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After which betrayal of his mental state, the master leaped to his feet, jammed his ancient hat over his eyes, called out that his classes for the next three days were to take their instruction from Balakirev, Gregoriev or Laroche; and then, informing them only that he should return within the week, he rushed out of the building.
Next to the writer, Ivan's fancy locked itself with that of bullet-headed, homely, great-hearted Balakirev: a man who has been the inspiration of a dozen greater than he; who, for thirty years a pillar of Russian music, has let his greatest ideas go to feed the brains of those who have learned to stand towards him, as the public towards themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All the works of this time, however, are so peculiar in style that they remained in manuscript long after his death, and the general public are still unfamiliar with that which is probably the greatest, though no doubt the strangest of them all: the "Pagan Fantasia," after the first reading of which Kashkine and Balakirev, who were alone together, looked angrily from each other to the fire, from which nothing but the memory of their friend's dead face saved that composition which afterwards came to exercise so powerful a fascination over both of them.
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.
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