Eden River

by Gerald Bullet

  GERALD BULLETT

  EDEN RIVER

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  AUREA PRIMA SATA EST AETAS . . .

  Ovid: Metamorphoses

  1

  The valley was green and wooded; the river ran with a continuing song, now silvery bright, now clouded like an opal and as diverse in colour; and for many days, he could not have said how many, the boy Adam lived in contentment. Contentment and more, for there was no limit to the pleasure his new world offered him. First, this body that went everywhere with him: the limbs that, as experiment proved, he could move at will; the fingers; the toes; the rippling muscles of arm and leg; the beating pulse; the phallus with its pendent purse; and the features of his face which he could learn only by touching. His curiosity pried with eyes or fingers into every part of him until, turning outwards, it came upon the larger body of nature with its multitude of shapes and sensations. He woke to a sense of light and colour and the invisible movement of air; of sounds, scents, contacts innumerable; of earth, and the fruits of the earth, and life blossoming in a thousand lyrical shapes. The broad leaves of the trees gave him shadow; the grass was a cool bed; and the changing sky was a friend he never tired of. Every day, every moment, added to his knowledge and delight; and best of all were the beasts and birds that came to stare dumbly at this new little brother, so queer and so pleasant, that had unaccountably appeared among them. The golden lion came; the antelope; the jackal; the leopard; the hovering eagle; the gazelle. For each of them he found a name; clapping his hands joyously like the child he was, he uttered a new cry at everything that caught his young fancy, and that cry became its name. He would have talked with them, but they would not answer. There was no fear in the world, but the lion was shy and turned away, and the monkey answered Adam’s greeting with unintelligible noises. The dove would take berries from his hand; the wolf nosed him with kindness and suffered his caresses with patience; the snake would share his bed and the lizard nestle confidingly in his palm; but from no bird or beast could he win an answering word. With so much still to be learnt, this did not trouble him; yet as time went on, and the moon grew big in the sky, round that small dismay, that scarcely apprehended beginning of loneliness, a wish began forming, and the wish cohered to a dream of which he had already forgotten the origin.

  It was a dream that visited him less in sleep than in waking life, in moments when the engaging clamour of the world was suddenly stilled, and the chattering voice of consciousness faltered in an emotion so light and subtle in its incidence, so light, so feathery-soft, so quickly vanishing, as to leave no image on the mind. Sometimes, enclosed in such a silence, he would sit and stare unseeingly at distance, blind and deaf to the rustling, chirruping, warm-blooded or cool green life of the wood; sometimes, when neither bird nor beast chanced to come near him and there was no one to play with or to talk to, even the coneys being hidden in their holes and the doves absent though audible in a crooning dream, his glance would fall on some part of his own body: on the fingers that closed round the warm velvet flesh of a nectarine, or on the flexing muscles of his legs as he moved idly through the flowered grass. He would pause to admire, if with little understanding, the subtle mechanism of wrist or ankle; he would stretch out an arm at full length and take pleasure in the sight of the golden hairs covering it and in the sensation induced in it by the touch of his fingers. In the sunlight each several hair seemed to be brushed with fire, and each cast a minute shadow on the brown skin. He would touch this arm and stroke it, shyly, tentatively, as though it had been another’s; but this ‘as though’ was hidden from his imagination until he chanced one day to wander downstream, reaching that point of Eden river where it curved and swelled to the roundness of a lake so that the tide flowing through left the circumference of the water smooth and untroubled, a glass in which the sky and the bending tree found a shadowy counterpart. From his seat in the branches of that tree Adam looked down, and there, in the water-world, was a face looking up at him that he had never seen before. It was the face of a new creature, a creature so beautiful that at sight of it a warm love gushed in his heart; and his wonder was enhanced, his joy redoubled, to see an answering joy in the eyes of the unknown, which at first had been searching and eager and a little sad. He gave a glad cry—Adam!—and the boy in the water seemed to repeat the cry; and smiled broadly, shewing white teeth; and nodded, and stretched out welcoming arms. And then it was to Adam as if the water-world rose up and seized him; the strange element closed over his head; he was blinded, choking, his body ready to burst; but arms and legs moved in a steady rhythm and his head emerged into the world of light, where everything was so much more agreeable that he was at pains to keep it there, until by a series of froglike movements he succeeded in reaching the bank. Having scrambled ashore, he was none the worse for his misadventure; for he knew no cause for fear and the bodily distress was already forgotten. Forgotten, too, in this physical distraction, was his new-found but elusive companion; but, before very long, memory returned, bringing hope in its wake, hope and a yearning desire, so that he came back every day, and for the first day every hour, to look for that fugitive loveliness, that false promise of a love fulfilled. Adam he called it in his thoughts, for these were the syllables with which he had chanced to greet the apparition; and this Adam-of-the-water, once he had returned, took possession of his nights and days. For a while it seemed to him that his secret wish had been realized in the very moment of his becoming aware of it; but as time went on there came to life a dim sense of something still lacking. Adam-of-the-water would answer him with the smiles and gestures of friendship, but no sound came from his moving lips; nor could he be persuaded to come out of the water, that water into which Adam now knew better than to pursue him. He lived in an inviolable mystery, beyond touch, beyond hearing, veiled by an element of cruelly varying transparency.

  It was always in that particular part of the river, and from that particular tree, that Adam sought his friend; and only there was he shy of the water, for in other places he often plunged or waded in, and by doing as the frog does, a creature he had often watched, he very soon became an easy swimmer. This added a new delight to existence, and with running and tree-climbing, finding new things to eat, seeing the moon rise and the sun go down, coaxing the birds and beasts of the wood to give him more of their company, marvelling at the greenness of grass and the scarlet of the wind-flower and the soft petals of the rose, searching indeed the face of every flower and the character of every tree, imitating the crooning of the dove and the liquid songs of the singing-birds till they were deceived into answering him, barking in brotherliness with the jackal, laughing with the hyena, and taking pleasure in the many colours of the snake which, learning to understand the boy’s whimsies, would sometimes make itself into a cylindrical nest for him, coil on coil of bright enamelled body—with these and a hundred other pastimes Adam assuaged his loneliness. Sometimes at the going down of the sun he would remember his shadowy companion and become pensive; but with the sudden darkness, when the noises of the day faded into a silence which presently, listening intently, he was able to analyse into a hundred and one small sounds that only the night knew, perhaps a bat would blunder against his face, and an owl would screech; and these homely encounters gave him deep comfort, so that he slept in peace, untroubled by the shadow of any fear.

  Sleep, however
, was no empty interval but another life, a life as diverse, and in its fashion rich, as the life of waking. For Adam there was at first no clear distinction between the outer life and the inner; nor could he, being as yet simple, feel that the one was any more or less real than the other. Moreover, very little remained to him on waking of what had happened in the night: incoherent fragments which served to enrich or to confuse his waking life by surrounding it with a fringe of question and conjecture. Yet in time he recalled enough to be persuaded that he had a second self, a self in which he lived a life of varied adventure while the first lay quiet. Sometimes in his fancy this dream-self was invested with strange and mighty powers. He could breathe under water; he could see in the dark; he could fly through the air as easily as a bird and more swiftly; and, above all, he could make anything happen merely by wishing it. At a wave of his hand, a new tree would grow, laden with a strange fruit; or the water of the river would gather up its length like the snake and rise in a majestic spiral to the sky; or the birds and beasts of Eden would talk to him in his own speech and assume shapes not their own. And sometimes, before lying down for the night, Adam would fancy that he was talking with this mighty second self, and would ask for his help in persuading Adam-of-the-water to leave the shadowy element and become warm flesh and blood.

  For a long while these prayers went unanswered, and often they were crowded out by other pre-occupations; but a time came when in a dream he stood by his sleeping body, which he took to be that of his elusive friend of the water. He bent over the body and touched it; he flung himself down by its side and greedily embraced it; but in that moment he was awake again, and lay desolate, bewildered, his mind hovering between the two dreams, sleeping and waking, uncertain for one hazardous instant of where he belonged and which person of the Adam-trinity he was: whether dreamer, doer, or lovely phantom. This dream, in many variant forms, he dreamed again and again, so often indeed that even the dreamer began dimly to remember those past occasions and to profit by them, growing at length so cunning that he was able to conceive the idea—seed of all creation—that he should make a companion of its own flesh for the sleeping body that he looked upon. I will take, said the dreaming Adam, a rib from this body; I will take moonlight and shadow, the milk of the doe, the scent of many flowers, and as much earth as may be held in the cup of my two hands; and these shall take shape at my word and be a companion meet for him. And, even with the thought, so in his dream it was.

  2

  Waking with the first chirp of dawn, Adam remembered nothing of his dream but its music and colour, and he spent the bright hours of the day wandering idly from one sheltering tree to another, where with their lifted branches and broad leaves they made cool intervals in the sun-drenched valley, not searching, not remembering, yet haunted by a sense of some new joy newly lost; and it was not until the shadows lengthened over the land, and the birds were going to their nests, that he forgot his uneasiness of spirit in seeing a fair new creature coming unaware towards him; and all the breath of his body escaped him in a sigh, so that he stood empty and trembling, living only in his eyes; and when at last he found a voice to cry out with, it was a voice harsh as the raven’s and feeble as the fledgling dove’s. Adam was his cry—for what could he think but that this was his shy brother come at last out of the water?—but his sigh had said Eve. At sound of him the newcomer lifted a downcast head and became aware of him, looking with great eyes of wonder in which his delight was given back and made double. The two moved slowly to their encounter, and holding out his arms Adam knew, even before the moment of contact, that this was indeed no Adam-of-the-water, but another and a fairer, a creature soft and curving and made for his delight. They touched shyly, and time paused, the sun lingering in his going down, as with curious fingers they stroked each other, learning the geography of their new-found country inch by inch, as though seeking by touch to confirm this miracle that the eyes reported. Adam, she said, the syllables coming unthought upon her lips; and Adam answered with the sigh, half rapture, half desire, that was to be her name thereafter. Her skin was honey-golden and soft to the touch; she was himself, yet not himself; he knew her for his own, and she him. Yet into this bliss of recognition, perhaps born of it, fell the shadow of a desire undefined and unfulfilled, a shadow that seemed to contradict their persuasion of being already made one and indivisible. If I let her out of my arms, thought Adam as they lay together in the deep grass, she will vanish away as that other did who always escaped my touch. And Eve said to herself: I won’t shut my eyes, or when I open them again he will be gone from me. And having less of animal wisdom than the innocent beasts that companioned them in Eden, they were at a loss to know how they might bring their love to the proof and set the seal of the flesh upon their hearts’ union. Nor did any such problem present itself to their minds, but lying tightly embraced together, bound by this common fear that they might lose each other, for a long time they dared not yield to the sleep that settled on their eyelids, but must be for ever prying and peering into each other’s faces to make sure that their happiness was not yet gone.

  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 no
t 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.