that they led them to the fire, where they sat and talked to them, and
presently they cooked a delicious meal for them of seal-soup and
wolf-chops. The coal that they burnt they had found in a deep hole in
one corner of the cave, and at the other corner there was a little
crack, down which they presently led the children. This opened upon a
ledge of ice, five or six feet above the shore, but now they could
hardly see anything, because the air was full of snow, driving fiercely
into their faces. The little ice-men looked grave.
"It's a blizzard," they said, "and very likely it'll go on for a week.
But luckily we've got plenty of meat, so that we shan't be in want of
food."
"But how shall we get back?" said Doris. "They won't know where we are,
and they'll think that we're both dead."
Marmaduke shook his head.
"I don't exactly know," he replied, "how you'd get back in any case. You
could never climb up the way you came, and it's very difficult to get
round the coast."
"But we'll have to get back somehow," said Cuthbert, "because of our
relations at home."
Marmaduke looked puzzled.
"What are relations?" he said. "And why should you want to go back?"
So Cuthbert had to tell them all about his father and mother and his
Uncle Joe and his sister Marian; and Doris had to tell them all about
her mummy and her five little brothers and her aunts and cousins. They
were very interested, but it was quite clear that Cuthbert and Doris
couldn't leave that night; and so presently they crept in among the
feathers, and were soon very comfy and fast asleep. The next morning it
was still snowing, but it was rather fun helping to cook the meals, and
the little men showed them some lovely dances that were almost as old as
the world itself.
For a whole week they had to stay in the cave, with the blizzard raging
outside, but one morning when they crept down the crack they found the
sky clear and the sun shining. They could now see, towering straight
above them, tremendous precipices of rock, and miles of boulders and
broken ice, stretching out toward the horizon.
"Our only hope," said Cuthbert, "is that Captain Jeremy and some of the
fishermen will come exploring for us," and just as he said that far in
the distance they heard the report of a gun. Then a long way off they
saw some little figures and a tiny sledge drawn by dogs; and they stood
on tiptoe and waved and waved, hoping that Captain Jeremy might see them
through his telescope.
The little ice-men never came out by daylight, and when they heard what
the children had seen they made them promise on their dying oath not to
tell anybody the way to the cave. Once before, they said, a learned man
had discovered them, and he had tried to measure them with a pair of
compasses, so they had had to kill him, as gently as they could, by
putting him in the middle of the pile of feathers. Then they said
good-bye, and all the little men kissed them and sent their love to
everybody at home, and Cuthbert and Doris began to scramble over the ice
toward the sledge-party that was now much nearer.
When Captain Jeremy met them, you can guess how pleased he was, because
he had made up his mind that they must have been killed; and good Mr
Smith had tears in his eyes, but they were tears of joy. Everybody at
Port Jacobson, too, was so pleased that they made a big bonfire to
celebrate the occasion, and they all drank the healths of the little
ice-men and ate a lot of sweets in their honour.
When the children arrived home, however, early in May, and Cuthbert told
Marian all about them, she said at first that she wouldn't believe in
them, because Cuthbert hadn't believed in Mr Jugg. But Cuthbert had
grown wiser and less conceited, and he told Marian that he had changed
his mind. So Marian believed in them, and her daddy was rather pleased,
because there were more things under the earth, he said, than most
people imagined.
Not a twig that learned to climb
In the babyhood of time,
Not a bud that broke the air
In the days before men were,
Not a bird that tossed in flight
Ere the first man walked upright,
Nor a bee with craftier cell
Than a Roman citadel,
But, with all its pride and pain,
Into dust crept back again.
Oh, what wisdom there must be
Hidden in the earth and me!
UNCLE JOE'S STORY
[Illustration: Bella at Eden]
IV
UNCLE JOE'S STORY
Marian's mummy used to read the Bible to her, so that she knew all about
Adam and Eve; but she never knew that Eve had a little daughter until
Uncle Joe told her this story. Next to her mummy and daddy, Marian loved
Uncle Joe better than anybody in the whole world. He lived in a little
house tucked into a sort of dimple on the side of Fairbarrow Down, and a
man called Mr Parker lived with him and helped to keep the place tidy.
Uncle Joe had been a soldier in a lot of queer countries a long way off;
and when Marian and Cuthbert asked him what he had fought for, he
generally used to tell them that it was for lost causes. In between wars
he had done lots of other things, such as trying to find out what caused
diseases, or whether plants that grew in some places could be made to
grow in others. Mr Parker had been a soldier too--a soldier of
misfortune, he used to say--and he had saved Uncle Joe's life three
times, and Uncle Joe had saved his life twice.
Uncle Joe's face was yellowish brown, because he had been in the sun so
much and had fever; but Mr Parker's face was red, and one of his eyes
was made of glass. Mr Parker used to call himself a lone, lorn orphan,
though he was much fatter than Uncle Joe, and afterward he used to spit
and say that it was rough weather in the Baltic.
It was about a fortnight after Cuthbert and Doris had come back from the
Arctic Circle that Uncle Joe told Marian this story, while they were
sitting under one of his apple-trees. Some of the apple-petals had begun
to drop, leaving the tiny, weeny, baby apples behind them, and the only
really ripe apples in Uncle Joe's garden were the two apples in Marian's
cheeks.
"But those aren't real apples," said Marian.
"Well, it all depends," said Uncle Joe, "on what you mean by real."
"You see," said Mr Parker, who had just come out to mow the lawn,
"there's more kinds of apples than a few. There's eating apples and
cooking apples and pineapples and crab-apples; and there's oak-apples
and Adam's apples and the apples what you sees in little girls' cheeks."
"Kissing apples," said Uncle Joe. "They're one of the most important
kinds."
He began to fill his pipe.
"And now that I come to think of it," he said, "they're one of the
oldest kinds too."
"As old as Mr Jugg," asked Marian, "or the little ice-men?"
"Well," said Uncle Joe, "I don't know about that. But they're certainly
as old as Eve's little girl," and then he began to tell Marian all about
her.
"I'm not quite sure," he said, "what her name was. It might have been
Gretchen or Olga, or it might have been Seraphine or Marie-Louise, but I
rather think that it was Bella. Of course you remember what happened in
the Garden of Eden, and how Adam and Eve had to leave it, not because
the good Lord God wanted to turn them out, but because He knew that they
could never be happy there any more. Every hour that they stayed they
would have become more and more miserable; and if they had come back it
would have broken their hearts, so He had to put two angels to guard the
gate. You see, He had wanted them to be sort of grown-up babies in the
loveliest nursery ever imagined, and to be able to go there and play
games with them whenever He was tired of ruling the universe. But when
once they had heard about growing up, and choosing for themselves, and
things of that sort, they could never have been babies any more, and it
would have been cruel to keep them in the nursery.
"Of course, they didn't understand that, and they thought it very hard,
and very often they used to grumble; and when they had learned to write
they used to send Him angry letters and say bad things about Him in
books. That was chiefly because they had to work and learn to look after
themselves; but that was the only way, as the good Lord God saw, in
which they could ever be happy again. 'They weren't content,' He
thought, 'just to be My playthings, so now they must learn to be My
comrades; and perhaps in the end that'll be the best for everybody,
though it'll be a long, long time before they've learnt how.' And then
He sighed as He saw the empty nursery and all the animals that they used
to play with, just as fathers and mothers sigh now when their babies
grow up and have to go to school. So Adam and Eve had to leave the
Garden, and just outside it there was a big town, full of houses and
factories and chimneys, and men and women who worked all day long. Who
were those men and women, and where did they come from? Well, it's
rather hard to explain. You see, Adam and Eve, through never having
grown up, had been in the Garden for thousands and thousands of years.
But outside the Garden there were seas and deserts and thick, hot
jungles full of wild animals. Some of these animals had looked through
the railings and been very struck with Adam and Eve, and sort of wished
in the bottoms of their hearts that they could have children just like
them. Some of them wished so hard that their next lot of children
actually did become a little like them, and their grandchildren became
liker still, and at last their great-great-grandchildren became real men
and women. Of course they weren't Garden men and women, like Adam and
Eve; they were just jungle men and women, running wild.
"Well, after thousands of years these jungle men and women became so
clever that they cleared away the jungle, and then they dug fields and
planted hedges and sowed corn and built towns; and those were the people
that Adam and Eve found when they left the Garden and began to look for
work. Later on Adam and Eve's children married the children of the
jungle people; so that now all the people in the world are half Garden
and half jungle."
"Even clergymen?" asked Marian.
Uncle Joe nodded.
"Yes, and policemen and postmen too."
"And lone, lorn orphans," said Mr Parker, "and the man what comes to
mend the bath."
"But that's jumping forward," said Uncle Joe, "a long time, for when
Adam and Eve left the Garden they didn't even know what children were,
and their hearts were full of bitterness against the good Lord God. That
was one of the reasons why He thought it would be so nice for them to
have a little girl of their own, because then in time they might begin
to guess, He thought, something of what He felt toward themselves.
"So about a year after they had left the Garden little Bella was born,
and they both thought that she was the loveliest baby that had ever been
seen since the world began. Poor Adam and Eve were then living in a dark
street on the outskirts of the town, and all that they could afford was
one room on the top floor at the back.
"Adam had got work at one of the factories where they made boots and
shoes, but he was only a beginner, of course, and hadn't learnt much,
and so his wages were very small. Sometimes Eve took in a little
washing, or got a job from somebody of darning socks, but she did her
best to keep their home tidy and some fresh flowers on the mantelpiece.
Every day, too, she put crumbs on the window-sill, and soon she had made
friends with the birds that came and ate them, and sometimes a bird
would fly from the Garden, and feed from her hand, and tell her the
news. Both Adam and Eve, you see, knew the birds' language through
having lived with them for so long. But they were never able to teach it
to their children, and since they died no one has ever learnt it.
"Soon after Bella was born Adam got a rise in wages, but soon after that
Eve had another baby; and then she had some more, and though they rented
another room or two they were always poor and often hungry. But after a
while they began to think less often of their old life in the Garden of
Eden, and sometimes they would even wonder whether they would go back
there if the good Lord God gave them the chance. You see, in spite of
their poverty and their hard work and the noise and smells of the great
town, they had learnt what it meant to have children, and to bend over
their cots and kiss them good-night.
"When Bella was eight she was rather a fat little girl, with dark eyes
and an impudent mouth, and she wore her hair in a long pigtail, and her
nose was ever so slightly turned up. Adam and Eve thought that she was
very beautiful, but everybody else thought her quite ordinary, and she
spent most of her time in the streets, though she was always punctual
for meals. She had lots of friends, most of them boys, but every now and
then she would get tired of them all; and those were the times when she
would go exploring and generally end up by hurting herself. Eve was too
busy ever to bother much about what Bella did or where she went, and the
Garden of Eden was the only place that she had strictly forbidden her
to go near. It was one of the rules, of course, that nobody was to go
near it, and there were angels at the gate with swords of flame; and
this was a rule, Eve thought, that it would be very much worse for one
of _her_ children to break than for anybody else.
"So she had always told Bella never even to go up the street that led
into the fields just outside the Garden; and if Bella hadn't been
feeling bored on this particular day--it was just a week after her
birthday--and if it hadn't been so hot, and the sun so scorching, and
the streets so dusty, and everybody so cross, and if Bella hadn't been
inquisitive just like her mother used to be, and if she hadn't sort of
happened to be walking up that street, and if the fields at the end of
it hadn't seemed so cool and so inviting, and if Bobby Gee, who was a
great friend of hers, hadn't dared her to do it--well, there's no
saying, but perhaps after all Bella wouldn't have stood looking at those
dreadful gates.
"There was now only a strip of grass between her and the Garden, and she
could see it stretched there beyond the railings. It was the middle of
the afternoon, and so heavy was the sunshine that the leaves of the
trees were all pressed down by it. None of them stirred. There was no
sound. The lawns beneath them looked like wax. And where were the
angels? Bella held her breath. There were none to be seen. There were
only the sentry-boxes.
"Very cautiously she took a step or two forward. Her bare feet made no
noise. The bars of the gate quivered in the heat. Then she stopped again
and listened. At first she heard nothing, but then, very, very faint,
there came to her ears the ghost of a sound. It came and died, and came
and died, like the waves of a sea hundreds of miles off. She crept
nearer and listened again, and now there were two sounds, rising and
falling. They came from the sentry-boxes, one on each side of the gate.
The angels inside were fast asleep. Bella bit her lip and crept forward.
She could feel her heart jumping like a mouse in a cage. The scents of
the Garden came to meet her. She could see its curved and vanishing
pathways.
"But what caught her eyes and made them grow round was a bending tree
just inside the gate. With her hands on the bars she stood looking at
it, and presently her mouth began to water. For from every branch of it
there hung such apples as she had never seen in all her life, and from
the lowest bough there hung an apple that was the biggest and most
beautiful of them all. And then another thing happened, for as she
pressed against the bars the great gate began to move. Very slowly it
swung open, and still the angels were fast asleep. Her heart was beating
now like two clocks at once--what an apple it would be to eat! A
bright-coloured bird hopped across the grass, and stood looking up at
her with an inquiring eye. She glanced round about her and over her
shoulder, but there was nobody in sight. Dared she go in? She thought
about the rules, and what her mother had said, and then she remembered
Bobby Gee. The angels were still breathing lightly and regularly. The
bright-coloured bird had flown away.
"Then she took a bold step and went into the Garden and tiptoed softly
up to the tree. The apple was so ripe that it was nearly ready to drop,
and it was just on a level with the tip of her nose. It smelt like
honey, and when she touched it it was as cool as marble. Then she
touched it again, and caught hold of it, and somehow or other it came
off the tree. She lifted it to her lips, and it felt like a kiss; and
then a Voice behind her said--
"'Well?'
"She jumped round, almost dropping the apple. It was the good Lord God
who stood looking at her.
"'What are you doing?'
"She hid the apple behind her, but His eyes shone through her, like
light through a window. She hung her head.
"'Are you Eve's little girl?' He asked.
"Bella nodded. She couldn't say a word.
"'I thought you must be,' He said. He put His finger under her chin.
There came a sound like the rushing of a great wind. The two angels had
heard His voice, and drawn their swords, and leapt into the Garden. In
another moment, Bella thought, they would have killed her. But the good
Lord God held up His hand. The two angels stood one on each side of Him,
leaning on their swords and looking rather downcast. Bella held out her
hand. The good Lord God bent forward and took the apple away from her.
"'Well, what excuse have you,' He said, 'for stealing My apples?'
"Bella considered for a moment. Then she thought of one.
"'Please, sir, mother did it. She told me so.'
"'But you knew the rules,' said the good Lord God.
"Bella hung her head again. She knew them quite well.
"'And the rules must be obeyed,' He said.
"Bella began to tremble.
"There was a moment's silence. The two angels stood like statues, still
leaning on their swords. Then the good Lord God spoke again.
"'Look at Me,' He said.
"Bella lifted her eyes and saw the World without End. He gave her back
the apple.
"'Well, you may keep it,' He went on, 'on condition that you give half
of it to Bobby Gee.'
"Bella said, 'Thank you, sir.'
"'But that's not all,' He continued.
"He bent forward and touched her cheeks.
"'For I hereby ordain,' He said, 'that now and for ever every little
girl and every little boy shall wear apples in their cheeks in
remembrance of what you have done. They shall be known as the brand of
Eden--the brand of Eden for little thieves--and their parents must see
to it, on pain of My displeasure, that they shall never be allowed to
fade away.'
"Then He bent still lower and gave Bella a kiss, and the tall angels led
her outside the gate; and that's why it is that the apples in little
girls' cheeks are almost the oldest kind in the world."
Uncle Joe lit his pipe. From where they were sitting they could see the
country for miles and miles. Down below them the town looked quite
small, and the spire of St Peter's Church just like a toy spire. Far
behind it, beyond the level cornlands, the sun was dropping into the
evening mists. It grew rosier and rosier, until it almost looked like an
apple itself. Mr Parker winked at Marian.
"Rough weather," he said, "in the Baltic."
Then he spat in his hands and rubbed them together.
"Well, I must be getting along," he said, "with this here lawn-mowing."
Eden had an apple-tree,
Eve a little daughter,
Tried to do as mother did,
But the Good Lord caught her.
"Wherefore 'tis ordained," He said,
"Here and in all places,
Children shall henceforward wear
Apples in their faces."
BEARDY NED
[Illustration: Beardy Ned's Fire]
V
BEARDY NED
Near Uncle Joe's house there was a small pool which was really the
beginning of a river; and this river ran into a bigger one that flowed
through the town in which Marian and Cuthbert lived. The big river was
rather muddy, but the little one was nearly always clear, and it was
quite easy to paddle across it, though there were some pools in it six
feet deep.
Up in the downs, where it began, it was hardly more than a bubbly
trickle, but lower down it grew wider and wider, and ran between the
reeds at the edges of the meadows. Close to Captain Jeremy's farmhouse,
where it joined the big river that flowed through the town, it ran for
almost a quarter of a mile through the middle of a sort of wood. It was
under the roots of some of these trees, as they pushed through the water
into the soil beneath, that the biggest of the trout had their nests,
where fishermen with flies couldn't reach them. But there were some big
trout, too, that lived under the meadow banks, and used to put up their
noses in the summer evenings, and suck down the flies that fell on the
water when they were tired of dancing in the air.
Cuthbert and Marian and Doris and Gwendolen were all very fond of this
river, and when they had finished paddling or bathing in the pools (for
they had all learnt to swim) they used to lie on the bank and keep very
still and watch the trout having their evening meal. They would see an
orange-coloured fly or a blue fly or a fly with pale wings like a
distant rain-cloud floating down on the top of the water and probably
wondering where it had got to; and then they would hear a little noise
like grown-up people make with the tips of their tongues against the
roofs of their mouths; and then the fly would be gone, and there would
be a tiny wave on the water, shaped like a ring, and growing bigger and
bigger. That meant that a trout had been lying in wait, with his eye
cocked on the surface of the stream, and had seen the fly, and liked the
look of him, and suddenly decided to swallow him up.
Sometimes a fisherman would come quietly along and kneel down on one
knee, and, after he had seen a trout rise, would open a little box and
take out a fly like the one that the trout had eaten. But this would be
a sham fly, made of feathers and silk, cunningly tied round a sharp
hook, and he would thread it on to a piece of gut so thin that they
could hardly see it. Then he would tie the gut to a sort of string that
was hanging down from the point of his fishing-rod; and then he would
swish his rod until the fly flew out straight and fell upon the stream,
just as the real one had done.
Sometimes they could see a trout come up and look at this fly and shake
his head, and go down again; but once or twice they had seen a big trout
rise and swallow it just as if it had been a real one. Then the trout
had found himself caught, and they had seen the fisherman's rod bent
almost double as the trout dashed to and fro; and at last they had seen
the fisherman slip a net into the water, and lift the trout on to the
bank, all curved and shining. But very often there would be no fishermen
at all, and they would see nobody for hours and hours, and hear nothing
but the cries of the river-birds and the suck, suck, of the feeding
trout.
The man that they saw most often was a man called Beardy Ned, because,
though he was only a youngish man, he had a sandy-coloured beard; and
they were always very sorry for him, because he had lost his wife in a
terrible railway accident soon after he had married her. She had left
him with a little girl only ten months old, and that was why Ned had let
his beard grow. He hadn't time, he said, to look after the little girl
and shave his face every day as well. When he had married, Ned had been
a postman, but after his wife had been killed he had given that up; and
he had wandered about ever since, doing all sorts of odd jobs.
Sometimes he helped the farmers get their hay in, or the gamekeepers
trap stoats, and sometimes he would chop wood, and sometimes he would go
far away and not come back for weeks and weeks. But wherever he went he
would take his little girl, whom he had called Liz after her mother; and
sooner or later he would always come back to this river, because that
was where he had first met his dead wife. He had lived so much in the
open air that his skin was as dark as a Red Indian's, and when he
laughed his teeth were like snow, and his eyes like the sea on a sunny
day. People like clergymen and large employers often used to tell him
that he ought to settle down. But why should he settle down, he asked,
so long as there was only Liz, and she could sleep in his arms as snug
as snug?
Liz was four years old now, and as brown as her father, and her hair was
short and curly like a boy's; and Cuthbert and Marian and Doris and
Gwendolen loved her almost as much as they loved Beardy Ned. For Beardy
Ned, in spite of his great trouble, was always full of a secret
happiness, and he had made this little song out of his own head that he
used to sing every two or three hours:
The wickedest girl there was,
The wickedest girl there is,
The wickedest girl there ever will be
Is my young daughter Liz.