“All my life.”
“Oh, yes; you said you studied here. Who were your masters?”
I named them.
The doctor’s face had been inscrutable. Merivale and I had sat on pins during the inquisition. Now the doctor’s face lighted up with a genial smile.
“You will do, Mr. Lexow,” he said. “I don’t know whom to thank the more, you or Mr. Merivale. You have relieved me in a very trying emergency. Your playing is fine, though perhaps a trifle too independent, a trifle too individual, and the least tone too florid. It is odd, most odd that I should never have heard of you; but we shall all hear of you in the future.”
We agreed upon the selections for the evening. I ran them through in the doctor’s presence and listened to his suggestions. Then we bade him good-by.
That day was a trying one. It would be bootless to catalogue the conflicting thoughts and emotions that preyed upon me. I practiced my pieces thoroughly. Merivale busied himself procuring what he styled a “rig.” The rig consisted of an evening suit and its accessories. He rented one at a costumer’s on Union square. As the day drew to a close, I worried more and more. “Brace up,” cried Merivale. “Where’s your stamina? And here, swallow a glass of brandy.”
We waited in the ante-room till it was my turn to go upon the platform.
I was conscious of a glow of light and a sea of faces and a mortal stage-fright, and of little else, when finally I had taken my position. The orchestra played the preliminary bars. I had to begin. I got through the first phrase and the second. The voice of my instrument reassured me. “After all you will not make a dead failure,” I thought, and ventured to lift my eyes. Not two yards distant from me, to my right, among the first violins, sat Mr. Tikulski. His gaze was riveted upon my face.
I had anticipated about every catastrophe that could possibly befall, but strangely enough I had not anticipated this. And it was so sudden, and the emotions it occasioned were so powerful, and I was so nervous and unstrung—well, the floor gave a lurch, like the deck of a vessel in a storm; the lights dashed backward and forward before my sight; a deathly sickness overspread my senses; the accompaniment of the orchestra became harsh and incoherent; my violin dropped with a crash upon the boards; and the next thing I was aware of, I lay at full length on a sofa in the retiring-room, and Merivale was holding a smelling-bottle to my nostrils. I could hear the orchestra beyond the partition industriously winding off the Tannhauser march.