East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

The hatred in Charles’ face frightened him. “I guess it was just an accident,” he said lamely. “I bet I couldn’t do it again.”

He did not know what it was, but it was not soft or weak, and it might be hatred.

And Adam was more afraid of the gentleness than he had been at the violence, for it seemed to him that he was being trained as a sacrifice, almost as though he was being subjected to kindness before death, the way victims intended to the gods were cuddled and flattered so that they might go happily

Adam wet his dry lips and tried to ask and failed and tried again. “Why do they have to do it?” he said. “Why is it?”

They’ll shuck off any little dignity you have— you’ll lose what you think of as your decent right to live and to be let alone to live. They’ll make you live and eat and sleep and shit close to other men. And when they dress you up again you’ll not be able to tell yourself from the others. You can’t even wear a scrap or pin a note on your breast to say, ‘This is me—separate from the rest.’

You’ll feel the danger in any difference whatever—a danger to the whole crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men.”

The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of his difference. They’ll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you.

They only do it to protect themselves.

But there are others who go down, submerge in the common slough, and then rise more themselves than they were, because—because they have lost a littleness of vanity and have gained all the gold of the company and the regiment.

But until you have gone way down you can never know this.”

“No,” Cyrus replied. “I wouldn’t do that. You can drive a human too far. I wouldn’t do that. Always you must leave a man one escape before death. Remember that! I knew, I guess, how hard I was pressing you. I didn’t want to push you over the edge.”

And then he is a soldier and he must learn to violate all of this—he must learn coldly to put himself in the way of losing his own life without going mad.

To put him in an army would be to let loose things which in Charles must be chained down, not let loose. I would not dare to let him go.”

“You asked a question. I guess I’ll have to answer. Maybe it’s good and maybe it’s bad to answer it. You’re not clever. You don’t know what you want. You have no proper fierceness. You let other people walk over you. Sometimes I think you’re a weakling who will never amount to a dog turd. Does that answer your question? I love you better. I always have. This may be a bad thing to tell you, but it’s true. I love you better. Else why would I have given myself the trouble of hurting you? Now shut your mouth and go to your supper. I’ll talk to you tomorrow night. My leg aches.”

“Shut your mouth. This is not your affair.” They were silent a moment, and then he said almost in a tone of apology, “It isn’t as though he were your child.”

“I saw him leaning close, talking the way he talks to men—not telling, talking.”

Charles said harshly, “Your crazy mother drowned herself. Maybe she took a look at you. That’d do it.”

Rage came first and then a coldness, a possession; noncommittal eyes and a pleased smile and no voice at all, only a whisper.

You brought him a mongrel pup you picked up in the woodlot. You laughed like a fool and said it would make a good bird dog.

He bent over and vomited, while the cold killing went on.

Dully he wondered why his legs did not buckle, why he did not fall, why unconsciousness did not come to him.

He wondered how his brother felt, wondered whether now that his passion was chilling he would feel panic or sorrow or sick conscience or nothing.

Adam cast about for an answer. “He doesn’t think you love him.”

“He doesn’t think his father loves him. But you love him—you always have.”

“He’s a strange boy. You have to know him—all rough shell, all anger until you know.” She paused to cough, leaned down and coughed, and when the spell was over her cheeks were flushed and she was exhausted. “You have to know him,” she repeated. “For a long time he has given me little presents, pretty things you wouldn’t think he’d even notice. But he doesn’t give them right out. He hides them where he knows I’ll find them. And you can look at him for hours and he won’t ever give the slightest sign he did it. You have to know him.”

He hid out for two weeks, and when he finally did return, murder had sunk back to simple anger and he paid his penalty in overwork and a false theatrical humility.

By this time the Indian fighting had become like dangerous cattle drives—the tribes were forced into revolt, driven and decimated, and the sad, sullen remnants settled on starvation lands. It was not nice work but, given the pattern of the country’s development, it had to be done.

He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

ought to be wandering around the world instead of sitting here on a good farm looking for a wife.

George was a sinless boy and grew to be a sinless man.

It is possible that his virtue lived on a lack of energy.

Ideas he found revolutionary, and he avoided them with suspicion and distaste.

He might, for example, prove too attractive to the wives of men who knew they were dull.

If Samuel had been a rich man like the Thornes or the Delmars, with their big houses and wide flat lands, he would have had a great library.

Such things did not help him bring in a crop or keep a scrap of cloth on his children’s backs. And if in spite of this he persisted, maybe he had reasons which would not stand the light of scrutiny.

Will might have picked up his conservatism right then. Later, as the other children came along and grew, Samuel belonged to the valley, and it was proud of him in the way a man who owns a peacock is proud.

He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn’t discover the world and its people, he created them.

out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.

Tom was a nice mixture of savagery and gentleness. He worked inhumanly, only to lose in effort his crushing impulses.

Samuel sent his models to a manufacturer, who promptly rejected the plans and used the method.

His mother and father thought him a poet because he wasn’t any good at anything else.

He day-dreamed out his life, and his mother loved him more than the others because she thought he was helpless.

Gradually he eliminated himself from every farm duty. His mother explained that his mind was in the clouds, as though this were some singular virtue.

She early seemed to find a shame for her family. She married young and went away and thereafter was seen only at funerals. Lizzie had a capacity for hatred and bitterness unique among the Hamiltons. She had a son, and when he grew up and married a girl Lizzie didn’t like she did not speak to him for many years.

Drinking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged deity.

She forced down the first spoonful, making a crooked face, but it was not so bad. And from that moment she never drew a completely sober breath.

The truth of it was that Charles was abysmally timid of girls.

and a shy man can be gay with her and even brutal to her.

Also, there is none of the horror of the possible turndown which shrivels the guts of timid men.

Every six months each girl was given one month of vacation to get drunk and raise hell.