She drifted into Schumann’s Kinderscenen, choosing unconsciously the saddest numbers, and then she struck the arpeggio chords and began his most wonderful Nachtstück.
“HILDA’S SELF-CONTROL BROKE DOWN COMPLETELY.”
It is fraught with melancholy, regret, longing, pity—and what else besides? But surely it is idle work to describe beautiful music. As we play and as we listen, if we are lovers of music, we use our own interpretation; we weave our own feelings, our own emotions, our own aspirations and regrets into it, and lo! for the moment we have made it our own language.... Before Hilda had reached the closing phrases of the Nachtstück, her self-control broke down completely. She nestled up to the piano, her arms resting on the finger-board, her head bowed over them. She sobbed unceasingly. The tears streamed unheeded from her eyes. There seemed to be no end to the sobbing, no end to the tears.
But at last she raised herself, and clasped her hands together at the back of her neck, and looked up. Her husband was standing in the doorway.
“Hilda!” he cried, and he advanced a step, his arms extended.
“No, no!” she cried, turning from him. “I want to be alone, I must be alone, I’m too utterly wretched for words. It’s all of no use, I can’t stand this life out here; it will just kill me—it isn’t life, it is only existence, and such an existence too! I must have been mad to come—I was mad, every one was against it—my mother and father and friends, all of them. But I didn’t know what I was coming to—how could any one know?—how could I picture to myself the desolation and the deadness and the dull monotony, and the absence of everything picturesque, and the barren country, which at its best can never be comforting? I hate those mountains there, I could shake them, and I could go out and tread down all those wretched rows of wretched little trees—it’s all an absurd mockery of a life, it’s starvation from beginning to end. You just feel that there is nothing to live for, and you cry out the whole time to be done with it. Yes, I was mad, mad to leave everything and come—I can see it well enough now, when it is too late. But it was little enough you told me in your letters. Why didn’t you make me understand clearly what I was coming to? And yet you did try—I remember you tried; but how could any one ever describe the awful desolation? Oh, it’s simply heartbreaking. And to think it has to continue month after month, and year after year, and that there is no escape from it. How shall I ever bear myself? How can I possibly go on, drudging all the day long? For that is what the life out here means to a woman—drudgery and desolation, and it is wickedly cruel.”
Robert Strafford stood there paralysed.
