The only two teachers who did not indulge him were Pievakin and the teacher of mathematics, a cheerful hunchback with a pale distended face lit by a pair of comical blue eyes, whom the boys had dubbed “truncated cone.” The teacher of mathematics made Pavel feel his exceptional position by treating him with special harshness. As to Pievakin, who had begun by addressing the aristocratic youth with an embarrassed air, he had gradually adopted toward him a manner of fatherly superiority that developed in the boy’s heart a filial attachment for the old pedagogue. In order to increase his income Pavel had made him his private tutor, although he stood high in his class and needed no such assistance, and this summer, when the old man complained of rheumatism, he had caused his mother to invite him to the German resort.
When they reached their hotel the countess unburdened herself to her son’s tutor of certain memories which interested her now far more than did her unexpected rupture with the Polish woman. She described a court ball at St. Petersburg at which the present Czar, then still Czarowitz, conversed for five minutes with her. She treated the gymnasium teacher partly as she would her priest, partly as if he were her butler, and now, in her burst of reminiscence, she overhauled her past to him with the whole-hearted, childlike abandon which is characteristic of her race and which put the humble old teacher ill at ease. “He told me to take good care of my ‘pretty eyes and golden eyebrows,’” she said. “And yet it was for these very eyebrows that Pavel’s father disliked me.”
She had been the pet daughter of a wealthy nobleman, high in the service of the ministry for foreign affairs, but Pavel’s father, and her living husband, from whom she was now practically separated, had almost convinced her that to be disliked was her just share in life. Her parents and sisters were dead. She had a little boy by her second marriage, but she was still in love with the shadow of her first husband, and the son he had left her was the one passion of her life. Having spent her youth in the two foreign countries to which her father’s diplomatic career took the family, she deprecated, in a dim unformulated way, many of the things that surrounded her in her native land. She was unable to reconcile her luminous image of the Emperor with the mediæval cruelties that were being perpetrated by his order. She was at a loss to understand how such a gentle-hearted man could send to the gallows or to the living graves of Siberia people like the Polish patriots. The compulsory religion of the Orthodox Russian Church, too, with its iron-clad organisation and grotesque uniforms, impressed her as a kind of spiritual gendarmerie. Yet she accepted it all as part of that panorama of things which whispered the magic word, “Russia.” And now the sight of the Czar had rekindled memories of her better days and stirred in her a submissive sense of her cheerless fate.
Pavel was meanwhile putting the case of the Polish woman to Onufri, one of the two servants who accompanied them in their present travels—a retired hussar with a formidable moustache in front of a pinched hollow-cheeked face.
“Her highness, your mother, is good as an angel, sir,” was Onufri’s verdict.
“And you are stupid as a cork,” Pavel snarled. His sense of the desecration to which the person of his Czar was being subjected by mingling with people like the widow of a hanged rebel rankled in his heart. He worked himself up to a state of mind in which the very similarity in physical appearance between the untitled people with whom the Czar and born aristocrats like himself and his mother were compelled to mingle at a place like this resort struck him as an impertinence on the part of the untitled people.
Later when he lay between two German featherbeds and Onufri brought him his book and a candle he asked him to take a seat by his bedside.
“Why are you such a deuced fool, Onufri?”
“If I am it is God’s business, not mine, nor your highness’.”