I was deeply interested in everything G. said. I felt in it some new points of view, unlike any I had met with before.
He invited me to go with him to a house where some of his pupils were to forgather.
We took a carriage and went in the direction of Sokolniki.
On the way G. told me how the war had interfered with many of his plans; many of his pupils had gone with the first mobilization; very expensive apparatus and instruments ordered from abroad had been lost. Then he spoke of the heavy expenditure connected with his work, of the expensive apartments he had taken, and to which, I gathered, we were going. He said, further, that his work interested a number of well-known people in Moscow—"professors" and "artists," as he expressed it. But when I asked him who, precisely, they were, he did not give me a single name.
"I ask," I said, "because I am a native of Moscow; and, besides, I have worked on newspapers here for ten years so that I know more or less everybody."
G. said nothing to this.
We came to a large empty flat over a municipal school, evidently belonging to teachers of this school. I think it was in the place of the former Red Pond.
There were several of G.'s pupils in the flat: three or four young men and two ladies both of whom looked like schoolmistresses. I had been in such flats before. Even the absence of furniture confirmed my idea, since municipal schoolmistresses were not given furniture. With this thought it somehow became strange to look at G. Why had he told me that tale about the enormous expenditure connected with this flat? In the first place the flat was not his, in the second place it was rent free, and thirdly it could not have cost more than ten pounds a month. There was something so singular in this obvious bluff that I thought at that time it must mean something.
It is difficult for me to reconstruct the beginning of the conversation with G.'s pupils. Some of the things I heard surprised me. I tried to discover in what their work consisted, but they gave me no direct answers, insisting in some cases on a strange and, to me, unintelligible terminology.
They suggested reading the beginning of a story written, so they told me, by one of G.'s pupils, who was not in Moscow at the time.
Naturally, I agreed to this; and one of them began to read aloud from a manuscript. The author described his meeting and acquaintance with G. My attention was attracted by the fact that the story began with the author coming across the same notice of the ballet, "The Struggle of the Magicians," which I myself had seen in The Voice o/Moscow, in the winter. Further—this pleased me very much because I expected it—at the first meeting the author certainly felt that G. put him as it were on the palm of his hand, weighed him, and put him back. The story was called "Glimpses of Truth" and was evidently written by a man without any literary experience. But in spite of this it produced an impression, because it contained indications of a system in which I felt something very interesting though I could neither name nor formulate it to myself, and some very strange and unexpected ideas about art which found in me a very strong response.
I learned later on that the author of the story was an imaginary person and that the story had been begun by two of G.'s pupils who were present at the reading, with the object of giving an exposition of his ideas in a literary form. Still later I heard that the idea of the story belonged to G. himself.
The reading of what constituted the first chapter stopped at this point. G. listened attentively the whole time. He sat on a sofa, with one leg tucked beneath him, drinking black coffee from a tumbler, smoking and sometimes glancing at me. I liked his movements, which had a great deal of a kind of feline grace and assurance; even in his silence there was something which distinguished him from others. I felt that I would rather have met him, not in Moscow, not in this flat, but in one of those places from which I had so recently returned, in the court of one of the Cairo mosques, in one of the ruined cities of Ceylon, or in one of the South Indian temples—Tanjore, Trichinopoly, or Madura.
"Well, how do you like the story?" asked G. after a short silence when the reading had ended.
I told him I had found it interesting to listen to, but that, from my point of view, it had the defect of not making clear what exactly it was all about. The story spoke of a very strong impression produced upon the author by a doctrine he had met with, but it gave no adequate idea of the doctrine itself. Those who were present began to argue with me, pointing out that I had missed the most important part of it. G. himself said nothing.
When I asked what was the system they were studying and what were its distinguishing features, I was answered very indefinitely. Then they spoke of "work on oneself," but in what this work consisted they failed to explain. On the whole my conversation with G.'s pupils did not go very well and I felt something calculated and artificial in them as though they were playing a part learned beforehand. Besides, the pupils did not match with the teacher. They all belonged to that particular layer of Moscow rather poor "intelligentsia" which I knew very well and from which I could not expect anything interesting. I even thought that it was very strange to meet them on the way to the miraculous. At the same time they all seemed to me quite nice and decent people. The stories I had heard from M. obviously did not come from them and did not refer to them.
"There is one thing I wanted to ask you," said G. after a pause. "Could this article be published in a paper? We thought that we could acquaint the public in this way with our ideas."
"It is quite impossible," I said. "This is not an article, that is, not anything having a beginning and an end; it is the beginning of a story and it is too long for a newspaper. You see we count material by lines. The reading occupied two hours—it is about three thousand lines. You know what we call a feuilleton in a paper—an ordinary feuilleton is about three hundred lines. So this part of the story will take ten feuilletons. In Moscow papers a feuilleton with continuation is never printed more than once a week, so it will take ten weeks—and it is a conversation of one night. If it can be published it is only in a monthly magazine, but I don't know any one suitable for this now. And in this case they will ask for the whole story, before they say anything."