For him there was less surprise. He had been seeking her, and yet his heart beat fast. He came towards her, slowly, with his eyes upon her face.
“You are the Princess,” he said. “My father has told me. You are the Princess who was given the Food of the Gods.”
“I am the Princess—yes,” she said, with eyes of wonder. “But—what are you?”
“I am the son of the man who made the Food of the Gods.”
“The Food of the Gods!”
“Yes, the Food of the Gods.”
“But—”
Her face expressed infinite perplexity.
“What? I don’t understand. The Food of the Gods?”
“You have not heard?”
“The Food of the Gods! No!”
She found herself trembling violently. The colour left her face. “I did not know,” she said. “Do you mean—?”
He waited for her.
“Do you mean there are other—giants?”
He repeated, “Did you not know?”
And she answered, with the growing amazement of realisation, “No!”
The whole world and all the meaning of the world was changing for her. A branch of chestnut slipped from her hand. “Do you mean to say,” she repeated stupidly, “that there are other giants in the world? That some food—?”
He caught her amazement.
“You know nothing?” he cried. “You have never heard of us? You, whom the Food has made akin to us!”
There was terror still in the eyes that stared at him. Her hand rose towards her throat and fell again. She whispered, “No.”
It seemed to her that she must weep or faint. Then in a moment she had rule over herself and she was speaking and thinking clearly. “All this has been kept from me,” she said. “It is like a dream. I have dreamt—have dreamt such things. But waking—No. Tell me! Tell me! What are you? What is this Food of the Gods? Tell me slowly—and clearly. Why have they kept it from me, that I am not alone?”
II
“Tell me,” she said, and young Redwood, tremulous and excited, set himself to tell her—it was poor and broken telling for a time—of the Food of the Gods and the giant children who were scattered over the world.
You must figure them both, flushed and startled in their bearing; getting at one another’s meaning through endless half-heard, half-spoken phrases, repeating, making perplexing breaks and new departures—a wonderful talk, in which she awakened from the ignorance of all her life. And very slowly it became clear to her that she was no exception to the order of mankind, but one of a scattered brotherhood, who had all eaten the Food and grown forever out of the little limits of the folk beneath their feet. Young Redwood spoke of his father, of Cossar, of the Brothers scattered throughout the country, of the great dawn of wider meaning that had come at last into the history of the world. “We are in the beginning of a beginning,” he said; “this world of theirs is only the prelude to the world the Food will make.
“My father believes—and I also believe—that a time will come when littleness will have passed altogether out of the world of man—when giants shall go freely about this earth—their earth—doing continually greater and more splendid things. But that—that is to come. We are not even the first generation of that—we are the first experiments.”
“And of these things,” she said, “I knew nothing!”
“There are times when it seems to me almost as if we had come too soon. Someone, I suppose, had to come first. But the world was all unprepared for our coming and for the coming of all the lesser great things that drew their greatness from the Food. There have been blunders; there have been conflicts. The little people hate our kind. …
“They are hard towards us because they are so little. … And because our feet are heavy on the things that make their lives. But at any rate they hate us now; they will have none of us—only if we could shrink back to the common size of them would they begin to forgive. …
“They are happy in houses that are prison cells to us; their cities are too small for us; we go in misery along their narrow ways; we cannot worship in their churches. …
“We see over their walls and over their protections; we look inadvertently into their upper windows; we look over their customs; their laws are no more than a net about our feet. …
“Every time we stumble we hear them shouting; every time we blunder against their limits or stretch out to any spacious act. …
“Our easy paces are wild flights to them, and all they deem great and wonderful no more than dolls’ pyramids to us. Their pettiness of method and appliance and imagination hampers and defeats our powers. There are no machines to the power of our hands, no helps to fit our needs. They hold our greatness in servitude by a thousand invisible bands. We are stronger, man for man, a hundred times, but we are disarmed; our very greatness makes us debtors; they claim the land we stand upon; they tax our ampler need of food and shelter, and for all these things we must toil with the tools these dwarfs can make us—and to satisfy their dwarfish fancies …
“They pen us in, in every way. Even to live one must cross their boundaries. Even to meet you here today I have passed a limit. All that is reasonable and desirable in life they make out of bounds for us. We may not go into the towns; we may not cross the bridges; we may not step on their ploughed fields or into the harbours of the game they kill. I am cut off now from all our Brethren except the three sons of Cossar, and even that way the passage narrows day by day. One could think they sought occasion against us to do some more evil thing …”
“But we are strong,” she said.
“We should be strong—yes. We feel, all of us—you too I know must feel—that we
