“I don't know,” was the puzzled reply. “I'll see what I can do,
Daddy. It's dreadfully hard to find anything in German music like
the slow-going, practical lives that we dull Yankees lead.” Then a
sudden idea occurred to the girl, and she ran to the piano with a
gleeful laugh: “Just see, for instance,” she said, fumbling
hurriedly amongst her music, “I was playing the Moonlight Sonata
this morning, and that's a good instance.”
“This is the kind of moonlight they have in Germany,” she laughed
when she found it. After hammering out a few discords of her own she
started recklessly into the incomprehensible “presto,” thundering
away at every crescendo as if to break her fingers. “Isn't it fine,
Daddy?” she cried, gazing over her shoulder.
“I don't see what it has to do with the moon,” said the clergyman,
gazing helplessly at the open window, and wondering if another crowd
was gathering.
“That's what everybody's been trying to find out!” said Helen; then,
as she heard the dinner bell out in the hall, she ended with half a
dozen frantic runs, and jumping up with the last of them, took her
father's arm and danced out of the room with him.
“Perhaps when we come to see the other side of the moon,” she said,
“we may discover all about it. Or else it's because the moon is
supposed to set people crazy.” So they passed in to dinner, where
Helen was as animated as ever, poor Arthur and his troubles seeming
to have vanished completely from her thoughts.
In fact, it was not until the meal was nearly over that she spoke of
them again; she noticed that it was growing dark outside, and she
stepped to the window just as a distant rumble of thunder was heard.
“Dear me!” she exclaimed. “There's a fearful storm coming, and poor
Arthur is out in it; he must be a long way from town by this time,
and there is no house where he can go.” From the window where she
stood she had a view across the hills in back of the town, and could
see the black clouds coming swiftly on. “It is like we were
imagining this morning,” she mused; “I wonder if he will think of
it.”
The dinner was over soon after that, and she looked out again, just
as the first drops of rain were falling; the thunder was rolling
louder, bringing to Helen a faint echo of her morning music. She
went in and sat down at the piano, her fingers roaming over the keys
hesitatingly. “I wish I could get it again,” she mused. “It seems
like a dream when I think of it, it was so wild and so wonderful.
Oh, if I could only remember that march!”
There came a crash of thunder near by, as if to help her, but Helen
found that all efforts were in vain. Neither the storm music nor the
march came back to her, and even when she played a few chords of the
great chorus she had sung, it sounded tame and commonplace. Helen
knew that the glory of that morning was gone where goes the best
inspiration of all humanity, back into nothingness and night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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