The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “At least you’re honest, and that’s more than the others are,” muttered William. “Poor old Ed.”

  “What?”

  “I was talking to myself, a bad habit of the elderly,” said William, and his soft brogue deepened.

  “I hate it,” said Ralph, with passion. “But Ed insisted I was an artist. What could I do, with him and his ambitions?”

  William looked at him and his hazel eyes danced with quiet wrath. “I made a mistake,” he said. “Another bad habit of the elderly.” He pushed his hands into his trousers pockets, bent his head, and ruminated while Ralph watched him irascibly. William began to speak. “Your teacher has said he can teach you no more; very ambiguous of him, what? Ed showed me the letter. You’ve sucked the toffy. Now it’s off to New York you want, in two years, says you, in your last letter. Two years more of Paris. So that is why I’m here, to talk with you. Eddie thinks, and may the saints have pity on him, that you know best.” William looked up with the keen and sudden swiftness of a fox. “And that will be what you’re wanting?”

  “A year, two years, more at the Sorbonne, and then I’ll be a portrait painter, too,” said Ralph. His high color had paled; he walked up and down the studio, striking the palm of his left hand with his right fist.

  “It’s not the truth you are speaking,” said William. “It is not the engineering you want, not at the expense of a breech with your brother, and his money.” He shook his head. “It is the easy safe life you want. You know that in your heart. Two years more of lolling, of not being a man—that is what you want, laddie. And then perhaps two more, and two more, pretending to be the artist. But time has run out; the world is exploding. Crash. Boom. And never the same thereafter. The end of life as we know it. You must take your chance like a man; you must do as you were created by Our Lord to do. Or be damned to you forever!”

  Ralph stopped his pacing. He confronted William with a kind of overwhelming terror. He thought of his old teacher, Miss Butterfield, who had taught him secretly in the library and in her miserable little rooms. Just before she had died, when he was sixteen, she had asked for him and he had come and she had said pleadingly, “You must stand on your own feet, Ralph. I see it so plain, now. No one can live your life for you; you haven’t any right to expect that. You must have courage—”

  “Why the hell don’t you mind your own business?” shouted Ralph, more in reply to his teacher than to William. He was distracted. He pushed his auburn hair into a tangled mane over his head. His life, as he had made it, so gay, so irresponsible, so pleasant, was being threatened as Miss Butterfield had once threatened his existence by telling him that God angrily rejected any pusillanimous plea that another was ever guilty of a man’s own sins.

  Ralph looked at his big hands, the sensitive finger tips: the hands of an engineer who could throw glittering steel arches across rivers. Who was stopping him? The single pronoun stood in ruthless fire before his inner eye, but he shut his vision against it. It was all Ed’s fault, he said in a desperate litany to himself. All his fault, the smug black bastard, the slave driver, the dreamer of silly dreams. All his fault, all his fault. He tried to smile placatingly after his outburst, and he said, “I can’t. You know I can’t. I can’t disappoint Ed. Why, we’ve been all his life.”

  “Don’t be afraid I’ll tell him what you’ve said,” William remarked. (How was it possible for a man to lie to himself?) “I won’t tell him his brother is a coward.”

  “I’m an artist!” said Ralph, and he turned red with shame and rage.

  “And now it’s lying you are,” said William, and he went away.

  Ralph watched him go, clenching and unclenching his meaty hands. His plump face became the violent color of a pomegranate, and sweat burst over his flesh. Curse it; curse all of them; curse the whole damn world, and particularly Ed, who hovered in the background like an avenging terror. Why couldn’t he, Ralph, spend his life as he loved it, playing happily at painting but working secretly as he wished to work? He wanted money! Was there anything wrong with a man wanting lots of money? And getting it, and keeping it, for himself? The whole bitching world was against a man who only wanted happiness the way he wanted it. “The pursuit of happiness!” And everything, and everybody, conspired to halt that pursuit.

  Particularly Ed, who had no happiness and was damn well going to see that no one else would ever have it, either, if he could prevent it! Ralph saw his brother’s face, and he made a vicious motion with his palette knife as if disembowling, and his face took on a coarse and most lustful look of furious pleasure, a sadist’s lascivious look.

  “But I’ll have it!” said Ralph. “In spite of him. And he’ll pay for it, too! Violette!” he screamed suddenly.

  CHAPTER IV

  The City, New York’s newest and smartest and most sophisticatedly ribald magazine, had been a success since its birth two years ago. It had protested from its beginning that it was a “New York magazine for New Yorkers,” but to the surprise, or perhaps not to the surprise, of its owner and editors, it had become immensely popular in the despised hinterland. Its smoothly urbane articles, its short but clever stories, its “news of the world,” and other features, were an innovation in a world of facile magazines with their wordy and flowery and diffuse offerings. The subtle cartoons held up a mirror to mankind, and mankind, professing to be shocked, laughed at the gently lewd reflections of itself. The people were beginning to tire of drawings of Gibson and Dana girls, and crude humor and sentimental stories. The City, etched, as someone said, in pure gall and acid urine, and conceived in mannerly contempt, was entirely mature, entirely impertinent, and had convinced New Yorkers that they were as sauve, worldly and knowing as itself. (It would give The New Yorker some uneasy moments in future years.)

  The owner, Harry Suffolk, was not a Manhattanite. He had been born and bred in Idaho. He was forty-one years old now, had published three novels which had been stupendous failures, had worked on several newspapers, had eaten irregularly and slept where he could, and had persuaded, two years ago, and by God only knew what means, a wealthy backer for his projected The City. He had selected his staff for these qualifications: lack of reverence, a light and nimble touch, a thorough knowledge of New York, unorthodox imagination, an impudent disdain of the simple and naïve, a flair for drollery and facetiousness, and a gay scorn for the dull and established mores. “Never kick people in the teeth, no matter how stupid,” Harry had told his staff. “Just stick them in the behind with a poisoned needle, and do it so artistically that they’ll think it was their neighbor who got stuck and not themselves.” It was rumored that when a cartoon appeared satirizing President Wilson, and even the backer was shocked, it was President Wilson himself (and he rumored to possess no sense of humor at all) who led the shout of laughter that went up all over the country. Harry sent him the original drawing and framed the grateful letter which came in reply.

  Harry, as editor-in-chief, passed on the lightest paragraph, the smallest cartoon, the most minute “squib,” as well as the major features. He was a fat, gross man, untidy and ink-stained, and had a voice like a Minotaur. He boasted that he never combed his hair, that he shaved his black beard only twice a week and took only one bath a month. Nobody questioned these statements, for obvious reasons. The City was his darling; the small offices, rarely swept out and in a constant state of disorder, hummed like a nest of hornets. The staff, indeed, resembled hornets themselves: lean, slight young men with sallow complexions, fast-moving but precise, sharp of speech and sharper of pen, and their stings were not without toxic results. Harry had only two words to express approval or disapproval of any manuscript or cartoon: “O.K.” or—“Stinks.”

  The City did not despise unknown cartoonists and authors; in fact, it encouraged them. The most famous writers were often outraged to have their drawings or stories returned to them with Harry’s succinct rejecting word, while unknowns, later to become famous themselves, were dazed to receive checks.

  Harry�
�s office was so small that he seemed to fill it to the very corners, as he sprawled in his battered chair or slumped over his splintery desk, which was heaped, always, with masses of material. “You have to edge around his bulges,” his editors would say. One of them edged around the bulges on this warm day in March. Harry snarled as usual, and wiped his inky hands on his hair. The editor said, “That young writer, Gil Enderson—you know, the one we bought three stories from and that article on Wilson’s New Freedoms, is here with your letter.”

  “Send the yokel in,” said Harry irritably.

  The editor coughed. “He doesn’t look like a yokel, Harry, even if he’s from New Haven. And his stuff isn’t yokelish, either, or you wouldn’t have bought it, and you wouldn’t have written him that letter.”

  “What letter?” exclaimed Harry, in outrage. “I said, send him in!” He thrust a cigarette in his thick mouth, and it appeared as small as a match in the mound of his face. His coarse black eyebrows twitched. Gil Enderson. Harry did not believe in encouraging anyone, even his best writers. He prepared to demolish the artful young man, and then repeat his offer. New Haven, by God! What was he doing there if he could write such stuff for The City?

  Gil Enderson, even in those three stories which The City had bought, had become a Name for his risible lampooning of tycoons and robber barons, not with the heavy hand of the current “muckrakers” who used indignation and polysyllable words and thunderings to denounce those they envied, but with a deft and sprightly touch that was much more devastating than all the moral screams of the deadly serious. He had created a character called Mr. Thor, and the subscribers had demanded more, and subscriptions had gone up gratifyingly. Harry suspected that Mr. Thor was an actual person, though caricatured, and that Enderson secretly admired him while he hated him. There was a distinct impression of a feline licking-of-wounds in the debonair tales.

  The creaking door opened and a shaft of sunlight tried to penetrate the dusty windows. A young man entered, and to Harry’s secret surprise, he seemed hardly more than twenty-one, though he was tall and with a largish frame. The frame, Harry noticed, was excellently clad in excellent tweeds and just managed to miss elegance imperceptibly, though considerable endeavor had been made to achieve that effect. There was an impression of a deliberate struggle to attain ease and grace of movement and assurance and even hauteur.

  But Gil Enderson had an engaging air, and his broad face, dark and alert, had an expression of lively pugnacity and vivid intelligence. His nervous eyebrows were quirked over small gray eyes, and they gave a look of animation to the rest of his features, which inclined to weak bluntness. There was something familiar about him, and Harry frowned, trying to remember. “Where’d I see you before?” Harry grunted. He waved his soiled hand. “Never mind. You’re Gil Enderson. Sit down, unless you don’t want to dirty the seat of those Irish tweeds.”

  Gil laughed, and it was a laugh of pure humor. He sat down. “I brought your letter, Mr. Suffolk. I want to talk with you about it.”

  Harry took the letter, grunted again, turned it over in his hands, staring at Gil with his round brown eyes. “New Haven, eh?” he said almost with loathing. “What’re you doing there?”

  “Yale,” said Gil.

  “A student?” said Harry, aghast.

  “Senior,” replied Gil. His voice was as quick as his eyes. He colored a little. “My last semester.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Harry, more and more aghast. “I thought you’d be older and—” He paused. “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  Harry combed his hair with his fingers again. He reread his letter. “I am offering you a job as editor for The City—one hundred seventy-five dollars a week—you’ll have to live in New York, of course. You can write your stories about Mr. Thor in your spare time—they’ve attracted some slight notice—”

  Harry studied the young man again, more narrowly this time. Just his meat. This kid could be trained into fine editorial work; he had the touch, the lightness, the awareness. There was no use, of course, in praising his stories too much; that led to egotism and egotism led to dullness. The editor whom Harry wished Gil to replace had just had what Harry called “a rush of respectability to the head.” And there was nothing like respectability to ruin a writer or an editor.

  “What makes you think you could fit in here?” demanded Harry.

  Gil raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t. You did, Mr. Suffolk. That’s why I came.”

  Harry tossed his letter aside with taurian contempt. “Some damn clerk must have written it, and I signed it without reading it.”

  Skepticism gleamed in Gil’s eyes. He laid an envelope on the cluttered desk. “I brought you two more stories about Mr. Thor,” he said. Now his face took on gloom and sullenness. “I can’t take the job, sir. Not even when I am graduated.”

  “You can’t, eh? Maybe I’m not offering you one. This is just a discussion. Never thought I’d be discussing anything with a damned schoolboy, at my age! But just suppose I was offering you that job, why wouldn’t you take it?”

  “I can’t.” The words were flat and vicious. “It’d be a risk—”

  “Well, what in hell isn’t? From the look of you, though, I wouldn’t say that you’d ever suffered any privation. And you’re young. And I’ve a faint idea I’ve read one of your scrawls, or a few paragraphs, anyway. School assignment?” he added tauntingly, though he knew better.

  “No,” said Gil, almost angrily.

  Harry leaned back in his chair. “Um. Somebody you know. Now,” he went on, observing Gil’s flush, “you could write maybe ten or twelve or fourteen more stories about Mr. Thor. I’m not saying you haven’t some small talent, you know. Then maybe you could get the stories together and publish them. Maybe. I’ve seen, though, the best stories we’ve published shoved together in a book and they’ve made just about as much sound as a pancake falling on a carpet. Books are different. And there’ll come a time when our readers will get tired of Mr. Thor. They’ll want something different. You’re callow. You’ve got yourself a character you know, somebody you hate, somebody you’ve caricatured. You can write the way you do about him because you despise his guts, and admire him, and are scared to death of him—”

  Gil’s color had so increased that he looked inflamed. Harry shook a rocklike finger at him. “I know,” he said. “And I repeat, you’ve got a talent. But you’re going to run out of characters, because you haven’t lived long enough or experienced enough, and you’re just writing biography, now. If you come here—and I haven’t offered you the job yet—you’ll learn, you’ll meet people in New York, you’ll listen, you’ll get experience—and your gift for satire will develop naturally in a natural environment. Some people have the genius for invention; you haven’t. You write as you see a man, and that’s both good and bad. And I’m not saying that your Mr. Thor does Mr. Thor justice. There’s just too much malice in your things. People are sons of bitches, sure. And Mr. Thor is a prize one. But I don’t think he’s as mean or as stupid or impervious a son of a bitch as you write. He wouldn’t have made all his money if he were. Some people are so superbly stupid that they can’t help succeeding in anything they do, but Mr. Thor isn’t that stupid. It leaks out here and there in your work, that he’s got a mind, though you probably wrote that subconsciously. When you get tired of Mr. Thor, or bored with him, or you’ve written him out, what’re you going to do?”

  “There’s my whole fam—” began Gil, and stopped, flaming again. He considered, his head bent, his eyebrows drawn almost down to his eyes. What did he really know about his family, except Ed? Gil was too intelligent to deceive himself in this matter. What did he know about anyone else, either? He had to be aroused, to hate, to envy, to resentment, to anger, to write vividly and with scarifying malevolence.

  “It takes a lot of loving and hating, and experience, to be an all-around writer,” said Harry astutely, watching the young man. “Well. You’re graduated. Then what do you
do, in June?”

  What do I do? Gil asked himself. Go home to Waterford? Well, it was cozy there; there was money; there was that house; there was leisure. This old fool was wrong. He, Gil, had a book in mind. He certainly could invent people! He wasn’t a reporter. But even if the book didn’t amount to anything, there was safety in Waterford, security, and he could travel. A couple of years in Paris, a year in England, a year in Rome, a year, another year, still another year. There was money, and old Ed would always put it out, in the name of “study.” A pleasant life.

  And, if I come here, where’s the guarantee I’d have a job in six months? I’ve heard about The City. Big turnover. This fat Satan uses up people like a grinding machine. You’re high this year, low next year, out the following year. What could I do then? Newspapers? Look for a job? Work like a woolen-headed laborer in some office? In Waterford, he was the genius, the great writer. Being a great and misunderstood and unpublished Writer in Waterford—with all that money and with all that travel—was something only an idiot would reject.

  Yet … Gil looked about the office, heard the distant beat of a press, heard the hurrying footsteps outside this room, the bark of laughter, the short and pungent words, the mutter of the monster city. Everything in him suddenly yearned and hungered for this life, and it seemed to him that his very heart twisted. For one instant he said to himself, I’ll take it! This is what I’m fitted for; this is what I love!

  Then fear struck him. No. He’d lose everything if he came here. He’d never be able to go back to Waterford. No more money, no more good clothing, no more surety, no more pampering. He’d have to stand alone and lose everything. Even if he were a success, he’d never make a real fortune. He’d be cut off. In a whole lifetime of work he’d never make as much money as he had right now, and which he would eventually inherit someday, from his parents, and from that damnable Ed.