The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel

nine

Mary said, through her bruised mouth, “It was not Bride. Indeed not.” Her eyes were cried to slits. She told a tale of being locked in a cellar.

Said Claffey, “Bride Caskey is the cellar queen.”

But Mary said, no, she was in a cellar by herself. Till she was starved two days, and would then beg food from anybody. Of what next occurred, she would not speak. Only of a swat in the mouth for insolence, and that came later. She had lost her grip on the passage of hours and days, a faculty that the men had always envied in her, and she seemed to have forgotten certain words and common expressions of her native tongue, so that they were forced to speak to her in a mixture of two languages, which stuck in their throats and blocked the flow of their thoughts.

Howison comes banging in. What a noisy brute he is! Is it a general rule that the man who has strength and gall to handle the deadweight corpse has not the consideration to tread soft among the living? For now it is always night, it is always night at Earl’s Court. Hunter is walking with his taper, up and down the storeys, the animal complaints deafening his ears, and replaying in his head the days of heroic experimentation, heroic anger.

Wullie is poorly, they say. Well, let him. All our family have rotten bones.

“So what is it?” he barks at Howison, his man. “What futility have you brought in now, to stop up my ears with trash?”

“You told me, reverence, to bring you in news of the Giant, Charles O’Brien.”

“Him? So what’s new?”

“Mr. Harry Graham, who is exhibiting—”

“Cut it short, I know all about that mountebank.”

“Mr. Harry Graham has offered O’Brien a go on his Celestial Bed, conception assured. With first-time partner of his choice. Free and gratis, whereas the normal rate—”

“Oh, do away with yourself, Howison. I know the rate. I know the rate for charlatans. I’ll tell you, shall I, what it is about Mr. Graham’s Celestial Bed that produces its results? ‘Tis not the naked nymphs playing string instruments, ’tis not the scented odours of incense nor the ostrich feather fans—”

“Really?” Howison looks keen. “I had not heard of the ostrich feather fans.”

Perhaps I embroider, thinks John Hunter: can it be that I, a man bound to fact and observation, embroider the tale?

“It is not either the ostrich feather fans,” he says, so loudly as to defeat his own qualms. “It is not crushed roses and strewn petals—there’s but one way to put a child into a woman’s belly, and that is to deliver the vital fluid to her at the right angle, and keep the jilt with her legs up and resting on her back while nature takes its chance. Now to that first point, the tilting mechanism of Mr. Graham’s bed explains its own success, and the second effect—the woman’s continued posture—is explained by the soporific odours and the sweet music.”

Sweet music. His Anne has composed certain verses: “My mother bids me bind my hair.” He had heard the song sung. Come home late, his hands stinging from scrubbing, his eyes stinging from lack of sleep. Coming in, a man to his own hearthside, to find the room a-twitter with excitement at some air set down by a foreigner and interpreted by his own spouse: “Get out! Get away to your own beds! I gave no permission for this kick-up.”

The falling silent of the instrument, as if a tense string had snapped. The faces only slightly dismayed; the social smiles, the smiles at odds with the eyes, the hurried removal, the sudden silence, and the cowed servants clearing glasses. Crystal’s embarrassed chink; remnants of jellies and mousses scraped quickly away. Anne’s head dropped: Anne dumb with suffering. Suffering? What did she know about it? Suppose she had a fistula? Suppose she had an abcess under a molar?

Heroic anger. Heroic experiments. “You remember the grocer’s wife?”

Grocer’s wife of the City: could not get a child. The woman herself seemingly free from disease, broad in the hip, her complexion bright and fresh, no hint of the dragging backache and the pinched yellow-grey that marks the face of the woman whose ovaries are diseased. Her tongue free too, with a frank account of the marital bed. “From which I deduced, Howison, that the man was not what you’d call a going concern. He’d hardly get within a foot of her without spilling on the linen, her thigh was the nearest—”

“You told me before,” Howison said.

“So I spooned in the fluid, man. I spooned it in.”

“So you said.”

“The child was healthy, and thrives to this day.”

“I wonder, did you not … . were you not tempted …”

It took him a moment to grasp the man’s implication. “No, sir,” he said calmly. “I am a man as we all are, but I would do nothing to introduce experimental error.”

But Howison’s very question—for suppose others had been asking it, snorting behind their hands?—had reduced him, when the man went out, to a rocking, silent, temple-bursting fury, his short nails driven into his palms, and rock, rock, rock in his chair, his life at the mercy of any imbecile who cared to taunt him … for yes, some men would have been tempted, seeing her brown eyes and flushed cheeks; some would no doubt have thought, there is a shorter way and more natural, and if this consultation did not do it, a man might take a guinea for the next, and soon the result would be achieved, for a man would know from the very handling of her, the plushness of her skin, her firmess of her limbs … but no. It is all very well to put yourself in your own experiment—it is inevitable, reatly—but it is unforgivable to bypass the proper procedure to get the required result. The child of the grocer’s wife was the child of the grocer, and not in any way—as people can see for themselves—sandy, freckled, or short. The gratification from the experimental process far exceeded that from the sexual act. Yet he remembered the question, and the rage: a little something bursting there, in his left temple.

These rages may be brought on by thwarting: or by the mention of low dirty foreigners who come to Britain on purpose to defame its institutions. “What, you don’t like this country, sir? Then quit its shores.” Never again, for instance, does he wish to endure the purple throbbing agonies that possessed his forehead (both sides) when a colleague of his remarked that “Dr. Jean-Paul Marat, the noted Swiss savant who calls each day at Slaughter’s Coffee House … Dr. Marat expresses a desire to see your specimens.”

“He does, does he?”

“He will wait on you, sir. At any convenient hour.”

“Will he so? Marat? See my specimens? I’ll shred ’em first. I’ll burn down the whole—burn, I say, live and dead—rather than let that damned Wilkite into my premises.”

Because he is establishing order. Night by night: skull arrangement. He is beginning to understand hierarchy; and these democrats will play the Devil with it. And especially a man like Jean-Paul Marat, with his five different names, his silver tongue in seven languages, his embossed certificates, his academic cavils and his snarling quibbles and his slick fingers—what might the man carry away?

“John Hunter, your rages will kill you,” his colleague said, expressing a simple truth.

“Yes. And when I am dead, you will not soon meet with another John Hunter.”

So: Bitch Mary’s tale.

“They had left me the exact time till I was hungry beyond bearing. Another few hours, and I would have been beyond it, God’s mercy would have numbed me. I was reduced to meekness and weeping by that hunger, it was agony in itself, but I knew from experience it is a pain which passes. Yet, one may have a piece of knowledge, and be unable to act on it. They plucked me out of the cellar the very moment when my strength was lowest and my need greatest.”

“That is how I know it was Bride,” Claffey said. “For what nation is more tutored than ours, in the art of hunger and in its science?”

“Ah well,” said Joe Vance, “be that as it may, tonight we have men to dine. Mary, my love, I know your clothes are gone, but can you not wrap yourself in a blanket for decency, and then busy yourself? And if you prove yourself useful in putting the place to rights, then tomorrow you will have a skirt and shawl.”

“Dress me out of Monmouth Street, would you, Joe? Send the boy Pybus running to the rag-seller, so I can go out again for your purposes?”

“There is some very respectable clothes sold in Monmouth Street,” Joe said. “My waistcoat was got there, and you must admit it’s very fine.”

“Stolen.”

“Stolen, so? I bought it in good faith, I will claim my title to this waistcoat in any court in the land. Less of your lip, bitch. The only friends you have are under this roof. Be mindful of it.”

The Giant roused from his sleep in the corner. Their speech, he thought, is now a compound of vileness. We abandon our own language because we need extra words, for things we had never imagined; and because there are superfluous words in it, for things we cannot imagine any more. “What men?” he asked. “What men to dine?”

“Slig,” said Joe. “You remember hearty Slig?”

“And my brother,” Claffey said eagerly. “Constantine Claffey, as he is known at Clement’s Inn. Which is where he lodges.”

“Which is a midden,” said the Giant. “Have I not been all about those parts? It is a midden and a criminal haunt and packed to the gills each split-up low deceiving house and alley with footpads and coiners and runners of poor women, with uncertificated pox-doctors and cat-gut spinners, with tripe-merchants and rumour-mongers and rabbit-breeders and slaughterers of the peace of the Lord. Why must your brother lodge there, Claffey? Could he not come here to us at Cockspur Street?”

“He may do that yet,” Claffey said.

“As for the man you call Slig—does he not keep that infamous cellar where we lodged when we were freshly arrived?”

“By the dripping blood of Christ!” Vance said. “I am sick of your verbiage. Slig is a sworn brother of mine. Slig gave you straw and a shelter for fourpence. Infamous cellar? It was a usual kind of cellar. I tell you, O’Brien—it was good, of its kind.”

“Sick of my verbiage?” the Giant said. “Sick of my stories, also?”

“I leave them to the brutes that want soothing.”

“Sick of my person, perhaps, tired of my height?”

“Well,” said Vance, sneering, “it doesn’t seem as if your height is very remarkable after all. Considering the new intelligence from Cork, communicated to me only this day and then by Slig himself, which is that Patrick O’Brien is now nine feet tall and will be here inside a fortnight.”

“And lodge in Slig’s cellar?”

“I doubt it. Slig is taken over as his agent now. He will be finding him a good address and a dozen plump virgins to be shaking out the feather beds. He will be getting a pagoda, which I said all along was what we should have, but oh no, you would set your face against it, advised by some rustic—”

The Giant turned his face away. He closed his ears to Joe. Mary said, “When I was walking the streets, and I no longer knew where I was, nor had I known for some hours, I found myself on a wide square that I thought I should recognise. While I was looking about it, to know where I was—it being then broad morning, and I so ashamed of my state, my rags scarcely covering me—then a carriage came, and a lady called out to me from it. She called to me to run after, and I should have sixpence and my breakfast.”

Pybus sucked his teeth. “You should not have so.”

“I know I should not,” Bitch Mary said. “But can you not recollect, Pybus, that I had been many days without a breakfast, and that the thought of sixpence made me summon my last reserves of strength so I could do her will and trot?”

“Joe commands us,” the Giant said, “to cut the verbiage.” He imagines words hacked down, like shoots in a tangled thicket: slash and cut, cut and burn.

“And so I will,” Mary said. “For I have little more to relate. I came to a great house, and anticipated that I would be ushered into a hall, with candles blazing.”

“What, in broad day?” said the Giant.

“It was a dark morning. I anticipated Bruges hangings, and Turkey carpets, and Antwerp silver, but what lay before me was London steel. For instead of any of these things, I saw the stone shelves of a pantry, and my head slammed down, and my hair sheared off, and a penny in my hand, and a crust, and out into the cold among the railings in a yard, and Why, why? And they said, To shore up milady’s wig. And I said sixpence and they said yes, sixpence: one penny for you and five pennies for us. We’re English and we’re entitled, and be glad we’ve not pulled out your teeth.”

Constantine Claffey was such a dandy as you would never think to come out of a thieves’ kennel like Clement’s Inn. His hair was powdered with a strange bluish powder, so his face looked very very white. His bad teeth were painted, and his large front pasted with fine embroidery and one stain from a dripped boiled egg.

“So you’ve got an interestin’ pig?” he said to his brother, in English. “Shall I see it?”

“Ah,” Claffey said. “The pig is only a rumour as yet. It is a topic amongst us. It is under discussion.”

Constantine sneered. “So you brought me all the way to Cockspur Street to view a pig under discussion?”

“It’s scarcely a half-mile.”

“Yes, yes,” Constantine said tetchily. “But I have left projects unsupervised. This is what you don’t seem to understand, bro. Time and tide wait for no man. Not at Clement’s Inn.”

Slig, who had got a couple of drinks in him, seemed less anxious to be away. “Isn’t there some story promised?” he said. “Your idiot Jankin was giving out there’s some story you don’t like to tell, about dwarves. Have you heard of Count Buruvalski? Your man’s exhibiting here, less than three foot high. Have you seen him, Charles?”

“May I correct you?” The Giant brought his eyes to focus on Slig. “The count is not a dwarf. He is a midget. That is different. He is, moreover, a thoroughgoing professional in his line of business. He comes from the land called Poland, where snow is deep and small men are honest. If—Joe Vance—if I should decide to dispense with your services—the count is the man to manage me.”

“I said, have you seen him?”

“I have seen him, I have bought him a drink. I have sat him on the counter to drink it, the count and I are”—the Giant overlapped his fingers—“like that.”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Vance. “It’s the first I have heard of this, Charlie. I was aware, of course, that the midget was sniffing around.”

“But look,” said Slig, “I would be obliged if you would get ahead with the story nevertheless, because I always want stories. Any spare you have, O’Brien, I can cost them out, and sell them to Punch and Judy. So, I can give you a shilling for each guinea you make me.”

“Formerly my portion,” Joe Vance said. He sniggered. “How are the mighty fallen.”

“I don’t know, how are they?” the Giant said.

“I’m going to have to bring your viewing fee down to a shilling, Charlie, or maybe a ninepence is realistic. Unless trade picks up, or we get Mester Goss’s pig over sharpish, or we pitch you into prize-fighting, which you seem to resist. You know yourself, nobody comes to see you regular, these days, except that Scotchman, short feller, the animal-trainer—”

“Hunter,” said the Giant. “He wrote down his name for me. He said I should send to him if I was sick. But he says physic is not his line, so I don’t know why.”

Hunter: he had been twice in the last week. “I know that man,” Claffey had said, frowning from the back of the exhibition room. “I seem to recognise the swivel on his nose at the tip there, and his pale eyes. A Scot, unless I am much mistaken.” Claffey was always looking for a fight. He would have thrown out any client who he thought gave offence. But the Scot gave none. “Too mean to spare an insult,” Claffey said. “But that’s his nation.”

He looked sideways at the Giant: didn’t he say his father came out of Scotland?

“The fellow is mannerly enough,” O’Brien said. “So far as it is in him. It is clear that he is gruff, unlettered, rude, whereas I am learned, poetical, and fond of civil company.”

Besides, the Giant thought, he is the only one who asks after my health, and listens to the answer. Yesterday, silent and attentive as ever, he had been among the audience, his odd eyes set on Charlie’s face, looking looking looking. Afterwards, he stepped up. “How do you, sir?”

“The ache in my bones increases.”

“As in mine, sir, as in mine.”

The Giant paused. “But you are not growing, sir, are you? Surely you are past that, your age must decree it? That is the cause of my distemper. Giants are not subject to the rules that govern other mortals.”

“I had observed that,” said the Scot: very dry. “This increase in your stature—do you see a good outcome?”

“In terms of income?”

“In terms of your future, sir.”

“What is it to you, my future?”

And then the little man washed his hands together. His face reddened. The Giant said, afterwards, he had never seen a man so moved. “I’d like to see you again,” the Scot said. “If I talked to your minder, do you think he’d give me some relief on your fee?”

“What, a discount? I think I’m soon down to ninepence, anyway.”

“That’s good news.”

“Not for me.”

“Have you any more signs or symptoms, by the way?”

“What?” said the Giant.

“I mean, do you have any further indispositions?”

“Besides what I told you? Yes, I have. I have griping in my brain and my ears, where language is destroyed by slow attrition day by day; where thought is bombinated, as if my skull were a besieged city.”

“Anything more?”

“I sleep now. Many hours in the day. I wake at dawn and hear myself growing, before the noise of the criers starts, and the wheels of carts. In the day the city’s noise swamps it, but in the watches of the night you may hear the crack as my bones break free of their moorings, and the slap of the tide beaches against my liver. Mr. Hunter, would you enter into my difficulties? A chair already will not fit me. My tailor has to stand on a ladder. He sends in bills that are insupportable.”

“Your agent … I am surprised, in the circumstances, that he thinks of reducing your rate. I would have thought, on the contrary …”

“I don’t grow quick enough for Joe. Patrick O’Brien in Cork is springing up day by day. They say he’s nine foot tall and practically embarked.”

“Indeed? I shall be most interested to see him. What is his age?”

“Pat? He’s a young lad, seventeen or so.”

“Healthy?”

“Prime.”

“I see.” The Scot frowned. “Nine foot, you say?”

“By repute.”

“We shall see.”

“It appears you are fond of giants, Mr. Hunter.”

“Oh, I never miss my chance to view. If the tariff is reasonable.”

For the benefit of Slig, whose ignorance of dwarves was deep, they had taken to explanations.

“They are the size of a child of seven,” Pybus said. “Their skin is the colour of earth, that is because they live in the earth. Their hair is black when young. Their cloaks are black—”

“Or red,” said Jankin.

“—and they wear long smocks so you don’t see their duck feet. Some of them have hairy ears—”

“And how do they disguise those?” Slig asked.

“With hats,” Jankin said. “They can change a lump of coal to a precious jewel. Can’t they, Charlie O’Brien?”

“They make cheese,” the Giant said. “They have the art of tending to cattle. There was once a man who had seven white cows, and it was the time of year to bring them down from the mountain to the lush valley grass. But the cows were missing, and though he searched all day he found no trace. That night he went to sleep exhausted, and didn’t say his prayers. When he woke the next day—”

“—and still no sign of the cows,” said Jankin.

“—he decided he would go on as if he had the cows still, so he milked them, invisible as they were, and he led them to the valley, and he fed them all winter on invisible food. When spring came—”

“You’d wonder where he got the idea,” said Slig.

“—when spring came, he drove them once more up the mountain. That night, when it was time for milking, his seven white cows came lowing towards him, and trotting after them, nuzzling their silken flanks, came seven shining white calves.”

“If Connor’s grandfather had only known,” Claffey said, sardonic. “Instead of all the shouting, and the breaking of pates among O’Sheas. If he’d just sat tight, he’d have been a wealthy man.”

“Well. There is a lesson to be learned,” the Giant said.

“You’re too tall,” Claffey said, “to be so sententious.”

“The lesson is not about getting beasts,” the Giant said calmly.

“The lesson is about believing that things may be invisible but still exist.”

Constantine Claffey stirred the coins in his pocket, smirking greasily at the deep jingle. “I like the evidence of my senses,” he said.

“Then you are a foolish fellow, Con. Supposing a mosquito lands upon the back of my hand. What do his senses tell him? Ah, here is a nice even plain, very well to romp upon, I’ll tell my friends. Ah, here is nice rich blood, I can take a gallon and tomorrow come back for more, we can drink, me and my wife, we can drink a gallon a piece. Then—splat. So where is he now, the wise mosquito?” The Giant grinned. “He has joined a larger reality.”

“More dwarves!” Jankin demanded. “I want the servant girl in the forest, freezing and starving as night comes down!”

“By the ghost’s waistcoat, you are a nasty piece of work,” Claffey said. “You are a kind of apprentice piece for a monkey, are you not, Jankin? When the Giant is the whole ape?”

“I only said,” Jankin complained, “I only said she is in the forest, and that’s true. I only said her belly’s empty, which it is because she’s been turned out of her home, and I said she’s cold because it’s usually at least autumn when this tale takes place.”

“So she’s walking in the forest,” Joe said. “And night’s coming down? But I bet she spies a little cottage, eh? With a little light burning?”

“Not yet!” Jankin was anxious. “Before she can spot the light she must wander—many hours—and she is shivering and the cold is fierce, each branch of a tree growing into crystal, and she thinks she will not live till morning, for already the ice is crusting her pale hair.”

His head bowed, his voice low, the Giant prompted Jankin. “Think—is the cold her only enemy?”

“By no means—she thinks the wolves will devour her, or the bears.” He looked up at Slig. “Devour is what we say when we mean eat, it is a superior word, more terrifying.”

“You are eloquent, Jankin,” the Giant said.

“For this is a country where there are still bears.”

“I see,” Joe Vance said. “But presently, she comes to a little cottage, eh?”

“And knocks at the door,” Pybus said. “Timidly. The door is opened by a dwarf and behind him are his six brothers, who are all of them dwarves as well.”

“Is she a pretty girl?” Con asked idly.

“I don’t know. Is she?” Pybus looked at the Giant.

“Her eyes as blue as the cornflower,” the Giant said. He felt he was re-using his encomiums. “Her neck like a swan’s on a summer lake.”

“Very passable, then,” Claffey said. “Allowing for the dirty feet and the mud caked on her.”

Pybus touched the Giant’s arm. “Take up the tale, Mester.”

“You know it,” the Giant said. “Tell it yourself.” The fact was, it sickened him, the tale of the seven dwarves. He was always trying to think of a different ending to it, but the snag was that it ended in the truth.

“Pybus, you tell it,” Jankin pleaded.

Pybus raked his fingers through his hair, thinking. “So she comes in. She comes in and she sees it’s a snug little place, a fire blazing and an iron pot over it, and a rabbit cooking in that pot.”

“Rabbit!” Jankin was distraught. “It was a fat hen stewing, was what I heard. Charlie—”

“Whatever,” the Giant said shortly.

“Am I telling it?” Pybus demanded.

“You’re telling it,” Jankin said.

“The table is set ready with a basket of bread, the candles are burning, and through a parted curtain she can see another room, where there is a row of beds, dwarves’ beds, all heaped with animal skins. So the dwarves take her to the fire and she warms herself. She says, ‘My dear sir dwarves, will you let me stay the night, and give me a meal from your pot? For out there in the cold the wolves and bears will eat me.’ Sorry. Devour. So the dwarves look at each other, and the eldest of them—”

“This is the good bit.” Jankin hugged himself.

“—the eldest of them says, ‘There is nowhere to sleep but our seven beds, so choose one of us to be your companion.’”

“If I know women,” Joe said, “she won’t run out into the cold again. She won’t put herself to the inconvenience.”

“You call a bear an inconvenience?” the Giant asked.

“So she consented: saying, ‘Which of you is the eldest?’ The eldest brother spoke up. ‘I’ll share your bed,’ she said.”

“And will the other dwarves watch?” Constantine Claffey said. The Giant’s eyes were rivetted to the egg stain on his waistcoat; did he wear it as a badge of wealth, boasting to his neighbours in Clement’s Inn that he could afford to eat?

Joe Vance said, “What if she had a dwarf baby?”

Con said, “It’s a surprise she didn’t say, ‘Pull down your nethers and let’s have a swift take on your pricks.’ And make her choice so. Or were they dwarf as well?”

The Giant stood up. “A need for air,” he advised.

He trod heavily downstairs, pushed open the barrier between himself and the night. Bitch Mary was slumped against the wall, her face turned towards the east. A glint from a lamp cut a gilded slice from her cheek: a Saracen’s moon. “You’re waiting for a client?” he asked.

“Why not? What’s to lose now?”

“Claffey would have wed you. It was the sound of your debt put him off.”

“Oh, I’ve paid it,” she said. “By God, Charlie, every farthing.”

He climbed the stairs again. The room was clogged with smoke. The fire was almost out. Vance sent to the chandlers for their coal, Jankin carrying it by the half-peck. Sea-coal fire, they called it. It sighed before it crumbled, as if the cold sea’s voice were in it. The voice of the boy Pybus ran on, continuing the story. “And all that night, in the dwarf’s embraces.”

Hunter: that same moon, a dripping sabre-cut, slashing at a window of his town house: shutter closed against it, his feet crossed before a low-slumbering hearth.

They say Wullie’s worse. His practice has fallen off altogether. Well, let him. I am now the famous Hunter. What did he ever snare but smart society snatches? Whereas my collection is the envy of every contemporary practitioner of human knowledge.

He is bolted in alone, in his cabinet at Jermyn Street. Anne is below, occupied with strumming and verse. Sound carries faintly, floor to floor; laughter that he does not understand. He pours a dram, though spirits are not his vice, the example of whoopsy-go Buchanan being ever before him. A half-glass inside him, he begins to pick a quarrel with someone who is not there: Wullie, perhaps.

There are some stupid men who believe fish to be deaf. If you have ever taken the trouble to discharge a pistol near a fishpond, you will find the truth is otherwise.

“In the morning, early,” said Pybus, “a woman of the next village came by, to sell eggs to the dwarves: for they had no fowl of their own. While she was lifting the cloth of her basket, her eyes were travelling about the house, looking to see how the dwarves lived, so she could carry tales to her neighbours. She peeped through the curtain, and then she saw the girl, rising naked from her bed. At once she—”

“Called her a dirty whore,” said Claffey.

“At once she cried out, ‘You catering slut—to sell them eggs is one matter, but to sleep with them in their beds’—and when the woman slapped her, the girl cried out, ‘I was here, only here, to save my life.’

“After the egg-seller had gone, the cottage would be silent. Sometimes she would shake herself, the girl, as if waking from a long sleep, and move half-hearted to the door. But the eldest dwarf would put out his paw to restrain her, with a word and a look of love, whilst his brothers, their cheerful habit subdued, swept out the house and made the neat beds and peeled vegetables for their dinner. So the light began to fade—for it is autumn, and in the forest—and she said, ‘It is too late for me to leave now’—and she felt that she might spend a year or two, winter and spring, in the forest amongst the dwarves.

“But when night fell, they saw the light of torches dance between the trees. They heard the murmur of voices. When they opened the door to a knock, it was the egg-seller that stood there. Behind her were the men of the village, armed with clubs. They dragged out the dwarves into their vegetable garden, and beat them to death, one by one, each dwarf watching the pulping of his brother, and the youngest came last. Then they dug up their vegetables and took them away, to cook in their iron pots. Meanwhile the girl hid in the press, among the clean linen, but then she smelled smoke, and this brought her out; she pitched out of the door, jeered at by the men and women, and punched in the face by the egg-seller, as the flames licked the thatch. They spat at her and shook their clubs, and thrust the burning brands into her face, so that she ran into the forest, screaming, barefoot and without her cloak, until she was lost among the trees, and the night’s blackness ate her up.”