"At last," said Queen Parysatis.
"It was Adam," answered Bagoas, smiling. "I have attempted, O King, to give you some notion of the thoughts which preoccupied me at my meeting with him. My outlook upon things is historical, and therefore necessarily pessimistic. Adam broke in upon my thoughts as a prophecy, a promise. He was in his first manhood, almost still a boy, and represented, in consequence, an earlier stage of evolution. He seemed in fact half child, and half animal. He had the stature of a man; he was well built, muscular, giving one the impression of an immense but graceful strength, of easy movements. His features were handsome, but unlike those usual in our country; the nose was a little rapacious, the mouth cruel, but his eyes were full of dreams. It was the face of one who looks towards distant horizons, having the immense calm of the desert, and full of a sleeping energy. Youth softened it, and lent it a delicate charm; but in age it will be terrible. And suddenly I heard a sullen voice saying: 'This is my garden.'
"I have noticed in all nomadic peoples, and in small scattered communities, that however terse the language, and however limited the vocabulary, the words are capable of innumerable shades of meaning. Gesture and modulation lend force and precision to what is said. Perhaps this is why the art of the theatre is always, at its best, the art of a naïve and unsophisticated people. Life in town tends to the production of a type, and individuality is suppressed; but life in the country, where the conventions are few and simple, tends to the formation of character. The theatric art, among town-dwellers, loses its broad simplicity and that directness of purpose which show man in immediate collision with facts, and is frittered away in mean motives and intangible temperaments, substituting for the play of circumstances the play of ideas. It is for the same reason that great empires always perish at the heart first; because dwellers in towns become uniform, and being surrounded by artificial circumstances are seldom brought into direct conflict with facts, but learn to cheat themselves with fine phrases and immaterial ideas."
"The good Bagoas is really a little prolix," whispered Parysatis to Merodach.
Bagoas heard the interruption and continued tranquilly:
"'This is my garden,' said Adam; and his words implied not only that I was an intruder, and that he was a proprietor, but also that the garden was beautiful, and that he was proud of it. I explained that I had lost my way, that I was hungry, that I was tired; and even as I spoke a young woman rose up out of the wheat and looked at me curiously.
"'We have little,' said Adam.
"They led me to their cabin of boughs, and brought me food; and they were naked and were not ashamed. They were strangers to the use of fire, and my meal consisted of nuts and honey, goat's milk and dates, such food as, our poets say, nourished the people of the golden age. In front of their cabin was an apple-tree, similar to the one upon which the birds had congregated, only with golden instead of ruddy fruit. I asked Adam if he would give me an apple from it.
"'The tree is dedicated,' he said; 'and we may not eat of the fruit; it is forbidden to us.'
"'We may not even touch it with our hands,' said the woman, who was called Eve; and she looked at the fruit covetously.