The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Why should I dress in the uniform of suburbia?” asked André. “I’m a gentleman, not a fake countryman, and I don’t play golf, stupid game, and I like wine better than bootleg whisky, and I prefer conversation to batting a tennis ball around, and I like music more than dirty stories which don’t have any subtlety. Why do Americans lack subtlety?”

  “You’re an American yourself,” said Gertrude. “And you’re not even eighteen yet, and you’re giving yourself airs.”

  “Have a cigarette,” said André, as an adult would offer a child a lollipop.

  He opened a gold case, and Gertrude took a cigarette with reluctance. He lit it for her gracefully, and put one in his own mouth. He stared before him for a moment or two, the lighter in his hand, and Gertrude was uncomfortable again at the maturity of his profile and the unyouthful quirk of his lips. “I was never a child,” he said, as if speaking to himself humorously. “And, to a great extent, neither were you, Grandmother. That’s why I’m in love with you; of course we’ll get married in a few years, after you’ve completed that nursing course and I’m finished at the Sorbonne.”

  Gertrude was mortified, as always, that she frequently and impulsively confided in André as she never confided in anyone else, not even her mother or Robert. She did not know why she gave André her deepest confidences, except that in some confused way she understood he would never betray her, in spite of his artfulness, his lack of conscience, and his perverted view of men and women, and his amused derision at the world.

  She said with some heat, “Don’t be stupid. When I marry, if ever, it’ll be to someone as unlike you as possible—child. And someone a lot older. I don’t intend to be a nursemaid to a brat. Or to raise a husband for myself. Seventeen!”

  “How you Americans use age as a yardstick,” said André, smiling now. “A man can have twice as much verve and zest for living at fifty than he had at twenty, but he’s old in the American opinion. He can be healthier, more alive, even gayer. But he’s old. And at twenty, a man can be dull and spiritless and sluggish and colorless, but he’s young, by God! The calendar is the measure of all things. Why, I know American girls in their teens who are actually middle-aged and lightless and without imagination and appetites, and about as sensual as a bowl of oatmeal, and just about as exhilarating. And I know European women, and some American ones, too, who are vivid and charming and diverting at forty, fifty, sixty. Even older.” He shook his head at Gertrude. “Oh, come on. You know better, even if you pretend not to. And I like the nursing idea. It’ll be helpful when we have our children, though of course we’ll have nursemaids for the little horrors.”

  “On whose money?” asked Gertrude, trying for light contempt and adulthood.

  André waved his hand, and a wisp of his cigarette smoke brightened in the sunlight. “Partly on yours, my dear. After all, as we French say, a girl must have a dot. And partly on mine; my father isn’t exactly poor.”

  Gertrude’s face turned harsh and dark. “He hasn’t anything but what my father—my father!—gives him! And you—”

  André gazed at her with a secret expression. He shrugged. He knew all about Ralph, his father, not that Ralph had ever confided in him. He had simply and cynically investigated his father two years ago, as he had investigated the others, too. It was his opinion that everyone could be a fruitful source of investigation; people always hid things, he had observed. What had been mere investigation, for the sole purpose of investigating, had become an adventure that had been most fruitful and enlightening. André could now name almost every bridge in America and in Europe which his father had designed and for which he had been richly paid. Any clever person, he had discovered, could acquire the knack of opening a drawer or locked bureau or desk, and could search without leaving evidence of the search behind.

  “You forget I’m really a writer, unlike Uncle Greg,” he said now. “I expect to make a lot of money at it. I know what people like to read, and I can write well in three languages, and I understand men and women.”

  “Oh, and so you, at seventeen, have found out how to write infallible best sellers?” said Gertrude, with hard ridicule.

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep repeating that I’m seventeen,” said André, distastefully. “What a non sequitur. I’m not a child prodigy but I’m also not a child, either, and as I’ve said to you often, I never was. Yes, I think I know how to write best sellers. Dickens and Thackeray and London and Dreiser and Tolstoy and Sinclair Lewis—unlikely company though they are together—had the secret, even if they didn’t know they had it. It’s a matter of writing about the world as it is and people as they are. Reality, in other words, not some private notion of reality or the world as some writers think it ought to be. For instance, did you read that imbecile latest from the pen of Uncle Greg? Morning Before the Wind? All about a ‘sensitive’ child born in the slums. Uncle Greg never saw a slum in his life; I did; all over Europe and in New York and other American cities, too. And children are about as sensitive as concrete; murderous little realists, red in tooth and claw. How many copies did he sell? About five thousand, I think, in spite of the frantic radical critics trying their best to promote it.”

  Gertrude was slightly appeased. She remembered her father’s irate comments on the book. She had also read it, and she had wondered where her uncle had gotten his odd ideas and where he had found such a child about whom he had written. Uncle Greg could write, but it was a sterile and twisted writing, with no base of actuality.

  “Besides, he’s a Communist,” said André, casually. “And while it may be fashionable now, just at this very minute, to be a Communist, it won’t be for very long. Because Communism isn’t based on reality, but only the unreality of violent dreamers and madmen. And they have no contact with humanity as it is.”

  “Uncle Greg a Communist!” cried Gertrude, aghast, thinking of her father. “I don’t believe it!”

  “Oh, I don’t mean he goes around brandishing a card, or anything like that,” said André. “I only mean he’s taken on the fashionable gloss of it. Or the fashionable bloodstains, synthetic ones. Everything about him is synthetic, like his books. Synthetic emotions, synthetic ideas, second-hand thoughts, chewed-over ideology. He never had an original thought in his life, nor an inspiring or pungent one. That’s symptomatic of American Communists. Bloodless, pulseless fools, with hand-knitted ties, the latest hackneyed jargon, and swimming in dry Martinis made with synthetic gin. The only thing they have in common with the real Communists, the Russian ones, is an urge to violence and hatred, and even then it’s synthetic.”

  Gertrude forgot that André was a child. She listened to him intensely, her gray eyes welling with distressed thoughts, just as the sunlight ebbed and flowed as the clouds crossed the bright sky. When André put one of his hands easily over hers, she was vaguely conscious of a strange deep thrill in her body, but only vaguely. She was too engrossed in what he was saying.

  “I’m not an ardent anti-Communist,” André said. “I just prefer things as they are, and common sense and reality, and I hate people who delude themselves. I don’t bleed for the plight of the Russian people under Communism. People generally deserve their government, though that isn’t very original. It’s a fact, though. I hate Hitler just as I hate Stalin, not because they’re murderers but because their point of view isn’t based on facts and human verities and history.” He opened his case again. “Have a cigarette.”

  “You smoke too much,” said Gertrude, abstractedly. For some reason there was a sense of relief in her. André’s realism touched her own, strongly.

  “And now,” said André lightly, squeezing her fingers, “tell me what you were brooding about when I found you here.”

  “I was thinking about my father,” said Gertrude, involuntarily.

  André gave her a glance of sympathy, and he was suddenly grave. He smoked a moment without speaking, and Gertrude, watching him and seeing the thoughtful glint of his narrowed eyes, wondered how she had missed, before, the r
esemblance between the youth and her Uncle David. “Yes,” said André. “Poor Uncle Ed. I often wonder why he doesn’t kick all of us out, and then I don’t wonder.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Gertrude, uneasily. André glanced at her again, and her color rose. So he was the only one who understood or wanted to understand. Tears smarted along her eyelids and she blinked and averted her head. For the first time she thought, If he weren’t so young!

  “There isn’t one—and I’m including my father, too—who’s worth a cent of his money or one of his thoughts,” said André. “Except, perhaps, Uncle Dave. I’m not excluding myself, either, from the bloodsucking gang of us. There’s a lot I know, but I’m not a talebearer—Look at us! Uncles, aunts, children, and Grandma. But no one can rid Uncle Ed of us, except Uncle Ed—”

  “I know,” said Gertrude in a low and faltering voice.

  André took her hand again. “At least, dear,” he said kindly, “I won’t be a drag on him much longer, through my father. And you’ve forgotten something: I have two hundred thousand dollars in my own name, nicely gathering dividends from good sound investments, thanks to Mama. So we’ll have money, besides your dot.”

  Gertrude tried to pull her hand away from his, but he laughed at her and held it more tightly. “You’re such a fool, just a precocious kid,” she said, and was angered at him, unreasonably, for his youth. A lump swelled in her throat and she wanted to cry. All at once he released her hand and stared at the distant glittering grass as if he had forgotten her.

  I don’t know why I sit here and listen to his nonsense! thought Gertrude, wildly. I never liked him; he was a terrible child. He was a tease, and sly—we always fought.… He never liked me, no, he never liked me! He said I was stupid, and Robert, too. He’s only teasing me now, with his ridiculous talk of marrying me.

  A bee, all iridescence and twinkling life, lighted on André’s hand. He lifted that hand slowly and gently, and said, “‘Fearfully and wonderfully made.’”

  Gertrude was astonished at the tenderness in his voice, the sincere love and admiration, which were without his customary raillery and derision. She watched as André turned and twisted his head, the better to see the little creature which contentedly stroked its wings and stretched its minute legs as though it were sitting on a leaf and were utterly at ease.

  “Look at it,” said André. “How innocent it is. How good it is. And how beautiful.”

  The bee flickered its wings, lifted them, and blew away like a living jewel. André watched it go in bemusement.

  “You mean,” said Gertrude, uncertainly, “that it isn’t like people, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said absently.

  The lump was in Gertrude’s throat again. He turned to her and smiled. “You’re like that bee, dear. Even when you were a gawky and prickly little girl. Innocent and good, but not as people think of innocence and goodness. And you had a sting, too.”

  He leaned toward her and kissed her mouth without touching her otherwise, and she sat there, shocked by her own confused passion of sweetness mingled with revolt. This was a man’s kiss, not the awkward kiss of a boy. She could see the closeness of his eyes now, wide and shining and unfathomable, and her heart jumped. The thick black lashes were so near her own that they almost touched.

  Then she was pushing him from her violently, and in that same movement she rose from the bench and ran away. He watched her go, laughing a little to himself. Her black, rather long hair, as straight as an Indian’s but glimmering, floated behind her, drifted over her wide shoulders, touched her thin broad back which was covered with the light gray silk of her dress. She ran as swiftly and as compactly as a boy, not throwing out her legs in a womanish way, and her waist was strongly slender. “Dear child,” said André, aloud, and he spoke in the voice he had used to the bee.

  Gertrude rushed into the house, high color staining her dark cheeks, her gray eyes wide and dilated. Compared with the brightness outside, the interior was cold and dim, like a prison, and Gertrude halted.

  It was all spoiled; it was all ruined. The wild sweetness was gone, and the breathless fear, and the queer, surging delight, and the revulsion, which was itself a delight. Gertrude felt flat and drained and lonely. Why had she wanted to think and to be alone? A boy of seventeen had kissed her; her own cousin, the wicked André, had kissed her, she who had been kissed by young men at dances! He had only been mocking her, this schoolboy home from Paris for the summer. That child! She wanted to cry in her humiliation and her loss and pain.

  Upstairs, everything was still and untenanted. It was evident that no one was at home except Maria, sitting quietly in her room and endlessly knitting. On an impulse, Gertrude went to her grandmother’s door and knocked, then entered. Yes, there sat Maria in the widow’s black she wore summer and winter, majestic as always, her hair a thick drift of snow around the old face. But the eyes were wise, remote and patient. She smiled at Gertrude with no question in the smile, for Maria no longer questioned anything, though she understood at once that her favorite grandchild was in some trouble. Maria knew many things, though she did not often descend from her room these days, as her heart was laboring and burdened with her mighty flesh. She continued to knit now, rocking slowly in her chair near the window. In all these years she had refused to let her suite be redecorated; the once-bright chintz had faded, the once-burnished rug had dimmed.

  Gertrude closed the door behind her, then leaned against it, looking at her grandmother silently. And Maria waited, her needles clicking. Gertrude knew that it was a sweater for her, a lustrous white sweater to be used at college. For some reason she was touched at the thought, and she thought how terrible it must be to be old and to have nothing left in life but one’s thoughts and a busyness of the hands. She was suddenly rebellious. There must be something more to life than this, this meaninglessness, this inevitable dull end. And she was frightened.

  “I—I do wish you wouldn’t work so hard. For me,” said Gertrude, still pressed against the door as if repelling something that threatened her. “It’s so nice outside. Grandma, you should be sitting on the terrace.”

  Maria knitted, counted a few stitches, and a small smile hovered over the pouches around her lips. “Is that what you came to tell me, my child?” she asked.

  But I never really tell anyone anything, not even Mother, not even Robert, or Daddy, thought Gertrude. Just André. And her eyes smarted again, and she was again bereft and angry. She said, “I didn’t want to tell you anything, really, Grandma.”

  “No?” said Maria. But everyone had something to tell, if nothing to say. She glanced up at Gertrude, and saw the girl’s dark pallor, the gray suffering of her eyes, the stern young lips that quivered at the corners. It was certainly something of importance; at that age, it was certainly love or infatuation or the pure misery of discovering that the world was neither happy nor peaceful, neither safe nor sure. Maria said, “You are so like your father, Liebchen.”

  Gertrude stood against the door, the whiteness of which outlined her feminine strength and slenderness and height, the width of her shoulders, the young leanness of her body. Her black hair was an almost Egyptian fall about her broad cheekbones, her stern forehead, vulnerable temples.

  “Yes, so like him,” said Maria, in a strange and weary voice. She said in German, “There is a fatefulness about life, an inevitability. One is fixed in a mold even before birth. But circumstance can modify that mold or the mercy of God. I pray that it will be so for you, little one.”

  “No one will ever hurt me,” said Gertrude, and her voice shook. “I’m not like Daddy in that, Grandma. I won’t let myself be hurt.”

  Maria sighed. “And who has hurt you, Gertrude? Today, perhaps?”

  Gertrude caught her lower lip between her teeth. Grandma saw too much; that was the penalty, or the reward, for becoming old, a terrible and barren penalty, or reward. It was coin which bought nothing; it was coin given for memory.

  “You do not want
to tell me?” asked Maria, and counted another row of stitches.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” said Gertrude, coldly.

  “Ah,” said Maria, and let her knitting drop. She fixed her eyes penetratingly on Gertrude. “You are very like your father. If he had a personal crest, it would not be inscribed, ‘Mollissima fandi tempora.’ It would also not be your crest, my child. He never found a favorable time for speaking.”

  “No one ever listened to him except Mother!” Gertrude burst out furiously.

  Maria shook her head but did not speak. Gertrude opened the door. She looked at her grandmother, but Maria seemed intent on her knitting again. “I’m sorry I bothered you,” said Gertrude, formally.

  She went out and closed the door with firmness, though her eyes were filled with wretched tears. “The most favorable time for speaking!” But she never really spoke with all her heart to anyone except André, whom she hated! Life was no longer sane and clear to her. He had ruined it all.

  “Boyo, you’re unrealistic, to use the ruddy new jargon,” said William earnestly. “The bleeding heart and the quivering soul are all very well—when a chap can afford it, though some of the rainbow-eyes in Washington just now say that some of us must jolly well afford it whether we can or not. But you’re paying your hundreds of lads and lassies in the shops everywhere what you paid them in the late twenties. Rot. Food’s down; every blinking thing is down, rents, clothes, boots. It’s like giving them, you are, a forty per cent raise in the wages. A dollar’s worth more than one hundred cents, this day; it was worth fifty-two cents before the crash. It buys more than twice as much. So down must go the wages, or out we go ourselves.

  “Now listen to me. Sure, and men must eat and food must be bought, either on the dole or wages. But the lass with the market basket is buying less, and she’s buying inferior, and staples. Not two chickens in the pot every day; a chicken once a month. Not tinned, wined peaches from Argentina but potatoes. Not a rib roast but minced meat. Not Norwegian sardines in olive oil but tinned salmon. Prohibition knocked our wine cellars into lumber and wee stones; that was a blow. We survived it. We closed two of the Chauncey shops only last week. The clerks in the cutaways stand idle and polish their fingernails. The lads and lassies in the Green and White Stores yawn over the canned soup and the flour bins. But each and every week they carry home their quid, and it’s merry they are. At your expense. And our outlets have cut down on our stock, and some have eliminated it entirely.