During the 1950s and 60s, in London, later Wadhurst, my mother wrote a number of short stories and novels.

Under her own or assumed names.

The Journey was the only original work of hers to be published.

Pick of Today's Short Stories 14, edited John Pudney (1909-77)

Eyre & Spottiswoode, 22 Henrietta Street, London 1963

He entered the dining-saloon and took his place at the table he had already selected. There were three other people seated there, but they neither looked up nor spoke as he sat down; yet he felt they must be as aware of his presence as he was of theirs, and despite the heat of the saloon a chill wind seemed to bear down from the north.

The blonde woman (Swedish, model-beautiful, alabaster figurine) pulled her fur cape closer about her shoulders. Looking straight into his eyes, she observed that the night had turned chilly. He neither acquiesced nor disagreed, yet his head bowed in her direction in a sort of negation: he was pleased when the woman looked away in some confusion. 'I shall be glad when the journey's over,' she declared petulantly. Her blue eyes were full of doubt, her fleshy, shell-coloured mouth curved in perplexity: he knew the signs — she was uncertain.

Her companions leaned towards her, anxious, slightly deferential. 'But it has hardly begun,' said the younger man. 'There are nine whole days yet,' the elder reminded her. 'We have still to journey far to the west.' The listener was amazed by their accuracy. How right they were, how precisely right! The man had not said, simply, 'to the west', but, categorically, 'far to the west'. A stranger might have supposed they had all made this journey before.

A waiter hovered for their orders. They consulted menus, conferred — anxious as children to get the best for their money — changed their minds, ordered, finally, in a sort of hurried desperation. Their decision was oysters naturel, Chicken Maryland, crêpes suzette. The listener shuddered fastidiously. He chose spring raindrops, with a dash of moon-beams, and for the sweet, he said gravely, he would try the diamond sunburst. In his present mood he would have preferred thunder and lightning, but did not want to embarrass his companions further. As it was, they stared apprehensively, and the older man started, looking over his shoulder, then loosening the collar of his evening shirt.

How boring they are, he thought. Were they always so? Why am I unable to communicate? At what limbo of the spirit do they reside, the drabness of their poverty evident in the harsh, metallic sounds they utter at each other? My God, how the very air vibrates with their vulgarity! So must the Lord of all things shudder when Balaam's ass opens its orifice to communicate neighbourliness! These companions of mine are rectitude itself on the surface (save for their braying utterances), but their spirits are so revolting that if I could I would change tables.

~

That night he dreamed he was adrift in space, in another dimension altogether — a terrible dimension loud with the music of the stars, silent with the blue ice of eternity. He was very frightened. He felt his teeth chattering with fright. He was surrounded by wisps of clinging cloud, voices all about him rose and fell, coming nearer, receding — and some of the voices were so other-worldly, so intent on a champing and gnashing of teeth that he was terrified the vistas before him would open up, dissolve, leave him face to face with the stricken faces of the damned. My God, he said when he awoke, I hope I never have another dream like that one.

He was inclined to blame the voyage, or perhaps something had upset his stomach. The motion of the sea? No doubt that was all it was. Even the stabilizers could not completely disguise its heaving, secret obscenity. It took him a long time to come to himself — and even then the familiar world was not quite in focus: it had now assumed the shallowness of a shadow on glass, or a faint mist before the eyes.

Puzzling it out, he fell asleep again. When he awoke finally, he looked around his cabin — which was filled with the caskets of fruit and baskets of flowers intended for his famous friend — and shivered because everything was so normal. The dreadful thing was that he couldn't remember where he had been, or with whom, and he couldn't remember the route, and this he found the most dreadful — for how could he avoid it in future if he didn't know where it was? Still, he was tolerably certain of one thing: he had been searching for his old friend, the person most dear to him in life.

At breakfast the next morning they mentioned his friend. He looked at them angrily, amazed that they should have the temerity to mention that name in his presence. The blonde woman (who had been his friend's wife) told the older man (who had been his friend's manager) that she simply couldn't bear to pass the cabin door. It frightened her, she said; it was too gruesome, death was very gruesome, wasn't it? She spoke in French, the common language which bound their differing nationalities, the words tripping aimlessly out of her mouth. 'And you know,' she added, a frown appearing between her eyes, 'I could swear I heard his violin — assuredly there was a strange noise !'

He blushed, averted his head. He realized that it was he, emerging in panic from his dream, that she had heard. But the violin? He put this down to her overheated imagination. He was certain nobody could have entered the cabin while he slept; he had been careful to lock the door. And he hadn't touched his friend's Stradivarius, that precious instrument he had willed long before his death to a famous European Conservatoire.

He became conscious of the woman's eye on him. He raised his head; their glances met for an instant. It was as if she demanded to know by what right the management had allotted to him the cabin intended for her famous husband, and by what token he assumed he would be welcome at their table, occupying the seat which should, in all decency, have been left vacant? He leaned forward angrily. Looking straight into her frozen, white face he said: 'Madame, I can only regret the circumstances that occasion my presence here!' She turned away, not even deigning him the courtesy of a reply. She caught the hand of the younger man (her lover — and her husband so newly dead!), and he saw that she trembled a little. He was disconcerted by her rudeness. He bulged with indignation when the lover raised her hand to his lips. My poor friend, he said to himself, I am almost glad that you are dead and not here to witness this betrayal. I wonder how many times you were cuckolded? For all your hard-headedness, your good business mind, your fiery genius as a violinist, your undisputed place in the world of the arts, you were always a bad judge of women. The merest smile or hint of flattery and you succumbed. You believed in women. They were the precious, fragile undertones of your art. Mon pauvre vieux! Did you truly imagine she loved you — old as you were, so ugly, the deep-scored lines of your troubled life mapping your European face like the scars of an old disease?

The woman said she wanted nothing to eat; she wasn't hungry — but, pressed by her lover, agreed to some orange juice, toast, black coffee. She was petulant, angry with something — perhaps with the unwelcome guest at the table? He found her attitude insupportable. She kept glaring at him, looking through him, almost as if he didn't exist. He would have liked to have it out with her there and then. 'How dare you behave like this,' he wanted to say, 'like a widow with feeling, like a woman who cared for her husband?' But, of course, he had no right to champion his old friend to that extent; he knew that. The time was past for dramatics.

He became aware that the waiter was now at his elbow, pencil poised. He was a foreigner, like himself, with a dark, sardonic face. No doubt he saw many things aboard ship. No doubt he wasn't even shocked that the widow of the great violinist held hands with her lover in public — and the husband hardly cold. He smiled to himself. He was ready to place quite a large bet that the sardonic waiter wasn't married! Such a thought restored his good humour. He felt superior to all men dependent on the whims of a woman, and he actually took pleasure in startling his companions by ordering ice crystals sprinkled with snowflakes.

~

He dreamed on the second night too. It was the same as the first dream, excepting that this time he managed to go much further. And there was someone with him as well. He remembered that the other person had cried, 'Halt!' the very moment he had exceeded the limits of the previous journey. With a sense of reckless anticipation he had ignored the warning. The voice was a curious one — thin and metallic, as though it was somewhere a long way ahead of him, somewhere in the future. He started forward again, groping through the rapidly thickening mist. 'I will not stop,' he cried furiously, and then started back in alarm as he heard his own words echoed deafeningly. 'No entrance,' cried the metallic voice. 'But I want to go on,' he heard himself whimpering. 'You really can't expect me to go back now.' He was very tired. He was so tired that he didn't think he'd ever be able to go back, and what was so annoying in these dreams was the way he kept losing the route. No matter what he did he couldn't keep track of it, or remember afterwards.

'Supposing I can't get back?' he asked aloud. The thought terrified him almost as much as the ominous silence. What, indeed, if he never got back to his own domain, if he were doomed forever to trespass in these regions far to the west of the Milky Way? My goodness, he thought proudly, people wouldn't believe me if I told them where I'd been. They simply wouldn't. I wouldn't have believed it myself.

He had some difficulty getting back — not like the first time, when the transition from one state of awareness to another had been smooth and effortless. He felt held by invisible hands. He could see nothing, feel nothing — only the residue of past terror — but he knew that he was in some way trapped in a dimension he did not know. Striving not to panic he tried a few deep breaths. The ship emerged, clear in the moonlight. He sighed with relief as the ship grew solid, three-dimensional, recognizably a thing of this planet. Now to get inside! With an effort, he managed it, and woke up in his own bed.

He sat up, still weak with fright. It really doesn't do to experiment with natural law, he thought. I must be patient, learn this new technique by degrees. I must stop this dreaming, remain incurious, bide my soul here until the end of the journey. He could hear the wash of the sea through the portholes, and when he gathered his still-trembling limbs together and looked out he saw the moon making a silver pathway from ship to horizon. How beautiful is life, he thought. The stars were pale in that bright sky, but he knew they were there, great leaping sheets of icy flame, spinning eternally in the orbits they had been allotted at the beginning of creation.

From a distance he heard the ship's orchestra, the murmur of voices. A footstep went past his cabin. Outside a cloud had veiled the moon. He sighed and felt lonely, aching with the need to communicate. He said aloud: 'But there's no one left now. If only my dear friend hadn't left me like this, naked to the world, bereft of one glance of understanding.' He pottered about the cabin, took the Strad out of its case, fingered it lovingly, ran his finger along the polished wood. Nostalgia flooded through him. If I could only cry, he thought, I'd feel human again.

~

On the afternoon of the third day the three spoke of the man who was dead. They spoke of him disparagingly, as though his death was now far enough away to make courtesy unnecessary.

The woman said petulantly. 'How I wish we had flown. How impossibly sentimental to have come on the same ship.'

Her lover said. 'But why, chérie?' He looked round the deck contentedly, enjoying the air and the sparkling sea and the admiring glances of other women. 'It is a good journey. Why get there too quickly ?'

'Because I hate having his coffin on board,' she snapped. 'It makes me nervous.'

The older man laughed indulgently. 'But it's down in the hold,' he said. 'Out of sight ... ' His eyes, looking at her, added and out of mind.

'It's macabre,' she protested, 'as he was sometimes.'

The word caught the listener's attention. Yes, his dear friend had certainly had an interest in the macabre, an interest which began at an early age, at the same time as his interest in music. The strange little boy sawing industriously on his fiddle had had dreams far beyond the ordinary range of music. And how strange that this vapid young woman, his widow, should use that exact word — macabre — as though he stood at her elbow, unseen, maliciously prompting her!

She caught his gaze on her, but did not turn away. She looked at him haughtily, her eyes cold as bits of blue glass; then she turned back to her companions. 'You know,' she said earnestly and with a little shiver. 'I never really understood him. Sometimes he used to look at me in the oddest way, as if I wasn't really there at all …'

'My dear, he was an artist.'

'Yes.' She twisted the rings on her long, white fingers, then she said urgently, as though impelled to confess some weakness. 'You know there were times when I didn't trust him at all …'

There was a shout of laughter from her lover. 'What!' he cried jovially. 'But surely ...? I mean, not trust him!'

She said impatiently. 'Oh, I know he was as ugly as sin' — the listener winced on behalf of his friend, made a movement to admonish her choice of words, hesitated, bowed his head in resignation: alas, his dear friend had been very ugly — 'but it wasn't other women I worried about; not that they would have looked at him, and in any case he adored me. I suppose he was so surprised I took him seriously ...' (Madame, he protested within himself, how dare you lie now when he is dead and unable to defend himself!) 'No, it was all this other-world business, this trying to get outside his body. You know he practised it, of course? I knew nothing about it myself until one night I nearly killed him by accident.'

'Tell us about it,' the others said.

'It was a night I couldn't sleep, and I went to his room to ask him where he kept his sleeping tablets. At first I couldn't wake him. I shook him again and again; he groaned; then he opened his eyes. He looked strange — I thought he'd been dreaming — and he said I wasn't to do such a thing again; if I did he might not be able to get back to his body. I didn't understand what he meant, and then he explained that he had been away somewhere — in another dimension, I think he said. I told him to stop talking nonsense, that I had a headache and wanted some pills to help me sleep. Then he raised himself up from his pillow and he said. 'And you woke me for that? Do you realize the crime you have perpetrated, the knowledge you have made me lose? I had just passed the ultimate stars of Ursa Minor on my way east to Alpha Draconis. I had almost crossed the river of time …'

'Extraordinary,' said the older man.

'What a fairy tale,' drawled the lover.

'And since we've been on this boat, I've sometimes had the feeling that he isn't dead at all.'

'What nonsense! In any case, wasn't that why you had the vein in his wrist opened, to make sure ?'

'Yes; I wanted to make sure. With a man like that, you couldn't tell whether he was dead or shamming.'

The listener turned his head. Yes, he too knew all about the incised vein — that beautiful wrist, so steely, so flexible, with what consummate artistry it had guided the bow — and now, exposed, useless, as dead as his dead friend.

'A wise decision,' said the lover. 'One hears of too many cases of people being buried alive.'

~

The dreams continued, impossible to control now. In fact, he no longer knew whether he desired or feared them. All he knew was that they left him exhausted and that he returned to his body more and more reluctantly. As the ship ploughed steadily through the calm seas, closing in on the end of the journey, so he travelled farther and farther each night, needing more effort to return. He began to realize dimly that he no longer had control over his movements; he was being driven outside himself, away from all that he had ever known or cared about. The pattern of the dreams had changed, too, assumed a strange quality of reality so that often when he awoke in the cabin he did not know where he was.

They began in the same way — the sense of release, of cold air rushing past, ice crystals forming on his flesh. But nowadays the great stars flashed by quicker and quicker, as though time was too short to linger in zones he had already explored. Like railway stations passed swiftly at night and imperfectly seen he could no longer recognize landmarks, and each night new stars appeared. They shouted their names to him on the electric wind that carried him onwards, but he was gone too quickly, he couldn't recognize what it was they said.

Later there came other voices — once he thought he heard his old friend, talking to Beethoven, arguing how the slow movement of the Violin Concerto should really be played.

♫

He even caught the sound of a violin, close beside him, within reach. But he found nothing, even though he searched frantically, beside himself with grief and excitement. 'Here I am,' he called. 'Wait for me, you great ones!' But their voices had faded; he found nothing but vibrating ether. He was filled with despair, with the impossibility of communication in this rarefied zone. He heard himself crying, 'My eyes are still blinded. Oh, release me; let me see the light ...' and then, in answer, chilling him with despair and ecstasy, a voice thundering: 'It is not time. You are transgressing natural laws. Go back until your hour comes …'

He found he couldn't go any further, for when he moved in a forward direction a sharp pain thrust like a knife between his ribs. Sadly, supported by the wind, he headed back for the ship.

~

On the sixth day the woman said: 'Thank God the journey's almost over. Last night I was very afraid. I heard the violin again.'

'Imagination,' said her lover absently.

'Perhaps you are right,' she agreed. She moved closer against him, their knees just touching. 'You have been a great comfort,' she said. 'I'm glad you helped me decide to have him cremated.'

The listener shuddered for the fate of the violinist. To cremate him, to reduce that mind to ashes! Dear old friend, he said silently, I am sorry this had to happen. But, you see, I wasn't consulted. They arranged everything together, behind my back.

He stared at the woman, wishing to chill her with his disapproval. There was no use speaking to her, he knew that. She ignored his every word and gesture, and turned her back when his gaze became too uncomfortably penetrating. Of course she hated him, he knew that. Even when his friend was alive he had known that.

On the seventh night he was convinced he had broken through at last. He travelled so far that even the wind deserted him. And, amazingly, nobody stopped him. Had he reached the ends of the universe? But no, obviously not, for he heard a sudden burst of laughter close at hand. When he looked round, he saw a strange golden bird with azure wings and aquamarine head and across his breast cryptic signs in a language he did not know. 'I am the phoenix bird,' the creature said, 'and the language I bear on my breast was old when Adam was created.'

'I am honoured to make your acquaintance,' he returned humbly.

'Oh, never mind that,' cried the bird. 'I only came to direct you. Straight on,' he added kindly. 'Heaven's right before you.'

'Oh, thank you,' he breathed, bowing low before this magnificent messenger. 'Does that mean I have reached the end of my journey?'

'Certainly not,' said the phoenix bird. 'Only an amateur would ask such a question. Still, never mind; even though you've only reached as far as heaven. It's a step in the right direction.'

He bowed once more and went on. Presently he came to a rainbow of ice which shimmered with all the colours there are and more besides. While he hesitated, uncertain whether to go on or turn back (he noticed that his side was beginning to throb again), an exotic peacock appeared. 'Please enter,' said the peacock. 'You're just in time for the conference.'

Before he knew what had happened he found himself in a sort of roofless, wall-less enclosure where blue was the predominating colour, and suns whirled round his head — some like diamonds, others like sapphires, still others like rubies. 'The colours show their ages,' the peacock explained. 'The red ones are the old ones. They have come here for recuperation, you know, before they blow themselves up and become super-novae.'

'Very interesting,' he said, bewildered somewhat by the noise they all made whirling about. To add to the confusion, there was someone making a speech in a voice like thunder.

'That's God,' said the peacock proudly. 'Even the stars shiver when He speaks! Why don't you go and ask Him about your friend's cremation?'

Somebody pushed a cocktail into his hand. It was made of sunbeams, iridescent moonbeams, a jigger of lightning to give it zip, and a dash of bitter eternity. He was about to raise it to his lips when God said sternly. 'Stop! You can't drink of the waters of eternal life; not yet, anyway. What are you doing here? Don't you know you've got yourself outside time now?'

'If it please your Majesty,' he began humbly, 'I was always of an adventurous spirit, but I really came to talk about the matter of my old friend's cremation. You see …'

'Away with him!' God interrupted rudely. 'Take him back to his own time, and bind his eyes so that he won't find his way back.'

Deposited outside by two hefty guardsman angels, he discovered how much his side was hurting him. The peacock, still beside him, said kindly. 'I'm afraid it wasn't quite the right moment. You see, God is always in a bad temper when He gives a party for His public relations men. He doesn't think they do enough to advertise Him, properly on your world, and — strictly between you and me, of course — He's a bit peeved because the Devil has a better set of admen.'

~

He was weary on the eighth day. His travels had exhausted him. He lay on his bed too tired to care what happened. The noises of the ship bewildered him, several times he awoke from a light doze wondering where he was, indifferent to the voices passing the cabin door.

He had almost forgotten his old friend. Somehow, in the course of this journey, he had mislaid memory. He had travelled so far from what was left of his friend that to remember him clearly, as he had known him, required too much effort. Let the dead rest, he thought wearily. He and I have nothing more to say to each other.

He dozed dispiritedly all day, yet was alert to the slightest sound around him. He did not travel out beyond the stars today, yet the glass shield between himself and his world seemed more opaque, difficult to shatter. This neither excited nor distressed him. He regarded this new state of being dispassionately, without emotion. Yet one atom of his being was still alive to suffering — his left side, at a point just beneath his heart. Each breath he took made him wince with pain, and the place throbbed most damnably when he tried to lie on his side.

The long day faded and he raised himself on his elbow to watch the last apricot light on the horizon. There would be no more days at sea: the ship docked tomorrow. Suddenly he grew impatient to sleep and dream, to travel beyond the finite, to loosen the irksome bonds of flesh. But he remained awake, subject to the physical world, bounded by night and stillness, by voices and laughter. How loud they are, he mused, these sounds of night, like the buzzing of a million bees. He was desolated when he thought of his friend: could anything be worse than to lie enmeshed in coffin darkness, beyond hope or pity, helpless, slashed across the wrist?

Nearing midnight he was interrupted by the opening of his door. He sat up in astonishment as the light was switched on, hurting his tenebrous eyes, and the blonde woman and the two men were revealed. They go everywhere together, he thought, as if they are afraid of being alone. He said crossly: 'May I ask why you are intruding on my solitude?'

The woman hesitated, stared at him for a moment or two, then burst into embarrassed laughter.

'You have no right to come here without my permission,' he shouted. 'This is my cabin, I have every right, I paid for the journey …'

She regarded him perplexedly, then turned her back without replying. He roused himself to action, but felt so remote, so weak, that it required effort to cross the cabin to her side. 'Madame,' he cried furiously, 'I have had enough of your bad manners! I demand some explanation, a reason for your unauthorized entrance ... Kindly answer my questions, madame, or leave my cabin immediately.'

She continued to ignore him. Instead she laughed tinklingly and looked across to her lover, as though to say: Listen to the funny little man!

'What a pleasant journey it's been, after all,' the older man remarked to nobody in particular.

She agreed. 'Better than I expected. Sailors don't like a corpse on board, you know. They think it's unlucky. They expect all sorts of bad things, even shipwreck I believe.'

'What pathetic nonsense,' the lover said.

She turned away to pick up the violin case. 'These medieval superstitions make me tired, too ...' She straightened up, eyed the withered flowers with distaste. 'I hope,' she added, sounding worried, 'that we're not going to come up against them when we get him home — the cremation I mean …'

'A Catholic country,' the older man mused. 'Perhaps they are against cremation? What will you do then ?'

'I shall insist,' she exclaimed arrogantly. She handed the violin case to her lover. 'Please take care of this,' she said. 'It's the only thing belonging to him here. We might as well go now.'

'But seriously, my dear, what will you do if ... ?'

'Please keep your doubts to yourself. Let me hear no more of them. They cannot refuse me. I shall tell them he cannot be buried in consecrated ground — a suicide, after all.'

A man who was murdered, the listener wanted to shout. A man to whom you, madame, administered several times the normal amount of sleeping pills so that you would be free to marry your lover! Oh, I know all about it, madame! You would have stopped at nothing — you knew that as a good Catholic my old friend would never divorce you, so you chose to get rid of him your own way. A murderer, madame, that's what you are — a murderer!

Of what use to cry such words aloud ? She would have denied them (and what proof had he, after all?), and her companions would have considered him mad. Yet he could not resist taking a step forward, touching the older man on the shoulder, saying: 'I hope you will see that he is vindicated!'

The man swung round and stared at him in astonishment. He touched him again. 'See to it,' he admonished, and then stepped aside to let the man pass.

After they had left the cabin he heard him say, 'I feel like a brandy ... for a moment, I thought ...' His voice faded into the distance.

Alone once more, he shut the door firmly and turned the key. Then he sat among the wilted flowers and the caskets of rotting fruit, the gifts admirers had sent his old friend only a short time before his death. Nine days, he mused aloud. It's been a long time.

~

Morning of the ninth day dawned clear and sparkling. Like Homer's dawn, it was 'tender ... flecking the east with red'. Through the porthole window he watched it for a long time. The colours paled and the sun came up, a small wind ruffled the sea. It is ended, he said to himself. Some time this afternoon they will sight land. I do not envy them. It is always a painful experience coming to the end of a journey.

He realized he had grown weaker. He felt light as air, and, save for the throbbing spot in his side, felt capable of undertaking the journey to the end of the seven universes. The sore spot bothered him. He couldn't bear to touch it — once he had tried and it was like an electric shock, searing his fingers. Perhaps it had begun to fester, to putrefy, like his old friend. With a sort of perception, he guessed that his friend was uneasy, that from time to time he stirred unhappily in the narrow confines of the coffin. 'There is no need to be restless,' he said gently. 'What is to be will be.'

He turned away from the porthole and the already brilliant sun (but you are pale, he whispered, compared to the suns I have seen). He looked around the cabin. 'I suppose on the whole it has been a pleasant journey,' he said. Suddenly he shuddered, in the way one does when a goose is said to walk over one's grave, and for the first time he was afraid. It was all very well going beyond the stars when one went of one's own free will, but the choice belonged to somebody else now: it was no longer in his hands.

A wind sprang up without warning, a dark cloud covered the sun. The ship rocked, tossing passengers from beds and bunks. He heard a voice cry: 'A waterspout!' Somebody replied : 'It's the corpse on board. I told you it was unlucky.'

Shaken by the ship's tremors, he smiled. Be quiet, old friend, he admonished. You're nothing but a discarded envelope; you must learn to accept your fate.

As the waves grew stronger and the boat splintered, as the demented cries of the passengers grew louder, he stretched himself joyously. One more effort, he whispered to himself encouragingly. No matter how tired you are make this one last effort towards perfection … it is the ninth day; you are free.

He soared through the badly listing ship, and first he was drawn to the hold, to the coffin he had never seen. The wound in his side throbbed like fire; he saluted the colour of valediction, afraid to look on the face of the dead. As if from a long way away he heard the screams of the doomed, and a last, sardonic sense of humour caused him to soar upwards in search of the woman. When she saw him she cried unbelievingly: 'You! My God! ... I believe you brought the storm on us ...' Her voice broke off in a scream as a wave swept her into the sea.

At the instant the ship went under he felt the place in his side healed. He looked down at the incised wrist: it alone was unhealed. It seemed to pour purple blood, souvenir of a time of desolation. But it was his side which intrigued and puzzled him, for a thin rope of light descended from it to the body of the coffin, and even as he looked and puzzled it disintegrated. Soaring joyously above the wreckage, he began his last journey, and knew that he was dead.

© Margarete Orga Estate

15 April 2023

♫  Beethoven Violin Concerto. Huberman, Szell, Wiener Philharmoniker. 

Mittlerer Konzerthaussaal, Vienna 18-20 June1934.