The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Hmm,” said Billy. He had discerned fear in David’s voice. Why should he fear? Forty thousand or more dollars already received for only six songs, and records, and a fortune to follow Samson Smith! The hectic ballet in the third act would become a classic in itself. Why should any man be afraid?

  David stood up, long and poised and graceful. “Let’s go to Delmonico’s for a late supper, Billy,” he said, and took up his cane and gloves. Billy hesitated. “Well, now,” he said, and rested his chin on the arms he had folded on the back of his chair. “The last time I was there, there was some murmuring from the clientele.” He smiled ruefully. “Oh, I’m not insulted or anything. But I hate to hurt people by exploding one of their precious myths. In the North I’m an abused young Uncle Tom from the Deep lynching South. In the South I’m a colored gentleman and my white friends show me off proudly. After all, they helped me get started, you know. My friend in Raleigh was the first to suggest a theater for me, and he rounded up all his friends and spread the word, and it was a great success. That’s what made me try this theater in New York.”

  He puffed at his cigarette and squinted thoughtfully, and with a smile, through the smoke. “I’m sure that my audience tonight and my Northern audiences in the cabarets think that after my men and I leave their lily-white presences we slink away meekly into some slum, where we sit and wail darky plantation songs and wipe away our tears. Even though they must know we get paid a fortune up here, I haven’t the slightest doubt that they believe that when we take off our striped trousers and Prince Alberts we put on rags. Who am I to destroy such a pathetic dream?”

  He chuckled. “When they swarm around after a session, avoiding shaking my hand, of course, I have to talk what they think is darky talk. In a thick Southern accent. They feel very happy with themselves, congratulating me. Why should I take that pleasure away from them? So why don’t you come to my hotel and have a late supper in my suite, with some of the boys?”

  “People are damn fools,” said David.

  “Not very original. But who isn’t?” and Billy fixed his eyes meaningly on his friend.

  “You couldn’t be referring to me, could you?” said David, smiling painfully. “See here, Billy, I struggled for three months, after writing my first song, before sending it to you.” He paused. “I suppose that makes me a fool.”

  “Am I to judge any man?” asked Billy, with a pious expression. “Come on, Dave. The boys get hungry after all that playing.” He put on his fur-collared black broadcloth overcoat and shimmering top hat, pearly gloves, and a silk scarf. Dave thought, There’s some aristocratic ancestor in that woodpile, and he’s probably got some very patrician relatives in North Carolina. Billy inspected himself happily in the mirror. He arranged his scarf meticulously and gave his hat a debonair tilt. Still studying his reflection, he asked with transparent carelessness:

  “How’s Ed?”

  “All right, from my mother’s letters.” David’s voice was stifled. Billy looked at him furtively in the mirror. David’s fine-drawn features had become thin, almost wizened, with some secret pain, which Billy suspected did not arise from the thought of Edward. David drew a deep breath. “He’s opened ten new stores, the Green and White Markets, in the big cities.” His voice was more easy. “My mother says he’ll have at least eight more by the summer. There isn’t any end to his energy.”

  “You wrote me he got married last June,” Billy said, fastening the buttons on his kid gloves. “But I read an item about it in a Chicago paper. Ed’s famous in his own right. I always thought he would be.” He had trouble with the last button and blinked.

  “Billy, when you’re in Albany in February, why don’t you go to Waterford to see him?” David spoke impulsively, as he watched the suddenly clumsy manipulation of the refractory button.

  “I don’t think so,” said Billy, quietly. “No, sir, I don’t think so. He probably knows who Prince Emory is. If he wanted to see me or know about me, he could write.”

  “Sometimes you’re an idiot,” said David impatiently. “Ed thinks popular music is as degrading as opium smoking and just as much to be avoided. He probably never even looked at a sheet of modern music, so how would he see your photograph on it? I may be wrong but I think he never forgot you. I think the memory of you plagues him sometimes. My mother wrote me that he is one of the big supporters of that private settlement house for Negroes in New York.”

  Billy’s head jerked up, and his smile was radiant. “You mean the Russell Home House? Was that for me, do you honestly think?”

  “Who else? I’m sorry I never mentioned it before; I thought you knew. There’s no other Russell there.”

  Tears sparkled in Billy’s beautiful black eyes. “I never knew,” he said, his voice trembling. “Honest to God, I never knew.” He paused. “And I have an idea he doesn’t know, either, that Russell is for me. Not consciously, anyway. He probably picked it out of the air.”

  David considered this, then nodded. “Possibly. Ed’s the most complex person I ever knew. Protean. One moment he’s as dull as tarnished brass, and the next he’s mercurial. Volatile. I’m the only one in the family who knows that, except my mother. And now, after all these years, I’m beginning to suspect he was always her favorite child and that she knows he resembles her in character a good deal, and that’s why she was hard on him. She was punishing herself, in Ed. And determined that he’d make none of her own past mistakes.” He looked at the gold head of his cane. “Even now I’m sorry for Ed, though I haven’t seen him since last March, almost a year ago.” His mouth changed, became intensely mournful and sad. “At first—well, I thought I’d throw the whole thing up, my pretense of believing I was a pianist. And then I couldn’t hurt him.”

  “What’s wrong, Dave?” asked Billy softly. Dave glanced up, startled, then saw his friend’s compassionate eyes. He had never confided in anyone fully in all his life, not even his old teacher in New York, not even Billy. But there was such an agony in his heart now, such a desire for surcease. He put his gloved hands over the top of his cane and leaned on it, and stared at the floor.

  “Billy,” he began, then stopped. His head drooped. In a lower voice, he said, “Ed married the girl I thought loved me, the girl I thought was going to marry me. I never told you. Or anybody. It was impossible.”

  “I see,” said Billy. He paused. “Did Ed know? Did you ever tell him?”

  “He knew,” said David. “Yes, he knew. Don’t think he married her to thwart or injure me. He didn’t. He’d met her, the first time, when she was a child and apparently never forgot her, and then one day he met her again. That was all. I suppose it was as much a shock to him, knowing about me—”

  “I see,” said Billy again. He took David’s arm. “Let’s go,” he added.

  His touch, his sympathy, almost unnerved David. They left the theater together. The air was full of dark cold and snow. “I have to take a cab,” said Billy. “I don’t dare use my limousine openly. Uncle Tom, you know.” He was silent a moment. “I’m sorry, Dave. And that’s why you haven’t been home since last March.”

  “That’s right,” said Dave. “But now I must. My father is very ill. I can’t avoid Ed—and Margaret—forever. By the way, I’m going to be an uncle soon.”

  The newsboys were crying in the streets, holding up papers with black headlines:

  “U.S. Protests English Interference with American Mail!

  “Berlin Accuses France of Fresh Atrocities!

  “Britain Seizes American Seamen on Neutral Ships!”

  Billy bought a newspaper. The two young men scanned the various shouting headlines. Then Billy took a coin out of his pocket and tossed it in the air.

  “Who do we fight, boys, who do we fight? Heads, England. Tails, Germany.” He threw the coin higher; it fell into the snow and its message was lost.

  “And for what?” asked David, angrily. “And for what?”

  “But my son should know,” objected Maria, calmly. “Why should anyone be sp
ared the stresses of life, man or woman or child? Life is stress and fury and grief and pain, and there is little joy but much suffering. Why it should be I do not know.” She put down her knitting and looked thoughtfully at space. “It is an old question: who is the creator of man’s misery and uncertainty and sorrow, man himself or God?” She thought acutely of Edward.

  The purplish-white February twilight stood at the windows of Margaret’s sitting room. The grounds below and beyond lay in ghostly mauve shadow as they swelled under the snow in waves like a small sea. A fire fluttered on the hearth in the ivory and gold room, threw its lancelike reflections on the ceiling. Margaret sat in a comfortable chair near the fire, her listless hands clasped in her lap, her swollen body heavy with life.

  She had no affection for Maria, but only a profound respect and an absolute belief in her integrity. So she had confided her fears about the birth to Edward’s mother. She knew now that she would bear twins, and the doctor, sworn to silence, had been dubious about the children’s, or her own, survival.

  “I don’t believe in worrying anyone until the time comes,” said Margaret. She looked down at the snow and the silence and the massed, empty trees, and she thought it all resembled a cemetery. She shivered. “He has enough to worry him,” she added with a touch of resentment.

  Maria said nothing. She knew that Margaret was referring to Edward’s family. She, Maria, had hoped much from this marriage. Part of her hope had been fulfilled—Margaret had brought Edward the first real happiness he had ever known in his life. But it had been a narrow happiness; his understanding of his wife had not broadened to an understanding of others. His concern for her, his merging with her, his tender consideration and new subtlety about the thoughts of others, ended with his wife. In fact, in connection with other people, his perceptions had hardened and darkened, had even, at times, become ruthless. Love, thought Maria, while sometimes it can wear the wings of an angel, can also become a short chain in a hidden cell.

  Maria said, in a tone of remote indifference, “Who does not have worry? Why do we have a tendency to look upon our neighbors’ smiling faces and say to ourselves: ‘There are the blessed of both the world and God, who are never tearful or oppressed or despairing.’ Why do we say, ‘He has never spent an anxious night or sighed in his sleep or contemplated death?’ We hide from each other, in a regard for manners or in pride or conceit.”

  They were speaking in German. Maria had been pleased that Margaret spoke the language so well, with such careful diction and without idioms, which were vulgar.

  What have you to worry about, and your children? Margaret asked her in her mind, with indignation. Ed’s given you all his life and all his work, and none of you have returned those gifts with affection or gratitude, but only with an air that all this is your right! You live a life of luxury and protection and safety; you never think of Ed, who’s so terribly worried constantly and who works so hard.

  “I am not going to tell Ed,” said Margaret. “And it will probably be all right. I am in good health, and I have heard my doctor is too conservative. Why should I add to Ed’s burdens?” she asked meaningly.

  But Maria could not be goaded when she knew silence was the best.

  “He thinks about the war all the time,” Margaret said.

  “So do I,” replied Maria, very quickly. “I have cousins and nephews in Germany. I have not heard from them. I write but receive no replies. That is because England is censoring and suppressing letters to and from Germany. She also cut the cable between America and Germany almost immediately.”

  “I know, Mother Enger. That is why, among other things, we almost declared war on England last December. Only our ambassador to London and the President prevented the indignation of the American people from culminating in a war with the English.”

  “Naturally,” said Maria, resuming her knitting. “It is not in the plan for America to fight the British. So the anger of the American people must be guided against Germany. So it is that the brave editor of Berlin’s greatest newspaper, who has been denouncing the war, has been imprisoned by that stupid German government, which does not understand. The Kaiser does not understand that he is only a puppet of those who have planned this monstrous thing over the years. He, too, is stupid. But where are the wise men? The Bible says that the children of darkness are wiser in their generation than the children of light. However, it is not necessary for good men to be stupid as well as virtuous.”

  Margaret sat up, surprised. “Then you know also, Mother Enger?”

  Maria smiled a little. “Did you think wisdom, or knowledge, begins and ends with Edward? When I was a girl, and young in my family’s Schloss, one of my cousins, who was a colonel in the Imperial Army, disclosed to us, with much anxiety, what he knew even in those days. For his presumption, in bringing this to the attention of his superiors, he was retired. Did they know all too well or did they think him mad? That, we shall never know.”

  “Then,” said Margaret, hopelessly, “there is nothing we can do now.”

  “I do not think so—not just now,” replied Maria, knitting faster. “Those who tried to warn us, from every country in the world, have been silenced or are heard no more. But is it necessary to discuss this? Edward is doing what he can, with his Save America Committee, and I suppose it is expensive and too much for him. It can even be dangerous, when so many are so determined that liberty must die, and reactionary primitiveness resume its old power, in the name of Socialism. However, a man must act in accordance with his principles, so I say nothing.”

  Margaret lifted her weighted body with difficulty and went to a window. The evening light deepened more and more; now the snow dunes were carved in marble and dark purple and the cobalt sky pulsed with one quicksilver star. It was one of the last days of February, and Margaret wondered how she could endure another month of this semihelplessness and discomfort and apprehension. But the thought ran over her mind lightly as a ripple runs over a lake. She must tell Ed when he came home that his mother knew what was troubling him, and that she not only believed but was fully aware of the truth. She rubbed a finger on the leaded glass, and a little aura of warm moisture spread out from her flesh.

  “It is not hard, having children,” said Maria from her seat near the fire. “Birth is the very least. It is the life of your children about you which is hard. Always, we conceive and bear strangers, and as the years pass those strangers rarely become friends of their parents. It is not unusual for hatred to grow between them. Shall the parents be blamed, or the children? That is impossible to know. If this were my wedding day, I would vow to myself that I would not bear children.”

  Margaret’s eyes widened and she turned as swiftly as she could. She looked at Maria’s calm and placid face which showed no vehemence, no bitterness.

  “It is not that my children are different in an important way from the children of other mothers,” said Maria. “They have not disappointed me more than the children of other women have disappointed them. But children inevitably bring sorrow and regret and sadness and fear, as they become men and women. She who denies this does not speak the truth.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?” demanded Margaret in a rising voice.

  Maria lifted her big head and smiled at the girl. “I am not a Catholic but often I think of Mary, the mother of Jesus, that young girl. Hers was a mortal’s pain and a mortal’s fear and a mortal’s love. Her Son’s were God’s. He suffered as God suffers, but still it was a divine suffering, not to be understood by us, not even by His mother. I think of her standing at the foot of the Cross and gazing up at her Son, and seeing the blood on His brow and in His side, and to her, I am certain, it was only her Son hanging there, the flesh of her flesh and the blood of her blood. Her knowledge of who He was was submerged, in those supreme moments, in the agony of a mother.”

  “You are telling me not to forget Ed, in my children,” said Margaret, in a soft and trembling tone, and for a moment she almost loved Maria. “Do not be d
isturbed. Ed will always be first and last with his wife, for she loved him from the moment she met him as a child.”

  Maria nodded vastly. “It is so. I am also warning you that when you are a mother you will never forget that you are a mother. But your children will forget they are your children. You must prepare for that day. It has been said in the Bible that a man and his wife are one flesh, but it has not been said that their children are their flesh.”

  Margaret stared at her in humble wonder, as if seeing for the first time. What did she know of Maria, after all? The huge woman knitting so placidly and so surely by the fire was an enigma, and no questions Margaret might ask would be enlightening. Moreover, they could not be asked. All at once Margaret was afraid of the answers.

  She felt a short and savage twinge in her side and put her hand hastily over the spot. The children moved in her, and it came to her that though she had conceived them and would bear them, and had given her blood and her life and the beating of her heart to them, they were mysteries. She could not imagine their faces. Even their sex was hidden from her. They knew themselves, in the vortex of her womb, but she did not know them. She was dazed by the thought, and vaguely frightened.

  The telephone rang by her bedside and she lumbered to it. It was Edward, and his first question, rich with love, was about her health today. Her voice shook in answering. “When will you be home?” she asked. “I’ve been expecting you every minute.”

  There was a slight pause, and his voice changed and seemed to fade a little. “I won’t be home until the day after tomorrow, darling. I am leaving for Cleveland in an hour.”

  He usually kept a packed suitcase in his office, for in these days he was quite often away overnight in behalf of the Save America Committee or on sudden business concerned with his burgeoning new stores.

  “Oh,” said Margaret, disappointed. She wondered if it was the fault of the line that he sounded so pent and yet so guarded. “When you go away, Ed, it seems that you’re away forever. Is it necessary—”