From the Relief Society Magazine, February 1943 –

Silent Strings

By Blanche Kendall McKey

With more certainty than she had ever felt before, on that late July afternoon, Sheila admitted to herself that she was old. It wasn’t because she felt weak or defeated, judging herself as an actor in the life she had led. Rather, it was the realization that she had never been truly herself, and now it was too late. For sixty years she had heard the song of the untouched West with its inscrutable mountains, but she had never tried to sing or paint or write it. She had not used what was finest within her; in fact, she had never been an artist at all. And now she was old.

The young Sheila she had been – with her perky red curls and quizzical blue eyes – seemed to stand literally before her faded gaze. She shook herself and crossed to the mirror over her dresser, pressing calloused palms to her creased cheeks, noting the grooves in her forehead and neck. Wind and the open plains had made her fair skin as dry as parchment. Studying the swollen veins of her hands, she saw youthful, tapering fingers reach across the strings of her aunt’s harp in Dublin, her aunt who had been celebrated musician and whose harp Sheila was to have inherited when she became eighteen. But when that birthday had arrived, she had looked across the scorched fields of Zion, to which her parents had fled ten years before, and thought of tapestries and a stately harp whose strings were silent, now that her aunt was dead.

“I should have done better,” thought Sheila bitterly; “I let little things crowd it all out.” She thought of the garden, the children, the endless housework, and of her mother’s long illness. “Why did I have such a heritage?” she asked. Then she looked at the picture of Colleen on her table and once more made a solemn resolution: Little Colleen, with the harp of Dublin hidden in her bosom, was going to have a chance to sing.

“Are you ready, Aunt Sheila?”

It was Elsie’s warm voice calling from the kitchen, and thoughts of youth and unfulfilled longings fled.

“Yes, I’m ready, my dear,” Sheila replied; and tying a white scarf over her thinning gray hair she went out to the shady front porch.

The poplars were casting thin shadows across the patch of lawn; the wide stretch of fields was still. Suddenly, from some unseen spot, came the clear call of a meadow lark. Gerald, Elsie’s husband, was taking good care of the farm now that John was gone.

The front door of the small house beyond the garden opened and John’s sister Maggie appeared. She followed slowly the narrow path between the two homes and climbed the steps of the larger dwelling with jerky effort. “Maggie is old,” thought Sheila – “really old.”

Elsie came out, crisp and cool in her blue organdy.

“Gerald said the rehearsal went fine last night,” she said with enthusiasm. “He thinks the pageant’s going to be great.”

“Weel, they’ll hae to do some fancy acting if they come up to Sheila’s – and that a long time ago,” replied Maggie dryly.

Sheila made a gesture of remonstrance, but she looked pleased.

“Young folks must have their day, Maggie. And don’t you forget that Colleen is going to sing tonight.” she squeezed her handbag tight against her breast, for it held Colleen’s stirring little note:

“I must see you tomorrow, grandma! I must! I have something important to tell you.”

Something important! Could it be an offer? Why, Colleen had had only a year of real training.

Maggie was describing to a patient Elsie the wonders of Sheila’s performance in Hazel Kirk..

“There, there,” cried Sheila with pretended petulance, “let the past be!”

But Maggie was bubbling with reminiscences. “Your Uncle John was over-proud of her, Elsie,” she said ruefully. “He was sae proud that I sulked. It’s nae pleasant for a sister to be shoved aside by a wee-bit wife.”

The laugh that had risen in Maggie’s throat broke off and ended in a sigh. Both old women thought of John sleeping beside his first wife, the gentle English girl who had not survived the rigors. After a pause Maggie’s thin voice rose again.

“Your Uncle John was nae the mon to let a bit o’ stubborn land get the best o’ him, Elsie. He dug out rocks to build his house and brought water down from the mountain for his fields.”

“Uncle John was a thrifty man,” corroborated Elsie.

“Aye,” said Maggie, “and masterful. He had Ireland in his household, but he managed to hold his ain.”

She screwed her wrinkled face until it gave a distorted impression of roguishness, cast a challenging glance at her sister-in-law, and waited for a sharp retort. But Sheila seemed to be unconscious of the prattle. Elsie noted her melancholy detachment with rising apprehension. Old people were so moody and hard to understand! When they should be gay they sank into the depths.

“Come, now, Aunt Sheila,” she pleaded. “Tomorrow’s the Twenty-fourth! They’re putting on this pageant for people like you. Think of all you’ve done for the town.” Her eyes swept the stretches of corn, wheat and alfalfa, the tops of farmhouses in the valley, the paved road which led to the recreation hall where the pageant was to be given. “No one has done more good than you have, Aunt Sheila.”

Sheila would have liked to talk to the sympathetic Elsie if she had thought the younger woman could understand. In her unhappy condemnation of what she had done with her talents she felt the need of love. That was why Maggie’s praise had sounded so sweet. she would gladly have confessed that she felt herself to be a flat failure but for a deep-sunk timidity. Elsie was young and didn’t know enough, whereas Maggie was old and knew too much. So she threw them both a Mona Lisa smile and hugged tight the thought of Colleen.

Elsie plucked playfully at her aunt’s sleeve and shook her bobbed head as though she were still a girl. “No one can go on acting and singing forever,” she tactlessly comforted.

Sheila smiled again, her glance unlighted; then her lids fell as she caught the significance of Maggie’s canny remark: “She’s not greetin’ for the songs she can sing nae more; she’s greetin’ for the songs she niver hae sung.” Good heavens! Was there nothing that the heart could hide? Such piercing seemed almost immodest. With an effort she lifted her gaze to find Maggie smiling at her fondly. After all Maggie loved her. She felt a painful little clutch at her throat. Then she let her great eyes rest illuminatingly on her sister-in-law’s face, fell in with the family dialect and said amicably, “Aye, lass.”

Elsie ran down the steps impatiently, looking up the road.

“Gerald should have been here with the car twenty minutes ago,” she exclaimed. “something has held him up – props, I suppose. It will spoil the whole evening if we have to rush in at the last minute.”

A half hour later, seated comfortably in the front row of the balcony which afforded the best view of the stage and so had been reserved for honored guests, Sheila attempted to subdue her rising excitement. Was Colleen nearly ready? Would she have a moment to slip upstairs before the performance? Suddenly she heard a quick step coming down the aisle, and almost before she could turn she heard Colleen’s whisper.

“Move over, Grandma. I can only stay a second.”

Sheila shuffled into the seat reserved for the president of the Relief Society and Colleen slipped down beside her.

“Look, Grandma!” Timidly she thrust out her hand on which shone the loveliest diamond the old lady had ever seen. She lifted her eyes to study the girl’s face.

“It had just come when I wrote the note yesterday. Bob and I are going to be married.”

“Bob?” wavered Sheila.

“Bob Brownell. Surely you remember Bob.”

Sheila hadn’t thought of Bob Brownell in a long time. With an effort she recalled an apple-cheeked boy.

“He’s been away to medical school, you know, for nearly four years.” Colleen’s voice trembled a little. She glanced at two tiny wings pinned over her heart. “Bob and I saw a good deal of each other when I was at school last winter.” Her hand pressed the small insignia. “Now he’s in the Air Corps.”

Sheila felt a throbbing in her own breast. Little Colleen’s hero was offering his life for his country! In a moment the tremulous voice came again.

“I’m not going back to the Conservatory in the fall, grandma. I’m going to make bullets. I – I’ve got to help.”

Sheila saw the glisten of heavy tears and felt empty herself. She knew that Colleen wanted to speak further, but couldn’t.

“It’s all right, dearest,” she whispered close to the wet cheek.

“I could never have gone to the Conservatory at all if it hadn’t been for your money. And you didn’t have any too much yourself. I know that. And you expected so much of me.”

“It’s all right; honestly, it’s all right.”

But Colleen was struggling to make a clearer explanation.

“I – I have to help – help Bob and the Red Cross and the farmers and everything that means America. You pioneers built such a wonderful country. We wouldn’t be worth the dust of the plains if we couldn’t protect it. I can’t just study music – not this year.”

And Sheila could only reiterate that everything was all right.

After Colleen had hurried away, leaving perfume and remembrance of youth behind her, Sheila was doubly thankful that some of Maggie’s old cronies had carried her off to sit with them. Absent-mindedly she heard their laughter rise above the babble of talk around her. The balcony became crowded and boys began placing chairs in the aisles on the floor below. The small orchestra filed in. Smiling, the Relief Society president took her seat beside Sheila and became absorbed in her officers sitting on her right. Sheila was grateful beyond expression to be let alone.

Little Colleen and her shining diamond! Her courage and faith in America! It was queer the way life surged along. She thought of her years with John. If he had been able to love her as he had loved the wife of his early youth, would that have lessened her sense of unfulfillment? She thought of all she and Maggie and John had given to the land before it had begun to yield. She recalled her mother’s privation, felt her horror of famine, and sat as though gripped in the silence of death. And as an accompaniment to the pageant of her mind, she heard the plaintive throbbing of the harp she had renounced.

Sheila was so deeply stirred before the curtains parted that the ensuing scenes shook her to her depths. The portrayal of the long trek; handcarts inching through sand; weary voices singing, “And if we die before our journey’s through – ” She scarcely knew what was her own dream, what was acting, and what was reality. Then with a little shock she was conscious of Colleen standing all alone on the dim stage at the foot of a covered wagon. Her auburn hair was demurely parted and arched by a small black bonnet. Her tiny waist was compressed into an unyielding basque. Her skirt, fluted and puffed here and there, fell to the floor. Plain white collars and cuffs softened the severity. Then, without accompaniment, her clear tones filled the hall:

O my Father, Thou that dwellest
In that high and glorious place,
When shall I regain Thy presence,
And again behold Thy face?

Throughout the four verses she held the audience motionless; she was part of the sleeping encampment, part of the covered wagon, part of the endless plains, and of the still, unresponsive night. And all at once Sheila knew, with the true intuition of a born artist, that her people were too close to their struggles, too young in culture for a great expression. But some day a man or woman would look over the fertile fields of Utah and Idaho and see the land as it was primevally, ringing with the whoop of the Indian, the beat of the buffalo, and the shrill cry of the mountain lion. Or he would look at the imperial mountains and interpret with brush or pen their awful aloofness. It wouldn’t be her heart strings a-quiver, nor was it likely to be Colleen’s. But some day it would come, for a great movement demands a great reproduction, and the message of her hills and plains had never been fitly expressed. and when the painting or play or novel came, her tears would be in it, and her yearning, for she and her parents and John and their friends had made a great work possible.

But little Colleen, like Sheila herself, could sing the song of Zion “in a strange land.” Tears on the girl’s rounded cheeks:

Then at length, when I’ve completed
All you sent me forth to do –

Sheila’s questioning eyes were lifted and for a moment she sat breathless. ‘O God,” her heart whispered, “the redemption of man! After all, wasn’t that the song of Zion?” she knew that this was true, and knew also that the brush of Michelangelo, the imagination of Milton, and the pealing of an organ in a great cathedral could only suggest the beauty of a soul returned to God.

With unconscious dignity shielded by the darkness, Sheila bowed her head. In a moment of realization she was paid for what the years had taken from her. She felt hot drops falling upon her folded hands, but the stabbing regret was gone.