The Genius

by Margaret Horton Potter

CHAPTER III

THE GREGORIEV HEIR

The west wing of the palace in the Serpoukhovskaia sheltered two beings whose outward and inner lives, though divergent in every detail, were nevertheless bound fast together by the most powerful tie of nature and of law. But it was at the other end of the huge building that there dwelt the solitary offspring of this unnatural union, a boy now in the eleventh year of childhood, companionless, physically inactive, mentally over-quick, perceptive, and quaintly imaginative.

Despite the fact that solitude was as much the keynote of his existence as of that of his father and mother, many eyes were concentrated upon the development, spiritual and mental, of Ivan Gregoriev. Upon him had been fastened the hopes even of the Gregoriev serfs, who were as devoted to him and to his mother as they were miserably afraid of their master. An hour's observation was enough to make plain the fact that Ivan had in him not one of his father's characteristics. For this reason he was said to resemble his mother. But as a matter of fact this statement was hardly more true than one of the paternal resemblance would have been. The boy certainly worshipped his mother; who had been his one staff during that fearful and lonely pilgrimage of his through dark caverns of speculation concerning the mysteries of his own and his mother's isolation: facts of which he had been cognizant at a startling age. From the first, indeed, he had stood, as it were, apart: a silent, observant young creature, not morbid nor markedly unnatural, yet holding within himself possibilities not to be found in the usual hobbledehoy of his age. And though it is probable that, in after years, he felt his aloofness far more keenly than at the present period, it was in his early boyhood that his sense of it was most apparent to others.

That Ivan should, from the first, have been a lonely child, was inevitable, considering his parentage. In the Russia of that day sons of noble families were not often kept under tutors. They were more frequently sent to select private schools, where they would meet only their own class, till they were of age to enter one or another of the "corps" or academies, started by Nicholas for the noble youths whom he wished to officer his army and people the royal households. Young Gregoriev, however, had, up to this time—the new year of 1852—worked, studied and dreamed by himself under the direction, first of his mother, recently of his tutor, Monsieur Ludmillo, the son of a Polish exile, educated in France, and only permitted to re-enter Russia upon the death of his father, in 1847. This man, a gentle, melancholy idealist, like so many of his race, had early taken a sincere liking for his young pupil, nor found, as the years passed, anything special to complain of in Ivan's performance of his tasks or his obedience during their many hours together. Of all, in short, who had to do with the young Prince, one person only, and that his father, felt any displeasure with him. But Prince Michael looked upon his son with a kind of bitter, resentful scorn as a creature of his mother's type: weak in character, and holding within him not one of those fierce and reckless traits which the traditional Gregoriev proudly claimed for his own.

From the time of his babyhood, Ivan had lived in the extreme eastern end of the house—as far as possible from his father's rooms. In this putting of him away even from her own proximity, Sophia had shown the self-sacrifice of devotion. During many a night had the unhappy woman lain thinking of her child, hungering for the pressure of his young head upon her breast, his little body by her side, nay, the sound of his sleeping breath in the same room with her. But she was determined to keep him as unfamiliar as possible with the details of his father's existence; and only in this way was it to be done. By day, however, she lived in the room that was first nursery, later school and living room, making herself the companion of her boy in his every occupation, patiently, from day to day, searching his childish face for incipient signs of unhappiness or melancholy. But it was not until she was too familiar with his every expression that such signs began to appear; and then, through very over-intimacy, she failed to perceive the marks of those peculiar characteristics that had already begun to mould his nature.

At eleven, Ivan was tall and well grown, shapely of limb, delicate of hand and foot, large-eyed, clear-skinned. In certain ways his face did suggest the face of his mother. But the fine chiselling of her features was augmented in the sensitiveness of his lip and nostril; and for the rest, his eyes, that resembled soft, black pansies, and his jet-black, stubborn hair, that grew like a thick, velvet cap above his smooth forehead, were all his own. His hands, likewise, were such as had never been seen upon a Blashkov. They were white and hard, but pliable as rubber, their fingers extraordinarily long. In fact, they were hands for which any musician, teacher or virtuoso, would, had such commodities been marketable, have bought at any price. And this fact had early been recognized by Ivan's tutor, and by him eagerly seized upon and used.

Monsieur Ludmillo was hardly the typical lazy, effeminate, creature whose only interests in life were holidays and the society of such ladies as would receive him. On the contrary he was conscientious, retiring to a point of absolute self-effacement, and able to forget himself only in his one great passion: music. He was a Pole of the Chopinesque type: and it was in spite of himself that he gave his pupil, besides the regular studies, a very thorough grounding in the classical masters, taught him something of the spirit of Schumann and Schubert, and even permitted in Ivan's repertoire such bits of Glinka and Sérov as were to be managed by the boyish hands. Happily, Ludmillo had not lived enough in the fashionable world for him to endure the vapid floridities of the late Italian school; but there rose in him a secret delight when he heard his charge, left to himself, return again and again to the wild and haunting melodies of little Russia, Lithuania, and, above and beyond all, of rebellious, crushed, poetic Poland.

The instrument on which Ivan gained his first understanding of the art that he was to make his own, was one that had come into the palace upon the marriage of his mother. In the days before the complete stifling of her talents, Sophia had been wont often to dissipate the misery of her earlier disillusions in music. But there arrived a time when grief became too deep for such sentimental balm; and then the piano's painted cover had been closed, as she believed, for good, and the instrument, at her orders, carried away to the unused room where, years afterwards, Ludmillo discovered it and put it into some sort of order. Madame Gregoriev's assent to his timid request to have it moved to Ivan's rooms had been indifferently granted. But later, when, in the candle-lit dusk, Ivan and his tutor drew instinctively together before the instrument, they were more and more often joined by another figure, silently stealing, who would listen to the half-forgotten melodies of other years that were, for her, ghost-haunted, till further endurance became impossible, and she would leave the twain again, and, through the lonely night, weep away some of the still-rankling bitterness, the incurable smart, of her many wounds. Later, however, came days when the memories held less of sadness, and, in those rich, slow harmonies, she began to discern vague thoughts, faintest hopes that, somewhere, perhaps deep in the fire-heart of God, she should learn His excuse for suffering: be taught the wherefore of the present: receive that compensation that must exist, to balance the account held for her by eternity. In time she came even to think a little of the music-maker: that silent man to whom her own existence seemed a thing peaceful and fine in its absolute security from any form of want. She realized, through him, those other thousands in the world who had lived through lifetimes of conscious insignificance and unattainable desire, nor thought these serious evils. In short she was given a horizon whereon she began to see things properly proportioned. And there, at last, she beheld also her son, and all the possibilities in the future of those for whom the road of life lies all ahead. But even she, who knew him best of all, knew little of Ivan's inner self. She never surmised his strange consciousness of the mighty void within his soul: the aching gap that his life could never fill: the unspoken question that waited in him, fulminating, till he should at last demand his answer from the most high God.

In the face of such things it is difficult to reiterate the denial that Ivan was a morbid boy. True, he bore an inheritance from his mother. The life she had led before his birth had certainly left its mark upon him. But that instinctive sadness had in her been tinged with an inner joy: the joy of eager motherhood. And in Ivan this joy found its repetition in a vein of practical gayety. There were days when his mischief was as diabolical as one could wish it: when Ludmillo, tormented, was still brought to laugh at his piquant, irresistible nonsense. Nor was the boy without other traits of his sex and age. There were weeks when he was full of the wildest plans for his future career; being all for the joys of the physical, beside which mental labor was to play a most unimportant rôle. He would be an explorer. Siberia, North America, Central Africa, were to open before his determined efforts. Or the Celestial Empire might be penetrated to its innermost recesses by him in his undetectable disguise; and he was to come home by the caravan route laden with costliest treasures. Again it was all his wish to be another Nimrod: Indian tigers, American buffaloes, African elephants were to go down in thousands before his imaginary gun. While once more (this when his every spare moment was divided between Peter the Great and the Arabian Nights), he saw himself, at the head of a Cossack army, storming Constantinople and carrying away the most beautiful Princess ever enslaved in royal harem. And while the boy silently performed these great deeds, he was also engaged upon a few simpler, but more salutary physical feats in a neighboring gymnasium, whence he emerged with muscles fairly well-developed, and a hand and eye unusually quick at the foils.