VOLUME FIVE

21

With the death of her father Mona became more and more obsessed with the idea of getting married. Perhaps on his death-bed she had made a promise which she was trying to keep. Each time the subject came up a little quarrel ensued. (It seemed that I took the subject too lightly.) One day, after one of these tiffs, she began packing her things. She wasn't going to stay with me another day. As we had no valise she had to wrap her things in brown paper. It made a very bulky, awkward bundle.

«You'll look like an immigrant going down the street with that,» I said. I had been sitting on the bed watching her manoeuvres for a half hour or more. Somehow I couldn't convince myself that she was leaving. I was waiting for the usual last minute break-down—a flare of anger, a burst of tears, and then a tender, heart-warming reconciliation.

This time, however, she seemed determined to go through with the performance. I was still sitting on the bed as she dragged the bundle through the hall and opened the front door. We didn't even say goodbye to one another.

As the front door slammed to Arthur Raymond came to the threshold and said: «You're not letting her go like that, are you? It's a bit inhuman, isn't it?»

«Is it?» I replied. I gave him a weak and rather forlorn smile.

«I don't understand you at all,» he said. He spoke as though he were controlling his anger.

«She'll probably be back to-morrow,» I said. «I wouldn't be so sure of that, if I were you. She's a sensitive girl... and you're a cold-blooded bastard.»

Arthur Raymond was working himself into a moral spasm. The truth was that he had become very fond of Mona. If he had been honest with himself he would have had to admit that he was in love with her. «Why don't you go after her?» he said suddenly, after an awkward pause. «I'll run down, if you like. Jesus, you can't let her walk off like that!»

I made no answer. Arthur Raymond bent over and placed a hand on my shoulder. «Come, come,» he said, «this is silly. You stay here... I'll run after her and bring her back.»

He rushed down the hall and opened the front door. I heard him exclaim: «Well, well! I was just going to fetch you. Good! Come on in. Here, let me take that. That's fine.» I heard him laugh, that cheery, rattling laugh, which grated on one's nerves sometimes. «Come on back here... he's waiting for you. Sure, we're all waiting for you. Why did you do such a thing? You mustn't run away like that. We're all friends, aren't we? You can't walk out on us like that....»

From the tone of his voice one would think that Arthur Raymond was the husband, not I. It was almost as if he were giving me the cue.

It was only a matter of a few seconds, all this, but in that interval, brief as it was, I saw Arthur Raymond again as I had the first time we met. Ed Gavarni had taken me to his home. For weeks he had been telling me of his friend Arthur Raymond and what a genius he was. He seemed to think that he had been granted a rare privilege in bringing the two of us together, because in Ed Gavarni's opinion I too was a genius. There he sat, Arthur Raymond, in the gloom of a basement in one of those solemn-looking brown-stone houses in the Prospect Park region. He was much shorter than I had expected him to be, but his voice was strong, hearty, cheery, like his hand-shake, like his whole personality. He emanated vitality.

I had the impression instantly that I was face to face with an unusual person. He was at his very worst, too, as I discovered later. He had been out on a bat all night, had slept in his clothes, and was rather nervous and irritable. He sat down again at the piano, after a few words, a burnt-out butt hanging from his lips; as he talked he nervously drummed a few keys in the upper register. He had been forcing himself to practice because time was getting short—in a few days he was giving a recital, the first recital in long pants, you might say. Ed Gavarni explained to me that Arthur Raymond had been a child prodigy, that his mother had dressed him like Lord Fauntleroy and dragged him all over the continent, from one concert hall to another. And then one day Arthur Raymond had put his foot down and had refused to be a performing chimpanzee any longer. He had developed a phobia about playing in public. He wanted to lead his own life. And he did. He had run amok. He had done everything to destroy the virtuoso which his mother had created.

Arthur Raymond listened to this impatiently. Finally he cut in, swinging round on his stool, and playing with two hands as he spoke. He had a fresh cigarette in his mouth and as he ran his fingers up and down the piano the smoke curled up into his eyes. He was trying to work off his embarrassment. At the same time I felt that he was waiting to hear me open up. When Ed Gavarni informed him that I was also a musician Arthur Raymond jumped up and begged me to play something. «Go on, go on...» he said, almost savagely. «I'd like to hear you. God, I get sick of hearing myself play.»

I sat down, much against my will, and played some little thing. I realized more than ever before how poor my playing was. I felt rather ashamed of myself and apologized profusely for the lame performance.

«Not at all, not at all!» he said, with a low, pleasant chuckle. «You ought to continue... you have talent.»

«The truth is I hardly ever touch the piano any more,» I confessed.

«How come? Why not? What do you do then?»

Ed Gavarni offered the customary explanations. «He's really a writer,» he concluded.

Arthur Raymond's eyes sparkled. «A writer! Well, well...» And with that he resumed his seat at the piano and began to play. A serious expression I not only liked but which I was to remember all my life. His playing enthralled me. It was clean, vigorous, passionate, intelligent. He attacked the instrument with his whole being. He ravished it. I was a Brahms sonata, if I remember rightly, and I had never been very fond of Brahms. After a few minutes he stopped suddenly, and then before we could open our mouths he was playing something from Debussy, and from that he went on to Ravel and to Chopin. During the Chopin prelude Ed Gavarni winked at me. When it was over he urged Arthur Raymond to play the Revolutionary Etude. «Oh, that thing! Drat that! God, how you like that stuff!» He played a few bars, dropped it, came back to the middle part, stopped, removed the cigarette from his lips, and launched into a Mozartian piece.

Meanwhile I had been going through internal revolutions. Listening to Arthur Raymond's playing I realized that if I were ever to be a pianist I should have to begin all over again. I felt that I had never really played the piano—I had played at it. Something similar had happened to me when I first read Dostoievski. It had wiped out all other literature. («Now I am really listening to human beings talk!» I had said to myself.) It was like that with Arthur Raymond's playing—for the first time I seemed to understand what the composers were saying. When he broke off to repeat a phrase over and over it was as though I heard them speaking, speaking this language of sound with which everybody is familiar hut which is really Greek to most of us. I remembered suddenly how the Latin teacher, after listening to our woeful translations, would suddenly snatch the book out of our hands and begin to read aloud to us—in Latin. He read it as though it meant something to him, whereas to us, no matter how good our translations, it was always Latin and Latin was a dead language and the men who wrote in Latin were even more dead to us than the language which they wrote in. Yes, listening to Arthur Raymond's interpretation, whether of Bach, Brahms or Chopin, there were no longer any empty spaces between passages. Everything assumed form, dimension, meaning. There were no dull parts, no lags, no preliminaries.