On the next Sunday afternoon his father walked off to the vicarage, six miles away by the field paths, to ask the advice of the old parson. He was the most learned man the farmer knew. But though the old gentleman listened to him very attentively, and was sorry for the trouble he was in, his chief fear was that the giant might find his way to the church. Once in, how without damage could he be coaxed out again?
There were giants in days of old, he told the farmer, who lived for centuries; and at a hundred or more were as hale and lusty as an ordinary man of less than forty. One such in Carmarthenshire had stolen all the millstones for thirty miles around and amused himself by flinging them into the sea. There had been a dearth of meal for months. Giants can be as cunning as a fox, the parson told the farmer, and as surly as a bear, and are great gluttons. But this the farmer knew already.
At last, one night, a little less than a fortnight after he had climbed the Beanstalk, having fallen asleep after hours of vain thinking, Dick suddenly woke up with so bright a notion in his head that it might have been whispered to him straight out of a dream.
There could be no waiting for the morning. He went off at once to his father’s bedroom, woke him up, and, having made sure the giant was not listening at the window, shared it with him then and there. And the farmer thought almost as well of the notion as Dick did himself. They sat together there, Dick hooded up in a blanket at the foot of his father’s bed, and for a full hour talked Dick’s plan over. To and fro and up and down they discussed it, and could think of nothing better.
So as soon as light had begun to show next morning, Dick mounted his pony, and keeping him awhile on thick grass to muffle his hoofs, he galloped off by the way he had gone before.
This time he had brought with him an old pair of leathern pruning gloves and climbing irons, and he reached the top of the Beanstalk before noon. He arrived at the Castle gates while it was still full daylight. Till this moment all had gone well with him, though he had hated leaving his father alone to all the troubles of the day.
But now, as Dick was on the point of leaping up to clutch the rusty bell-chain, a distant bombilation fell on his ear – such a rumbling and bumbling as is made by huge puncheons of rum being rolled about over the hollow stones of a cellar. He had not listened long before he guessed this must be the voices of Grackel’s uncles colloguing together. At sound of them he shook in his shoes. What was worse, they seemed to be in an ill humour. But whether it was anger or mere argument in their voices, there was nothing in the music of them that boded much good for Dick!
At last they ceased, and Dick (who was by now bitterly cold, for an icy wind was whiffling round the Castle walls) decided to give a tug at the bell only just strong enough for a single ding. He then hid himself behind a buttress of the wall. The woman presently looked out of the wicket in the great gates. And Dick, peeping, and seeing that she was alone, showed himself and came nearer.
‘Aha,’ she called at sight of him, ‘so you have come back! Aye, and a fortnight late! And where, my fine young man, is my husband? Answer me that! Grackel!’ she wailed aloud, as if beside herself, ‘Where are you? Where are you, Grackel?
‘Not here, eh!’ she went on, watching Dick out of her black eyes as closely as a cat a bird. ‘So you have come back to…’ – and with that she pounced on him. She gripped him by the slack of his coat, and stooped low over his face. ‘Eh, eh, eh! So now I have you, my fine young man!’ Her teeth chattered as she spoke. ‘Step you in, and you shall see what you shall see!’
Dick had scarcely breath left to speak with. He thought his end was come at last. And then, suddenly, the woman drew back, let go of him, turned her head away and began to cry.
Then Dick knew that what had seemed only anger was chiefly grief, that she supposed her husband must be dead and would never come back to her. And he rejoiced. His plan was turning out even better than he had hoped for. As best he could he tried to comfort the poor woman. He took the long hand that hung down beside her, and assured her that her husband was in the best of health, better far than when he had started, and in such ease and comfort at his father’s farm that nothing would persuade him to go on his travels in search of the Little Hen and the Harp, or induce him to come home again. ‘It’s no use your crying,’ he said. ‘That won’t bring him back!’
At last the woman dried her eyes and began to listen to him. She took him into a little room this side of the kitchen, hung with smoked carcases of beasts for the table, a room, which, though cold, was secret.
‘I kept on telling your husband,’ Dick said, ‘that he need but send you word that he is well, that he is comfortable. I thought of you, ma’am, and kept on. For though I haven’t a wife myself, I know they want news of their husbands. So would my mother of my father, if she had not died when I was four. And perhaps she does even now. But your husband has grown fatter and won’t stir out of the house even to take a little exercise. He eats and eats, and at mention of home only flies into a rage.
‘“But,” I said to him, “your wife will be weeping for you to come!” And all he answered was to bawl for another bucket of cider. So I came along by myself and am nearly dead-beat and starved with the cold.’
All this Dick said, and, it being chiefly lies, he said it much too boldly. But the woman was overjoyed at his news and believed him. Her one thought now was to get her husband home again, and to keep her wrath against him till then.
She told Dick she would go at once and wake her husband’s uncles. ‘They are taking a nap,’ she said. Then he himself could go along with them, and they would soon persuade her husband to come home. ‘And if he won’t, they’ll make him,’ she said.
But this plan was by no means to Dick’s liking. He asked the woman how long the giants would be sleeping and in what room they lay. ‘I am too tired to talk to them just now,’ he said, ‘frozen. I couldn’t bear the din they make. Leave them at peace awhile and take me into the kitchen, ma’am, else I shall soon perish of cold. Give me some food and a mug of milk, and I’ll tell you a better plan – a far better plan – than that. But quietly!’
Now by good fortune the giants were napping in a room at the other end of the Castle where they were accustomed to play cards – Dumps, Frogbite, and other old games. And Dick sat up once more on his stool by the kitchen fire, and after refreshing himself, he explained to the woman his plan.
‘What I want to say, ma’am, is this,’ he said. And he told her that the people of his country were utterly weary of having her idle husband loafing about in their villages and doing nothing for his keep. ‘Down there, we are all little like me,’ he said, ‘and though my father – who wouldn’t hurt a fly – has done his utmost to put your husband at his ease, to feed him and keep him happy, it is all wasted. He has no more thanks in him than a flea.
‘He wanders about, scares the women, frightens the children, steals from the shops, and shouts and sings at dead of night when all honest folk are asleep in their beds. And now the King’s soldiers are coming, and as soon as they catch him, ma’am, they will drag him off to some great dismal underground dungeon, and he will never see daylight again. For little though we may be, there’s a cage in my country that would hold nine or more giants together, and every one of them twice as big as your husband, and every one of them loaded groaning up with chains. You see, ma’am, we don’t mean them any harm, but can’t keep them safe else. So I came to tell you.’ He took another slow sip of his greasy buttermilk, and glanced back into the fire.
‘Then again,’ he went on, ‘if these two uncles of your husband’s, who you say are big heavy men, ventured to go my way home, and that must be ten thousand feet from top to bottom, they would only come to grief. They would topple down and break every bone in their bodies. And even if they did climb safely down and came into my country, what good would that be to them? I agree, ma’am, that in mere size and shape they are much larger than we are where I come from. But for wits and quickness and cunning – why, they are no better th
an rabbits!
‘Just think, ma’am, though I have no wish to hurt your feelings, with your husband gone and all, how a mere boy of my size and not much older, came sneaking again and again into this huge Castle of yours, and ran off with your great-grandad’s treasures three times over without losing a hair of his head. I agree it was not fair dealings, between equals, as you might say. I agree that that Jack borrowed the Harp without leave. But boy to giant, ma’am, you can’t but agree he had his wits about him and was no coward.
‘Besides, down there we have great cannon and what is called gunpowder, which would blow fifty giants to pieces before they could sneeze. I mean,’ cried Dick, ‘there would be a noise like that,’ and he clapped his hands together, ‘and the next minute there wouldn’t be a scrap of your husband’s uncles to be seen. Except perhaps for a button here and there for a keepsake ten miles off. You must give me something to prove I have seen you.’
Dick spoke with such a zest and earnestness that this poor woman began once more to be afraid that she would never see her husband again, alive or dead, for she dearly loved him even though he had given her his word of honour and not kept it. She would talk to him about that, all in good time.
‘Now see here,’ said Dick at last, ‘your husband has been gobbling and guzzling so much that he is almost too stupid now to understand good sense when he hears it. It’s true I could make a fortune out of him by leading him round from town to town and charging a piece of silver for every peep at him. But I haven’t a heart as hard as that, ma’am; and if you want your husband back, there is only one thing to do.’
So after they had talked the matter over a little longer the woman fetched out from her bosom on a ribbon a locket in which was a twine of her husband’s hair when he was a little boy. The hair though very coarse was almost as pale as gold. And in the back of the locket was a glass in which, said the woman, you could see your dearest friend. But she herself did not much believe in it, because when she looked into it she could see only herself.
So Dick peeped in, and there he saw what looked very much like his father. His cheeks grew red and he smiled into the locket; and his father seemed to give him a look back. ‘And what,’ Dick said to the woman, turning the locket over, ‘what is this milky side for?’
‘Oh, in that,’ said the woman, ‘you can see what you are dreaming about. But it’s nothing but black dreams come to me.’
Dick looked; and sure enough, the milkiness cleared away in a moment, and he saw a tiny image there of Jack’s Beanstalk, but fresh and green. He slipped the bauble into his jacket pocket and told the woman that it would do very well for a proof to her husband that he himself had seen and talked with her. ‘For you see,’ he said, ‘if I had nothing to show him, he might not believe me.’
And the message the woman sent Grackel was that she had heard with joy he was happy in the place he had come to, that he must remember to behave himself, and that his uncles would not come out in search of him so long as she knew he was safe. All she desired was to have but one more glimpse of him, and that he should come back if but for one night, because a feast was preparing, the feast they had every year on his long-lost great-grandfather’s birthday.
‘He’ll remember that,’ the woman said to Dick. ‘And tell him that his uncles and his nephew and his cousins and his neighbours and his friends from afar off will all be at the feast, and will never forgive him if he is absent. Tell him I haven’t missed him so much as I thought I should. Tell him I cried a little when I thought he was dead, and laughed when I knew he was safe. If he thinks I don’t much want him back, back he will come. If he settles for good in your country, I am a lost woman.’
‘Ah,’ said Dick, ‘leave that to me. But what am I to have for my trouble?’
The woman offered him a bag of money. There it was in the cupboard.
‘Too heavy,’ said Dick.
She brought out her family’s Seven-League Boots.
Dick laughed. He could almost have gone to bed in one of them. She showed him her husband’s drinking cup.
Dick laughed again. He said it was too big for a wash-basin and not big enough for a bath. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘it’s only silver.’
At last the woman, as Dick hoped she would, remembered her husband’s watch – the watch that had belonged to one of his aunts. This of course was but a little watch compared with the giant’s father’s watch, which was safe upstairs. Dick’s mouth watered as he took hold of the chain and lifted the watch out of the woman’s hand. What he had supposed were sapphires and emeralds were not common stones like these at all. There was a toadstone, a thunderstone, an Arabian crystal and a blagroon – though Dick didn’t then know the names of them.
‘But I had hoped,’ he said, eyeing it and pretending to be disappointed, ‘that it was not a mere pocket watch, but a watch with a little magic in it. I think perhaps, after all, I should get more money by taking your husband round to show him off at some of our country fairs. You see, as I keep on saying, he doesn’t want to come back.’
But the woman showed him with her finger that if he pressed a secret spring at the edge of the watch near the guard-ring he could make time seem to go much slower – whenever, that is, he was truly happy; and that if he pressed the secret spring on the left he could make time seem to go much quicker – say, when he was feeling miserable, or was tired or waiting for anything or anybody. And not only this; there was a third spring. ‘If you press that,’ the woman said, ‘you can’t tell what will happen next.’
Dick was mightily pleased with the watch, and just to test it, pressed the left-hand spring. And it seemed not a moment had passed by when there came a prodigious stamping and thumping and clattering from out of the back parts of the Castle, and he knew that Grackel’s two uncles had woken up. So loud was the din they were making that it sounded as if a volcano had broken out, and it scared Dick more than he liked to show. So – though he pretended to be in no hurry – he let the spring go, fixed the chain round his waist, and slipped the watch in under the front of his breeches.
‘If your husband isn’t with you again by sundown tomorrow evening,’ he told the woman, ‘then send his uncles after me. The Beanstalk, of course, might bear them; and even though they might never come back again, they would at least have a chance to make an end of me.’
‘If you come along with me now,’ said the woman, ‘you shall have a peep at them, and they won’t see you. But quietly! They have ears like the east wind!’
So, treading mimsey as a cat, Dick followed after the woman, and she led him up a flight of stairs so steep he might have been climbing a pyramid, and took him into a gallery overlooking the room in which the giants sat. Dick crept forward, and, leaning out a little between the bases of the balusters of the gallery, peeped down. They were intent on a game that looked like common dominoes, though the pieces or men they played with were almost as big as tombstones. In no story-book he had ever read had Dick chanced on the like of these giants. They sat like human mountains at their game, and the noise of the dominoes was like Pharaoh’s chariots. And when one of them, laying down a domino on the table, mumbled, Double!, it was like the coughing of a lion. Dick didn’t need to watch them long. But as soon as he was out of earshot of them again, he burst out laughing, though it was only feigned.
‘It’s a good thing,’ he said to the woman, ‘I thought of what I told you. They are fine men, your husband’s uncles, and no beanstalk I have ever seen would bear even half the weight of either. I’ll keep the locket safe, you can trust me, ma’am, and if my father will let me, perhaps I might come back with your husband to the feast.’
The woman was by nature mean and close, but seeing how little by comparison Dick would be likely to eat and drink, she said he would be welcome. So he bade her goodbye and off he went.
It was pitch-black night when he got home again, but his father was waiting up for him. They were so anxious for the giant to be gone that they couldn’t stay till morning. They w
ent off together with a lantern to the barn, and having gone in, shouted at the top of their voices in Grackel’s ear. They managed to wake him at last, and gave him his wife’s message. He was so stupid after his first sleep, and he had eaten so vast a supper, that they might as well have been conversing with a mule. Even when he understood what they were saying, he sat blinking, morose and sullen at being disturbed.
‘And how can I tell,’ said he, ‘that what you say is true? A fine story, a pretty story, but I don’t believe a word of it.’
But when Dick told him of the feast that was being prepared, that all his wife wanted was to see him once again, that else his uncles might come to look for him; and when at last he showed the giant his wife’s locket – then Grackel believed what was said to him (though Dick kept the watch to himself). And the very next morning the two of them set out together for the Beanstalk. And the farmer, eyes shining and all smiles, saw them off.
It was a morning fine and bright. A little hard snow had fallen in the small hours and lay on the grass like lumps of sago. The ponds were frozen hard as crystal. And as he cantered along on his pony – the giant’s lank legs keeping pace with him on his right side like the arms of a windmill – Dick was so happy at the thought of at last getting rid of his guest that he whistled away like a starling as he rode.
And Grackel said, ‘Why are you whistling?’
‘“Why?”’ said Dick. ‘Why, to think what a happy evening you are going to have, and how pleased your wife will be to see you, and what a feast they are making for you up there. I could almost smell the oxen roasting for the cold meats on the side table; and there must have been seven score of fat pigs being driven in for the black puddings.’
Short Stories for Children Page 41