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."