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The Sound of Thunder
A Novel
Taylor Caldwell
For George and Helene Slotkin
“There will always be the sound of thunder, and chaos and ruin and death, in the affairs of men and nations until they achieve God and enter into His tranquility.”
LAO-TSE
PART ONE
“Should there be a son or a nephew or a cousin in the family who is capable and courageous enough to do all the work, then the other members need not disturb themselves, or save their money, or labor. For it has been shown by the gods that it is their intention that The Strong One must carry the burden.”
OLD CHINESE SAYING
EPILOGUE
Dawns always came too soon for Margaret, who loved the night. But this dawn would never come. She was certain of it. She stood at the window and looked over the twisted, silent snarl of the trees against a sky left milky white by the falling moon. Was that pale magenta streak in the east the dawn at last? The streak did not brighten; it lay coldly in the east like a wound that had bled too much and had no more blood to give. Like my heart, thought Margaret, like my heart all through this night. Her eyes were so parched that they felt dusty and stiff; she had no tears at all. She had tried to pray, but the terror in her had been a black storm through which no shafts of prayer could penetrate; they had been tossed aside, and had fallen, impotent. Could you reach the ear of God if you could not pray, if the agonized tempest of your despair and fear rose between you and Him, a towering, dense pillar of fulminating darkness? There was not even a cry in her; her very brain was mute and cowering; it had no words.
This was grief; this was the very deadness of grief. This was anguish, even if dumb. It was necessary to scream out to God, to grasp one of His shining feet as they went on their meaningless business through constellations beyond meaning. “Father,” she whispered, and her lips were as dusty as her eyes, and the word, she believed, went no farther than her tongue. She rubbed her dry palms together, and the slight sound was a hiss. All she had to offer God was a threat: If—he—dies, then I’ll hate You. I’ll hate You! But one did not threaten God, the Church said. One did not tempt God. But God was merciless. Was He, was He? Are You merciless? her mangled heart demanded. Yes, You’ve been merciless—all the days of his life.
She leaned her cold forehead against the colder glass of the window and felt no chill. She was conscious of no exhaustion, no sinking in herself. There was only rigidity, the rigidity of powerful resistance. To God. Now she stood between God and His ravenous and impersonal cruelty. She was a battlement of defense. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away—” He gave, but He took away, when it was wrong, when it was unjust, when it was monstrous. She did not think of her children. What did children matter if he whom you loved more than children, more than God—and yes, she loved Ed more, much more—was dying? Dying, because he had given so much, with faith, with both hands loaded with gifts, asking only that they be accepted and used for the benefit of the receiver! Dying, because flesh and blood could endure only so much work, so much anxiety, so much bewilderment and disillusion and betrayal, so much false accusation and shrill hatred, so much ungrateful grasping and greed!
Her body was empty and cold and starved and withered as she stood by the broad window looking for the morning. For she was alone. There was no Ed now to put his good arms about her and murmur comfort to her, and draw her head to his shoulder so that she could cry out her frozen tears of anguish. Her children? They were nice children, even thoughtful, even loving, but they were only children after all. They would surmount this; they would grieve awhile, but youth ran in them like a torrent, and it would take them away, and she would be desolate forever. Unless, she thought numbly, unless I choose not to live. She challenged God: If Ed dies, then I won’t live. I’ll follow him, cursing You.
But—what if there were no God at all, no God to listen to either importunities or despair or grief or challenges? What if there were no God? It would, in a way, be easier if there were no God, if there were no Ear. Never to suffer this again, never to watch the years go by, the fearful years as Ed grew older and more tired and more baffled and despondent—the years, the years! There had never been anything for her, really, but Ed. Neither father nor mother, neither sister nor brother, no children, no other joy, no other fulfillment, no other hope—but her husband. Now a lancelike pain of sheer torture ran through her stumbling mind, through her dimming mind. “Ed, Ed,” she whispered. She saw the long dim estate of trees and grass through the window; it was a cemetery, not a home any longer. When had it stopped being either a home or a delight? She could not quite remember. She put her hand to her cheek. Yes, now she remembered. It was when Ed had taken out a mortgage on this big and lovely mansion and had told her that as co-owner she must sign the papers with him. The mortgage had been necessary, in spite of Ed’s vast holdings, because there had been, and still was, a depression, and there were literally thousands of people dependent on him. Margaret had smiled and nodded encouragingly at her husband while she signed, but upon the signing the house became only a house to her, and not a home. Ed had never known this. Or had he?
Something quickened in the region of her heart, like a bitter and ruthless fire. It was hatred. Hatred for them all, all of them, Ed’s mother, his three brothers, his sister. But the fire could not expand the withered tensity of her body; it raged like a death, but it raged in iron, without heat.
I mustn’t hate, thought Margaret incoherently. I’ve been hating them for years, but I mustn’t hate now! Not now! Perhaps God will hear me and punish me! (Where was the loving and merciful Father of Whom the Church spoke? She could remember only the vengeful and punitive God of her young Sunday-school days, Who “smote.” He smote the just and the unjust. He had struck down Ed as purposelessly as lightning struck a tree, and for no more intelligent reason, unless to punish her, Margaret, for her presumption to hate, when hate was “forbidden.”)
She hurried frantically to placate God. “You won’t take him, will You?” She spoke in herself with the voice of a cringing and terrified slave. “You’ll be kind, won’t You, God? Not Ed, God, not Ed—just anyone else in the world. Me, for instance. Take my eyes, my life, give me an awful disease, strike me down, do anything to me, kill me now, give my strength to Ed. He’s so strong; it won’t hurt him so badly for me to be gone. Not as it will hurt me to lose him. He was never taught much about You, but You understand, don’t You?” Margaret’s thoughts began to spin. “You and I know there’s nothing after death, don’t we? We know there isn’t a You. It’s a secret between us.” She felt quite sly, and nodded over and over to the magenta slit in the east.
Someone was taking her arm urgently; someone had seen her nodding, had seen her fixed, cunning smile, her silent, moving lips. “Mrs. Enger, you must take that pill Dr. Bullitt gave you; you must! You’ve got to rest a little. You’ve stood by this window for hours. Won’t you sit down for a minute, please?” It was the nurse. The tiny night light on the table near the bed showed her broad blunt face in large masses of dimness and vague illumination. She was greatly concerned. Margaret stared blankly at her; her mouth retained the fixity of her deathly grimace. She shook her head and resisted the pull of the nurse’s hand. Her voice came faintly through her shriveled throat. “I can’t, I can’t. Let me alone, please. How—?” and her voice fainted.
“Mr. Enger is resting comfortably. Look, you can see for yourself.”
But Margaret was paralyzed
. She could not go to the large bed where her husband lay, hardly breathing. She could not look at Ed’s unconscious face, for she could not follow him into the dark mazes and convolutions of time and suffering, the involutions of mystery through which death draws the naked and shivering soul. Ed was alone on that long and terrible journey, and her voice, her touch, her cry, could not reach him. She saw his retreating back, the tall wide back which was so strong, which she loved. Her spirit lifted appealing hands to that back but he did not turn.
“There, that’s right,” said the nurse in a low and kindly voice. “Let me put this stool under your feet. Now just swallow this and here’s the glass of, water—We’ve got to keep up our strength.”
“He’s dying; he will soon be dead,” Margaret whispered, and the whisper was a rustle. She tried to see the nurse’s face through a mist. She grasped the other woman’s arm. She prayed, “Save him. Save him. I’ll give you—I’ll give you—”
“There,” said the nurse comfortingly. “Look, the door of your room is open. We’ll lie down and have a little sleep.” She was a middle-aged woman and had been a nurse for many years, but it always tore at her heart to see grief. And this poor lady, this pretty, slender lady, opened misery and pain in her again. “I’ll call you, Mrs. Enger, if there’s the slightest change. He’s breathing real quiet now. The—the cardiogram wasn’t so bad,” she added, lying in her compassion. “I’ve seen worse. I’m sure he’ll make it, with the help of God. Honest. I wouldn’t tell you a fib, Mrs. Enger. I’ve seen worse cases up and around, good as new in three months.” (She prayed inwardly, Now, dear Blessed Mother, you won’t hold that against me, will you, and I’ll go to confession Saturday. You’ve got to lie sometimes, to help people.)
But not Ed, thought Margaret. Ed isn’t going to live. God hates me; He’ll take Ed, and Ed won’t remember, because there won’t be Ed any more, no Ed for me any more, because there is no God.
“The doctor wouldn’t have left him, if he—well, if he—was in any real danger,” lied the nurse again, and remembered how many times she had told this to so many other piteous wives, or parents, and how many times it had been only a consoling falsehood. “Now would he?”
She left Margaret in the chair into which she had practically forced her. She had a stethoscope of her own, and she put the plugs in her ears and pressed the disk against the white silk which covered Edward Enger’s chest. She listened intently, her lips tight, her eyes sorrowful. The heart fluttered feebly; it wavered, skipped, almost stopped, then took up its weary pulsing again. Doctors didn’t like nurses using stethoscopes on their patients; they didn’t like nurses taking blood pressures, and using their own judgment, when the holy saints knew that if it weren’t for nurses many people wouldn’t live. But Mary Hurtz did these things in the doctors’ absences, and had often saved lives. She glanced at the hypodermic syringe, swathed in cotton, on the bedside table. At six o’clock, Dr. Bullitt had said sternly. It was only half past four. Mary took up the syringe, shot a drop or two from the top, then plunged the needle firmly into the arm of the unconscious man. She studied his square, gray face, with the purplish hollows under the eyes, the purplish tints in the furrows about his big mouth and under his chin. She stood there, bent over Edward, watching intently. Then she applied the stethoscope to his chest again. The wavering heart was hardly struggling now. Cold water seeped over Edward’s forehead, lay in the hollow between nose and lip, ran from his temples.
Then his stricken heart, rallying, gave a leap, a few running beats, as if in haste; it jumped once or twice. And then it was beating more steadily, more determinedly, as if by an actual act of his submerged will. He moved his head, moaned almost inaudibly. Mary nodded with satisfaction. Six o’clock, says the doctor! Why, the poor man would’ve been dead by then! She moved lightly, for all her weight, to Margaret, who was half lying in prostration now in the round red chair which matched the red brocade curtains at the windows. The little light in the room evoked twinkling flashes of gold from the draperies but made Margaret’s face ghostly and without substance under the tangled, bright waves of her hair.
“There!” said Mary proudly. “He’s doing fine. Really fine, Mrs. Enger. Why, in a couple of hours he’ll be awake and you can speak to him. Now won’t you go to bed and lie down?” she added coaxingly.
“No,” said Margaret. She lifted her arms heavily and ran her slender fingers through the shoulder-length mass of her hair, and it stood about her face in a halo of distraction. “I can’t leave, not even for a minute. Thank you,” she added dully, with an automatic politeness. She raised her head and looked blindly at the nurse. The night light glimmered briefly in the blue of her eyes between her thick gilt lashes. Her pointed face was the color of death itself, and her lips, wide and sensitive, were absolutely white. She still wore the tan, tailored suit she had put on yesterday afternoon to go shopping, and her yellow silk blouse. Even in her distraught condition, her numbing anguish, she was a pretty woman in her middle forties, and Mary studied her approvingly.
Margaret dropped her head on her breast. She returned to her thoughts. What was it that Ed was always saying? “All the days of my life.” She had been curious about that phrase, even when she had first met him, over twenty-two years ago, curious about the buoyancy with which he said it, the grim lightness, the casual humor. She had told him, for he did not know, that it came from the Twenty-third Psalm, and she had repeated the whole Psalm to him. He had seemed disappointed, she never knew why, though she suspected that he had believed it to come from another source. It had been a sort of “excelsior!” to him, and then a bitterness. Oh, Ed, Ed, said Margaret in herself, and her dusty eyes ached.
She turned her head. The dawn was here at last, the reluctant, hidden dawn. She pushed herself to her feet and went to the window again. The magenta slit had vanished, and the cold eastern sky had turned a far and remote green. Its weird light lay over the landscape, revealing it rather than giving it life. Now Margaret could see, very clearly, the long line of the March-bound lawns, the trunks of the immobilized trees, the stiff black branches, the little mounds of corroded snow scattered here and there like the mounds of graves. Like Ed’s grave will be soon, she thought. The bells of St. Michael’s Church, half a mile away, began to clang, discordantly to Margaret’s ears. That would be the first Mass; two or three of the servants would be leaving by the back door. Would they pray for Ed? Would they remember? Did anyone remember a man except his wife? His children, his brothers, his sisters, his servants, his friends, his associates, his employees or employer, all those he had helped? “No, no,” said Margaret aloud, and shook her head. She swallowed dryly.
Then she saw a yellowish gleam on the crystal-coated arborvitae near the living-room window. Was it possible that Ed’s family were keeping their own vigil, as she had kept hers, all this terrible night? She started away from the window. She did not look at the bed; it was not Ed there, moaning faintly. Ed was far away, remembering nothing, forgetting everything. Margaret knew that if she went to the bed she would begin to scream beyond her control, that something would break in her and disintegrate and she would fly wildly into a darkness of her own, and without her volition. She brushed by Mary as she ran from the room, and the nurse jumped with alarm.
The broad hall outside was lightless and chill, and the thick carpet hushed Margaret’s flying footsteps as she passed closed mahogany doors. Now she was racing down that curved and stately staircase, which seemed to float from floor to floor. The great chandelier hung from the ceiling; it still burned, with its mauve and shadowy pendants and prisms shaking in a slight draft. All the lamps were lit in the long living room, and exhausted murmurs crept through the dead air.
Margaret, at the foot of the staircase, paused and caught her breath. She ran her hands over her disordered hair, over her slim hips and arms, as if to draw herself together, as if to make of herself a compact and avenging force. She threw back her head with that valiant gesture which Edward had always loved, and
her chin became poised again in the position which Gregory had termed “arrogant, without any reason for her being arrogant.” Now Margaret’s eyes flashed with an almost fiery blue, and her white lips became stern. She went into the living room in silence. There were Gregory and Sylvia and Ralph and Margo and David. They were weary and silent, Ralph smoking steadily as always, the Venetian glass ashtray near his elbow filled to overflowing, the ashes spilling on the polished walnut table.
It had been too much to expect, of course, that Ed’s mother would be keeping vigil, too. No doubt she was sleeping smugly, in her big bedroom with the faded chintzes. Margaret had spoken to none of them tonight, except Gregory, who had precipitated Edward’s attack and whom she now hated even more than she hated the others. Even in her numbness Margaret was surprised to see David, who had not been at home when the terror had happened. But Edward despised him more than he despised the others, and accordingly Margaret despised him, too.
Someone had been bringing coffee into this vast living room which Margaret and Edward had furnished with such pride and satisfaction. The mighty silver service had been placed on the big drop-leaf table near the golden marble fireplace, in which ashy logs still smoldered. Margaret’s best Spode coffee set lay scattered on other tables, the dregs black and cold under the stately silver or crystal lamps. No one noticed Margaret on the threshold of the room. Sylvia, thin and dark as a lifeless twig, but chic as usual, and with her narrow lips painted their usual dark red, was now speaking. “I’m worn out,” she murmured. Her face was stark and white as bone, and her tilted black eyes had blurred with fatigue. “I wonder how—” She stopped suddenly, and her white throat revealed a sudden spasm, and she clenched her hands together. She moved her long and narrow body, in its tight-bodiced, wide-skirted black dress, as if trying to find a more comfortable position in the Louis Fifteenth chair. Her black hair, drawn harshly back from her cold bleak temples, was rolled into a big knob on her neck, and because of the dye used to keep any gray from showing, it had no lights or shadows in it. “Oh, God,” she murmured again. “He’s our brother, isn’t he? Why hasn’t someone been down—?”
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