East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

  Driving up the Hamilton road, Tom wondered how to break it to Dessie that their plan was no good. The best way would be to have another plan to substitute for it. How could they make enough money in one year to go to Europe? And suddenly he realized that he didn't know how much they'd need. He didn't know the price of a steamship ticket. They might spend the evening figuring.

  He half expected Dessie to run out of the house when he drove up. He would put on his best face and tell a joke. But Dessie didn't run out. Maybe taking a nap, he thought. He watered the horses and stabled them and pitched hay into the manger.

  Dessie was lying on the gooseneck sofa when Tom came in. "Taking a nap?" he asked, and then he saw the color of her face. "Dessie," he cried, "what's the matter?"

  She rallied herself against pain. "Just a stomach ache," she said. "A pretty severe one."

  "Oh," said Tom. "You scared me. I can fix up a stomach ache." He went to the kitchen and brought back a glass of pearly liquid. He handed it to her.

  "What is it, Tom?"

  "Good old-fashioned salts. It may gripe you a little but it'll do the job."

  She drank it obediently and made a face. "I remember that taste," she said. "Mother's remedy in green apple season."

  "Now you lie still," Tom said. "I'll rustle up some dinner."

  She could hear him knocking about in the kitchen. The pain roared through her body. And on top of the pain there was fear. She could feel the medicine burn down to her stomach. After a while she dragged herself to the new homemade flush toilet and tried to vomit the salts. The perspiration ran from her forehead and blinded her. When she tried to straighten up the muscles over her stomach were set, and she could not break free.

  Later Tom brought her some scrambled eggs. She shook her head slowly. "I can't," she said, smiling. "I think I'll just go to bed."

  "The salts should work pretty soon," Tom assured her. "Then you'll be all right." He helped her to bed. "What do you suppose you ate to cause it?"

  Dessie lay in her bedroom and her will battled the pain. About ten o'clock in the evening her will began to lose its fight. She called, "Tom! Tom!" He opened the door. He had the World Almanac in his hand. "Tom," she said, "I'm sorry. But I'm awfully sick, Tom. I'm terribly sick."

  He sat on the edge of her bed in the half-darkness. "Are the gripes bad?"

  "Yes, awful."

  "Can you go to the toilet now?"

  "No, not now."

  "I'll bring a lamp and sit with you," he said. "Maybe you can get some sleep. It'll be gone in the morning. The salts will do the job."

  Her will took hold again and she lay still while Tom read bits out of the Almanac to soothe her. He stopped reading when he thought she was sleeping, and he dozed in his chair beside the lamp.

  A thin scream awakened him. He stepped beside the struggling bedclothes. Dessie's eyes were milky and crazy, like those of a maddened horse. Her mouth corners erupted thick bubbles and her face was on fire. Tom put his hand under the cover and felt muscles knotted like iron. And then her struggle stopped and her head fell back and the light glinted on her half-closed eyes.

  Tom put only a bridle on the horse and flung himself on bareback. He groped and ripped out his belt to beat the frightened horse to an awkward run over the stony, rutted wheel track.

  The Duncans, asleep upstairs in their two-story house on the county road, didn't hear the banging on their door, but they heard the bang and ripping sound as their front door came off, carrying lock and hinges with it. By the time Red Duncan got downstairs with a shotgun Tom was screaming into the wall telephone at the King City central. "Dr. Tuson! Get him! I don't care. Get him! Get him, goddam it." Red Duncan sleepily had the gun on him.

  Dr. Tilson said, "Yes! Yes--yes, I hear. You're Tom Hamilton. What's the matter with her? Is her stomach hard? What did you do? Salts! You goddam fool!"

  Then the doctor controlled his anger. "Tom," he said, "Tom, boy. Pull yourself together. Go back and lay cold cloths--cold as you can get them. I don't suppose you have any ice. Well, keep changing the cloths. I'll be out as fast as I can. Do you hear me? Tom, do you hear me?"

  He hung the receiver up and dressed. In angry weariness he opened the wall cabinet and collected scalpels and clamps, sponges and tubes and sutures, to put in his bag. He shook his gasoline pressure lantern to make sure it was full and arranged ether can and mask beside it on his bureau. His wife in boudoir cap and nightgown looked in. Dr. Tilson said, "I'm walking over to the garage. Call Will Hamilton. Tell him I want him to drive me to his father's place. If he argues tell him his sister is--dying."

  3

  Tom came riding back to the ranch a week after Dessie's funeral, riding high and prim, his shoulders straight and chin in, like a guardsman on parade. Tom had done everything slowly, perfectly. His horse was curried and brushed, and his Stetson hat was square on his head. Not even Samuel could have held himself in more dignity than Tom as he rode back to the old house. A hawk driving down on a chicken with doubled fists did not make him turn his head.

  At the barn he dismounted, watered his horse, held him a moment at the door, haltered him, and put rolled barley in the box beside the manger. He took off the saddle and turned the blanket inside out to dry. Then the barley was finished and he led the bay horse out and turned him free to graze on every unfenced inch of the world.

  In the house the furniture, chairs, and stove seemed to shrink back and away from him in distaste. A stool avoided him as he went to the living room. His matches were soft and damp, and with a feeling of apology he went to the kitchen for more. The lamp in the living room was fair and lonely. Tom's first match flame ran quickly around the Rochester wick and then stood up a full inch of yellow flame.

  Tom sat down in the evening and looked around. His eyes avoided the horsehair sofa. A slight noise of mice in the kitchen made him turn, and he saw his shadow on the wall and his hat was on. He removed it and laid it on the table beside him.

  He thought dawdling, protective thoughts, sitting under the lamp, but he knew that pretty soon his name would be called and he would have to go up before the bench with himself as judge and his own crimes as jurors.

  And his name was called, shrilly in his ears. His mind walked in to face the accusers: Vanity, which charged him with being ill dressed and dirty and vulgar; and Lust, slipping him the money for his whoring; Dishonesty, to make him pretend to talent and thought he did not have; Laziness and Gluttony arm in arm. Tom felt comforted by these because they screened the great Gray One in the back seat, waiting--the gray and dreadful crime. He dredged up lesser things, used small sins almost like virtues to save himself. There were Covetousness of Will's money, Treason toward his mother's God, Theft of time and hope, sick Rejection of love.

  Samuel spoke softly but his voice filled the room. "Be good, be pure, be great, be Tom Hamilton."

  Tom ignored his father. He said, "I'm busy greeting my friends," and he nodded to Discourtesy and Ugliness and Unfilial Conduct and Unkempt Fingernails. Then he started with Vanity again. The Gray One shouldered up in front. It was too late to stall with baby sins. This Gray One was Murder.

  Tom's hand felt the chill of the glass and saw the pearly liquid with the dissolving crystals still turning over and lucent bubbles rising, and he repeated aloud in the empty, empty room, "This will do the job. Just wait till morning. You'll feel fine then." That's how it had sounded, exactly how, and the walls and chairs and the lamp had all heard it and they could prove it. There was no place in the whole world for Tom Hamilton to live. But it wasn't for lack of trying. He shuffled possibilities like cards. London? No! Egypt--pyramids in Egypt and the Sphinx. No! Paris? No! Now wait--they do all your sins lots better there. No! Well, stand aside and maybe we'll come back to you. Bethlehem? Dear God, no! It would be lonely there for a stranger.

  And here interpolated--it's so hard to remember how you die or when. An eyebrow raised or a whisper--they may be it; or a night mottled with splashed light until powder-driven lead
finds your secret and lets out the fluid in you.

  Now this is true, Tom Hamilton was dead and he had only to do a few decent things to make it final.

  The sofa cricked in criticism, and Tom looked at it and at the smoking lamp to which the sofa referred. "Thank you," Tom said to the sofa. "I hadn't noticed it," and he turned down the wick until the smoking stopped.

  His mind dozed. Murder slapped him aware again. Now Red Tom, Gum Tom, was too tired to kill himself. That takes some doing, with maybe pain and maybe hell.

  He remembered that his mother had a strong distaste for suicide, feeling that it combined three things of which she strongly disapproved--bad manners, cowardice, and sin. It was almost as bad as adultery or stealing--maybe just as bad. There must be a way to avoid Liza's disapproval. She could make one suffer if she disapproved.

  Samuel wouldn't make it hard, but on the other hand you couldn't avoid Samuel because he was in the air every place. Tom had to tell Samuel. He said, "My father, I'm sorry. I can't help it. You overestimated me. You were wrong. I wish I could justify the love and the pride you squandered on me. Maybe you could figure a way out, but I can't. I cannot live. I've killed Dessie and I want to sleep."

  And his mind spoke for his father absent, saying, "Why, I can understand how that would be. There are so many patterns to choose from in the arc from birth back to birth again. But let's think how we can make it all right with Mother. Why are you so impatient, dear?"

  "I can't wait, that's why," Tom said. "I can't wait any more."

  "Why, sure you can, my son, my darling. You're grown great as I knew you would. Open the table drawer and then make use of that turnip you call your head."

  Tom opened the drawer and saw a tablet of Crane's Linen Lawn and a package of envelopes to match and two gnawed and crippled pencils and in the dust corner at the back a few stamps. He laid out the tablet and sharpened the pencils with his pocketknife.

  He wrote, "Dear Mother, I hope you keep yourself well. I am going to plan to spend more time with you. Olive asked me for Thanksgiving and you know I'll be there. Our little Olive can cook a turkey nearly to match yours, but I know you will never believe that. I've had a stroke of good luck. Bought a horse for fifteen dollars--a gelding, and he looks like a blood-horse to me. I got him cheap because he has taken a dislike to mankind. His former owner spent more time on his own back than on the gelding's. I must say he's a pretty cute article. He's thrown me twice but I'll get him yet, and if I break him I'll have one of the best horses in the whole county. And you can be sure I'll break him if it takes all winter. I don't know why I go on about him, only the man I bought him from said a funny thing. He said, 'That horse is so mean he'd eat a man right off his back.' Well, remember what Father used to say when we went rabbit hunting? 'Come back with your shield or on it.' I'll see you Thanksgiving. Your son Tom."

  He wondered whether it was good enough, but he was too tired to do it again. He added, "P.S. I notice that Polly has not reformed one bit. That parrot makes me blush."

  On another sheet he wrote, "Dear Will, No matter what you yourself may think--please help me now. For Mother's sake--please. I was killed by a horse--thrown and kicked in the head--please! Your brother Tom."

  He stamped the letters and put them in his pocket and he asked Samuel, "Is that all right?"

  In his bedroom he broke open a new box of shells and put one of them in the cylinder of his well-oiled Smith and Wesson .38 and he set the loaded chamber one space to the left of the firing pin.

  His horse standing sleepily near the fence came to his whistle and stood drowsing while he saddled up.

  It was three o'clock in the morning when he dropped the letters in the post office at King City and mounted and turned his horse south toward the unproductive hills of the old Hamilton place.

  He was a gallant gentlemen.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 34

  A child may ask, "What is the world's story about?" And a grown man or woman may wonder, "What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we're at it, what's the story about?"

  I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught--in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too--in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill?

  Herodotus, in the Persian War, tells a story of how Croesus, the richest and most-favored king of his time, asked Solon the Athenian a leading question. He would not have asked it if he had not been worried about the answer. "Who," he asked, "is the luckiest person in the world?" He must have been eaten with doubt and hungry for reassurance. Solon told him of three lucky people in old times. And Croesus more than likely did not listen, so anxious was he about himself. And when Solon did not mention him, Croesus was forced to say, "Do you not consider me lucky?"

  Solon did not hesitate in his answer. "How can I tell?" he said. "You aren't dead yet."

  And this answer must have haunted Croesus dismally as his luck disappeared, and his wealth and his kingdom. And as he was being burned on a tall fire, he may have thought of it and perhaps wished he had not asked or not been answered.

  And in our time, when a man dies--if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man's property and his eminence and works and monuments--the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?--which is another way of putting Croesus's question. Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: "Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?"

  I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone received the news with pleasure. Several said, "Thank God that son of a bitch is dead."

  Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise and, just beneath, with gladness that he was dead.

  There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, "What can we do now? How can we go on without him?"

  In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to li
ve that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

  We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

  Chapter 35

  1

  Lee helped Adam and the two boys move to Salinas, which is to say he did it all, packed the things to be taken, saw them on the train, loaded the back seat of the Ford, and, arriving in Salinas, unpacked and saw the family settled in Dessie's little house. When he had done everything he could think of to make them comfortable, and a number of things unnecessary, and more things for the sake of delay, he waited on Adam formally one evening after the twins had gone to bed. Perhaps Adam caught his intention from Lee's coldness and formality.

  Adam said, "All right. I've been expecting it. Tell me."

  That broke up Lee's memorized speech, which he had intended to begin, "For a number of years I have served you to the best of my ability and now I feel--"

  "I've put it off as long as I could," said Lee. "I have a speech all ready. Do you want to hear it?"

  "Do you want to say it?"

  "No," said Lee. "I don't. And it's a pretty good speech too."

  "When do you want to go?" Adam asked.

  "As soon as possible. I'm afraid I might lose my intention if I don't go soon. Do you want me to wait until you get someone else?"