The Winter of Our Discontent

by John Steinbeck

  With the first taste of his second drink, Mr. Hartog developed the power of speech. He had a low, vibrant voice, like that of an actor or a singer or a salesman of some product people don't want. You might even call it a bedside voice.

  "Mrs. Young-Hunt tells me you're in business here," he said. "It's a fascinating town--unspoiled."

  I was about to tell him exactly what my business consisted in when Margie took the ball. "Mr. Hawley is the coming power of this county," she said.

  "So? What line are you in, Mr. Hawley?"

  "Everything," said Margie. "Absolutely everything, but not openly, you understand." Her eyes had a liquor shine. I looked at Mary's eyes and they were just beginning to surface, so I judged the others had had a couple before we came, or at least Margie had.

  "Well, that saves me from denying it," I said.

  Mr. Hartog came back to his laugh. "You have a lovely wife. That's half the battle."

  "That's the whole battle."

  "Ethan, you'll make him think we fight."

  "Oh, we do!" I gulped half the glass and felt the warmth spring up behind my eyes. And I was looking at the bottle end of one of the tiny window panes. It caught the candlelight and seemed to revolve slowly. Maybe it was self-hypnosis, for I heard my own voice go on, listened to myself from outside myself. "Mrs. Margie is the Witch of the East. A martini is not a drink. It's a potion." The gleaming glass still held me.

  "Oh, dear! I always thought of myself as Ozma. Wasn't the Witch of the East a wicked witch?"

  "She was indeed."

  "And didn't she melt?"

  Through the crooked glass I saw a man's figure walking past on the sidewalk. He was all misshaped by the distortion, but he carried his head a little to the left and walked curiously on the outsides of his feet. Danny did that. I saw myself leap up and run after him. I saw myself run to the corner of Elm Street but he had disappeared, perhaps in the back garden of the second house. I called, "Danny! Danny! Give me back the money. Please, Danny, give it to me. Don't take it. It's poisoned. I poisoned it!"

  I heard a laugh. It was Mr. Hartog's laugh. Margie said, "Well, I would rather be Ozma."

  I wiped the tears from my eyes with my napkin and explained, "I should drink it, not bathe my eyes in it. It burns."

  "Your eyes are all red," Mary said.

  I couldn't get back to the party but I heard myself talk and tell stories and I heard my Mary laugh like golden glory so I guess I was funny, and even charming, but I couldn't ever get back to the table. And I think Margie knew it. She kept looking at me with a concealed question, damn her. She was a witch.

  I don't know what we had to eat. I remember white wine so perhaps it was fish. The brittle glass revolved like a propeller. And there was brandy, so I must have had coffee--and then it was over.

  Going out, when Mary and Mr. Hartog had gone ahead, Margie asked, "Where did you go?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "You went away. You were only part here."

  "Aroint ye, witch!"

  "Okay, bud," she said.

  On our way home I searched the shadows of the gardens. Mary clung to my arm and her footsteps were a little jerky. "What a nice time," she said. "I never had a better time."

  "It was nice."

  "Margie's a perfect hostess. I don't know how I'll match that dinner."

  "She surely is."

  "And you, Ethan. I knew you could be funny but you had us laughing all the time. Mr. Hartog said he was weak from laughing about Mr. Red Baker."

  Had I told that? Which one? I must have. Oh, Danny--give back the money! Please!

  "You're better than a show," my Mary said. And in our own doorway I grabbed her so tight that she whimpered. "You're tipped, darling. You're hurting. Please don't let's wake the children."

  It was my intention to wait until she slept and then to creep out, to go to his shack, to look for him, even to put the police on him. But I knew better. Danny was gone. I knew Danny was gone. And I lay in the darkness and watched the little red and yellow spots swimming in the water of my eyes. I knew what I had done, and Danny knew it too. I thought of my small rabbit slaughter. Maybe it's only the first time that's miserable. It has to be faced. In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind--but he must get there first.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Templeton Airfield is only about forty miles from New Baytown, and that's about five minutes' flying time for the jets. They come over with increasing regularity, swarms of deadly gnats. I wish I could admire them, even love them the way my son Allen does. If they had more than one purpose, maybe I could, but their only function is killing and I've had a bellyful of that. I haven't learned, as Allen has, to locate them by looking ahead of the sound they make. They go through the sound barrier with a boom that makes me think the furnace has exploded. When they go over at night they get into my dreams and I awaken with a sad sick feeling as though my soul had an ulcer.

  Early in the morning a flight of them boomed through and I jumped awake, a little trembly. They must have made me dream of those German 88-millimeter all-purpose rifles we used to admire and fear so much.

  My body was prickly with fear sweat as I lay in the gathering morning light and listened to the slender spindles of malice whining away in the distance. I thought how that shudder was under the skin of everybody in the world, not in the mind, deep under the skin. It's not the jets so much as what their purpose is.

  When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone. Maybe the assembly-line psychoanalysts aren't dealing with complexes at all but with those warheads that may one day be mushroom clouds. It does seem to me that nearly everyone I see is nervous and restless and a little loud and gaily crazy like people getting drunk on New Year's Eve. Should auld acquaintance be forgot and kiss your neighbor's wife.

  I turned my head toward mine. She was not smiling in her sleep. Her mouth was drawn down and there were lines of weariness around her squinched-shut eyes and so she was sick, because that's the way she looks when she is sick. She is the wellest wife in the world until she is sick, which isn't often, and then she is the sickest wife in the world.

  Another flight of jets exploded through sound. We had maybe a half-million years to get used to fire and less than fifteen to build thinking about this force so extravagantly more fierce than fire. Would we ever have the chance to make a tool of this? If the laws of thinking are the laws of things, can fission be happening in the soul? Is that what is happening to me, to us?

  I remember a story Aunt Deborah told me long ago. Early in the last century some of my people were Cambellites. Aunt Deborah was a child then, but she remembered how the end of the world was coming at a certain time. Her parents gave everything away, everything they owned but the bed sheets. Those they put on and at the predicted time they went to the hills to meet the End of the World. Dressed in sheets, hundreds of people prayed and sang. The night came and they sang louder and danced and as it got near time there was a shooting star, she said, and everybody screamed. She could still remember the screaming. Like wolves, she said, like hyenas, although she had never heard a hyena. Then the moment came. White-dressed men and women and children held their breaths. The moment went on and on. The children got blue in the face--and then it passed. It was done and they were cheated out of their destruction. In the dawn they crept down the hill and tried to get back the clothes they had given away, and the pots and pans and their ox and their ass. And I remember knowing how bad they must have felt.

  I think what brought that back was the jets--all that enormous effort and time and money to stockpile all that death. Would we feel cheated if we never used it? We can shoot rockets into space but we can'
t cure anger or discontent.

  My Mary opened her eyes. "Ethan," she said, "you're talking in your mind. I don't know what it's about but it's loud. Stop thinking, Ethan."

  I was going to suggest that she give up drink but she looked too miserable. I don't always know when not to joke, but this time I said, "Head?"

  "Yes."

  "Stomach?"

  "Yes."

  "All over?"

  "All over."

  "I'll get you something."

  "Get me a grave."

  "Stay down."

  "I can't. I've got to get the children off to school."

  "I'll do it."

  "You've got to go to work."

  "I'll do it, I tell you."

  After a moment she said, "Ethan, I don't think I can get up. I feel too bad."

  "Doctor?"

  "No."

  "I can't leave you alone. Can Ellen stay with you?"

  "No, she has examinations."

  "Could I call up Margie Young-Hunt to come over?"

  "Her phone is out. She's getting a new thingamabob."

  "I can go by and ask her."

  "She'd kill anybody that waked her this early."

  "I could slip a note under her door."

  "No, I don't want you to."

  "Nothing to it."

  "No, no. I don't want you to. I don't want you to."

  "I can't leave you alone."

  "That's funny. I feel better. I guess it was shouting at you that did it. Well, it's true," she said, and to prove it she got up and put on her dressing gown. She did look better.

  "You're wonderful, my darling."

  I cut myself shaving and went down to breakfast with a red tatter of toilet paper sticking to my face.

  No Morph standing on the porch picking his teeth when I went by. I was glad. I didn't want to see him. I hurried just in case he might try to catch up with me.

  When I opened the alley door I saw the brown bank envelope that had been pushed under it. It was sealed and bank envelopes are tough. I had to get out my pocket knife to slit it open.

  Three sheets of paper from a five-cent lined school pad, written on with a soft lead pencil. A will: "I, being in my right mind . . ." and "In consideration I . . ." A note of hand: "I agree to repay and pledge my . . ." Both papers signed, the writing neat and precise. "Dear Eth: This is what you want."

  The skin on my face felt as hard as a crab's back. I closed the alley door slowly as you'd close a vault. The first two sheets of paper I folded carefully and placed in my wallet, and the other-- I crumpled it and put it in the toilet and pulled the chain. It's a high box toilet with a kind of step in the bowl. The balled paper resisted going over the edge, but finally it did.

  The alley door was a little open when I emerged from the cubicle. I thought I had closed it. Going toward it, I heard a small sound and, looking up, I saw that damn cat on one of the top storage shelves hooking out with its claws for a hanging side of bacon. It took a long-handled broom and quite a chase to drive it out into the alley. As it streaked past me, I swiped at it and missed and broke the broom handle against the doorjamb.

  There was no sermon for the canned goods that morning. I couldn't raise a text. But I did get out a hose to wash down the front sidewalk and the gutter too. Afterward I cleaned the whole store, even corners long neglected and choked with flug. And I sang too:

  "Now is the winter of our discontent

  Made glorious summer by this sun of York."

  I know it's not a song, but I sang it.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  New Baytown is a lovely place. Its harbor, once a great one, is sheltered from the northeast screamers by an offshore island. The village is strewn about a complex of inland waters fed by the tides, which at ebb and flow drive wild races through narrow channels from the harbor and the sea. It is not a crowded or an urban town. Except for the great houses of the long-gone whalers, the dwellings are small and neat, distributed among fine old trees, oaks of several kinds, maples and elms, hickory and some cypresses, but except for the old planted elms on the original streets, the native timber is largely oak. Once the virgin oaks were so many and so large that several shipyards drew planks and knees, keels and keelsons, from nearby.

  Communities, like people, have periods of health and times of sickness--even youth and age, hope and despondency. There was a time when a few towns like New Baytown furnished the whale oil that lighted the Western World. Student lamps of Oxford and Cambridge drew fuel from this American outpost. And then petroleum, rock oil, gushed out in Pennsylvania and cheap kerosene, called coal oil, took the place of whale oil and retired most of the sea hunters. Sickness or despair fell on New Baytown--perhaps an attitude from which it did not recover. Other towns not too far away grew and prospered on other products and energies, but New Baytown, whose whole living force had been in square-rigged ships and whales, sank into torpor. The snake of population crawling out from New York passed New Baytown by, leaving it to its memories. And, as usually happens, New Baytown people persuaded themselves that they liked it that way. They were spared the noise and litter of summer people, the garish glow of neon signs, the spending of tourist money and tourist razzle-dazzle. Only a few new houses were built around the fine inland waters. But the snake of population continued to writhe out and everyone knew that sooner or later it would engulf the village of New Baytown. The local people longed for that and hated the idea of it at the same time. The neighboring towns were rich, spilled over with loot from tourists, puffed with spoils, gleamed with the great houses of the new rich. Old Baytown spawned art and ceramics and pansies, and the damn broadfooted brood of Lesbos wove handmade fabrics and small domestic intrigues. New Baytown talked of the old days and of flounder and when the weakfish would start running.

  In the reedy edges of the inner waters, the mallards nested and brought out their young flotillas, muskrats dug communities and swam lithely in the early morning. The ospreys hung, aimed, and plummeted on fish, and sea gulls carried clams and scallops high in the air and dropped them to break them open for eating. Some otters still clove the water like secret furry whispers; rabbits poached in the gardens and gray squirrels moved like little waves in the streets of the village. Cock pheasants flapped and coughed their crowing. Blue herons poised in the shallow water like leggy rapiers and at night the bitterns cried out like lonesome ghosts.

  Spring is late and summer late at New Baytown, but when it comes it has a soft, wild, and special sound and smell and feeling. In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different. Then in the evening the bobwhites state their crisp names and after dark there is a wall of sound of whippoorwill. The oaks grow fat with leaf and fling their long-tasseled blossoms in the grass. Then dogs from various houses meet and go on picnics, wandering bemused and happy in the woods, and sometimes they do not come home for days.

  In June man, hustled by instinct, mows grass, riffles the earth with seeds, and locks in combat with mole and rabbit, ant, beetle, bird, and all others who gather to take his garden from him. Woman looks at the curling-edge petals of a rose and melts a little and sighs, and her skin becomes a petal and her eyes are stamens.

  June is gay--cool and warm, wet and shouting with growth and reproduction of the sweet and the noxious, the builder and the spoiler. The girls in body-form slacks wander the High Street with locked hands while small transistor radios sit on their shoulders and whine love songs in their ears. The young boys, bleeding with sap, sit on the stools of Tanger's Drugstore ingesting future pimples through straws. They watch the girls with level goat-eyes and make disparaging remarks to one another while their insides whimper with longing.

  In June businessmen drop by Al 'n' Sue's or the Foremaster for a beer and stay for whisky and get sweatily drunk in the afternoon. Even in the afternoon the dusty cars creep to the desolate dooryard of the remote and paintless house with every blind drawn, at the end of Mill Street, where Alic
e, the village whore, receives the afternoon problems of June-bitten men. And all day long the rowboats anchor off the breakwater and happy men and women coax up their dinners from the sea.

  June is painting and clipping, plans and projects. It's a rare man who doesn't bring home cement blocks and two-by-fours and on the backs of envelopes rough out drawings of Taj Mahals. A hundred little boats lie belly down and keel up on the shore, their bottoms gleaming with copper paint, and their owners straighten up and smile at the slow, unmoving windrows. Still school grips the intransigent children until near to the end of the month and, when examination time comes, rebellion foams up and the common cold becomes epidemic, a plague which disappears on closing day.

  In June the happy seed of summer germinates. "Where shall we go over the glorious Fourth of July? . . . It's getting on time we should be planning our vacation." June is the mother of potentials, ducklings swim bravely perhaps to the submarine jaws of snapping turtles, lettuces lunge toward drought, tomatoes rear defiant stems toward cutworms, and families match the merits of sand and sunburn over fretful mountain nights loud with mosquito symphonies. "This year I'm going to rest. I won't get so tired. This year I won't allow the kids to make my free two weeks a hell on wheels. I work all year. This is my time. I work all year." Vacation planning triumphs over memory and all's right with the world.

  New Baytown had slept for a long time. The men who governed it, politically, morally, economically, had so long continued that their ways were set. The Town Manager, the council, the judges, the police were eternal. The Town Manager sold equipment to the township, and the judges fixed traffic tickets as they had for so long that they did not remember it as illegal practice--at least the books said it was. Being normal men, they surely did not consider it immoral. All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.

  The yellow afternoon had the warm breath of summer. A few early season people, those without children to hold them glued until school was out, were moving in the streets, strangers. Some cars came through, towing small boats and big outboard motors on trailers. Ethan would have known with his eyes closed that they were summer people by what they bought--cold cuts and process cheese, crackers and tinned sardines.