he stories are true, after all--?" Then both men stood up,
shook hands and said: "Neshevna will tell us. She knows." ...

II

Pavel Illowski was a man for whom the visible world had never existed.
Born a Malo-Russ, nursed on Little-Russian legends, a dreamer of soft
dreams until more than a lad, he was given a musical education in
Moscow, the White City--itself a dream of old Alexander Nevsky's days.
Within sight of the Kremlin the slim and delicate youth fed upon the
fatalistic writers of the nineteenth century. He knew Schopenhauer
before he learned to pronounce German correctly; and the works of
Bakounin, Herzen, Kropotkin became part of his cerebral tissue.
Proudhon, Marx, and Ferdinand Lassalle taught him to hate wealth,
property, power; and then he came across an old volume of Nietzsche in
his uncle's library. The bent of the boy's genius was settled. He would
be a composer--had he not, as a bare-headed child, run sobbing after
Tschaikowsky's coffin almost to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in
1893--but a composer who would mould the destinies of his nation,
perhaps the destinies of all the world, a second Svarog. He early saw
the power--insidious, subtle, dangerous power--that lurked in great art,
saw that the art of the twentieth century, his century, was music. Only
thirteen when the greatest of all musical Russians died, he read
Nietzsche a year later; and these men were the two compelling forces of
his life until the destructive poetry of the mad, red-haired Australian
poet, Lingwood Evans, appeared. Illowski's philosophy of anarchy was now
complete, his belief in a social, aesthetic, ethical regeneration of the
world, fixed. Yet he was no militant reformer; he would bear no
polemical banners, wave no red flags. A composer of music, he endeavored
to impart to his work articulate, emotion-breeding and formidably
dangerous qualities.

Deserting the vague and fugitive experimentings of Berlioz, Wagner,
Liszt and Richard Strauss, Illowski modelled himself upon Tschaikowsky.
He read everything musical and poetical in type, and his first attempt,
when nearly thirty, was a symphonic setting of a poem by a
half-forgotten English poet, Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came," and the music aroused hostile German criticism. Here is a
young Russian, declared the critics, who ventures beyond Tschaikowsky
and Strauss in his attempts to make music say something. Was not the
classic Richard Wagner a warn