The Genius

by Margaret Horton Potter

But the young singer herself, it would appear, cherished no such protective vision. Her professional career in Petersburg was a brief one. By mid-May, a fortnight before the opera season came to an end, Mademoiselle Petrovna had left the company and was no longer available for pleasant little suppers at the Bellevue or the Courteliain. The matter of her going—and more especially its manner—formed a week's subject of surmise at the three great clubs. But the retreat of the charming débutante was not discovered. And if she had taken with her a companion, the identity of that person was a matter rather of surmise than of knowledge. For which reasons, probably, the gossip about the affair gradually ceased, though the subject that replaced it was common enough, neither spiced nor salted, but found, by more people than one, to be as indigestible as it was unsavory.

To be plain, June was at hand; and every officer in that capital of officers, was preparing for his ten weeks of annual drill and roasting in the camp at Krasnoë-Selo.

In considering the peculiarity of the army regulations in Russia, it becomes necessary, first of all, to take brief survey of that greatest and most dread factor of all the life in that Empire, neglected though it has been by every commentator and critic of civilized nations: a factor which stands first in the life of every Russian, from the highest official of the cumbrous governmental machine down to the humblest descendant of the serfs; both of whom, with every member of every class between them, lives, and for ten centuries have lived, at the mercy of that grim and terrible,—climate.

It has for some years been the custom among certain foreign nations, notably the great English-speaking mother and her rebellious offspring, to set forth, in various forms of print, many individual opinions of Russia, its people, and its government. Here all the scribbling of the quasi-authoritative, statistical variety has lately focussed itself, bursting forth in a very tornado of long-winded, vilificacious ignorance. Certain subjects may be suitable vehicles for the exploiting of this species of personal vanity. But of them the most incongruous, and the most abused, has been the great, white, silent, unprotesting land. Nothing about it, from its origin to its beverages, but has had to bear the brunt of outrageous comment, for which the justification proffered is usually some six weeks' summer residence in the capital, and perhaps one or two brief "arranged" conversations (by means of an interpreter), with an official of the third or fourth grade. Such the source of many a book; though the few English-speaking foreigners who have enjoyed ten or more years of residence among the Russian people, would be slow to make a single generalization anent that remarkable race.

In this class of writings, however, and even among articles of a better type, there is, strangely enough, nowhere to be found so much as a straw's weight of stress laid upon the relentless, indestructible cause of so many of the woes of a country whose struggle for the bare means of subsistence has been Titanic. Nowhere is there any analysis of the power that has won so many victories against the one implacable enemy of Russia: nowhere any suggestion of the million strategic coups by which a handful of feeble human beings have again and again defeated this gigantic force. Above all, has no one ever given pause to the unquestionable fact that, supposing Russia to be (what she is not) five hundred years behind the rest of European civilization, she has had but one month out of the other nations' two, in which to progress. If her armies be worse drilled, less hardy, than those of her enemies, it is because they live their soldier-lives for scarcely one-third of the year. And finally, the half-brutal, half-savage, wholly ignorant condition of her one hundred and forty million peasants, is due, not in any wise to the tyranny of mere kings and overlords, but to the relentless, never-dying, never-staying cruelty of that unconquerable ruler, whose abuse of power is to be stopped by neither rebellion nor assassination; and whose heart is to be warmed to humanity by no tears, by no appeal; by the lashes of whose frozen knouts a great people has been beaten into apathy, their brains deadened through physical suffering, their children's children bearing a hopeless heritage down to generation after generation of those who wage, from birth to death, their dreary, dragging warfare with the real tyrant of Russia, monarch unlimited and unapproachable, the Winter of the North.

It is, then, in this grim fact, that there is to be found the origin of the curious custom of the Russian army to take all its lessons in the art of warfare, together with all discipline, drill, and general training, during those ten weeks of summer when the daily parade will not produce a hospitalful of frozen ears, hands and feet. During the winter, indeed, only the guard regiments, quartered in the large cities, are kept at anything like full complement, the whole army of the line dispersing to village and farm, country estate and smaller town, whence, in the first weeks in June, they come pouring into the half-dozen huge camps stationed at various points of the Empire. These camps had all of them been designed by Nicholas I., and they serve his purpose to this day. Of them all, the most important is naturally that nearest the capital and, therefore, under royal supervision: Krasnoë-Selo, distant from Petersburg between fifteen and eighteen miles, and about half a mile from the little town of that name. Thither, therefore, Ivan and Vladimir were about to proceed, with their regiment.

Naturally enough every cadet, before leaving his Corps, was made aware of many of the facts of this camp-life. But its more intimate details, those making the existence tolerable or intolerable, were to be discovered only by experience; and, moreover, depended largely upon the name and the reputation of the individual, and the standing of his regiment.

Ivan himself obtained considerable information from de Windt, to whom camp life was by no means a novelty. Certainly the work would be hard, the days long, and the quarters the opposite of luxurious. At the same time Ivan, rather weary of his idle existence, looked forward with some enthusiasm to aiding his captain in whipping their company into shape. Despite the fact that their regiment was one of the few that remained in barracks during the winter, it was in anything but "crack" condition. Indeed, as its under-officers admitted, sadly, among themselves, they were living now upon their past reputation, gained in a year when they had led the camp in marching, and won the medals for drill and the spotless nattiness of their arms and uniforms. They had fairly earned their nickname of the "Imperial Dandies." But that had been in the time of Mezéntsoff. Since the day when his promotion had brought his adjutant, Brodsky, to the colonelcy, the regiment had retrograded steadily. And now, it appeared, they were about to reach their climax of disgrace. Already there were whispers in the air concerning the utter incompetency of their leader. But it was left for the first month at Krasnoë to reveal to the whole army the dire truth of the whispers.

Meantime, as the northern days lengthened till the night was a bare two hours in length, the great houses of the Admiralty quarter were closing, one by one. The city was filling with merchants, come down from Helsingfors and the various Finnish towns, for their annual holiday; and there was the usual invasion of ubiquitous tourists, whose dread of the Russian winter led them to visit the city at the dismal season when brown holland covers and fast-boarded windows shroud and coffin the corpse of the dead winter. In short, the season, Ivan's first season, was over. The imperial family were at Peterhoff. Tsarskoë-Selo was brilliant with arrivals from the cream of the court society, among whom, naturally, the Dravikines occupied a foremost place. The Grand-Duchess Helena, with both Rubinsteins in her train, had gone to Baden-Baden to drink the waters and listen to half a dozen summer concerts which the brothers were to conduct. Lastly, two young officers, Ivan and de Windt, were closing their snug apartment, and preparing kits suitable for tent accommodation. The younger of the two men, looking back over the happenings of his first winter in the great world, that first winter of his happiness, felt in his heart a pang of regret that those bright months were gone, carrying with them the great beautiful freshness which was so soon to pass out of his life forever. There might—nay, there should, be a hundred more winters, some one of which should bring with it events greater than any he had known. But never again would one of them hold for him a touch of the same unlooked-for delight, the same exquisite joy at the welcome of the world for him, that he had known this year. He wondered, vaguely, if his mother knew how all that bitterness of his birth, the sting of his father's whispered reputation, had been removed from him. And as he prayed that this might be, he yearned for one hour of her presence, of that unselfish interest in all that interested him; for but a dozen words of her gentle but unerring council, as he had scarcely yearned for her through the first days after her death. But Ivan was, at this time, little given to melancholies; and a laughing question from Vladimir in the next room, brought him back to realities and his man's work.

Thus, finally, on the second Monday in June, the regiment began its two-day march to camp; and bore the hours of unaccustomed walking badly enough to draw upon it the immediate attention of every colonel in the Corps. But its own colonel was not there to see. The senior Major led the men to their quarters; and it was not till they had encamped for four-and-twenty hours that Brodsky made his appearance in the luxurious double tent prepared for him at a little distance from the end of the officers' row.