Years of Grace · Part I · III · Chapter 1 3 1 (2/2)

André and Agnes pushed casually through the concert crowd and ran up the great staircase. Agnes had good seats, in the front row of the balcony. Jane always thought the music sounded better there than downstairs. She wondered, though, if any of her mother’s friends would see her, perched up alone with André and Agnes. They would think it was very queer.

The orchestra was already assembled on the enormous stage. Theodore Thomas made his entrance as they took their seats. The first bars of the Third Symphony diverted Jane’s mind from all temporal troubles. They wafted her away from the world of her mother and Isabel, and even from that of André and Agnes, on waves of purest sound to an ethereal region where the problem of chaperonage didn’t matter. Jane leaned forward in her seat, intent on the music, watching the little waving arms of Theodore Thomas pulling that mysterious magic out of strings and keys. The Eroica Symphony⁠—how beautifully named!

The second movement made her think of Dido⁠—the throbbing Marcia Funebre for all gallant souls. She whispered as much to Agnes and fell to listening with closed eyes, dreaming of the deserted queen and the flames of the funeral pyre and Aeneas’s white sailed ships turned toward the promised land across the tossing seas. “I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade,” she whispered softly. A proud thought. A self-respecting thought. Something to live and die for. Something much better than just keeping a restive Aeneas, tied to your apron-strings.

She came out of her trance at the applause of the intermission. André was wild with enthusiasm. Agnes was talking of the German music she hoped to hear that summer.

“While you drink beer, Agnes!” cried André cheerfully. “And eat sausage. Beer and sausage do a lot for a symphony!”

The last half of the program was all Wagner. It was over all too soon. André and Agnes and Jane descended the stairs very slowly. Jane was beginning to think once more of the Clark Street cable car.

“I’ll take you home in a four-wheeler,” said André magnificently, as they stood at the entrance. “Jane looks tired.”

Jane smiled at him gratefully. André always understood. He hailed a disreputable vehicle. They all climbed in. It smelled dreadfully of the stable. André lowered the windows. They rattled quickly north up Wabash Avenue and over the Rush Street bridge and down Ohio Street, then turned into Pine. Nice familiar streets, safe ones, that Jane had known from her babyhood. Jane slipped quickly out of the cab at her door.

“Don’t come up the steps with me, André,” she said. “I’m all right.”

She opened the door with her latchkey. It was not late, barely half-past ten. Her mother came out of the library. She looked quite pleased.

“I didn’t think,” she said, “that Mr. Johnson would have the sense to bring you home in a cab.”

Jane made no comment. It was really a backhanded compliment for André, if her mother only knew it. And this time her mother was right, though there was no use in saying so. Jane knew perfectly well that a girl of almost seventeen shouldn’t go downtown alone with a couple of contemporaries to a Thomas concert in a Clark Street car.