And speak for himself he did.
“Despite the doubts cast upon my parentage by Darwin, I am Adam’s son,” he said, in response to my question. “But, say, I’m an angel with wings full grown compared with what Pa was when he was a boy.”
“Do tell me about the time Adam was a boy,” I implored. In imagination I saw a spilling of red ink over the first page of the New York Universe: “Adam’s Own Story of the Rise and Fall of Man.”
“Dad and Darwin do beat creation,” Cain commented. “The delineator of the ‘Descent of Man’ says that the earth grew as naturally as a mushroom on a dung heap. Since hearing of it, Topsy has been giving herself airs under the impression that as she ‘just growed,’ she was the first woman. Adam says he doesn’t mind being called a myth by the higher critics, but when an Afro-American minister proves by logic as indisputable as a proposition in Euclid that the oldest inhabitant was a black man, and when Topsy lays claim to being his wife, he thinks it’s about time to draw the color line. Job tried to comfort Pa by telling him that it is better to be a myth than a martyr, for martyrs are burned that myths may live.”
“And Mother Eve?”
“Oh, she is an allegory, too. The legend of the lady of the pippins was generated into the genius of Genesis for the sole purpose of stimulating the cerebral cells of the clergymen whose imaginations have become stunted by much raking for Greek roots. Despite the ancient scandal when she listened to the solo of the serpent—and the result proved so disastrous woman has never been inclined to listen to any voice but her own since that distant day—Eve actually asked Adam to buy her one of those serpentine dresses the next time he went to Vanity Valley-on-the-Hudson. Pa replied that because other women were reverting to the original clinging fig-leaf garb, was no reason why she should advertise her shame to the world.
“‘To be fashionable is better than to be a Puritan mother,’ Eve retorted. A woman can find comfort in a new garter or a picture hat even when a scandal is hanging over her backbone.”
“Then the episode of Eden—”
“Eve’s appetite for apples, which gave the world dyspepsia and all the ills to which flesh is heir, has been thrown up in her face ever since the world began. Come to think of it, though, Darwin says there never was any beginning.”
“Darwin has had his day,” I observed. “His teaching is now obsolete. Some day I’m going to write a book—everybody does these days—and I have already copyrighted the title, so literary pirates may beware. It is to be called ‘The Ascent of Man.’ No more is man the old Adam, the Eden of his perfect behind him forbidding its gardens of delight. In his present imperfect is the creative hauntings of the perfect he is yet to be. As in the old days the man said, ‘The woman’—so it is the woman who has given man the new birth. Creation always did centre about a petticoat, fables and creeds to the contrary notwithstanding.”