At last the audience has become quiet; the concert proceeds.
Monsieur Albert Perfection sits down to the piano, plays a nocturne of Chopin, an étude of Thalberg, and a Liszt tarentella with blameless technical perfection, and without faltering a single time.
After the impure, confused, over-hasty, and still, in spite of everything, fascinating playing of Lensky, his performance has a calm, soothing effect on the nerves, and without reckoning to what phenomenon to ascribe the effect, the public breathes freely, breaks out in stormy bravos, then suddenly recollects itself--considers. To distinguish his accompanist at one of Boris Lensky's concerts! It is not fitting.
Then follows quite a long pause, and at length Lensky once more steps upon the stage.
In two minutes scarcely one of those present remembers that Albert Perfection exists. Whatever musical adherents Lensky had lost, he has quite won back.
Even now his playing is not perfectly free from continual little technical faults and impurities, but still, who would have time to stop at those while this sense-enthralling, oppressing, resonant charm flows from his violin? It is now no longer a violin; it is a human heart which spreads out all its treasures before the crowd, exposes its holiest of holies to it, and in a wonderful, mysterious language, a language which all understand, and to which no one can lend words, confesses his joys and sorrows, his heaven-aspiring enthusiasm, and, swooning, back to earth sinking, human sadness.
His appearance also has changed, become ennobled. His formerly flushed face is now deathly pale; the deeply sunken eyes are almost closed; the hateful expression about his mouth has disappeared, and has given place to an inconsolably melancholy expression; his lips are half parted; he breathes with difficulty, sometimes something like a gasp interrupts his performance. The insane story from Figaro comes to the mind of more than one of his listeners. It is not to be denied, his playing gives the impression of a bad charm to which he himself has fallen victim.
Now Lensky plays his own composition, his famous, wonderful "La Légende," for which every one in the audience waited eagerly. In the middle of the powerful, striking melody of the piece something like a sob and the wearily fluttering wings of an angel who has wandered into Hades, and now vainly seeks the way to its home, sounds from beneath his bow.
The audience is beside itself. Men laugh, weep, rejoice, clap their hands, stamp their feet, mount on chairs in order to see him better.
"Bis, bis, bis!" sounds from all sides. He repeats it.