Margaret Horton Potter

“ A smile of self-forgetfulness, of an enthusiasm that betrayed the beauty of her royal soul, shone upon the lips and from the eyes of this true Princess, as Ivan, his heart beating to suffocation, fell impetuously upon one knee before her and raised her frail hand to his lips.
It was indeed his début in the Russian world of music; and alas! it gained for him fewer friends than enemies. For, of all types of men and women upon earth, those into whom Euterpe has breathed her spirit, are certainly the most practised in envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness. ”

“ Madame Dravikine, Nicholas, Zaremba, and old Sósha: ay, even pallid Joseph, too, lurking behind a little group of brethren of the spirit: in life unknown; in death beloved. There was Mozart the beautiful; Beethoven, of lion-mien; Schumann, Schubert, Wagner the tempestuous, and the melancholy Pole. But none of them approached him closely, yearn as he might for welcome from them, his familiars. Nor did Sophia's sweet seriousness brighten.
"Mother, what is it?" he whispered. "Why are we waiting?"
"For a decision, Ivan. You have come to us before your time." ”

“ 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.
The chronicle of a human life can never do justice to nature; for the reason that, for every man and woman, there come long periods of quiet labor or inaction when for months, perhaps years, scarce one untoward incident comes to break the slow routine of existence. ”

“ Words, tone, appearance, moved the son intensely; for never before had man beheld Michael Gregoriev show such stress of emotion. Never had any hour so clearly revealed the ravages of mad living and secret unhappiness.
True, the fierce eyes could flash as of old; the voice would presently once more ring harsh and servant and equal alike would cringe before him; for still he held half Moscow in the iron grip of his terrible omniscience. But Ivan noted the color of his hair—that dead white that is not the snow of years but the ashen colorlessness borne of continuous nervous strain. ”

“ Kashkine and Balakirev, each one hard at his own work; but delighted at the opportunity of drawing Ivan a little out of his melancholy. In time, indeed, they came to think it banished, and the young man at peace. He was merely gathering strength to renew his battle: that intangible fight against circumstance and his own nature that has been waged by every fine and sensitive soul since the world began, and Abel bethought him of his lamb-offering. Meantime, Ivan's secret but ardent desire to work again worthily was fulfilled on a day that was to become one of the vividest of his memories. ”

“ Endless as the Russian winter seems, there does, at length, when hope is dormant, come that quickening of nature when the green steppes break through snowy coverlets, when swelling buds burst the last, thin ice-films from the branches, and the melancholy peasant-chants come nearer to the major key than at any other season. Now, also, was the time when young blood rushes like sap through the veins, and artists' dreams turn, irresistibly, to the greatest of their subjects. On such a day it was that Joseph Kashkarin and Irina Petrovna came for the first time face to face. ”

“ Never, in truth, was young workman more modest than the Gregoriev of that day. But he had the grace to appreciate his friendships, and to cling to them as if he understood, even then, from what blackest depths of depression and melancholy they were, by-and-by, to rescue him!
Looking back upon the early days of his musical life, it was, as a matter of fact, to the occasion of the formal opening of the Conservatoire that Ivan pointed, as marking the real beginning of his prolific career. Yet, for years after that night, he could not recall it without a twinge of bitterness. ”

“ I see, I feel, I create! Color is life to me: form is the bread of my soul! But I cannot get beyond my body. Hunger and cold and fever—then all the visions go!—The soul of an artist, mated with the existence of a serf!—Almighty God! Do me justice at last, and free me from this useless torture of life!"
Once more carried beyond himself by this fragmentary outpouring of his long and unsuccessful battle, Joseph sank back on his pillows, weak and shaken, but evidently at the end of his confession.
Ivan was deeply moved; and in more ways than one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am widowed; and the first numbness of the unexpected shock has not left me yet. I can say to you truly, cousin, that I love you: that the comradeship we have known is something which I shall try to continue while we both live: though we are far beyond our twenties now, Ivan. But more than this, more than pure friendship, seems to me impossible. Marriage—even though it be with the love of my girlhood—is still half-terrible to me. ”

“ She could smile, that dying one, in her great wisdom, at this passionate repudiation of the balm of time. To her, it appeared, the secrets of the dead had been already revealed. "You are still very young, dear boy. None of us of the world can escape this pain of parting. 'Death is the last enemy that shall be overcome.' The time is not long, Ivan, before you will take on man's full estate. Shall you remember then what I, your mother, have suffered—through a man?—through your father, Ivan?" ”

“ It was this feeling which had generated that deep, all-pervading sense of injury, that anger with and distrust of the Almighty, that had thrown Ivan into his revolt. And who was to explain why we are left in the world without any knowledge of whence and whither; knowing only that from birth till death we are surrounded by evil:—evil rewarded; good defiled, disgraced; yet mankind still under the command of man and of God to walk straightly, in fear of promised damnation? It was the question he had asked in his "Tosca Symphony": that symphony of helpless, human wonder and sorrow. ”

“ The form upon the couch had neither moved nor given any sign of life; yet body and soul still held together. The mind was only sunk into a stupor of complete unconsciousness. When it was that the change began, none could have determined. After a few moments of a faintly visible fluttering of the breath, a wider parting of the lips, the feeble movement of a finger, Ivan's eyes suddenly flew wide open, his jaw relaxed and dropped. ”

“ Ostrovsky, the librettist, was behind the scenes, still on his knees before the Menschikov, in a mad endeavor to obtain her promise to abstain from the French habit of adding an e to the end of every word.
Ivan, deserted even by Sósha, who had a seat in the topmost gallery of the opera-house, sat before his dying fire, enduring the last throes of that long struggle for recognition which, he believed in the depths of his soul, was finally to end, to-night. It is seldom, indeed, that there does not linger, however unwelcomed, one little shred of hope for the success of one's own work. ”

“ Later that night Ivan, left alone, dazed and tremulous at the fortune now hovering within his grasp, laid upon the altar of his gods his first fruits of success.—Long, long after, when the chimera had become a form radiantly real, Ivan looked back upon this night as perhaps the happiest of his life. That it should be spent in solitude, seemed to him most natural. It would have been abnormal to him to seek companionship in an hour of exaltation: desecration to drown the pure delights of the intellect in the artificial ecstasy of alcohol. ”

“ In the weeks dividing New Year's Day from the April of 1890, Gregoriev seldom left his bed. He was attended night and day by Piotr and Piotr's son; who saw, with growing alarm, how slowly the strength seemed to come back to him, and how little increase of vitality arrived with that quickening of the year to which Ivan had always heretofore responded so eagerly.
Through the long days during which he alternated between fever and debility, Ivan sank into a hell of the senses; and daily gazed with longing upon the still closed gates of life. ”

“ And though ordinarily the mother-sense would speedily have penetrated that awkward reserve, Sophia, herself all unaccustomed to deceit, was so fully occupied in hiding every sign of her own secret, that Ivan's reticence appeared to her only the reflection of her own. It was as natural, then, as it was unfortunate, that these visits, looked forward to by each of them as bright oases in an otherwise treeless desert, should also have brought with them their quota of discomfort and vain regret. Throughout each week, woman and boy alike hungered for each other. ”

“ By unhappy degrees his whole life, his every act, became leavened and tinctured with this melancholy, till it had risen to the height of his soul's acropolis, and invaded and overflowed—his work. Thus did it come about that the labors of the lonely soul given into the keeping of a yearning, lonely woman one New Year's night of long ago, came at last to reproduce for the world, in sound, the burden of the world. For who will deny that Gregoriev's music cries out with the dread cry of humanity in pain? ”

“ Like all of those few artistic masterpieces that approach perfection, the "Tosca Symphony" is popular alike with the many and with the few; because it contains something of the essence of all humanity: strikes a chord that must find some echo in the breast of every man and woman that has known the meaning of pain. But, superb as was the height attained in this work, Ivan paid dearly for its accomplishment. For, from the nervous breakdown that marked its conclusion, he never fully recovered. ”

“ Not one of them all but had once known Sophia Blashkov intimately: none but greeted Madame Dravikine as a familiar acquaintance of to-day. But, for the first time since his wedding-day, Michael Gregoriev felt himself slighted for that woman he had so long despised. One and all, women and men alike, they slid by him as rapidly as decency would permit, nor cared to notice him again, though, from far corners and discreet retreating-places, they bestowed on him glances that ran the gamut from curiosity to open horror. Not so did Sophia fare. ”

“ Ivan remembered with relief how, even under the influence of nearly a quart of vodka, he had gently refused Vladimir's generosity. From the very beginning, when, in his numbness, the future had been still unimaginable, Ivan's course had appeared perfectly clear to him. Cast out on all sides, by friends and family alike, he would be beholden to no one in the world. Starve he could, without a murmur, if he did not find work. ”

“ But those men and women who have dwelt all their lives beneath a sky of leaden gray, in an horizonless space of desolate, unbroken steppe; whose children and children's children must come into a heritage even heavier than their own, handed down from those first, hunted creatures who began the age-long battle with ice and snow and frozen hurricanes—these, alas! know well that the disease of Ivan was no pretence, but a reality, as grim, as terrible, as sullen, as the temperament of their peasant-brethren. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For, when the inner life is throbbing fast and strong, intimate expression becomes impossible. And above these two men, chatting about the trivial things of their existence, hung a black shadow of dread: a strain of waiting which, minute by minute, grew more tense.
An hour had passed, and the ears of both were strained for the faintest sound in the corridor, when there came an unhoped-for break. Less than forty-eight hours after the first news had reached her in Petersburg, Caroline Dravikine entered the Gregoriev house in Moscow. ”

“ Don't you know, Vladimir Vassilyitch, that most of us would be infinitely stronger men if we had to act men's parts?—Bah! How many thousands are in just my state to-day, except that, besides themselves, they have a wife and children to feed, clothe and shelter?—That might come hard! But if I can't earn my own living, I have no right to live at all. Why the devil should I pity myself?" And he gave a short, rather hard, laugh.
"You might pity yourself, Ivan Mikhailovitch, because you have just had three blows about as big as the average man is called upon to bear throughout his lifetime. ”

“ Indeed, as Wagner adored, and yearned to imitate, Beethoven, his diametrical opposite, so Ivan, tempestuous iconoclast, pored, year after year, over Mozart, deeply deploring his inability to imitate the simple, wearisome, weakly-flowing syrup of obviousness, which constitutes the secret of that master's popularity. So the two great men, each of whom must be reverenced by all the members of the other's following, found in each other, through the insistence of human nature, ficklest of contrary jades, none of the greatness but all of the faults. ”

“ There come to most lives certain periods of crisis, when the violence of shock drives away every commonplace thought or remembrance; when the mind seems a comparative blank, and time ceases to have any meaning. For an instant, or an hour, a mortal gazes out upon the void of eternity. So was it with Ivan, to-day. He sat for the most part huddled in a chair, lost in depths of the past, the strangeness of the present, the blank of the morrow. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ The whole wealth of Moscow would pass through those rooms during the next month. Only take the fancy of a wealthy man, or woman, and he might say good-bye forever to frugality: to his whole life of unrelenting poverty.
Ah, how he hated it, all those dreary little shifts that had formed the laws of his life! How he yearned, how he longed, for a month of carelessness concerning the state of his pocket!—But what a humiliation to ask for money—even from great-hearted Ivan! Ivan, with his new millions—why had he not offered something, instead of letting himself be dunned? ”

“ It may be said that it was not until after the ending of Joseph's weak tragedy that Ivan passed into his third, and final, mental stage. As a boy, he had known very intimately the inner buoyancy of youth, hope, and faith in the joy of life. After the marriage of Nathalie, and his subsequent precipitation, had come those wild rebellions of the soul, the violent protestations, the young and petted cynicisms, that are the inevitable accompaniment of the inevitable hour of disenchantment. ”

“ The grand Érard, which had been his one great extravagance, stood in the new studio between two high windows. And about it Ivan's new life revolved, dreamwise, for a time. Indeed, Piotr and Sósha and a handful of their fellows, used to weep with the weakly sentiment of age, as they served their young master in the rooms that had witnessed the long tragedy of their beloved Lady Sophia, who had been his mother, and whose gentle presence, outliving the wild individuality of her lord, still haunted the house for them as for Ivan. ”

“ And Ivan, who shrugged away the whole affair, found Monsieur de Windt perfectly right. Fortune had stationed herself at his shoulder, at last; and the young man did well docilely to obey her whispered directions. In a month, there were a thousand young men about town, far above the station of a Gregoriev, who would have given half their prospects for Ivan's present position. But the fickle goddess loves well to show her face to him who has never sought to lift her veil; and to Ivan, whom she had hitherto served so ill, she chose suddenly to shower with all the things that youth desires. ”

“ Who can say? who explain that perverseness of human nature which will not value what it has, but must drop it by the way to stretch out unavailing hands for the fleeting ungraspable? This, certainly, was what Ivan did; and his face came in time so to show the bitterness of his heart, that Joseph, rising stealthily from his unknown depth, dreaming of finding help from his once benefactor, twice beheld the depth of Ivan's habitual frown, and stole away without making appeal to the heart-hungry man who now, year by year, labored alone in his desolate palace. ”