The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  He remembered nothing else until he heard a loud knocking on his door. He pushed himself up on the bed and blinked. I must have slept, he thought. A lonely winter sun poured through the windows. The knocking increased in tempo. His mouth and throat were so dry and tight that it was a moment or two before he could demand who was knocking.

  “Why, and it’s your old friend, William Montgomery Percival Chauncey MacFadden!” cried a cheery voice. “And a very good morning to you, sir. Open up!” The door knob rattled.

  Edward was stupefied. He stared at the door and rubbed his eyes. Then he got up and opened the door. “Now what the hell brings you here?” he demanded, fastening his dressing gown around him. He still could not believe it was William there, jaunty as always, the hazel eyes dancing, the foxy face quivering in greeting. “How did you know I was here?”

  William bounced lightly into the room. “Aha,” he said, tapping his brow. “It’s a little pixie I have up here who whispers to me.” He threw his bag on the bed and rubbed his freckled hands. “It’s starving I am, boyo. Shall we order a light refreshment, say several poached eggs and some good ham?”

  He pushed his black derby hat to an acute angle or his sandy hair and laughed at Edward’s face and expression of disbelief. “The telephone, the blessed room service,” he said. “It’s nine o’clock, and I just disembarked from the Pullman. Blessed Pullman. Well I remember the days I rode under it and not in it, and you may take my word for it, laddie, there’s a bit of difference and a different point of view.”

  He radiated zest and innocence as he pulled off his smart topcoat and gloves and hurled them after his bag.

  “How did you know I was here?” demanded Edward again, wondering vaguely at the sudden rise of his spirits. He peered at William suspiciously.

  William looked at him pleadingly. He clasped his hands in an attitude of prayer. “Let me have my delusions. The lovely, sprightly delusions. The pixie, chappie, the pixie.”

  Edward went to the telephone and ordered a large breakfast for two, and he wondered why he was hungry after that night. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  William sighed. “Ah, let us be prosaic. Let us shatter the bright childhood dreams. Let us get down to the damned realities, and there is nothing so boring as a reality. Compact as a steel ball; no color, no rainbow shimmerings. And was it Aristotle who said reality was subjective? I wish it were. But the fact remains it is a Tuesday morning, nine o’clock and fifteen minutes, and a damned ruddy snow on the ground, and Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States of America, 1915. February.” He shuddered elaborately, and twitched his nose. “How did I know? There is the new-fangled thing called the telephone, and I had occasion to put in a call for you from New York, and it was gone you were, on the wings of the wind, to Cleveland. So I am here.”

  “Why? What’s so important to bring you down here?”

  “That, my dear young friend, is a gruesome story, one that will melt your heart and cause you to howl. No, no, there’s no new assaults on the holy shops. It is a personal matter, and damned if I’m going to break down and sob on your shoulder before I have my brekky.”

  He pretended to be unaware of the grayness of Edward’s face and the stained and sunken pits about his eyes, and the purplish shadow on his lips. He pretended not to see the pile of paper neatly stacked on the desk. “Bloody close in here,” he said. “Let’s have a breath of fresh air.” He opened the window and took deep and audible breaths. Then he swung about alertly, sniffing. “I smell the breakfast, the dear, darling breakfast, and hear the musical clangor of dishes on a table. Let in the male equivalent of Hebe before I drown in my own saliva.”

  They ate breakfast in warm contentment, and Edward was surprised at how spiritually satisfying good coffee was, and how food could lift the heart after agony. He leaned back in his chair and smoked a cigarette, and said, “Now, come on. What brought you here, and no lies, understand?”

  William shook his head solemnly. “And so it’s the liar I am now. After all these years of servitude, during which I bled for you and toiled for you in a barren vineyard.”

  “Not so barren,” said Edward, smiling for the first time. “Not with those munitions stocks, even in this Wilson depression. Not with that two-hundred-dollar broadcloth coat, with the fur collar, and the gold-headed cane, and those infernal spats, and that pearl tie pin. For a cowering slave, you’ve done well for yourself—in my service.”

  Then he saw that William was not smiling and that he was staring at the bottom of the cup. “It’s Padraig,” he said. “I’m to bring you a message. He is leaving soon, with Maggie and the brat, Sean, for Ireland, and the old boy and the old sod.”

  “What?” cried Edward. “What the devil for? Is he going to get himself in that war after all he’s said about it?”

  William shook his head. “No, laddie. It’s not off to the wars for Padraig. It’s to save Ireland, he says. It’s to join the old society his dadda belongs to, with the object, he says, of getting free from the Sassenachs, and stopping the Irish lads from shouldering guns for England and making blasted dying fools of themselves for the Union Jack. Did I not tell you? His dadda just served two months in the prison for ‘insurrection,’ says they, and he’s an old man but full of ginger. ‘My country needs me, and this is the time for freedom,’ says Padraig, and it’s off he will be, with the lovely Maggie and the heir.”

  Edward considered this. “Good God!” he exclaimed.

  “And what blinking good is it if he gets his head shot off, or thrown into the paddy for ‘treason’? Knowing Padraig, it’ll be one or the other, and he knows it. ‘But they’ll have to find me first,’ says he. ‘And here I have a boy for the old dadda, and not a drop of blood in him that isn’t Irish. The old dadda will live a hundred years, but this fight is not for the old men. It is for me.’”

  “Principles,” said Edward, pouring himself more coffee.

  William studied him shrewdly, his sallow face wrinkling and thoughtful. He said, after a moment, “Life is short and principles are long, and I’m a man who doesn’t believe the mob is worth principles. Never shall it be said of a MacFadden that he was a Galahad and had the strength of ten because his heart was pure. Always shall it be said of a MacFadden that he believed the people deserved what they got, and no bally prophet ever lived out his days in peace or grew a gray beard. No locusts and honey in the desert for a MacFadden. It’s comfort I want, as long as I can get it. Principles! Do they put money in the bank or bring a man a comfortable old age, surrounded by the wet-nosed grandchildren and a garden? They do not.”

  Edward was angry. “Yet you’ve been telling me for years what we are going to face! You’re the one who’s given me a lot of my information. Didn’t you warn me about the Federal income tax?”

  “So I did. It was conversation, not warning. A comment, no more, no less. A discussion of the inevitable. A remark on the passing scene. Not an exhortation, laddie, to spurs and banners and a trumpet. I am a commentator, not a hero.”

  “You were the one who suggested that I do something, and you contributed to the Save America Committee.” Edward’s anger was rising.

  “Ah, there’s the touch of the Don Quixote in me, I must confess. And a faint hope—a very faint hope, mind you—that some of the good seed scattered by that hammy fist of yours will bear fruit in some far distant future, under the glitter of the police bayonets and under the sound of the chains. Not much of a hope. You must permit me my sentimentalities.”

  “You call it sentimental to try to save your country from disaster and bankruptcy and slavery?”

  William shrugged. Then he shook a lean and sallow finger under Edward’s nose. “Laddie. Hearken to words of wisdom. When a people are bent obstinately on enslaving themselves—and never was a people enslaved without its willing—then Our Lord Himself cannot stop them. They must bleed and die first, before the great enlightenment dawns in their noggins, and they get out the ropes and set up the scaffolds for the rascals.
” He sighed nostalgically. “Ah, may the good God let me see the day when in America, and in all the world, that hour comes to pass. Damn me, if I won’t volunteer to be a hangman, though I’ll know in my heart that the people had deserved their oppression.”

  He leaned back in his chair and pushed his hands into his trousers pockets and stared at the ceiling, and now his face, that lively and expressive face, was somber. “What did we do with Satan? He’s been banished from the modern churches, with a wave of an urbane and ‘civilized’ finger. Only old Mother Church and a few Protestant. Fundamentalist sects pound away at him with both hands. Do the others think that a little modern abracadabra caused him to be bottled up like a blasted genie or exploded into the air and lost forever? No, no. It’s on his black and fiery throne he is, chuckling over the damned world, his world. He’s murmuring over the shoulders of the coming tyrants; he’s thrown his red banner over the battlefields; he’s the familiar of the bankers and the madmen and the millionaires who want power, and the kings and the emperors and the presidents. Now is my time! says he. This is what I’ve been waiting for, and whispering for, ever since I was booted out of heaven. Now I’ll show Him who rules this bloody bit of mud He’s so fond of and what He died for. I’ll drown His cross in the blood of His precious people, and I’ll banish Him to the farthest reaches of the universe. I’ll close down His temples and His churches, and I’ll have my boys foul up His altars, all in the name of the people. A thousand years, says He, I’ll be bound. Not I, Lucifer, Star of the Morning. I’ve got a cleverer mind than He has, because I believe in nothing and hate everything. Let evil be unconfined! Let madness be unloosed, and all the whirlwinds. Isn’t that what the people want, and was there a day I didn’t serve the people?”

  “You’re not serious, of course,” said Edward.

  But William stared at him. “Serious? I was never more serious. Do I believe in the Devil? Why, laddie, of course I do. I am not a fool. Oh, I’ve listened to the holy men who say God is good and incapable of error. There I agree with them. But I depart from their company when they say that ignorance and error are only in the hearts of humanity, because of their imperfections. Now God created men, and as He created them, they were perfect. It is Satan who is bedeviling them and leading them into the abattoirs—by their own will, their own greed, their own evil, their own hatred of their fellow men, with which Lucifer inspired them. Could they be going down into the pit without him, they for whom God died?”

  “You’re a priest at heart,” said Edward uncomfortably. “And a medieval one. Let’s not talk foolishness. You wanted to know why I was here. I’ll tell you.”

  William listened as if this was news to him. He clouded his face with the smoke of Turkish cigarettes, to conceal any expression which might betray him.

  When Edward had finished, William smoked out his last cigarette. Then he said, “Permit me a discourtesy. You are an idiot, my benighted young friend. You will call in the press and give your life away. Let me remind you. Millions of the American people are of German stock, as you have said. Yet I must tell you, out of my observation. When Washington gives the word to the American people that they must hate Germany, then they will hate Germany. They will chant the slogans of murder the government will give them. Even those with German fathers and grandfathers. Who can doubt any government? Isn’t it all wise, all knowing? God bless the State with its bloody bureaucrats! It’s well on the way to replacing God as the source of all knowledge, and all beneficence. Is that not what all people have been doing since they first set up governments? First God and the altars, then a stirring of compassion for more wretched men, then reforms. Not a man thinks of first reforming himself. No. He turns to the government, the slavering, hungry government, and says, ‘The job’s too big for me. You do it. If I’m only taxed within my capacities.’ And the government puts on a pious face and issues reams of slogans and homilies, and spits on its sword and slices off heads. It was always so. And so it will be in America, for men cannot delegate morality and compassion and justice to despots.”

  Again he shook a finger in Edward’s frowning face. “And it is the government you would defy, who has already chosen the ‘enemy.’ It is the government you will try to control. You? You and a few other men? Too late, boyo, too late. What Georgie Enreich said to you was true, and you broke his heart with your nonsense. But it will be nothing to what the government will do to you! It’ll drive you into the ground, for your presumption. It will call you a traitor. It will set the blessed people against you; it will look at your income-tax returns and declare that you have cheated! And then will come boycotts and ruin. And where will you be? Economically excommunicated, you with your family, and your wife, and the childer who will be born. Will that make you happy? Will you look at the wreck of your life and say to yourself, ‘I tried. But it was no good’? Yes, that you will say, in your exile, and when you are eating your crumbs.”

  “What do you think I should do?” shouted Edward furiously. “Just sit and collect profits, and work, and do nothing?”

  “I just ask you not to tell the press who you are and what you are doing. Then you can keep on with your Save America Committee until the day war is declared against Germany. You can hide behind your mask. Prudence. Sense. A few will remember, later. And on that few, weak though you are, you may bank. They may grow into a chorus, that’ll defeat the murderers through the ballots, not tomorrow, not next year or next decade. But surely sometime. Not that I believe in the virtue of the people. No. But self-preservation’s a mighty thing, and God has hinted over and over that liberty is His gift. They’ll remember; they always do when the chains grow too heavy. And when that day comes, you’ll have your money as your sword, to fight, to publish, to help.”

  “Maybe I won’t be alive then. Maybe it’ll be too late for my country. You want me to be a coward!” But Edward was desperately thinking, and as desperately despairing. “And in the meantime my shops will be sabotaged. I’ve heard from my managers in the other cities. The men who did that weren’t hooligans or thieves. It was a design, because our enemies know who I am.”

  He got up and began to lunge about the room, walking faster and faster. William was composed. He covered a cold slice of toast with marmalade, as if unaware of the tramping going on around and about him. Then he said casually, “Sure, and it was a design. A Socialist design; the boys are out for blood. That reminds me of a stanza from Bobbie Burns, another lover of liberty like yourself. It was a poem about a louse, on a lady’s bonnet, but it is pertinent, I’m thinking, about the Socialists. And if you’ll stop that blooming riot about my chair, I’ll recite it for you.”

  He chewed the toast with enjoyment, and then in his soft brogue he quoted:

  “Now haud you there, ye’re out of sight,

  Below the fatt’rils, snug and tight;

  Na, faith ye yet! ye’ll no be right

  Till ye’ve got on it,

  The very tapmost, towering height

  O’ Miss’s bonnet.”

  Edward stopped, listening irately, catching the gist of the words. William poured some more coffee and sugared it. “No,” he said. “They’ll ‘no be right’ till they’ve got on it, the very tapmost. But in the meantime,” and he drank, “Socialism is a dirty word, since your fine Eugene Debs was indicted on a charge of conspiracy to kill, in 1895. Dirty word in America. You’ve got to capitalize on that in America now, my laddie. In ten years, or twenty years, it’ll be respectable. But not now.” He yawned. “I’ll not be relying on you to capitalize on it. It’s not in you. The Teutonic soul rushes out with a ghostly sword; it is all the Drachensgrab, the mysticism. Fighting intangible enemies at the gates of Valhalla.”

  “What are you talking about?” Edward roared.

  “When you talk with a German, it’s first the moat, and then the drawbridge pulled down, then the rattling of rusty chains, and then the cobbled courtyard teeming with the blasted specters. Now I, a Scot, with a laving of good sound Irish in me, am mo
re practical. I get at roots. I dig. I stump around on the knees. I search the stems. I peer around for the wee louses. And there they are.”

  “Meaning what?” asked Edward, with enraged impatience.

  “I consult with the pixies in the dark of the moon while I’m grousing around on my knees. ‘Now what,’ I ask them, ‘do we do about the big laddie, the Senator Bonwit? For, gentlemen, I’ve smelled mice.’ When you have enemies, chappie, you look into their closets. Everybody has a closet. So I found the skeleton in Bonwit’s.”

  Edward, glaring and bewildered, sat down abruptly in his chair, and threw his big arm over the back. “Bonwit?” he exclaimed. “Of course, Bonwit!”

  “Ah, now you see. So, after the other shops are smashed to bits, I go to Washington, two days ago, smelling the mice. And with a top of the morning he greets me and slaps me on the back, the beefy bastard. ‘And how’s my good young friend Ed Enger?’ he asks, beaming like the blinking sun. And I look him in the eye and say, ‘Bad, very bad.’”

  “That swine,” said Edward, not seeing, and his impatience growing.

  William inclined his head in agreement. “But a swine with a closet that holds a big stout skeleton. That I found out. Twenty years ago he was a Socialist, one of Debs’s friends, a contributor; he furnished counsel for Debs, of dour reputation. And I know our Senator has ambitions; Vice-President or President, he wants, or perhaps the Supreme Court, or a little Cabinet job.

  “So I says to him, says I, ‘And I’ve been an admirer of yours, dear boy. Your campaign manager in New York is closer to my heart than breathing,’ and that’s the God’s truth, Siegfried. ‘Always cuddle up to a political laddie,’ my old dadda told me. ‘Never know when it comes in handy.’