The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Are you Irish?” asked Edward, more and more enchanted.

  “I am that strange manifestation known as a Scots-Irishman, my lad. Neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. My sainted mother was of the Doyles of County Cork, and never without her rosary. My father, not so sainted, was the Scot MacFadden, and he was an Orangeman. To turn an Orangeman into a Catholic is only a little more difficult than to turn granite into flesh, but my mother prayed. Holy Saint Francis, how she prayed! And the Blessed Mother performed the miracle for her.”

  “You must meet a very good friend of mine, Father Jahle,” said Edward. William immediately became Mephisto shrinking in terror from the Archangel Michael, cowering on his stool, protecting his head with his thin arms and freckled, clever hands, shivering violently, and knocking his knees together. Entranced by this realistic performance, Edward laughed aloud, throwing back his head.

  “Priests affect me that way,” said William, immediately becoming the connoisseur of excellent food again. “Three cousins. Priests are usually jolly souls, good-naturedly cynical—they know about humanity by instinct—and ready with a pleasant joke. When they are off duty. But, sadly, my cousins are Scots-Irish, too, and they are what we call dour. Calvins in Roman collars. None become even a monsignor. They lacked sufficient tact or intellect to bring joy into their religion, and surely religion should be suffused with joy. They preferred brimstone and hell-fire, and they loathed everybody. That takes considerable insight but is frowned upon by the hierarchy. To loathe is bad enough, but a gentleman conceals it. But to loathe, and making the loathing obvious, is not only vulgar but inspires the displeasure of the bishop. Inspiring the displeasure of a bishop means an obscure parish with at least three tight-fisted old maids in it, who put buttons in the plates and one small lump of peat in the fire at a time, and at least a hundred children all with running noses. Speak of no priests to me, laddie. I have had my cousins.”

  The telephone rang shrilly and abruptly, and both men jumped. Edward answered somewhat irritably. It was Heinrich. It was typical that Heinrich was worried over his son’s long delay because of the large amount of cash in the safe. “What is it, Eddie?” he asked. “Why is the lateness? It is the safe that causes me anxiety. In these days there are many robbers.”

  “No robbers,” said Edward, curtly. “But what if there was and I’d just had my head shot off?”

  Heinrich laughed feebly. “My Eddie can take care of himself. You have closed the safe?”

  Edward glanced over his shoulder at his appreciative guest. “Yes,” he answered. “Don’t worry. Just some late customers. I’ll be home after a while.” He hung up the receiver and frowned at it, and William, the keen-eyed, watched him. Edward returned to the counter, and his youthful face was eager again for fresh stories. It is a hungry face, thought William compassionately. What little pleasure there must be in that young life!

  “Well, if you had a remittance, why did you sneak a ride on a train?” asked Edward. “And why are you looking for a job?”

  “It is a painful story,” said William, discreetly. “I prefer not to speak of it. Suffice to say, there is no longer a remittance, no love and kisses in letters, for I receive no letters. I am a vagabond on the face of the earth. I have committed no crimes, though some would be boorish enough to disagree. There is a judge or two … That is irrelevant. I wandered to this remarkable country when I was twenty-five, ten years ago. The streets are paved with gold. I have not found gold. My occupation? Frankly, I am a jack of all trades. And I never stole but three quid in my life. Honest William.”

  He sipped the tea with the absorbed and critical air of a winetaster. “Nectar,” he said reverently. “The jasmine flowers are abloom in it. It takes a knowing hand to brew tea like this. I was born in Belfast, laddie. My father had a large stable of horses. He hunted with the hounds. A damned hullabaloo every autumn. Stupid animals, horses. The hounds are only a little better. The hunters are the most stupid of them all, in their pink coats, and their ruddy faces swelled and red and boarish. It is quite a spectacle; you must enjoy it someday. You will never be the same again. My sympathies were always with the fox.”

  He looked more foxlike than ever. Hypnotized, Edward could actually see pricked-up ears, the nose sharpening to a point, the bright hazel eyes startlingly wild and excited, the sandy hair gleaming like a pelt.

  “Nevertheless, I like horses,” said William. “They are malicious people and not innocently so. I am malicious myself. Consequently, they knew I was their master. I have attended horses all over the damn world, race horses. I firmly believe they decide among themselves, in the paddock, who shall win the day’s race, and they have their small joke, which disconcerts their masters. We’ve had many a laugh together, the horses and I. What fool said that only man has the gift of laughter? I have seen the fox laugh, as well as other animals. And all animals are cynics. Yet they enjoy life. They understand that the green garden of the world was made for joy and frolic. Only man never learned that. So, he is serious. And being serious he is murderous. Frankly, I detest people.”

  This made Edward uneasy, with a nameless uneasiness. He drummed on the counter with the fingers of his right hand and stared into space. “What else can you do besides joking with horses, William?”

  “Anything,” said William, with a dramatic spreading of his arms. “Name it. I’m your man.”

  Edward thought. Then he told William of the Fine Food Market, and William listened to him with as much fascination as Edward had listened to his own stories, and his head was tilted courteously.

  “I will need help in my first shop,” Edward concluded. “Someone I can trust.” He studied Honest William warily.

  William nodded. “No sticky hand in the till. It so happens that I have managed a haberdashery about four years ago. I increased the volume of customers and I received ten dollars a week at the end of the first year. Unhappily there was only that one year. There was the matter of the daughter of the owner of the shop. She insisted upon marrying me, and I recoil in horror at the idea of marriage. So I departed in a dust.”

  Edward scrutinized him openly. “You’ll make a wonderful clerk,” he said. “But it’ll be some weeks before I have that first shop. In the meantime you can help the janitor here. He’s an old man and overworked. He sleeps at home, mostly, but sometimes he sleeps here. We’ve got quite a comfortable room walled off in the basement, with a cot and clean blankets and a lavatory. Fritz is very neat. He’s home tonight, and you can sleep down there. It’s warm. And help yourself to breakfast early in the morning. We open at half past seven.” He paused. “I’ll give you fifteen dollars a week as helper to our janitor, and twenty-five dollars a week to start when I open my new shop. And all you want to eat, free.”

  There is considerable here that I don’t as yet know, thought William. He smiled, and his yellow teeth were the teeth of a pleased fox. “A fortune,” he commented. “I never made so much except when I was gambling. Just among friends, you see. Don’t be disturbed. I gamble with my own money.” All at once he was the gambler, seemingly careless but intent, his hand cupped over dice, his shoulder lifted to throw, his eyes gleaming fixedly.

  Edward gave him a key to the room in the basement. “Open the door in the morning. You’ll have to explain to old Fritz when he arrives, and explain quick. He carries a night stick all the time. He was a policeman until some thief shot his right leg off; he’s got a wooden leg. And no pension. He was off duty when he saw the thief running out of a house with a bag. So, no pension.”

  “It’s a drab world,” said William with pity. “Increasingly drab. We must talk about that someday. I find it appalling. It is all Victoria’s fault. Strange how the Widow of Windsor could so have influenced the world that it lost color. But good night. I am suddenly desirous of testing that bed, laddie.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  “Damn these old oil lamps, anyway!” Sylvia said aloud. “You can go blind trying to read under them. But Ma and Ed like the
m and the rest of us can get ourselves white canes in a few years.” She took the chimney off the lamp and poked at the black wick disconsolately with a hairpin. It spluttered and stank, and a blue smoke rose from it to circle about the room. Sylvia hastily replaced the chimney.

  Her bedroom was small and ugly, with a crazed wallpaper of green lattices and bulging, bloody roses, with, here and there and incongruously, little bunches of strawberries growing as nature never permitted them to grow. Sylvia never looked at the walls without shuddering. The huge brass bed took up nearly half the room and swelled with a feather mattress and a feather quilt, the latter in a dull navy-blue color. It spilled almost to the red Brussels rug, which always smelled dusty in spite of Maria’s endless brushing, and it hurt Sylvia’s thin white feet when she walked on it. “Like walking on a washboard,” she would say. An old tall chest of drawers, bought in a second-hand store, then crudely varnished so that the original soft cherry was hidden under a stain of mahogany, leaned against a wall surmounted by a cheap, pine-framed little mirror which had cost twenty-five cents and which distorted the young face now scowling into it. Only two feet from the foot of the bed stood a round oak Mission table, dark brown and hideous, which held schoolbooks and the bleak kitchen oil lamp. Two kitchen chairs had been as brilliantly and crudely varnished as the chest of drawers, and were supremely uncomfortable. Sylvia, grumbling under her breath, sat down in one of them, a magazine on her knee, her lacquer-black and brilliant hair pouring straightly over her shoulders and far below her waist.

  Everything’s terrible around here, she thought bitterly. Then her bony face, which had a white luminosity in the lamplight, became dreamily and intensely absorbed as she bent over the fashion magazine. Now here was an elegant blue linen suit! Draped skirt, tapering down to nothing at the ankles. Peg-top. A flat tucking over the hips would be better than those little pleats. The jacket could be flared a little more, the bodice tightened, and crystal buttons instead of those pink ones. And that white lawn shirtwaist wuld be stunning without all that lace jabot and the fussy pin. Stunning!

  I can make it up in blue cotton, cheap, Sylvia said to herself. But how I’d like to have linen, a fine handkerchief linen! And a hat like this, big yellow straw like a cartwheel, the brim overflowing with blue water lilies and flat green leaves. And those real patent leather slippers! And the French heels and spats! We can afford it, too, just once. But oh no! You mustn’t waste money. It’s sacred.

  She lifted her eyes and fixed them on space. Then she turned her head aside, away from the lovely picture, and brooded. A clean-cut angle appeared sharply under her white chin, a tricornered angle as clear as if painted by a black brush. Her distinct and narrow profile had a look of desolation, and her hair fell away from it bleakly. She let the magazine slip from her knee with a rustle. She listened to the disembodied voices of the house, her attenuated shadow high and bent on the wall and the ceiling. The lamp burned with a repulsive odor, and the room grew colder moment by moment as the banked furnace sent up no heat. The rug smelled of dust, though the strong and ardent spring wind flapped at the little window. Maria and Heinrich were already in bed, and little Ralph slept like a rosy cherub in his own room. The nickel alarm clock on the chest moved its arms to midnight.

  We’ll never get out of here, never, Sylvia thought, her desolation increasing. But no one wants to but me and perhaps Dave. Nothing must be spent to make life nicer and more beautiful; it must all go into the bank. “For the future.” What if there’s no future for any of us? What if we get sick and die? What good will the money be then, except to get us a funeral, cut-rate of course. Pa and Ma have probably fixed that, too! Oh, my God! I’d give years of my life just to get out of Waterford just for one week. Just to see something else, to get out of this house, out of this street, out of this family!

  She clenched her white fists on her knees and tears ran around the rims of her eyes. I’m eighteen, she said to herself. I’m not a child any longer. I’m a woman. I could go away, perhaps to Albany, even to New York; I’ve fifty dollars of my own saved. I could work for some modiste.… I could …

  Her forehead was damp. But no, her dreary thoughts went on. I couldn’t do that. Why not? Because I’m weak. We’re all weak, all of us. But Ma. And Ed. She shivered, hugged her long thin arms about her flannel bathrobe which she had made herself of a material only she could find—wool in a streaked pattern of blue and blue-black and clear red on white. It fitted her with elegance. She stood up and went to the window and put aside the cotton scrim curtains and looked at a far and indifferent moon shining down on the dark and silent earth. Chimneys threw sharp shadows on steep roofs, turned walls to silver, made the sidewalks look like stiff lengths of light.

  There’s got to be a way out for me, Sylvia implored the unanswering sky. She no longer prayed to anything. Maria insisted on church, and, her children obeyed, but none of them believed in the God spoken of by the minister. Nor did they believe in the god of their father—the heroic masses of which he spoke so fervently and with such a glow in his eyes. Sylvia leaned on the window sill and said aloud, “I wish there was really someone you could pray to. Someone who could hear you and promise you things and give you hope. Pa’s ‘masses’?” She laughed thinly. “He wouldn’t recognize a ‘mass’ if he saw one. He thinks they live up in the blue, blue sky, somewhere. The men on the street, with their dinner pails and their overalls, aren’t masses to Pa. He’s so damned innocent. But I can’t forgive him for getting rid of God for us and replacing Him with something he calls man. Oh, he’s not an atheist, the way Ingersoll is; he believes in what he calls an abstract, but it’s just as bad.”

  She became aware that she was speaking aloud, and laughed again. “I think I’m going crazy,” she remarked. “Don’t crazy people talk out loud to themselves?”

  Black despondency closed about her. There’s a way out for me, she thought. I know it. Why don’t I go? Who’s to stop me, when I’m eighteen? I’m my own mistress now. But I know I can’t go. Not because of Ma and Pa and Ed. No, not because of Ed. Just because of me.

  This sudden confession terrified her. She put her hands to her cheeks and pressed fiercely. She mustn’t think those thoughts! They weren’t true! It was everything that imprisoned her. Mostly, it was Ed. Ed, the jailer, the monster, who pushed her remorselessly through the empty days.

  Someone was coming down the street, footsteps echoing. It was Edward. Sylvia looked down at him and now her face turned sharp with malevolence. She did not hesitate. She ran, her carpet slippers flopping, to the door, opened it swiftly and silently, and raced down the stairs, to meet Edward at the foot of them. He started back at this white-faced vision with the swinging lengths of black hair, and Sylvia pushed by him. The lower floors were unlighted except for a gas jet near the stairs.

  “Hey,” said Edward, in a low voice. “What’s the matter?”

  Sylvia turned and faced him. “You,” she said.

  “Me?” A dull flush passed over Edward’s drawn face. “Are you dippy? What’ve I done?”

  “Everything. But you’re too stupid to understand.” Then she stared at him narrowly and her mouth twitched. “No,” she said, slowly, “you’re not stupid. You never were. I just found that out, right this minute. You’re brighter than anybody else in this house!”

  She came closer to him. His gray eyes were gleaming oddly, and though he did not give the impression of smiling, Sylvia knew that he was secretly amused. There was something terrible and yet defenseless in Sylvia’s piercing regard of him. The gas jet sent eerie, flickering shadows over the stark bones of her face and in the hollows of her eyes. She was peering at him now, her head thrust forward, and the intensity of her expression quelled his amusement.

  “Is it just because of Pa?” she asked. “You’ve got to tell me.”

  Edward put his hand on the newel post. He turned his head and gazed at his sister in a silence she confusedly thought was threatening.

  “No,” she said, softly and t
hickly, “it isn’t just Pa, is it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sylvia. Why aren’t you in bed?” The dull flush had deepened on his cheekbones. “I’ve been working since seven this morning. I’m not going to stand here and talk to you. Good night.”

  But she put out her almost fleshless white hand and caught his big arm. She was trembling. “Why don’t you let us go?” she demanded.

  He shook her off. He stood there, large and powerful and dominant, like a young man carved from immutable rock.

  “Who’s keeping you?” he said. He no longer pretended to misunderstand her. “Are any of you prisoners?”

  Her hand dropped from his arm and hung at her side as if exhausted. “I could forgive you if it was just for Pa. But it’s for you, not Pa. When did it begin? Years ago. It was in a summer. That’s the time you began to think, wasn’t it, and began to hate us?”

  “Hate you?” he repeated, meditatively. “Haven’t I worked for all of you?”

  Sylvia was too young to grasp the immensity of the instinctive thoughts she was thinking, the thoughts that rose from a kind of helpless terror—out of the deeps of her soul.