Molly laughed and looked at the King’s youngest son, turned her head, frowned, then laughed again, and said she would try. This time, when she had stolen into the giant’s house, she hid in the chimney niche.
At dead of night, when the giant was snoring, she stept out of the chimney niche and crept towards the bed. By good chance the giant lay on his back, his head on his pillow, with his arm hanging down out over the bedside, and it was the arm that had the hand at the end of it on which was the great thumb that wore the ring. First Molly wetted the giant’s thumb, then she tugged softly and softly at the ring. Little by little it slid down and down over the knuckle-bone; but just as Molly had slipped it off and pushed it into her pocket, the giant woke with a roar, clutched at her, gripped her, and lifted her clean up into the dark over his head.
“Ah-ha! Molly Whuppie!” says he. “Once too many is never again. Ay, and if I’d done the ill to you as the ill you have done’s been done to me, what would I be getting for my pains?”
“Why,” says Molly all in one breath, “I’d bundle you up into a sack, and I’d put the cat and dog inside with you, and a needle and thread and a great pair of shears, and I’d hang you up on the wall, be off to the wood, cut the thickest stick I could get, come home, take you down, and beat you to a jelly. That’s what I’d do!”
“And that, Molly,” says the giant, chuckling to himself with pleasure and pride at his cunning, “that’s just what I will be doing with you.” So he rose up out of his bed and fetched a sack, put Molly into the sack, and the cat and the dog besides, and a needle and thread and a stout pair of shears, and hung her up on the wall. Then away he went into the forest to cut him a cudgel.
When he was well gone, Molly, stroking the dog with one hand and the cat with the other, sang out in a high clear, jubilant voice: “Oh, if only everybody could see what I can see!”
“ ‘See,’ Molly?” said the giant’s wife. “What do you see?”
But Molly only said, “Oh, if only everybody could see what I see! Oh, if only they could see what I see!”
At last the giant’s wife begged and entreated Molly to take her up into the sack so that she could see what Molly saw. Then Molly took the shears and cut a hole in the lowest corner of the sack, jumped out of the sack, helped the giant’s wife up into it, and, as fast as she could, sewed up the hole with the needle and thread.
But it was pitch black in the sack, so the giant’s wife saw nothing but stars, and they were inside of her, and she soon began to ask to be let out again. Molly never heeded or answered her, but hid herself far in at the back of the door. Home at last came the giant, with a quick-wood cudgel in his hand and a knob on the end of it as big as a pumpkin. And he began to belabour the sack with the cudgel.
“Woe betide ye, Molly Whuppie, If ye e’er come back again!”
His wife cried: “Stay, man! It’s me, man! Oh, man, it’s me, man!” But the dog barked and the cat squalled, and at first he didn’t hear her voice.
Then Molly crept softly out from behind the door. But the giant saw her. He gave a roar. And Molly ran, and the giant ran, and they both ran, and they ran and they ran and they ran—Molly and the giant—till they came to the Bridge of the One Hair. And Molly skipped along over it; but the giant stayed, for he couldn’t. And he cried out after her in a dreadful voice across the chasm:
“Woe betide ye, Molly Whuppie,
If ye e’er come back again!”
But Molly waved her hand at the giant over the chasm, and flung back her head:
“Never again I’ll come to see ’ee,
Though so be I come to Spain.”
Then Molly ran off with the ring in her pocket, and she was married to the King’s youngest son; and there was a feast that was a finer feast than all the feasts that had ever been in the King’s house before, and there were lights in all the windows.
Lights so bright that all the dark long the hosts of the wild swans swept circling in space under the stars. But though there were guests by the hundred from all parts of the country, the giant never so much as gnawed a bone.
Rapunzel
In a cottage near the garden of an old woman who knew magic and was a sorceress there was a small square window under the thatch of the roof, and at this window the woman who lived in the cottage delighted to sit and look out. There were strange and far-fetched flowers and herbs and plants in the garden of the sorceress, and the air was full of their sweet smells; but the one thing she wanted most as she sat at her window gazing over the wall was some rampions.
There they were in plenty, blooming freely in the garden, with their pale blue clusters of bell-like flowers. But it was not these this woman longed for and pined after most, but the sweet roots of the rampions for a salad. That evening she told her husband, who was a woodcutter, that she must have some, or die. “A dish or even so much as a taste of those rampions,” she entreated him, “or I die!”
At last, though he was full of fear of the sorceress, he climbed over the wall, and plucked up some of the roots. But the sorceress, when she went walking in her garden that evening, spying this way and that, knew that some of her rampions had been stolen, and she watched. The next time the woodcutter set out to climb over the wall and trespass in her garden—for his wife gave him no peace—the sorceress spied him out through the trees. And she called out to him in a strange tongue, and he could move neither hand nor foot.
So he must needs tell the sorceress why he had come; and in his fear, he promised to do whatever the old woman asked him. She let him go free only on one condition—that, if ever they had one, he and his wife would promise to give up their first child to her.
Now, a little while after this a baby was born which the woodcutter and his wife called Rapunzel, for it means rampion or bell-flower. In fear of the sorceress they hid the baby for some little time, but at last the poor woman died, and when one day the woodcutter was away in the forest at his work, Rapunzel got up on to a stool and looked out of the little window under the roof, and for the first time peeped into the old sorceress’s garden. It was fresh with the dew of morning, and green and fair in the sunshine.
She gazed into it with delight, and drank in its sweetness. But, alas! the sorceress espied her at the window, and when the woodcutter came home she was awaiting him, and threatened that if he did not keep the vow he had made and let Rapunzel go, she would with her enchantments turn the child into a toad, and himself into a lump of stone. He cringed before her, as she sate on high on her white mule, and dared not disobey.
With tears in his eyes the woodcutter kissed Rapunzel for the last time, stroked her hair, and bade her goodbye. And the sorceress, seeing how lovely the child was, with her fair skin and golden hair, took her away into the forest and shut her up in a small chamber at the top of a stone tower. There, every evening the sorceress used to visit her; and because she was afraid if, whenever she came, she opened the door of the tower with her key she might some day lose the key, she mused within herself and thought of another way by which she could climb up to Rapunzel’s room in the tower.
This was her way. When the sorceress in the evening twilight called under the tower, “I come, Rapunzel,” the child would let down her long gold hair, having already wound its plaits twice round a bar in the window. Then the old woman would climb up as if by a ladder, and so into her room. But Rapunzel feared and hated the sorceress, and dreaded her coming. She pined to escape and flee away from her enchantments. But for years she pined in vain.
Now one summer’s day the King’s youngest son was riding in the forest, and having missed his way, approached by chance the tower of the sorceress, and heard a singing, but not of birds. Indeed, it was the voice of Rapunzel, who was now seventeen, and so well used to being alone that she hardly knew how lonely she was or how much she yearned for company. She sat in solitude at her window in the tower and was singing softly over her needle:
“Ah-la-la, ah, la-la,
And O la, a-la-la . . .”
Even when the singing was ended he remained silent under the trees, for the notes sounded on in his mind as if—like the sea-nymphs’—they were the echo of a voice heard long ago. He kept watch, and a little while after, he saw the old sorceress come riding in on her mule, and draw rein beneath the window; and heard her say: “I come, Rapunzel!” Then in amazement he watched the sorceress mount up to Rapunzel’s window by the ladder of gold hair.
For years she pined in vain.
The next day the Prince towards evening, but an hour earlier, came to the tower, and himself stood at its foot under the window and called softly, and in a voice unlike his own: “I come, Rapunzel!”
When, instead of the face of the sorceress, the face of the young Prince showed at the window, Rapunzel at first could not speak for fear and astonishment. But the Prince comforted her, and was gentle, and said that all his hope was only to help her. The next day he came again to see Rapunzel, and then again. At last her one thought was of him. Her eyes were now clear as sunbeams in winter, she sang half the day through, pining for evening, and in spite of her solitude she always had company. Then, at last, one day the Prince persuaded Rapunzel to try to win away the key of the tower from the old sorceress.
“Then,” said he, “you can let yourself out of the door at the foot of the tower, and I will carry you away in safety to my mother, the Queen, who will love you dearly.”
But when he had left Rapunzel, he felt, though he knew not why, ill at ease, and instead of riding away at once he stayed and lingered near the tower, though out of sight of it, and waited and watched.
Yet again, and early in the evening, the sorceress came to the tower, and climbed up to Rapunzel. They sat together, and the last blood-red of the sun was in the west. And Rapunzel, as she bent over her sewing, her face bowed down, asked the old sorceress if she might have the key of the tower. “Then I could myself let you in whenever you come,” she said, “and it would spare your breath.”
“And what tongue in a dream,” said the sorceress, “put that into your head?” She looked at Rapunzel, her eyes cold and still as a serpent’s.
“I come, Rapunzel!”
And Rapunzel, still stooping over her sewing, and without thinking, replied: “You take such a long, long time to climb up.”
“Ah!” cried the sorceress in a rage, “and how did you learn that, wicked deceiver, unless some meddling stranger has climbed up to tell you it? Hearken to me, Rapunzel: prince or no prince, he that comes to spy shall have his eyes put out. Ay, and his tongue too. As for you, be ready for me at daybreak to-morrow, and with my sharp scissors we will trim a few strands of that fine gold hair.” Trembling with anger, she climbed down again out of the window, and rode away to her own mansion in the green garden, on her mule.
But the Prince, keeping watch in the forest, had heard her shrill voice as she talked to Rapunzel, and as soon as she was safely gone he came stealthily to the tower and called: “I come, Rapunzel!” And by her hair he climbed up yet again to her window.
The first stars were glowing in the sky, and it was dark night over the forest. Rapunzel was weeping. She told him of the evil designs of the sorceress, and entreated him to be gone and to come again no more. But the Prince comforted her. They talked together in voices so low and secret that even the crickets shrilled loud above them, and in a while they had agreed what should be done on the morrow. And the Prince gave Rapunzel his hunting-knife.
At daybreak next morning the sorceress came again to the tower, with her lean-bladed scissors, and worse besides. The sun was not yet risen, and mist like milk lay over the glades of the forest, but the birds in the woods were beginning to waken, and the sorceress cried: “I come, Rapunzel!”
And she climbed, and she climbed, and she climbed up the golden ladder of Rapunzel’s hair until she was almost within touch of the window. Then, but not till then, with the Prince’s hunting-knife in her hand, Rapunzel began to saw and saw at the plaits of her own hair, until at last she cut through every strand, and the old sorceress fell from the tower flat to the ground. And the scissors she carried pierced clean through to her heart. So her evil was over.
Then the Prince took the key of the tower out of its leather wallet in the mule’s red saddle, and himself mounted up the stairs. Soon he and Rapunzel were galloping off together through the forest. Merrily rang his riding bells and merrily rang their voices, while Rapunzel’s hair flowed down and away from his saddle-bow as if it were a stream of sunbeams made solid as gold.
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