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Christmas Outside of Eden
by
No one answered. He questioned each in turn, but none of them could advise him.
“We have to find a name for it,” he said crossly; “so let’s sit down and think hard.”
So they sat down in the snow, scratching their heads, and thought hard. From time to time the Man enquired whether any of them had had an inspiration. They never had, which was discouraging when you consider what a lot of them were thinking. In this way at least an hour must have passed.
Things were getting both cold and embarrassing, when the little creature, who was being thought about so hard, showed signs of waking and began to stir in the Woman’s arms. I ought to have told you that ever since the Man’s home-coming it had been sleeping. First it kicked out with its bandy legs. Then it fisted its pudgy hands and yawned. Then it puckered its wee red face in a manner most alarming and, to the amazement of them all…. The Woman was so amazed that she nearly let it drop. And yet what it did was perfectly natural; it opened its eyes, like two blue patches of heaven, and blinked at them. Last of all it emitted a thin, wailing sound that made everybody abominably unhappy. The crocodile became so emotional that his tears froze in two long icicles. After a pause the sound was repeated. All the animals rose on their hind-legs and covered their ears with their paws.
The Woman stared at them apologetically. She was distressed and puzzled. “Please don’t cover your ears,” she begged. “And don’t think that I’m hurting it. There’s something that it’s trying to tell us. It’s said the same thing before. It began saying it the moment I first found it. It’s gone on saying it, on and on…. There, there my little one, my belovedest.”
As if to corroborate her assertion that it had gone on and on, it commenced to cry afresh. Out of politeness to the Woman, though the sound hurt them, the tenderhearted animals uncovered their ears and listened intently. This is what they heard, repeated over and over, “Baa-aa-by! Baa-aa-by! Baa-aa-by!”
They were all shaking with sobbing when the elephant, in his coarsest manner, lifted, up his trunk and snorted through it contemptuously.
“Stop snorting,” the Man ordered impatiently. “There’s no reason why you should snort.”
“Isn’t there?” The elephant shuffled to his feet to depart. Before he went, just to show his independence, again he snorted. Across his shoulder he remarked. “And you think yourself so wise! You want to know what to call it. Every time it speaks it tells you.” It cried once more. “There you are!” The elephant trumpeted triumphantly as he seated himself at the top of the slide, having pulled his tail from under him preparatory to tobogganning down the path. “Don’t you hear what it says? ‘Baa-aa-by! Baa-aa-by!’ It couldn’t be put more plainly. It’s asking you to call it baby.”
As the elephant pushed off and vanished in a whirl of flying snow, the Woman turned to the Man with a smile of gladness. “The clumsy fellow’s right. Weren’t we the stupids? Fancy not understanding our own baby!”
IX
As you may imagine, all the beasts and birds went back to the jungle very discontented. They didn’t see why they shouldn’t have babies. They were wild to have babies. They talked of nothing else. No sooner had they got down the hill from visiting the cave than they turned round and started to climb back again. They kept urging the Woman to be frank with them and to confess how her baby had happened. Of course she couldn’t confess, seeing that she didn’t know herself. All that she knew was that she hadn’t felt well since she had eaten the forbidden fruit in Eden and, now that the baby had been born, she felt completely restored. Such information wasn’t of much use to the animals, for the forbidden fruit grew inside of Eden and the gates of Eden were locked. At last the Man had to interfere to prevent her from being bothered. He stuck up a notice at the entrance to the cave, December 25th. Mother And Child Both Doing Well. Don’t knock. When the animals came to call, he prevented them from entering by explaining gravely that having a baby was a very touch-and-go business and left one decidedly exhausted. To have listened to him you might have supposed that he’d spent all his life in rocking cradles, whereas he was such a novice that, had it not been for the elephant, he wouldn’t even have known that babies were called babies. Like all fathers he deceived himself that there was nothing he didn’t know about baby-lore. What was very much more surprising, by whispering and looking secretive he managed to impress the animals with his new-found learning and paternal importance.