"Grigory, I think the Colonel needs your assistance. He is indisposed; and you would do well to get him a drink of vodka."
The man, to whom the whole progress of recent events was perfectly well known, forgot his salute, and stood, open-mouthed, staring after this incomprehensible young man. It was five minutes before he entered his chief's tent with the liquor, and found there matter enough to double his perturbation. What in the world had been done to change that bawling, swearing, furious and malignant man, who had ordered a subordinate to his tent with a manner spelling disgrace to the unhappy offender, into this broken, white-faced, tremulous, sweating creature, who actually thanked his servant for service done: a thing which, during Grigory's four years of service, had never happened before?
If the Colonel's orderly asked himself this question and found no answer to it, how much more did the matter puzzle the other men and officers of the Second Grenadiers, and, gradually, as the change in Brodsky and his regiment became known, the entire camp? To the Colonel's relieved astonishment, he met with neither avoidance nor taunts from his superiors; nor yet any special disdain from his inferiors. Ivan, acting up to his own standard, had told the secret of that interview to no one, not even de Windt, who, however, brooded over his silence as an injustice. Indeed, if the truth were known, Gregoriev was strangely regretful of his behavior towards his chief. True, he had had no choice; and he had saved a woman from infamy. But his shame at the deeds of his father had marred his life for so many years, that the consciousness of having adopted his father's method, though in an unselfish cause, depressed him unaccountably. And, even had he known, at the time, how bitterly he was afterwards to rue his silence, it is probable that he would have acted again in precisely the same fashion.
From this time forth, however, his standing in the regiment rivalled that of its former commander, now General of their brigade. Not a man nor an officer there but gave him the whole credit for that change for the better which had begun in the Colonel on the day after his first, plucky interview, and which grew, steadily, throughout the summer, till, at a last dress-parade, held in the presence of the Czar, the Second actually captured the Iron Medal for drill—which gave them the third place in their army division. Brodsky, when he had nothing else on hand to occupy him, was a good officer, and strict to a point of tyranny with regard to dress and the appearance of his regiment. By the time of the grand reviews he should, had he had the least particle of generosity in his nature, have forgiven Ivan's victory in his satisfaction over his renewed standing in the army and at his clubs.
Meantime, the remaining weeks of camp life proved to be monotonously dreary. Ivan was not of the type of man to press his popularity and batten upon it. Rather, flattery, and the inevitable toadyism of weaker natures, revolted him; and he began once more to retire into himself, and to live again with dreams, which now formed themselves round any one of three topics: first and highest, his music, at which he had begun again to work; secondly, the sweetest of the three, Nathalie, of whom he thought as of some rare and lovely flower, not to be plucked by human hands; lastly, at first rarely, later far more often, round that girl whom he had come to regard in a measure as his protégée—Irina, whom he saw twice during the summer, and whose father, though he had paid two small instalments on his debt, had begun, (to Irina's secret delight, and Ivan's persistent blindness), to regard the handsome young officer ("whose father was a millionaire prince") as an excellent successor to the fallen Brodsky.
The one important fact of these weeks, however, and the one having most to do with the young man's subsequent career, was the time which he spent, in his solitary evenings, over his musical note-books. The absence of a piano sharpened his faculties amazingly; till, by the time of his return to civilization, an instrument was no longer necessary to him in composing. Ivan was beginning, at last, to know the faces of his secret gods; and to be not a little troubled at the anomalous position of an army officer, whose dreams and ambitions were all towards the arts of peace. How, indeed, was he now to reach the realm of these heavenly beings? For always, in the midst of his highest flights, there lowered above him, blotting out the gleaming spires of his Parnassus, the dark forms of those demi-gods into whose service he had been forced. And more than once, in his high solitude, Ivan heard, in the secret chamber of his soul, a strong voice of command bidding him leave this present life, drop every vanity of his existence, and set out boldly along that steep path that should lead him at last, through hardship and labor, to summits of the highest joy that can be known to human heart and brain. Then, puzzled and disturbed by his sense of the responsibility of his solitude, Ivan would perform by day his mechanical duties, and then hurry away, at evening, to labor undisturbed through the strange northern twilights, at his chosen task.