VTHE GARDEN OF EDEN
THAT second visit of Mary Christmas always stood out in the Wescott mind as being particularly satisfying. In the first place, there were no formalities of introduction or of early acquaintance to be undergone. In other words, they could get right down to the business at hand, which was, as everyone must know, the asking of questions concerning that ancient and distant land the charm of which Mary Christmas had upon her first visit only suggested. Moreover, a year had wrought much improvement in Mary Christmas’ speech. Now there was little necessity to strain one’s ears for familiar words; in fact, there were few words that were unfamiliar. Only the curious rhythm in her voice had not changed, or the deep, rich tones that rose and fell with her changes of mood, or the lingering softness which she gave to especially loved words.
Nor was she averse to talking. After dinner, while their father interviewed a client in the library and their mother did some leftover household tasks, the children gathered around her in the warm sunlight of the orchard, white and fragrant with its falling blossoms, and asked the questions they had vainly asked one another all winter long.
“Is it really the oldest country in all the world, Mary Christmas—older than the Garden of Eden?”
Mary Christmas looked at them all as though she were trying to bridge the gulf between them and her, between their land and her own. There were time and agony in her eyes. Mary Wescott saw them there, though she did not know their names—wise, brooding, long-suffering things that were more ancient even than Mary Christmas’ land.
“Is it really the oldest country in all the world, Mary Christmas—older than the Garden of Eden?”
“Itisthe Garden of Eden,” said Mary Christmas, smiling at the slow surprise that crept over their faces. “God made it thefirst of any land after He had parted the waters. He was tired of looking at just water, and so He made land. That was my land, where Erzerum is now—the Garden of Eden.”
“Where Adam and Eve lived, Mary Christmas? And all the trees in the world?”
“Yes,” said Mary Christmas. “Trees white like these by the rivers, and blossoms blowing through the air when the spring comes after the long winter.”
“And the Tree of Life, Mary Christmas? Is that in Erzerum, even now?”
“Yes,” said Mary Christmas. But her eyes grew dark when she told them that, and she would not describe the Tree of Life.
They were all quiet then for a few moments. The idea of anyone’s having lived in the Garden of Eden was quite too staggering. John particularly could not get things straight in his mind. Was Mary Christmas so old that, like the Garden of Eden, she was ageless? She who had seen the Tree of Life, was it not likely that she, too, had walked in the cool of the day with God and Adam and Eve?
“What’s the next oldest thing in your land, Mary Christmas?” It was Roger who asked this question. The Garden of Eden with Mary Christmas in it was too much for him. Like John, he could not get it clear, and he was hoping now for something less overwhelming.
“The next oldest thing?” repeated Mary Christmas, as though all time were passing in slow review before her. “A great mountain is the next oldest thing, the highest mountain in the world, almost, with snow on it all the year. It rises from the plain—so.” With her quick, brown fingers she gathered handfuls of the fallen petals and piled them on a flat, bare place near the tree trunk. The children helped her silently by scooping up more petals from among the grass and giving them to her. “So—it goes up from the plain into Heaven, white with snow. It is a holy mountain. It is where Noah landed with the ark, after the rain fell forty days and forty nights.”
“I know,” said Roger. “Mount Ararat. It’s in the Bible.”
“It’s in the geography, too,” said Cynthia.
“Ararat,” repeated Mary Christmas slowly. “Masis, my people call it. Well, Noah landed there after all the rain had fallen. One morning the ark stopped and shook them all. And there they were! The water began to go down—quickly—and there was my land—the oldest land in all the world!”
Again John was puzzled. Mary Christmas and her land were so inseparable that it almost seemed as though she must have been there to show its high pastures and clear waters to Shem, Ham, and Japheth, while Noah’s wife tidied up the ark before leaving it, and Noah anxiously loosed the beasts, clean and unclean alike, determined that this time there should be no hitch in the starting of a new world.
“What became of the ark?” asked Roger. He had a detail-loving mind. “The Bible doesn’t say.”
Mary Christmas looked at them all without replying. Perhaps she hesitated to supplement the Bible; perhaps she was preparing them for the effect of her answer.
“The ark is still there on the top of themountain.” She spoke slowly and solemnly. “God keeps it there to make the people good. No one can see it, but it is there. When the moon shines on the mountain or the sun on certain days, there is its great shadow.”
“Oh, but, Mary Christmas! Still there, after all those thousands of years?”
“I tell you the truth,” said Mary Christmas. There was finality in her tone. “There is its shadow on the mountain-side.”
“Have you seen its shadow, Mary Christmas—you—yourself?”
“Yes,” said Mary Christmas. And then she did a strange thing. Raising her right hand to her head, she touched her forehead lightly with her fingers, then her breast, and then her shoulders from left to right, closing her eyes as she did so. Her still face awed the children. They had never seen that sign before.
“But what if anyone should climb the mountain to its very top?” they persisted, breaking the silence once she had opened her eyes. “Couldn’t they see it if it is there?”
“No,” said Mary Christmas. “Only someoneholy could see it—someone very, very good. The Virgin Mary—or, perhaps, your father.”
Years afterward they were to laugh at the remembrance of Mary Christmas’ words and at the picture of Father Wescott toiling up Ararat with all the zeal which he had ever shown on the eve of a Republican victory. But now they were impressed only by the reverence in her voice. Good and wise as they had always known their father to be, they had never thought him fit for such celestial company.
“Once a saint, a holy man, tried to climb the mountain to see the ark,” continued Mary Christmas. “That was hundreds of years ago. His name was Saint Jacob. For three days he went up and up through the snow and ice. But each morning, when he woke from sleep, he found himself back at the same place where he had started the day before. Then an angel came to him with a great plank of wood. The angel told Saint Jacob that God would let no one walk on the top of the mountain, for it was sacred; but that He had sent the saint a piece ofthe ark as a reward for his patience. And now that wood is in the great church at Etchmiadzin.”
“Say it again, Mary Christmas,” they begged, forgetting Saint Jacob and the ark in this unfamiliar, ringing word. “Say it again—please!”
She repeated it, and they said it after her, against those days when they should retell her stories to one another and to all their friends.
“Have you seen the wood yourself, Mary Christmas, in the great church?”
“I have touched it with my hand,” said Mary Christmas, again pausing a moment to make that mysterious sign on forehead and breast. “Once, when I was a little girl like Mary and Cynthia, I was ill. I could not walk or play. My father took me to Etchmiadzin—a long journey in a donkey-cart. I remember how tired I got and how my bones ached. When we came to Etchmiadzin, we went straight to the great church inside the high walls. It was dark, with lights only at the great altar, and sweet smells everywhere. The priest there toldme to place my hand on the wood. Then he made a prayer, and I was well again. On the way back home I sprang from the cart and ran ahead of the donkey. My father—he cried for joy!”
Mary and Cynthia looked at Mary Christmas’ hand, which lay in her lap, motionless for a moment, as she noted the effect of her story upon them. That long-fingered hand which was strained and knotted and bruised from the weight of her great bundle, which had yearned to hold an avenging weapon and to shed blood, which had woven birds and stars, tired sheep and climbing roses into their mother’s shawl—that hand had, years ago, touched a piece of the ark of Noah, and had felt within itself the quickening sense of returning health. The thought was too immense and far-reaching for them. They needed weeks and months to be able to comprehend it.
“In the church at Etchmiadzin there are other holy, sacred things,” continued Mary Christmas, her voice lingering over her words. “There is the head of the spear which the soldiers put into the side of our Lord. Thenin a great silver box there is the hand of holy Saint Gregory. He was the saint who lived down a well for thirteen years.”
“For thirteen years!” cried Roger, disbelief punctuating his words. “In a well! Oh, Mary Christmas!”
“He did,” said Mary Christmas. “I tell you the truth just as they told it to me when I was a little girl. A wicked king cast him into the well because he would not give up his faith. And there he stayed, holding tight to the rocks so that he might not slip into the black, terrible water. There were serpents in that water. They reached their heads toward him! But when he made the sign of the cross they slipped back again. It was the same with all the other creeping things. They fled before that holy sign!”
“What did he eat all those years, Mary Christmas?”
“A widow woman who lived near the well lowered food to him in a basket every night at midnight. One night the king’s soldiers caught her. They would have put her to death if holy Gregory had not heard her cries and called from his well. They heardhim call and mocked him. Then God sent an angel from Heaven who changed them all, and the king too, into wild boars, and threw a veil over the woman so that they could not find her.
“Then, when God knew that Gregory was good and patient enough to be a saint, He sent another angel to the wicked king’s sister, and commanded her to bring Gregory up out of the well. And when they lowered cords and drew the saint up, he was black like a man from Africa! The first thing he did was to put his hands on the horns of the boar who had been the king. The horns faded away, and the king came back. And Gregory said, ‘I am building a church for God in Etchmiadzin. Will you give gold and jewels?’ And the king said, ‘Yes.’”
“And the great silver box, Mary Christmas? What about that?”
Then Mary Christmas told them that when Saint Gregory died they cut off his right hand, which had wrought such wonders, and placed it in a silver box in the great church. The hand still wrought wonders, for when sick and suffering people and those who weretroubled with care and sin came to Etchmiadzin and knelt and touched the box, they were healed. Then, she said, there was a certain good bishop who was much worried in his mind over an old sin in his boyhood—a sin which most persons would have forgotten. But he could not forget it. All his life he had wanted to atone for it in some more satisfactory way than just by holy living. When he saw the miracles wrought by the hand of the saint, he thought of the most satisfactory way in all the world.
One night, when all was still within the high walls of the cathedral square in Etchmiadzin, he laid aside his bishop’s robes and put on the gray gown and hood of a pilgrim. He went to the dark church with its dim altar lights, and took the silver box, which he wrapped in purple velvet and bound with cords of gold. Kneeling by the altar in the stillness, he consecrated himself to purity of thought and act and, with the aid of holy Saint Gregory, to the service of God among those who most needed Him.
He did not know just where he was going, Mary Christmas told them; but once he wasoutside the wall, some Power led him where It would. It took him far beyond cities and towns to high, wind-swept plains, where rough men wandered with their flocks and herds, and to secluded mountain villages whose people knew nothing of Etchmiadzin and its great church, and had never heard of the good saint. Among these people and in these villages the pilgrim lingered, and wherever he saw sorrow or sickness, he would take the silver box with its rich covering of purple and gold from beneath his shabby cloak and show it to those who needed help. Here the power of the saint was greater even than at Etchmiadzin, for those in suffering or anxiety needed but to look upon the box, and they were straightway healed.
Most wonderful of all, the saint gave his miraculous help not only to people but to animals and flowers. For once when the tired pilgrim rested on the top of a high, silent hill and sang a psalm to God, he chanced to see a lamb that had fallen and was caught between two rocks. Carefully placing the silver box on the hillside, he hurried to help the poor creature. But as he drew near, he sawto his amazement the rocks that held the lamb separate, and the animal spring to its feet and frisk away.
“And an old man told me once,” concluded Mary Christmas, looking at the rapt faces of the children, “whatheheard about the hand of holy Saint Gregory. He said that flowers and trees which wanted water in the hot summer would spring up afresh when the silver box was brought among them. So that wherever the pilgrim went, the valleys and hills blossomed and there was peace everywhere—just as on Ascension eve.”
“What’s Ascension eve, Mary Christmas?”
Mary Christmas looked at them in perplexed surprise, and then at the church spire, just visible through the blossoming trees. Evidently she was doubtful as to the sufficiency of New England Congregationalism in the nineties.
“It is the eve of the day when our Lord ascended into Heaven,” she said slowly. “On that night, in my country, at one moment which no one knows, all the water everywhere is still. Rivers and streams do not move. In that moment stones and flowersand stars and all creatures speak to one another. If you should hide in a cave in the mountain and hear them, you would never feel sadness any more.”
The tense softness of her voice as she said those last words mingled with the hum of bees in the quiet orchard. The children were silent as they looked at her, even the boys vaguely conscious that this was no time to speak. She leaned back against the gray trunk of the apple tree, her body relaxed, her quick hands listless in her lap, her mouth still and thoughtful. Only her eyes under their dark brows were not still. They were as though haunted by living flames that soared upward from the fire in her heart. Mary Wescott saw them burning there, and understood all at once that Beauty had kindled them—the irresistible, torturing loveliness that lies in ancient, lip-worn tales, consecrated forever by their own mystic grace and by the simple faith of a people’s childhood.
In mid-afternoon, when their mother called Mary Christmas to a lunch of sandwiches and milk before she should again take to theroad with her great pack, the children followed her to the house, fairly dazed by all the unfamiliar things which they had heard. When she had gone, they would sort out all these bewildering events and persons and places and put them in orderly, well-kept mental niches, to be taken out and reviewed one at a time: the Garden of Eden with its Tree of Life; the ark and its one transcendent plank; Saints Jacob and Gregory; the penitent pilgrim with his silver box; Armenian hills and valleys in the single magic moment of Ascension eve. But now, overpowered by the wealth to which they had become the heirs, they could only stand and watch her as she ate her lunch and talked with their father and mother about the roads she would travel during the next few days and her prospects for the summer.
When, intent upon reaching a near-by town before the late June twilight should fade, she had gone upon her way in the lengthening afternoon shadows, and the children retold her stories to their father and mother, Mary Wescott, impelled by the desire to be alone, left them on the porch andhurried through the pasture to the boulder. Once she had climbed to the top and looked again at the crab-apple tree, now white with drifting bloom, the lump in her throat got the better of her and her eyes filled with tears. But no one can be quite sure that the crab-apple tree was the cause. It might have been the sad, haunting beauty of certain words of Mary Christmas, or the thought of one star calling to another across a wide Eastern sky.
The next day it rained. An east wind swept the last petals from the orchard trees, and drove them through the misty air into the drenching grass. Cynthia, returning in the rain from an errand for her mother, brought in one which clung close to her wet, pink cheek. Watching the storm from the library windows, they talked of Mary Christmas. What was she thinking of as she followed the coast road beneath the lowering rain-filled clouds? Was it of Saint Gregory, or the great, dim church where she had been healed, or of Raphael and little Mary in Erzerum? There was one place which theyknew where the highroad ran just above the ocean, where on clear days one could see the Mount Desert hills lying like a sleeping giant against the blue horizon. Here, on days like this, the surf, driven by the wind, pounded at the foot of fog-wrapped cliffs; here, they felt sure, she would wish for Ascension eve when for one moment the waters are still.