John Steinbeck - The Winter of Our Discontent

“Take me with you.”

“Silly, I can’t. But if you’ll come in the kitchen, I’ll wash your face.”

“Take me with you. You’re not coming back.”

“What do you mean, skookum? Of course I’m coming back. I’m always coming back. You go up to bed and rest. Then you’ll feel better.”

“You won’t take me?”

“Where I’m going they wouldn’t let you in. Do you want to stand outside in your nightgown?”

“You can’t.”

She grappled me again and her hands caressed and stroked my arms, my sides, dug her balled fists into my side pockets so that I was afraid she might find the razor blades. She was always a caressing girl, a stroking girl, and a surprising girl. Suddenly she released me and stood back with her head raised and her eyes level and without tears. I kissed her dirty little cheek and felt the dried blood against my mouth. And then I turned to the door.

“Don’t you want your stick?”

“No, Ellen. Not tonight. Go to bed, darling. Go to bed.”

I ran away fast. I guess I ran away from her and from Mary. I could hear Mary coming down the stairs with measured steps.

The tide was on the rise. I waded into the warm bay water and clambered into the Place. A slow ground swell moved in and out of the entrance, flowed through my trousers. The fat billfold in my hip pocket swelled against my hip and then grew thinner under my weight as it water-soaked. The summer sea was crowded with little jellyfish the size of gooseberries, dangling their tendrils and their nettle cells. As they washed in against my legs and belly I felt them sting like small bitter fires, and the slow wave breathed in and out of the Place. The rain was only a thin mist now and it accumulated all the stars and town lamps and spread them evenly—a dark, pewter-colored sheen. I could see the third rock, but from the Place it did not line up with the point over the sunken keel of the Belle-Adair. A stronger wave lifted my legs and made them feel free and separate from me, and an eager wind sprang from nowhere and drove the mist like sheep. Then I could see a star—late rising, too late rising over the edge. Some kind of craft came chugging in, a craft with sail, by the slow, solemn sound of her engine. I saw her mast light over the toothy tumble of the breakwater but her red and green were below my range of sight.

My skin blazed under the lances of the jellyfish. I heard an anchor plunge, and the mast light went out.

Marullo’s light still burned, and old Cap’n’s light and Aunt Deborah’s light.

It isn’t true that there’s a community of light, a bonfire of the world. Everyone carries his own, his lonely own.

A rustling school of tiny feeding fish flicked along the shore.

My light is out. There’s nothing blacker than a wick.

Inward I said, I want to go home—no not home, to the other side of home where the lights are given.

It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. [80] It’s so much darker when a light goes out… shone: The typescript of the novel ends with this sentence; the rest of the book is a handwritten addition. The world is full of dark derelicts. The better way—the Marulli of that old Rome would have known it—there comes a time for decent, honorable retirement, not dramatic, not punishment of self or family—just good-by, a warm bath and an opened vein, a warm sea and a razor blade.

The ground swell on the rising tide whished into the Place and raised my legs and hips and swung them to the side and carried my wet folded raincoat out with it.

I rolled on one hip and reached in my side pocket for my razor blades and I felt the lump. Then in wonder I remembered the caressing, stroking hands of the light-bearer. For a moment it resisted coming out of my wet pocket. Then in my hand it gathered every bit of light there was and seemed red—dark red.

A surge of wave pushed me against the very back of the Place. And the tempo of the sea speeded up. I had to fight the water to get out, and I had to get out. I rolled and scrambled and splashed chest deep in the surf and the brisking waves pushed me against the old sea wall.

I had to get back—had to return the talisman to its new owner.

Else another light might go out. [81] End. And I hope this time it’s clear. I really do hope so. JS: The typescript and handwritten addition end with this remark.

spermaceti: Moby-Dick or The Whale (1851), by Herman Melville, was one of Steinbeck’s two favorite novels, according to Elaine Steinbeck; Don Quixote was the other. Spermaceti is mentioned in chapter 77, “The Great Heidelburgh Tun.”

Admiral Halsey:William F. “Bull” Halsey (1882-1959). Fleet commander in the South Pacific during World War II, he took the title of five-star fleet admiral after the war. In the Winter manuscript, Halsey was Ethan’s last name. When Morphy asks if he’s related to Admiral Halsey, Ethan responds this way: “ ‘Not that I know of,’ Ethan said pleased, ‘But I guess all Halseys are related if you go way back.’ ”

Ethan Allen:(1738-89) Hero of the American Revolution and leader of the Green Mountain Boys, dedicated to keeping Vermont free from New York control. But in 1778 he was charged with treason for negotiating with Canada to recognize Vermont as a British province. He wrote Reason: The Only Oracle of Man (1784), a tract outlining his deist ideas. Ethan Allen Hawley notes that his ancestors, the Hawleys, “got mixed up” with Vermont Allens (p. 39).

Aroint!:Term of dismissal, “begone.” “Aroint thee, witch,” from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “Aroint” is inscribed in a cement slab outside Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor retreat, an octagonal writing house he called “Joyous Garde.”

Unimum et… :Joseph Fontenrose, classical scholar, says Ethan chants “counterfeit Latin… in something like the Black Mass.” To translate Malory, Steinbeck wrote to a California friend that he had to “reactivate my limping Latin, Anglo-Saxon and old French.”

As soon as it was day… :Luke 22:66-23:31.

Well, this also serves… :The final line of “On His Blindness,” a sonnet by John Milton, is “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Artemis:Goddess of the hunt in Greek mythology.

And after that… :Matthew 27:31-33.

Valerius Maximus:(ca. 20 B.C.E.-A.D. 50) Roman historian, moralist, and author of Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings), a popular collection of moralistic stories and anecdotes used by writers and rhetoricians.

lama sabach thani:Matthew 27:46: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Hearst papers:William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) took over the San Francisco Examiner from his father in 1887 and then went on to create a newspaper empire in the United States, with twenty-eight dailies by the late 1920s. His wealth was legendary in California.