Thunder and Roses Read online

  I got to the car and dumped Sykes in. He shifted around on the seat some. I asked him how he felt. He didn’t answer that but mumbled a lot of stuff.

  Something like this.

  “They knew we’d reached the atomic age. They wanted to be told when. The transmitter did just that. They came and took the recordings and refilled the machine.

  “They sealed off the room with something they thought only controlled atomic power could break into. This time the transmitter was triggered to human beings in that room. Your torch did it, Kemp—that three-hundred-years-in-the-future torch! They think we have atomic power! They’ll come back!”

  “Who, Doc? Who?” I says.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbles. “There’d be only one reason why someone—some creature—would want to know a thing like that. And that’s so they could stop us.”

  I laughed at him. I got in and started the car and laughed at him.

  “Doc,” I said, “we ain’t goin’ to be stopped now. Like the papers say, we’re in the atomic age if it kills us. But we’re in for keeps. Why, humanity would have to be killed before it’d get out of this atomic age.”

  “I know that, Kemp—I know—that’s what I mean! What have we done? What have we done?”

  After that he’s quiet a while and when I look at him again I see he’s dead. So I brought him in. In the excitement I faded. It just didn’t look good to me. I knew nobody would listen to a yarn like that.

  There was silence in the courtroom until somebody coughed, and then everyone felt he had to make a sound with his throat or his feet. The coroner held up his hand.

  “I kin see what Brother Kemp was worried about. If that story is true I, for one, would think twice about tellin’ it.”

  “He’s a liar!” roared a prospector from the benches. “He’s a murderin’ liar! I have a kid reads that kind of stuff, an’ I never did like to see him at it. Believe me, he’s a-goin’ to cut it out as of right now. I think this Kemp feller needs a hangin’!”

  “Now, Jed!” bellowed the coroner. ‘If we kill off this man we do it legal, hear?” The sudden hubbub quieted, and the coroner turned to the prisoner.

  “Listen here, Kemp—somethin’ jest occurred to me. How long was it from the time of the first atom blast until the time that room got sealed up?”

  “I dunno. About two years. Little over. Why?”

  “An’ how long since that night you been talking about, when Sykes died?”

  “Or was murdered,” growled the prospector.

  “Shut up, Jed. Well, Kemp?”

  “About eighteen mon—No. Nearer two years.”

  “Well then,” said the coroner, spreading his hands. “If there was anything in your story, or in that goofy idea of the dead man’s about someone comin’ to kill us off—well, ain’t it about time they did?”

  There were guffaws, and the end of the grange hall disappeared in a burst of flame. Yelling, cursing, some screaming, they pushed and fought their way out into the moonlit road.

  The sky was full of ships.

  Largo

  THE CHANDELIERS ON the eighty-first floor of the Empire State Building swung wildly without any reason. A company of soldiers marched over a new, well-built bridge, and it collapsed. Enrico Caruso filled his lungs and sang, and the crystal glass before him shattered.

  And Vernon Drecksall composed his Largo.

  He composed it in hotel rooms and scored it on trains and ships, and it took more than twenty-two years. He started it in the days when smoke hung over the city, because factories used coal instead of broadcast power; when men spoke to men over wires and never saw each other’s faces; when the nations of earth were ruled by the greed of a man or the greed of men. During the Thirty Days War and the Great Change which followed it, he labored; and he finished it on the day of his death.

  It was music. That is a silly, inarticulate phrase. I heard a woman say “Thank you” to the doctor who cured her cancer, and then she cried, for the words said so little. I knew a man who was born lonely, and whose loneliness increased as he lived until it was a terrible thing. And then he met the girl he was to marry, and one night he said, “I love you.” Just words; but they filled the incredibly vast emptiness within him; filled it completely, so that there was enough left over to spill out in three syllables, eight letters.… The Largo—it was music. Break away from individual words; separate yourself from the meaning of them strung together, and try to imagine music like Drecksall’s Largo in E Flat. Each note was more than polished—burnished. As music is defined as a succession of notes, so the Largo was a thing surpassing music; for its rests, its upbeats, its melodic pauses were silences blended in harmony, in discord. Only Drecksall’s genius could give tangible, recognizable tone to silence. The music created scales and keys and chords of silence, which played in exquisite counterpoint with the audible themes.

  It was dedicated to Drecksall himself, because he was a true genius, which means that everything in the universe which was not a part of him existed for him. But the Largo was written for Wylie, and inspired by Gretel.

  They were all young when they met. It was at a summer resort, one of those strange outposts of city settlement houses. The guests were plumbers and artists and bankers and stenographers and gravicab drivers and students. Pascal Wylie was shrewd and stocky, and came there to squander a small inheritance at a place where people would be impressed by it. He had himself convinced that when the paltry thousands were gone he could ease himself into a position where more could be gotten by someone else’s efforts. Unfortunately this was quite true. It is hardly just, but people like that can always find a moneymaker to whom their parasitism is indispensable.

  Gretel was one of the students. Without enthusiasm, she attended a school in the city which taught a trade for which she was not fitted and which would not have supported her if she had been. Wylie’s feminine counterpart, she was spending her marriageable years as he spent his money, in places where it would impress others less fortunate. Like him, she lived in a passively certain expectation that when her unearned assets were gone, the future would replace them. Her most valuable possession was a quick smile and a swifter glance, which she used very often—whenever, in fact, a remark was made in her presence which she did not understand. The smile and the glance were humorous and understanding and completely misleading. The subtler the remark, the quicker her reaction. Her rather full lips she held slightly parted, and one watched them to catch the brilliantly wise thought they were about to utter. They never did. She was always surrounded by quasisophisticates, and pseudo-intellectuals whose conversation got farther and farther above her silly head until she retreated behind one slightly raised golden eyebrow, her whole manner indicating that the company was clever, but a bit below her. She was unbelievably dumb and an utterly fascinating person to know slightly.

  Vernon Drecksall washed pots and groomed vegetables for the waspish cook. He had a violin and he cared about little else, but he had discovered that to be able to play he must eat, and this job served to harness his soul to earth, where it did not belong. He got as many dollars each week as he worked hours each day, an arrangement which was quite satisfactory by his peculiar standards.

  Each night after Drecksall had scoured the last of his eight dozen pots, disposed of his three bushels of garbage, and swabbed down an acre and a half of floor-space, he went to his room for his violin and then headed for the privacy of distance. Up into the forest on a rocky trail that took him to the brink of a hilltop lake he would go; beating through thick undergrowth he reached a granite boulder that shouldered out into the water at the end of a point. Night after night he stood there on that natural stage and played with almost heartbreaking abandon. Before him stretched the warm, black water, studded with starlight, like the eyes of an audience. Like the glow of an usher’s torch the riding lights of a passing heliplane would move over the water. Like the breathing of twenty thousand spellbound people, the water pressed and stroked and rus
tled on the bank. But there was never any applause. That suited his mood. They didn’t applaud Lincoln at Gettysburg either.

  Every ten days the pot-walloper was given a day off, which meant that he worked only until noon, which, again, generally turned out to be four in the afternoon after various emergency odds and ends had been taken care of. Then he had the privilege of circulating among people who disliked him on sight while he mourned that the woods were full of vandals and the lake was full of boats and the telejuke box was incapable of anything but rhythmically insincere approaches to total discord. He didn’t look forward to his days off, until he saw Gretel.

  She was sitting on an ancient Hammond electric organ, staring off into space, and thinking about absolutely nothing. The mountain sunset streamed through a window behind her, making her hair a halo and her profiled body the only thing in the universe fit to be framed by that glorious light. Drecksall was unprepared for the sight; he was blinded and enslaved. He didn’t believe her. She must be music. It was, for him, a perfectly rational conclusion, for she was past all understanding, and until now nothing not musical had struck him that way. He moved over to her and told her so. He was not trying to be poetic when he said, “Someone played you on the organ, and you were too lovely to come out as sound.” He was simply stating what he believed.

  She sat above him and turned her head. She gave him an unfathomable half-smile, and as she drew her breath the golden glow from behind her crept around her cheek and tinted the arched flesh of her nostrils. It was an exquisite gesture; she saw in his eyes that she had pleased him and thought, He stinks of grease and ammonia.

  He put out his hand and touched her. He was actually afraid that she would slip back into a swelling of symphonic sound, sweep over him and be gone past all remembering.

  “Are you a real woman who will be alive?” he faltered.

  Stupid questions are not always stupid to stupid people. “Of course,” she said.

  Then he asked her to marry him.

  She looked at his craggy face and boniness and his hollow chest and mad-looking eyes and shook her head. He backed away from her, turned and ran. He looked once over his shoulder, and caught the picture of her that lighted his brain until the day he died. For there, in light and shade, in warm flesh and cool colors, was the Largo; and he would have to live until he turned her back into music. He could not command her as she was; but if he could duplicate her in sharps and flats and heart-stopping syncopation, then she would be his. As he ran, staring back, his head thwacked on the doorpost, and he staggered on, all blood and tears.

  Gretel looked pensively at her fingernails. “Good God,” she said, “what a dope.” And she went back to her cow-like mental vacancy.

  A couple of nights later Gretel and Pascal Wylie were in a canoe on the hilltop lake, blandly violating the sacredness Drecksall had invested in her, when they heard music.

  “What’s that?” said Wylie sharply.

  “Vi’lin,” said Gretel. For her the subject closed with an almost audible snap, but Wylie’s peering mind was diverted; and seeing this, she accepted it without protest, as she accepted all things. “Wonder who it is?” said Wylie. He touched a lever, and the silent solenoid-impulse motor in the stern of the canoe wafted them toward the sound.

  “It’s that kitchen-boy!” whispered Wylie a moment later.

  Gretel roused herself enough to look. “He’s crazy,” she said coldly. She wished vaguely that Wylie would take her away from the sound of the violin, or that Drecksall would stop playing. Or—play something else. She had never heard these notes before, which was not surprising considering the kind of music Drecksall played. But such music had never bothered her until now. Very little ever bothered her. She made an almost recognizable effort to understand why she didn’t like it, realized that it made her feel ashamed, assumed that she was ashamed because she was out with Wylie, and dropped the matter. Having reasoned past the music itself, she was no longer interested. She might have been had she realized that it was her own portrait in someone else’s eyes that she had listened to.

  Wylie felt himself stirred too, but differently. It didn’t matter to him why this scullery lad was scraping a fiddle on the lakeshore when he should have been asleep. The thing that struck him was that the man could make that violin talk. He made it get inside you—inside people who didn’t give a damn, like Wylie. Wylie began to wonder why the hands that performed that way had taken on a duty of washing pots. He had learned early that the best way to get along (to him that meant to get rich) was to find your best talent and exploit it. Here was a man wasting a talent on trees and fish.

  Music is a science as well as an art, and it is a shocking thing to those who think that musicians are by nature incompetent and impractical, to discover that more often than not a musician has a strong mechanical flair. Conversely, a person who is unmechanical is seldom musical. Drecksall’s playing on this particular night was careful, thoughtful, precise. He was building something quite as tangible to him as a bridge is to an engineer. The future whole was awe-inspiring, beautiful, but, like the bridge, it was composed of quite unromantic essentials—tonal nuts, bolts and rivets. It was the skillful machining of these that intrigued Wylie, possibly far more than would the completed work.

  Drecksall paused at the end of a bewildering arpeggio, and stood with his violin in his hand, staring puzzledly across the water. He had just realized the enormity of his task, and was completely wrapped up in it, so was totally unprepared for Wylie’s sudden burst of clapping. It was not applause, exactly; Wylie was gladhanding, following the birth of a bright idea. He had an idea he would butter up the violinist, befriend him, get him to someone who would know if he was really any good or not from a commercial point of view. If he was, Wylie could take a cut, maybe. Ten percent—forty—seventy-five? Drecksall was young. He would last a long time, and he looked like a dope.

  So he cracked his lean hands together and whistled shrilly, like a grandfather at a burlesque house. Surely the ape would appreciate enthusiasm!

  Drecksall leapt like a startled moose, nearly lost his footing, and then froze, peering toward the dark canoe, a hot smoke of anger curling into his brain. He felt stripped, imposed upon. He felt kicked. His night playing demanded infinitely more privacy than his body, and it was being rudely stared at. He suddenly broke the violin over his knee, hurled the pieces at the canoe, and ran into the dark woods.

  “I told you he was crazy,” said Gretel complacently.

  It was a long time before Pascal Wylie could puff the wind back into his sails.

  Two days later Drecksall was returning from a copse a hundred yards from the resort’s main building, carrying a couple of large garbage pails. There was an incinerator back there, and as he left it he heard the whirring of rotary wings. He looked up and saw a cab descending, and would have ignored it altogether had he not noticed that the man who climbed out and paid the driver had a violin-case under his arm. Drecksall looked at it the way a prep-school boy looks at a soft-drink calendar.

  “Hi,” said Pascal Wylie. Drecksall nodded.

  “I want to talk to you,” said Wylie.

  “Me?” Drecksall couldn’t take his eyes off the violin.

  “Yeh. Heard you lost your fiddle.”

  Drecksall just stared. Wylie grinned and handed over the instrument. Drecksall dropped his garbage cans, clasped the case and clawed it open. The violin was a good one, complete with three bows, spare strings, and a pitch pipe. Drecksall stood helplessly, his wide mouth trying fruitlessly to say the same thing his eyes were saying.

  “You want that violin?” asked Wylie briskly. The question needed no answer. “It’s yours if you’ll do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  Wylie gestured toward the cab. “Just hop in there with me. We’ll run into the city, and you’ll play that thing for a friend of mine. Chances are that after he hears you you can go right on playing as long as you want to, and you’ll never wash another pot. How’s it
strike you?”

  Drecksall looked at the tumbled garbage cans. “I can’t leave here,” he said. “I’d lose my job.”

  Wylie was not thinking about that. If the violinist failed the audition, he would starve—and he could, for all Wylie cared. But he thought the man had a chance. He snatched the violin and walked toward the cab. “Okay, then.”

  Drecksall picked up the cans and stared after Wylie. His would-be manager climbed in, giving not a backward glance. With elaborate carelessness, however, he did manage to have a great deal of difficulty in getting the violin-case in after him. It hung, black and shining and desirable, for seconds; and suddenly Drecksall realized just how badly those cans smelled. He ran to the cab and climbed in.

  “Good boy,” said Wylie.

  Drecksall took the violin-case from him and opened it. “I never had a violin as nice as this before,” he said simply.

  The audition went off smoothly. Drecksall was led into a soundproof room containing a novachord and an unpleasing female organist. He was handed a sheaf of sheet music which, but for the individual titles, he thereafter ignored. A red light flashed, a speaker baffle said boredly, “Go ahead, please,” and Drecksall played. He played for an hour, stopping twice in the middle of selections to tune his violin, which was new and springy, and once to upbraid the organist, who, after the first few bars, had never played better in her life.

  Afterward, in another room, Wylie was called in to speak to an official. He crossed the room and, with his hat on, perched easily on the edge of the man’s desk and looked at his fingernails until the man spoke.

  “You’re this fellow’s manager?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Eight hundred for thirty minutes five times weekly, thirteen weeks.” He dragged a contract form out of the desk, filled in some spaces, and shoved it over to Wylie. Wylie looked at it gingerly as if it was one of Drecksall’s garbage pails, took the pen, crossed out the $800 and wrote in $5000. Then he yawned and looked out of the window.