Eden River (2 page)

But darkness fell and sleep came to them at last. They wandered apart in sleep, he dreaming of the sky-country, she of a rushing river that carried her away and laid her at length on the placid bosom of a vast blue ocean. The sky of Adam's adventuring was a hanging garden, where tall trees grew rooted in billowy cloud, with golden stars flitting like moths among their branches. From the edge of this cloudland Adam looked down on Eden, but no memory of Eve troubled his dream, and no thought of Adam penetrated hers, and it was therefore with surprise as lovely as a dawning rose that each in the morning came back from a long alien life to find the other, the forgotten bedfellow.
It was a revelation as new in spirit as the first meeting had been: as new and still more wonderful, for this moment of waking grew big with the beauty of a gradually remembered past, and love, in this first morning of the world, had already the fragrance of yesterday to enhance its sweetness. You, you, their hearts said; and they untwined their arms, and lay for a moment apart that they might see and admire each other the better, see and delight in every detail of their bodies. Eve was smaller than Adam by the length of his hand. Her hair was sleek and blacker than night; his was ruddy. Her gaze was soft as the gazelle's, patient and loving; but the eyes of Adam searched far and flashed with questions. With unclouded candour the two compared their bodies, point by point and limb by limb, she laughing with pleasure and surprise at sight of his small masculine nipples, he enclosing the warm smooth apples of her breasts with curved caressing hands. The phallus puzzled them both; but no puzzle could distract them from their joy in each other, and no speculation came to hinder their rising to go in search of food, and having found it and eaten, to wander happily about the valley hand in hand, now running, now leaping, now squatting or lying in the grass. He
did not ask her where she had come from: as to the past he was incurious, and no memory of his dream of her had as yet come back to him. She was here: that was enough. Where, I wonder, are the beasts this morning? he asked. I want you to see them. But here are the birds come to look at you, he added; and, as he spoke, the dove herself, his particular friend, came to perch on Eve's wrist and peer at her obliquely with inquisitive eyes.

This was a sign for others, the parrot and the cockatoo, the hawk, the wren, the giant eagle, the hoopoe with its little lordly crest and its blazon of black and gold: from their mountains, their tree-tops, their nests among the reeds of the river-bank, these and others came flying to look at Eve, to her great delight. Each one she greeted kindly, and presently the soft noses of the deer came thrusting through the brake into the shady covert where the lovers were, and the coneys came out of their burrows, and the leopard pounced elegantly across the grass to fawn at her feet and have his head scratched. And here comes Lion, said Adam; he's come down from his mountain to see you, Eve. And there's old Snake uncoiling himself. Adam spoke proudly, grateful to these courteous creatures for sharing his pleasure in Eve; and not till the few
who still lingered in her neighbourhood seemed to have withdrawn into a preoccupation with their own affairs—the others, one by one, had unobtrusively retired after satisfying their curiosity—not till then did he take her hand again and lead her to that bend of the river where another companion was to be seen; and there from branches of the same tree overhanging the water they looked down in search of the elusive one. There he is, cried Adam: see, see! But, answered Eve, there are two faces. Adam in his astonishment was silent for a moment, but presently he gave a laugh of contentment, as though a dark problem had been solved at last. He's found an Eve, too, said he; let's not stay any longer up here. But Adam, she answered, they are talking to us: I can see their lips moving. Oh never mind
them
, exclaimed Adam, with some impatience. Can you swim, Eve? It's quite easy: I'll show you.

Adam-of-the-water, who had occupied him so long and so often, was now banished from his mind; and a happy hour was spent in teaching Eve to swim. At first she was timid, but her hesitations being only skin-deep, having no basis in knowledge or imagination, she very soon allowed herself to be persuaded. Long before the sun had reached his zenith she was finding herself quite at
home in the water; and coming here with Adam for many days in succession she became in time as agile a swimmer as himself. The two took great pleasure in this pastime, and there were days when they were as much in the water as out of it. They learned presently the trick of opening their eyes under water, and acquired great skill in holding their breath. Then they would dive to the bottom where the river was deepest, and, squatting on the sandy floor, would stare at the strange shapes of life that loomed suddenly up out of the distance and glided past them with wide staring eyes and gaping mouths. In this way Adam made the nearer acquaintance of the creatures he had sometimes watched from the river-bank, and of many others besides. Some were like little snorting horses, delicately pink and all but transparent; some were solid and boldly coloured; some were lean and swift; some, with slow spiderly gait, walked on their many legs over the river-bed. The greenish light that filled this world below water was sometimes suffused with a misty goldenness; and the bewildering effects of colour and changing magnitudes gave to the place the evanescence of a dream.

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.

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 such 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.