When Adam was a Boy: Random Recollections of the Oldest Inhabitant.
By the time Cain had completed his recital, we had reached an extensive
estate in the suburbs of Cimmeria.
“This is my birthplace,” said Cain, proudly.
“What! the Garden of—”
“Haven’t you heard that E. P. Roe has driven us back to Eden? At first
Mother didn’t want to come, for contrary to legendary lore, Eden is
situated at the North Pole. It is pretty cold when one’s only covering
is a shiver and the shadow of the Arctic circle. The only way Eve could
keep warm was by reading Jonathan Edwards’ sermons. She was especially
interested in the one wherein he said that sinners are held over the
pit of hell as one holds a spider or some other—the ‘other’ is mine:
I have to correct his grammar as well as his theology—loathsome insect
over the fire.
“After reading that, nothing would do for Mother Eve but that she must
cease shivering and become a sinner in order to have a hot time. Of
course being a woman, the snake could not resist her fascination, and
so she had no more reason to complain of the cold. Roe tried to open a
chestnut burr, pricked his fingers and got so mad that he drove the old
folks back to Eden. Mother Eve flirted with a Stygian plumber until she
got him to put hot air pipes from Jonathan Edwards’ crematory to the
Aiden roof garden. Weatherwise, the _mater_ is again comfortable.”
Adam and Eve were eating apples under the trees as we entered the
Garden. So glad was Eve to see a man who wasn’t a shade that she put a
pair of cherry lips to mine with a resounding smack.
“Forbidden fruit,” scowled Adam.
“There was a time,” I observed, “when I thought it better to welcome
the sting of a wasp rather than the kiss of a woman, but that was
before I had come in contact with a wasp and before I had been kissed
by a woman. Both have taught me that I knew neither wasps nor women and
that all things alliterative are not synonymous.”
Adam seemed anxious to change the subject from osculation to the origin
of things kissable, and to a man, of course, the only things kissable
are sweet little bits of laughing gurgling femininity.
“Doubtless you would be interested in my first impressions of my
helpmeet,” he said, “so I will give you the Genesis of Revelation. When
I was a boy—”
“He always gets childish after dinner,” whispered Eve in an aside
to me. Adam filled in the interruption by whittling on a toothpick.
“I’m glad he has a plentiful stock of lumber, for if you can keep him
whittling, you can get everything out of him except the truth. He
thinks he cuts a chunk out of history every time he flourishes his
jack-knife. The shavings he sells to the breakfast-food trust.”
“When I was a boy,” continued Adam, “I invariably spoke in the first
person, because I was the first person, but as Eve is my better half
I am now only a third, so in future I will not even use the editorial
‘we,’ but simply ‘the man’.”
“And the man said, ‘The woman’—” mocked Cain.
“You’re not in America, where the children bring up the parents,”
reproved Eve. “Besides, your information is but second-hand, for you
were ‘among those absent’.”
“Eve was bone of my bone,” continued Adam, “but not flesh of my flesh.
When I first set eyes on the woman she had not enough adipose tissue to
impair in an infinitesimal degree the rapid penetration of an X-ray; in
fact, from Cosmos to Cleopatra, woman has evaded the searching inquiry
of the X and is still an unknown quantity.”
“And the apple episode?” I questioned.
“That came about very naturally, as did everything in those days.
When the man and the woman were put in Eden, they were told that
everything should be kept decently and in order. Now in those days,
the English tongue had not reached the perfection it has to-day under
the clarifying influences of the spelling reform. There was no Trench
to tell us the use of the words and no popular novelists to bone the
dictionary as a chef does a bird. Eve’s education had been sadly
neglected. She didn’t know just what kind of order was meant and there
was no ‘Complete Housekeeper’ which could be consulted and no ‘Answers
to Correspondents’ column in a newspaper to aid her. So she sat down
and folded her hands.
“There is an aphorism that Satan finds ‘mischief still for idle hands
to do,’ and so when he saw that Eve left the dishes unwashed and her
hair uncombed, he said, ‘Presto, change!’ and was turned into a snake.
“Now it came to pass that the woman listened to the voice of the
charmer. Satan told of her grace and beauty, which Adam took as a
matter of course after the first day and ceased to comment thereon,
whereat the woman’s heart grew troubled.
“If you wish to know wherein you have failed to provide for the wife of
your bosom, you will find your neighbors well informed on the subject.
Adam might have learned much from the snake, for Eve poured her woe
into sympathetic ears—if snakes have ears. She wanted to know what was
the best kind of order.
“‘Apple-pie order,’ advised Satan promptly. Then being a lawyer, he
peeled off an apple-ate laugh.
“Eve related how her husband had tired of her and had taken to sleeping
night and day in the hope that Darwin might take the hint and find use
for another of his ribs—Adam had not yet been put wise to the fact
that he was minus a tail and thought that he could populate a harem by
dispensing with his ribs.
“The next day the serpent made another social call on Mistress Eve, who
tearfully besought a recipe for winning back her husband’s alienated
affections. Satan pondered a moment; then he said:
“‘You can’t please Adam, your husband, unless you give him apple
pie—the kind his mother used to make.’ Satan chuckled at the joke; he
thought it so good that he vowed it should be retold in every age as a
memorial of the fall.
“‘Give Adam some sass and then you can have everything in apple-pie
order,’ hissed the snake.
“‘You order the apples and I’ll make the pies.’
“But Satan had been cunning in transforming himself into a snake
instead of into a monkey, for he reminded Eve that he had no arms and
she must pick the fruit herself. This she did and then the serpent said
all good cooks tasted the ingredients to test their fitness for use.
Eve took a bite of the pippin; then she called Adam to get the core.
They liked the apple so well neither could wait for the pies to cook,
but ate up all the forbidden fruit.
“Sans bathing suit and sans modesty, Adam was taking a sun bath on
the beach, looking longingly over the gates of Eden at the wide world
outside when Landlord Darwin appeared.
“‘Front!’ came the command.
“Adam tried to put on a bold front, but as his linen was in the wash
and he had never been bell-boy in a hotel, he failed miserably. He
blushed at the exposure and was mercifully covered with confusion.
“‘I may as well tell the naked truth,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve been
swimming, and the woman thou gavest me did steal my clothes, saying
that to be in style she must have a tailor-made suit.’
“So Eve became the original new woman and ever since then the Edenless
Adams have called marriage a failure whenever they couldn’t lay the
blame on the woman. And Eve—well, she can make apple pies as good as
she ever did!”
“But that green apple gave Mother Eve a belly ache,” ejaculated Cain,
“and I came to deliver her. She has since said that wasn’t the last
time I gave her a pain, but one can excuse her using slang after
associating with such a fabulistic personage as Æsop.
“You would have lacerated laughter could you have seen Dad when the
Ichthyosaurus—the mother-in-Latin of the stork—brought me to Eden.
The chimney wasn’t large enough for the reptile relic of the Mesozoic
age to crawl down, so it carelessly dropped me onto the stomach of
the astonished Father Adam, breaking what has since been known as the
floating rib. From that accident arose the legend that woman was made
of the crookedest part of man, which was the reason she couldn’t keep
him straight.
“Eve welcomed me all right, for a mother takes to babies and goo goo
talk as naturally as ducks take to water, but Adam felt queer—out of
place; he didn’t quite understand the thing and wondered why I hadn’t
been born full-grown. He didn’t know whether I was a new kind of
breakfast food, a condensed milk advertisement, or an alarm clock sent
to wake him up early in the morning. Most of the time I was cutting my
teeth, Dad was sulking out in the backyard under the apple tree with a
pretty well-developed case of green eye and the blues. Occasionally
he would come in and try to smile as he peeped over in the couch of
fig leaves. Then Eve would take me up and hand me to Papa. He took me
as if he were afraid I would bite and held me out at arm’s length as
if he thought the thing might melt and ruin his full dress suit, which
consisted of a smile minus the fig leaves. I understand that evening
dress has differed little from that day to this.”
“I confess that I am lamentably ignorant on the subject, but I find
Henry James more lucid than the naturalists who wrote ‘Wild Men I Have
Known.’ What was the origin of species?”
“With all deference to Darwin and the rest,” explained Cain, “methinks
it was an apple seed!”
And being the first seed of the woman, Cain certainly ought to know!
ELECTION DAY BEYOND THE STYX.