The turf at his foot had been nibbled close by rabbits. His seat, though smooth, was freckled with tiny holes, and it rounded up out of the turf like a huge grey stone. Near at hand, ivy and bramble had grown over it, but there showed another smaller hummock in the turf about three or four paces away. And as he eyed it he suddenly realized that he must be sitting on the big knuckle end of one of Jack’s Giant’s larger bones, probably his thigh bone, now partly sunken and buried and hidden in the ground. At thought of this he sprang to his feet again, and glanced sharply about him. Where, he wondered, lay the Giant’s skull. Then he took another long look at the vast faded Beanstalk, and another at the bone. It was still early afternoon, but it was winter; and at about four o’clock, he reckoned, the sun would be set.
The more Dick looked at the Beanstalk, the more he itched to climb it – even if he got only as high as the cottage chimney. Farther up, much farther up, he would be able to see for miles. And still farther, he might even, if his sight carried, catch a glimpse of Old Bowley – a lofty hill which on days when rain was coming he could see from his bedroom window.
And he began arguing with himself: ‘Now, surely, my father would never forgive me if he heard that I had actually discovered Jack’s Beanstalk, and had come away again without daring to climb an inch of it!’ And his other self answered him: ‘Aye, that’s all very well, my friend! But an inch, if it bears you, will be as good as a mile. What of that?’
What of that? thought Dick. He went close and tugged with all his might at the tangle of stalks. A few hollow cockled-up bean seeds peppered down from out of their dry shucks. He ducked his head. Once more he tugged; the stalks were tough as leather. And he began to climb.
But he made slow progress. The harsh withered strands of the bean-bines not only cut into his hands but were crusted over with rime, and his hands and feet were soon numb with cold. He stayed breathless and panting, not venturing yet to look down. On he went, and after perhaps a full hour’s steady climbing, he stayed again and gazed about him. And a marvellous scene now met his eyes. His head swam with the strangeness of it.
Low in the heavens hung the red globe of the sun, and beneath him lay the vast saucer of the world. And there, sure enough, was Old Bowley! Jack’s cottage seemingly no bigger than a doll’s house showed plumb under his feet. And an inch or so away from it stood Jock, no bigger than a mole, cropping the grass in Jack’s mother’s garden.
Having come so high, Dick could not resist climbing higher. So on he went. Bruised with the beans that continually rattled down on him, breathless and smoking hot though powdered white with hoar-frost, at last he reached the top of the Beanstalk. There he sat down to rest. He found himself in a country of low, smooth, but very wide hills and of wide gentle valleys. Here too a thin snow had fallen. In this clear blue light it looked much more like the strange kind of place he had sometimes explored in his dreams than anything he had ever seen down below. And, far, far to the north, rising dark and lowering in the distance above the blur and pallor of the snow, showed the turrets of a Castle. Dick watched that Castle; and the longer he watched it, the less he liked the look of it.
Still, where Jack had led, Dick soon decided to follow. And best be quick! Thinking no more whether or not he would be able to get home that night, and believing his father would forgive him for not this time keeping to the bargain between them, since it was certain Dick would have plenty to tell him in the morning, he set off towards the Castle as fast as he could trudge. The frozen snow was scarcely an inch deep, but it was numbing cold up here in this high country; and the crystals being dry and powdery he could not get along fast.
Indeed, Dick did not reach the great Castle’s gates under their cavernous, echoing, stone archway until a three-quarters moon had risen bright behind him. It shone with a dazzling lustre over the snow – on the square-headed iron nails in the gates, and on the grim bare walls of the Castle itself. A rusty bell-chain hung high over his head beside the gates. Dick stood there eyeing it, his heart thumping against his ribs as it had never thumped before. But having come so far he was ashamed to turn back. He gave a jump, clutched at the iron handle with both hands, and tugged with all his might.
He heard nothing, not a sound. But in a few minutes – and slow they seemed – a wicket that had been cut out of the timbers of the huge gate, turned on its hinges, and a leaden-faced woman, her head and shoulders muffled up in a shawl, and, to Dick’s astonishment, only about nine feet high, looked out on him and asked him what he wanted.
Following Jack’s example, Dick told her that he had lost his way – as indeed he had, though he had found Jack’s! He said he was tired out and hungry, and afraid of perishing in the cold. He implored the woman to give him a drink of water and a crust of bread, and perhaps to let him warm himself if only for a few minutes by her fire. ‘Else, ma’am,’ he said, ‘the only thing I can do is to lie down under the wall here and maybe die. I can go no further.’
Not the faintest change showed in the woman’s long narrow bony face. She merely continued to peer down at him. Then she asked him his name. Dick told her his name, and at that her eyes sharpened as if she had expected it.
‘Step out there into the moonlight a little,’ she told him, ‘so that I can see your face. So it’s Dick, is it?’ she repeated after him. ‘“Dick”! And you have come begging, eh? I have heard that tale before. And how, pray, am I to tell that you aren’t from the same place, wherever that may be, as that villainous Jack who came here years and years and years ago with just such a tale as you have told me, and then ran off, first with my great-grandfather’s moneybags, then with his Little Hen, and last with his Harp? How am I to know that? Why! – from what I’ve heard – you look to me as like as two peas!’
Dick stared up in wonder into her face. Jack’s Giant, he thought, could not have been nearly so far back as the story had made out if this woman was only his great-granddaughter. He himself would have guessed a round dozen of greats at least. It was a mystery.
‘Jack?’ he said, as if he were puzzled. ‘And who was Jack, ma’am? There are so many Jacks where I come from. Nobody of mine. What became of him, then?’
‘Ah,’ said the woman, ‘you may well ask that. If my great-grandfather had caught him he would have ground his bones to powder in his mortar, and made soup of what was left. He was in the flower of his age, was my great-grandfather then, but he never came back. Never. And a kinder gentler soul never walked! “And who was JACK,” says he!’ she muttered to herself, and Dick little liked the sound of it.
‘Well, I wonder!’ said he, wishing he could hide his face from the glare of the moon. ‘I mean, I wonder if your great-grandfather ever found his Harp again. Or his Little Hen either. There are plenty of hens where I come from. And harps too, as I have heard. It sounds a dreadful story, I mean; but what could that bad boy you mention have wanted with a harp?’
‘Aye,’ said the leaden-faced woman, blinking once but no more as she stared at him. ‘What?’
‘Anyhow,’ said Dick, ‘that must have been more years ago than I could count. And if I were Jack, ma’am, or even his great-grandson either, I couldn’t be the size I am now. I should have grown a grey beard as long as your arm, and be dead and done with long ago. I am sorry about your great-grandfather. It is a sad story. And I don’t know what end that Jack mustn’t have come to. But if you would give me only a sip of water and a bit of bread and a warm by the fire, I wouldn’t ask for anything more.’
‘Nor did Jack, so they say,’ said the woman sourly; and looked him over, top to toe again.
But she led him in nonetheless through the great gates of the Castle and down into the kitchen, where a fire was burning on the hearth. This kitchen, Dick reckoned, was about the size of (but not much bigger than) a little church. It was warm and cosy after the dark and cold. A shaded lamp stood burning on the table, and there were pewter candlesticks three feet high for fat tallow candles on the dresser. Dick looked covertly about him, while he sto
od warming his hands a few paces from the huge open hearth. Here, beside him, was the very cupboard in which in terror Jack had hidden himself. The shut oven door was like the door of a dungeon. Through a stone archway to the right of him he could spy out the copper. A chair stood beside the table. And on the table, as if waiting for somebody, was a tub-sized soup tureen. There was a bowl beside it, and a spoon to fit. And next the spoon was a hunch of bread of about the size of a quartern loaf. Even though he stood at some distance, it was only by craning his neck that Dick could spy out what was on the table.
He looked at all this with astonished eyes. He had fancied Jack’s Giant’s kitchen was a darker and gloomier place. But in Jack’s day there was perhaps a fire less fierce burning in the hearth and no lamp alight; perhaps too in summer the shadows of the Castle walls hung coldly over its windows. Not that he felt very comfortable himself. Now that he had managed to get into the Castle, he began to be anxious as to what might happen to him before he could get out again. The ways and looks of this woman were not at all to his fancy and whoever was going to sup at that table might look even worse!
She had taken off her shawl now, and after rummaging in a high green cupboard had come back with a common-sized platter and an earthenware mug – mere dolls’ china by comparison with the tureen on the table. She filled the mug with milk.
‘Now get you up on to that stool,’ she said to Dick, bringing the mug and a platter of bread over to him. ‘Sit you up there and eat and drink and warm yourself while you can. My husband will be home at any moment. Then you can tell him who you are, what you want, why you have come, and where from.’
Dick quaked in his shoes – not so much at the words, as at the woman’s mouth when she said them. But he looked back at her as boldly as he dared, and climbed up on to the stool. There, clumsy mug in one hand and crust in the other, he set to on his bread and milk. It was pleasant enough, he thought to himself, to sit here in the warm eating his supper, though a scrape of butter would have helped. But what kind of dainty might not this woman’s husband fancy for his when he came home!
So, as he sipped, he peeped about him for a way of escape. But except for the door that stood ajar, some great pots on the pot-board under the dresser, and a mouse’s hole in the wainscot that was not much bigger than a fox’s in a hedgerow, there was no crack or cranny to be seen. Besides, the woman was watching him as closely as a cat. And he decided that for the present it would be wiser to keep his eyes to himself, and to stay harmless where he was.
At last there came the sound of what Dick took for footsteps, from out of the back parts of the Castle. It was as if a man were pounding with a mallet on a tub. They came nearer. In a moment or two the kitchen door opened, and framed in the opening stood the woman’s husband. Dick could not keep from squinting a little as he looked at him.
He guessed him to be about eighteen to twenty feet high – not more. Apart from this, he was not, thought Dick, what you could call a fine or large-sized giant. He was lean and bony; his loose unbuttoned leather jacket hung slack from his shoulders; and his legs in his stockings were no thicker than large scaffolding poles. There was a long nose in his long pale face, and on either side of his flat hat dangled dingy straw-coloured hair, hanging down from the mop above it.
When his glance fell on Dick enjoying himself on his stool by the kitchen fire, his watery green-grey eyes looked as if they might drop at any moment from out of his head.
‘Head and choker! what have we here, wife?’ he said at last to the leaden-faced woman. ‘What have we here! Hm, hm.’
Before she could answer, Dick spoke up as boldly as he knew how, and told the young giant (for though Dick could not be certain, he looked to be not above thirty) – he told the young giant how he had lost his way, and chancing on the withered Beanstalk had climbed to the top of it to have a look round him. He told him, too, how grieved he had been to hear that the woman’s great-grandfather had never come back to the Castle after he had chased the boy called Jack away, and how much he wondered whether the Little Hen was buried, and what had become of the Harp. Dick went on talking because it was easier to do so than to keep silent, seeing that the two of them continued to stare at him, and in a far from friendly fashion.
‘I expect it played its last tune,’ he ended up, ‘ages and ages before I was born.’
‘Aye,’ said the woman. ‘That’s all pretty enough. But what I say is that unless the tale I have heard is all fable, this ugly imp here must be little short of the very spit of that wicked thief himself. Anywise, he looks to me as if he had come from the same place. What’s more——’ she turned on Dick, ‘if you can tell us where that is, you shall take my husband there and show it him. And he can look for the grave of my great-grandfather. And perhaps,’ and her thin dark lips went arch-shaped as she said it, ‘perhaps if you find it, you shall learn to play a tune on his Harp!’
Dick, as has been said, liked neither the looks nor the sound of this woman. She was, he decided, as sly and perhaps as treacherous as a fox. ‘I can show you where I came from easily enough,’ he answered. ‘But I know no more about Jack than I have – than I have heard.’
‘Nor don’t we,’ said the woman. ‘Well, well, well! When he has supped you shall take my husband the way you came, and we shall see what we shall see.’
Dick glanced at the giant, who all this while had been glinting at him out of his wide and almost colourless eyes. So, not knowing whether he followed his great-grandfather’s habits, or how long his wife would remain with them, he thought it best to say no more. He smiled, first at one of them, and then at the other, took a sip of milk, and rank greasy goat’s milk it was, and said, ‘When you are ready, I am ready too.’ The difficulty was to keep his tongue from showing how fast his heart was beating.
At this the giant sat down to table and began the supper his wife had prepared for him. Spoon in hand he noisily supped up his huge basin of soup, picking out gingerly with his fingers, and as greedily as a starling, the hot steaming lumps of meat in it. He ate like a grampus. His soup finished, he fell to work on what looked like a shepherd’s pie that had been sizzling in the oven. Then having sliced off a great lump of greenish cheese, he washed it all down with what was in his mug. But whether wine, ale, cider, or water, Jack could not tell.
Having eaten his fill, the young giant sat back in his chair, as if to think his supper over. And soon he fell asleep. Not so did the woman. She had seated herself on the other side of the hearth in a great rocking-chair, a good deal closer to him than Dick fancied, and she had begun to knit. Like the clanking of fire-irons her needles sounded on and on in the kitchen, while the young giant, his mouth wide open, now and again shuddered in his slumbers or began or ceased to snore. Whereas if Dick even so much as opened his mouth to yawn, or shifted his legs out of the blaze of the fire, the woman’s slow heavy face turned round on him, and stared at him as if she had been made of stone.
At last, much to Dick’s comfort, the young giant awoke and stretched himself. He seemed to be in a good humour after his nap, and not sulky or sharp as some people are. ‘What I say,’ he said with a laugh on seeing Dick again, ‘what I say is, there’s more than one kind of supper!’
‘Ha, ha, ha!’ echoed Dick, but not very merrily. The giant then fumbled for a great club of blackthorn that stood behind the kitchen door. He put on his flat hat again, wound a scarf of sheep’s wool round his neck, and said he was ready. Never had Dick, inside a book or out, heard before of a giant that wore a scarf. He clambered down from his stool and stood waiting. Her hand over her mouth, and her narrow sallow face showing less friendly than ever, the woman took another long look at him. Then she turned to her husband, and looked him over too.
‘Well, it’s a cold night,’ she said, ‘but you will soon get warm walking, and won’t need your sheepskins.’ At mention of cold her husband stepped back and lifted the curtain that concealed the kitchen window. He screened his eyes with his hands and looked out.
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sp; ‘Cold!’ he said. ‘It’s perishing. There’s a moon like a lump of silver, and a frost like iron. Besides,’ he grumbled, ‘a nap’s no sleep, and I don’t stir a step until the morning.’
The two of them wrangled together for a while and Dick listened. But at last after drawing iron bars across the shutters and locking him in, leaving him nothing to make him comfortable, and only the flames of the fire for company, they left him – as Dick hoped, for good. But presently after, the woman came back again, dangling a chain in her hand.
‘So and so!’ she said, snapping together the ring at the end of it on his ankle. ‘There! That kept safe my old Poll parrot for many a year, so it may keep even you safe until daybreak!’
She stooped to fix the other end of the chain round a leg of the great table. Then, ‘Take what sleep you can, young man,’ she said, ‘while you can, and as best you can. You’ll need all your wits in the morning.’
Her footsteps died away. But long afterwards Dick could hear the voices of the two of them, the giant and his wife, mumbling on out of the depths of the night overhead, though he himself had other things to think about. After striving in vain to free his leg from the ring of the chain, he examined as best he could with the help of his stool the locks and bolts of the shutters over the windows – stout oak or solid iron every one of them. He reckoned the walls of this kitchen must be twelve feet thick at least and the bolts were to match.
And while more and more anxiously he was still in search of a way out, he heard a sudden scuffling behind him, and a squeak as shrill as a bugle. He turned in a flash, and in the glow of the fire saw what he took to be a mouse that had come out of its hole, though it was an animal of queer shape, lean and dark, and half as large again as a full-sized English rat. Next moment, a score or more of these creatures had crept out of the wainscot. They gambolled about on the kitchen floor, disporting themselves and looking for supper.
Short Stories for Children Page 39