“Do you—do you really want me to?” he asked. For of course, if she really wanted him to, he must! Liane smiled.
“Well, yes,” she said. “I really want you to, Monsieur. Do you know ‘Les Jeux d’Eaux,’ that has an especial appeal to me, or better still, Debussy’s ‘Les Jardins sous la Pluie?’”
“I don’t know either of them,” said Jean.
Liane thought him an idiot.
“Play, then, what you will,” she said, and resignedly wondered if she could safely light a cigarette, but she decided to wait. However, she leaned back on the chaise longue luxuriously and closed her eyes. Unless he played too badly she could perhaps go to sleep.
Jean found himself trembling all over when he rose to go over to the piano. Liane had talked to him so cleverly that it had not appeared to him that he had failed to amuse her. On the contrary, he had enjoyed their conversation intensely. Elizabeth was the most sympathetic woman he had ever met, but her conversation was not nearly so interesting as Liane’s. But music! music was different; here he was really afraid to fail, because he knew what good music was, and he knew nothing about amusing conversation. In half an hour’s time he felt he would be eternally disgraced in his own eyes and in Liane’s. Then he began to play some of the Russian music he had just been learning by heart in his rooms as a hermit. In a moment he realized that the music expressed Liane, expressed the wonder of her, the sacred beauty, the incredible force and joy! He was not nervous any more after that, the music became a communication between them, and he let himself go. Jean’s music was an original and instinctive note. He had spoken the truth when he had told Liane it was the only thing for which he cared. It was his only personal channel of expression, roughened by inexperience and without the bell-like clarity of disciplined practice, but it was an authentic, living talent, and it shook the artist in Liane wide awake. She sat up suddenly and opened her eyes. Who was this young man who was playing to her? This quite ordinary, inarticulate young man, with his cachet of fils de famille written all over him? The little Baron D’Ucelles, who oughtn’t by all the rules of the game to do anything better than anyone else?
He had caught at her heart and was holding it with those hands of the master; he was making her think and feel and forcing her back into the currents of life. The notes flowed from his fingers like fire and dew, his vivid impetuosity awaked and astonished her. He had come out of the world where, to Liane, men were as trees walking; and he had become a distinct value. When he stopped playing and came back to her, she looked straight in his eyes.
“Bon!” she cried, “you deceived me, my friend. I thought you were a young gentleman, it appears you are an artist. What, may I ask in the name of all the blessed saints, are you doing in the Bank?”
“Ah!” cried Jean, exhausted but triumphant. “Then you really think I can play? You really believe in me?” Liane looked at her watch.
“I have listened to you for an hour, my child,” she said; “do you not call that belief in you?”