with his pin, but Jimmy was equally unconscious of the pricks. The thunder died abruptly. A dead silence fell upon the whole house—you could have heard Davie's pin drop. St. George, in amazed consternation, released his hold of Sabra and cowered back before the wild glare of the bloodshot eyes. "How dare you?" rang out in hoarse screaming accents from the protruding head, and with one terrific blow of its right fore-leg the hybrid monster felled Sabra's insulter to the ground.
The astonished St. George lay on his back, staring up vacantly at the flies.
"I'll teach you how to behave to a lady!" roared the Dragon.
Then Davie tugged him frantically backwards, but Jimmy cavorted obstinately in the centre of the stage, which the actor-manager had taken even in his fall, so that the Dragon's hind legs trampled blindly on Davie's prostrate chief, amid the hysterical convulsions of the house.
•••••••••• Next morning the local papers were loud in their praises of the "Second Edition" of St. George and the Dragon, especially of the "genuinely burlesque and topsy-turvy episode in which the Dragon rises from the dead to read St. George a lesson in chivalry; a really side-splitting conception, made funnier by the grotesque revelation of the constituents of the Dragon, just before it retires for the night."
The actor-manager had no option but to adopt this reading, so had to be hoofed and publicly reprimanded every evening during the rest of the season, glad enough to get off so cheaply.
Of course, Jimmy was dismissed, but St. George was painfully polite to Sabra ever after, not knowing but what Jimmy was in the gallery with a brickbat, and perhaps not unimpressed by the lesson in chivalry he was receiving every evening.
Perhaps you think the Dragon deserved to marry Sabra, but that would be really too topsy-turvy, and the sentimental beast himself was quite satisfied to have rescued her from St. George.
But the person who profited most by Jimmy's sacrifice was Davie, who stepped into a real speaking part, emerged from the obscurity of his surroundings, burst his swaddling clothes, and made his appearance on the stage—a thing he could scarcely be said to have done in the Dragon's womb.
And so the world wags.
