The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Thank you,” she repeated. (He could not be over forty.) “I am Mrs. William McNulty—”

  “I know, Mrs. McNulty,” he replied, and his voice was so gentle and yet so resonant that Maggie was thrilled to the heart. “My name is Padraig Devoe.”

  Little Mary was peering at them inquisitively, and then when they did not appear to know that she was present, she discreetly pinched her friend on a vulnerable and highly improper spot. “Ouch,” said Maggie, absentmindedly. “Oh, Mary. Mary, this is Mr. Padraig Devoe. Mr. Devoe, my friend, the famous modiste, Madame DelaFontaine.”

  Padraig bowed again but he looked at Maggie. “I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you several times on the stage, Mrs. McNulty,” he said, and Maggie felt as young as a girl. Her fair cheeks colored entrancingly, and her blue eyes deepened in color. “How kind,” she said, and her voice trembled. She caught her breath as Padraig half turned away to leave her. “Oh, Mr. Devoe. Isn’t this terrible to be stalled here in Waterford?”

  “It isn’t so bad for me,” he said. “I am stopping at Waterford for a few days or a week.”

  “One of your businesses?” she asked, eagerly. Surely he must be someone important, she thought, noticing his clothing again, his handmade boots, his English gloves, his broadcloth coat with the French velvet collar.

  “I am the advertising manager of C. C. Chauncey’s,” he replied, and seemed reluctantly pleased at being detained.

  Maggie’s eyes became big with delight. “C. C. Chauncey’s!” she cried, ecstatically. “Who doesn’t know them in New York and Boston and Chicago and Philadelphia! Mary! C. C. Chauncey’s!” she almost sang, turning to Mary, who displayed great interest and pleasure. “Why, the original shop is right here in Waterford, isn’t it, Mr. Devoe?”

  He smiled faintly and inclined his head. “I should have remembered,” Maggie breathed. “I’ve heard that dozens of times.”

  “Yes,” said Padraig. He had forgotten that a woman could be so beautiful. He had never really looked at a woman since Norah had been killed by his horse, and she only seventeen. Little Norah Bellamy, with the dark blue eyes and golden hair and a smile like the sun itself.

  “Aren’t you Irish?” blurted Maggie, desperate to keep him. The coach was emptying rapidly of its disgruntled passengers. “I am, too. And so is Mary—Mary Garrity.” She looked down at Mary and was annoyed, unreasonably, by her friend’s trim and immaculate appearance. Her own crimson velvet was sprinkled with cigarette ashes, as usual, and she was conscious of her size and the wrinkles in her clothing as she had never been conscious before. If only she had had the sense to leave Mary in New York, as her astrologer had hinted darkly. What had the astrologer said? “The journey you are about to take will have its unpleasant aspects.” Madame DelaFontaine, at this moment, seemed to Maggie to appear to be a most unpleasant aspect, and definitely a nuisance and a drag.

  “Yes, I am,” said Padraig. He hesitated. He never involved himself with people, but another look into Maggie’s intensely blue eyes undid him, and the sensation brought back a pang of anguished memory. “May I help you ladies to a hack? They seem to be disappearing very fast out there.”

  “We’ll need two,” said Maggie, suddenly remembering Eloise and Harry. She turned to Mary, who shook her head in silent negation. Maggie’s hope that Mary could be induced to ride to the hotel with the maid and the manager, leaving her, Maggie, to ride alone with Mr. Devoe, disappeared dismally. The unpleasant aspect of Mary was becoming clearer every moment. Then Mary relented at the speechless plea on her friend’s face, and, remembering her role, she gave a Latin shrug. “We’re going to a place called the Whitney House,” she said to Padraig. “I’ll go along with Eloise and Harry, Maggie. If Mr. Devoe can get us two hacks.” Good heavens, was Maggie, the distant and virtuous, going to get herself entangled with a perfect stranger, who wore such a shadowy air of impenetrable sadness? He probably had a wife who was a perfect horror, blowsy and without an ounce of taste, and a dozen brats besides.

  “I hope we won’t be taking you out of your way—home,” said Mary, the loyal and loving, with immense tact. “Perhaps Mrs. Devoe will wonder what’s delaying you.”

  Maggie’s mouth opened soundlessly. She had never considered a wife. Her heart beat with sudden rapidity as she waited for Padraig to speak. He said quietly, “It happens that I am staying at the Whitney House myself.” He paused. He did not know what made him add, “And there’s no Mrs. Devoe.” He rarely made gratuitous remarks except when doing business.

  Maggie shut her eyes quickly and passionately, and when she opened them again, they were the color of Irish skies in the spring, moist and with a violet overcast on the blueness. She put her fingers, long, white, plump, on Padraig’s thin arm, and said gaily, “Oh, let us go, let us go!” And her lovely voice was a song.

  “I wouldn’t go out even if St. Michael called me, in person, not in this damned snow and wind,” said Mary later. “What a night, what a town! And you accepting an invitation to see some amateur two-cent show put on by yokels! You, Mrs. William McNulty! Are you out of your mind, Maggie? Why can’t you stay in this drummer’s dream of a hotel, where it’s at least warm?” She looked about her at the tiny “suite” which was the best the hotel afforded. It had a brown rug, brown velvet draperies at the tall and slitlike windows, brown plush furniture, and two depressing marble-topped tables. The brown and yellow walls boasted gas globes, which offended Mary more than anything else. “Not even electricity. And going out with a man you practically picked up on the train. He didn’t even have the manners to invite you to dinner first.”

  “He’s the reserved kind,” said Maggie. She glowed. She appeared even more incandescent than in her best roles. She shines all over, thought Mary with disquiet. “Besides,” said Maggie, “he’s having dinner with his employer and his family. And his employer’s sister, Padraig says, is putting on the show. Why, it’s one of my old ones and I get a royalty on it! What the hell is the name of it? Yes, Lady in Waiting.”

  “It stank. Highly,” said Mary. “Not one of your best inspirations, Maggie darling.”

  Maggie shrugged. “Oh, that was eighteen years ago. Don’t belittle, Mary. What’s the man’s name? Yes. Enger. Where did he get the Chauncey? It doesn’t matter. They’re rich as dirt. I understand Mr. Enger subsidizes his sister’s shows. You know,” Maggie added, happily, “the girl may have talent.”

  “Don’t get involved, dearie,” said the discouraging Mary.

  “I believe in encouraging young talent,” said Maggie, with a superb gesture.

  “That’s not what I mean,” answered Mary, darkly.

  She suddenly resolved to go with Maggie. After all, the man had thrown the invitation casually to the both of them, not Maggie alone. And Maggie, in this dithering state, so very apparent and so unique, could not be trusted with this man. He was such a strange person, and Mary, who had a very compelling imagination, could see her friend lying strangled, somewhere, in the snow, probably not to be found until summer, if it ever got to be summer here.

  Mary stood up. “If you insist upon going, and making a fine high fool of yourself, Maggie Regan McNulty, then I’m going, too,” she said. “As your guardian.”

  “Oh, no!” wailed Maggie, the regal, to Mary, the doll-like.

  “We’ll both be fools together,” said Mary, and there was nothing to be done with her when her small and piquant face took on that particular expression. “And we’ll both get pneumonia together,” Mary added. “By the saints, you’re not going to wear your black lace, are you? All that bosom and shoulders! Maggie, your lungs will freeze solid!”

  But Maggie wore the black lace, and her friend, in a desperate attempt to nullify that grandeur, in this small city, wore her most severe suit which did not become her at all, to Maggie’s secret gratification. Never had her own shoulders and bosom taken on such a sheen and luminousness before. Never had her cheeks been so blooming, not even in early youth. Maggie was in love, passionately in love.<
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  CHAPTER II

  “I just can’t believe that Mrs. William McNulty—the Mrs. William McNulty, is actually coming to our Little Theater tonight,” said twenty-four-year-old Sylvia Enger. Her spare white face, so angular and so distinguished, almost softened with pleasure. It softened even more, it almost gleamed, when she turned it to Padraig Devoe across the rich damask of the tablecloth. Her intensely black eyes dimmed moistly in the candlelight. A pulse beat in her long white throat, and her pale lips trembled. He was smiling at her, that infrequent smile which could so charm, and her heart leapt.

  “These stage people will do anything for publicity,” said Edward, twenty-five years old. “Didn’t her manager or agent, or something, call up the newspapers tonight? There’ll be headlines tomorrow, and that’s what she wants. I never heard of her before.” This was not true. He had seen her three times in New York and had admired her immensely. He had always sat in the first row, and when he had caught the brilliant blue flash of her eyes in the lights, something had stirred in him, like a quick current under ice, disturbing and moving. Somewhere he had seen eyes like hers, large and radiant, but he could not remember. The blueness was so all-pervading that it seemed to tint the very whites themselves and fill the eye sockets with enchanting color.

  “Don’t be disagreeable, as usual,” said Sylvia, bitterly. “What kind of publicity can she get in Waterford? This horrible city. What would it mean to an actress as famous as she is? You have no sense of proportion, Ed.”

  “You could be in New York if you wanted to,” said Edward, and his gray eyes were like stone. “But no. You preferred to stay in this ‘horrible city,’ though you never exactly explained why.”

  “I did. New York’s full of stage producers. I’m no dilettante,” Sylvia said, her voice growing more bitter. She could never tell him, though now she knew beyond self-deception, that she had no inspiration, no feeling for the stage at all. She could not even admit it freely to herself. She had attended many plays in New York and had understood her own inadequacy. Too, there had been those two years she had spent in New York, studying, and her teachers’ verdict, given privately to her, out of pity, and not to her brother.

  “I was willing to—what do they call it?—angel a play for you,” said Edward.

  Sylvia drew a deep breath. She was terrified that he would guess. She threw up her small head, crowned with its Grecian coronet of glassy black braids. She was terrified that she might be forced, one awful day, to confess what she had not thoroughly confessed to herself. That would be the end of her pride. She needed to hate her brother in order to survive. She had nothing else now but her deception, nothing in the world.

  “You’ve never thought,” she said in a patient voice, “that the theater isn’t confined to New York. We do good plays here. People come from miles around. I think it’s my duty to stay here, considering that not even third-rate stock from New York ever patronizes this place. Our Little Theater is the only center of culture in Waterford.”

  Padraig watched her from under his short thick lashes. He was full of pity for Sylvia. It was his compassion for all that lived that kept him apart from people, a compassion that was partly composed of a silent anger. Mankind was stupid, and there was no excuse for stupidity, for mankind possessed reason, and its stupidity was an obstinate determination to be blind. The “lesser animals” were different. They had innocence, because they had no reason, and only their instincts.

  “And Ralph, when he’s home, does an excellent job painting the sets,” Sylvia added.

  Edward frowned at the mention of his brother’s name. Ralph was in Paris now, studying under the best masters in the art of portraiture. But he was costing a devil of a lot of money, far beyond his tuition, far more than a young man of nineteen should spend even in Paris. One of these days I’ll go over there and see for myself, Edward thought. But he knew he would not. He did not often leave Waterford, and then only on business, and he did not know why he felt this reluctance. Waterford had become his cocoon, which he had spun about himself as if in protection.

  There were only these three at dinner tonight, Sylvia, Edward, and Padraig. Heinrich, who disapproved of “the late dinners,” had his meal with Maria in his own suite in this fine new mansion, just completed eight weeks ago. He was also “unwell.” More and more, as time passed, his periods of indisposition increased. There seemed to be some unknowable spiritual sickness in him, and during the past few years an unconfessed but total estrangement had developed between him and Edward. On many occasions poor Heinrich, in anxious despair, had tried to cross that abysmal crevice to his son, but Edward retreated more and more. He was the considerate son, kind and thoughtful. But he was a stranger. He stood alone. Once Maria had said to her husband, “Edward always stood alone. It was your illusion, Heinrich, though never mine, that he was ever close to you or to anybody.”

  “You are wrong, Maria! When he was a child, he was as close as my own flesh. He was my only companion.”

  Maria had studied him thoughtfully. And then in a tone of unusual gentleness she had said, “He was a child. Now he is a man.”

  For Maria, who accepted everything calmly and with Teutonic fatality, the years had gone like months. David was on tour for the past eighteen months, after his studies in Paris under a famous maestro. No one but Edward knew that the agent who handled him did not receive large fees for David’s appearances in the smaller cities and towns. It was Edward who, through the agent, had added an equal amount to the mediocre fees. The agent was happy. He collected his ten per cent on the bolstered fees, and it remained a secret between him and Edward. He had told Edward, in the very beginning, with careful tact, that it would be some years before David would actually be in what he called “the big time,” such as Carnegie Hall and appearances before “important” audiences in Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston and San Francisco. Edward, during this private interview, had said nothing but had kept his eyes fixed in a most disturbing way on the agent’s bland face. “An artist must creep before he walks, and walk before he can run,” the agent had said. “David must build up a reputation in the smaller places. But one of these days—!”

  But Edward had thought, with hatred and anger like metal in his mouth: David had wasted himself, both in New York and Paris. He had not been dedicated; his chronic attitude was one of sullenness. He played brilliantly but without passion. There had been times when Edward, hearing him in some small dank hall in a distant city, had felt a surge of furious pain in himself and had cried out to his brother in his heart, “Emphasize it there! Lift it there! Soften it there, slow it, increase it! God, don’t you have any feeling for it, damn you?”

  He was like a man whose whole being urges him to sing, but who is mute. He knew what was missing in David’s musicianship. He believed that David knew it also and was too indifferent to try, to care, or, in malice, was deliberately restraining himself. “How are you ever going to be a pianist of importance and fame?” he had asked David once, in a rage. “Don’t you care?”

  “I’m technically perfect,” David had replied, with an inscrutable glance at his brother’s suffused face. “Even Paderewski told me that, and you know it. You can’t go beyond perfection.”

  “But the missing thing, the—the—feeling, the power, the emotion—why don’t you have it?”

  Ask God, David had thought. He was always so tired. His life was a weariness. The only time when he came to life was when he played the music he really loved, in secret, apart from his expensive coach, apart from everybody but himself. When in New York, where he had never been asked to play, he visited the cabarets in which he could listen to the music that delighted him and filled him with fervor and a sense of youth. A few times he had come upon Prince Emory and his Dukes and had spent many evenings, far in a shadowy background, listening and rejoicing, full of the excitement and passion and emotion so absent in his classical performances. They could call it cheap, the infernal fools, but it wasn’t cheap. It was a new music
, perfect in itself, expressive of its own vitality. It brought a fleeting vitality to David, but also a growing misery.

  “You could do a lot with your stupid ragtime,” Edward had said. “You could make it ‘roll,’ somebody said, once. The piano almost jumped off its legs. Deafening. If you could do that with worthless music, if you want to call that music, why can’t you do it with something worthwhile?”

  David had not answered. Years later he knew that he should have lashed out to Edward then and told the truth. But, like Sylvia, he had his pride. Where she had her hatred, too, he had his confused commiseration for his brother. But we were all cowards, he was to think far in the future. And, in a way, Ed was the biggest coward of any of us. One of us, at least, should have had some courage, and we might have saved Ed years of suffering and frustration. Not to speak of ourselves.

  Sometimes Maria and Heinrich went to hear their oldest son play in one of the nearer towns. Heinrich was invariably enraptured. But Maria was silent. She kept her perturbation to herself, and forced herself to believe that perhaps the years had dulled her keener sensibilities.

  Edward was deeply in debt, in spite of his incredibly flourishing shops. On George Enreich’s suggestion, over the past few years he had invested all his spare cash, and what he could borrow, in munitions, steel, mines, woolen mills, and sugar. “Why munitions?” he had asked, obscurely afraid and irritated. But George had only laughed at him silently, all his gold teeth shining. The stock had been picked up very cheaply, just after the depression of 1913, but the amount of stock was enormous. It carried a huge margin, also. Then the mansion, built on the eighteen acres of land Edward had bought from his old friend, had cost more than originally expected, though Mr. Enreich had managed to get most of the materials at cost for Edward. There was a large mortgage on the house, and Edward, the prudent, felt that the house would never truly be his unless he owned it free and clear. In the meantime, at George’s insistence, he became more and more involved in the stock market.