A Wagner Matinée
Willa Cather
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 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 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
farmer-boy my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains1 and bashfulness, my
hands cracked and sore from the cornhusking. 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 Ramses 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.