“I must get rid of it,” said the man in the corner of the carriage,
abruptly breaking the silence.
Mr. Hinchcliff looked up, hearing imperfectly. He had been lost in the
rapt contemplation of the college cap tied by a string to his
portmanteau handles—the outward and visible sign of his newly-gained
pedagogic position—in the rapt appreciation of the college cap and the
pleasant anticipations it excited. For Mr. Hinchcliff had just
matriculated at London University, and was going to be junior assistant
at the Holmwood Grammar School—a very enviable position. He stared
across the carriage at his fellow-traveller.
“Why not give it away?” said this person. “Give it away! Why not?”
He was a tall, dark, sunburnt man with a pale face. His arms were folded
tightly, and his feet were on the seat in front of him. He was pulling
at a lank, black moustache. He stared hard at his toes.
“Why not?” he said.
Mr. Hinchcliff coughed.
The stranger lifted his eyes—they were curious, dark grey eyes—and
stared blankly at Mr. Hinchcliff for the best part of a minute, perhaps.
His expression grew to interest.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Why not? And end it.”
“I don’t quite follow you, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Hinchcliff, with
another cough.
“You don’t quite follow me?” said the stranger, quite mechanically, his
singular eyes wandering from Mr. Hinchcliff to the bag with its
ostentatiously displayed cap, and back to Mr. Hinchcliff’s downy face.
“You’re so abrupt, you know,” apologised Mr. Hinchcliff.
“Why shouldn’t I?” said the stranger, following his thoughts. “You are a
student?” he said, addressing Mr. Hinchcliff.
“I am—by Correspondence—of the London University,” said Mr. Hinchcliff,
with irrepressible pride, and feeling nervously at his tie.
“In pursuit of knowledge,” said the stranger, and suddenly took his feet
off the seat, put his fist on his knees, and stared at Mr. Hinchcliff as
though he had never seen a student before. “Yes,” he said, and flung out
an index finger. Then he rose, took a bag from the hat-rack, and
unlocked it. Quite silently, he drew out something round and wrapped in
a quantity of silver-paper, and unfolded this carefully. He held it out
towards Mr. Hinchcliff,—a small, very smooth, golden-yellow fruit.
Mr. Hinchcliff’s eyes and mouth were open. He did not offer to take this
object—if he was intended to take it.
“That,” said this fantastic stranger, speaking very slowly, “is the
Apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Look at it—small, and bright, and
wonderful—Knowledge—and I am going to give it to you.”
Mr. Hinchcliff’s mind worked painfully for a minute, and then the
sufficient explanation, “Mad!” flashed across his brain, and illuminated
the whole situation. One humoured madmen. He put his head a little on
one side.
“The Apple of the Tree of Knowledge, eigh!” said Mr. Hinchcliff,
regarding it with a finely assumed air of interest, and then looking at
the interlocutor. “But don’t you want to eat it yourself? And
besides—how did you come by it?”
“It never fades. I have had it now three months. And it is ever bright
and smooth and ripe and desirable, as you see it.” He laid his hand on
his knee and regarded the fruit musingly. Then he began to wrap it again
in the papers, as though he had abandoned his intention of giving it
away.
“But how did you come by it?” said Mr. Hinchcliff, who had his
argumentative side. “And how do you know that it _is_ the Fruit of the
Tree?”
“I bought this fruit,” said the stranger, “three months ago—for a drink
of water and a crust of bread. The man who gave it to me—because I kept
the life in him—was an Armenian. Armenia! that wonderful country, the
first of all countries, where the ark of the Flood remains to this day,
buried in the glaciers of Mount Ararat. This man, I say, fleeing with
others from the Kurds who had come upon them, went up into desolate
places among the mountains—places beyond the common knowledge of men.
And fleeing from imminent pursuit, they came to a slope high among the
mountain-peaks, green with a grass like knife-blades, that cut and
slashed most pitilessly at any one who went into it. The Kurds were
close behind, and there was nothing for it but to plunge in, and the
worst of it was that the paths they made through it at the price of
their blood served for the Kurds to follow. Every one of the fugitives
was killed save this Armenian and another. He heard the screams and
cries of his friends, and the swish of the grass about those who were
pursuing them—it was tall grass rising overhead. And then a shouting and
answers, and when presently he paused, everything was still. He pushed
out again, not understanding, cut and bleeding, until he came out on a
steep slope of rocks below a precipice, and then he saw the grass was
all on fire, and the smoke of it rose like a veil between him and his
enemies.”
The stranger paused. “Yes?” said Mr. Hinchcliff. “Yes?”
“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 every one 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
some one 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, 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.