His days were kept wisely full. At that time it was the custom to cram children rather unmercifully. But Sophia and Ludmillo together made saner disposal of Ivan's hours. He was made to know thoroughly what he knew. And it was their great effort to keep him busy enough to prevent a real appreciation of his isolated life. Their plans were made skilfully and carried out to the letter. Wherefore the fact that their end was not actually accomplished, could be charged only to the merciless quickness of the boy's own apperceptions.
How early it was that he learned the difference between himself and others, it would be nearly impossible to say. His mother, indeed, was probably spared the discovery of his knowledge. For he was reserved beyond his years, and a violent secret pride was his one unsuspected Gregoriev trait. However it happened, Ivan learned, as a very little boy, that only in his life was no provision ever made for visits to and from others of his kind. He knew that he had been left out of the lives of his class: that the young Mirskies, Blashkovs, Kropotkins, Osínin, visiting almost daily among themselves, never came to, never asked for, him. He even divined the one or two half-hearted attempts on his mother's part to obtain for him at least the occasional companionship of her own nephews and second-cousins. But what it was that hurt him so unconscionably about this knowledge he did not realize until after he had come into manhood. It was doubtful if even his mother, suffering for him, had a greater sense of unhappiness than he, in his blind sense of injustice somewhere. For to Sophia, ostracism had long since become a kind of second nature. But for her son it still had all the misery of perennial newness.
Nevertheless, despite the deadening of time, the mother-yearning over her child's loneliness never wholly left the poor Princess. In the case of the ball, for instance, if her labor for its success, if the care spent on its details, the summoning of Caroline from Petersburg, the unwonted extravagance of her Paris costume, had one and all been suggested by her husband, they had been carried out by her not for his sake nor for her own; but for the sake of all that it might afterwards accomplish for Ivan. Once she and Prince Michael were actually accepted, their son must naturally find his new place. Thus, for weeks before the event, she had seen Ivan, in her dreams, taking his place among as yet unknown companions: outstripping all rivals in brilliance and in popularity. And after the ball, though some of her dreary disappointment had, unquestionably, been for herself, the better part of it, also, had been for the child whose protector she had always been. It was almost a pity that she was so careful never to drag him into the shadows of her life. Had he once surmised them, the two, mother and son, might have found a companionship in sorrow that would mean more to them both than all their separate, painful pretence of happiness—or contentment.
Everything considered, Ivan saw much of his mother; and next to nothing of his father. And because of the apparent mystery with which the Prince was surrounded before his son: his mother's reluctance in speaking of him, the serfs' sign for avoidance of the evil-eye when the master was mentioned, even Monsieur Ludmillo's careful reticence on the subject, Michael came, by degrees, to play a foremost part in his son's imaginings: a part at once heroic and terrible. Ivan knew very well that his father was not a good man: that he frequently did hateful things that seriously hurt his mother. Nevertheless, there was a strong fascination about such a personality. Gigantic, fierce, wild, darkly omniscient, mysteriously terrible, he stalked in a mental lime-light through Ivan's dreams. His existence, in the boyish imagination, was more adventurous than that of any hero of Scheherazade. And perhaps the greatest charm of all was the fact that, in all seriousness, Ivan believed his father actually capable of most of the deeds he arranged in his thoughts.
The boy had been told of his father's importance to the Government; his power in Moscow. But this was a matter to be so much taken for granted that it brought little additional pride. Ivan's imaginary father had long been invested with greater honors than these. He would much have preferred a satisfactory explanation of the one point which troubled him mightily: which had filled many of his nights with unsuspected grief, and disturbed his day-dreams while he puzzled, anxiously, over known facts that had become too inconsistent with his beliefs for comfort. That scene enacted in his mother's rooms, at supper, on the evening after the ill-starred ball, when, at his mother's bidding, he had left her, knowing that she wished to keep him from questions that must not be asked, was neither the first such affair that he had seen, nor yet the tenth. He had left the room with hands clinched and his heart burning with anger: anger against—whom? what? The person who brought the look he could not bear into his mother's eyes; the thing that reopened those never-healed wounds he knew she bore within her. And these wounds?—the suffering in her look?—Well, he knew, well enough, of course, that they had all been made by his father! But the father of such deeds was not the embodiment of romance that he had created out of the stuff of dreams! There was, then, another; a reality: terrible, perhaps, but also despicable, and full of things so mean, so low, that he was hardly even to be hated? Already he could feel that hate was a strong passion, not unflattering to its object. But—a man who ill-treated women:—Incredible!
This was Ivan's immediate tangle. And, mercifully, tangle it remained for many years. Only by degrees so gradual that they hardly hurt, did he begin at last to draw away from the ideal, and accept, with whatever reluctance, the real. At the very end, the struggle may have been sharp. But this was simply because the idealized being himself seized and tore away his last shred of illusion, and stood, bare-souled, before the son who could only sit and gaze in horrified, horrible judgment.
It happened in this wise.
Through the years of his son's infancy and boyhood Michael Gregoriev, disregarding all thought of his child, saw practically nothing of the boy. He had, in his heart, some faint satisfaction concerning Ivan's sex, mingled with a fancy, gained after one accidental interview, that nevertheless, considering his tastes and traits, Sophia's child should have been a girl. Later, as Ivan began to emerge a little from utter childishness, his father had resorted occasionally to his school-room to search the little dweller there for certain longed-for signs of temperament. Not finding them, he once more put his son away, this time furiously raging that he should have been given a Blashkov heir. Nevertheless, because Ivan was his all, and because the Prince, to his own discomfiture, found himself constantly building careers for a successor, there came again a day when his wild heart turned one last time towards the boy, and, calculating his age, he was astonished to find that his son had passed the first year of his teens.
That summer—the summer of 1854—Madame Gregoriev, Ivan, and Ludmillo had spent at the Princess' favorite country-place, the tiny estate of Maidonovo, near Klin. Here, in the spot where she had fewest memories of the man whose name she bore, Sophia found that she could, for a few weeks, rally from the weakness, the premonitory pain and its accompanying dread which had lately found definite place in her life. Here the summer skies were of Italian blue; the bells rang through air liquidly golden, perfumed, rich with the murmur of insect life. And here the three, mother, son, and their quiet companion, walked the country-side, watching, first, the hurried sowing, fostering and reaping of the brief-seasoned crops, and then the mad Russian festivals which terminate the frightful summer labor. This year marked itself especially in Ivan's mind; because it was the first in which he began to be haunted by unremembered harmonies and melodies that throbbed again and again across his brain till he would rush, in a frenzy, to the piano, and play them swiftly away as one ridding himself of a torment. And it was at this time rather a misery to him than a delight that, within a few hours, they were always back again, driving him to continued pondering over strange mysteries of tone.