"Old fellow, I am giving myself a chance. I've a lot of expensive trash in these rooms that I sha'n't need now. I shall sell the greater part of that and make use of the proceeds. Most of the furniture here belonged to my mother. My own stuff was bought with the little money she left me.—As for the other affair,—if I had anything else in the world for which—my father paid, I should certainly return it to him, as I am returning this money.—You can't possibly understand my feeling; because you don't know—the man."
"Well, well! You see, Vladimir, that I should have some hundreds of roubles, in spite of everything. And that will be enough to keep me for six months, with economy. By that time I shall prove my manhood.—Meantime, I intend that one week shall see me settled in my new world."
Thus ended their conversation—and with it de Windt's last effort to prevent his friend from, as he considered, deliberately ruining himself. Yet, in the end, he did help Ivan, much to that young man's secret chagrin. And the little affair was managed so adroitly, that it was impossible to refuse the presentation of two hundred and fifty roubles which had been obtained in a perfectly business-like way. The rent of the young men's apartment, which was by no means low, had always been divided evenly between them, and payed, quarterly, to their landlord. Immediately upon the decision that Ivan was to leave this fashionable quarter of the city, a young ensign of the Second Grenadiers, one to whom both young men had taken a great fancy during the winter, offered to take Ivan's share of the apartment off his hands. As he entered before the 1st of June, he naturally insisted upon paying the two months' rent, which, however, Vladimir did not send Ivan until twenty-four hours after that quixotic youth had mailed his father a check for every kopeck of money saved by him from his large allowance. The rent-money, added to that accruing from the sale of his personal effects, which were extravagantly rich, was certainly acceptable to him, in his otherwise penniless situation; and, stiffly as he acknowledged the receipt of young Frol's check, de Windt perceived that he was deeply sensible of the kindliness and friendly feeling that had inspired the act. This was at least a crumb of comfort to the unhappy Vladimir; who had been overwhelmed by bitter regret at the series of misfortunes which now ended forever his friendship with the one intimate companion of his life. For de Windt, so speedily and so easily attracted to Gregoriev, was the most difficult officer in the regiment to know. This peculiarity, indeed, he carried with him through life: for from boyhood to death, he was always unhappily swift to read the meaner faults of men; and pettiness, hypocrisy, selfishness and vanity, were stamped, to his piercing eyes, upon the faces of ninety out of every hundred with whom he came in contact. By the time he had reached twenty-five, his inbred pessimism was so deeply rooted within him, that mankind, always interesting and to be studied as a theme, was to be fenced with, and generally avoided as a living entity. He rose in his time, did Vladimir de Windt, to be the Premier of Russia. But never again, throughout his magnificent career, did he find in the eyes of any man the clear truthfulness, the unselfishness, and the pathetic faith that he had known and so loved in his lost friend, Ivan Gregoriev.
The end of Ivan's brief and brilliant career was like its beginning: meteoric. On the 20th of April, a whisper against him whirled through the salons. On the 30th it had become a murmur. From May 5th to May 19th, Petersburg had stood, with open mouth, craning its neck to catch a glimpse of this monster of vice and crime. On May 21st, as Ivan walked from the court-room, every eye had been averted from him, every skirt drawn back from possible contact with that uniform which he had no longer the right to wear. By the first of June, occasional furtive eyes were seeking the chance to look through him once again; and their owners wondered what signs of shame and misery they should have the joy of reading upon his face. But, none of these eyes perceiving him, whispers began once more to creep slowly round: in a weak-voiced inquiry about the criminal. But, among all of those that asked, there was not one who received an answer; though it was not till the middle of the month that society, on the eve of departing to defile the country-side, paused for a moment to lift its brows over the discovery that Ivan Gregoriev would never be snubbed again. He had disappeared, absolutely, completely, out of the ken of his former world; though it took infinite repetition to convince everybody that even Vladimir de Windt did not know his address. Certainly Ivan had accomplished a very unusual thing. Living still in the midst of the world, he was lost to mankind; had vanished utterly from sight or hearing.
Yet poor Ivan's decisive action might have been more difficult had he known that, though his romance was over, there was yet to be a postscript to society from Nice—an epilogue, as it were, to the finished romance that had so inconsiderately turned itself into a tragedy. Princess Shúlka-Mirski, the intimate friend of the Countess Dravikine, had received a letter, written in the first heat of the news of the court-martial's verdict. To be sure, she tried to hide her real motive, by giving a brief description of Nathalie's wedding, and then introducing the delicate topic by uttering fervent thanks that her princess-daughter should have been preserved from marriage with that infamous creature—Sophia's son!
Old Princess Shúlka-Mirski had lived long in the world; and reading between lines becomes to some women as much second-nature as calculating the cost of a neighbor's gown. Madame Dravikine, then, had been shaken by the news. Although it was plain that she should always resent any accusation of him: probably even references to his name, in her presence, she had still not been able to refrain from inquiring after his physical health. And the reader guessed how she longed for full news of him; his reception of his disgrace; his attitude towards the world; his present whereabouts; and his plans for the future. In her own mind, the old noblewoman wondered how much of Caroline's odd letter had been prompted by the mental condition of Caroline's daughter. But she had the grace not to repeat this mental query aloud, in her world. As for others' thoughts—well, why should the ecstatic young bride, full of the delight of her title and the Féodoreff sapphires, take the least interest in the fate of a miscreant with whom, in the period of his success, she had indulged in an ephemeral flirtation?
Thus for nine days more they chattered. And then, as Tsarskoë-Selo filled, and the Nikitenko divorce proceedings came thundering down the broad corridor of scandal, Ivan Gregoriev, his youth, success, trial, disgrace and disinheritance, melted away into the utter oblivion of the twice-told, the old, and the stale.
Ah! Could Ivan himself have gained something of indifference! Could his senses, his jangled, shattered nerves, his bruised and bleeding pride, have acquired that callousness of stupidity, how well would it have been with him! But Ivan was Ivan still: high-strung, keenly apperceptive and receptive; his spiritual, like his physical, nerves, alive to every emotion, every pain or pleasure that rose up into his present. Only to a certain natural extent had he changed. The sudden violent revolutions of his wheel of life, had strengthened his character, though they had temporarily shocked both mind and body. His mental state, during the weeks immediately succeeding his change of residence, was one of blank depression. The hand of inheritance lay heavy on him now. The hypersensitiveness of Sophia Blashkov, during the months before his birth, reproduced itself, with startling similarity, in the youth whose sensibilities had been so sharpened by long pampering in the hot-house atmosphere of luxurious idleness; and an attitude of constant flattery and suavity from the men and women in whose eyes he was always haloed by a crown of thousand-rouble pieces. To-day, how different his estate! He saw his world now with the eyes of the outsider. And what a thing it was!—This stolid dummy, from which both tinsel robe and leering mask had now been stripped for him, exposing the brutal, heartless machine that had taken such delight in crushing a fallen man!
Metaphors such as these are stale enough: yet Ivan, in his soreness, concocted many an unlovely allegory, during those first days of his lonely exile. He had been at this useless occupation for some time on a certain afternoon in June, when all his soul seemed crying to him for a breath of country air. He was sitting in his single rocking-chair, by the open dormer of his attic-room, in one of the narrow dwelling streets on Vassily Island—the poorest quarter of Petersburg. Day after day had he sat thus, coming, by slow, rather timorous degrees, face to face with himself and his new surroundings. Just now his eyes were closed; but the noise of the street, in which most of the inhabitants passed the greater part of their time at this season, and the fetid smells of the baking city, came up to him from below, reminding him constantly of his neighborhood.—Ay, he had got his wish!—The half-gods had gone, indeed. But the gods—how should they honor such a spot as this by their divine presence? Nay; he was alone in a strange land. Alone, yet known to many, all too well! Deserted by his own class, how should the poverty-stricken creatures who must henceforth be his neighbors welcome among them one repudiated by his father and his nearest relatives?—Ah! In this last thought lay, indeed, the keynote to poor Ivan's mental state. All through the recent, dreadful weeks, he had held in his heart a hope, however faint, that there would reach him some message, some word, some hint, even, that she—Nathalie, did not utterly condemn him: had still for him a thought of sympathy and understanding of his reckless deed. But day after day had come and gone. The trial had ended. He had left his old haunts: had severed himself completely from all former associations; and without knowing whether the woman he loved—she for whom he had virtually ruined himself,—was a happy wife, a wretched bride, or—dead. Nathalie, like all the rest, had passed out of his life. And night by night he laid him down, clasping in his arms the gaunt figure of despair, before whose dread embrace courage and manhood alike fell back, wavered, and seemed to fade from him forever.