an forward, fear in his face; but
Ivan, smiling at him, waved him away:

"It is quite well with me, Sosha.--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-ac