I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy,
blue-lined note-paper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska
village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as if it had been
carried for some days in a coat pocket that was none too clean, was from
my uncle Howard, and informed me that his wife had been left a small
legacy by a bachelor relative, and that it would be necessary for her to
go to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to
meet her at the station and render her whatever services might be
necessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival, I
found it to be no later than tomorrow. He had characteristically delayed
writing until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed my
aunt altogether.
The name of my Aunt Georgiana opened before me a gulf of recollection so
wide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a
stranger to all the present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at
ease and out of place amid the familiar surroundings of my study. I
became, in short, the gangling farmer-boy my aunt had known, scourged
with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and sore from the corn
husking. I sat again before her parlour organ, fumbling the scales with
my stiff, red fingers, while she, beside me, made canvas mittens for the
huskers.
The next morning, after preparing my landlady for a visitor, I set out
for the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding
my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and it was not
until I got her into the carriage that she seemed really to recognize me.
She had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become
black with soot and her black bonnet grey with dust during the journey.
When we arrived at my boarding-house the landlady put her to bed at once
and I did not see her again until the next morning.
Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance, she
considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's battered figure
with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who
have left their ears and fingers north of Franz-Joseph-Land, or their
health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a
music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter
sixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the Green
Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled
the callow fancy of my uncle, Howard Carpenter, then an idle, shiftless
boy of twenty-one. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard
followed her, and the upshot of this infatuation was that she eloped with
him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticism of her
friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of
course, had no money, took up a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty
miles from the railroad. There they had measured off their land
themselves, driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which
they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting its revolutions.
They built a dug-out in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings
whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they
got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of
provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty
years my aunt had not been farther than fifty miles from the homestead.
I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my
boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During the years
when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking the three
meals--the first of which was ready at six o'clock in the morning--and
putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her
ironing-board, with me at the kitchen table beside her, hearing me recite
Latin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy head
sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing
or mending, that I read my first Shakspere, and her old text-book on
mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught me
my scales and exercises on the little parlour organ which her husband had
bought her after fifteen years during which she had not so much as seen a
musical instrument. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and
counting, while I struggled with the "Joyous Farmer." She seldom talked
to me about music, and I understood why. Once when I had been doggedly
beating out some easy passages from an old score of _Euryanthe_ I had
found among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands
over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying
tremulously, "Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you."
When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival in Boston, she was
still in a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize that she
was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place longed for
hungrily half a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly train-sick
throughout the journey that she had no recollection of anything but her
discomfort, and, to all intents and purposes, there were but a few hours
of nightmare between the farm in Red Willow County and my study on
Newbury Street. I had planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon,
to repay her for some of the glorious moments she had given me when we
used to milk together in the straw-thatched cowshed and she, because I
was more than usually tired, or because her husband had spoken sharply to
me, would tell me of the splendid performance of the _Huguenots_ she
had seen in Paris, in her youth.
At two o'clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner program, and I
intended to take my aunt; though, as I conversed with her, I grew
doubtful about her enjoyment of it. I suggested our visiting the
Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed altogether too
timid to wish to venture out. She questioned me absently about various
changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten
to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to a certain
weakling calf, "old Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she explained,
evidently having forgotten how long I had been away. She was further
troubled because she had neglected to tell her daughter about the
freshly-opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, which would spoil if it
were not used directly.
I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas, and
found that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their
respective situations, and had once possessed the piano score of _The
Flying Dutchman_. I began to think it would be best to get her back to
Red Willow County without waking her, and regretted having suggested the
concert.
From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was a trifle less
passive and inert, and for the first time seemed to perceive her
surroundings. I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware of
her queer, country clothes, or might experience some painful
embarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had been
dead for a quarter of a century. But, again, I found how superficially I
had judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almost
as stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a museum watches the
froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal. I have seen this
same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown hotel at Denver,
their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard faces
unshaven; standing in the thronged corridors as solitary as though they
were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon.
The matinée audience was made up chiefly of women. One lost the contour
of faces and figures, indeed any effect of line whatever, and there was
only the colour of bodices past counting, the shimmer of fabrics soft and
firm, silky and sheer; red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, écru, rose,
yellow, cream, and white, all the colours that an impressionist finds in
a sunlit landscape, with here and there the dead shadow of a frock coat.
My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as though they had been so many daubs of
tube-paint on a palette.
When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little stir
of anticipation, and looked with quickening interest down over the rail
at that invariable grouping, perhaps the first wholly familiar thing that
had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weakling
calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had
not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh from
ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in
a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a
shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their
linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the
instruments, the patches of yellow light on the smooth, varnished
bellies of the 'cellos and the bass viols in the rear, the restless,
wind-tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows--I recalled how, in the first
orchestra I ever heard, those long bow-strokes seemed to draw the heart
out of me, as a conjurer's stick reels out yards of paper ribbon from
a hat.
The first number was the Tannhauser overture. When the horns drew out the
first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus, Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat
sleeve. Then it was I first realized that for her this broke a silence of
thirty years. With the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy of
the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me an
overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat;
and I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a
wooden fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin
pitted with sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain gullied clay banks about
the naked house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dish-cloths were
always hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there was the flat
world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to
daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, the
conquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war.
The overture closed, my aunt released my coat sleeve, but she said
nothing. She sat staring dully at the orchestra. What, I wondered, did
she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day, I knew, and her
musical education had been broader than that of most music teachers of a
quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and
Meyerbeer's, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago, certain
melodies of Verdi. When I had fallen ill with a fever in her house she
used to sit by my cot in the evening--when the cool, night wind blew in
through the faded mosquito netting tacked over the window and I lay
watching a certain bright star that burned red above the cornfield--and
sing "Home to our mountains, O, let us return!" in a way fit to break the
heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already.
I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, trying
vainly to conjecture what that seething turmoil of strings and winds
might mean to her, but she sat mutely staring at the violin bows that
drove obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a summer
shower. Had this music any message for her? Had she enough left to at all
comprehend this power which had kindled the world since she had left it?
I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon her
peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility throughout
the number from The Flying Dutchman, though her fingers worked
mechanically upon her black dress, as if, of themselves, they were
recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor hands! They had been
stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and knead
with;--on one of them a thin, worn band that had once been a wedding
ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands, I
remembered with quivering eyelids their services for me in other days.
Soon after the tenor began the "Prize Song," I heard a quick drawn breath
and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were
glistening on her cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in my
eyes as well. It never really died, then--the soul which can suffer so
excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only;
like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and
yet, if placed in water, grows green again. She wept so throughout the
development and elaboration of the melody.
During the intermission before the second half, I questioned my aunt and
found that the "Prize Song" was not new to her. Some years before there
had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp
cow-puncher, who had sung in the chorus at Bayreuth when he was a boy,
along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a Sunday morning he used
to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands' bedroom which opened off
the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle, singing the
"Prize Song," while my aunt went about her work in the kitchen. She had
hovered over him until she had prevailed upon him to join the country
church, though his sole fitness for this step, in so far as I could
gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of this divine melody.
Shortly afterward, he had gone to town on the Fourth of July, been drunk
for several days, lost his money at a faro table, ridden a saddled Texas
steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collar-bone. All this
my aunt told me huskily, wanderingly, as though she were talking in the
weak lapses of illness.
"Well, we have come to better things than the old Trovatore at any rate,
Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with a well meant effort at jocularity.
Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth.
From behind it she murmured, "And you have been hearing this ever since
you left me, Clark?" Her question was the gentlest and saddest of
reproaches.
The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the _Ring,_
and closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, but
almost continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows in a rain-storm. From
time to time her dim eyes looked up at the lights, burning softly under
their dull glass globes.
The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the
shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what
happy islands. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that
before the last number she had been carried out where the myriad graves
are, into the grey, nameless burying grounds of the sea; or into some
world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope
has lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept.
The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and
laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman
made no effort to rise. The harpist slipped the green felt cover over his
instrument; the flute-players shook the water from their mouthpieces;
the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to the
chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield.
I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. "I don't
want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"
I understood. For her, just outside the concert hall, lay the black pond
with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with
weather-curled boards, naked as a tower; the crook-backed ash seedlings
where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking
up refuse about the kitchen door.