John Steinbeck - The Winter of Our Discontent

Item: There was Mary, my dear, to think of, asleep with the smile of mystery on her lips. I hoped she wouldn’t awaken and look for me. But if she did, would she ever tell me? I doubt it. I think that Mary, for all that she seems to tell everything, tells very little. There was the fortune to consider. Did Mary want a fortune or did she want it for me? The fact that it was a fake fortune, rigged by Margie Young-Hunt for reasons I didn’t know, made no difference at all. A fake fortune was just as good as any and it is possible that all fortunes are a little fake. Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that’s what he wants. Mostly it’s women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him. The great artists of finance like Morgan and Rockefeller weren’t deflected. They wanted and got money, just simple money. What they did with it afterward is another matter. I’ve always felt they got scared of the ghost they raised and tried to buy it off.

Item: By money, Mary meant new curtains and sure education for the kids and holding her head a little higher and, face it, being proud rather than a little ashamed of me. She had said it in anger and it was true.

Item: Did I want money? Well, no. Something in me hated being a grocery clerk. In the Army I made captain, but I know what got me into O. T. C. It was family and connections. I wasn’t picked for my pretty eyes, but I did make a good officer, a good officer. But if I had really liked command, imposing my will on others and seeing them jump, I might have stayed in the Army and I’d have been a colonel by now. But I didn’t. I wanted to get it over. They say a good soldier fights a battle, never a war. That’s for civilians.

Item: Marullo was telling me the truth about business, business being the process of getting money. And Joey Morphy was telling it straight, and Mr. Baker and the drummer. They all told it straight. Why did it revolt me and leave a taste like a spoiled egg? Am I so good, or so kind, or so just? I don’t think so. Am I so proud? Well, there’s some of that. Am I lazy, too lazy to be involved? There’s an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.

There is a smell and a feel of dawn long before the light. It was in the air now, a tempering of the wind; a new star or a planet cleared the horizon to eastward. I should know what star or planet but I don’t. The wind freshens or steadies in the false dawn. It really does. And I would have to be going back soon. This rising star was too late to have much of a go before daylight. What is the saying—“The stars incline, they do not command”? [15] The stars incline, they do not command: In Latin, Astra inclinant, non necessitant. A common Elizabethan astrological notion. Well, I’ve heard that a good many serious financiers go to astrologers for instruction in stock purchase. Do the stars incline toward a bull market? Is A. T. and T. influenced by the stars? Nothing as sweet and remote in my fortune as a star. A beat-up tarot deck of fortune-telling cards in the hands of an idle, mischievous woman, and she had rigged the cards. Do the cards incline but not command? Well, the cards inclined me out to the Place in the middle of the night, and they inclined me to give more thought than I wanted to, to a subject I detested. That’s quite a bit of inclining right there. Could they incline me to a business cleverness I never had, to acquisitiveness foreign to me? Could I incline to want what I didn’t want? There are the eaters and the eaten. That’s a good rule to start with. Are the eaters more immoral than the eaten? In the end all are eaten—all—gobbled up by the earth, even the fiercest and the most crafty.

The roosters up on Clam Hill had been crowing for a long time and I had heard and not heard. I wished I could stay to see the sun rise straight out from the Place.

I said there was no ritual involved with the Place but that is not entirely true. Sometime on each visit I reconstruct Old Harbor for my mind’s pleasure—the docks, the warehouses, the forests of masts and underbrush of rigging and canvas. And my ancestors, my blood—the young ones on the deck, the fully grown aloft, the mature on the bridge. No nonsense of Madison Avenue then or trimming too many leaves from cauliflowers. Some dignity was then for a man, some stature. A man could breathe.

That was my father talking, the fool. Old Cap’n remembered the fights over shares, the quibbling with stores, suspicion of every plank and keelson, the lawsuits, yes, and the killings—over women, glory, adventure? Not at all. Over money. It was a rare partnership, he said, that lasted more than one voyage, and blistering feuds ever afterward, continuing after the cause was forgotten.

There was one bitterness old Cap’n Hawley did not forget, a crime he could not forgive. He must have told me about it many times, standing or sitting on the rim of Old Harbor. We spent a goodly time there, he and I. I remember him pointing with his narwhal stick.

“Take that third rock on Whitsun Reef,” he said. “Got her? Now, line her up with the tip of Porty Point at high water. See it there? Now—half a cable-length out on that line is where she lies, at least her keel.”

“The Belle-Adair? ”

“The Belle-Adair. ”

“Our ship.”

“Half ours, a partnership. She burned at anchor—burned to the waterline. I never believed it was an accident.”

“You think she was fired, sir?”

“I do.”

“But—but you can’t do that.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“Insurance.”

“Then it’s no different now.”

“No different.”

“There must be some difference.”

“Only in a single man alone—only in one man alone. There’s the only power—one man alone. Can’t depend on anything else.”

He never spoke to Cap’n Baker again, my father told me, but he didn’t carry it to his son, Mr. Banker Baker. He wouldn’t do that any more than he would burn a ship.

Good God, I’ve got to get home. And I got. I almost ran and I went up the High Street without thinking. It was still dark enough but a rim of lightness lay on the edge of the sea and made the waves gray iron. I rounded the war memorial and passed the post office. In a doorway Danny Taylor stood as I knew he must, hands in pockets, collar of his ragged coat turned up, and his old peaked shooter’s cap with the earflaps turned down. His face was blue-gray with cold and sickness.

“Eth,” he said, “I’m sorry to bother you. Sorry. I’ve got to have some skull-buster. You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.”

“I know. I mean I don’t know, but I believe you.” I gave him a dollar bill. “Will that do it?”

His lips were trembling the way a child’s lips do when it’s about to cry. “Thank you, Eth,” he said. “Yes—that will put me away all day and maybe all night.” He began to look better just thinking of it.

“Danny—you’ve got to stop this. Think I’ve forgotten? You were my brother, Danny. You still are. I’ll do anything in the world to help you.”

A little color came into his thin cheeks. He looked at the money in his hand and it was as though he had taken his first gulp of skull-buster. Then he looked at me with hard cold eyes.

“In the first place it’s nobody’s goddam business. And in the second place you haven’t got a bean, Eth. You’re as blind as I am, only it’s a different kind of blindness.”

“Listen to me, Danny.”

“What for? Why, I’m better off than you are. I’ve got my ace in the hole. Remember our country place?”

“Where the house burned down? Where we used to play in the cellar hole?”