Half-Past Bedtime

by Sir H. H. Bashford

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."