A Wagner Matinée

🔊 Read AloudWhen the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and when I got her into the carriage she looked not unlike one of those charred, smoked bodies that firemen lift from the débris of a burned building. Her linen duster had become black with soot and her black bonnet gray with dust during the journey. Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance, she considerately concealed. 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.

Her skin was as yellow as a Mongolian's from constant exposure to a pitiless wind, and to the alkaline water. She wore ill-fitting false teeth. The most striking thing about her physiognomy, however, was an incessant twitching of the mouth and eyebrows, a form of nervous disorder resulting from isolation and monotony, and from frequent physical suffering.

🔊 Read AloudIn my boyhood this affliction had possessed for me a sort of horrible fascination. During the three winters 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, hearing me at the kitchen table recite Latin declensions and conjugations, and 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 text-book of 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. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and counting, while I struggled with the "Harmonious Blacksmith"; but 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 the music-books, she came up to me an 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 be it is not that."

🔊 Read AloudWhen 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. At two o'clock the Boston Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner programme, and I intended to take my aunt, though, as I conversed with her, I grew doubtful about her enjoyment of it. She questioned me absently about various changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten to leave instructions about feeding a certain weakling calf, "Old Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she explained.

From the time we entered the concert-hall, however, she was a trifle less passive and inert, and seemed to begin to perceive her surroundings. But I had judged her superficially. 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.

🔊 Read AloudThe first number was the Tannhäuser overture. When the violins drew out the first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus, my Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat-sleeve. Then it was that I first realized that for her this singing of basses and stinging frenzy of lighter strings broke a silence of thirty years, the inconceivable silence of the plains. With the battle between the two motifs, I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.

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.

🔊 Read AloudSoon 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 dies, then, the soul? 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. My aunt wept gently throughout the development and elaboration of the melody.

During the intermission, I questioned my aunt and found that the Prize Song was not new to her. Some years before there had drifted to the farm a young German, a tramp cow-puncher, who had sung in the chorus at Baireuth, when he was a boy, along with the other peasant boys and girls. He had hovered about her until she had prevailed upon him to join the country church, though his sole fitness for this step was his ability to sing. Shortly afterward he had gone to town, ridden a saddled Texan steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collar-bone.

🔊 Read Aloud"Well, we have come to better things than the old Trovatore at any rate, Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with well-meant 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 of reproaches.

The second half of the programme consisted of four numbers from the Ring, and closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, but almost continuously, as though tears were the only language she could find. During the intermission before the second half I had gauged the silence and isolation of her present life by the things she had not heard.

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. I spoke gently to her. 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, naked as a tower, with weather-curled boards; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.