“You like Brussels?”

She laid her little hand to her heart, half closing her eyes.

“I will never be so happy again as with the sweet little people of Brussels.”

“I, too, love Brussels.  I studied there four years with Ahrenfest.”

“I know you did.  My teacher, Lyndahl, in Berlin, was his brother-in-law.”

“You have studied with Lyndahl?”

“He is my master.”

“I—­will I sometime hear you sing?”

“I am not yet great.  When I am foremost like you, yes.”

“Gina—­Gina Berg, that is a beautiful name to make famous.”

“You see how it is done?  Gins—­Berg.  Gina Berg.

“Clev-er!”

They stood then smiling across a chasm of the diffidence of youth, she fumbling at the great fur pelt out of which her face flowered so dewily.

“I—­well—­we—­we are in the fourth box—­I guess we had better be going—­fourth box left.”  He wanted to find words, but for consciousness of self could not “It’s a wonderful house out there waiting for you, Leon Kantor, and you—­you’re wonderful, too!”

“The—­flowers—­thanks!”

“My father, he sent them.  Come, father—­quick!”

Suddenly there was a tight tensity that seemed to crowd up the little room.

“Abrahm—­quick—­get Hancock—­that first rows of chairs has got to be moved—­there he is, in the wings—­see the piano ain’t dragged down too far!  Leon, got your mute on your pocket?  Please Mr. Ginsberg—­you must excuse—­Here, Leon, is your glass of water.  Drink it, I say.  Shut that door out there, boy, so there ain’t a draft in the wings.  Here, Leon, your violin.  Got neckerchief?  Listen how they’re shouting—­it’s for you—­Leon—­darlink—­go!”

In the center of that vast human bowl which had finally shouted itself out, slim, boylike, and in his supreme isolation, Leon Kantor drew bow and a first thin, pellucid, and perfect note into a silence breathless to receive it.

Throughout the arduous flexuosities of the Mendelssohn E-minor concerto, singing, winding from tonal to tonal climax, and out of the slow movement, which is like a tourniquet twisting the heart into the spirited allegro molto vivace, it was as if beneath Leon Kantor’s fingers the strings were living vein-cords, youth, vitality, and the very foam of exuberance racing through them.

That was the power of him—­the Vichy and the sparkle of youth, so that, playing, the melody poured round him like wine and went down seething and singing into the hearts of his hearers.

Later, and because these were his people and because they were dark and Slavic with his Slavic darkness, he played, as if his very blood were weeping, the “Kol Nidre,” which is the prayer of his race for atonement.

And then the super-amphitheater, filled with those whose emotions lie next to the surface and whose pores have not been closed over with a water-tight veneer, burst into its cheers and its tears.