Eden River Page 2

  A dream it seemed to Adam after each such experience, and it happened that one day, as he and Eve sat sunning themselves on the bank, he was visited by the memory of a real dream in which, as he fancied, she herself had figured. It was night, he said, and I was lying asleep in the grass. I looked down and there I lay in the grass sleeping. But Eve broke in: How could that be? I don’t understand you, Adam. Never mind, said Adam, I’m telling you how it was: there was one Adam asleep and another Adam looking on. And they were both you? Eve asked. How can I tell? said Adam, impatient of the interruption. The one that was awake seemed to be me, and perhaps the sleeping one was some other. But, all the same, when the sleeper woke up it was I that woke. What a strange dream! said Eve: shall we dive again, Adam? But I haven’t finished the story yet, said Adam; won’t you listen to me? In my dream I bent over the Adam that was asleep and took a rib out of his body—A rib, what’s that? asked Eve. And Adam began laughing softly. It’s strange you should ask that, he said. Look, these are what I call ribs. He seized her hand and made her feel for herself the ribs of his body. There was one more than these, he said, as she felt them one by one; but I took that one out of me, and I took moonlight, and the milk of the doe, and flowers, and a handful of earth, and of these I made you, Eve. Eve’s eyes shone with excitement. What a lovely story! she cried. When you woke up, Adam, was I still there? Adam’s face clouded, for he could not remember the further details of his dream; and to confess that she had not been at his side when he woke seemed to weaken the story a little. So after a thoughtful moment he said, evasively: The sun was going down when you came. Are you glad I came? asked Eve. He grunted, still staring into distance and trying to get the affair straight in his mind.

  The sun was going down when you came, he repeated after a long silence. He has gone down many times since then, she answered. And Adam went on, speaking rather to himself than to her: The sun was behind you, the red of him was spilt over the world’s rim, and at first there was a dimness covering your face. I could only see the shape of you coming towards me, your dark shape moving in front of the red sky; and the trees stood so still, they seemed to be listening for something. But when you came near the day grew bright again, and I saw you face to face, and I saw that you were different. Different? echoed Eve question-ingly. Different from the other Adam, he answered. And different, she asked quickly, from your dream? When I looked at you, said Adam, telling over his thoughts without heeding her question, the nested birds began singing again, the ground shook under my feet, and there was a noise in my breast like the beginning of thunder. The sky was never so bright before, the grass put pain into my eyes. To keep that pain out, I shut my eyes; and when I opened them again the sky and the grass were gone and there was only you, Eve. With this last word he turned to look at her, asking with a kind of anger: Where did you come from, Eve? I think, she answered, that I came from the back of the mountains, where my own country is. Be quiet, he cried out, in sudden anguish; you are saying what is not. You are me, Eve. You are me. Before I dreamed of you you were nothing at all. How is that? she asked. What is ’nothing’, Adam? You were nothing, he insisted desperately. In the day before I saw you, there was no Eve. And if you forget me, she sadly answered, there will be no Eve again.

  They stared at each other with a tragic questioning, each in the other’s eyes reading a dark mystery, a formless unfathomable fear. And the wish to deny that mystery, to defeat that fear, ran in their veins like flame, so that they clung fiercely together, and their two bodies, at last, were made one in love. And when they were back from that vast journey Eve did not know, nor did it enter into the mind of Adam, that already the unborn centuries of man lived in her womb.

  3

  The change of the seasons was a matter of surpassing interest and pleasure to Adam, who was witnessing it for the first time; and with Eve to talk to he observed and remembered things that otherwise might have passed as unregarded as the incidence of sunshine and rain is unregarded by the flowers to which they bring life and renewal. For his hunger, and Eve’s, there was fruit in plenty; for, if some trees ceased to yield, there were always others to resort to. The citron and the olive, the pomegranate and the vine—one tree or another in this fertile valley was always bearing. Of dates and figs Eve had gathered a store, scarce knowing why; and these, with the crusted seeds dropped by walnut and quintillidon, the plump roots of small plants pulled up in mere curiosity, bush-berries and fungus of many kinds, the fruit of quince and bullace, and what remained in the grass of the fallen apples of high summer, these kept them from hunger until the almond came to her second blooming and the new green thrust its way through the earth, putting the old to shame. Adam watched earth and sky as he had always watched them, but now, with Eve at his side, there was more meaning in these wonders: to see the moon rise in the bare sky, to see the sun spill his colour over the mountain-crest, was something that made the lovers pause and listen, as to their own beating pulses, or to the pulse of a larger life in which they had part. Day followed day uncounted: for Adam and Eve all things were contained in the moving present, which, like the moon in her waxing, grew big with its growing store of yesterdays, so that each day, being manifolded with its predecessors, was longer and richer than the last. The flavour of their life became subtler, spiced with a dark conjecture, when the thought of tomorrow first entered their reckoning: this was the beginning of Adam’s speculation and of Eve’s husbandry. The changing shape of the moon became their time-measure.

  Once, and again, and yet once more, had the moon increased and diminished since their marriage when Eve told her lover of the bird that fluttered in her body. See, Adam, it’s here: feel it. She took his hand and placed it palm downwards against the warm smooth wall of her belly. A little bird, Adam—how did it get inside me? Adam was as puzzled as she, and the puzzle set him thinking, but all his thought brought him no nearer the truth than to suppose that she had eaten a seed and that the seed had flowered into a bird. That same night he had a dream in which he saw Eve squatting on the ground with legs straddled, and out of her body a beak came thrusting its way: a beak, a feathered head, and at last the bird entire, tweeting with pleasure in its new estate. Eve laughed happily at sight of it and stretched out a loving hand, but the bird spreading golden wings flew into the sky, leaving Eve desolate, until she saw that the bird was joined to herself by a cord, thin and shining as a hair of her own head. And she laughed again and would have drawn the captive back within reach of her fingers, but Adam in his dream ran forward and broke the cord with his teeth and the bird flew away. Whereupon Eve seemed to reproach him, saying: You have destroyed my joy. And she wept bitterly. In the morning, though he did not remember his dream, Adam told her confidently that one day the bird would push its way out of her body; and often, in the time that followed, their thoughts pursued that day and they wondered what marvel it might bring them. Meanwhile the world was theirs, earth and river and sky; every creature was their friend, and every tree of the garden yielded them fruit in its season.

  The bird in Eve’s body grew big, and sometimes she would wake in the night and feel it drumming on the wall of its dark room. So active was it, and so strong, that as time went on she began to have doubts of its being a bird at all and pictured it as a small four-footed creature, a lamb perhaps, or a kid. With a secretiveness that was new to her she did not confide these fancies to Adam, but kept her own counsel and waited patiently for what should ensue. As for Adam, the whole matter would have passed out of his mind altogether but for Eve’s altered shape, and in time he grew accustomed even to that, forgetting its cause; and when one morning, on waking, Eve seemed reluctant to accompany him on his forage for food, and in fact allowed him to go off into the woods by himself, he did not pause to ask himself the reason of her unusual behaviour. It chanced that he wandered further than usual that morning, penetrating far into the forest that stretched between his country and the mountains of the horizon, and emerging at intervals into a wide glade. In one s
uch glade he came upon a tree alive with yellow birds: a large tree standing alone, and the birds filled it with singing and gold, and the lower branches sagged to the green ground. The young of a wild cat came mewing after him, till their dam, following indulgently, grew impatient and pounced, seizing her eldest by his scruff: whereat the others flung themselves playfully upon her, and thus laden and beset she picked her way delicately back to her lair in the undergrowth. The animals may well have found Adam a little strange this morning, for though he paused to ruffle the mane of a sleeping lion, and surrendered his hand for a moment to the eager tongue of a leopard, his manner was abstracted, his eyes having the evasive slant of one who looks inward. Yet his thoughts had little definition: it was no more than a wandering daydream that engaged him, a dim conjecture stirred into being by the occasional sight of those distant mountains, which were in his fancy the end of the world. And beyond the end—what? For the first time the question became articulated in his mind, and it was in the company of this idea of a something beyond that he slowly returned, empty-handed, to where he had left Eve. The sun had already made the half of his journey up the sky: perceiving which, Adam knew that he had been long absent.

  Eve being nowhere in sight, he grew afraid and called out to her. No answer came, but in the long silence that followed his cry he heard a distant moaning: a sound unlike the voice of Eve, yet hearing it he felt fear leap again in his bowels, and his feet, without instruction, began taking him in the direction whence it had come. The moaning was repeated, and now it was louder and to Adam’s ears so unfamiliar that his instinct was divided against itself and he trembled, not knowing whether to go forward or run away from his first contact with another’s pain; but his curiosity gaining the upper hand of him he went on with dragging feet and soon found Eve where she lay in the long grass, hiding her secret labour. Yes, it was Eve: his doubt was set at rest. But she was a strange Eve: he stared at her coldly, in bewilderment and self-defensive anger. For what she would be at, and why her face was contorted and her mouth uttering strange noises, was beyond understanding, until, as he stared and gaped at her, the half-formed memory of a dream flashed into his consciousness, and her posture became reminiscent for him of something he had witnessed in another life. As he drew nearer he saw that a dark conical shape was beginning to protrude from the entrance of her body; and Eve, becoming aware of his approach, cried out in a sighing voice: O Adam! At the sound of that cry a ghostly pain shuddered in his belly and he knew in every pulse of his blood, as before he had known only by the cool report of the eyes, that this was Eve indeed, a part of his very self. The bird, the bird! he answered her. The bird is coming out of you. Kneeling down to get a nearer view he could see nothing to justify the prediction, and at last, impatience getting the better of fear, he thrust in his hand and so eased the passage of the new-comer into the world of light. Eve shuddered and lay still, with closed eyes; but Adam, at first, had eyes for nothing but this odd little creature that lay in his hand. It lay so very still that he, to see what it would do next, set it down in the grass; and, to see what it was made of, gave it an experimental slap or two. Whereupon it began showing signs of life, and set up a thin wailing cry. It is a man, said Adam, marvelling. And in a loud voice he said again: It is a man. Receiving no answer from Eve, he cried excitedly: Wake up, Eve: it is a man you have brought forth, and no bird. But Eve, hearing the cry of her first-born, had already opened her eyes. Give him to me, she murmured. And Adam, guided by his dream though not recalling it, bent over the wailing creature and severed with his teeth the cord that still bound it to its mother; then lifting it with his two hands he laid it in the curve of Eve’s arm. He looked down on the pair—a strange sight it was—and wondered what next must be done.

  4

  Though strong, and skilled in much, and growing daily in wisdom, Adam was still a mere stripling; and many a time had Eve, herself so young and gentle, looked on him dewy-eyed, with maternal tenderness. But now, staring down at mother and babe, he knew himself forgotten. Eve lay exhausted; but the touch on her breast and sheltering arm of the man she had brought forth was bliss to her, and contentment relaxed the rigid lines that suffering had marked in her mouth. The light that shone in her eyes, before she closed them again and yielded herself to sleep, was not for Adam; and he, having no part in her triumph, tasted a moment’s sense of a paradise from which, it seemed, he must be for ever shut out. But the sun shone as of old, and earth and sky called him out of himself to share the being of all visible things. He wandered back into the nether wood, a hundred gossamer impulses succeeding each other in his mind at every second stride. Now he must gather fruit for his hunger; now crawl on all fours into the under-growth; now climb to the topmost bough of a tall tree, from which vantage-point he might see the mountains in a new aspect. Between thinking and doing there was neither interval nor distinction, and he was aware of nothing but these immediate things, though somewhere in his mind, a problem awaiting solution, lay the picture of Eve lying with the stranger. Drawn back at last by habit and curiosity to the place where he had left the pair sleeping, he stood for a long time staring and undecided; and when at last Eve opened her eyes and looked up at him, he greeted her with a grin of conciliation, guiltily assuming that his recent thoughts were known to her. Holding her child with one arm she raised herself on an elbow to a sitting posture and stretched out a hand to him. He ran towards her eagerly, but she fended him off, saying: I’m hungry. Under one arm, forgotten, he held a large russet-coloured fruit, something between round and ovoid in shape and consisting of five conjoined sections. Waking to a sense of her need, Adam with his teeth tore a strip of tough skin from this fruit, and with plunging fingers dug out a handful of its moist substance and began feeding her. She would have urged some of this food upon the child, but the blind red mouth was already fumbling at her breasts, and after a few failures the face of the suckling became creased with greedy contentment, and milk began trickling out of the corners of his mouth. And when presently the milk failed him and he began wailing again, Eve, having learned from him the art of motherhood, shifted in her seat and guided him to the other nipple. Seeing him firmly established there she rose to her feet and moved a few steps in the direction of the river; and Adam, divining her intention, held out his arms to receive the stranger, saying: Give the man to me and I will teach him to swim. But she would not. Then Adam, seeing that she wished to cleanse herself and her child of the stains that were upon them, lifted up his arm and said: Wait. This he said without thinking, for he was not yet aware of the plan that had been forming in his mind; but his glance now falling on the hollow gourd, which was all that was left of the quintillidon whose substance Eve had consumed, he snatched it up with an excited cry and running quickly was out of sight in a moment, to return very soon carrying a vessel brimmed with water from the river. This journey he made again and again, till Eve’s purposes were fulfilled. He’s of our kind, said Eve, giving Adam a loving glance. And of the coneys that ran from their holes to see what was happening, and of the lamb and the lion that came to peer and sniff at their new brother, she exclaimed, as though remorseful of forgetting them: But these too are kind. And what has come to the birds that they are so shy of us? Look, Adam! He’s ours, a new man. And Adam smiled on the usurper of his bed, though he did not know, nor Eve guess, that this new man was the fruit of his loins and the flower of his seed.

  Seeing him thoughtful, and wishing to atone to him for her inattention, How clever of you, Adam, said Eve, to bring us water! And this achievement, and Eve’s praise of it, so mightily pleased him that it became the first of many inventions. From the shore of the lake, when the tide of the river was low, he collected shells and stones, not idly as hitherto, but with an eye to their shape. Fallen branches had a new meaning for him, and he learned to delve in the earth, whence would spring water more cool to the tongue, more cool and clear, than the river water. It was Eve who, by plaiting long grasses together, made the first basket; but it was Adam
who contrived baskets that should hold water, for, having noticed in a season of comparative drought that the clay of the river bank dried hard, a dim memory, some moons later, led him to gather handfuls of clay while it was soft, and to mould it, with grass for binding, into various shapes, the gourd itself being his first model. It was Eve who fashioned a quilt or coverlet of large leaves, for warmth when the nights grew cold; Adam who invented a way of tapping a tree for water, making with a sharp stone a cross-cut in one of the channels where rain and dew ran down the trunk, and driving in a chip of wood by which the water would be diverted into his clay-vessel. This last device was born of the necessity that persuaded them, in the season of rain, to sleep in the shelter of a giant tree, far away from the river; and it was a related cause, the fear of floods, that put it into Adam’s mind to build a bed for himself and his two companions in the convenient lower branches of this same tree, branches no higher from the ground than his own shoulders but amply high to be beyond reach of such floods as he had known: as he had known, and Eve too, and suffered no harm from, though often they had woke to find the grass of their bed all but covered with the rising water; but now, having a creature to care for that was oddly more helpless than the smallest shrew-mouse, as helpless indeed as a bird naked from the egg, Eve instinctively required a higher standard of comfort and safety; and when, not long after her labour, the rains came and the river swelled overflowing its banks, and for seven days, a period beyond her counting, the greater part of the valley was covered in shallow water so that the grass seemed to ebb and flow like a green sea, then she was glad of this high dry bed, wrought cunningly of interlaced boughs, and furnished with moss and turves; and as they lay, all three, under their quilt of stitched leaves, and heard the water beneath them soaking into the ground with little sucking and gurgling noises, her heart grew warm for Adam and her blood leapt with his.