I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy,
blue-lined notepaper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska
village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as though 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 who had recently died, 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 no later than tomorrow. He had
characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for
a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether.
The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own figure,
at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet 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 farm boy
my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands
cracked and sore from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb
tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her
parlor organ, fumbling the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she,
beside me, made canvas mittens for the huskers.
The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, 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 gray with dust, during the journey. When
we arrived at my boardinghouse 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 misshapen figure
with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who
have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef 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 the most idle and shiftless of all the
village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of
those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one
sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she
returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of
this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the
reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with
him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of course, had no money,
had taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the
railroad. There they had measured off their quarter section themselves
by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had
tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They
built a dugout 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 further than fifty miles from the
homestead.
But Mrs. Springer knew nothing of all this, and must have been
considerably shocked at what was left of my kinswoman. Beneath the
soiled linen duster which, on her arrival, was the most conspicuous
feature of her costume, she wore a black stuff dress, whose
ornamentation showed that she had surrendered herself unquestioningly
into the hands of a country dressmaker. My poor aunt's figure, however,
would have presented astonishing difficulties to any dressmaker.
Originally stooped, her shoulders were now almost bent together over her
sunken chest. She wore no stays, and her gown, which trailed unevenly
behind, rose in a sort of peak over her abdomen. She wore ill-fitting
false teeth, and her skin was as yellow as a Mongolian's from constant
exposure to a pitiless wind and to the alkaline water which hardens the
most transparent cuticle into a sort of flexible leather.
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 Shakespeare', and her old
textbook on mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands.
She taught me my scales and exercises, too--on the little parlor organ,
which her husband had bought her after fifteen years, during which she
had not so much as seen any instrument, but an accordion that belonged
to one of the Norwegian farmhands. She would sit beside me by the hour,
darning and counting while I struggled with the “Joyous Farmer,” but she
seldom talked to me about music, and I understood why. She was a pious
woman; she had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her
martyrdom was not wholly sordid. 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. Oh, dear
boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that.”
When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival 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. Indeed, for her own sake,
I could only wish her taste for such things quite dead, and the
long struggle mercifully ended at last. 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 have been 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 the absurdities of her attire, 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-separated from it by the lonely stretch of centuries. 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, conscious that certain
experiences have isolated them from their fellows by a gulf no
haberdasher could bridge.
We sat at the extreme left of the first balcony, facing the arch of our
own and the balcony above us, veritable hanging gardens, brilliant as
tulip beds. The matinee 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 color of bodices past counting, the
shimmer of fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer: red, mauve, pink,
blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the
colors 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 plowing 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 thrown by the green-shaded
lamps 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 had 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 my Aunt Georgiana clutched
my coat sleeve. Then it was I first realized that for her this broke a
silence of thirty years; the inconceivable silence of the plains. 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 dishcloths 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 at the orchestra through a dullness of thirty
years, through the films made little by little by each of the three
hundred and sixty-five days in every one of them. 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's. 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 though, of themselves, they
were recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor old hands!
They had been stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and
lift and knead with; the palms unduly swollen, the fingers bent and
knotted--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 that 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 of the concert, 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 cowpuncher, who had sung 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 about him until she had prevailed upon
him to join the country church, though his sole fitness for this step,
insofar 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 Texan steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured
collarbone. 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 rainstorm.
From time to time her dim eyes looked up at the lights which studded the
ceiling, burning softly under their dull glass globes; doubtless they
were stars in truth to her. I was still perplexed as to what measure of
musical comprehension was left to her, she who had heard nothing but
the singing of gospel hymns at Methodist services in the square frame
schoolhouse on Section Thirteen for so many years. I was wholly unable
to gauge how much of it had been dissolved in soapsuds, or worked into
bread, or milked into the bottom of a pail.
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 numbers she had been carried out where the myriad graves
are, into the gray, 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 its 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 door of 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 dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting
turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.