The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  Then Gertrude turned and fled, not only down the echoing stairway and not only into the hall. She wrenched open the big doors of the house and ran out into the rain and the storm and the shrieking cries of the trees, and the tearing power of the winds.

  André knocked lightly at Maria’s door, opened it, and entered her sitting room. The storm flashed and roared against the window, near which she sat, knitting. “You wished to see me, Grandma?” he asked in his perfect French. She replied calmly, “Yes, my dear. Will you sit beside me?” But André, made even more electric by the storm, preferred to stand near her chair where he had a view of the rain and the tumultuous trees in the furious green gloom and fiery light.

  “I see much from this window,” said Maria, as if there was no booming of thunder and glare of lightning.

  “So I would believe,” said André, politely. A red and brilliant vein snaked down the heavens, and it was followed by a deafening crash. “That was very close,” André added. “I think we have lost a tree.”

  “Much is lost during any storm,” said Maria. “I have lived long enough to know that. And much is cleared away and illuminated.”

  André smiled. He was accustomed to Maria’s enigmatic speech and enjoyed it. He knew that it was not some mere desire for his company which had made Maria send for him. While Maria distrusted him, she was also amused by him. Once, a few years ago, she had said, “André, you are a rascal and we both know it without illusion, but your rascality is open. However, you are extremely intelligent, and I prize intelligence above all other things.” They had, in this way, reached a modus vivendi, and they often had what Maria called “serious conversations.” She was the only one in the family who had not resented Heinrich’s will, which she understood was not inspired by a subtlety she would have appreciated, but only by his simple willingness to be deceived by artfulness if it came in the guise of affection. She had thought, It is very good, and though plotted, it will serve an excellent purpose in the years to come.

  “You will be returning to France in September,” she said now, counting her stitches. “May I suggest you remain in this country and attend some university here?”

  André slid a quick and shining glance down at her, but she was absorbed in her work. “Why?” he asked, teasingly. “Because I’m an American and should complete my education in America?”

  “Shall we call it that?” said Maria. “It is as sensible an idea as anything else.” She paused, and it was extraordinary how her large and puffy features could flatten under an emotion she could control and keep out of her voice and manner. “You are not one of those whom my son Gregory calls the lost generation, which is a stupid appellation, is it not? What did those young men lose? They were egotistic and petulant and given to postures, and desired attention and admiration which only fools could give them. Men go to war for the pure sake of warring; it is the business of evil men, or imbeciles, to deceive them that they warred for a good purpose. My son’s generation was not protesting against war’s uselessness and disillusion. It was a protest against their own secretly acknowledged mediocrity. They hate the world for being what they are. Enough. I was speaking of you. You will be a truly great writer. I particularly admired your essay on man’s infinite capacity to delude himself. When will you have enough essays to publish them in a book?”

  “In perhaps another three years,” said André. “You believe I cannot complete them in Europe?”

  “A writer can write anywhere,” said Maria, reprovingly. “And that you know. Still, may I suggest that you remain in America?”

  André lit a cigarette and studied the storm with increasing interest. “You have a reason, Grandmother,” he said.

  “Naturally,” she replied. “And it is not concerned with you, of course.”

  “That I understand,” he said, and turned his admiration from the storm to Maria. “There is little that escapes you.” He put his hand on her massive shoulder in a gesture of genuine affection. “When I was a child—if I ever was a child—I believed that you were the only member of this family who was truly civilized. But now I know it. May I ask you what, in particular, inspired your suggestion that I remain here?”

  Maria knitted busily; then she looked at the window. “When a young girl who is all pride and innocence and integrity, who is all control usually, suddenly darts from a hidden distance with tears on her face, which is also flushed yet smiling timidly, and who is breathing with excitement and fear, and then runs into her home as if for a refuge she does not really want, it is obvious that something has occurred of considerable importance. And then when a young man studiously strolls, smoking as you are smoking now, from the very same spot from which the girl burst a moment or two ago, only a blind woman would fail to come to the proper conclusion.”

  André patted her shoulder. “And what would you say of a girl who cries about age constantly and insists upon age, Grandmother?”

  “I would say that that girl is a child and not a woman as yet. She is still without sight. Nevertheless, that, too, was only a protest against the strength of the heart, which has awakened and has destroyed the level order of her world, a world that did not really exist except in her determined and juvenile illusion that existence must be governed by reason always.”

  “I admire reason,” said André. “But not what is generally called reason. I am a very logical person. However, there is still the matter of years, though not of age. My education is not complete; the young lady’s education is not complete. This would not interfere, so far as I am concerned. In a truly civilized world marriage would not interfere with education, which is a continuous thing. However, there are parents to consider and the small affair of law.”

  “Absence from one loved frequently gives parents an opportunity to distort a girl’s life,” said Maria, nodding approvingly over what André had said. “A father in particular. The father we are now considering is as obdurate and as innocent as his daughter.” She sighed. “He has plans for her. She is resisting them, being possessed of some common sense. But she also loves him. He may succeed in ruining her life, with the very best intentions and out of some terror which possesses him. It is strange that a man can be a genius and a fool at the very same time. It is also tragic.”

  “The father is indeed a genius,” André said.

  “And geniuses frequently annihilate. They are elemental forces, like the storm outside. I have made my suggestion. Do you agree with it?”

  André smoked intently. Then he said, “Grandmother, you are the wisest woman in the world. I would be stupid indeed not to listen to you. And I am happy that you approve, in the light of what you have called my rascality and in the light of the fact that the young lady is your favorite grandchild.”

  He bent to kiss her smiling cheek. “Do you think I will make her the good bourgeois husband?”

  She shook her head vigorously. “No. And that is why I approve. The girl is very profound; her profundity is still folded in her heart like a bud. It must be persuaded to flower into true wisdom. She must be rescued and taught and loved. Everything else is of no significance. And I—”

  “Excuse me, please,” said André in a quick, changed voice. “I have seen something through this famous and enlightening window of yours.”

  He turned swiftly and ran from the room. He ran down the dark stairway and hardly touched the stairs. A servant was beginning to turn on the lights in the hall, and she exclaimed as André fled by her, and almost screamed when he pulled open the doors and bolted outside. “What in the world!” she cried as wind and rain and lightning gushed into the hall. It was very difficult to close the doors after André. She shook her head. This was sure a very funny family. That boy, running out into the storm, bare-headed, not noticing anything, not even the rain. Well, he was French, and he was the funniest one in the whole house! Except for the old German lady who had a nasty, cold eye and just sat knitting or embroidering all the time.

  André was momentarily caught and whirled by th
e wild gale and rain. They were like solid blows on his face and body, and he was blinded both by water and lightning. He put his hands over his mouth and drew in a breath protectingly. Then he bent his head and plowed into the storm. The soaked earth yielded under his running feet; sometimes the wind struck him aside and made him stagger; sometimes the lightning dazed him as it lit up and distorted the furious lashing world about him. Sometimes the ground rumbled under him, echoing the thunder. Once, his eyes streaming with rain, he collided with a tree.

  Now he was running freely, and faster, over the sodden grass, toward the place where he and Gertrude had sat that afternoon. He was angry, alarmed, and frightened. It was dangerous under those huge trees now, with the leaping lightning hovering closely, waiting for a place to strike. But he did not call out. It was all he could do to breathe in this world of smothering water, which was illuminated by constant glares of fierce and unearthly light. He passed the fountain, which gushed over its bowl in silvery cataracts. The small naked statue of the boy which dominated it glistened with pale life, the laughing and depraved face flowing with bright water. André, even in those concerned moments, could give the statue a glance of appreciation.

  Now it was behind him, and he was running down the long slow slope toward the trees. Once he slipped on the wet grass and sprawled upon it. He was up again in a moment, cursing quietly. The soft black hair of his head, cropped like fur, had picked up blades of grass as well as much rain. He was like a fleeing faun, tall and slender, his drenched clothing hanging on his body.

  A particularly fiery and vicious blaze of lightning showed him Gertrude at last, crouching on the bench under the maddened trees, her face in her hands, her slight body bent and crushed in unseeing and unfeeling grief and despair, her gray dress blackened and flooded with water.

  Someone called her name, and she started violently and dropped her hands. André was before her, holding out his arms and trying to make her understand. She stared at him with blank amazement. And then she uttered a deep and broken sob and sprang up and threw herself, like an abandoned and terrified child, into his arms and clung to him, and cried.

  “There, there,” he said and held her tightly, and drew her away from the perilous trees to a safe spot where they had only wind and rain to battle. His arms became stronger about her. Her loose hair whipped about her contorted face, and the wet strands of it blew against his cheek. Her hands clutched his arms, his shoulders; even above the sound of the storm he could hear her incoherent cries, her piteous stammering.

  “There, there,” he said again, understanding that something had driven the usually controlled Gertrude out into this primordial fury. But what did that matter? Her cold and trembling mouth, tasting of rain and the saltness of her tears, her innocent mouth, was pressing against his, and her arms were about his neck, in an utter abandon of sorrow and love.

  Now her lips were at his ear, and she was crying, “Don’t go away, André! Don’t leave me!”

  “Of course not, darling,” he said. “I’ll never go away. What made you think I would?”

  CHAPTER X

  The gray autumnal rain drizzled against the wide windows of Edward’s offices. The whole world was gray and still, a melancholy twilight though it was only three in the afternoon. Edward sat and looked at his papers, and the hushed blank stillness of the day ran like drowning water over his desperate thoughts. He struggled against this dolorous anesthesia; for, he told himself numbly, he must think! Think how to keep what he had; think how to fight against his monolithic debts; think how to prevent being plowed under the glacier of the increasing depression, which grew worse instead of better in this November of 1936. All the President had done, and was doing, could not overcome this leaden horror that flowed like lava over the country.

  His secretary came in. “Mr. Standard is here,” she said listlessly, for the weather and her employer’s chronic mood of wretchedness disheartened her. She held the door aside, and Mr. Edgar Standard, of the huge Standard Super Markets entered, smiling. Edward got up to meet him with reserve, and they shook hands.

  When they sat down again, Edward said abruptly, “I wrote you you were wasting your time, Mr. Standard. I’m not going to sell out to your chain. I can’t. I built my own smaller chain up myself, and it’s been my whole life.”

  Mr. Standard nodded understandingly. He was a slender, quiet man with a shrewd and perspicacious face, a man about ten years Edward’s senior. “Yes, we had quite a discussion at the home office about your letter, Mr. Enger. And then I thought I ought to come and talk it over personally. We’ve gone over the whole thing in our letters, haven’t we?” His small brown eyes appeared to shine with sympathy on Edward. “But a personal interview can be more rewarding, and points gone over—”

  He wore a perpetual air of benevolence, and there were humorous lines graven about his mouth. Though he was older than Edward, his hair was smooth and brown. He went on, “You’ve accused us of being buccaneers. We aren’t really, you know, Mr. Enger. We’re not even entrepreneurs, though, as you’ve written, we have absorbed independent business wherever we’ve opened new markets. The day of independent business is over—we can’t stop that ending. We’re a big country now—”

  Edward leaned back in his chair with overwhelming tiredness. “I shouldn’t have said you were buccaneers. That was childish. You aren’t entrepreneurs, and that’s the sickening part of the whole thing. There’s no real vitality these days in most big businessmen, no power or force. Everything’s just the Organization, as if any organization has a life of its own, outside of the people who run it! You’re so benevolent, you businessmen today, and you insist on benevolence, that it’s sort of—suspect. You’re just as materialistic as the old robber barons—but you call this new materialism the ‘adjusted life.’ You’ve gone in for Freud, and you’ve taken away all adventure from your employees, and all meaning out of their lives, in the name of ‘security.’”

  “Well,” said Mr. Standard, with a faint smile, “what is the mass of men, anyway? Clods. We treat them, in these days, as kindly as possible, and don’t exploit them as the old boys did. At least we’ve made them happy, and being happy is all they want, in their cretin way—beer, a two-bedroom house, a little adultery when they get tired of the old girl, and three kids in every kitchen, a used car that runs, and bowling every Wednesday. What more do clods want? In fact, they don’t want anything more.” He lit a cigarette. “Besides, isn’t our government trying to make people happy, too, especially the clods? And isn’t its spokesmen always talking of the ‘more abundant life’ and ‘security’?”

  “Who made them clods?” asked Edward, flushing deeply. “A man isn’t born a clod, or, at least, he has some capacity to become more than a clod. Who sold them on security and the other nonsense? Government? Probably. But you helped, too, you know.”

  “‘The more abundant life,’” quoted Mr. Standard, his smile widening. He had thick brown brows that were very mobile. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Here, he thought, is a very desperate and beset man, with old-fashioned ideas that the government will knock out of him if reality doesn’t.

  “And what the hell does that mean?” exclaimed Edward, his passion rising. “Cocktails instead of beer, four bedrooms instead of two, a more expensive prostitute, a higher-priced car, a country-club membership instead of the Wednesday night bowling, and one child in the dining room instead of three in the kitchen! It’s still passive materialism, and it’s still meaningless and without purpose. It’s still a drug. A man can’t be just a belly in a pair of overalls or in a tailor-made suit. Industry and business can’t go on forever by taking conflict and victory and meaning out of men’s lives. You won’t always be able to take defeat from them; defeat’s the price men pay for being men and for their successes. One of these days your millions of ‘clods’ will suddenly wake up to the fact that they’re living in a benign desert, a blank monotony, and they’ll react! And somehow, when people react, they don’t do it peacefully;
they do it with violence. You won’t succeed—”

  “We’ve already succeeded,” said Mr. Standard, gently. “Our people in our chain are happy and contented.”

  “So are the dead,” said Edward. To his own brief and savage amusement, he thought of Mr. Standard as an undertaker. “I know how you use psychiatrists in your personnel departments: smoothing out of people all that makes them men—ambition, hope, competition, struggle against environment, periods of exultation. Making them good adjusted organization men. Why, this is worse than the old grueling system of the old buccaneers. At least, even a ‘clod’ had his dreams then, and dreams for his children. But there’s no place for real dreams in the Organization. And no place for life, either. Life’s so damned untidy, isn’t it? So gross, too. Bursting out of all the tidy little strait jackets you modern employers force it into—you think the jacket will crush out all emotion, make life creamy and predictable, and so goddamned nice—!”

  Mr. Standard shrugged. “You may be right. But you’re putting the cart before the horse, Mr. Enger. You seem to think we big organizations are some sort of Machiavellian villains, with a ‘plot’ against our thousands of employees. You think we thought up this benevolence and security all by ourselves. We didn’t. The people forced it on us. If there’s guilt in this, then the workingman is the guilty one, not the officers of a company. The workingman doesn’t want to struggle against his environment any longer; he doesn’t want to dream; he just wants his absolutely sure paycheck every week; he doesn’t want to risk anything; he wants shelter and food and a new radio and car and lots of sex excitement. Mr. Enger, to give our employees that has cut deeply into our profits, but we did it. It’s the New Order, the sociologists call it.” He no longer smiled. He glanced quickly about the office as if fearing an eavesdropper. “Don’t you think we’d prefer to advance men on their merits or fire those who haven’t the brains to hold a job? But we can’t—any longer. ‘Everybody has a right to be taken care of.’ That’s what they say, Mr. Enger.”