The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Padraig, now, is a still man, and that is enough to make a man a stranger in a shouting world. But never have I seen him so still. There were ten shells. A diver hammers away, and then he reaches in the turret and he drags out the conchie, a big poor soul about sixteen inches long, all liver-spots and white patches and helpless head. It was then that Padraig gives a start, like a convulsion. He turns away his eyes as the conchie is plopped into the bucket to die. One of the divers said sometimes it takes a full twenty-four hours for them to die, in agony, and who is there to care?

  “Then Padraig drops on his knees and stares at the waiting shells, and leans over them. The diver chappies begin to laugh, for it is that Padraig is protecting them with his long body, and his clothing patched like the bodies of the conchies themselves, whitish and black. I can see it as clear as if it is happening now. Padraig had thick black hair, all bristles, on that narrow head of his, and that sinister copper light from the sun lit up the ends like fire. He has a suffering face, by nature, but now it was all anguish.

  “And then a conchie looks out from his turret, and the heart in me flopped like a fish itself. A gray, leatherish head with big, wrinkled, leatherish eyes, in gray folds. And it looks straight at Padraig, and damn it! you could feel they were talking to each other, and you could feel the fear of the conchie, and the pleading. He had come to the right man,” added William ruefully.

  Edward, listening, could see the dark and flowing ocean, the broken path of the dropping sun, the depths of the burning sky, the distant glimpse of palms rising above the waters. He could hear the hot silence, the murmur of waves against the boat. But most of all he could see the tragic figure of Padraig, thin almost to death, and his tragic face, and the baffled crew and divers.

  William sighed. “He looks at the conchie and the conchie looks at him, and it was like big brother and little brother, and he says, ‘How much for the whole damned lot?’ And the divers laugh and stamp their wet legs, and Padraig repeats himself in that muted voice of his, like a harp murmuring to itself. ‘A pound will do it, Irish,’ one of them says. ‘Setting up business?’

  “And there kneels Padraig on his hands and knees over the conchies and their shells, and I know there isn’t a pound between us. Is Padraig going to fight for the conchies? Never a man was born who could best Padraig in a fair fight, though he looks like a lath. But Padraig is a just man. The conch shells are the divers’ way of making a living, and it is a Sassenach’s ill fortune that he has no heart. Then Padraig heaves a huge breath, and without looking up he pulls a ring from his finger, all that he has in the world, a big gold ring with a ruby set in it, and never did he tell me who gave it to him.

  “‘This is worth a hundred pounds or more,’ he says. ‘Take it for the poor creatures.’

  “They pounce on the ring, slavering. And while they’re shouting how much they can sell it for, Padraig picks up the conchies, one by one, and drops them back into the sea. He’s got just three left when the divers come to themselves, and they screech. But Padraig throws the conchies into their waters and wipes off his hands and stands up, and by the Blessed Mother, if he isn’t smiling and full of peace, like a man who’s just taken Holy Communion.

  “You should have seen the gaping divers, Eddie. Big eyes and falling mouths. It’s a madman they’ve been dealing with, they are thinking. And they run off and tell the captain. And the captain gives us both the sack, on the spot. And we with three bob in Jamaica.”

  William looked at Edward, who was trying to smile. Edward said, “I think I can understand why he did it. But still, he’s impractical. How did you get away from Jamaica?”

  “We worked in the sugar canes for over three accursed months and then we shipped out.” William slipped off the counter and the telephone rang angrily. “It’s only Pa,” said Edward, in bemusement, and answered the telephone impatiently. He said over his shoulder, “I suppose Padraig never thought that the divers would probably pick up the same conchies the next day.”

  “What was that to him, then? They had another lease on their lives. And he’d spaced them, in deeper waters. If they crawled home, it would take them some time. And if there is a God, it is possible that He would remember Padraig’s ring, which even when we were starving he would not sell, but cherished it with love, and He would protect the conchies for Padraig’s sake. A man does not give his heart, and God not knowing.”

  Edward picked up his coat, and his face was dark and brooding. William watched him keenly. Then Edward was staring at the clean and empty counters. “What makes you think he’d make a good man, William?”

  “There are very few things or people in which Padraig believes. I think, Eddie, that he will believe in you. And when Padraig believes, God or man cannot stop him. He has a way with him and an eloquence, when he wills, that can move stones.”

  Edward glanced up quickly, and he could not understand William’s shrewd but compassionate smile.

  “Aye, laddie, he will believe in you.” He will, it is possible, be your conscience, William added to himself.

  PART TWO

  “It is difficult for power to avoid despotism.”

  GASPARIN

  CHAPTER I

  Mrs. William McNulty, the internationally famous American actress, “never moved,” as she put it, unless she “first consulted the stars.” To skeptics, she would recall Montaigne’s aphorism that a leaf on this planet cannot move without disturbing the most distant galaxies in their august courses.

  The stars were unpropitious about her new tour, but ambiguously so. She had been a widow for five years, and the astrologer had hinted that she would meet “a dark and taciturn stranger of great tragedy, male,” and obscure men and women whose lives she would affect. Mrs. McNulty, who cared nothing for people, brushed that aside impatiently, but she was intrigued by the “dark and taciturn stranger of great tragedy, male.” Almost puritanical in her private life, she had not comforted herself since Mr. McNulty’s death in the conventional stage fashion, and as love to her meant marriage—with one at least as wealthy as herself, she would think prudently—she was stirred by the astrologer’s mysterious message. Men of tragedy, she had discovered, were usually men who could afford to be tragic. Gentlemen who worked hard for a living were necessarily cheerful, or, at least, they had no time to indulge themselves.

  The tour, this early March of 1914, did not appeal to her particularly. She had just closed her latest play, A Woman of Morality, in New York. The play was a bad one but had been saved triumphantly by her superb and majestically emotional acting. She had managed to keep the play alive and prosperous for four months. When diminishing returns had set in, she had immediately closed it, for she was a partner.

  She had been invited to appear, solo, in Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago, for she had her own repertoire apart from large plays. As a woman who never spurned a dollar, and as she was not to appear in London until June, and as she hated idleness, she had accepted the offer, after doubling the amount of the original offers. She, though never a sentimentalist, had a love for what the New Yorkers disdainfully called “the hinterland.” She had, in fact, been born in Buffalo, on the east side, née Maggie Regan, and had been the pride of the amateur theatricals in St. Boniface’s parish. The mother superior, a very “advanced” woman, had written to a producer she mysteriously knew in New York, and thus had launched Maggie’s career. Maggie, if ever lovingly conscious of Mother M. Francis, and ever generous, through the redoubtable nun, to the needs of her old parish, had not seen her friend for many years. Now she had the opportunity. “I doubt the ‘dark and taciturn stranger of great tragedy, male,’ is Father Dougherty, though God knows he was always groaning about something or another, and striking desperate poses, and raising hell generally with everybody,” she confided to her friend, the equally famous French modiste, Madame Honora DelaFontaine, née Mary Garrity of Brooklyn.

  “Priests!” replied Madame DelaFontaine, who attended Mass every morning, went to confession every Sa
turday, and took Holy Communion religiously. She spoke with eloquence and rolled up her black Irish eyes in a very Latin expressiveness. She had adopted a French accent several years ago, but occasionally lapsed, especially when with her friend. The “Madame” was purely for effect. She was a spinster, nominally so, to her confessor’s distress. “I remember the priest at St. Luke’s—miserable parish, half-starving—and we needed a lot of comforting. And what does he do? He keeps threatening us all with hell-fire and utter damnation and herds us, really herds us, to confession, like we were a bunch of sheep and not human beings. And makes sarcastic remarks about the contents of the collection plate. He had a case on foreign missions, though he himself could have used some of the clothing we donated.” She meditated. “He died of what the doctors called malnutrition. Poor Father Fisher.”

  Mrs. William McNulty was thirty-eight years old. She was advertised as thirty-two. She was a “fine figure of a woman,” buxom, tall, commanding, theatrical in appearance and manner, and was thoroughly “black Irish,” with a mass of hair as black as Satan, blue eyes as intense as an autumn sky, and a skin as white as foam. Her friend, Mary Garrity, alias Madame DelaFontaine, had increased the drama of Maggie’s appearance by designing for her dresses and gowns and coats of the utmost grace and in a classic manner. Mary detested lavishness, in a very lavish age. “I’m not austere,” she would say coldly. “I’m just against vulgarity. The present styles are really vulgar, you know. It is not a matter of being puritanical. It is a matter of the woman setting off the clothes. I never design a dress for an average personality. What is there to display? If a woman has character and distinction, classic clothing will enhance them. If a woman has nothing, then she is nothing but a hanger, and I refuse to design clothes for her and have my efforts made into dowdy caricatures or dummies.”

  Mary Garrity, alias Madame Honora DelaFontaine, was petite, vivid, acrimonious, and full of humor. She had finished with her spring showing in New York. On invitation, she had decided to accompany Mrs. McNulty on this dubious tour. “One never knows where one will get ideas,” she had said. Moreover, Mrs. McNulty had offered to pay all expenses. Moreover, Madame DelaFontaine would be conspicuously mentioned on the programs as New York’s “foremost designer and modiste.” It never hurt to consider future markets, even among “the barbarians” across the Hudson. The fact that Mary Garrity had just invested in a pioneering firm which promised mass production on “original models” had nothing to do with the case, of course, even though the “original models” had been designed by Mary Garrity.

  There were no secrets between these two devoted friends. Their conversation together was secretive, hilarious, and sometimes lewd. They had no other confidantes. They were also fond of whisky, though each pretended, to others, that sherry was a “lady’s drink.” In short, they were women full of the lust for life, vital and eager, and ever ready for new experiences.

  So, on an early March day in 1914, these robust two set out on the tour, leaving New York on a dank morning adrift with fog and wind. They were accompanied only by Mrs. McNulty’s maid and manager, two meek people who shared a Pullman seat in the coach that carried the actress’s drawing room. Maggie and Mary, after a brief shudder at the weather, opened a golden bottle and prepared to exchange confidences, scandal, and laughter. “I don’t know why I’m going with you, Maggie,” said Mary as she dashed the pungent liquor into a glass and disdained offered water.

  “Except you want a little publicity yourself,” said Maggie McNulty, with a glass at her own lips. “My God! Look, it’s snowing. And do I remember the snows! Listen to that wind.”

  Mary, who had never been west of the Hudson before, regarded the ominous and rolling skies with equanimity. “Let it snow,” she said in a voice remarkably deep and hoarse for so diminutive a woman. “Where are we now?”

  “We’re leaving Albany,” replied Maggie, in a foreboding tone, straining at the windows and pulling aside the red velvet curtains to see more clearly. The heating system clanked with a melancholy sound, and Maggie shivered. “Winter Monday mornings at school,” she mourned. “Will I ever forget that noise!”

  “Pull your sables over your shoulders,” said Mary. “I always said there’s nothing better than Irish whisky. I hope our trunks got aboard safely.”

  Maggie patted the mounds of curls over her head and ears and tried to forget the snow. “I didn’t tell you,” she said. “Vitagraph wants me to do a three-reeler.”

  “Oh, no,” groaned Mary. “Leave that kind of thing to the Mary Pickfords. And the other little girls with pinched-up little mouths and thin legs. Are you a woman or are you a squirt?” She contemplated her glass. “But there might be money in it.”

  Maggie brightened. “They offer me fifteen thousand dollars,” she said. “It’ll take me only three weeks.”

  “What are you waiting for then?”

  “I’m not waiting,” replied Maggie, smugly. “I’ve already accepted.”

  By the time their lunch was served in the drawing room they were very gay. And the snow lunged at the windows so heavily that no landscape could be seen, and the wind howled at the smallest crack in a banshee voice. It was very cosy in the drawing room. Mary, the spinster, sang some very disreputable songs in her masculine voice, and Maggie accompanied her in the choruses. Their lively faces had flushed deeply, and their eyes sparkled. Later they dozed. At twilight they awakened to discover that the train had stopped and rushing white curtains veiled the windows.

  “Where the hell are we?” asked Madame DelaFontaine, rubbing her eyes.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  “You ought to know this territory. What’re we stopping for?”

  “Look at that snow,” said Maggie, uneasily. “I remember we always had the worst snows in March.”

  She rubbed the steamed window with a froth of real lace and peered through the glass, at which the wind and the snow pounded furiously. “We’ve stopped at some station, I think,” she said. “But I can’t see any sign.” She rang the bell for the porter, who came in almost immediately. “Where are we?” she demanded imperiously. “What are we stopping for? I thought our next stop was Buffalo.”

  But the conductor pushed the porter aside and looked at the two ladies with worried anxiety. “I’m sorry, but the train is stalled, ma’am,” he said to Maggie, who appeared to him to be the most imposing woman in the drawing room, and therefore in command. “At Waterford. We can’t go on until tomorrow, if then. All trains are stopping at the nearest stations. The weather is getting worse to the west, all the way to Chicago. We are going on a sidetrack, and I’m afraid you ladies will have to spend a day or two in Waterford.”

  “In where?” boomed Mary, incredulously.

  “The man says Waterford,” said Maggie. “I’ve heard of it.”

  The conductor saw the nearly empty bottle of whisky, and his Yankee face became remote. No wonder that little woman there had such a voice, like a man’s. Whisky voice; her cords must all be cobbled. She was glaring at him in outrage. “Two good hotels in Waterford,” he said, stiffly, and replaced his cap. Women who drank were no ladies and it wasn’t necessary for a man to remove his hat for them. “The Whitney House’s the best. We’re in the station now, and you can get a hack. See them standing out there now, waiting.”

  Maggie sighed with resignation. “Nothing for it but to gather ourselves up, call Eloise and the jackass who calls himself my manager, or something,” she said. Her voice, the conductor heard approvingly, was both sonorous and velvety. A lady’s voice. The little woman was probably her maid.

  “I’m not going to leave this damned train,” said Mary, positively, pulling her own sables over her neat little shoulders. “Why, it’s death out there. Waterford! Where in hell is that?”

  “You’ll stay a couple of days in here then,” said the conductor, with happy gloom. “Better hurry, ladies, or the hacks’ll all be gone, and then you’ll have to walk three miles.” His lanky face glowed at the
prospect.

  “Let’s go. Don’t be a fool, Mary,” said Maggie, rising, and in so doing inadvertently upsetting the bottle of whisky on the floor. The compartment was immediately flooded with the fumes of alcohol. Maggie went to the door and shouted, “Eloise! Harry! Come on in here!” The conductor retreated.

  “But your engagements!” said Mary.

  “It stands to reason I can’t walk to them,” replied her friend. “We’ll send telegrams. People in Buffalo understand about snows, and there won’t be any hysteria if I’m a day or two late. Not like New York.”

  “Maggie McNulty and DelaFontaine holed up at the end of the world,” protested Mary. She stood up, chic in her black broadcloth suit and white lace shirtwaist and small black sailor hat of the finest beaver. Beside her, in crimson velvet and lace, with a wide crimson velvet hat, Maggie towered like a rather lush goddess. She swung her sable cape expertly over her round and well-nourished shoulders as her maid and manager came rushing in, aghast at what they had just heard from the porter. “Don’t look like carp,” said Maggie, annoyed. “Perhaps you’d both like to take shovels and clear off the tracks in front of the train. Gather things up, Eloise. Where’re my gloves?”

  The two ladies emerged into the coach, and Maggie, looking for her gloves up her sleeve, where she usually kept them, dropped her purse. It was immediately picked up by a man even taller than herself, who returned the article to her with a slight and formal bow. “Thank you,” she said, and then looked at him again. “A dark and taciturn stranger of great tragedy, male.” He had not spoken, he had not even smiled at her, and he certainly had a tragic face, all somber lean angles and muted handsomeness and still grave eyes, black as faintly gleaming coal. He was narrow and almost fleshless under his excellently tailored clothing, Maggie saw at a glance. His thick black hair was cut shorter than the fashion, and he had fine ears, seemingly without blood, so pale they were. Even his mouth, wide and stern, had no color. A wave of excitement ran over Maggie.