The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Put the shirtwaist on the altar as another sacrifice in the service of humanity,” replied the other weary woman, sardonically. “Well, anyway, we do help, just like the teachers. Wonder if we’ll ever have enough money for two silk waists and perhaps a pair of French-kid button boots, and perhaps a pair of silk stockings for Sunday?”

  The library’s narrow confines had dingy, white-plastered walls and ceilings, and brown wainscoting running four feet up the sides of the walls. Everything was clean and dreadfully poor, from hissing gas globes hanging from the ceilings to the bare floors so dingy with age that they appeared black, in spite of frequent waxings. The shelves, in many cases, had been built by the two male librarians themselves, out of odd pieces of wood salvaged from house-building or bought by starved, saved dollars. “After all, you can’t keep books in piles on the floor,” they would plead as if begging someone’s pardon. “We would have gotten new shelves, and perhaps a new library, if those New Progress men in the city government hadn’t suddenly decided that all the playgrounds should be renovated with millionaire’s toys for the illiterate kiddies, who wouldn’t know a library from a chicken coop. At that, there’s considerable resemblance!”

  An ancient wooden clock ticked from a wall over the checking-out desk. The librarian was an elderly woman, Miss Clare Sullivan, and her salary was ten dollars a week. She was a scholar. It was also true that she spent all day Sunday baking a huge pot of beans and pork, which would last her for five meager dinners. Friday was no problem: having little to spend for fish, she merely fasted as did the early Christians; and though her lined face was wan, it also had a curious alabaster translucence from mingled starvation and piety. She supported an antique aunt with arthritis. At confession, she was not quite sure as to whether or not she should confess that she often slipped slender religious books between volumes of Keynes, Engels, Leibnich, and Marx, which were having such an interesting run these days, much to her bafflement. Sometimes, quite by accident, the furtive little books on the lives of saints or religious exercises were withdrawn, too. This gave Miss Sullivan a joyful satisfaction. She decided not to confess; Father Mangan was rather strict, though whether he would be outraged at the cheek-by-jowl arrangement on the shelves, or be censorious at her sneakiness, she did not know.

  The last borrower had trailed out. It was ten minutes to six now. Miss Sullivan glanced up and was happy to see that “little Ralph Enger” was still studying with the assistance of Miss Butterfield of Benton High, advanced mathematics teacher. “Little Ralph Enger” was at least five inches taller than Miss Sullivan, who was not particularly short, but she had known him for six of his twelve years. It was she, intrigued by the books he borrowed, who had at first investigated and then had excitedly enlisted the interest of Miss Butterfield, who was seventy and nearly six feet tall and who possessed a head of magnificent if somewhat spurious jet-black hair wrapped in braids about her leonine head. Miss Butterfield might have a granite exterior, but “she’s all gold inside,” her friend, Miss Sullivan, would say. That had been six months ago.

  “That boy, with the remarkable shining auburn hair, is a little weak in English, and weaker in grammar, and practically nonexistent about geography, and he doesn’t know the Supreme Court from a police station, but he’s a genius at mathematics,” Miss Butterfield reported, her gray eyes gleaming exaltedly. “He’s a born mathematician. But his parents insist he is a great painter, and they must be absolute fools. I must talk with them. As far as mathematics are concerned, he could pose some difficult questions for a college senior.”

  Miss Sullivan, who knew Ralph’s story, was alarmed. “Never,” she cried, “but really never, must you talk with his parents, Cynthia! They’d forbid Ralph ever to come here again. In fact, they don’t know he comes at all. He is taking time off from the art gallery. His father is a meek little chub of a man, but his mother! Brünnehilde gone to fat and dressed in cotton shirtwaists with straining buttons and with dragging serge skirts. But, Ralph told me, she’s a Von Brunner, and you’re practically supposed to genuflect when you hear that name. I’ve looked in the Book of European Nobility, and there they are, but they’re just yeoman nobility; you’d think, to hear Ralph talk, that they’re directly related to the Kaiser. He believes it, poor lamb.”

  “He’s not such a lamb, he has quite wicked black eyes,” said Miss Butterfield, with approval. “Quite wicked eyes. Don’t have a fit, Clare. I’ll take him on every other Saturday afternoon, if he can come, and meet him here. So intelligent. Colorful character. I will try.”

  Months later she reported again. “It’s that delicatessen shop,” she said with disdain. “It’s the family altar, the Holy of Holies to them, or at least to the parents and perfect ogre of an older brother. It is that ogre who is really trying to destroy Ralph by his attempts to make him a painter or something. I never go into a delicatessen; what teacher could afford those delicacies, and what stringent teacher’s stomach could absorb them? But I went into the shop yesterday; Enger’s, they call it. All porcelain and steel and wood and shiny floor and pretensions. And the ogre in charge of two slave-clerks. A big brute of a young man. A stevedore. Hands that could strangle a donkey. Though I must admit,” she added thoughtfully, “that he has fine gray eyes. I am now convinced, after seven decades of life, that you cannot truly judge a man by his eyes.”

  “You didn’t mention Ralph to him?” asked Miss Sullivan apprehensively. “That would be the end!”

  “You can surely trust me to lie adequately, I hope, Clare,” replied Miss Butterfield with some dignity. “I’ve been lying to parents for fifty years with considerable success. I merely told this young Mr. Enger that I wished half a pound of boiled ham—he personally cut it for me himself, and must be most careless; he had given me a pound, I discovered when I got home. I wanted to return the half-pound or at least pay for it, though it is very expensive, and then I remembered poor little martyred Ralph and hardened my heart. This, of course, was after I—shall I say—gave him the impression that I was the older cousin of one of Ralph’s teachers at School 12. It is possible that he was trying to bribe me to influence my ‘cousin.’”

  “Quite possible, dear Cynthia, if he is such an ogre.”

  “While I was speaking, he had a distinctly insolent way of studying my clothing. It is true it was wet weather—and what is worse than spring in Waterford?—and I was wearing my gray worsted skirt with the raveled edges to save my good skirt, and my coat is not very fine and has a tendency to sag in the wrong places, and my hat was water-soaked in spite of my umbrella. However, it was very insolent of him to notice these things; he is not a gentleman. And when I mentioned that I was a teacher myself, he said in an insinuatingly and very false gentle voice, ‘I am sorry to hear that, Miss Butterfield.’ I could feel my face actually blushing and I haven’t blushed for over half a century. I wanted to reprimand him for his impertinence, but he was slicing the ham then, and though I wished for a moment that he would cut his finger, I realized it was not a Christian thought.”

  “Father Mangan often reminds us, or tries to remind us, that God loves our enemies as much as He does us, or even people who insult or wound us, for they are God’s children also,” said Miss Sullivan sadly. “It’s a very disconcerting thought.”

  “Very disconcerting; it doesn’t do to dwell on it,” said Miss Butterfield. “Too upsetting.” (Miss Butterfield was partial to English novels.) She continued, “I mentioned that Ralph was doing excellently in school, which is an exaggeration except for mathematics, and then I introduced the idea that Ralph might make an excellent teacher himself. Of mathematics. You should have seen the ogre then! He is so absentminded that he was about to drop two cans of Campbell’s Soup into my bag, and then he came to himself and put them back on the shelf. And his eyes! They positively glared at me. He said, ‘My brother is a genius, an artist; his teachers have reported that for years. And an artist he is going to be. My God, a teacher!’”

  “He swore at you!” cri
ed Miss Sullivan, horrified.

  “It’s very strange,” said Miss Butterfield. “It sounded less like an imprecation than a sound of distress and sympathy. He conducted me to the door himself, and bowed me out, and he looked after me after the door was closed, and bowed again. It was only my imagination, of course, but he appeared to be pitying me. Me, Cynthia Butterfield, a lady, a teacher!”

  “Such impertinence. But, of course, he is a boor, according to poor little Ralph. No refinement, no culture. No touch of the Von Brunner blood.”

  Miss Butterfield nodded, but she became lost in thought. On this second Saturday in March, a fine mild day fervid with awakening life, she had a talk with Ralph at their usual table in the library.

  The dusty windows had been opened, and there was the fragrance and movement and voices of a city suddenly uplifted by the promise of the spring, and Miss Butterfield, though seventy years old, felt the never-failing thrill of youth along her arthritic spine, and her tired body responded with a throb of hope. Timid shafts of pale sunlight struck the shabby tables, the mildewed walls and ceiling, the books on the shelves. Miss Butterfield’s jet hair looked more meretricious than ever in that light, yet, oddly, it also looked jaunty and indomitable. There was even a flush on her gray cheeks.

  She studied young Ralph and admired, as always, the splendor of his auburn hair, which appeared like spun-copper filaments, severely brushed over the top of his skull and then irrepressibly curling behind his somewhat overlarge ears. (“Artists almost always have small close ears,” Miss Butterfield would say, firmly. “But scientists are apt to have big, flaring ears, well fleshed and vigorous.”) Ralph’s small, upturned nose had an impudent tilt, and his black and restless eyes glittered with anticipation of his lesson. A big, rather plump boy, giving off an aura of virility and ardor, and with pink firm cheeks and a wicked smile, he had become very dear to Miss Butterfield, who had longed for a houseful of children. She pushed down the curls behind his ears with a severe glance but with a gentle hand.

  She came to the point at once, closing the book Ralph had already opened. “I have had a talk with your brother—Edward, is it?”

  Ralph gave her a ribald wink. “Yes, I know, ma’am. He mentioned it the other night. He was mad that you said I could be a professor of mathematics in some university, or an engineer. The whole family’s set on me being a painter; I told you that before. Glad you didn’t give me away.” He paused, and his expression became sulky. “Guess being a university professor or an engineer is every bit as good as being a painter, and I told. Ed that, and he got madder than ever and said I was going to be what I started to be, and that he hadn’t worked all the days of his life for nothing. Pooh! Who cares about him, Old Garlic and Pickles!”

  Miss Butterfield surveyed Ralph’s clothing, which, though not ostentatious, was neat, well made, and of good quality. The fact that it shone, here and there, testifying to frugality, did not minimize its intrinsic excellence. She tapped her pursed lips with her pencil and suddenly remembered Edward’s “fine gray eyes,” and she was disturbed.

  “Your brother’s life is every bit as valuable as anyone else’s life,” she said. “And from what you’ve told me, and from what I have heard from others, he’s been sacrificing his life since he was much younger than you, Ralph. And for you, and his brothers and sister. I have an old friend, Professor Faure, of the Waterford School for Girls, and he told me only yesterday, upon my inquiries about your family, that Edward has been studying with him for a long time—all the things he had been forced to miss at school because he was working for you.”

  “What else is he good for except working for us?” Ralph asked carelessly, ignoring, in a common human fashion, the things he did not want to hear and which might make him uneasy. “That’s what he was born for, Pa says.”

  “And your father is an oracle? Infallible?”

  Ralph glanced swiftly at the grim old woman. He said nothing.

  She fingered the old silver watch pinned to her clean but very cheap white shirtwaist. “I am wondering if Edward is not a victim of his family.”

  Ralph colored angrily. “Gosh darn it, Miss Butterfield, if anyone’s a victim, we all are! Of Ed. He scares me to death sometimes. Pounding, pounding, pounding. Why can’t he leave us alone?”

  Miss Butterfield considered this a long time. A family of weaklings except for Edward. I must help this child, Ralph, not only for his own sake but for his brother’s, she thought, and she suddenly remembered Edward’s words when she had told him she was a teacher: “I am sorry to hear that.” Her stern eyes moistened. He had not been impertinent at all! She opened a book briskly. “We are wasting time,” she said. “Let us get on with it.”

  But Ralph was staring at her oddly, and blinking. He respected Miss Butterfield more than he had ever respected anyone before, more than he would ever again respect another fellow human. She’d talked very funny about old Ed, and not with contempt. Ralph was uneasy again, and he put the end of his pencil in his mouth.

  “He insults us all the time,” he said resentfully. “Why, when Mr. Yaeger, our minister, had dinner with us a couple of Sundays ago and was congratulating old Ed on what he was doing for us, Ed looks at him and sneers out loud, ‘Oh, you mean the Fund for Fools.’ Has anyone got a right to call his brothers and sister fools, Miss Butterfield?”

  Only a victim, replied Miss Butterfield inwardly. Who was it that had said, “Beware of the wrath of a patient man”? Such wrath, breaking out uncontrollably at last, could devastate a city or a nation. She said to Ralph ambiguously, “One should so treat another that there is no provocation.”

  CHAPTER XI

  “You are certain, my Eddie, that you do not wish me to be present when you tell your parents of our new plans and our partnership?” asked George Enreich on the telephone.

  Edward smiled. “You mean, you think I might need moral support?” His smile became unpleasant. “I’m not that delicate. I can handle things myself. No thanks, Mr. Enreich.”

  Over the past few years he had frequently called “conferences” between his parents and himself, and both Maria and Heinrich, upon being told by Edward tonight that he wanted to talk with them, were pleased. Edward’s talks inevitably were the prelude to larger income. Sylvia and Ralph were banished to their rooms, and Maria took up her endless knitting and Heinrich loosened the buttons of his vest as they sat in the parlor with Edward. Too, in order to produce a proper and “cultured” atmosphere, the conversations were invariably conducted in German rather than in frivolous and “formless” English. “One must have precision during important discussions,” Maria would always say. “There must be no room for ambiguous meanings, which could cause trouble later.” To Maria, German was like a legal document, embellished with red seals and firm signatures.

  Edward did not sit down. Heinrich lit his pipe and looked anxious and meek as usual, waiting to take all his cues from Maria. His wife knitted with massive serenity and patience, not lifting her eyes from her work. It was always so, from the beginning, thought Heinrich with uneasy surprise. Maria has respected Eddie, not despised him. Ach, they are alike, these ones!

  Edward glanced about the tiny parlor. It was warm, this spring night, but the windows were not open—to conserve the heat for cooler hours. He looked at the gas globes. He was done with this place! It enclosed him like a constricting shell which was now too small for him.

  “I do not speak,” he began, “until I have made up my mind, until I have closed all contingencies, all retreats, and there is no turning back. I must have this understood from the beginning.”

  “Yes,” said Maria, with a nod, indicating that all sensible and intelligent people proceed in that way, while only fools discuss plans before resolving them into action. Her needles clicked decisively. “Ach, yes,” murmured Heinrich.

  Edward put his hands in his pockets. “We have come a long way. We’ve taken several steps. Small steps. Now we must take the large step. And I must warn you, my parents, th
at nothing you can say can cause me to turn back. We go on together or,” and he paused, “I go on alone.”

  Maria lifted her bulbous blue eyes and fixed them on her son. For an instant the large impassiveness of her face became intent. “You have threatened that before,” she said. “I do not believe for a moment that you make idle threats. But why is it necessary to threaten? Have I not always been reasonable?”

  Edward smiled that unpleasant smile which more and more had a habit of dislodging his former agreeable expression. “You have been reasonable, Mother, when all my plans indicated that my brothers and sister, and yourselves, would be the ones mainly to profit from my ideas.”

  Maria knitted in silence for a few moments. Heinrich pulled himself up in his chair. He did not like this! Then Maria was saying calmly, “It is a strange thing about humanity. It considers its sacrifices solely for the benefit of others. But altruism, as a great philosopher has said, is deeply rooted in a desire, an egotistic desire, to benefit the altruist first of all and himself enormously more than others. However, where is the man who is honest with himself? Edward, you have not reached understanding yet. No one can give you that understanding. Time alone can accomplish that.”

  Now she’s talking like George Enreich, thought Edward, angrily. I’m a simple person, an American, and I don’t like these oblique references. It’s impossible for Germans to think or talk without mysticism.

  Maria continued in that same calm and detached manner. “I, too, your mother, have an existence apart from my children, though perhaps it has never occurred to you.”

  Edward pondered on this, then shook his head irritably. It was so like his mother to get away from the subject. She was exhibiting no curiosity. She was never in a hurry or eager. Her son had no doubt that she would be willing, now, to discuss philosophy for quite a while and delay discussion of the momentous thing in his mind and will.