The Stone Giant Read Free

stroller were walking away from him, an odd thing altogether. For whoever it was hadn’t passed him; the tap, tap, tap of the stick on the road simply started up out of the mists and echoed its way into nothing.
    Escargot told himself it was a woodpecker of some nocturnal variety, tapping holes in the bark of trees to hide acorns. But he didn’t half believe it. And more than once he heard the titter of laughter somewhere off in the fog. It was as if someone were laughing at
him
, an unsettling notion altogether, and one which led him to keep an eye out for goblins, although it did seem unlikely that any of the little men would leave the darkness of the woods. There was no good in being careless, though, it had already been made very clear to him that goblins wandered by night farther up the Oriel River valley than most villagers liked to believe.
    His thoughts always returned home, however, even though he’d never cared much about such things before. A home had simply been shelter, and one shelter was as good as another. A man ought to have any number of them, he told himself, so that if one wore out he could move on to another. He wouldn’t grow too fond of any that way and go moping about through the silent evening streets if his house burned down or was blown away in a hurricane or if he was pitched out of it for eating a pie with cream. Perhaps it was the same way with children. It mightn’t have been a bad idea to have a couple in reserve. But he hadn’t any except little Annie, had he?
    After a week of such nights he found his clothes and books and assorted odds and ends in a heap on his front porch, or on
her
front porch, such as it was. He left most of them. It was then that he began to feel very sorry for himself. It was all very well to be tramping about in the foggy darkness when one knew that just over the hill lay a bed with a feather comforter, a fireplace loaded with last year’s oak logs, and a waiting family. But it was another thing when just over the hill lay nothing at all but more hills.
    Perhaps it
had
been his fault. He’d been hasty, compounding the pie crime by leaving without a word. What had happened, he wondered, to his marriage. He wasn’t prime husband material; that was certain. When it came to being husband material, he was pretty much tangled together out of old rags. He liked fishing a little too much, and he believed that work was something a man did when he had to. He had always been able to get along well enough without it, especially for the last couple of years. A little bit of barter at just the right moment would keep things afloat – a squid clock, perhaps, for a pair of boots; the boots for a brass kaleidoscope and a penknife with a bone handle; the knife for a hat and the hat for a coat and the kaleidoscope rented out for a penny a glimpse. A man could keep busy forever, couldn’t he?
    It made him tired to think about it, but not half as tired, apparently, as it had made his wife, who had pointed out that he was ‘too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work.’ Escargot’s defence – that he had an artistic temperament suited more to philosophy than to work – had rung false even to him. He had no excuse; that was the truth of the thing. But why should a man go about with an apology on his lips? Why, in fact, did a man have to beg to eat his own pie? The thought of pie reminded him somehow that the nights were getting longer and colder, and he slipped once again into remorse. He took to hanging round the old house in the mornings, careful not to be seen but half hoping that he would be, as if by magic something would appear to make everything all right again.
    What appeared was Gilroy Bastable, heading along very officiously toward town, happy with himself. Bastable shook his head. Everyone in the village, by that time, was familiar with Escargot’s fate, and sympathy, said Bastable, was pretty much on the side of the wife, lamentable as it might seem.