The last touch to this tragedy was the sordid tinge of poverty.  The wretched man alone in Switzerland was without means.  Now Frau von Meck, with great secrecy, offered him an annual income of 6,000 rubles—­about $4,500—­purely in payment, she said, of the delight his music had given her.  He accepted a gift so graciously and gracefully made.  Tschaikovski was thenceforth an institution fully endowed.

Modeste says that without this relief from anxiety Tschaikovski would have died.  He wrote to the benefactress:  “Let every note from my pen henceforth be dedicated to you.”

This was not the first time she had aided him.  A strange, notable woman, she; a true phenomenon—­or a phenomena, as one would be tempted to say who had even less Greek than I or Shakespeare, if such an one exist.

Nadeschda Filaretovna, being poor, had married a poor railway engineer; they lived carefully, and raised eleven children.  A railroad investment brought them a sudden wealth, soaring into the millions.  In 1876 she lost her husband, but all of the children and the riches remained to keep her busy.  She lived in almost complete seclusion.

Tschaikovski’s strenuous music penetrated her solitude and her heart.  The stories of his small income touched her.  She planned schemes to fill his purse, ordering arrangements of music and paying for them munificently.  Yet she would not receive the composer personally, and when they met in public they did not speak or exchange a glance.

In Du Maurier’s perfect romance, Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess of Towers lived their hearts out in a dream-world.  So Frau von Meck and Peter Iljitsch lived theirs in a letter-world.

In 1877, before his marriage, learning of his financial troubles, she had offered to pay him well for a composition.  He had said he could not conscientiously degrade his art for a price.  So she paid his debts to the extent of three thousand roubles.  This he could accept.  These theories of art!

It was to her that he unburdened in his letters the wild scheme of his marriage.  It was to her that he poured out his soul in endless letters not yet publishable entire.  Their life apart seems to have been continued to the end.  During his last years, after a period of travel, he lived almost a hermit, dying in 1893, only three years over fifty.  Whatever posterity may do with his music, he has left a life-story of strange perplexities, in which apparent frenzies of effeminacy and hysteria, of passionate terror and helplessness at self-control fall in strange contrast with the temper of his music, which at its gentlest is masculinely gentle and at its fiercest is virile to the point of the barbaric.

I am haunted by the vision of that poor Antonina Ivanovna, helpless to keep silence in her love, and winning her bridegroom only to find, like Elsa, that her Lohengrin could not give her his Heart.  And almost more harrowing is the vision of the composer, with womanish generosity, giving himself to the one that asked, and finding that love cannot follow the mere placing of a wedding-ring.  So he stands in the icy river, and its gloom and cold are no more bitter than the despair in his own mad heart.  It is Abelard and Heloise without the love of Abelard or the joy Heloise knew for a while at least.