The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  Billy nodded soberly. “I guessed all that a long time ago. He’d talk about stage art, from looking at Sylvia’s books on it, and about music like a professional, and he used to sneak in a couple of hours a month at the art gallery and describe the pictures to me like a painter himself, and he’d get books from the public library on medicine and read them in the basement, and physics books with all kinds of jargon and charts in them, and when he talked, it looked like he was on fire, just burning up. You couldn’t stop listening to him; it was like listening to somebody hypnotizing you. I guess you’re right. He could have been anything he wanted to be. But he runs the store and he’s sure making something out of it! Yes, sir! A real genius at selling and plans. Maybe he decided, all by himself, that he was best at that.”

  Tonight, to his astonishment, in that little restaurant in the Village, David was hearing fully about his brother, and he could not help it, in his youth and jealousy and resentment against Edward, that he discounted almost everything Billy was saying. The music, yes. But not all the rest! It was impossible. Billy was just enlarging his friend, in his affection, to the dimensions of a god. David smiled indulgently, and Billy stiffened.

  “Ed’s a first-class merchant,” said David. “We’re getting rich out of the delicatessen, and getting what we want. Perhaps we’ll never know what it is we really want, but that’s our own fault.”

  The waiter brought the whisky. David had never drunk whisky before, and he watched covertly as Billy dealt with it like a man. Then he sipped. It nauseated him, but he controlled his affronted expression.

  Billy subsided in thought. He watched the candlelight shining on the gold cuff links. Then he asked, as if idly, “How’s Ed? I mean, how’s he feeling?”

  “Ed? Why, Ed’s an ox! He never gets tired; he can lift a hundred pounds as easily as I can lift ten. He’s like a wrestler, all broad muscles and limber as a snake. Make two of me, though I’m a little taller. He lives in the shop, though we’ve got two clerks now. Pa has to stay home a great deal, with his heart.”

  Billy pursed his finely carved lips. “Maybe Ed’s big and ambitious but I don’t think he’s very healthy. He almost fainted in the basement one time and almost fell in the furnace. Caught him on the way in. He looked like he was dying.”

  “Ed?” repeated David, incredulously. “Why, Ed was never sick a day in his life! He must have just tired himself out. Fainted? Ed?”

  Billy changed the subject. He said earnestly, “Look, Dave, I want you to promise me something. Here’s my card; it’s got my agent’s name and address on it, right here in New York. I’m traveling around the country now, but if you write me I’ll get your letter, if you send it to my agent. Dave, don’t tell Ed you saw me or anything about me. Promise?”

  David took the card and carefully put it in his flat wallet, which, if it contained only a few bills, was of the finest morocco. He was puzzled. “Why, Billy? Ed would want to know how well you’re doing.”

  Billy shook his head. “Maybe. But do you know something? I bet he’s still mad at me for leaving him. And,” and now Billy smiled inscrutably, “if he found out about me he’d—well, he’d try to do something for me. Ed’s like that. I’m doing good and I’ll do better, but I don’t want Ed pushing in and trying to help me! I need fresh air.”

  Now his eyes began to kindle. “Dave, in about twenty minutes people’ll start coming in. I’ve got an idea! I’ve composed a couple of pieces myself. A new one, I call it ‘The Royal Street Blues.’ It’s just been published in a place down in N’Orleans. I’m trying it out tonight.” He became very excited. “Wait! I’ll get it off the piano and I want you to run your eyes over it.”

  He ran to the piano, where his musicians were straining to hear the conversation. He snatched a sheet of music from the piano and ran back to David, who was suddenly feeling the whisky. There was a golden haze shifting before his eyes, yet everything appeared preternaturally acute and clear, and there was a rising lightness and pleasure in him. “There,” said Billy proudly. “You just read it! You can follow it while we run it off for you.”

  He returned to the dais and picked up his trumpet, and his musicians prepared to play. He put the trumpet to his mouth and made it sound as David had never heard a trumpet sound before. The other instruments joined in, and David, following the music with his eyes, was enchanted and dazzled. He listened intently as he read. Why, this was something new, something never heard before, something so exciting that it made a man’s heart jump!

  That tonal color! Tones sounding with infinite variety between flat and natural, themes involving those tones as chord components. Mobile third and seventh with the diatonic. Lilting slurs, glissandi, tones pure and singing, then brazen. Percussive accents, like jungle drums. Sudden changes of pitch. Three-over-four polyrhythmic superimpositions. And over it all, the bright silver shouting and seductive glimmerings of the trumpet, like a living voice, an exultant voice. Yet, while leading the other instruments, it blended them, echoed them, soared above them. The pianist’s dark fingers danced over the keys in a blur, the violin wailed and skipped, the drum beat like a fevered man’s heart.

  Billy put down the trumpet and began to sing in a rich baritone:

  “I got the blues, I got the Royal Street Blues!

  I got the mis’ries, yes, sir, I got the mis-er-ies!

  I ain’t got my girl,

  Somebody’s got my girl,

  Somewhere, somebody’s got my girl,

  And I got the blues, I got the Royal Street Blues!”

  David, entranced though he was, had begun furiously to edit the sheet of music. His face was flushed and damp, and his pencil raced. He would lift his head, listen intently, his mouth parted and smiling; then he would bend his head again and scribble faster than ever. His heart pounded. He was uplifted, carried away. The trumpet blazed again, and it was voluptuous. This was music he could understand! This was his own kind, his own music! The other musicians now sang the song, dolefully, movingly, and the trumpet now followed them as if mourning, in notes David would have thought before tonight as utterly impossible with that instrument.

  It was the whisky, of course, and his own suddenly released youth, and his rapture, that made him seize the sheet of music and Billy’s harmonica and run to the dais. The musicians grinned at him, and Billy laughed around the mouth of the trumpet as if utterly content. He nodded. David put the harmonica to his lips and followed the music, and after a few notes the musicians eyed him with joyful respect. Their heads jerked in time. Then David threw the harmonica on the top of the piano, pushed the pianist fiercely aside, and took his place. The piano, to the amazement of everyone but Billy, took on new expression, new depth, new feeling. Billy softened the trumpet, the violinist let his notes sink, the drum murmured, and the piano rolled out triumphantly. David was now scarlet; he looked drugged yet fervid and ebullient, lost in his music. He played plaintively, flatting the notes, crying in his notes, tinkling, racing, darting, his long body swaying back and forth as his hands danced. His face streamed with sweat. He was alive as he had never been alive before.

  The waiters crowded at the back to listen, and their eyes glazed, and their feet tapped. They rolled in unison. One or two hummed the melody. When the music came to a wild end, they clapped without their own volition and stamped their feet. The musicians rose and screamed a passionate hosannah, and beat David’s shoulders in a frenzy, and they all shrieked at once.

  David sat now, in silence, and grinned, all his white teeth glittering. He could feel the blood rushing in his body, the tingling of his flesh. He shook hands with all the four young Negroes and accepted their accolades.

  “You’re for us!” cried Billy. He turned to his musicians. “I’ve known him since we were kids. I knew all the time what he could do, yes sir! Yes sir, yes sir! Did you hear that piano? Man, that piano! It’ll never be the same!”

  “Oh, now,” said David, and he was a little hoarse. He gave Billy the sheet of music. “I’ve made s
ome corrections. You dragged here and there. Hurry it up; slide there, see? Drag it out in that quick phrase, move it along here. Then it’ll be perfect.” He looked at his hands in wonder, his “blasphemous” hands. But he was not remorseful. “And the lyrics aren’t so good. I made corrections here and there. Billy, you’ve got a wonderful voice.”

  Billy took the music, squinted his eyes doubtfully, then became very excited. “You got it, Dave, you got it! This’ll have ’em sobbing in their beer and wine and whisky, and make ’em twirl. Yes, man!”

  He looked at David, and though his bronze face still glowed, he became sober. “Man, you got a job with us anytime you want! Anytime! Two pianos! That’ll do something to ’em. What’re you wasting your time for? Classical music! You’re wasting your time.” He looked at the music on which David had scribbled, and he was transported. “I got the name for you, too, Dave! Davey—Jones. Davey—Jones. You’re white. You can wear a mask. Mystery stuff. What you say, Dave? Man, we’ll make a team, we’ll make a band that’ll send ’em out of their heads! We’ll be famous.”

  David was suddenly sobered, and a chill settled on him. He looked at the piano wistfully, and all his soul longed for it.

  “Tell you what, Dave,” said the sensitive Billy. “You just keep my card. You think about it. I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll never stop waiting for you. No sir. And you’ll get around to this; it’s in you. You can’t keep it out. Davey Jones!”

  David whispered, and he was trembling: “I—I can’t, Billy. Not yet, Billy.” Then he lifted his head and his eyes sparkled. “But maybe sometime, Billy. Sometime, Billy!”

  He stood up. He stammered, “There’s Ed, Billy. He’s been working for me—all the days of his life.” And his face paled, then darkened.

  “You got your own life,” said Billy, with pity and obstinacy. “Dave, you got your own life.”

  But David left the dais and began to walk to the door. Customers were beginning to enter, and they stared at the dazed and elegant young man curiously as he pushed through them.

  Billy called after him, urgently, “You come back, Davey. Davey Jones. Someday, you come back! You got my agent’s card.”

  But David did not reply. He vanished through the door.

  CHAPTER IX

  The spring sun very gently washed the low and scattered red brick cottages of the Englebert Boys School in the suburbs of the small city of Andersburg, Pennsylvania. Mr. Englebert was quite an innovation among schoolmasters. He did not believe that schools, public or private, should be grim and cold and compact and as repellent as prisons. “Learning,” he would say, “should be a joy and full of excitement. It is life’s greatest adventure; it is an illustrated excursion into the minds of noble and learned men, not a conducted tour through a jail. So its surroundings should be as gracious as possible, to complement it.”

  Thirty years before, in 1878, he had bought twenty acres of land in what was then only farm acreage, and had built his school upon them, all of warm and rosy brick with white casement windows and white doors and shutters, in the Virginia manner, for Mr. Englebert had come from that state. The school building itself was four stories high, with a handsome bell tower which chimed the hours and the half-hours. A little nonsectarian chapel adjoined it, and each Sunday a minister of a different denomination came to conduct the services, another innovation not entirely approved by the people of Andersburg, who thought that only ministers who were Lutherans or Episcopalians should be invited. When Mr. Englebert invited priests, who came, most of Andersburg was totally shocked. “I love Christians,” Mr. Englebert would say genially. “They detest everybody not of their particular sect. How they can read their Bible and hate afterwards is one of the more jovial paradoxes, and also the most tragic. But then it is almost impossible to find a Christian among Christians.”

  The cottages were the dormitories, each with a pleasant little living room, complete with fireplace, a study hall, and happy bedrooms, each one single. “Gregariousness is splendid,” said Mr. Englebert. “But I have never heard of anything worthwhile or creative accomplished in the midst of a crowd, or by a crowd. Barracks, I have heard, are always the scenes of hate and animosity and quarrels. When a man is alone, he is truly himself, and if he fights, he fights with his own soul, or with God, and that is excellent. Better solitariness in a bleak cell than sleep in a palace chamber with a number of your fellows.”

  He chose his teachers from all over the country, with extreme care. They were all men of sound learning and with a reverence for the liberal arts. “I do not object to vocational training,” he would explain. “What would we do without manual workers? But industry alone should have its own vocational schools. It is not in the province of the State or of private schools to teach trades.”

  He was so short and so rubicund and so fat that his boys irreverently called him Santa Claus. He was genial but adamant when it came to scholarship. He was just except when injustice had been done, and then he was intolerant. He believed in mankind except when it went to war or—accursed word!—when it became “enthused.” He was gay, but never gay about learning. He trusted discreetly, but only discreetly, being an elderly man of much experience. “You know where your enemy is and what he is up to,” he would say. “Your friends are a different matter, of course. Never let a friend out of eye-range, or you’ll smart for it.”

  He had, in short, only two reverences: his God and his country. “One does not question the Absolute,” he would tell his boys. “As for America, she has her most grievous faults, but she is less faulty than other nations, and she is founded on a Constitution which must have been inspired by God, it is so without flaw. No man could have conceived it. I worry only about the Amendments, which are the work of men. Thank the Almighty that no one attempts to amend the Bible!”

  When some troubled teacher called upon him in his big and untidy house on the campus, Mr. Englebert would first press a drink upon him and first talk of trivial or amusing matters. It usually ended by the teacher deciding that he could handle his problem himself, or that it was too petty to be mentioned to Mr. Englebert. Mr. Englebert invariably agreed, and the teacher would depart confident and with increased stature. “When a man solves his own problems, his belly muscles are tightened,” Mr. Englebert would think, somewhat vulgarly. “More universal problems should be referred to God, who invented them Himself. He has the shoulders for them.”

  Edward Enger had chosen the school on the recommendation of George Enreich, who was a friend of Mr. Englebert. He had visited the schoolmaster some months before sending Gregory to the school. Mr. Englebert had listened politely to Edward’s taut and direct remarks about his brother and his “genius.” But Mr. Englebert was less interested in his prospective boy than in Edward, who fascinated him and worried him. This was unusual; Mr. Englebert rarely worried about anything. He told George, “I am sorry for your young friend. He believes absolutely in too many things, but probably never in the right ones.”

  Young Mr. Struthers, this mild spring Saturday afternoon, walked across the campus toward Mr. Englebert’s house, near the chapel.

  The boys were enjoying the good weather, wandering about under the stark trees and looking at the distant amethyst mountains, sitting on the white stone steps of their various dormitories, boxing, skylarking, laughing, or happily doing nothing whatever. Mr. Englebert believed in long periods of idleness, during which a youth could contemplate his soul or nothing, “which often amounts to the same thing in some of these rascals.” There was no gymnasium on the premises, which always horrified the parents of new students. “They’ll get their exercise,” Mr. Englebert promised them. And they did. They shoveled snow, washed all the windows of the school, painted woodwork inside and out, mowed grass, had individual gardens which were strictly patrolled once a week, polished interior floors, made desks and chairs, and, in short, worked so hard on these things that the school had but two janitors. Many of the boys were wealthy, some would never be wise, but they had abundant
health in common. They did not complain that there was no football or baseball team. They were familiar with Mr. Englebert’s saying, “History, as they say, was made on the playing fields of Eton, but so were a good many damnable wars. When my boys leave my school, they’ll have so much respect for the work a man can do, and the thoughts he can think, that war which destroys men will seem the unpardonable sin to them.”

  Mr. Struthers found Mr. Englebert drowsing contentedly by his cindery fire, his ugly black tomcat sleeping on his knee, a tray—containing coffee cups and a steaming coffee pot for whoever might be inclined to disturb him on Saturday afternoon—waiting on a round table at his side, and a big cigar in his mouth. For a man who carefully avoided all physical effort and who had an aversion for too much fresh air, Mr. Englebert was remarkably rosy and glossy, from his bald skull to the last of his three chins, which rested abruptly on his great chest, apparently dispensing with the need of a neck. He opened one brilliant blue eye, very small and clear, when Mr. Struthers entered, murmured sleepily, “Coffee, help yourself,” and shut his eye again. Mr. Struthers seated himself, filled a cup, munched at a small cake, got up and tended the fire, hesitated, tentatively stroked the tomcat, which snarled, and sat down again. Mr. Englebert’s eye opened again. “Tom’s got a sixth sense,” he remarked. “He knows that you’re going to talk about some damned boy or other. Make it brief.”