erhaps 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 mos