the Garden Of Eden (1963)

by Brand, Max

  He made a grimace. "Well, I'll shut them in. Have I been very wrong in my talk to you?"

  "I think you haven't talked to many women," said Ruth. "And--most men do not talk as you do."

  "Most men are fools," answered the egoist. "What I say to you is the truth, but if the truth offends you I shall talk of other things."

  He threw himself on the ground sullenly. "Of what shall I talk?"

  "Of nothing, perhaps. Listen!"

  For the great quiet of the valley was falling on her, and the distances over which her eyes reached filled her with the delightful sense of silence. There were deep blue mountains piled against the paler sky; down the slope and through the trees the river was untarnished, solid, silver; in the boughs behind her the wind whispered and then stopped to listen likewise. There was a faint ache in her heart at the thought that she had not known such things all her life. She knew then what gave the face of David of Eden its solemnity. She leaned a little toward him.

  "Now tell me about yourself. What you have done."

  "Of anything but that."

  "Why not?"

  "No more than I want you to tell me about yourself and what you have done. What you feel, what you think from time to time, I wish to know; I am very happy to know. I fit in those bits of you to the picture I have made."

  Once more the egoist was talking!

  "But to have you tell me of what you have done--that is not pleasant. I do not wish to know that you have talked to other men and smiled on them. I do not wish to know of a single happy day you spent before you came to the Garden of Eden. But I shall tell you of the four men who are my masters if you wish."

  "Tell me of them if you will."

  "Very well. John was the beginning. He died before I came. Of the others Matthew was my chief friend. He was very old and thin. His wrist was smaller than yours, almost. His hair was a white mist. In the evening there seemed to be a pale moonshine around his face.

  "He was very small and old--so old that sometimes I thought he would dry up or dissolve and disappear. Toward the last, before God called him, Matthew grew weak, and his voice was faint, yet it was never sharp or shaken. Also, until the very end his eyes were young, for his heart was young.

  "That was Matthew. He was like you. He liked the silence. 'Listen,' he would say. 'The great stillness is the voice; God is speaking.' Then he would raise one thin finger and we caught our breath and listened.

  "Do you see him?"

  "I see him, and I wish that I had known him."

  "Of the others, Luke was taller than I. He had yellow hair as long and as coarse as the mane of a yellow horse. When he rode around the lake we could hear him coming for a great distance by his singing, for his voice was as strong as the neigh of Glani. I have only to close my eyes, and I can hear that singing of Luke from beside the lake. Ah, he was a huge man! The horses sweated under him.

  "His beard was long; it came to the middle of his belly; it had a great blunt square end. Once I angered him. I crept to him when he slept--I was a small boy then--and I trimmed the beard down to a point.

  "When Luke wakened he felt the beard and sat for a long time looking at me. I was so afraid that I grew numb, I remember. Then he went to the Room of Silence. When he came out his anger was gone, but he punished me. He took me to the lake and caught me by the heels and swung me around his head. When he loosened his fingers I shot into the air like a light stone. The water flashed under me, and when I struck the surface seemed solid. I thought it was death, for my senses went out, but Luke waded in and dragged me back to the shore. However, his beard remained pointed till he died."

  He chuckled at the memory.

  "Paul reproved Luke for what he had done. Paul was a big man, also, but he was short, and his bigness lay in his breadth. He had no hair, and he stood under Luke nodding so that the sun flashed back and forth on his bald head. He told Luke that I might have been killed.

  "'Better teach him sober manners now,' said Luke, 'than be a jester to knock at the gate of God.'

  "This Paul was wonderfully silent. He was born unhappy and nothing could make him smile. He used to wander through the valley alone in the middle of winter, half dead with cold and eating nothing. In those times, even Luke was not strong enough to make him come home to us.

  "I know that for ten days at one time he had gone without speech. For that reason he loved to have Joseph with him, because Joseph understood signs.

  "But when silence left him, Paul was great in speech. Luke spoke in a loud voice and Matthew beautifully, but Paul was terrible. He would fall on his knees in an agony and pray to God for salvation for us and for himself. While he kneeled he seemed to grow in size. He filled the room.

  And his words were like whips. They made me think of all my sins. That is how I remember Paul, kneeling, with his long arms thrown over his head.

  "Matthew died in the evening just as the moon rose. He was sitting beside me. He put his hand in mine. After a while I felt that the hand was cold, and when I looked at Matthew his head had fallen.

  "Paul died in a drift of snow. We always knew that he had been on his knees praying when the storms struck him and he would not rise until he had finished the prayer.

  "Luke bowed his head one day at the table and died without a sound--in spite of all his strength.

  "All these men have not really died out of the valley. They are here, like mists; they are faces of thin air. Sometimes when I sit alone at my table, I can almost see a spirit-hand like that of Matthew rise with a shadow-glass of wine.

  "But shall I tell you a strange thing? Since you came into the valley, these mist-images of my dead masters grow faint and thinner than ever."

  "You will remember me, also, when I have gone?"

  "Do not speak of it! But yes, if you should go, every spring, when these yellow flowers blossom, you would return to me and sit as you are sitting now. However you are young, yet there are ways. After Matthew died, for a long time I kept fresh flowers in his room and kept his memory fresh with them. But," he repeated, "you are young. Do not talk of death!"

  "Not of death, but of leaving the Garden."

  He stared gravely at her, and flushed.

  "You are tormenting me as I used to torment my masters when I was a boy.

  But it is wrong to anger me. Besides I shall not let you go."

  "Not let me go?"

  "Am I a fool?" he asked hotly. "Why should I let you go?"

  "You could not keep me."

  It brought him to his feet with a start.

  "What will free you?"

  "Your own honor, David."

  His head fell.

  "It is true. Yes, it is true. But let us ride on. I no longer am pleased with this place. It is tarnished; there are unhappy thoughts here!"

  "What a child he is!" thought the girl, as she climbed into the saddle again. "A selfish, terrible, wonderful child!"

  It seemed, after that, that the purpose of David was to show the beauties of the Garden to her until she could not brook the thought of leaving. He told her what grew in each meadow and what could be reaped from it.

  He told her what fish were caught in the river and the lake. He talked of the trees. He swung down from Glani, holding with hand and heel, and picked strange flowers and showed them to her.

  "What a place for a house!" she said, when, near the north wall, they passed a hill that overlooked the entire length of the valley.

  "I shall build you a house there," said David eagerly. "I shall build it of strong rock. Would that make you happy? Very tall, with great rooms."

  An impish desire to mock him came to her.

  "Do you know what I'm used to? It's a boarding house where I live in a little back bedroom, and they call us to meals with a bell."

  The humor of this situation entirely failed to appeal to him.

  "I also," he said, "have a bell. And it shall be used to call you to dinner, if you wish."

  He was so grave that she did not dare to laugh
. But for some reason that moment of bantering brought the big fellow much closer to her than he had been before. And when she saw him so docile to her wishes, for all his strength and his mastery, the only thing that kept her from opening her heart to him, and despising the game which she and Connor were playing with him, was the warning of the gambler.

  "I've heard a young buck talk to a young squaw--before he married her.

  The same line of junk!"

  Connor must be right. He came from the great city.

  But before that ride was over she was repeating that warning very much as Odysseus used the flower of Hermes against the arts of Circe. For the Garden of Eden, as they came back to the house after the circuit, seemed to her very much like a little kingdom, and the monarch thereof was inviting her in dumb-show to be the queen of the realm.

  Chapter TWENTY-NINE

  At the house they were met by one of the servants who had been waiting for David to receive from the master definite orders concerning some woodchopping. For the trees of the garden were like children to David of Eden, and he allowed only the ones he himself designated to be cut for timber or fuel. He left the girl with manifest reluctance.

  "For when I leave you of what do you think, and what do you do? I am like the blind."

  She felt this speech was peculiar in character. Who but David of Eden could have been jealous of the very thoughts of another? And smiling at this, she went into the patio where Ben Connor was still lounging. Few things had ever been more gratifying to the gambler than the sight of the girl's complacent smile, for he knew that she was judging David.

  "What happened?" he asked.

  "Nothing worth repeating. But I think you're wrong, Ben. He isn't a barbarian. He's just a child."

  "That's another word for the same thing. Ever see anything more brutal than a child? The wildest savage that ever stepped is a saint compared with a ten-year-old boy."

  "Perhaps. He acts like ten years. When I mention leaving the valley he flies into a tantrum; he has taken me so much for granted that he has even picked out the site for my house."

  "As if you'd ever stay in a place like this!"

  He covered his touch of anxiety with loud laughter.

  "I don't know," she was saying thoughtfully a moment later. "I like it--a lot."

  "Anything seems pretty good after Lukin. But when your auto is buzzing down Broadway--"

  She interrupted him with a quick little laugh of excitement.

  "But do you really think I can make him leave the valley?"

  "Of course I'm sure."

  "He says there's a law against it."

  "I tell you, Ruth, you're his law now; not whatever piffle is in that Room of Silence."

  She looked earnestly at the closed door. Her silence had always bothered the gambler, and this one particularly annoyed him.

  "Let's hear your thoughts?" he asked uneasily.

  "It's just an idea of mine that inside that room we can find out everything we want to know about David Eden."

  "What do we want to know?" growled Connor. "I know everything that's necessary. He's a nut with a gang of the best horses that ever stepped.

  I'm talking horse, not David Eden. If I have to make the fool rich, it isn't because I want to."

  She returned no direct answer, but after a moment: "I wish I knew."

  "What?"

  She became profoundly serious.

  "The point is this: he may be something more than a boy or a savage.

  And if he is something more, he's the finest man I've ever laid eyes on. That's why I want to get inside that room. That's why I want to learn the secret--if there is a secret--the things he believes in, how he happens to be what he is and how--"

  Connor had endured her rising warmth of expression as long as he could.

  Now he exploded.

  "You do me one favor," he cried excitedly, more moved than she had ever seen him before. "Let me do your thinking for you when it comes to other men. You take my word about this David Eden. Bah! When I have you fixed up in little old Manhattan you'll forget about him and his mystery inside a week. Will you lay off on the thinking?"

  She nodded absently. In reality she was struck by the first similarity she had ever noticed between David of Eden and Connor the gambler: within ten minutes they had both expressed remarkable concern as to what might be her innermost thoughts. She began to feel that Connor himself might have elements of the boy in his make up--the cruel boy which he protested was in David Eden.

  She had many reasons for liking Connor. For one thing he had offered her an escape from her old imprisoned life. Again he had flattered her in the most insinuating manner by his complete trust. She knew that there was not one woman in ten thousand to whom he would have confided his great plan, and not one in a million whose ability to execute his scheme he would have trusted.

  More than this, before her trip to the Garden he had given her a large sum of money for the purchase of the Indian's gelding; and Ruth Manning had learned to appreciate money. He had not asked for any receipt. His attitude had been such that she had not even been able to mention that subject.

  Yet much as she liked Connor there were many things about him which jarred on her. There was a hardness, always working to the surface like rocks on a hard soil. Worst of all, sometimes she felt a degree of uncleanliness about his mind and its working. She would not have recoiled from these things had he been nearer her own age; but in a man well over thirty she felt that these were fixed characteristics.

  He was in all respects the antipode of David of Eden. It was easier to be near Connor, but not so exciting. David wore her out, but he also was marvelously stimulating. The dynamic difference was that Connor sometimes inspired her with aversion, and David made her afraid. She was roused out of her brooding by the voice of the gambler saying: "When a woman begins to think, a man begins to swear."

  She managed to smile, but these cheap little pat quotations which she had found amusing enough at first now began to grate on her through repetition. Just as Connor tagged and labeled his idea with this aphorism, so she felt that Connor himself was tagged by them. She found him considering her with some anxiety.

  "You haven't begun to doubt me, Ruth?" he asked her.

  And he put out his hand with a note of appeal. It was a new r(le for him and she at once disliked it. She shook the hand heartily.

  "That's a foolish thing to say," she assured him. "But--why does that old man keep sneaking around us?"

  It was Zacharias, who for some time had been prowling around the patio trying to find something to do which would justify his presence.

  "Do you think David Eden keeps him here as a spy on us?"

  This was too much for even Connor's suspicious mind, and he chuckled.

  "They all want to hang around and have a look at you--that's the point," he answered. "Speak to him and you'll see him come running."

  It needed not even speech; she smiled and nodded at Zacharias, and he came to her at once with a grin of pleasure wrinkling his ancient face.

  She invited him to sit down.

  "I never see you resting," she said.

  "David dislikes an idler," said Zacharias, who acknowledged her invitation by dropping his withered hands on the back of the chair, but made no move to sit down.

  "But after all these years you have worked for him, I should think he would give you a little house of your own, and nothing to do except take care of yourself."

  He listened to her happily, but it was evident from his pause that he had not gathered the meaning of her words.

  "You come from the South?" he asked at length.

  "My father came from Tennessee."

  There was an electric change in the face of the Negro.

  "Oh, Lawd, oh, Lawd!" he murmured, his voice changing and thickening a little toward the soft Southern accent. "That's music to old Zacharias!"

  "Do you come from Tennessee, Zacharias?"

  Again there was a pause as the tho
ughts of Zacharias fled back to the old days.

  "Everything in between is all shadowy like evening, but what I remember most is the little houses on both sides of the road with the gardens behind them, and the babies rolling in the dust and shouting and their mammies coming to the doors to watch them."

  "How long ago was that?" she asked, deeply touched.

  He grew troubled.

  "Many and many a year ago--oh, many a long, weary year, for Zacharias!"

  "And you still think of the old days?"

  "When the bees come droning in the middle of the day, sometimes I think of them."

  He struck his hands lightly together and his misty-bright eyes were plainly looking through sixty years as though they were a day.

  "But why did you leave?" asked Ruth tenderly.

  Zacharias slowly drew his eyes away from the mists of the past and became aware of the girl's face once more.

  "Because my soul was burning in sin. It was burning and burning!"

  "But wouldn't you like to go back?"

  The head of Zacharias fell and he knitted his fingers.

  "Coming to the Garden of Eden was like coming into heaven. There's no way of getting out again without breaking the law. The Garden is just like heaven!"

  Connor spoke for the first time.

  "Or hell!" he exclaimed.

  It caused Ruth Manning to cry out at him softly; Zacharias was mute.

  "Why did you say that?" said the girl, growing angry.

  "Because I hate to see a bad bargain," said the gambler. "And it looks to me as if our friend here paid pretty high for anything he gets out of the Garden."

  He turned sharply to Zacharias.

  "How long have you been working here?"

  "Sixty years. Long years!"

  "And what have you out of it? What clothes?"

  "Enough to wear."

  "What food?"

  "Enough to eat."

  "A house of your own?"

  "No."

  "Land of your own?"

  "No."

  "Sixty years and not a penny saved! That's what I call a sharp bargain!