The Sound of Thunder

  “You’re not just working for us,” she stammered, intimidated by her brother for the first time in her life. “What are you working for?”

  Edward smiled, and it was not a youthful smile. “You can think what you want, Sylvia. You’re a genius, aren’t you? Can’t geniuses think?”

  She was stammering more than before. “I’ll tell—I’ll talk to Ma, to Pa—I’ll talk to Dave—”

  “Go ahead, Sylvia. Talk to them all. But just what’ll you say?”

  “That you—that you—”

  “Yes?”

  Sylvia was silent. Her brother was looking at her with adult indulgence, but his eyes were like granite struck by light.

  Then he said, “You’re not going to ruin what I started out to do, what I’m doing, what I’ll be doing. For all of you.”

  Sylvia was trembling violently. “You think we are geniuses?”

  He studied her. Then he said, with hard sincerity, “Yes. And you’d better be!” For an instant, an instant only, there was a sick quailing in him.

  He left her then, going up the stairs and not looking back. He walked weightily, in his weariness, and each of his footsteps fell on Sylvia’s heart like a doomful drum. She waited until he had disappeared, then sat weakly down on the steps, and tears ran down her face.

  He acts—as if he wants revenge, thought the young girl. Revenge on whom? Revenge for—what? Oh, I’m silly. How can I think those things? He works awfully hard, and what’s he getting out of it? Poor Ed.

  She started. Poor Ed! She pressed her hands tightly against her temples and rocked mournfully as she sat on the stairs and the gas jet flickered. Poor us, she thought vehemently. And then again—poor Ed. She cried soundlessly. She did not know why she cried now.

  “The Chopin,” said Professor Emilio Autori. “That is not the way we play the Chopin. Not so fast, not with the lilt. It is blasphemy. It is most the blasphemy with a young man with your gifts.” He blew his pallid old nose on a soiled silk handkerchief on which a red-and-blue crest had been embroidered. Then he smiled. “But it is not the so bad. It is gay. There is no gaiety in this country. Tell me, my young friend, why is there no gaiety in a country which calls itself young?”

  David smiled briefly and fleetingly at his teacher and ran a trill of light and flexible notes on the great piano. “Who says we’re young?” he asked. “I’ve been thinking. We’re barbarians. Millions of barbarians, born into America all these years. The Goths. The Visigoths. I’ve been thinking. Man isn’t really created equal. The ancient savages are born in every generation, totally incapable of culture, just healthy, war-making, simple savages with a primitive inborn code of their own. Thing-worshipers. Not idea-worshipers. A man who worships things can’t ever be taught to worship abstractions. It’s a waste of time to try. And barbarians aren’t ever gay. Only a civilized man, born of civilized ancestors, can really laugh at—things. And even life. Barbarians can only get drunk, and fight, and they’re serious as all hell, like other animals.”

  “You have no high regard for humanity, David?” asked the old man, gently.

  David shrugged, ran his beautiful hands tenderly over the keys. “I accept it,” he said. “I don’t anguish over it. A conductor doesn’t despise the drums, and the barbarians are the drums—in the symphony. It’s just that I don’t think the drums should dominate the orchestra, and that’s what they’re doing in this country.”

  Signor Autori sat down very slowly on an old plush chair and contemplated his young pupil with amazement. “Ah, so it is!” he murmured. “It did not come to me before. We Italians, we are an old and cultured race, full of laughter and art and music and philosophy. We have given the world our civilization. But among us, in every generation, are born some bear-eyed barbarians who cannot comprehend music or the philosophic laughter or the noble tenets of Christianity. As among other nations, so are the barbarians born among the civilized Italians. I have often marveled that in some of these fellow Italians of mine there is not the multicolored Italian soul.”

  David again smiled. “I guess that’s true of all other nations. The civilized man has a restless mind, but he doesn’t have a restless body. Barbarians are physically restless. They’re the explorers, the adventurers. The civilized man stays at home. You know something, Professor? Kant, the great German philosopher, never traveled more than eighty miles from the place where he was born! Spinoza stayed at home, in Amsterdam. They ranged the world and the universe with their minds. But the barbarians must range it with their bodies. Hunters. Change, all the time. But they never stop to reflect on the new scenery. Anyway, we shouldn’t condemn or detest them, I suppose. They open territory for the man of mind.”

  “They make tracks in the terrible jungle with their pounding feet,” said the old teacher excitedly. “Their bare feet. And so at last it is safe for civilized men to walk among the dangers and bring his culture with him. Ah! That will be good for America!”

  “Generations,” said David. “But wasn’t that the history of Greece and Rome, too? The barbarians first, and then the scholars later, after things were calmed down and the forest cleared.”

  The professor rested his veined and spotted hands on his knees, which were covered by broadcloth so old and worn that it gave off a greenish shimmer. He shook his head. “The barbarians make war. That is the danger. And they are so strong, so vital, that cultivated man cannot control them, not with polished epigrams or the wisdom of the ages. Who has ever turned aside a wild beast with a quotation from II Philosophus? What argument can reach a reddened brain, crowned with horns? Can you touch a man restrainingly who wears the skins of animals? He longs for the arena.”

  “The barbarian has his place, and it’s important, too,” said David uneasily. “You can get so damned polished and civilized that you become corrupt. Covered with algae. Stinking, like an unfed pond. The barbarians open up fresh springs. They’re—why, they’re an elemental force, I suppose. The trouble is, people sometimes think the elemental force is the only valuable one. You never, hardly, get proportion in people’s thinking. It’s all barbarism, or all decadent culture. We ought to get together, maybe, and think things out. Look, it’s almost seven o’clock, Professor. Time to eat, isn’t it?”

  The old teacher laughed silently, his wrinkled mouth widening to show two rows of mottled teeth. He said, “It is good to be young and long for the fragrance of excellent food and the taste of it. But it is also good to be old, when digestion is more important.” He stood up, and all at once he was grave. “You have heard of Karl Marx? The god of the barbarians. I have his work, in Italian. You are able to read Italian now. Then you will see that the barbarians can devastate the world, in their physical restlessness. The elemental force can be as destructive as a cosmic storm. But it is the mind, the soul, which finally tempers the hurricane. Our Divine Lord walked on the waters to demonstrate that the spirit is more powerful than the elements.”

  “Not always, not very often,” said David, gloomily. “My pa has an idea that we’re doomed to wars in this century. No sign of it that I can see. But maybe the universal barbarians will think up something soon.”

  “It is possible that we press the barbarians too rigorously,” said Signor Autori sadly. “Then they must escape from our restraints. Or they smother.”

  “And kill us while they’re escaping.” David stood up. “Pa often talked to us about Bismarck. He admires Bismarck. I’ll borrow your book tonight, Professor.”

  His lean face darkened. There was a curious haunting in his mind, amorphous, which he could not embody nor give substance. There was someone … He shrugged, touched the keys again, and they sent up a frail and melancholy sound of distress.

  A glimmering evening light, colorless and sad, filtered through the two tall thin windows near the piano. There was one tree on the miniature lawn outside the three-story gaunt house, which had a spindly look between two wider houses, for it was only twenty-five feet wide and of dull gray brick. But its ceilings were grot
esquely tall and molded of faded white plaster, and this room possessed a black marble fireplace in which a fire sullenly muttered to the voice of the wind in the chimney. An old, old room, with darkly polished parquet floors covered by dimmed and ancient rugs whose pattern was almost obliterated by time, with high antique furniture of carved mahogany and crimson plush seats, with a Florentine mirror, octagon-shaped and blurred, over the mantelpiece which held bronze candlesticks dripping with crystal prisms and a marble head of the Madonna. Between the two windows stood a high ebony stand bearing a cloisonné vase, all dark red and blue and black enamel and gilt traceries. Against one streaked white wall had been placed a Florentine chest of mahogany, its carvings flaking with gold, green, and dying scarlet.

  Yet it was an august room, and David loved it for all its majestic bleakness and age. He loved the whole house, this Italian house on West Fourth Street, and he especially loved his tiny apartment on the third floor which enclosed rather than contained his own piano for practice after his lessons in the parlor below, and his severe white bed and the Italian chest of drawers and minute fire. He liked to listen to the sound of the spring rain on the roof, and the motley voices of the Village in the evening. He loved the two rooms below, the crowded dining rooms with their red-checkered tablecloths on round little tables and their lofty carved ebony sideboards which the professor and his wife had brought from Italy. The shelves were full of cheerful plates and platters and bowls; the professor affected to deplore them, calling them “peasant,” and would give a loving glance at his fat and laughing wife, nearly twenty years his junior. “But her father, from Milano, manufactured shoes, and made it possible for me to teach music,” he would say to his pupils, with pretended apology for his Antonia’s bouncing figure and deeply dimpled pink cheeks and mounds of shining black hair. “Ah, it is always the fate of an artist to espouse the exuberant lower orders if he is to live and have his wine. Too, Antonia cooks well, but not in the Roman fashion, which is more subtle and cosmopolitan. Unfortunately, her mother was from Napoli.”

  “Poof! Roma!” Antonia would cry happily. “These are not Italians, in Roma. My husband, he is from Roma, and the men of Roma have no bellies and no laughing, and they talk. Santa Maria, do they not talk!” She would slap her husband’s broadcloth shoulder vigorously and with love, and he would look at his pupils, gathered about the tables, with a glance imploring charity and pity, and they would laugh delightedly, and he would be pleased and would nod to himself, grateful for the laughter of these ten young men who had so little merriment in their dedicated and too-serious lives. Ah, these Americans, the professor would remark inwardly. They have no true laughter, and it is possible that it is because they are too young.

  Antonia cooked in the basement, from which floated upwards all day long, and far into the night, ineffable odors and song and loud feminine voices, for Antonia employed a countrywoman as an assistant. At first David had alarmedly believed that these voices, emphatic and ululating and somewhat hoarse, were engaged in a perpetual quarrel which imminently threatened to break out into physical violence and destruction. Later, learning Italian, he gathered that the arguments were merely discussions of the weather, neighbors, laundry, and menus, all affable and affectionate. Antonia was temperamentally incapable of quarreling, as was her very short, very fat, and very sallow assistant. But do they have to throw such emotion into a discussion as to whether or not there should be more beans, or less, in the minestrone? thought David at first.

  Only David lived in the house, for only David could afford the rent of the little apartment on the third floor. The other piano students lived in wretched tiny rooms in the neighborhood, working as waiters or scrubbers or dish washers in restaurants in the Village to pay the very modest fees of Professor Autori. They received no meals during their work, and it was Antonia’s pleasure to feed them so luxuriously at night (their one meal) that it was enough to satisfy their stomachs for twenty-four hours. Too, when they arrived for their lessons, there was sometimes a pot of coffee for them, or an unpretentious wine, and a dish of rich little cakes, and sometimes a small platter of ham or a mound of hot tetrazzini.

  “Why did you and Mrs. Autori come to America, Professor?” David had once asked. The old man had given him a peculiar and quizzical glance and had coughed. “It was a slight affair of politics,” he had murmured. “You are surprised, my David? In this America a man does not leave his home for politics, which are regarded with humor and which are not too dangerous. And that is good, very good. There are many other excellent things in your country, even if it does laugh too easily and without true laughter. But that again may be good, for it is laughter without malice or cruel subtlety. It is all very paradoxical.”

  David remembered this remark this cold spring evening as he looked at the one bare elm outside, its bark running with sooty rain, its branches dripping. Paradoxical. He was learning of paradoxes for the first time in his twenty years. There were never any paradoxes at home, in Waterford. Only stringencies, severe and harsh, which rose from the nature of the Engers. For some reason, he thought of his brother Edward. He put his hands on his narrow hips and wondered why he was disturbed.

  Professor Autori joined him at the window. He was so tall an old man that he was even taller than David, and he seemed all bone and string under his greenish broadcloth coat and slender trousers. Even his face, long, furrowed, and pale, appeared fleshless beneath a rolling mass of silver hair like a mane. His sunken eyes glowed impetuously under enormous silvery brows, and his wise old mouth was etched into a pattern of skeptical drollery. The corners twitched meditatively as he, too, thought of Edward Enger, who had brought his brother to this house and who had bargained smartly with him about the rent of the miniature apartment but not about the fees. “My friend, Mr. George Enreich, has told me about you,” Edward had said, without unnecessary preamble and with a straight gleaming of his gray eyes directed at the professor. “He recommended you highly. He says that you conducted in the La Scala Opera in Milan and that you’ve forgotten what the ordinary conductor knows. And so here is my brother David, and he is a genius, and I want the best for him.”

  The professor coughed now and said to David, “It has come to me that I am thinking of your brother. Eduardo? That is the name?”

  David started and smiled moodily. “Funny. I was just thinking of him myself.”

  “I have been told that I have the perception,” said the professor gravely. He regarded David tentatively and without apology. “It is not often that you speak of your family, though when you do speak of them you speak almost always of Eduardo.”

  For a moment David, who had been brought up in an atmosphere where one did not inquire into the affairs of a family, paused. But the professor was smiling at him with bland inquisitiveness. David shifted in his narrow and polished boots. “I suppose,” he said with irritable candor, “that the whole family is really Ed. I’ve suspected that for a long time. Maybe Ed knows that and maybe he doesn’t, but he sure acts that way! I remember when he brought me here. That’s funny, too. He’s about a year younger than I am, but he brought me here. I didn’t bring him. I think that sums up Ed.” He paused again. “Genius,” he continued reflectively. “I don’t know about myself, but Ed’s a genius. Sometimes he scares the hell out of me, and I don’t know why. He sacrifices himself all the time for all of us, but—”

  He thought of the Christmas Eve when he had played Bach-Gounod’s “Ave Maria” for his brother, and his heart, so volatile, so easily annoyed, so strangely distressed, softened. “You can live in the same house with a brother and not know him at all. I thought I knew Ed. We used to call him the Dummy.”

  “The Dummy,” repeated the old man. “And what is the Dummy?”

  David’s fine-boned face colored. He ran one of his extraordinarily elegant hands over his smooth black hair. “A fool,” he said ashamedly. “That’s how stupid we are, my brothers and sister and me. And my father,” he added. He thought again. “You know, Pr
ofessor, though my mother always says that Ed doesn’t have any genius and that he’s not gifted, I don’t believe she thinks that. And now I don’t, either. There’s something—well—something terrible about Ed. It’s impossible to explain.”

  “But he sacrifices his life for the family,” said the professor.

  David was silent. Then he nodded slowly. “Yes. He reminds us of that all the time.” He laughed faintly. “And he reminds us we’re geniuses; he never lets us forget it for a single minute. It’s gotten to the point where I’m—I’m frightened. And it’s not Ed’s fault. He’s had it drummed in him all his life that we’re gifted, and he believes it as much as we do, maybe more so.”

  The professor turned thoughtfully to the piano and touched the keys with love. “You do not believe you are a genius, David?”

  David followed him with anxiety. “Do you, Professor? I’ve been with you since last September. You ought to know by now. I’ve been afraid to ask.”

  Or, perhaps, thought the professor with compassion, you have been hoping that I would reply no. He danced his fingers over the keys and the most fragile and delicate notes answered him, like a harp.

  He said, in Italian, “We must speak in Italian, for it is necessary for you to be proficient. A cultured man knows several languages; with only one he is like a man who knows but one song. Yes, David, you are a genius.” He smiled at the young man with a deeper compassion. But not as you think, not as your brother thinks, he thought.

  He put his hand on David’s tense shoulder. Ah, nerves. This is a youth of nerves. He is never at rest. The old man smiled. “So I have told you, and I would not deceive you. We must pray for you, must we not? When I was young,” he said with a musing and dreaming expression, “I was the agnostic, the atheist. There are years of youth when it is in rebellion. It becomes daring, bold, to announce that God does not exist. It shocks the parents; it outrages the clergy, who are more simple. It is exhilarating. But the intelligent youth knows he lies, while he rejoices in his lies. He is the man now, the knowing man, the emancipated man, and he swaggers, with his books under his arm. He is the scientist, the youthful Darwin, the man of the Age of Enlightenment, free of superstition. He is also a child. With the years comes wisdom, and it is not the wisdom of fear but the wisdom of knowledge. So we must pray.”