The Genius

by Margaret Horton Potter

To the indignation of the prima-donna, however, the Menschikov, who, in the end, had risen to no small heights in her interpretation of the hapless Marie, was allowed to retain the rôle. But Ivan had the relief of seeing Finocchi of the hopeless ear replaced by Limpadello, through whom the quartet was now firmly united and became the sensation of the whole, sensational piece.

In the eight weeks of January and February, the opera was given eleven times. During the latter month the St. Petersburg company began to rehearse it; and at the end of March, on the Monday after Easter—one of the great nights of the year—Ivan and Ostrovsky sat together in a stage-box, watching the delight of one of the most magnificent audiences ever assembled in the Grand Theatre. The performance was as faultless as a performance can be made; and, as a final compliment to the composer, his own "nature ballet" was performed, with Mademoiselle Ellsler, who had come from Vienna for the purpose, in her already famous pas seul of the Butterfly. Before the last curtain descended, Ivan had been forced upon the stage beside his companion, to respond to the frantic plaudits of the men and women who, a few years before, had turned from Ivan Gregoriev as from one accursed.

After the opera there was still a long and hilarious supper, given by Merelli, to be endured; and when, an hour or two before dawn, Ivan finally reached his rooms, he found upon his table a sealed envelope, unaddressed. Opening it, there fell to the floor a packet of notes for two thousand roubles, together with a little slip of paper containing, in his father's writing, the words:

"You have deserved this; but I do not wish to see you."

The wish was obeyed. But the money, after some hesitation, Ivan spent.

Final success after long and bitter waiting is apt to prey curiously on the human character. Ivan took his oddly enough. His intimate friends—the only people to whom hitherto he had showed common civility, became first amazed, then chagrined, finally infuriated, by his sudden change of front. By swift degrees he ceased his intimacy with them all: Laroche, Kashkine, Balakirev, nay, Nicholas himself. And by mid-April he found himself scarcely on speaking terms with one of them.

Angered, hurt as these men were, they naturally put Ivan's behavior down to a sudden turning of the head. One only of them all, and he, had they but known it, the most deeply hurt, failed to censure, and guessed at something like the truth: that the young man, suddenly weary of his long term of unceasing labor at his profession, was seeking temporary playmates from another sphere.

In this spring of 1868, Ivan was nearly eight-and-twenty years of age. In knowledge of the gray and ugly sides of life, he was twice as old. Only in experience of the frivolities of existence was he deficient, his education there having been cut off in its heyday. It was towards this, then, towards young companionship and youthful pleasures, that his heart turned with irresistible longing. His former associates and their dry discussions and pursuits, the round of petty rivalries, the continual life of the shop, tortured his nerves. Music itself, his great goddess, became unworshipful, wearying to his very soul. Thus, repudiating her in a night, he set forth in all the glory of a cleansed record and a full pocket, to hunt for pleasure. His Conservatoire classes he changed from afternoon to morning; and, though he taught abominably, Nicholas kept the dire red notice from him by doing much of his work over after him, that he might be free for once to laugh with the spring.

The quarter to which Ivan turned for his recreation would have surprised his comrades not a little; and young Laroche would curtly have denied the truth that he had been responsible for his colleague's type of amusement. Nevertheless it was he who had been responsible for bringing Irina Petrovna and her brother to Ivan's rooms on the night of the opera, inspired, rather maliciously, by some faint memory of the old court-martial proceedings, and the long intrigue deduced by every one between Ivan and the girl. That night, after Ivan's recovery from his fainting-fit, Irina's brother, Sergius, had, on request of the young composer, given Ivan the address in the student quarter where he and his sister were living. Old Petrov was dead. Irina had freed herself long ago from her Petersburg connections; and now she was keeping up two rooms on ten roubles a month, while her brother finished his medical course at the university.

On the morning after the opera, brother and sister discussed the vague possibility of Ivan's visiting them. Irina had no difficulty in hiding from Sergius just how much the hope meant to her; but there was no idea of concealing the same thing from herself. As the days passed and Ivan did not come, she grew almost frightened at her own disappointment, discovering only now, perhaps, that there could never be any other man in her life who could make her feel the extremes of emotion. In two weeks she had gone through every stage from eager expectation to apathy; and then, suddenly, during the last, vague flicker of dying hope—he came; and her life grew red again. She was even content that he should evince most interest in men—her brother and the fellow-students that thronged their rooms at all hours. Of these, one and all regarded the visitor as a great and wealthy personage; and yet none could long remain unfriendly before the gay simplicity which speedily made Ivan as one of them. By rapid degrees their intercourse became intimate; and Ivan believed that their minds, their dreams, their trials, were as open to him as his to them. If they were not, if their secret hopes and the all-powerful reason for their community spirit remained sedulously concealed, this was, in truth, still greater proof of their friendship for him; for there were few of the hated upper class that they would have scrupled to use in their own way for their own purposes.