Only of late had the family come to realize what an asset to their career this “Genius” might be. They had humored him in his strange whim to devote his life to fiddling; money had been spent on him freely--he brought home with him a famous Cremona instrument for which three thousand dollars had been paid. But now it was dawning upon them that this was an “ugly duckling”; he was to make his _début_ in the metropolis, where an overwhelming triumph was expected; and then he would return to the home city in the middle West, and would play at _musicales_, which even the most exclusive of the “_élite_” must attend.
There was also the great Prof. Reminitsky, the teacher who had made Lloyd, and had come to New York with him; and there was the Herr Prof. von Arne, of the University of Berlin, a world-renowned psychiatrist, author of “The Neurosis of Inspiration”. The Herr Professor had come to America to make some studies for his forthcoming masterpiece on the religious mania; and he was glad to see his old friend Reminitsky, whose seventeen-year-old musical prodigy was most interesting material for study.
Prof. Reminitsky was the world’s greatest authority in the art of tearing the human soul to pieces by means of horse-hair rubbed with resin and scraped over the intestines of a pig. There were no tricks of finger-gymnastics and of tone-production that he had not mastered. As for the emotions produced thereby, he felt them, but in a purely professional way; that is, the convictions he had concerning them related to their effects upon audiences, and more especially upon the score or two of critical experts whose psychology had been his life-study. But having studied also the psychology of youth, he knew that his _protégé_ must needs have other convictions concerning his performances. This was his supreme greatness--that he understood the paranoia of enthusiasm, and used this understanding to tempt his pupils to new heights of achievement.
In all of which, of course, his friend von Arne was a great help to him. Von Arne had dug through a score of great libraries, and had travelled all the world over, frequenting cafes and salons, monasteries and prayer-cells, prisons and hospitals and asylums--wherever one might get new glimpses of the extraordinarily intricate phenomena of the aberration called “Genius”. He had several thousand cases of it at his finger-tips--he had measured its reaction-times and calculated its cephalic index, and analyzed its secretions and tested it for indecan. He knew trance and clairvoyance, auto-suggestion and telepathic hallucination, epilepsy and hysteria and ecstasy; and over the head of any disputatious person he would swing the steam-shovel of his erudition, and bury the unfortunate beneath a wagon-load of Latin and Greek derivatives.