The Sound of Thunder

  “I believe in the American people,” protested Edward.

  George laughed faintly. “I believe in nothing. When the masters call the tune, the American people will dance to it, in revolution and blood, or in war and blood. The Pied Piper of Hamlin never played a more seductive tune leading to oblivion and death.”

  “We can play another tune—”

  “Ah, but it will not be so attractive. It will not promise hatred and revenge and war and the satisfaction of greed, and power, and murder. Do you think men are civilized? No, it was only yesterday when they descended from the trees. The way to civilization is long and bloody and full of pain, and the journey has just begun.”

  The fragments of shining sky above the topmost trees was suddenly darkened by a passing cloud, and the garden plunged into ghostly dimness. Edward stood up. “I’m going to hope for the best, and still work for it,” he said, glancing at his watch. George smiled again and said nothing. Edward looked at him, and their eyes held.

  “I’ll come again. Soon,” he said, and took George’s hand.

  George watched him go, then closed his eyes. He said in himself, I do not believe in You, naturally. But You are everywhere, and there is nothing that escapes You. And so I must ask You now: Give my young friend peace, even if he must die to attain it. Deliver him from evil.

  At sunset, the warm June day suddenly darkened, the west swam in dulled gold, and shadow-based clouds strode into the sky. All at once thin veins of brilliant fire divided the heavens and the sound of thunder rolled over the earth. Edward Enger barely reached the great doors of his mansion when the storm crashed about him. There was an oppressive pressure in the air, and his laboring heart was further constricted. He passed through the hall, which seemed hollow and empty to him, and went upstairs to his suite. Margaret had shut the windows; the house was pervaded with heat and dimness; the rain rushed against the glass and glared as lightning struck it.

  When Edward entered, Margaret got up and went to him and kissed him, after her usual long and searching look of anxiety and appraisal. She said, in the careful voice of a worrying wife, “How are you, darling?”

  And in the voice of a husband automatically answering the question of love, he replied, “Well enough. What’ve you been doing with yourself?”

  “I was at the Clinic,” she said. “I came home about an hour ago.”

  They stood and looked at each other, and Margaret thought with pain, When did we start to move apart? We love each other with all our power. Yet it was the children who finally stood between us, the children who will not let their father direct their lives as he directed the lives of his brothers and sister. I’m glad I was able to help them stand against him, for his own dear sake, more than for theirs! But still there is that reserve between us, which he erected.

  “I have your drink ready,” said Margaret, moving away to a table. Her figure was still tall and slight and girlish, her face hardly touched by her forty years, her hair only a little less bright. Her eyes were always anxious, but the blueness, as always, seemed to fill the entire socket with intense color. Edward sat down and waited. Oh, surely it’s only my imagination that he seems more tired than usual, and grayer! thought Margaret, and the thought was a desperate prayer. Dear God, don’t let him mind so much about the mortgage and dwindling business and all the other material things! Let him remember that love is more important than anything else, and cannot be bought and isn’t based on materialism, and is the very breath of life.

  She gave Edward a very large drink of whisky, for this his physician had ordered. “Too much,” said Edward, but he put the glass to his lips and drank. Surely it was her imagination that the purplish color of his mouth was deeper today. “Why do you stand in front of me like that, with your hands clasped together as if you had a spasm or something?” asked Edward, with mingled affection and annoyance.

  “You never tell me anything any more, dear,” she said in a low voice.

  He shrugged. “What is there to tell? Business is getting worse. My debts are bigger. I’m struggling along.” He stared at the windows, which alternately flared and dimmed in the lightning. He’s thinking about that damned mortgage again! thought Margaret, despairingly. She pulled a chair close to him and said, “Please listen to me. Ed, you’re all my life. There’s nothing else. The children are nice children, but I’d give them up in an instant to save you. You’ve said I don’t sound like a mother. Ed, I was a wife before I was a mother, and I’m still a wife, first, last, and always. Children start to leave you the minute they’ve finished preparatory school; when they go off to college, they never come home again except for visits. They’re on their way to their own lives, and they’re only visitors after that.”

  “So you’ve told me a hundred times.” said Edward, and frowned at her. “But this is their home. Even when they marry, this’ll be their home.”

  Margaret looked at her hands. “Dear, I know you have terrible worries. I don’t want to add to them. When Gertrude and Robert marry, it’s very likely they won’t live in Waterford. They may marry people from distant cities. You can’t keep them forever. You can’t keep anyone forever!”

  “What’re you talking about?” asked Edward, roughly. “Of course nobody can keep anybody! Who said he could?” She looked up with some sharpness and saw a sudden feverish terror in his eyes. I see, she thought sadly. You’ve always been afraid, my darling, but sometimes fear can save as well as destroy.

  “All I ask of my children is that they fulfil themselves,” Edward went on in an accusing voice, as if Margaret were the enemy of his children or desired to frustrate them out of stupid selfishness. “And be happy.”

  “Happy?” said Margaret, outraged at such puerility. “Are you serious? How can you guarantee happiness for anyone, Ed? You speak as if happiness were a commodity that can be dispensed by someone else and not come from yourself alone, with the help of God. You can’t give anyone happiness! You can’t legislate it; you can’t will it for yourself or anyone. You’ve always loved Dr. Samuel Johnson; you read and quote him by the hour. Don’t you remember what he said? ‘Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured—and little to be enjoyed.’ Yet you talk of making the children ‘happy,’ as if it is in your power to make them so!”

  “Are you going to be hysterical—again?” asked Edward, with some cruelty—for whenever Margaret talked with him about the children now, her voice, to him, appeared to become too loud and raucous, too vehement, though in reality it was always quiet if often indignant these days. “You can’t talk calmly any more Margaret. We can’t discuss the children rationally. You fly up, as if I’m threatening them—”

  Margaret lost her temper. “And so you are, in a way! Why do you expect so much of everybody, as much as you expect from yourself? Sometimes, when I’m not emotional about you, I think of your whole family, and sometimes I feel a vague pity for them, while I despise them. You hold on to everyone! Ed, you’re not going to hold on to the children as you’ve held on to your brothers and sister. Your grasp on the children may be love, but your grasp on the others—my God, Ed, it’s probably hate!”

  He looked at her with intense and vengeful silence, and she thought despairingly, Do you think for a moment, my darling, that I care about anyone but you? In fighting to set the children free, I am trying to set you free. Force your family to be free—so you will be free of them.

  “Yes,” said Edward, in a low and bitter voice, “you’re hysterical. There isn’t a sensible thought in what you’ve just said. I have a sense of responsibility. You haven’t.”

  “Responsibility for your brothers and sister—now?” demanded Margaret, with a sense of growing sickness at the futility of this argument, which had been going on for the past few years intermittently. “In these days? Are they children? They’re men and women—”

  But when, she asked herself, does a man so involved in others possess reason or understanding? Edward’s face became violent, and duskiness spread
over it. She tried to reach him again, though hopelessly.

  “Haven’t you any responsibility for me?” she cried. “Don’t you think how I know how deep in debt you are and how too hard you work? Don’t you think you owe me some peace of mind? Why can’t your brothers and sister get out and stay out, Greg and that Margo of his, here at least five or six months a year, and André, and Sylvia, and Ralph and Violette who ‘visit’ for months, and Dave who comes ‘between engagements,’ as he calls them, while staying for weeks and weeks—They have money. You’ve given them fortunes over the years, and are still giving them more than you can afford—they never spend anything; you pay for Greg’s apartment in New York, and there’s Sylvia, who must have a big bank account, and Ralph who does sell pictures and who never lets go a cent you give him—” Tears dashed down her cheeks, and she sobbed.

  “You’ve always hated my family, haven’t you?” said Edward, with slow ruthlessness. “Perhaps you’d like me to throw my mother out, too. And close the doors in Ralph’s, Violette’s, and David’s faces when they come home—to their home. Perhaps you’d like our children to stay in a hotel when they’ll be on their vacations from college?” He stood up and slammed his glass on the table. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re remembering that you lent me your ninety thousand dollars two years ago. You want me to economize, so you can get it back. Well, don’t worry about it. I’ll get it for you within a month. Just give me a little time.”

  Margaret gazed at him blankly, utterly appalled. Her heart squeezed in her breast. She faltered, “How can you talk like that? I didn’t ‘lend’ you that money. A man doesn’t have his own money, or a woman hers, not when they’re married. It’s all one thing; what belongs to one belongs to the other. The money I had was yours; I never gave it another thought. And you know it!”

  He was ashamed, and angered at her because of his shame. “I’ll still get it for you,” he said, sullenly. Then he shook his finger almost in her face. “I’ve told you a thousand times. I built this house for my family; this is theirs as well as mine. I have a provision in my will, leaving the house to you on condition that my family have the use of it as long as they want to, and putting aside, in their names, the allowances I’ve always given them. But just the allowances. You’d like me to stop them, wouldn’t you, after I’m dead? It isn’t enough for you that I’ve left you the bulk of my estate and insurance in trust for you. You’d like everything.”

  Margaret’s face became absolutely white. “I never asked you about your will. I never talked, it over with you. How dare you speak to me like that! I’ve always prayed that I’d die before you, Ed. I don’t want to live without you and I don’t think I will! And I don’t want this house, even if I decide to live, if your family is to live in it. I wouldn’t dream of living here with them.” She uttered a great dry sob of terror at the thought of Edward dying, and pressed her hands to her breast. A blaze of lightning struck her face and he could see the agony on it, the wideness of her eyes. “Leave it to them! I don’t want it, I never wanted it.”

  Edward felt a passionate urge to take her in his arms and to hold her tightly, and to hide her agonized face and eyes against his shoulder. He wanted to say, “Forgive me. I’ve been hurting you because I’m so damned beset and afraid and worried. Everything I’ve said to you has been cruel and vicious and unpardonable, my darling, my wife. Forgive me. Because I don’t know, God help me, what to do!”

  Margaret saw his change of expression, and held her breath and even began to smile piteously. And then Gertrude came in. Later, Margaret would think, Children always intrude; at the most supreme moments between a man and his wife they always intrude and ruin and destroy and change things beyond repair and beyond hope.

  “Oh, go away, Gertrude!” Margaret almost screamed at her daughter in her anguish and frustration. “Your father and I are having a talk—”

  But the moment of reconciliation and passionate coming together had gone. As Gertrude hovered uncertainly on the threshold, her whole sensitive nature understanding, Edward said, “Why should she go away, Margaret? She wants to tell us something. Come in, sweetheart.”

  But Gertrude said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m awfully sorry. I should have knocked, Daddy. What I came to say can wait.” She glanced at her mother’s stiffly white and tear-stained face, and she wanted to beg for forgiveness. She had seen her father slowly begin to raise his arms, and she hated herself. “I—I’m not important,” she said to her mother imploringly.

  “You’re not important?” exclaimed Edward, angrily, giving his wife a look of affront. “Who told you that?” he added accusingly, still looking at Margaret.

  “Please,” murmured Gertrude, and prepared to retreat. But Edward was on her; he seized her shoulders in his big hands and pulled her into the room. Margaret sat down abruptly. She had almost hated her daughter, who was her darling, and she was sick at the thought, and most terribly sick at what her daughter had destroyed.

  Edward, smiling fondly, pushed the resisting Gertrude into a chair. He sat down beside her and took her hand. “All right, sweetheart,” he said. “Tell me. Have you run over your allowance again?”

  Gertrude sat up straight, and her pale gray eyes, so like her father’s, fixed themselves on him. “Daddy, do you think all I ever want is money? Don’t you ever think,” and her voice broke, “that I might love you sometime? And I’m not the one who runs over allowances. That’s Robert.”

  Edward’s face tightened a little. “You’re always criticizing your brother, sweetheart. Boys usually spend more than girls; besides, he has to take his girls out, and that costs money. Did you come here to complain about your brother?”

  This was so absurd to Gertrude, who never complained about anything, that she smiled in a tired way. Well, there was no help for it now; she had ruined something between her parents, so she had best go on with it. She waited until a particularly splintering crash of thunder had rumbled away before speaking, and then she said, “It really wasn’t important, honestly. I’ve just been thinking, Daddy. I don’t want to go to Wellesley, after all. I want to take up a nursing career; I’ve wanted that for years.”

  Edward dropped her hand, almost in a gesture of throwing it away. “What’re you talking about? What’s this nonsense? Of course you’re going to Wellesley. What about your writing?”

  He stared at her incredulously. “What did you say? Nursing?”

  Gertrude looked at her mother, who had lifted her head, and who was regarding her with a strangely strong smile of encouragement. The girl was grateful, and so moved that she could not speak for a moment. Then her voice was steady. “Daddy, I’m not really a writer. Dozens of girls in my classes could write, too, and a few of them better than I. I haven’t taken the thought of writing seriously for years. But I’ve known what I really wanted. I want a nursing course; that’s all I can think of. I can get a bachelor-of-science degree in it; it’s a marvelous profession. Then I’ll go on to specialize in laboratory work; I want to be a technician.” She paused while Edward stared at her with complete disbelief. “I want to work in your Clinic.”

  Edward jumped up and stood over her as if he would strike her. “Why, you damned young fool,” he said slowly. “With all your talent! With that gift of yours! Nursing! You’re out of your mind. It’s degrading even to speak of it. A drudge—my daughter!”

  “Daddy.” Gertrude’s voice was still steadfast, and her eyes glowed. “Nursing’s a profession. Things have changed. You have to pay to learn to be a nurse these days. And only the best-qualified girls are admitted for study. If I have any gift at all, it’s a scientific gift. I’m not going to fritter away my life, like Uncle Gregory, pretending to be a writer when I’m not.”

  “Shut up!” Edward shouted, knotting his fists. “Your uncle is a famous writer now, even if the illiterate public doesn’t realize it and even if I don’t approve of his subject matter! He’s made a name for himself; he’ll make a bigger name. And he didn’t have as much tale
nt to begin with as you have! Why, you stupid little wretch! I never heard such arrogance, such imbecility! Did you know he just sold his last book to Hollywood for fifty thousand dollars?”

  Gertrude stood up and faced him. “Daddy, I don’t know what’s the matter with you. Not entirely.” She flung up her head with a proud and fearless gesture. “I don’t know, and perhaps you don’t know, either, but it’s killing you. Daddy,” she went on, and the lightning seemed to encompass her, “I know what I want and I’m willing to sacrifice for it. I’m not going to Wellesley. I’m not going to waste all the days of my life. If you won’t help me—and it wouldn’t cost much, not near as much as Wellesley, I’ll manage someway, myself—”

  It was that phrase, “All the days of my life,” which shattered and maddened Edward more than anything else. Such a chaos and a roaring opened up in him that he was not aware that he had slapped Gertrude full in the face and with all his strength, until he saw her stagger backward, catch at a chair, and then fall sideways on the floor. He stared at her, astounded, his hand still in the air. She lay there, sobbing, her black hair tumbled over her face and shoulders, and it seemed like an awful dream to him.

  “Ed!” cried Margaret, running to him and seizing his arm. “Ed, what have you done?”

  He thrust her from him violently, desperately ill with his crushed amazement and the horror of his blow, for he had never struck either of his children before. A huge nausea swelled up in him. “It’s your fault!” he shouted at his wife. “It’s all your fault! You’ve done this behind my back, treacherously! I’ll—I’ll—” He actually lifted his hand as if to hit Margaret herself. And Margaret stood and did not retreat, and the sound of thunder was all about them, like a magnification of their own passions.

  Gertrude got to her feet. The impression of her father’s blow was red against the pallor of her cheek. But she did not put her hand to it. She moved backward toward the door. Her parents stood there and watched her, Edward in an attitude of violence, her mother straight and tall.