The dreadful dragon of Hay Hill

by Sir Max Beerbohm

IN the faint early dawn of a day in the midst of a golden summer, a column of smoke was seen rising from Hay Hill, rising thickly, not without sparks in it. Danger to the lives of the dressmakers in Dover Street was not apprehended. The fire-brigade was not called out. The fire-brigade had not been called into existence. Dover Street had not yet been built. I tell of a time that was thirty-nine thousand years before the birth of Christ.

To imagine Hay Hill as it then was, you must forget much of what, as you approach it from Berkeley Square or from Piccadilly, it is now. You knew it in better days, as I did?—days when its seemly old Georgian charm had not vanished under the superimposition of two vast high barracks for the wealthier sort of bachelors to live in? You remember how, in frosty weather, the horse of your hansom used to skate hopelessly down the slope of it and collapse, pitching you out, at the foot of it? Such memories will not serve. They are far too recent. You must imagine just a green hill with some trees and bushes on it. You must imagine it far higher than it is nowadays, tapering to a summit not yet planed off for the purpose of Dover Street; and steeper; and with two caves aloft in it; and bright, bright green.

And conceive that its smiling wildness made no contrast with aught that was around. Berkeley Square smiled wildly too. Berkeley Square had no squareness. It was but a green valley that went, uninterrupted by any Piccadilly, into the Green Park. And through the midst of it a clear stream went babbling and meandering, making all manner of queer twists and turns on its off-hand way to the marshlands of Pimlico down yonder. Modern engineers have driven this stream ignominiously underground; but at that time there it still was, visible, playful, fringed with reeds, darted about in by small fishes, licensed to reflect sky. And it had tributaries! The landscape that I speak of, the great rolling landscape that comprised all Mayfair, was everywhere intersected by tiny brooks, whose waters, for what they were worth, sooner or later trickled brightly into that main stream. Here and there, quite fortuitously, in groups or singly, stood willows and silver birches, full of that wistful grace which we regard as peculiarly modern. But not till the landscape reached Hyde Park did trees exert a strong influence over it. Then they exerted a very strong influence indeed. They hemmed the whole thing in. Hyde Park, which was a dense and immemorial forest, did not pause where the Marble Arch is, but swept on to envelop all Paddington and Marylebone and most of Bloomsbury, and then, skirting Soho, over-ran everything from Covent Garden to Fetter Lane, and in a rush southward was brought up sharp only by the edge of the sheer cliffs that banked this part of the Thames.

The Thames, wherever it was not thus sharply opposed, was as tyrannous as the very forest. It knew no mercy for the lowly. Westminster, like Pimlico, was a mere swamp, miasmal, malarial, frequented by frogs only, whose croaks, no other sound intervening, made hideous to the ear a district now nobly and forever resonant with the silver voices of choristers and the golden voices of senators. Westminster is firm underfoot nowadays; yet, even so, as you come away from it up the Duke of York’s steps, you feel that you are mounting into a drier, brisker air; and this sensation is powerfully repeated when anon you climb St. James’s Street. Not lower, you feel, not lower than Piccadilly would you have your home. And this, it would seem, was just what the average man felt forty-one thousand years ago. Nature had placed in the steep chalky slopes from the marshes a fair number of commodious caves; but these were almost always vacant. Only on the higher levels did human creatures abound.

And scant enough, by our present standards, that abundance was. In all the space which the forest had left free—not merely all Mayfair, remember: all Soho, too, and all that lies between them—the population was hardly more than three hundred souls. So low a figure is hard to grasp. So few people, in a place so teeming now, are almost beneath our notice. Almost, but not quite. What there was of them was not bad.

Nature, as a Roman truly said, does not work by leaps. What we call Evolution is a quite exasperatingly slow process. We should like to compare favourably with even the latest of our predecessors. We wince whenever we read a declaration by some eminent biologist that the skull of the prehistoric man whose bones have just been unearthed in this or that district differs but slightly from the skull of the average man in the twentieth century. I hate having to tell you that the persons in this narrative had well-shaped heads, and that if their jaws were more prominent, their teeth sharper, their backs less upright, their arms longer and hairier, and their feet suppler than our own, the difference in each case was so faint as to be almost negligible.

Of course they were a simpler folk than we are. They knew far less than we know. They did not, for example, know they were living thirty-nine thousand years before Christ; and ‘protopalaeolithic’ was a term they never used. They regarded themselves as very modern and very greatly enlightened. They marvelled at their ingenuities in the use of flint and stone. They held that their ancestors had been crude in thought and in mode of life, but not unblest with a certain vigour and nobility of character which they themselves lacked. They thought that their descendants would be a rather feeble, peevish race, yet that somehow in the far future, a state of general goodness and felicity would set in, to abide forever. But I seem to be failing in my effort to stress the difference between these people and ourselves. Let us hold fast to the pleasing fact that they really were less well-educated.

They could neither read nor write, and were so weak in their arithmetic that not a shepherd among them could count his sheep correctly, nor a goat-herd his goats. And their pitiful geography! Glancing northward above their forest, they saw the mountainous gaunt region that is Hampstead, that is Highgate; southward, across the river and its wide fens, the ridges of a nameless Surrey; but as to how the land lay beyond those barriers they had only the haziest notion. That there was land they knew. For, though they themselves never ventured further than the edge of the marshes, or than the fringe of the tangled forest that bounded the rest of their domain, certain other people were more venturesome: often enough it would happen that some stranger, some dark-haired and dark-eyed nomad, passed this way, blinking from the forest or soaked from the river; and glad always was such an one to rest awhile here, and tell to his good hosts tales of the outlying world. Tales very marvellous to the dwellers in this sleek safe homeland!—tales of rugged places where no men are, or few, and these in peril by night and by day; tales of the lion, a creature with yellow eyes and a great mop of yellow hair to his head, a swift and strong creature, without pity; and of the tusked mastodon, taller than the oldest oak, and shaking the ground he walks on; and of the winged dragon, that huge beast, poising so high in the air that he looks no bigger than a hawk, yet reaching his prey on earth as instantly as a hawk his; and of the huge crawling dragon, that breathes fire through his nostrils and scorches black the grass as he goes hunting, hunting; of the elephant, who fears nothing but mastodons and dragons; of the hyena and the tiger, and of beasts beside whom these seem not dreadful.

Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, the homelanders would sit listening. ‘O wanderer,’ would say one, ‘tell us more of the mastodon, that is taller than the oldest oak.’ And another would say, ‘Make again for us, O wanderer, the noise that a lion makes.’ And another, ‘Tell us more of the dragon that scorches black the grass as he goes hunting, hunting.’ And another, ‘O you that have so much wandered, surely you will abide here always? Here is not hardship nor danger. We go not in fear of the beasts whose roast flesh you have tasted and have praised. Rather go they in great fear of us. The savoury deer flees from us, and has swifter feet than we have, yet escapes not the point of the thrown spear, and falls, and is ours. The hare is not often luckier, such is our skill. Our goats and our sheep would flee from us, but dare not, fearing the teeth of certain dogs who love us. We slay what we will for food. For us all there is plenty in all seasons. You have drunk of the water of our stream. Is it not fresh and cold? Have you cracked in your wanderings better nuts than ours? or bitten juicier apples? Surely you will abide here always.’

And to the wanderer it would seem no bad thing that he should do so. Yet he did not so. When the sun had sunk and risen a few times he would stretch his arms, maybe gazing round at the landscape with a rather sardonic smile, and be gone through the forest or across the water. And the homelanders, nettled, would shrug their shoulders, and thank their gods for having rid them of a fool.