Eden River (3 page)

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.

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.

The hazards and discomforts of the rainy season served to enhance the pleasure of these three in the innumerable golden days that followed, when the waters receded and the sun shone and a new greenness was seen upon the earth. And perceiving that the child depended on its mother's milk, lest Eve should be drained of all her substance Adam became diligent in the gathering of food, and Eve cunning in the husbanding of such as could be put aside without loss. So the child prospered, and Eve had great joy of him, remarking and marvelling at every symptom in him of growing power and
dawning intelligence, notwithstanding that in the beginning she had marvelled, with much astonishment, at his singular lack of either. When the child slept he was pretty, when he evacuated his bowels he was clever, and when he cried she admired his lustiness. It had surprised her in the first days to find that his fingers were unable to grasp the gifts she showered on him; and it surprised her still more, to the point of laughter and tears, when they acquired that capacity. O look at him, Adam, she would say with a kind of ecstatic indignation; look at him holding my finger with his little hands! And, obediently, Adam would look, and grunt his acquiescence in her pleasure. At first it was no more than acquiescence, but when even to his disinterested and inattentive eye it became apparent that the child was growing bigger, and when by an imaginative leap Adam began dimly to perceive whither this growth was leading, he became, in brief moments, as excited as Eve herself, with eyes of startled conjecture looking to a day as yet beyond range of his conscious prevision, the day when he would be no longer unique, but a man among men.

And Eve conceived again, and grew big, and brought forth a man-child. And Eve called her
firstborn
Cain,
and her secondborn she called
Abel.
Thereafter many sons and many daughters were born to Eve; and, to them again, many sons and daughters. Now when Abel his brother was born Cain was not yet weaned from his mother's breast. And Abel, by reason of his smallness and newness, was very dear to Eve's heart; to the simple pleasure of suckling him was added the joy of knowing that he drew life from her breast; and when Cain climbed upon her and would have fastened his mouth upon her nipple she pushed him away, saying: That is for the little one. Cain, being without understanding, came back again and again, with ravenous cries; but always he was thrust aside in favour of his brother. And seeing a stranger cherished at his mother's breast, he was desolate, even as Adam had been at sight of Cain; but Cain's desolation was greater than Adam's. Adam, he's hungry, said Eve; why don't you feed him? And indeed Adam was sorry for Cain and would gladly have yielded him nourishment, but Cain, being wiser in this than his elders, though he ran into Adam's arms for comfort knew better than to hope for milk of him. From that moment there was the bond of fellow-feeling between Adam and Cain, and the day was not much older when the child
found a foster-mother in his friend the goat, whose kids, when their needs conflicted with his, he learned to push aside as he himself had been pushed aside. He learned to eat of the various fruits and roots that Adam found for him; he learned to swim, to climb, to ride on Adam's shoulder, to turn somersaults in the grass; and he collected words to his use as eagerly as Adam had collected shells and stones from the river-bed. He became a great talker, and sometimes even Adam grew tired of listening.

Where are the boys? asked Eve. The question was an idle one and Adam did not trouble to answer it. Nor did Eve look for an answer. She now had other babes to cherish, and though she took pleasure in her sons when they chanced to visit her she did not yearn for them during their long absences. The idea that any harm could befall them was something quite alien to the life of Eden and could not, in the nature of things, have entered her head: the present moment was all her joy and all her care. Cain 'and Abel, still children though they were, had developed already a wandering habit. It was the more marked in Cain, the elder and more enterprising, perhaps because he had had so early to fend for himself; but Abel had learned independence from his brother, and much else besides. Cain was hardly entered on the adventure of adolescence when he first succeeded in persuading the goat to stand and be milked. But it was Abel who had chosen for their sleeping-place a natural terrace or plateau which, by good luck, was already
to some extent sheltered from rain by the broad leaves and spreading branches of a great tree: nothing then remained—though this was a mighty labour—but to fetch sharp stones from the riverbed at low tide, and with the help of these implements ditch the place round, so making it the more secure from flood.

Cain and Abel admired each other's work and there was love between them. The younger children, in whom they had never taken more than a moment's interest, were virtually strangers to them; by the time Cain's voice began breaking, the brothers had established themselves near the lake, a long day's distance from their mother and Adam. So when Eve said: Where are the boys? she meant nothing, expected no answer, was merely thinking aloud; and the thought, though affectionate in its way, was incurious and fleeting. She had never seen the little camp that her sons had made for themselves.