It was this laugh, or, rather, the chaos of emotions which produced it as their synthetic culmination, that Ivan carried away from his father's house. So peculiar had been its tone, that even the soldiers at the gate who heard it were enabled to surmise something of its meaning. But only Ivan himself was fully conscious of how perfectly it epitomized the final disillusionment that had swept away from him the last of his youth. By that laugh, also, was engendered the mood that now rode him for many months, and was only thrown at last by means of a desperate strategy. Nor is that devil-haunted period to be reviewed in a single phrase.

Anger, disappointment, bitter regret, had driven him back to a mechanical performance of neglected duties. Thus, presently, his discarded comrades drew once more about him. Perhaps all save Nicholas Rubinstein returned at first out of a malicious curiosity; for Moscow still buzzed about the death of Ternoff; and Ivan's name had got itself mysteriously coupled with the affair. After their first visit to him five of his old friends, Laroche, Balakirev, Ostrovsky, Kashkine, and, inevitably, Nicholas, met together by common impulse to discuss their brilliant contemporary and the question of their relations with him. The five of them secretly admired, openly liked him, still. Two of them loved him, one confessedly. Of the remaining three, one was to become the closest companion of his famous years. Naturally, then, the decision arrived at was, that Gregoriev's nature was not to be forced. Theirs would be the loss should they repudiate him now. When he desired them, he would find them within call:—this last delicacy being the suggestion of Rubinstein.

Meantime, Ivan's nature, even in unhappiness, called aloud for solitude. He must struggle alone through his deep waters: waters of the soul, wherein float neither life-preserver nor raft, rope or even light; neither coral reef nor oozy grave, for such as he. Darkness and struggle alike lasted till the end of his strength; but, with exhaustion and the coming of dawn, came at last one mighty breaker, by which Ivan was thrown high upon the strand of a new country.

During the summer of this spiritual woe, Ivan was at Vevey: had proceeded thither as usual at the beginning of his vacation. He carried in his pocket a plentiful sum of royalties; and in his brain a hundred floating ideas. Moreover, the pretty town held two good friends of his: Kashkine and Balakirev, each one hard at his own work; but delighted at the opportunity of drawing Ivan a little out of his melancholy. In time, indeed, they came to think it banished, and the young man at peace. He was merely gathering strength to renew his battle: that intangible fight against circumstance and his own nature that has been waged by every fine and sensitive soul since the world began, and Abel bethought him of his lamb-offering. Meantime, Ivan's secret but ardent desire to work again worthily was fulfilled on a day that was to become one of the vividest of his memories.

It was a morning of mid-July, sweet-aired, hot-sunned, the waters of the lake just feathered with a breath that turned the pulsating satin to a white-sheened, crinkly azure velvet. About eight of the morning the three men, each brain teeming with its own ambitions and its peculiar appreciation of the mysterious Mother, started off for one of their habitual rambles. Ivan was in a mood whimsically frank, but changeful; and he blew the conversation this way and that out of sheer wantonness, till presently it touched a point on which Balakirev suddenly laid a detaining hand. Gregoriev had been analyzing the character of Ophelia—the delicate, fantastic disorder of her pathetic mentality; and something, some specially delicate comprehension of this particular conception of the greatest poet, caused the burly Russian to say, softly:

"She is abstract enough—elusive, rainbow-hued enough, for your harmonies, Ivan Mikhailovitch. Behold a tone-poem ready to your hand!"

Ivan halted, quickly lifting his head, as an animal who scents something: "You think so?—An entire tone-poem?" The tone was alive with attentiveness.

"Why not?"

"Ah—a little too fragile—too—wanting in discord." A moment's pause. Then he broke out in another voice: "But you, Balakirev,—it is your idea: your theme. You felt it, therefore it belongs to you. Subjects borrowed—mechanically worked up—bah! It is the worst prostitution of art." And Ivan tried hard for conviction. Indeed it was quite true that he had no faith in other men's ideas for his own use. Yet within sixty seconds of contemplation, this theme had suddenly taken possession of him in a manner joyously well-known. Already the necessary contrast, the shadow-background of Ophelia's silver brightness—the melancholy of her Prince-repudiator, was tingling through him. Could he really relinquish it to the other?

No necessity for this, fortunately. Balakirev, bigger, perhaps, in generosity than any other musician of any time, known purveyor of ideas for men even smaller than he in accomplishment, forced Gregoriev's eyes to meet his. All was said in that look, though presently, with a slow smile, these words were added:

"I call you to witness, Kashkine, that our Ivan herewith weds the Lady Ophelia for the space of one month; the condition being that we listen to the manuscript on the night of its completion.—Nay, you shall not refuse me, Gregoriev. I tell you no subjects but those connected with Russia can fire me. You are bigger—universal. Take this tragedy, then, and write it again for us in music."

It was thus that the young man gained the most congenial of the subjects that were to fill his summer months. The second, something bigger, though hardly more complex, was another opera—already bespoken by several impresarii, and founded on a translation of Keats's "Isabella." Into this subject he grew, slowly, but strongly and with full interest, till by August the tone-poem was nearly done, and the opera well under way: he having worked his six hours a day assiduously. And these hours of occupation gave him courage to bear the other eighteen, in which he was constantly forced to face—himself.

Ivan had, indeed, been badly bitten by the snake of the world. The poison, entering his system long since, had spread, slowly, till his present weariness brought him wholly under its malign spell. Disillusion, disappointment, distrust—they worked in him till he was in a fever of pessimism, denying the good of the world. The newest maggot in his brain was a bitter over-appreciation of the fact that, while, after long years of scoffing and revilement, his work had finally come to some little success, that success was only popular, hardly in any way professional. This fact every critic in great Russia had taken pains to impress upon the public and upon him; so that, while solvency was now his, the butterfly of lasting power seemed farther away than ever. Ay, truly, the bad blood that ran in his veins was his only inheritance! Family had he none. This appalling solitude must, plainly, be henceforth his portion: neither man nor woman should he trust again.

So ran the black reveries; for he was in the throes of his second severe attack of "Tosca"—the Herzeleide of the Russians: that national melancholy, borne of barren steppe and dreary waste, to which every giant intellect that race has known, has sooner or later become a prey, from the great Peter down to the littlest Romanoff; and from which more than the first Alexander have actually died.

Ivan knew it young enough, and long. Moreover, it had now come upon him at a critical time, just as he was emerging into broadened manhood. His salvation probably lay in the fact that for his work, only, could he throw off the black mantle; for much of the time he was wont to labor at the white heat of what is called inspiration. His meditations, his analyses, were those of a mature mind, replete with human knowledge of evil and good. But because his belief in the power of evil had become tainted with morbidness, and because he governed the kingdom of his own soul with a rigid purity, the friction of the two forces produced in him an abiding melancholy: a melancholy abstract, almost impersonal, thoroughly Russian, and yet, because he was a type of the universal, all-comprehensive. By unhappy degrees his whole life, his every act, became leavened and tinctured with this melancholy, till it had risen to the height of his soul's acropolis, and invaded and overflowed—his work. Thus did it come about that the labors of the lonely soul given into the keeping of a yearning, lonely woman one New Year's night of long ago, came at last to reproduce for the world, in sound, the burden of the world. For who will deny that Gregoriev's music cries out with the dread cry of humanity in pain? It has come to be known as the Herzeleide of the Creation: the sorrow of the great, throbbing world-soul. And technique and conception had worked well together; for in this year both came to their fulness in him who used both wonderfully, artistically, yet always with the restraint that can come only through absolute self-mastery. It is the great reward of him who has made complete sacrifice of all things else: the act without which genius comes not into its own.

In the last week of August, the three artists left Vevey together: Kashkine on his way to Germany, for a concert tour; Balakirev to Kiev, the holy city of the Slavs, for inspiration; Ivan back to Moscow and the Conservatoire.

Throughout the ensuing winter he taught all morning six days in the week, reserving his composing for the hours of early morning and evening. After his midday meal, he came into the habit of taking long tramps through the streets of the poorer quarters, resting himself in little traktirs, finding unhealthy companionship in the patent discontent, poverty, and misery of the laboring class. By five o'clock he was in his own rooms again, and from then till ten he worked at piano and desk, a samovar bubbling at his elbow. Promptly at the hour, the new manuscript pages, beautifully finished, were locked away; and the piano closed. Then, in the shadowy corners of his bedroom, devils began to stir, and creep about, uneasily, waiting for their victim's nightly attendance at his own torture, where he was set upon in some one of their hundred ways. Fevered brain, weary body, tumbled bed; loneliness, regret, heart-hunger, unsated ambition; most of all a longing for loving arms to close about him, words of comfort and courage to come through the darkness that thrilled only to his own stifled sighs—thus the night, with its long dance of horned, fire-eyed beings, who held captive all his angels of mental health, faith, hope, joyous life. And so at last the presage of morning, when, for an hour or two, sleep would free him from the bondage of his inner life—that ugly prison, whose black walls were unbeautified by time, unsoftened by the clinging vines of memory; whose stones were but made darker by the shadow of the banner floating over all: the black flag of that "Tosca" that has unfurled itself above so many of the world's great.

Autumn bursts of rain had whitened into snow. Moscow was now a city of dazzling purity topped by steep roofs and domes of gold and azure and water-green, so filling the air with brightness that one minded less the persistent leaden gray of the vault overhead. But cold and grayness are bad companions for the morbid-melancholic; and Ivan took his tone from the clouds, steadily repulsing the gentle efforts of his friends to draw him from his dim retreat into sunny mental climes.

The holidays went by, and Ivan began to realize that a few more weeks would bring about a necessary farewell to two more of his brain-children. It was the 2d of February before the Ophelia tone-poem lay before him finished, polished to the last point of perfection. Another week and "Isabella"—Kashkine's translation, his own score—would receive its last stroke of the pen. Ivan waited till that moment came, then laid his two beloved companions side by side in their cabinet, turned the key, and left them there, while he fared forth into the frozen night, his brain at last as empty as his heart.

There remained, however, the fierce desire to place his children well. The Ophelia he carried to Balakirev and Nicholas Rubinstein, who sat over it one whole night examining, discussing, rejoicing at its splendor, its delicacy, the perfection of the reconceived masterpiece. Next morning Nicholas sent its composer word that he would play it at the fifth concert of his regular series, on the afternoon of March 4th. And Ivan was satisfied; for these concerts were the musical events of Moscow; and the new work was assured of a performance as perfect as he could desire: an audience as distinguished as it was ably critical.

This arranged, and one rehearsal—at which technical difficulties loomed large before both men and conductor—impatiently endured, all Ivan's mind was given up to considerations for the placing of his opera. Merelli, he knew well, was thirsting for it: would make it his feature of the next year's season. Should he insist, it would even be rushed through during the spring. But he was not in haste. Moreover, folly though it was, he had already, some time ago, begun to desire a petty triumph: a piece of retribution for the man who had more than once brought him dire suffering. He wanted unstinted praise for a new work from his old master, the implacable Zaremba. Since the success of "The Boyar" he could certainly not be put off with a hasty reading and a damning criticism of the new score. His peculiar style, many a time torn and ridiculed by Zaremba and the great virtuoso, had now been applauded by the entire Russian musical world: was beginning to be recognized beyond the frontier. Certainly it was no longer within range of one man's malice. So far, no ear but Ivan's had heard "Isabella"; no eye but his had beheld the pages of that score which, by the after-judgment of five nations, remains unsurpassed in the history of opera save by the music-dramas of one Richard of Bayreuth. Already, in his heart, Ivan knew the value of his work. But his nature, ever prone to self-depreciation, never wholly believing in his own power till another had assured him of it, cried out for confirmation of his secret hope. With the stamp of Zaremba's approval, Petersburg, first city in the land, would crowd to hear his work; and it would come to Moscow, to his father, with a double reputation.—In fine, on the morning of February 15th, a letter and a registered parcel left Moscow for the north, addressed to the Director of the Petersburg Conservatoire:—who was at present in a condition of nervous irritability that kept his every pupil in a state of petrified wretchedness throughout the working day.

Miserable Ivan! Zaremba too—even Zaremba, was in the throes of composition! He was attempting a work as far beyond his creative powers as are the harmonies of Wagner beyond the quaint simplicities of olden-time Scarlatti. Wretched Ivan! Relentless circumstance!—To this monster of vanity, vain ambition, malicious jealousy, went the masterpiece of an offending pupil.

However, happily, Ivan was not clairvoyant. The satisfactory close of his long period of labor brought with it a state of passive languor. A quiet numbness replaced the acute sensitiveness of his nerves, and made him for the nonce impervious to his devils, though it could not prevent his inner sense of loss. For the creator who has lived for many months in daily communion with the living creature of his imagination, cannot, if he work as artists must, but come into a state of great and secret love for his dream-images. The feeling is sacred, indeed; for what dweller in Philistia but would scoff at such a sentimentality as love for work, and unhappiness at its conclusion? Nevertheless it is true that, when the hour of triumph, the finishing of a long, successful creation is accomplished, and eager Philistia waits clamoring to enjoy it, its master knows well that his hour is over: that his good-bye must be said. His child, stared at, listened to, conned by ten thousand eyes, ears, or tongues, is his no more; cannot return to him; for it is of the world, and the dream between them is dissolved.

This had come to Ivan. His two friends were gone from him to other men. His whole being cried out for rest; but his heart was empty.

A week's desultory waiting, however, suddenly brought an episode that turned his mind in another direction. Nicholas Rubinstein sent him a troubled missive, asking his presence at the next rehearsal of Ophelia. Anxiety stared from every line of the brief note; and, after some hesitation, and a very bad half-day, Ivan presented himself at the Grand Theatre; where he instantly found himself the centre of an uproar. The new tone-poem was impossible. Concertmeister, head of second violins, all the heads of the other bodies, swarmed to him, each pointing out the various passages deemed by them either unplayable or unmusical; and, finally, the whole number came to an agreement of scorn regarding one fantastical episode—an analysis of Hamlet's yearning to know the mind of his father, and a suggestion of his own indecision and unbalanced mentality. This, a passage of some thirty bars, was universally declared to be contrary to every known law or license possible to composition.

To this superior, scoffing company of weaklings Ivan, always gentle-mannered, shrinking from argument or petty conflict as other men from a nagging woman's tongue, undertook, by rehearsing, to explain his heart's work. Had it not been for Nicholas, he would soon have left the field to his opponents. Upborne by the conductor, he did manage to endure two rehearsals. The evening after the second, however, found him, haggard and white-faced, in the old apartment, pleading with Rubinstein, in the presence of Laroche, to give the whole thing up, to strike his name from the programme.

Rubinstein stoutly refused; and, the more he was entreated, the more stubborn did he grow, till he had actually argued himself from a position of doubt into a mulish insistence that if they played nothing else that day, Ophelia should be properly rendered. Indeed by his yielding, Ivan had unconsciously brought about the thing he had in his own heart desperately desired.

At a little past midnight he left his former home, somewhat comforted in heart and mind. However, he went to no more rehearsals; and speedily gave his associates to understand that he wished the subject avoided; though he failed to notice that his wishes were also Rubinstein's. Nicholas, however, was harassed to a point of fury with all the world. Never in his life had he encountered such insubordination among his men. He set out to quell it persistently but tactlessly, regardless alike of the temper of his prospective audience, and of the highest interests of the boy whom he had taught, protected, and now unselfishly admired. He was perhaps more wretched than Ivan. For that youth had temporarily thrust this subject away from him and was dreaming day and night of his opera, and of the word that was to come from Zaremba; that word of absolute capitulation that should make the performance of Ophelia a mere episode, barely worth considering.

All too speedily for the unhappy conductor came the afternoon of his fifth symphony concert. By two o'clock pit and stalls were black with people. By half-past, even the boxes were noticeably full; and at that hour Nicholas Rubinstein appeared, bowed to the tumult of applause, lifted his baton, and drew forth the opening notes of the second "Lenore" overture. Ivan, very still and pale, troubled and apprehensive, sat in one of the stalls near the front, between Balakirev and Laroche, with Kashkine just behind: both of his Vevey companions having journeyed a thousand miles to hear their joint tone-poem. Never afterwards, however, could Ivan remember a single incident of the early afternoon. The "Italian Symphony," something of Glinka's, one of Anton Rubinstein's short orchestral commonplaces, were played with the usual brilliant finish. With the intermission came palpitation, a dry mouth, and a vague impression of Laroche's biting truths anent Anton's stupidity as a composer, and his strange influence over hard-headed Nicholas. Then there was one, last, terrible moment of dread, as the conductor remounted his daÏs and paused. Obviously he was addressing his men. More than that, he was pleading and admonishing; for yesterday's rehearsal had been a piece of wanton cruelty. But now the baton must go up, happen what might. And immediately the twenty-minute practical joke began.[1]

The orchestra played their tone-poem faultlessly as to notes. Like so many machines, the instruments performed each its allotted part. But, oh, Heavens!—the effect! Expression: fire, poetry, understanding—piano, fortissimo, crescendo, rubato—there was absolutely none. Never had thing so dead, so stiff, so hideous, so discordant, been heard in that opera-house. People stared, looked at one another, frowned for an instant, smiled; at length, tittered, openly. In all that great building, but one little group sat silent. Ivan and the three gathered close at his side, were like men dead. Long before it was over, Nicholas had flung his baton to the floor and left the stage; but still the orchestra went on—and on. In the silence following on the last chord—a silence broken by no demonstration, either of applause or of hissing—Ivan the composer rose, pushed his way to an aisle, and hurried blindly out into the streets. Thus he knew nothing of the remarkable sequel of the affair: how Rubinstein, an instant after the cessation of the horror, had rushed back upon the stage, addressed a dozen wild phrases of explanation to the house, and then, at the end of a sudden clamor demanding Ivan, turned to his men, audibly fined every one of them a month's pay, after which, once again rapping the desk with his broken baton, he drove them, cowed and shamed, into a twenty minutes with Ophelia that was destined to fix Ivan's orchestral fame forever with the Moscow public; for it was a quarter of an hour after the piece ended for the second time, before the people would accept Kashkine's frantic assurances that the young man was not in the house.

Utterly oblivious of the turning of the tables, wrapped, as by a shroud, in that dire silence, Ivan was walking—walking—out into Moscow, through the frozen streets, under the leaden sky, the terrible anger and rebellion in him fading slowly to a numbing stillness—a stillness as of death. Was it really by accident that, on his homeward way, he passed the post-office to which his letters went? Without hesitation he had gone into the building. When he came out again there was an expression of fear in his eyes, and his heart was beating wildly. Nor were his steps any longer aimless. Taking the nearest droschky, he directed it first to a chemist's shop, then to his own room, where SÓsha opened to his knock, and noted, as he passed, the envelope in his hand, across which sprawled Zaremba's old, familiar writing. But the pink package with its crimson danger-label lay hidden in a pocket.

Ivan sat at his bedroom window for twenty minutes before he found courage to open his communication. For the first time, doubt of his opera began to stir in his heart; and the memory of that other long-past day of disappointment, when Nicholas had found him in this very room, and had tried to hearten him, came to him as a premonition of doom. How was he to be heartened now—after so many more years of failure? Nay—with a half-smile, Ivan laid his recent purchase on the window-ledge, and slowly drew the letter from its envelope:

Slowly at first, then with more rapidity, Ivan read the letter through. Even after he had noted the signature, he continued to hold the sheet in his hands, while his eyes fixed themselves on some distant object. Two, three, five minutes passed. Then he placed the paper carefully on the table, dropped into a chair by its side, and seemed to meditate.

After a time, there came a clamor at the door of the living-room; and Ivan recognized friendly voices. Instantly he glided to the door, turned the key, drew the bolt, and returned noiselessly to his place just as SÓsha knocked. After a pause, the knock was repeated. Then the door was tried, shaken, and pulled. In vain. There came no sound from within. Ivan heard his servitor inform the would-be condolers that his master had evidently gone out again. There were muffled good-byes and so—silence.

Twenty minutes later SÓsha, dozing in his tiny kitchen, was roused by his master commanding tea at once, and enjoining him to let no one into the rooms that night. At the acknowledgment of this command, Ivan returned to his bedroom, to wait. Ten minutes passed. Then SÓsha came, set down the samovar and a plate of food, prepared his bed, and hobbled off to a quiet evening, a pipe, and the companionship of the old concierge who came up to sit with him nightly.

Meantime, SÓsha's master had not yet moved, but sat at the table where the water in the copper pot now bubbled merrily, his eyes still fixed on some far-off vision of night. There was about his appearance and his occasional slight movements that mechanical unconsciousness that is a strong signal of danger. For, when burdens grow unbearable, when one is taxed beyond that point at which nature sets her limit of endurance, there comes a condition of mental numbness in which men are apt for deeds quite transcending their normal natures. And this was the condition to which, by a long series of mistakes and accidents all similar in effect, Ivan had been reduced. Many years had passed since the time when, by the folly of a fortnight, he had been stripped of youth, gayety, wealth. Since then, balanced only by his little success of the previous winter, had come a countless string of disappointments and misfortunes, which, striking him always in one spot, had rendered him exquisitely sensitive. Now, in one afternoon, he had lost the fruits of eight months of sincere and careful labor. In his heart he knew that it was at last too much; and he felt himself driven, with a wild rush, down towards the valley of the shadow.

Tea had come; SÓsha was gone; he was alone with the night. The samovar hissed and steamed, comfortably; and to its accompaniment the man filled a glass with the amber liquid, tore the wrapper from his chemist's package, and poured into one hand a dozen yellowish pills. In the other hand he grasped the tea-glass. There was an instant's pause. He smiled and his lips moved. Then, suddenly, he lifted his hand to his face, gulped down the morphia pellets, following them with the steaming tea.—In that instant all his chains, loosened, rattled down about him to the floor. Brave man or coward, he felt a sudden mighty wave of relief over-sweep him. The set, strained look left his face. His eyes softened. Once or twice he paced across the room. Then he went to his arm-chair, threw himself into it, and leaned back with closed eyes.

The period of waiting seemed long. He remembered so much that he ought to have done: papers that should have been destroyed.—Still, it was too late for that.—After all, this languor was very pleasant. He was glad his eyes were closed. Back of them—behind sight—there appeared to be a most charming country.—What was it he must see there? Out of the silver mist there was surely a form emerging?—a creature slender, delicate, crowned with a weight of fragrant hair! Clothed in rose-red, she; and her lips were smiling, her arms out-stretched to him:—Nathalie!—Naturally he went forth to meet her, to melt with her into that radiant light. And there came a great roaring in his ears—the noise of many waters rushing. Ay, they were closing now above his head. He was down.—And so—night.—Oblivion.

There passed an endless time. In the darkness the soul of Ivan, ready poised, waited for the summons. No summons came. Must it indeed return within itself, unfreed? Yes, for the senses were stirring even now. Out of the void came a vague murmur of human voices—a sharp exclamation. Then blackness once more; this time complete.

Complete though it had seemed, when Ivan opened his eyes again upon the scanty furniture of his bedroom, it was with the sense of many days gone by. His head was iron-bound; his tongue dry and swollen; life a series of horrible retchings. After a time his dull eyes travelled slowly round the room. Kashkine was near, and Rubinstein, and two strange men. On every face was an expression of relief, of joy. Ivan marvelled at the reason. Then his eye encountered the table, and he thought he knew. For there, in a pile, lay the manuscript pages of his opera; to recover which, indeed, Balakirev had, during the five-day battle with death, journeyed to Petersburg and told his tale to the frightened Zaremba. But this and certain other things—the fact that there were men in the world who loved him, and a place in the world that demanded him, Ivan was to learn by faint degrees, and with some sardonic humiliation.