The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  He scampered off and touched Margo on the arm. She glanced over at Gregory, and what she saw evidently pleased her, after LeCroix’s whispered comments. She arched golden brows, and simpered, and smoothed down the coat of her suit, and lifted her head in a model’s attitude, and arranged her legs in a model’s “stance,” as she listened to what was apparently a thumbnail sketch of Gregory. Her blue eyes never left him during the recital, and now Gregory could see the shrewdness and calculation in them. He did not like this; he concentrated on the dimples, strong and deep, that waxed and waned in her pink cheeks. Strong, strong, he said to himself. Strong as earth. A sound wench. LeCroix, standing near her, was like a black and lifeless twig stuck beside a flourishing tree.

  They came to Gregory together, and LeCroix introduced them. “I’ve been telling Mamie—I mean Margo—that you’re a famous author, Greg. She’s read all your books. She says.” He winked at Gregory with malice.

  “I subscribe to all the book clubs,” said Margo, with a wide, wet-lipped, and very scarlet smile, which enhanced her innocent lewdness. “I read everything. I sure liked your last book, Mr. Enger.”

  Gregory, accustomed to this sort of thing, suppressed his usual sharp query: “My last? Or my next to the last? What did you like about it?” This would throw the unhappy man or woman into utter confusion, a state of affairs which Gregory would acidly enjoy. But now he said, caught in the overflow of the girl’s simple strength, “Did you? I’m glad.” He did not even remark that none of his books had been a book-club choice.

  Margo did indeed have a loud and husky baritone of a voice. She beamed on him. “I thought your last book was better, even, than Always Adorable.”

  LeCroix grinned at Gregory, who ignored him. Margo wet her lips again. They were really very large lips, and very full, and her teeth would have been enormous and too blazing in a smaller woman. She’s a lioness, thought Gregory, and let himself be drawn into the orbit of strapping potency. “Didn’t you just love Always Adorable?” Margo went on, determined to make an intellectual impression.

  “I thought it adorable,” Gregory said gravely. LeCroix barked briefly and scuttled off. Gregory and Margo stared at each other, smiling. Then Gregory thought, She really isn’t stupid. She’s as bright as new tin foil. Cheap, yes. But aware, too. You could never really fool her. And she’d be loyal to anyone she trusted; you could tell her the damnedest lies and she’d believe them and follow you. If she loved you. But she has a greedy face; you’d better be ready to give her—things. Material things, not only affection and devotion. He looked again at her hands and thought their coarseness to have a quality of ruthlessness, and a seizing quality, open and unashamed. That bold face, so sensual, so large, was immune to subtlety, like an animal’s.

  “Why do they serve cocktails that taste like witch hazel?” Margo was asking him, with humor. “Everywhere Thornton takes me it’s like this. And they just sip at the drinks, so they wouldn’t know they’re terrible. Me, I like good bootleg bourbon.”

  “They’re intellectuals,” said Gregory. “Intellectuals sometimes go brawny and drink needled beer to be one of the proletariat boys, but they hate it. And bourbon’s too bourgeois.” After this witticism, he glanced about him uneasily, but they were still cloistered in the draperies.

  Margo was vaguely disappointed after Gregory’s remark. He was going to talk just like old Thorn, and he looked different, somehow. Like the folks at home. Well, a writer. She beamed at him. Writers made millions, just millions. Besides, she liked him. He had a very cute face, and his gray eyes were nice.

  “I guess my Dad is bourgeois,” she said, wondering if she knew just what that was. “He really likes beer, and he swills bourbon, when he can get it. Do you like bourbon, Mr. Enger?”

  “I certainly do—Margo,” he said. Margo was pleased. Now, she could be intellectual, herself. “Thorn takes me around, and it’s always Martinis, with seven eighths bad vermouth and one eighth smuggled gin. What’s your first name? Oh, Gregory, Greg. Thanks. If they don’t like to drink, why do they drink anything? They could have Cokes.”

  “They usually do. At home,” said Gregory. Then he was uneasy again. Why had he said “they”? After all, he was one of them.

  “I don’t get it,” said Margo. “I’ve listened and listened. After all, a girl has to be sophisticated, doesn’t she? What does it matter if you were born on a farm? My folks aren’t sophisticated. Dad’s a farmer; he makes hardly anything these days. He thinks I’m living a life of sin. He lives with Mom in Ohio. He won’t even write to me. But he sure cashes the checks I send them.”

  Gregory thought of the checks his brother sent him, and he frowned. Margo said hastily, seeing that frown, “Oh, I don’t mind! After all—”

  “The poor deserve to be supported; the weak must be nurtured by the strong,” said Gregory. “That’s what they—we—are determined to bring about in this capitalistic country.”

  “Sure, all these poor people in this depression,” said Margo, heartily. She pondered. “I came here without a cent, and I know what it’s like to be hungry. But I got a job as a model almost right off. It’s very interesting. And you get clothes at half price, too. You just have to take care of yourself and have some—some courage—and you get somewhere. You can’t expect other people, who’ve got their own troubles, to take care of you, if you don’t want to work or think the world owes you a living.”

  For an instant Gregory, namelessly smarting, disliked her. Margo, believing that she had made an “intellectual” impression on this famous writer, went on cheerfully, “I just went to ninth grade. That doesn’t matter, though, if you’ve got sense.” (Yes, he was really very cute; there was something about him which more and more reminded her of the common-sense “folks” she had known in Ohio. He should be wearing tweeds, or something; that smooth broadcloth was all right for old Thorn. I bet, thought Margo, that even if he’s a famous writer he comes from people with their feet on the ground. I’ll find out!)

  She continued frankly, “I don’t get it, do you?” She glanced over her broad shoulder at the others. “All these rich people. They talk and talk of the Common Man and the little fellow. Who do they mean, anyway? You know something, Greg? I bet anything they never give a cent to charity; they’re just the kind. And what’s this dialect materialism?”

  Gregory smiled, wrapped in billows of strength and heartiness. “You mean dialectical materialism.”

  “Well, it’s foreigners who speak that, isn’t it?”

  Gregory shook his head, amused. “Well, in a way. Most people think it came from Russia, through Karl Marx. But it didn’t. It started in Western Europe. What’re you doing here with Thorn Greene?”

  Her eyes, not too large, almost disappeared in a small twinkle between thick eyelashes. Her big red tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. “Oh, he thinks he’s making time with me. He isn’t, though; he’s got a wife. You can’t blame him for hoping, anyway, can you? Besides, he thinks I should be educated; get into the ‘movement.’”

  Gregory said, “What movement?”

  “Well, all this. He told me the intellectuals can’t carry it all; it has to be a Common Man movement, too. I’m common, you see.” Again the eyes twinkled shrewdly. “I’m not ritzy like these other dames here; just a farmer’s daughter. D’ever see Thorn’s wife? She’s in the movement. A real bitch. Oh, not because she’s in the movement. But I’ve started to wonder if bitches aren’t drawn to it—and I mean men-bitches, too—because they’re the kind of folks they are. I don’t know what it’s all about; sometimes it sounds crazy, but then, as I said, I only went to ninth grade.”

  “And you’re not a bitch,” said Gregory gravely.

  She laughed with much boisterousness, and she caught the annoyed attention of some of the ladies nearby, who gave her what she would call “a look.” “Yes, I am,” she said. “But in another kind of way. I take care of myself. You’ve got to do that in this man’s world. There was something our teacher told
us in ninth grade: ‘The race to the swift, and the battle to the strong.’ Now that’s for me. You know how it is,” and Margo had a feeling that Gregory indeed knew how it was, and understood. “In every litter there’s a couple of runts. No good. And there’s scrub cattle. You just get rid of them. That is, if you want to raise good stock, without disease. You build up a fine herd that way.”

  “People aren’t litters and scrubs,” said Gregory, and he flushed.

  Margo shrugged. “Aren’t they?” she murmured archly. The shrug had pulled on the gauzy softness of her blouse, and Gregory could see the smooth roundness of her full breast, which needed no artificial aids of support and enhancement. Suddenly he wanted to lay his tired cheek against that breast and close his eyes and be at peace. Peace, he thought, forgetting his annoyance. A place to rest, to take stock, to regain or gain courage and strength.

  Then he was angered. “The race to the swift, and the battle to the strong.” And he was frightened without knowing why. A stupid and ignorant and barbarous idea. It bred competition, individualism, independence, all harsh barbarisms. It was ox-cart, fit only for primitive societies. The New Order was collectivism. In collectivism there was the strength of “the group.” Man was nothing; the group, and then the State, was everything.

  Corrupted, he must corrupt. That was the imperative. He did not express it to himself in that way; it was simply intolerable to him that this girl, a farm girl, a realistic model, should not be “educated” to the New Order. She was “one of the people.” (Like others of his kind, he never considered himself part of “the people.”) He was seized with the furious fanaticism of the corrupted, which cannot endure the presence of innocence and cannot refrain from seduction. The innocent were a menace to himself; there was always the danger that they would, in the power of their innocence, compel him to think, and such thinking was dangerous.

  He turned abruptly and stared through the window. He looked out at the towering giant buildings around him. They were beginning to glitter like magic monuments with the blue-and-white rectangles of their windows; they stood against a murky reddish sky in an imperial majesty that even the things made by God could not surpass. Gregory’s temper subsided. Pigmy man, with his frail hands, his uncertain legs, his weak neck, his overweight head, his shortness of life and his certain death—he had built all this. Here was a crowd of Colossi, hewn from stone, standing high and motionless with the two rivers at their heroic feet. Man was everything! The people in this room were right. It was time for Man to be deified, and not some abstract, some absurdity, called God. He said, without looking at Margo, “See all that around and beside us? Man did that. And you call him a runt!”

  Margo peered over his shoulder. She smiled, pleased. “That’s because he’s got a soul,” she said. “And where did he get a soul? From God, that’s where. People think things in their minds—they’ve got imagination, and that’s part of the soul—and then they use their hands to make the things come out so the rest of us can see them.”

  Gregory was silent, he was enraged that this stupid girl could throw him into a whirlwind of inner turmoil. She was cutting the ground from under his feet. She was taking from him the only surety and sense of belonging that he possessed. He had been lonely for years; he had never “belonged.” His mother had regarded religion as a necessity, and his father had considered it a noble “abstract,” in the very nature of man. But religion, he thought, was no longer adequate enough (though it was a great lie, of course) to control the huge world of modern mankind, because it was based on free will and free choice, ideas valuable in a tiny society but too tenuous for a world grown monolithic. These friends of his now in this room, believed absolutely with the millions of their kind that only the State was adequate to control and direct, with force and coercion—ah, particularly force!—the vast chaotic condition of mankind. And who would be the State? The intellectuals, the innately powerful, with an army of bureaucrats to enforce their superior ideas and directives on the unthinking and mindless masses. He, Gregory Enger, was one of the powerful, the intellectual.

  He suddenly thought of his father, the gentle and the meek. But Pa really had had some right ideas. Pa loved Christmas and Easter; he called them “folk festivals” when he was out of range of his wife’s massive and formidable stare. Once Gregory had asked him, when he himself had been only fifteen, “Pa, don’t you believe in God? You go to church and you pray.”

  Heinrich had smiled with that pink uneasiness of his. “Ach, now, my son, God has His importance. It is concrete for the masses, hein? It is a symbol. Someday there will be men greater of mind than myself. They will take that symbol and make it into ultimate man, the hero of the ages, the master of life. You have not read Shaw? Ja? You must remember the Superman.”

  Up to that very moment in his childhood, Gregory had possessed, in a small measure, a sense of belonging to something greater than himself, something which had reassured him, something which had given him courage and a secret rebelliousness. He had understood, even as a boy, that a man needs not only his own individuality and independence but also an affinity with, and a cohesiveness with, a Power stronger than his own spirit, a guidance filled with clarity and direction. For weeks after that short conversation with his father he had been filled with confusion and hopelessness, and what courage he had had deserted him. For years afterwards, until he had met these people, he had possessed no polar star, he had been overwhelmed with loneliness and a growing inadequacy of spirit, for which he had blamed his brother and not himself, and not his father. In truth, he had forgotten that conversation with Heinrich. Edward, in some strange twisted reasoning of a distressed soul, had become the cause of what he was enduring. Edward was the suppressor, the enemy of, the Superman.

  These friends with their Marxist jargon had restored his self-confidence, had put his feet once more on rock, had given him a feeling of belonging, of fellowship. And Mamie Elkins, alias Margo Montgomery, was threatening all that he had gained. The stupid cow! She would take from him the only religion he knew.

  The imperative to corrupt filled him with a cold and driving passion. He turned to Margo abruptly. “It was man, Superman, who built this city, Margo. Not some abstract God.”

  He was cynically amused when she retreated a little and stared at him almost inimically. “Why, you sound like one of those Nazis,” she said. “Are you a Fascist, Greg? Are all these people here Nazis, too? And Thorn?”

  For one moment, one terrible and blinding moment, he was struck with horror and complete understanding. For one whirling moment, filled with light and darkness and the sound of thunder, his soul came alive and aware, and shuddered. Then he was freshly terrified. No, no! he cried in himself. If I lose this, then I lose my foundations again, I lose my belonging, my power. I lose my hope of revenge …

  Margo, startled at his expression, moved backwards uncertainly. “I guess I’d better go back to Thorn,” she murmured. But Gregory caught her arm, her warm full arm, pulsing with strength. “Of course we aren’t Fascists,” he said, trying to smile. “You don’t know very much, do you, Margo? We’re the antithesis of Nazism.”

  “Well, you sounded just like a Nazi. My boss is a Nazi,” said Margo. “Always talking about the Superman. He’s one, he thinks. He’s just a miserable little squirt; he pinches us. Once I had to swat him. If he’s a Superman, then I’m—”

  “Look, Margo, let’s get out of here. Forget Thorn. We’ll go somewhere and drink bourbon together. I have an apartment—”

  Margo smiled broadly. “No, sir. I don’t go to apartments without a crowd. You’ll talk real intellectual to me, for maybe a couple of drinks, and then you’ll try to take my clothes off.” Her eyes sparkled, but her big mouth was severe. “The only fellow who’ll ever take my clothes off will be the fellow who’s put a wedding ring on my finger, and when I’ve put the wedding certificate in my bureau drawer. You see, I’ve been around. My minks, when I get them, are going to be legal.” Her face shone with wistful avar
ice. “Not even for a ten-thousand-dollar mink and God, how I’d love one of them! It’s not that I’m frigid,” and the lascivious bloom was on her lips again, “it’s just that Margo’s going to take care of Margo, because nobody else will.”

  Gregory began to warm with pleasure and affection. “All right, Margo, we’ll go to a speakeasy I know of. And we’ll talk. There are things I’d like to tell you.”

  She regarded him with responsive pleasure. He was really awfully good-looking, in a big, rugged sort of way, though when she saw his profile she was not certain of the ruggedness. And he was rich, too. Everybody here was rich, except Margo.

  The great room hummed with voices. The butler circulated busily with his pale, weak Martinis, followed by the maid with her tasteless hors d’oeuvres. More and more people were arriving, obviously not “rich.” Quiet, tense-faced men in cheap clothing, vehement-eyed women in rough wool dresses and “sensible” shoes, their faces dark and watchful. Gregory knew them. They were the “leaders.” They pressed against the ermine, sable, and mink scarves, against the fine flannels, of the other people incongruously. They had brought with them a sense of power, of inexorable hatred and purpose.

  “We can get out, now,” said Gregory. “We won’t be missed.”

  “Sure,” said Margo. “Look, Thorn’s talking to those three women. Besides,” she added practically, “he’ll never get a divorce from his wife.”

  Within fifteen minutes they were cozily harbored in a dimly lit bar, where there was no nonsense about food or a band, or other entertainment. After the first copious drink of straight bourbon Margo and Gregory smiled at each other with confidence. The girl’s strength embraced Gregory like warm arms, protectively. He ordered another drink, and then another. It was a relief to be with someone who knew nothing of books or music or “the dance,” or the State, and to whom intellectual jargon was incomprehensible. The bar became roseate. “Say,” said Margo, humorously, “are you ordering a fourth round? Not for me, brother. And you look a little high yourself. No, not for me. Go ahead for yourself if you want to.” She had been amusing Gregory for nearly an hour now with tales of her adventures as a model, and surprisingly he had enjoyed the anecdotes. His busy writer’s mind, fired rather than dulled by alcohol, was already evolving a series of sprightly stories for The City about a model’s experiences. “The Virgin Nude” series, or “The Brassière Set.” Why, it was only yesterday that someone had told him that he had made The City better than The New Yorker.