Half-Past Bedtime Part 6

When the children arrived home, however, early in May, and Cuthbert told Marian all about them, she said at first that she wouldn't believe in them, because Cuthbert hadn't believed in Mr Jugg. But Cuthbert had grown wiser and less conceited, and he told Marian that he had changed his mind. So Marian believed in them, and her daddy was rather pleased, because there were more things under the earth, he said, than most people imagined.

Not a twig that learned to climb In the babyhood of time,

Not a bud that broke the air In the days before men were,

Not a bird that tossed in flight Ere the first man walked upright,

Nor a bee with craftier cell Than a Roman citadel,

But, with all its pride and pain, Into dust crept back again.

Oh, what wisdom there must be Hidden in the earth and me!

UNCLE JOE'S STORY

[Ill.u.s.tration: Bella at Eden]

IV

UNCLE JOE'S STORY

Marian's mummy used to read the Bible to her, so that she knew all about Adam and Eve; but she never knew that Eve had a little daughter until Uncle Joe told her this story. Next to her mummy and daddy, Marian loved Uncle Joe better than anybody in the whole world. He lived in a little house tucked into a sort of dimple on the side of Fairbarrow Down, and a man called Mr Parker lived with him and helped to keep the place tidy.

Uncle Joe had been a soldier in a lot of queer countries a long way off; and when Marian and Cuthbert asked him what he had fought for, he generally used to tell them that it was for lost causes. In between wars he had done lots of other things, such as trying to find out what caused diseases, or whether plants that grew in some places could be made to grow in others. Mr Parker had been a soldier too--a soldier of misfortune, he used to say--and he had saved Uncle Joe's life three times, and Uncle Joe had saved his life twice.

Uncle Joe's face was yellowish brown, because he had been in the sun so much and had fever; but Mr Parker's face was red, and one of his eyes was made of gla.s.s. Mr Parker used to call himself a lone, lorn orphan, though he was much fatter than Uncle Joe, and afterward he used to spit and say that it was rough weather in the Baltic.

It was about a fortnight after Cuthbert and Doris had come back from the Arctic Circle that Uncle Joe told Marian this story, while they were sitting under one of his apple-trees. Some of the apple-petals had begun to drop, leaving the tiny, weeny, baby apples behind them, and the only really ripe apples in Uncle Joe's garden were the two apples in Marian's cheeks.

"But those aren't real apples," said Marian.

"Well, it all depends," said Uncle Joe, "on what you mean by real."

"You see," said Mr Parker, who had just come out to mow the lawn, "there's more kinds of apples than a few. There's eating apples and cooking apples and pineapples and crab-apples; and there's oak-apples and Adam's apples and the apples what you sees in little girls' cheeks."

"Kissing apples," said Uncle Joe. "They're one of the most important kinds."

He began to fill his pipe.

"And now that I come to think of it," he said, "they're one of the oldest kinds too."

"As old as Mr Jugg," asked Marian, "or the little ice-men?"

"Well," said Uncle Joe, "I don't know about that. But they're certainly as old as Eve's little girl," and then he began to tell Marian all about her.

"I'm not quite sure," he said, "what her name was. It might have been Gretchen or Olga, or it might have been Seraphine or Marie-Louise, but I rather think that it was Bella. Of course you remember what happened in the Garden of Eden, and how Adam and Eve had to leave it, not because the good Lord G.o.d wanted to turn them out, but because He knew that they could never be happy there any more. Every hour that they stayed they would have become more and more miserable; and if they had come back it would have broken their hearts, so He had to put two angels to guard the gate. You see, He had wanted them to be sort of grown-up babies in the loveliest nursery ever imagined, and to be able to go there and play games with them whenever He was tired of ruling the universe. But when once they had heard about growing up, and choosing for themselves, and things of that sort, they could never have been babies any more, and it would have been cruel to keep them in the nursery.

"Of course, they didn't understand that, and they thought it very hard, and very often they used to grumble; and when they had learned to write they used to send Him angry letters and say bad things about Him in books. That was chiefly because they had to work and learn to look after themselves; but that was the only way, as the good Lord G.o.d saw, in which they could ever be happy again. 'They weren't content,' He thought, 'just to be My playthings, so now they must learn to be My comrades; and perhaps in the end that'll be the best for everybody, though it'll be a long, long time before they've learnt how.' And then He sighed as He saw the empty nursery and all the animals that they used to play with, just as fathers and mothers sigh now when their babies grow up and have to go to school. So Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden, and just outside it there was a big town, full of houses and factories and chimneys, and men and women who worked all day long. Who were those men and women, and where did they come from? Well, it's rather hard to explain. You see, Adam and Eve, through never having grown up, had been in the Garden for thousands and thousands of years.

But outside the Garden there were seas and deserts and thick, hot jungles full of wild animals. Some of these animals had looked through the railings and been very struck with Adam and Eve, and sort of wished in the bottoms of their hearts that they could have children just like them. Some of them wished so hard that their next lot of children actually did become a little like them, and their grandchildren became liker still, and at last their great-great-grandchildren became real men and women. Of course they weren't Garden men and women, like Adam and Eve; they were just jungle men and women, running wild.

"Well, after thousands of years these jungle men and women became so clever that they cleared away the jungle, and then they dug fields and planted hedges and sowed corn and built towns; and those were the people that Adam and Eve found when they left the Garden and began to look for work. Later on Adam and Eve's children married the children of the jungle people; so that now all the people in the world are half Garden and half jungle."

"Even clergymen?" asked Marian.

Uncle Joe nodded.

"Yes, and policemen and postmen too."

"And lone, lorn orphans," said Mr Parker, "and the man what comes to mend the bath."

"But that's jumping forward," said Uncle Joe, "a long time, for when Adam and Eve left the Garden they didn't even know what children were, and their hearts were full of bitterness against the good Lord G.o.d. That was one of the reasons why He thought it would be so nice for them to have a little girl of their own, because then in time they might begin to guess, He thought, something of what He felt toward themselves.

"So about a year after they had left the Garden little Bella was born, and they both thought that she was the loveliest baby that had ever been seen since the world began. Poor Adam and Eve were then living in a dark street on the outskirts of the town, and all that they could afford was one room on the top floor at the back.

"Adam had got work at one of the factories where they made boots and shoes, but he was only a beginner, of course, and hadn't learnt much, and so his wages were very small. Sometimes Eve took in a little washing, or got a job from somebody of darning socks, but she did her best to keep their home tidy and some fresh flowers on the mantelpiece.

Every day, too, she put crumbs on the window-sill, and soon she had made friends with the birds that came and ate them, and sometimes a bird would fly from the Garden, and feed from her hand, and tell her the news. Both Adam and Eve, you see, knew the birds' language through having lived with them for so long. But they were never able to teach it to their children, and since they died no one has ever learnt it.

"Soon after Bella was born Adam got a rise in wages, but soon after that Eve had another baby; and then she had some more, and though they rented another room or two they were always poor and often hungry. But after a while they began to think less often of their old life in the Garden of Eden, and sometimes they would even wonder whether they would go back there if the good Lord G.o.d gave them the chance. You see, in spite of their poverty and their hard work and the noise and smells of the great town, they had learnt what it meant to have children, and to bend over their cots and kiss them good-night.

"When Bella was eight she was rather a fat little girl, with dark eyes and an impudent mouth, and she wore her hair in a long pigtail, and her nose was ever so slightly turned up. Adam and Eve thought that she was very beautiful, but everybody else thought her quite ordinary, and she spent most of her time in the streets, though she was always punctual for meals. She had lots of friends, most of them boys, but every now and then she would get tired of them all; and those were the times when she would go exploring and generally end up by hurting herself. Eve was too busy ever to bother much about what Bella did or where she went, and the Garden of Eden was the only place that she had strictly forbidden her to go near. It was one of the rules, of course, that n.o.body was to go near it, and there were angels at the gate with swords of flame; and this was a rule, Eve thought, that it would be very much worse for one of _her_ children to break than for anybody else.

"So she had always told Bella never even to go up the street that led into the fields just outside the Garden; and if Bella hadn't been feeling bored on this particular day--it was just a week after her birthday--and if it hadn't been so hot, and the sun so scorching, and the streets so dusty, and everybody so cross, and if Bella hadn't been inquisitive just like her mother used to be, and if she hadn't sort of happened to be walking up that street, and if the fields at the end of it hadn't seemed so cool and so inviting, and if Bobby Gee, who was a great friend of hers, hadn't dared her to do it--well, there's no saying, but perhaps after all Bella wouldn't have stood looking at those dreadful gates.

"There was now only a strip of gra.s.s between her and the Garden, and she could see it stretched there beyond the railings. It was the middle of the afternoon, and so heavy was the sunshine that the leaves of the trees were all pressed down by it. None of them stirred. There was no sound. The lawns beneath them looked like wax. And where were the angels? Bella held her breath. There were none to be seen. There were only the sentry-boxes.

"Very cautiously she took a step or two forward. Her bare feet made no noise. The bars of the gate quivered in the heat. Then she stopped again and listened. At first she heard nothing, but then, very, very faint, there came to her ears the ghost of a sound. It came and died, and came and died, like the waves of a sea hundreds of miles off. She crept nearer and listened again, and now there were two sounds, rising and falling. They came from the sentry-boxes, one on each side of the gate.

The angels inside were fast asleep. Bella bit her lip and crept forward.

She could feel her heart jumping like a mouse in a cage. The scents of the Garden came to meet her. She could see its curved and vanishing pathways.

"But what caught her eyes and made them grow round was a bending tree just inside the gate. With her hands on the bars she stood looking at it, and presently her mouth began to water. For from every branch of it there hung such apples as she had never seen in all her life, and from the lowest bough there hung an apple that was the biggest and most beautiful of them all. And then another thing happened, for as she pressed against the bars the great gate began to move. Very slowly it swung open, and still the angels were fast asleep. Her heart was beating now like two clocks at once--what an apple it would be to eat! A bright-coloured bird hopped across the gra.s.s, and stood looking up at her with an inquiring eye. She glanced round about her and over her shoulder, but there was n.o.body in sight. Dared she go in? She thought about the rules, and what her mother had said, and then she remembered Bobby Gee. The angels were still breathing lightly and regularly. The bright-coloured bird had flown away.

"Then she took a bold step and went into the Garden and tiptoed softly up to the tree. The apple was so ripe that it was nearly ready to drop, and it was just on a level with the tip of her nose. It smelt like honey, and when she touched it it was as cool as marble. Then she touched it again, and caught hold of it, and somehow or other it came off the tree. She lifted it to her lips, and it felt like a kiss; and then a Voice behind her said--

"'Well?'

"She jumped round, almost dropping the apple. It was the good Lord G.o.d who stood looking at her.