East of Eden Read online

  She said quietly, "I don't want to go to California."

  "Nonsense. Why, it's nice there, sun all the time and beautiful."

  "I don't want to go to California."

  "You are my wife," he said softly. "I want you to go with me."

  She was silent and did not speak of it again.

  They heard Charles slam out the door, and Adam said, "That will be good for him. He'll get a little drunk and he'll feel better."

  Cathy modestly looked at her fingers. "Adam, I can't be a wife to you until I'm well."

  "I know," he said. "I understand. I'll wait."

  "But I want you to stay with me. I'm afraid of Charles. He hates me so."

  "I'll bring my cot in here. Then you can call me if you're frightened. You can reach out and touch me."

  "You're so good," she said. "Could we have some tea?"

  "Why, sure, I'd like some myself." He brought the steaming cups in and went back for the sugar bowl. He settled himself in a chair near her bed. "It's pretty strong. Is it too strong for you?"

  "I like it strong."

  He finished his cup. "Does it taste strange to you? It's got a funny taste.".

  Her hand flew to her mouth. "Oh, let me taste it." She sipped the dregs. "Adam," she cried, "you got the wrong cup--that was mine. It had my medicine in it."

  He licked his lips. "I guess it can't hurt me."

  "No, it can't." She laughed softly. "I hope I don't need to call you in the night."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, you drank my sleeping medicine. Maybe you wouldn't wake up easily."

  Adam went down into a heavy opium sleep though he fought to stay awake. "Did the doctor tell you to take this much?" he asked thickly.

  "You're just not used to it," she said.

  Charles came back at eleven o'clock. Cathy heard his tipsy footsteps. He went into his room, flung off his clothes, and got into bed. He grunted and turned, trying to get comfortable, and then he opened his eyes. Cathy was standing by his bed. "What do you want?"

  "What do you think? Move over a little."

  "Where's Adam?"

  "He drank my sleeping medicine by mistake. Move over a little."

  He breathed harshly. "I already been with a whore."

  "You're a pretty strong boy. Move over a little."

  "How about your broken arm?"

  "I'll take care of that. It's not your worry."

  Suddenly Charles laughed. "The poor bastard," he said, and he threw back the blanket to receive her.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 12

  You can see how this book has reached a great boundary that was called 1900. Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be--more rich and meaningful the farther back it was. In the books of some memories it was the best time that ever sloshed over the world--the old time, the gay time, sweet and simple, as though time were young and fearless. Old men who didn't know whether they were going to stagger over the boundary of the century looked forward to it with distaste. For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost--good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies any more, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word.

  There was a time when people kept their fly buttons fastened. And man's freedom was boiling off. And even childhood was no good any more--not the way it was. No worry then but how to find a good stone, not round exactly but flattened and water-shaped, to use in a sling pouch cut from a discarded shoe. Where did all the good stones go, and all simplicity?

  A man's mind vagued up a little, for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them. An elder man might truly recall through water the delicate doctor-testing of little girls, but such a man forgets, and wants to, the acid emotion eating at the spleen so that a boy had to put his face flat down in the young wild oats and drum his fists against the ground and sob "Christ! Christ!" Such a man might say, and did, "What's that damned kid lying out there in the grass for? He'll catch a cold."

  Oh, strawberries don't taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!

  And some men eased themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.

  History was secreted in the glands of a million historians. We must get out of this banged-up century, some said, out of this cheating, murderous century of riot and secret death, of scrabbling for public lands and damn well getting them by any means at all.

  Think back, recall our little nation fringing the oceans, torn with complexities, too big for its britches. Just got going when the British took us on again. We beat them, but it didn't do us much good. What we had was a burned White House and ten thousand widows on the public pension list.

  Then the soldiers went to Mexico and it was a kind of painful picnic. Nobody knows why you go to a picnic to be uncomfortable when it is so easy and pleasant to eat at home. The Mexican War did two good things though. We got a lot of western land, damn near doubled our size, and besides that it was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murder settled on us the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible.

  And then the arguments:

  Can you keep a slave?

  Well if you bought him in good faith, why not?

  Next they'll be saying a man can't have a horse. Who is it wants to take my property?

  And there we were, like a man scratching at his own face and bleeding into his own beard.

  Well, that was over and we got slowly up off the bloody ground and started westward.

  There came boom and bust, bankruptcy, depression.

  Great public thieves came along and picked the pockets of everyone who had a pocket.

  To hell with that rotten century!

  Let's get it over and the door closed shut on it! Let's close it like a book and go on reading! New chapter, new life. A man will have clean hands once we get the lid slammed shut on that stinking century. It's a fair thing ahead. There's no rot on this clean new hundred years. It's not stacked, and any bastard who deals seconds from this new deck of years--why, we'll crucify him head down over a privy.

  Oh, but strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!

  Chapter 13

  1

  Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then--the glory--so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

  I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective produ
ction has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

  At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

  Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

  And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

  And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

  2

  Adam Trask grew up in grayness, and the curtains of his life were like dusty cobwebs, and his days a slow file of half-sorrows and sick dissatisfactions, and then, through Cathy, the glory came to him.

  It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?

  Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

  Whatever Cathy may have been, she set off the glory in Adam. His spirit rose flying and released him from fear and bitterness and rancid memories. The glory lights up the world and changes it the way a star shell changes a battleground. Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted was she by his eyes. Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl, precious beyond thinking, clean and loving, and that image was Cathy to her husband, and nothing Cathy did or said could warp Adam's Cathy.

  She said she did not want to go to California and he did not listen, because his Cathy took his arm and started first. So bright was his glory that he did not notice the sullen pain in his brother, did not see the glinting in his brother's eyes. He sold his share of the farm to Charles, for less than it was worth, and with that and his half of his father's money he was free and rich.

  The brothers were strangers now. They shook hands at the station, and Charles watched the train pull out and rubbed his scar. He went to the inn, drank four quick whiskies, and climbed the stairs to the top floor. He paid the girl and then could not perform. He cried in her arms until she put him out. He raged at his farm, forced it, added to it, drilled and trimmed, and his boundaries extended. He took no rest, no recreation, and he became rich without pleasure and respected without friends.

  Adam stopped in New York long enough to buy clothes for himself and Cathy before they climbed on the train which bore them across the continent. How they happened to go to the Salinas Valley is very easy to understand.

  In that day the railroads--growing, fighting among themselves, striving to increase and to dominate--used every means to increase their traffic. The companies not only advertised in the newspapers, they issued booklets and broadsides describing and picturing the beauty and richness of the West. No claim was too extravagant--wealth was unlimited. The Southern Pacific Railroad, headed by the wild energy of Leland Stanford, had begun to dominate the Pacific Coast not only in transportation but in politics. Its rails extended down the valleys. New towns sprang up, new sections were opened and populated, for the company had to create customers to get custom.

  The long Salinas Valley was part of the exploitation. Adam had seen and studied a fine color broadside which set forth the valley as that region which heaven unsuccessfully imitated. After reading the literature, anyone who did not want to settle in the Salinas Valley was crazy.

  Adam did not rush at his purchase. He bought a rig and drove around, meeting the earlier comers, talking of soil and water, climate and crops, prices and facilities. It was not speculation with Adam. He was here to settle, to found a home, a family, perhaps a dynasty.

  Adam drove exuberantly from farm to farm, picked up dirt and crumbled it in his fingers, talked and planned and dreamed. The people of the valley liked him and were glad he had come to live there, for they recognized a man of substance.

  He had only one worry, and that was for Cathy. She was not well. She rode around the country with him, but she was listless. One morning she complained of feeling ill and stayed in her room in the King City hotel while Adam drove into the country. He returned at about five in the afternoon to find her nearly dead from loss of blood. Luckily Adam found Dr. Tilson at his supper and dragged him from his roast beef. The doctor made a quick examination, inserted a packing, and turned to Adam.

  "Why don't you wait downstairs?" he suggested.

  "Is she all right?"

  "Yes. I'll call you pretty soon."

  Adam patted Cathy's shoulder, and she smiled up at him.

  Dr. Tilson closed the door behind him and came back to the bed. His face was red with anger. "Why did you do it?"

  Cathy's mouth was a thin tight line.

  "Does your husband know you are pregnant?"

  Her head moved slowly from side to side.

  "What did you do it with?"

  She stared up at him.

  He looked around the room. He stepped to the bureau and picked up a knitting needle. He shook it in her face. "The old offender--the old criminal," he said. "You're a fool. You've nearly killed yourself and you haven't lost your baby. I suppose you took things too, poisoned yourself, inserted camphor, kerosene, red pepper. My God! Some of the things you women do!"

  Her eyes were as cold as glass.

  He pulled a chair up beside her bed. "Why don't you want to have the baby?" he asked softly. "You've got a good husband. Don't you love him? Don't you intend to speak to me at all? Tell me, damn it! Don't turn mulish."

  Her lips did not move and her eyes did not flicker.

  "My dear," he said, "can't you see? You must not destroy life. That's the one thing gets me crazy. God knows I lose patients because I don't know enough. But I try--I always try. And then I see a deliberate killing." He talked rapidly on. He dreaded the sick silence between his sentences. This woman puzzled him. There was something inhuman about her. "Have you met Mrs. Laurel? She's wasting and crying for a baby. Everything she has or can get she would give to have a baby, and you--you try to stab yours with a knitting needle. All right," he cried, "you won't speak--you don't have to. But I'm going to tell you. The baby is safe. Your aim was bad. And I'm telling you this--you're going to have that baby. Do you know what the law in this state has to say about abortion? You don't have to answer, but you listen to me! If this hap
pens again, if you lose this baby and I have any reason to suspect monkey business, I will charge you, I will testify against you, and I will see you punished. Now I hope you have sense enough to believe me, because I mean it."

  Cathy moistened her lips with a little pointed tongue. The cold went out of her eyes and a weak sadness took its place. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry. But you don't understand."

  "Then why don't you tell me?" His anger disappeared like mist. "Tell me, my dear."

  "It's hard to tell. Adam is so good, so strong. I am--well, I'm tainted. Epilepsy."

  "Not you!"

  "No, but my grandfather and my father--and my brother." She covered her eyes with her hands. "I couldn't bring that to my husband."

  "Poor child," he said. "My poor child. You can't be certain. It's more than probable that your baby will be fine and healthy. Will you promise me not to try any more tricks?"

  "Yes."

  "All right then. I won't tell your husband what you did. Now lie back and let me see if the bleeding's stopped."

  In a few minutes he closed his satchel and put the knitting needle in his pocket. "I'll look in tomorrow morning," he said.

  Adam swarmed on him as he came down the narrow stairs into the lobby. Dr. Tilson warded off a flurry of "How is she? Is she all right? What caused it? Can I go up?"

  "Whoa, hold up--hold up." And he used his trick, his standard joke. "Your wife is sick."

  "Doctor--"

  "She has the only good sickness there is--"

  "Doctor--"

  "Your wife is going to have a baby." He brushed past Adam and left him staring. Three men sitting around the stove grinned at him. One of them observed dryly, "If it was me now--why, I'd invite a few, maybe three, friends to have a drink." His hint was wasted. Adam bolted clumsily up the narrow stairs.

  Adam's attention narrowed to the Bordoni ranch a few miles south of King City, almost equidistant, in fact, between San Lucas and King City.

  The Bordonis had nine hundred acres left of a grant of ten thousand acres which had come to Mrs. Bordoni's great-grandfather from the Spanish crown. The Bordonis were Swiss, but Mrs. Bordoni was the daughter and heiress of a Spanish family that had settled in the Salinas Valley in very early times. And as happened with most of the old families, the land slipped away. Some was lost in gambling, some chipped off for taxes, and some acres torn off like coupons to buy luxuries--a horse, a diamond, or a pretty woman. The nine hundred remaining acres were the core of the original Sanchez grant, and the best of it too. They straddled the river and tucked into the foothills on both sides, for at this point the valley narrows and then opens out again. The original Sanchez house was still usable. Built of adobe, it stood in a tiny opening in the foothills, a miniature valley fed by a precious ever-running spring of sweet water. That of course was why the first Sanchez had built his seat there. Huge live oaks shaded the valley, and the earth had a richness and a greenness foreign to this part of the country. The walls of the low house were four feet thick, and the round pole rafters were tied on with rawhide ropes which had been put on wet. The hide shrank and pulled joist and rafter tight together, and the leather ropes became hard as iron and nearly imperishable. There is only one drawback to this building method. Rats will gnaw at the hide if they are let.