By good fortune, when the squeak sounded, Dick had been standing on his stool by the window. He held his breath at sight of them, and perhaps had held it too long, or the giant’s pepper had got into his nose, for he suddenly sneezed. At which a jubilee indeed went up in the kitchen. And if, in spite of his chain, by a prodigious leap from the stool to the table he had not managed to land on it safely, it might well have been the last of him. Luckily too, the margins of the table jutted out far beyond its legs, so that though the sharp-nosed hungry animals scrabbled up the legs in hopes to get him, they could climb no further.
Now and again, squatting there, through the long hours that followed – half-hidden between the giant’s tureen and mug – Dick drowsed off, in spite of these greedy noisy rodents, and in spite too of the crickets in the outer cracks of the oven, which kept up a continuous din like a covey of willow-wrens. He was pestered also by the cunning and curiosity of a wakeful house-fly, though others like it, straddling as big as cockroaches on the walls in the dusky light of the fire, remained asleep. It must be a fusty airless place, Dick thought, that had flies in winter. And so he passed a sorry night.
It was five by the clock when the giant and his wife came down again, Grackel still grumbling, and she pressing him to be gone. At last he was ready. She looked him up and down. ‘What’s to be done is best done quickly,’ she said to him. ‘You can get breakfast at a tavern maybe. And leave your aunt’s watch behind you, husband. It will be safer at home.’
The giant sullenly did as his wife had bidden, drew out of his pocket a fine gold watch, its back embedded with what looked to Dick like sapphires and emeralds and other precious stones, and laid it on the table.
‘That looks a fine watch,’ said Dick, shivering in his breeches, for he was stiff and cold.
‘Aye, so it is,’ said the woman, and she put it away on a shelf in the cupboard. ‘Now look you here, Grackel,’ she added, when they had all three come together to the gates of the Castle, ‘if you are not home before sundown the day after tomorrow, I shall send for your uncles, and they shall come and look for you.’
Dick raised his hat to the woman as he left her there by the Castle gates, but there was so much mistrust of him in her eye that he feigned he had done so only in order to scratch his head, and he couldn’t manage even to say the good-day that was in his mouth.
So he and the giant went off together into the snow, shining white in the light of the moon. The moon was still far from her setting. But they had not gone much above a mile – one of Dick’s miles – before the giant began to be impatient at the slow pace he had to move in order that Dick might keep up with him, even though for every stride he took Dick trotted three. So at last he stooped down in the snow and told Dick to climb up over his back on to his shoulders. Up went Dick like a cat up a tree, clutched on to his coarse yellow hair, and away they went.
Perched up on high like this, a good twenty feet above the snow, and tossing along on Grackel’s shoulders, the giant’s great bony hand clutched round his knees, Dick thought he had never seen a more magical sight than these strange hills and valleys sparkling cold and still in the glare of the moonlight. No, not even in his dreams. He might have been an Arab on the hump of his camel in the desert of Gobi.
It was easy for the giant to find his way. For though there were many prints of wild creatures and of long-clawed birds in the snow, Dick’s footmarks were clearer than any. Now and then they passed a great clump of trees – their bare twigs brushing the starry sky – which looked like enormous faggots of kindling wood. And in less than a quarter of the time that Dick had spent on his journey to the Castle, they came to the top of the Beanstalk. And Dick shouted in the giant’s ear that he wanted to be put down.
‘Here we are,’ he shouted, when he was on his own feet again. The giant in the last few minutes had been ambling on very warily as if he knew he was on dangerous ground. As soon as Dick had stamped life into his legs again, he pointed to the huge tangle of frosty bine and withy that jutted high above the edge of the abyss. ‘See there!’ he shouted at the top of his voice, in the sharp frosty air. ‘That’s the Beanstalk. Down there is where I come from. But I doubt if it will bear you.’
He almost laughed out loud to see with what caution Grackel crept out on hands and knees to peer out over the brink at the world below. But the giant could see nothing in the sombre shadow of the moon except the dried-up Beanstalk twisting and writhing down below him into space. ‘Hm, hm,’ he kept stupidly muttering.
And Dick understood at last how it was that the Beanstalk had never been discovered before. These giants, it seemed, were by nature a stupid race. So scared was Grackel at last at sight of the abyss that his teeth began to chatter like millstones, and his face was as white as a sheet. Dick rejoiced. It seemed he would never dare even to set foot on the Beanstalk.
Grackel peered round at him. ‘So this,’ he said, ‘is where my great-grandad climbed down when he was chasing after that thief and vagabond Jack! I can’t see to the bottom of it!’
Dick shook his head. ‘No, nor, I suppose, could he! Though why you should be so fond of your wife’s grandad I can’t think!’
‘Aye,’ said the giant leering at him, ‘and supposing she and I are first cousins and he was grandad to both, what then?’
‘Well,’ said Dick, ‘I know nothing of that. But Jack or no Jack, this is not only the only way down I know, but it’s the way I climbed up. Once, I suppose, it must have been green and fresh and full of sap. Now it’s all dried-up and withered away. And every yard I climbed I supposed it would come tumbling down over my head.’
‘Aye,’ said the giant. ‘But what did you want to come for?’
‘Oh, just to see,’ said Dick, as airily as he could. The giant with a sigh rose to his feet.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m not so weighty as was my great-grandad, not at least according to his portrait in the gallery. And if he managed to climb down in safety when this ladder was young and green, what is there to prevent my doing the same, now that it is old and tough and dry?’
With that, he thrust his long lean arm over the edge and, clutching the tangle of withered shoots, violently shook the Beanstalk. It trembled like a spider’s web in all its fibres, and Dick could hear the parched seeds clattering down from out of their pods towards the earth below.
‘Well,’ said he, looking up at the giant in the moonlight, ‘what may be, may be. My only fear is that once down there, you may find it impossible to get back again. Or supposing it breaks in the middle?’
Graded stared into his face, and then at the snow. ‘He’s thinking of the Little Hen,’ thought Dick to himself, ‘and the Harp.’
‘Yes, it would be a dreadful thing,’ Dick repeated, ‘if it broke in the middle.’
‘Aye,’ leered the giant, ‘and so it would! But what about my great-grandad? It didn’t break in the middle with him.’ Dick made no answer to this. He held his peace.
‘We’ll have no more words about it,’ said the giant. ‘I’m never so stupid as when folks talk at me. You shall go first, being no more than an atomy, and I will follow after. I’ll wait no longer.’
And with that, he flung his cudgel over the edge and began to pull up his wristbands. Dick listened in vain to hear the crash of the cudgel on the earth below. He feared for poor Jock.
There was no help in waiting. So Dick began to climb down the Beanstalk, and the giant followed after him so close with his lank scissor-legs that Dick had to keep dodging his head to avoid his great shoes, with their shining metal hooks instead of laces. Beanseeds came scampering down over Dick’s head and shoulders like hailstones. It was lucky for him they were hollow and dry.
‘Now,’ said Dick at last, when they reached the bottom and he had seen the cudgel sticking up out of the ground beyond the broken wall. ‘Here we are. This is where I come from. This is England. And you will want to be off at once to look for your great-grandfather’s grave. Now that way is the way you should go
. I go this. My father is expecting me and I must get home as soon as I can.’
It was so he hoped to slip away. But Grackel was at least too crafty for that. He stood leaning his sharp elbows on the broken roof of the cottage, leering down at Dick so steadily that he was mortally afraid the giant might notice the bulge of his great-grandad’s leg-bone in the rabbit-nibbled turf of the garden.
‘No, no, my young master,’ said he at last. ‘Fair and easy! Good friends keep together. You have had bite and sup in my house, now you shall give me bite and sup in yours. And it may be your father has heard of that Jack. The cackling of my great-grandad’s Hen, let alone the strumming of his Harp, must have reached a long way among stubby hills in a little country like this! England!’
The rose and grey of daybreak was stirring in the eastern sky. Dick, though angry, reasoned with the giant as best he could, but the great oaf could not be dissuaded from keeping him company. It was bitter cold in this early morning, and Dick longed to let his father know that nothing was amiss with him.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I have told you nine times over that no travellers come this way. It is over there the big cities are.’ And he pointed west. ‘But if come you must, why come! And I can only hope my father will be pleased to see you.’
He put two fingers into his mouth and whistled. There came an answering whinny. And from a lean-to or out-house behind the cottage where it had found shelter during the night and a bite or two of old hay to munch, Jock answered his summons. This time Grackel had no reason to complain of Dick’s lagging behind. Jock cantered away up the valley with his young master on his back, and the giant like a gallows strode on beside them.
When they came at length to a drift of woodland near the farm, Dick dismounted; and, having pointed out the chimneys of the farmhouse in the hollow below, he told the giant to hide himself among the trees, while he went to prepare his father for the guest he had brought home with him. So Grackel edged down as best he could among the trees, and Dick, leading Jock by his bridle, went on to the house.
In spite of the cold, the back door was ajar, and on an old horsehair sofa beside the burnt-out fire Dick found his father fast asleep, the stable lantern with which he had been out in the night looking for his son still burning beside him. Dick called him softly and touched his hand. His father stirred, muttering in his dreams; then his eyes opened. And at sight of Dick a light came into them as if he had found an unspeakable treasure.
Safely come home again, Dick was soon forgiven for being so long away. As quickly as he could he told his father his adventures. But when the farmer heard that the giant was actually in hiding not more than a quarter of a mile away from the house, and greedy for bed and board, he opened his eyes a good deal wider.
‘Is that so?’ he said at last. ‘Twenty-foot in his shoes and all! Lorramussy! Well, well! And his great-grandad and all! That don’t seem so very far back, now do it? Still, if there he is, my son, why, there he is; and we must do the best we can. And I don’t see myself,’ he added, glancing at Dick’s troubled face, ‘being what and where you were, you could have done much else. But who’d have guessed it, now? Who would? That Beanstalk!’
‘The worst of all, father,’ said Dick, ‘is that woman up there. She’d freeze your blood even to look at her. What she wants is the Little Hen. And if she came down…!’
‘Fox or vixen, one thing at a time, my son,’ said the farmer. ‘Your friend out in the cold, if we keep him waiting, may get restless. So we’ll be off at once to see what we can do to keep him quiet. The other must come after.’
The shining of the wintry sun lay all over the frosty fields when they went back together to the giant. And sour and fretful they found him. He only scowled at the farmer’s polite good-morning, grumbled that he was famished and wanted breakfast. ‘And plenty of it!’ he muttered, leering at Dick.
The farmer eyed him up and down for the twentieth time, and wished more than ever that Dick could have persuaded him to stay in his own country. He liked neither his pasty peevish face nor his manners. And his blood boiled to think of Dick tied up like a monkey to the leg of a table. Still, it had always been the farmer’s rule in life to make the best of a bad job. With worry, what’s wrong waxes worse, he would say. So he decided then and there to lodge the giant for the time being in his great barn; and to keep him in a good temper with plenty of victuals. The sooner they could pack him off the better. But they must be cautious.
So Dick and his father led the giant off to the barn, the sheep-dogs following behind them. They threw open the wide double doors, and stooping low, Grackel went in and stretched his long shins in the hay at the other end of it. After which they shut-to the doors again and hastened off to the farm to fetch him breakfast.
By good chance there was not only a side of green bacon but a cold roast leg of mutton in the larder that had been prepared for dinner the day before, though then the farmer had no stomach for it. With this, a tub of porridge, half a dozen loaves of bread, a basketful of boiled hens’ eggs and a couple of buckets of tea, they went back to the barn. Two or three journeys the giant gave them before he licked the last taste out of his last broken honey-pot, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said he had had enough. Indeed, he had gorged himself silly.
‘My son tells me,’ bawled the farmer, ‘that you have had a broken night. His friends are my friends. Maybe you’d enjoy a nap in the hay now. Make yourself easy; we’ll be back anon.’
They closed behind them the great doors of the barn again, and went off themselves to breakfast, staying their talk and munching every now and again to listen to what sounded like distant thunder, but which, Dick explained to his father, was only the giant’s snoring.
For the next day or two their guest was good-humoured and easy-going enough but, like some conceited people far less than half his size, he was by nature both crafty and stupid. And since he had now found himself in lodgings where he had nothing to do, no wife to make him mind and keep him busy, and he could eat and guzzle and sleep and idle the whole day long, he had little wish to be off in search of his great-grandfather, and none to go home again.
He knew well, the cunning creature, that even if his wife sent out his uncles in search of him and they discovered the Beanstalk, neither of them would venture to set foot on it. It would be certain death! For these were ordinary-sized giants, while he himself was laughed at in his own country for a weakling and nicknamed Pygmy Grackel. But this Dick did not know till afterwards.
When evening came, and the farm hands had gone home from their work, Grackel would take a walk in the fields, though Dick’s father, after once accompanying him, did not do so again. He had kept the great bumpkin out of the meadows and the turnips because it was lambing season. But it enraged him to see Grackel’s clod-hopper footprints in his winter wheat, and the ricks in his stackyard ruined by Grackel’s leaning upon them to rest. And it enraged him even more when the giant crept up to the farmhouse one midnight to stare in at him as he lay in his bed, and kicked over the water-butt on his way. The great lubber grew more and more mischievous.
In less than a week both Dick and his father were at their wits’ end to know what to do with their guest. The good woman who cooked for them had to toil continually the best part of the day to prepare his food. A couple of ducks and three or four fat hens he accounted no more than a snack; he would gollop up half a roasted sheep for supper and ask for more. Indeed his appetite was far beyond his size, and he seemed to think of nothing but his belly.
Apart from this too, and the good home-brewed ale and cider they had to waste on him, he lay on their minds like a thunder cloud. And when he had eaten and guzzled to gluttony, as like as not he would grow sulky and malicious. He could do more damage in five minutes than an angry bull in half an hour. And when in a bad humour he would do it on purpose. Besides, tongues soon began to get busy about him in the villages round about. The shepherd complained that his lambs began to be missing; the ploughma
n’s wife that her two small children had not been out of doors for a week. It was reported that the farmer had caught a cruel and ravenous ogre in his fields, and had chained him up in his barn. Some said it was not an ogre but a monster that trumpeted like an elephant and had claws like a bird.
Though the great doors of the barn were usually kept shut on the giant all day until dusk, and the farmer had stuffed up every hole he could find in its roof and timbers – and Grackel was as sensitive as any female to draughts – the roar of his snoring could be heard a full mile away, and when he laughed – which luckily was seldom – it was like a house falling down. At least so it seemed, though perhaps Dick made worse of it than was the truth. He had not yet seen Grackel’s uncles.
There was at any rate no hope of keeping the giant secret. For some reason too there was always a host of birds – rooks, daws, starlings and the like, hovering about the barn. The horses and cattle, and even the pigs, were never at peace while the giant was near; but pawing and lowing and neighing and wuffing the whole day long. And well any pig might wuff, since Grackel could devour him at a meal.
The result of all this was that the farmer would now often find strangers lurking in his fields. They had come in hope to get a glimpse of the giant. And whether they succeeded or not, talk of his size, his appetite, his strength and his fury spread far and wide. Worse even than this: two small urchins from a neighbouring village had managed by hiding themselves in a ditch until it was evening to creep up close to the barn and, peeping through a hole in the wood where a knot had fallen out, found themselves peering into the great staring still watery eye of the giant fixed on them as he lay in the hay on the other side. Cold as stone with terror, they had rushed away home to their mothers, been seized with fits, and one of them had nearly died.
Dick could hardly get a wink of sleep for thinking of the giant and how to be rid of him. To see the trouble and care in his father’s kindly face filled him with remorse. He searched his story-books again and again but could find no help in them. Nor could he discover any advice, not a single word, about giants in The Farmer’s Friend or The Countryman’s Companion – books which belonged to his father.
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