The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “I told you once. Satan’s in it.”

  Edward was profane again. “Don’t let’s talk imbecility, please. I’m tired.”

  “I’ve been reading my Bible again, a book. I’ve ignored a number of years, laddie. It says the last battle will be between God and Satan for men’s souls. There’s all the signs of it. Not an actual bloody battle on battlefields, perhaps, but a battle in the minds and hearts and spirits of men—between good and evil. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was the opening engagement—the Communists are the bloody legions of hell.”

  “At least, since 1920, we’ve stopped the advance of Socialism in the United States!” said Edward. “You’ve got to admit that.”

  “I admit nothing,” said William, soberly. “The blasted devils are just gathering forces. Let there be a remittance in this wild prosperity we’re having now, and there they’ll be, waving their red flag with the hammer and sickle on it, and calling to the proletariat to throw off their chains. The devils never sleep; they never did. They’re a special breed of men, descended right from Cain, I’m thinking. Why, look at Cato, with his shrieks that Carthage must be destroyed. Look at ’em, all right down through history, legions of them. Now they’re ready to take over the world, five years, twenty years, forty years. If we let them.”

  “And how do we stop them?” asked Edward, derisively. “Shoot them down in the streets?”

  William nodded slowly. “It may come to that, laddie, it may come to that. I do hope. But before that, they’ll have the world, I’ll be thinking. Socialism, and the club and the bayonets and the prisons and the all-powerful government of murderous bureaucrats.”

  He rubbed his lip with one freckled finger. He coughed. “And in your household—A man like you can start in his own house; every man can.”

  Edward stared at him, frowning. He thought of his brother Gregory, who, after a very brief and safe billet in France, during his short Army service, had become one of the young men now grandiloquently called “the lost generation.” He had had one lurid novel published, The Sun Rises West. A very bad novel, purporting to be a story of the “oppressed” in America, the “submerged,” and their awakening since “the dawn” of Communism in Russia. It had sold two thousand copies in the United States, and the critics had jeered at it, in the main, with the exception of a few of the “progressives” in New York. These had been ecstatic. The novel had been published in 1922. Edward had written his brother: “Another such piece of trash and you’re on your own.” And Gregory had thought, I’ve got to be more subtle. That bastard doesn’t threaten emptily. Unknown to anyone in his family, Gregory was contributing, under a pseudonym, to various inflammatory pulp-paper journals in Europe and in the United States and was writing another novel of America which was more discreet but hardly less dangerous than his first. It was not in Gregory, as yet, to understand that in attacking orderly government and time-proved traditions, and in supporting chaos and ruin and death, he was actually assaulting his brother and all that he stood for.

  Edward wrote to Gregory again. “I notice that in your foolish novel you speak reverently of Lincoln and his ‘humble’ beginnings and his love for the oppressed, as you call them. Well, let me quote something else to you that Lincoln said: ‘You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.’”

  Gregory, on reading that, was much startled. Why, Lincoln sounded like the modern reactionary sons of bitches! (He had a real devotion to Lincoln, and for all of a week he was greatly disturbed and confused. A volatile and unstable man, he had reached the point in his life when he could have been given a firmer footing in life. Unfortunately Edward wrote him another letter so derisive and contemptuous that Gregory’s bewildered mind hardened again into the tiny and inflexible mold of iron, and he forgot the warning words of Lincoln and all the wisdom they contained.)

  Sylvia was listlessly running her theater again, in Edward’s belief. But her assistants, enthusiastic young women, were in reality the true managers, the true producers, the true set designers. They listened to Sylvia respectfully, then did as they wished, and she was too indifferent to notice or to care. The theater was paying its way but no more. In the meantime Sylvia designed hats and frocks and gowns for Mary Garrity, and her private bank account in Albany was fast approaching respectable dimensions. Her large allowance from Edward joined that account regularly, while Edward paid her bills for clothing and other necessities and luxuries and trips to New York and to Paris.

  Edward said to William, still frowning, “I don’t know what you mean by starting in my own house. My family’s settled down. Greg’s not writing his fool stuff any more. And he did show real genius even in that one stinking book; even his adverse critics said so. And whenever Ralph makes a sale, he tells me about it and suggests I cut down his allowance for the next quarter. So he isn’t robbing me, though I do send him money. Yes, they’re settling down. They’re not fly-by-nights. They do their best and they do it well.”

  William said nothing. Though Edward was considered and rated an enormously rich man, he had not thrown off his debts, though he had cleared away the mortgage on his house. In fact, his debts were rising steadily. “His bloody family eats him like cannibals,” William would comment to himself. Whenever Edward was in sight of complete solvency, he opened new stores. He poured into them his huge dividends from stocks and bonds. He was deeply entangled in the speculative market. He was a driven man. He never stopped expanding. To him, the status quo was repugnant. He spent little on himself, nor did money in itself gratify him. He was like a ruddy top, William would think. Set spinning and then keeping on spinning, in its own inertia. But who knows what makes a man do the things that are killing him?

  Edward was saying, “And I don’t have to subsidize Dave any longer. Funny, he’s the only one who won’t take money from me any more.” He did not like the thought, and his deep hostility for his brother grew in consequence. “I don’t know how he manages to support that apartment of his in New York, and his elegant clothes and his car and that valet of his. But I don’t care.”

  “Thrifty, no doubt,” murmured William, with hidden irony. But he, too, wondered. David had numerous engagements all over the country; William doubted that they brought him much money. The chap probably had invested some of the money Edward had previously given him. Still, you had to give him credit. He was no longer a leech on his brother. He was unique in that damned family.

  “It isn’t the fault of my brothers and sister that their genius isn’t widely acknowledged,” said Edward, gloomily. He repeated, “They do their best. After all, America isn’t exactly a cultured country, I’ve got to admit. I think of my family as trail breakers.” But his face was hard.

  He picked up the papers on his desk again, and a tide of gray exhaustion washed over his face. “The three stores in Kansas City aren’t paying their way. I think you’d better run out there, William. Something’s wrong. I’m paying my managers top salaries, and the other employees, too, yet—”

  That’s part of your damned trouble, thought William, compassionately. There’s not a chain or any other shop in the whole country which pays the wages you do. And pensions, too, by God, and sick benefits, and big holidays, and no pay taken out for anything. And yet you do have strikes, laddie, you do have strikes! Rum that your competitors don’t. God, people are the scaliest lot of dogs the Almighty ever created. Give them marmalade on their bread and butter and they’ll howl for caviar. And the farmers you buy your meats and vegetables from—you pay
them over the market price. Are they grateful? They are not! If you can pay that much, they tell their black hearts, it’s because you’re the rich man you are, and they want to dig deeper into your pockets. But they don’t ask the same prices, or get them, from your competitors.

  It had been a relief, William thought, when George Enreich had been paid off, at a tremendous sacrifice, by Edward. But George Enreich, in his fashion, had acted as a brake. Now that brake was gone. Nor had the friendship been resumed. George had made overtures many times, had actually humbled himself. But for some perverse reason Edward repeatedly repudiated his old friend. Edward explained it: “He pulled out when I most needed him, when I was working almost alone for my country. He has contempt for the American people—”

  “He has contempt for all people,” William would say. But Edward would only shrug and change the subject.

  “All right, go out to Kansas City,” Edward said. He rubbed his hands over his face, and the pressure put red streaks over the grayness. “One of these days,” he continued, “I’m going to take a vacation myself. A long rest.”

  Margaret was chairwoman of the Ladies’ Lutheran League of the Enger Clinic, which Edward subsidized, and also a member of the Ladies’ Medical Auxiliary of the Enger Wing of the Waterford General Hospital, which was devoted to children ill of cancer. In these capacities she organized entertainment for the occupants of the fifty beds of the Enger Clinic, helped manage their disorganized domestic affairs during their hospitalization, and assisted in the procurement of nurses and other specialized technicians. She had, in these nine years of marriage to Edward Enger, become exceedingly popular with the leading ladies of the city, because of her beauty, delicacy, tact and modesty, and willingness to give of herself to any good charity. She was not often at home during the day; she had a little office of her own, and an assistant, in the Enger Clinic, where she conducted her humanitarian work.

  This worried her. She was a passionately devoted mother to her two children, Robert and Gertrude. She wished she could spend more time with them. To her dismay, they hardly seemed to miss her, though they loved her with charming devotion. And to her greater consternation, they seemed extremely attached to their aunt, Sylvia. Often Margaret admitted her jealousy to Edward, half laughing. The love and tenderness and pampering Sylvia heaped upon the children was incredible to the parents, who did not know that Sylvia cherished the little ones because she was partly responsible for saving their lives. “She’s trying to usurp us, out of malice,” Edward would say angrily. “Turning our children against us.” But Margaret did not believe this in the least. She saw that Sylvia not only loved her son and daughter but that she was quite a disciplinarian and taught them to respect and honor Margaret and Edward, a fact that puzzled Margaret more than ever. When Margaret was with the children, Sylvia never interfered to any great extent.

  Her former open hatred and contempt for Margaret had been strangely, to Margaret, replaced by a wary civility and curt politeness. There were even times when she talked to Margaret in her short, taut phrases, almost in a friendly manner. This, too, was because she had helped save Margaret’s life. Unobtrusively she had taken over the management of Margaret’s wardrobe; she designed Margaret’s clothing, to the younger woman’s confused gratitude, or she shopped for it in New York. Margaret did not know that her more fetching costumes, bought in the best shop in New York, Madame DelaFontaine’s, had been designed by Sylvia and made to her meticulous requirements in that establishment, in which she now owned a share. Sylvia could not resist beauty in hats and garments, and Margaret was a perfect model for her.

  “She’s sometimes almost kind to me,” Margaret would confess to her husband. “But I do wish she’d get married!”

  The family was becoming a weary obsession to her. They all lived, of course, in Edward’s mansion, including the little, quick son of Ralph and Violette, André, a sly, intelligent and ingratiating child of seven, a year younger than Robert and Gertrude. He appeared much younger, being at least half a head shorter than the tall twins, and he was very lively and gay and lied atrociously and winningly, and was very slight and active. He had a round hard head covered with a thin black fur, and sharp and diminutive features, except for his eyes, which were extraordinarily large and dark and shining, and fringed heavily, all around, with the thickest but shortest jet eyelashes his family had ever seen. This gave him, according to Sylvia, a “Hindoo” look. He was as foreign in that household as a gypsy. In addition to the odd appearance of his eyes themselves, his eyelids had a brownish stain, enhancing the shine and the peculiar expression. “He whirls,” Sylvia often said with cold disapproval, for she did not like the little boy and at times actually hated him. She thought him a bad influence on her darlings, Robert and Gertrude, whom she sometimes considered her own.

  Margaret pitied the child, because he had last seen his parents nearly two years ago. She thought him pathetic. In truth, he was not pathetic at all. He was a compact person in his own right, sure of himself, careful of himself, subtle and wheedling, and caring for no one but André. He enjoyed life with an intense and cunning zest, had a high sense of humor, and considered himself, even in his few years, as a most remarkable person. He did not miss his parents at all. He hardly spoke of them. His existence was too interesting, and he had an alien handsomeness of his own which Margaret appreciated. His exploitation of everybody, which amounted to actual genius, kept him delightfully employed. His pretty eagerness about “presents,” a mention of which made him clap his dark and little prehensile hands so like his mother’s, induced even the somber Edward to gratify him. Edward was not without his own sentimentality in connection with this disingenuous child. Only Sylvia and Margaret and Maria were not deceived, and David, the few times he was at home.

  Margaret, always hungry to be alone with her children and Edward, nevertheless did not urge him to establish another home either for his family or for herself. She did not understand his insistence that his brothers and sister be his dependents, in his Own house, for was he not always vehemently telling them they should stand on their own? He can’t, of course, force out his father and mother, at their age, I suppose, Margaret would think, nor Sylvia, either, seeing she’s unmarried, nor André, as his parents are always leaving him on everybody’s hands.

  But they stick like flies in honey, Margaret would think, sighing. She had hopes that Gregory would marry someone in France, as Ralph had done, and never come back, except, perhaps, for a visit every year or so. She did not resent Dave much, for whom she had a cool regard, which was a mystery to her, except that he was so kind and thoughtful on his rare appearances and seemed to love the children. Besides, he had an apartment in New York and traveled all the time. Sylvia was a fixture; she showed no indication of marrying at all. Besides, Margaret told herself dolefully, even when they married they remained an incredible drain on their brother, Edward. They were like bloodsuckers, Margaret would think, with not much originality but with truth.

  Edward was involved not only with the Clinic—a fine, square white structure of five stories—and the Waterford General Hospital but with many other charities, local, national, and international. He gave lavishly, to the detriment of his solvency. Margaret knew of his donations to Father Jahle’s church and parish and school, and his equally large contributions to the church his parents attended. Without quite knowing why, for Edward did not talk with her about his affairs, Margaret was afraid that he was overextending himself. He was exultant over the gaudy stock market, in which he was heavily invested; he was endlessly planning for new Green and White Stores. The headquarters for the Stores was in Waterford, but he went to New York very often to the offices of C. C. Chauncey’s, which remained his favorite. He would take Margaret, who found business very dull, though she had managed her own affairs competently enough.

  Her greatest worry was that he had no friends but William. Padraig was dead; George Enreich repudiated. Father Jahle lived on a plane which was incomprehensible to Edwar
d. As for Mr. Yaeger, Edward had nothing but contempt for him, which Margaret considered unfair. It was necessary for the minister to placate, appease, and cater to his congregation, she would tell Edward. Moreover, Mr. Yaeger, within his limits, was an intelligent and sincere man, in spite of his pomposity and his inability to grasp the subtleties of spirituality. “He’s afraid of you; that’s why he isn’t himself when you are around,” she would plead. To which Edward would reply, “The man hasn’t a ‘self’!”

  For some reason, on this August 3, 1923, Margaret was more troubled than usual about Edward’s friendlessness. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, warm and golden, strident with cicadas, alive with hurrying bees, shining of hot sky and burning of wind. She had just returned from a meeting in behalf of the Clinic, and felt despondent and listless. She sat under the shade of a clump of glittering trees, in sight of the house, her short blue dress revealing her beautiful legs, her bright hair clipped about her pretty face. There was some coolness here; from a distance she could hear the sound of children’s voices and their vehement laughter. This enhanced her loneliness, but she did not particularly desire the company of the children just now. She thought only of Edward, who was more to her than her children, more to her than life. If only he had a confidant besides herself! If only he could relinquish his brusque and faintly derisive manner when among others! Surely, among the hundreds of people he knew in Waterford and in New York and Albany and in other cities, there was at least one man, besides William, who could give him honest friendship. He maintained that in essence humanity was vile, weak, stupid, and cruel. To a certain extent, yes, Margaret thought, but there is heroism and idealistic self-immolation and goodness in men, too.