Eden River

By Gerald Bullett

First published in 1934, Eden River tells the story of the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, as they make their way in Paradise, living by the river of Eden.Here, Gerald Bullett brings his characteristic style and grace to one of the oldest stories known to man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448203710

Gerald Bullett

Gerald William Bullett (December 30, 1893 - January 3, 1958) was a British man of letters. He was known as a novelist, essayist, short story writer, critic and poet. He wrote both supernatural fiction and some children's literature. Bullett was born in London and educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. During World War II he worked for the BBC in London, and after the war was a radio broadcaster. Bullett also contributed to the Times Literary Supplement. Politically, Bullett described himself as a "liberal socialist" and claimed to detest "prudery, prohibition, blood sports, central heating, and literary tea parties".

Book preview

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