Ivan sprang to his feet with an exclamation. Then, suddenly, he swayed, caught himself, by means of the table, and sank back in his chair with a suppressed groan. The old servitor ran forward, fear in his face; but Ivan, smiling at him, waved him away:
"It is quite well with me, Sósha.—Go bring the samovar up here:—here, to my mother's room."
So, with less thought of Nathalie in his heart than he had known for many a long day, Ivan began his life at Klin: an existence which, barring one restless interval of travelling, was to continue till the end of material things came for him. He was not yet old in years. The experiences that had been given him were scarcely of a theatrical kind. Those which had gone deepest, and upon which his soul had fed itself, had been scarce visible to the world, could not have been surmised by his closest friends. His scars were the scars of temperament: the result of an abnormal capacity for feeling. The vividness of his imagination heightened petty trials to a semblance of wanton cruelty. Impersonal matters he unconsciously made his own. Echoes of the great Weldschmerz, coming to him from the void, vibrated their way through his nature till they emerged again, imprisoned in harmonies of his creating.
This summer, for example, the first that he spent at Klin, brought him scarce one outward incident worthy of note; yet it was to him a time overflowing with events—of mind, and memory. To an outsider or a mondaine, the Maidonovo routine would have seemed monotonous to a verge of imbecility. Ivan, ghost-haunted, found each minute of each day pregnant with its own suggestion: saw his life as a tapestry, the design of which was woven upon a background of surpassing natural beauty—the climax and gradual decrescendo of the year. He had emerged from that long period of semi-idleness in which he had been able to do no more than refine a mass of half-finished work; and was now feeling a fresh joy in a renewed and strong-flowing power; an excitement in the evolving of new ideas. September found ready for the printer five new works; the first of them and the biggest, his "Fifth Symphony," the andante of which must remain forever unrivalled, while the work as a whole can only be surpassed by its successor in the same form, Ivan's last and greatest creation: the "Tosca Symphony." Beside this he had written the "D-minor Violin Concerto" for Brodsky; the "Liturgy of Joseph of Arimathea," for four voices with organ accompaniment; half a dozen of the melodious songs that were his special delight: and, lastly, the little, one-act opera "Iris," for which he had written both libretto and score, and which created a furore on its performance in Petersburg, the winter after his death.
The months that produced this large amount of work were spent in a depth of solitude such as only Ivan would have dared to undergo. Nathalie's letters, which grew more frequent as the days went by, and to which he faithfully replied; two visits from Kashkine, one from Mily Balakirev, and half a dozen from Nicholas, who was to be daunted by no amount of taciturnity, were the only incidents of the period. Balakirev, indeed, had brought with him a young protégé, one Rimsky-Korsakow, (since heard from,) to worship at the shrine of Russia's Gregoriev; whereupon that hero, highly disgusted, behaved so boorishly that the chagrined Balakirev refused Nicholas' next plea, and would not go again. Ivan's one, regular recreation were his long, solitary walks through the country-side, disturbed only by the clamorings of children, whom he had spoiled with kopecks, and whose chatterings interrupted his thoughts no more than did the voices of squirrels and birds—from which latter, indeed, he got many an idea.
These five-mile walks, with four hours in the morning and two in the evening at the piano, an hour or so spent in skimming over some of the scores in his vast musical library, considerable reading, especially at meal-times, of Russian, French and English novelists and the German philosophers, whom he approached worshipfully, formed the occupations of his quiet life during many years. And, as the first months passed, he began to realize that his painfully acquired philosophy of living was demonstrating its practicability in the many volumes of his daily journal.
No artist, nor, indeed, any scholar or original thinker of temperament, can progress far in his chosen work without acquiring a certain philosophic attitude of his own that makes for religion; though it be no more than the result of orderly habits of thought: its premise gleaned merely from a continual subconscious synthesis of the sum of personal existence. The type of the synthesis matters no more than the form of its result: mockery and atheism of Schopenhauer or von Hartmann; poetic illogicalities of Hegel; dizzy flights of Schelling; materialism of Locke; idealism of Berkeley; magnificent transcendentalism of the imperial Kant;—they become one at last. Truth is one and indivisible; therefore it is the sincerity of thought, not its fashion, that matters. True, Ivan Gregoriev, musician by necessity, philosopher by instinct only, left in the end little record of his answer to the riddle. But this was rather well than ill. For, from the very beginning, Ivan's "glimpse behind the veil" was distorted, clouded, smirched, by an unconquerable cynicism: a personal resentment and rebellion against the God who stood forth as the acknowledged creator of the miserably unhappy race of men. The eternal question:—if God be only Omnipotent Good, why the existence of evil?—he asked in ever-growing bitterness, till so-called altruism became to him a mockery; and he took a painful delight in twisting his wisdom into the most fantastic forms, which he also made the sport and butt of formal logic; knowing always, in his own heart, the evil that was wrought in him by those bitter reflections that formed the refuge of his idle hours. Ah! Had Nathalie but cared!
September was gone ere Ivan wrote the dedications of his five newly-finished works. And then, thinking of the men so remembered, he realized that they all happened, for the moment, to be in Moscow. Thereupon he suddenly decided to invite them to Maidonovo for forty-eight hours, and, during that time, to hold a manuscript festival, in which his and their unpublished works should be played each by its composer, and criticised by the listeners.
An invitation from Ivan was not now a thing to be refused. Therefore the evening of October 10th found six men assembled round the samovar in the transformed living-room of Ivan's home. For the time, the host had thrown off his habitual air of grave reserve, and, responding to the friendly and congenial atmosphere around him, expanded to a gayety, a magnetic boyishness, that fascinated as much as it amazed the four who knew him as no others could; and sent Avélallement, a wealthy German dilettante, whose acquaintance with the famous Russian consisted of a long correspondence and a fanatical admiration of his work, back to his native Hamburg determined on bringing Ivan to Germany, in order that the most sentimental, hospitable and musical race in the world might come to know, as he did, the great-hearted Russian, whose only possible fault was that he had not been born on the other side of the frontier.