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.
“How do you feel?” asked Merivale, as I opened my eyes.
“I feel as though I should like to annihilate myself,” I answered,
as memory cleared up. “I have permanently disgraced us both.”
“But what was the trouble? You were doing nobly, splendidly, when
all of a sudden you collapsed like that,” clapping his hands. “The
doctor is furious, says it was all my fault.” “No, it wasn’t your
fault,” I hastened to put in. “I should have pulled through after
a fashion, only unluckily I caught sight of Tikulski—her uncle, you
know—in the orchestra; and, well, I—I suppose—well, you see it was
so unexpected that it rather undid me.”
“Oh, yes; I understand,” said he.
We kept silence all the way home in the carriage.
Next morning, as I entered the sitting-room, Merivale tried to hide a
newspaper under his coat.
“Oh, don’t bother to do that,” I said. “Of course it is all in
print?”
Possessing myself of the newspaper, I had the satisfaction of reading a
sensational account of my fiasco. But what I had most dreaded from the
quarter of the newspapers had not come to pass. None of them identified
me as the Ernest Neuman who, rather more than two years since, had been
tried for murder.