"There he was, all torn and bloody from the knife-blades of the grass,
the rocks blazing under the afternoon sun--the sky molten brass--and
the smoke of the fire driving towards him. He dared not stay there.
Death he did not mind, but torture! Far away beyond the smoke he heard
shouts and cries. Women screaming. So he went clambering up a gorge in
the rocks--everywhere were bushes with dry branches that stuck out like
thorns among the leaves--until he clambered over the brow of a ridge
that hid him. And then he met his companion, a shepherd, who had also
escaped. And, counting cold and famine and thirst as nothing against
the Kurds, they went on into the heights, and among the snow and ice.
They wandered three whole days.
"The third day came the vision. I suppose hungry men often do see
visions, but then there is this fruit." He lifted the wrapped globe in
his hand. "And I have heard it, too, from other mountaineers who have
known something of the legend. It was in the evening time, when the
stars were increasing, that they came down a slope of polished rock
into a huge dark valley all set about with strange, contorted trees,
and in these trees hung little globes like glow-worm spheres, strange
round yellow lights.
"Suddenly this valley was lit far away, many miles away, far down it,
with a golden flame marching slowly athwart it, that made the stunted
trees against it black as night, and turned the slopes all about them
and their figures to the likeness of fiery gold. And at the vision
they, knowing the legends of the mountains, instantly knew that it was
Eden they saw, or the sentinel of Eden, and they fell upon their faces
like men struck dead.
"When they dared to look again the valley was dark for a space, and
then the light came again--returning, a burning amber.
"At that the shepherd sprang to his feet, and with a shout began to run
down towards the light, but the other man was too fearful to follow
him. He stood stunned, amazed, and terrified, watching his companion
recede towards the marching glare. And hardly had the shepherd set out
when there came a noise like thunder, the beating of invisible wings
hurrying up the valley, and a great and terrible fear; and at that
the man who gave me the fruit turned--if he might still escape. And
hurrying headlong up the slope again, with that tumult sweeping after
him, he stumbled against one of these stunted bushes, and a ripe fruit
came off it into his hand. This fruit. Forthwith, the wings and the
thunder rolled all about him. He fell and fainted, and when he came to
his senses, he was back among the blackened ruins of his own village,
and I and the others were attending to the wounded. A vision? But the
golden fruit of the tree was still clutched in his hand. There were
others there who knew the legend, knew what that strange fruit might
be." He paused. "And this is it," he said.
It was a most extraordinary story to be told in a third-class carriage
on a Sussex railway. It was as if the real was a mere veil to the
fantastic, and here was the fantastic poking through. "Is it?" was all
Mr. Hinchcliff could say.
"The legend," said the stranger, "tells that those thickets of dwarfed
trees growing about the garden sprang from the apple that Adam carried
in his hand when he and Eve were driven forth. He felt something in
his hand, saw the half-eaten apple, and flung it petulantly aside.
And there they grow, in that desolate valley, girdled round with the
everlasting snows, and there the fiery swords keep ward against the
Judgment Day."
"But I thought these things were"--Mr. Hinchcliff
paused--"fables--parables rather. Do you mean to tell me that there in
Armenia"--
The stranger answered the unfinished question with the fruit in his
open hand.
"But you don't know," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "that that _is_ the fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge. The man may have had--a sort of mirage, say.
Suppose"--
"Look at it," said the stranger.
It was certainly a strange-looking globe, not really an apple, Mr.
Hinchcliff saw, and a curious glowing golden colour, almost as though
light itself was wrought into its substance. As he looked at it, he
began to see more vividly the desolate valley among the mountains, the
guarding swords of fire, the strange antiquities of the story he had
just heard. He rubbed a knuckle into his eye. "But"--said he.
"It has kept like that, smooth and full, three months. Longer than that
it is now by some days. No drying, no withering, no decay."
"And you yourself," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "really believe that"--
"Is the Forbidden Fruit."
There was no mistaking the earnestness of the man's manner and his
perfect sanity. "The Fruit of Knowledge," he said.
"Suppose it was?" said Mr. Hinchcliff, after a pause, still staring
at it. "But after all," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "it's not my kind of
knowledge--not the sort of knowledge. I mean, Adam and Eve have eaten
it already."
"We inherit their sins--not their knowledge," said the stranger.
"That would make it all clear and bright again. We should see
into everything, through everything, into the deepest meaning of
everything"--
"Why don't you eat it, then?" said Mr. Hinchcliff, with an inspiration.
"I took it intending to eat it," said the stranger. "Man has fallen.
Merely to eat again could scarcely"--
"Knowledge is power," said Mr. Hinchcliff.
"But is it happiness? I am older than you--more than twice as old.
Time after time I have held this in my hand, and my heart has
failed me at the thought of all that one might know, that terrible
lucidity-- Suppose suddenly all the world became pitilessly clear?"
"That, I think, would be a great advantage," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "on
the whole."
"Suppose you saw into the hearts and minds of everyone about you, into
their most secret recesses--people you loved, whose love you valued?"
"You'd soon find out the humbugs," said Mr. Hinchcliff, greatly struck
by the idea.
"And worse--to know yourself, bare of your most intimate illusions.
To see yourself in your place. All that your lusts and weaknesses
prevented your doing. No merciful perspective."
"That might be an excellent thing too. 'Know thyself,' you know."
"You are young," said the stranger.
"If you don't care to eat it, and it bothers you, why don't you throw
it away?"
"There again, perhaps, you will not understand me. To me, how could one
throw away a thing like that, glowing, wonderful? Once one has it, one
is bound. But, on the other hand, to _give_ it away! To give it away
to someone who thirsted after knowledge, who found no terror in the
thought of that clear perception"--
"Of course," said Mr. Hinchcliff thoughtfully, "it might be some sort
of poisonous fruit."
And then his eye caught something motionless, the end of a white board
black-lettered outside the carriage window. "--MWOOD," he saw. He
started convulsively. "Gracious!" said Mr. Hinchcliff. "Holmwood!"--and
the practical present blotted out the mystic realisations that had been
stealing upon him.
In another moment he was opening the carriage-door, portmanteau in
hand. The guard was already fluttering his green flag. Mr. Hinchcliff
jumped out. "Here!" said a voice behind him, and he saw the dark eyes
of the stranger shining and the golden fruit, bright and bare, held
out of the open carriage-door. He took it instinctively, the train was
already moving.
"_No!_" shouted the stranger, and made a snatch at it as if to take it
back.
"Stand away," cried a country porter, thrusting forward to close the
door. The stranger shouted something Mr. Hinchcliff did not catch, head
and arm thrust excitedly out of the window, and then the shadow of the
bridge fell on him, and in a trice he was hidden. Mr. Hinchcliff stood
astonished, staring at the end of the last waggon receding round the
bend, and with the wonderful fruit in his hand. For the fraction of
a minute his mind was confused, and then he became aware that two or
three people on the platform were regarding him with interest. Was he
not the new Grammar School master making his début? It occurred to him
that, so far as they could tell, the fruit might very well be the naïve
refreshment of an orange. He flushed at the thought, and thrust the
fruit into his side pocket, where it bulged undesirably. But there was
no help for it, so he went towards them, awkwardly concealing his sense
of awkwardness, to ask the way to the Grammar School, and the means of
getting his portmanteau and the two tin boxes which lay up the platform
thither. Of all the odd and fantastic yarns to tell a fellow!
His luggage could be taken on a truck for sixpence, he found, and he
could precede it on foot. He fancied an ironical note in the voices. He
was painfully aware of his contour.
The curious earnestness of the man in the train, and the glamour
of the story he told, had, for a time, diverted the current of Mr.
Hinchcliff's thoughts. It drove like a mist before his immediate
concerns. Fires that went to and fro! But the preoccupation of his
new position, and the impression he was to produce upon Holmwood
generally, and the school people in particular, returned upon him with
reinvigorating power before he left the station and cleared his mental
atmosphere. But it is extraordinary what an inconvenient thing the
addition of a soft and rather brightly-golden fruit, not three inches
in diameter, may prove to a sensitive youth on his best appearance.
In the pocket of his black jacket it bulged dreadfully, spoilt the
lines altogether. He passed a little old lady in black, and he felt
her eye drop upon the excrescence at once. He was wearing one glove
and carrying the other, together with his stick, so that to bear the
fruit openly was impossible. In one place, where the road into the
town seemed suitably secluded, he took his encumbrance out of his
pocket and tried it in his hat. It was just too large, the hat wobbled
ludicrously, and just as he was taking it out again, a butcher's boy
came driving round the corner.
"Confound it!" said Mr. Hinchcliff.
He would have eaten the thing, and attained omniscience there and
then, but it would seem so silly to go into the town sucking a juicy
fruit--and it certainly felt juicy. If one of the boys should come by,
it might do him a serious injury with his discipline so to be seen.
And the juice might make his face sticky and get upon his cuffs--or it
might be an acid juice as potent as lemon, and take all the colour out
of his clothes.
Then round a bend in the lane came two pleasant sunlit girlish figures.
They were walking slowly towards the town and chattering--at any
moment they might look round and see a hot-faced young man behind them
carrying a kind of phosphorescent yellow tomato! They would be sure to
laugh.
"_Hang!_" said Mr. Hinchcliff, and with a swift jerk sent the
encumbrance flying over the stone wall of an orchard that there abutted
on the road. As it vanished, he felt a faint twinge of loss that lasted
scarcely a moment. He adjusted the stick and glove in his hand, and
walked on, erect and self-conscious, to pass the girls.
* * * * *
But in the darkness of the night Mr. Hinchcliff had a dream, and saw
the valley, and the flaming swords, and the contorted trees, and knew
that it really was the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge that he had
thrown regardlessly away. And he awoke very unhappy.
In the morning his regret had passed, but afterwards it returned and
troubled him; never, however, when he was happy or busily occupied. At
last, one moonlight night about eleven, when all Holmwood was quiet,
his regrets returned with redoubled force, and therewith an impulse to
adventure. He slipped out of the house and over the playground wall,
went through the silent town to Station Lane, and climbed into the
orchard where he had thrown the fruit. But nothing was to be found
of it there among the dewy grass and the faint intangible globes of
dandelion down.