Eden River Read Online Free Page A

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.

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    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 alreadyfumbling 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