THE CORPS OF CADETS
In the old, feudal days of quick-spilled blood and easy death, there was
a certain fateful, epoch-making cry which had power to carry dread or
terror through the high ranks of the official world, while it brought to
others exultant hopes of desires and ambitions at last to be fulfilled.
It was a cry of life and of death, of the ending of one rule, the
beginning of another, consisting of two phrases from which nations took
their being; which were cried aloud by men in robes of mingled black and
white and punctuated by the breaking of a black, the flourishing of a
white, wand. It is the cry with which history ends and begins: "Le Roi
est mort! Vive le Roi!"
Now Russia, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was almost Europe
in the sixteenth. It was on February 18, 1855, that the reign of the
Iron Czar actually came to an end. But the news of his death was made
public in Moscow only two days later. For forty-eight hours the sudden
closing of that rule, which had been as sombre, as turbulent, as
tyrannical as that of any Borgia or Medici, was concealed from the
nation. But the morning of the twenty-first found the petty-official
world, risen early from sleepless unrest, pushing aside its early tea to
re-read the unexpected bulletin from the Hermitage.
High and low, from the Minister of the Interior to the humblest customs
inspector, waited, trembling, for the readjustment. But Michael
Petrovitch Gregoriev, who, it might have been thought, had good cause
for apprehension, came down from his bedroom at the usual hour, shut
himself into his sanctum, sat down to stare thoughtfully at a certain
portion of his hieroglyphic map, and then, with a deep, relieving sigh,
fared vigorously forth to the day's officialdom.
And it soon appeared that Monsieur Gregoriev's confidence was justified.
More yet, special favor was shown him. He passed his summer in a long
and important journey through Southern Russia, travelling especially
through battle-scarred Crimea, and, returning with his report to Moscow,
found awaiting him that for which he had vainly intrigued for years.
Thus his wife was hastily summoned from her retirement at Baden-Baden,
where she had been joyously living with Ivan and her sister; and she
returned, drearily, to Moscow, to receive a blow she had never thought
to dread.
It was again the evening of October seventh when Ivan, called from the
quiet festivity he was enjoying with his mother and Ludmillo, followed
Piotr unwillingly into the presence of his father, who awaited him in
his official room. Left alone at the closed door, Ivan entered, slowly,
and was motioned to a seat opposite his father at the paper-piled table.
For a moment or two Michael regarded him thoughtfully. Then all at once
he cried out: "_You_ my son! God! What a baby it is!"
Ivan's face flamed and his lips twitched; but, in the end, he held his
tongue. After all, did it matter what this man said?
Michael, watching him, and in some measure reading his thought, let his
face soften again. "Well, it may be better that way. Listen,
Mikhailovitch! I have done for you what has been done for no Gregoriev
before. You are to be pushed up the ladder. You're to be deostracized.
In the end, you'll find that Petersburg will receive you. They must; for
at last I've obtained your commission in the Cadet Corps: something
that none of our race has ever had. I tried, of course, for the Pages,
but that they wouldn't give. Nevertheless, you'll come out an ensign of
the line, and I can buy your lieutenancy in a guard regiment within the
month. You understand?"
Michael paused, and fixed his keen eyes on the boy who was now on his
feet, motionless, his brows knitted. He was a little bewildered by the
unexpectedness of the thing. Yet he did understand--tumultuously, what
that great news meant.
"When do I leave here?" he asked, presently, in a voice that was strange
to him.
"In one week--to the day. There are preparations to be made. You go like
the Prince you are. Christ! If _I_ had had the chance!"
This last, muttered exclamation, Ivan scarcely heard. He was still
staring down at the table, trying to readjust himself, to resolve his
thoughts into either joy, or--more difficult--regret. The silence seemed
longer than it was. Then Ivan looked up, silently asking permission to
go. But he found his father's unholy eyes fixed on him, and
instinctively he shrank backward, trying to cover his naked soul from
that piercing vision.
"Wait! I've not finished yet. I want you to see just what I'm giving
you. I want you to understand the start you're getting. Do you realize
that, unless you make an unholy fool of yourself, within four years all
Petersburg will be open to you? At twenty you will penetrate to those
places to which I--_I_, with all the--experience, and the intimate
knowledge I've got, shall never be admitted. I can buy commissions for
you in any regiment. But in the end I don't intend you for the army. Oh,
if I could have started you in the Pages Corps! Still, your advance is
certain. And this is my first, middle, and last advice to you: walk
instantly to the very centre of the first high intrigue that presents
itself--everywhere. You'll find them even at the Corps--in your first
year. For in Russia, Ivan, a full comprehension of that great game means
power. Understand, the utterance of such a sentiment would mean Siberia.
But this young Alexander is simply a puppy. He's to be influenced by a
footman--by a serf! See that you reach him, then. Study him: learn him:
absorb him. Then find your own methods and stick to them; stopping at
absolutely nothing they may carry you to. It's the stopping, sooner or
later, that is the universal mistake: the mistake I've never made--else
I should have been in the gutter yet. You begin, Ivan, where I end. I
see no limit for you. Petersburg will hold more than one empty
portfolio. But you must not look below the highest. Take the Interior
for yourself. To-night, Ivan, I, your father, make you Premier of
Russia. Am I so careless of my son?"
Once more Michael's gloomy, flashing eyes were fastened upon Ivan's
uplifted face; nor was he wholly dissatisfied at the unquestionable
interest he perceived in the boy's expression. Ivan, indeed, felt
petrified at the vista opened up before him. It seemed as if his
father's words were burning themselves into his brain. And yet, even as
he waited, quietly, for the dismissal that soon came, these ambitions of
his father's for him were succeeded by something all his own: a thing as
yet only half understood, and held secret in his heart out of dread of
hearing it mocked or of finding it something common to all men. While,
then, the words "Premier of Russia" still echoed through his head, there
rose upon his inner ear a sudden note of melody, vagrant, sweet and
melancholy as the songs of the Steppes. Known song it was not, however;
but something unique, as were all the airs that came to him unbidden.
Under its influence it was natural that his face should change, and
soften. But Michael, imagining that rapt expression to be the result of
his own words, was well satisfied; and he sent the boy from him so
preoccupied with his uncomprehended gift, that the immediate prospect of
the new life faded, for the moment, into the dim land of the unimportant
Real.
This brief ecstasy of unsought happiness could not last, however. During
the ensuing days Ivan was obliged to banish dreams, and yield himself to
preparations for that change which, though it should have brought
something of eager anticipation to his boy's mind, was really invested
with an unreasonable dread: dread rooted no less in a presentiment of
his own than in the expression of his mother's face, the morning redness
of her eyes, the uncontrollable quiver of her lip. Sophia, indeed, had
received a blow that she was not to recover from. But the full misery of
her immediate future she could, fortunately, not as yet surmise.
The farewell between Ivan and his quiet tutor was somewhat pathetic. The
prospects of the Pole were, in their way, far drearier than those of his
pupil. He was an intensely shy man; and yet the thought of leaving the
home which had come so perfectly to suit his sensitive temperament, was
to him more calamitous than the prospect of finding and fitting himself
into another place. On the last morning, master and pupil spoke but
little. Ivan sat drearily strumming out one of the nocturnes of that
young countryman of Ludmillo's, lately dead but already hailed immortal
by a select few, Monsieur Chopin; and the heart-break in its strange
harmonies seemed to express all that neither of them dared attempt to
say. Fortunately, the strain did not last long. It was barely ten
o'clock when Casimir, having imprinted a kiss upon the hand of his
Princess, and actually left another on Ivan's scarlet cheek, was driven,
with his modest box, away from the familiar portal into the unfriendly
realms beyond. With him slipped away the first large piece of Ivan's
child-world. And the rest of it was not to be long in following.
Of the final clinging of Sophia to her child, the child of her
martyrdom, the man-child who must be relinquished now to the world that
called to him, who shall write? Torn mother-love stares not out from
paper pages, in the cold black and white of print. Poor Princess! She
was strong in neither mind nor body. Trained to a fashionable young
ladyhood of delicacy, vapors and graceful fainting-fits, there had been
little in her married life to build up fortitude and the courage to
endure unwelcome griefs. From day to day her little store of bravery had
been drawn upon, extravagantly. For in Sophia, fear bred no angry pride,
but rather a flat despair. And it had come to a point at last where even
the hauteur of her class would no longer suffice to cover the
humiliations of her daily life. Now that the final climax had come, it
found her quite denuded of all force, all strength, all hope. Her one
_raison d'être_ was to be removed, her single prop drawn from her.
Therefore she fell, quietly, with scarcely a word of protest, only an
instant of tottering. This the metaphor. To speak plainly, so complete
was her desolation that, outwardly, she betrayed nothing. Ivan was drawn
to wonder at it; but he left her, perhaps, with the less anxiety, being
too inexperienced in the ways of grief to worry as a woman might have
done over this attitude towards their parting. Nevertheless, the memory
of their last evening together lay graven so ineffaceably upon Ivan's
heart, that he recalled it clearly, in its every incident, during the
last hour of his life.
It was a Sunday--the evening of the day of Ludmillo's departure. Ivan
had been summoned to his mother's room, where he found her sitting,
rather wearily, he thought, before a table on which steamed a brightly
polished samovar, surrounded by the dishes of a tempting meal, devised
by Másha to suit the respective tastes of her lady and the young Prince.
Darkness had fallen an hour before, and the room, with its quaint old
furniture, tapestry-hung walls, and old oaken floor strewn with Bokhara
rugs, was lighted by three swinging-lamps that cast red reflections upon
the polished wood of wainscot and floor. Mother and son sat side by side
at the table, and, while they ate, made little attempt at conversation.
Instinctively, each was waiting for the other to speak.
But the inevitable talk, at thought of which Sophia's heart fluttered
till her breath was all but gone, was not allowed a natural beginning.
After a time there came from below the first of a crescendo of
sounds--that noise of muffled voices, long since familiar to the room.
As the sound increased, and the laughter began to be punctuated by
clangs of shivering glass, the woman and the boy drew closer together,
and began a hasty conversation, each trying to draw the attention of the
other away from that which occupied them both irresistibly. It was long
before there arrived any diminution in the unholy racket. But at last,
by some fortunate caprice, the party evidently decided to leave the
house for some place of public amusement; so that, at last, the great
palace was wrapped in its wonted, daytime stillness. And in the first
minutes of this, Ivan, as if he read his mother's thoughts, grew silent,
and turned to her expectantly.
His hope was fulfilled. That night, acting impulsively upon a
half-considered plan, Sophia, for the first and last time in her life,
laid bare her heart before her son. The boy listened in a silence that
grew by degrees from reverent interest to pity, from pity to horror,
from horror to absolute fury, till, thinking of the Gregoriev blood that
ran in his veins, he longed to tear from his breast the heart which had
been made to beat by the man below--that father whom he now saw in the
full light of truth. It was in that hour that Ivan put away from him
forever all childish things. His mother's story, so direfully heightened
by reason of all which she left to the intuition and imagination of her
listener, suddenly brought him to an understanding of true womanhood
that is the portion of very few experienced men. It seemed as if his
existence had been enveloped in all that was foul, and wicked, and
heart-breakingly pathetic in the world. And afterwards he realized that
in that evening was sown in him a seed which was to bear bitter fruit:
the seed of the Russian Tosca, that _Herzeleide_, which has stamped
every one of the company of illustrious Slavs with an indelible print of
melancholy.
Sophia probably did not realize Ivan's capacity for feeling or for pity.
Yet she had a purpose in the telling of her story. Ivan, a Gregoriev,
must be given the opportunity of knowing how a woman's soul can be
killed within her. Then, should he follow the footsteps of his race, his
sin would be upon his own head. Nevertheless, she used little art in her
tale, and she drew therefrom neither moral nor homily. Of what use
either of these? What remonstrance was there that could hold a true
Gregoriev from the pursuits of his maturity? At the same time, if Ivan
was what she believed him to be, he could read the moral as he ran. She
spoke from a bursting heart, and only in small degree relieved herself
by speaking. Nor did she mention their approaching parting; for
reference to this subject was beyond her. Ivan must divine what he could
of her feeling, or he must believe her callous in her great despair.
Meantime the boy had yielded one slender hand to his mother's clasp; the
other was tightly clinched. He sat bolt upright, his burning eyes fixed
sternly on the wall before him, his face pallid save for the two round
spots of flaming red that burned high upon his cheekbones. His heart was
throbbing irregularly. And in his brain, amid the chaos of broken
ideals, crumbled idols, and all the jumbled facts of his new
understanding of misery and of evil:--amid all his strange and vibrant
emotions, there thundered gigantically a series of magnificent minor
chords forming a motive over-poweringly climatic. It was the same theme
of "hope abandoned," which, nearly forty years later, was to open the
last movement of his greatest work: that "Tosca Symphony" which has
moved the whole world to wondering tears. Many times during the
succeeding years it left his memory, and he would try vainly to recall
it. But circumstances always rose to bring it again to his mind; till,
at last, recurrent pain had fixed it there forever: that world-theme,
which had its birth on this first Sunday of his sixteenth year.
It was eleven o'clock when Madame Gregoriev, worn out and trembling with
feeling, finally ended her narrative. It was midnight before she and
Ivan kissed good-night. During that whole hour, neither one of them
uttered a word. Ivan had sunk to the floor at his mother's feet, his
head in her lap, his burning hands clasped in her icy ones, his throat
contracting ever and again with the dry, gasping sob of extreme emotion.
Sophia, on the contrary, sat above him, her head lifted, her pale face
calm, her tearless eyes gazing off into some far country of her own. Yet
before their minds lay the same picture--that of a woman's woe: a petty
thing, the commonest of all affairs in the man-ruled world, yet hardly a
thing to be discussed. Some reverence, or understanding, must be granted
it by the dullest mind. So, as the distant voice of Moscow's great bell
boomed its twelve strokes, Ivan rose, slowly, as one still in his dream;
went for a moment into the mother-clasp; and then, still without
speaking, turned to pass, for the last night, down the corridor leading
to the distant wing in which were his own rooms.
* * * * *
It was on a Monday--beginning of the working week--the morning of
October fourteenth in the year 1855, that Ivan went out into the world.
His flight was not far: merely to the other end of Moscow; but it led
into a life that he had been unable to imagine in the smallest detail.
Once there, it took him less than a week to perceive that, while his
vague hopes of companionship were scarcely to be realized, he was to
drink to its dregs his preconceived cup of unhappiness.
The four great _Corps des Cadets_, created in the mid-reign of the Iron
Czar, had been devised especially for the preparation of youthful
Russian nobility for their respective places in the military, possibly
the official, world. As it presently turned out, these great schools
were destined to become hot-beds of tyranny, intrigue, rivalry,
caste-feeling, and snobbery in their worst forms. Hence, considering the
certain future of each cadet, the Corps afforded an even more adequate
preparation for bureaucratic methods than their creator had had reason
to expect. In the Moscow institution every inmate, from its head,
Colonel Becker, to the youngest boy of the fourth class, was subject to
a government of favoritism, bribery, deceit, and the pettiest meanness,
in which was no room whatever for advancement along the lines of
conscientious work, honesty, or honor. Here prestige of birth, or
aptitude for intrigue, carried all before them; for this was, indeed,
the period of the worst mismanagement these schools were to know. In
later years the Liberator found time to look to them. At present--in the
Moscow Corps, Sitsky, "Cock" of the school, a vicious dunce of twenty,
would never be called upon to yield his position to Kashkarev, a
brilliant scholar and a thoroughly scrupulous boy of eighteen, who was
generally despised because his grandfather had been a Pole.
In this gathering, where all were in some degree noble, the distinctions
drawn by the boys themselves between lineage and wealth, political
prestige and the quiet conservatism of lofty birth, were so arbitrary,
so contradictory, so innately Russian, that the very masters, who, from
Becker down, were German, did not pretend to understand the system, but
blindly followed the lead of the scholars and their truculent head. And,
to those who have had any experience at such hands, it is bitterly plain
that of all merciless cruelty of civilized lands, that of boys under
twenty-five is the most remorseless.
It is, then, not difficult to understand that, from the first days, Ivan
was in a situation undreamed-of even by his father. In the immediate
beginning Becker, awed by his knowledge of the enormous power wielded by
Prince Michael, would have treated Michael's son with some sort of
consideration. He was soon shown his mistake. The boys he was supposed
to teach had none of them, as yet, ever come under the eye of the
mysterious, hardly-credited "Third Section." Upon the day following
Ivan's arrival, therefore, there was held, in the dormitory inhabited by
the upper ten of the dreaded "first class," a solemn conclave, headed by
the lords of the school: Sitsky, Sabléf, Osínin, Pryanishikoff, and
Blashkov--this last actually a second cousin of Ivan. The decision
resulting from the debate, held when the lower school was at drill, was
spread abroad without delay by certain methods known only to the boys.
By nightfall every cadet knew that young Gregoriev's status had been
fixed; and henceforth none would dream of disputing it till the boy in
question had passed his second year. By the third day the masters had
read and accepted the decree, quietly assigning the new boy to his
destined oblivion. For Ivan was a Gregoriev, son of a trans-Moskva
house, and had never even seen the Equerries' Quarter! grandson,
moreover, of a creature who had _worked_. Worse yet, he was the son of
what was really no more than a police officer. (For, though officialdom
meant much in their ranks, the police was beyond the pale of their
bigoted respect.) Thus it is easy to recognize Ivan's natural place, and
why he must henceforth regard himself honored if a member of the upper
school so much as addressed to him a command. This much the week
decided. But it was Sunday night before active persecution began.
Boys' schools, be they in what country they may, are as much alike as
boy nature is alike and unalterable the world over, from age to age.
Only the details differ. At Rugby, new boys undergo blanket-tossing. In
France there is a custom less vigorous though physically more painful.
In the Moscow _Corps des Cadets_, in the fifties, matters were as much
more savage as Russian civilization was, at that day, lower than that of
England. In the Kishinaia, then, the popular form of hazing is--or
was--the "circus"; and the pretty game was ordinarily arranged for
several victims. But Ivan was accorded a distinction, inasmuch as the
boys of his form positively refused to soil themselves by contact with a
rank outsider; and the upper school could not but condone its inferiors
in their aristocratic aloofness. Having, then, but one victim for the
evening's sport, it was thought fitting that some unusual climax should
be invented for the furtherance of the school ideals. And this touch was
finally invented by a youth who had just finished a certain forbidden
book relating to some unspeakable customs of the Orient.
Ivan's Sunday evening shall know no record here. He bore it, lived
through it--even infuriated his tormentors by his insistent refusals to
cry out or beg for mercy: choosing, instead, meanly to faint just before
the crucial moment. But though it was a week before he crept shakily
from his bed again, there was no inquiry in the school as to the cause
of his peculiar illness. Only in secret was some notice taken of the
affair; which had really gone beyond ordinary bounds. Colonel Becker
gave Ivan more than one hour of serious consideration; for to him Ivan's
father was more than a name. And, in the end, the boy was granted what
his mother had hitherto vainly asked: leave to spend thirty-six hours,
weekly--from Saturday night to Monday morning--at home, in his mother's
company. It was a wise decision, and it served a double purpose; for not
only did it remove a sure victim from the band of savages that held
possession of the school through every weekly holiday, but it gave one
miserable boy just enough respite from his wretchedness to stifle the
revelations which time and suffering would otherwise have surely
brought. Even so, at first, Becker trembled lest the terrible Chief
should be made aware of his son's treatment at that noted school. But
weeks passed and no complaint was made. And thus came Ivan's first step
towards favor. For Becker could not but be thankful for the boy's brave
silence; nor thereafter did he always try to hide that gratitude from
the unhappiest of his pupils.
* * * * *
Such was the beginning of Ivan's school life. It had taken just seven
days to teach him that the curse of his parentage must still be his
heavy burden. He had done infinitely more than was generally required to
prove a boy's worthiness for acceptance by his fellows. Not a boy in the
school but had watched his clothes cut to ribbons before them, under the
knout. Not a boy but surmised the hideous state of his bruised body. And
yet, not a boy in the school offered the slightest sign of friendliness,
even of recognition. Loneliness he had known--was, indeed, to know
again--but never thereafter the loneliness that he endured in this
crowded school.
Of what Ivan bore during his first year in that harsh preparation for
his after life, it would be useless to write. The day's routine was long
and hard: its hours from early morning till nine at night; its subjects
the usual studies, with military drill, tactics, and history. Moreover,
at the end of the ordered day there was frequently guard-duty at the
door of the first form's secret club, which used pretended fear of
discovery as a means of keeping some younger boy awake till he should
fall asleep on his feet, and be carried into the club-room for the
punishment always inflicted for this military crime of "sleeping on
duty." This year the fourth form had one more cause of gratitude for the
existence of Ivan; for he was chosen for this vigil three nights to any
other boy's one. The consequence of this was that, between October and
April, he was in the hospital four times, always owing to an increase in
the low fever induced by physical and mental exhaustion. Through the
winter, Becker had made a few feeble attempts at protection, all of
which proved abortive. But finally, in the early spring, noting Ivan's
look of frailty, and fearing a breakdown that must be brought to the
notice of Prince Michael, he took the case in hand vigorously, and
procured for the boy at least unbroken sleep at night, though he could
force no other consideration from the scornful young brutes towards
their physically broken, mentally-raging victim.
It was, for Ivan, an added irony of Fate that, during this long period
of physical strain, the severest he was ever to know, his one hitherto
unfailing refuge should be denied him. And the trial culminated in a
shock as unexpected as it then seemed unendurable.
For many weeks the boy, while sedulously concealing the facts of his
school life, had nevertheless wondered that, during his Sundays with
her, his mother divined none of his unhappiness. But he himself failed
to perceive the burden which that same mother, hitherto as near to him
as he to her, was herself bearing. How should he guess that she was at
last obliged to concentrate her every faculty upon herself in order to
keep from him any betrayal of her condition? Ivan had, certainly, more
than once remarked the haggard pallor of her face; or caught her in an
involuntary movement of pain. There were nights at school when he
thought long and anxiously of her. Yet he was thoroughly unprepared
when, on the morning of the third of April, he received from her a
brief, strained, unnatural note, containing the astounding information
that she was starting at once, with his aunt, for the Riviera, where she
might remain for some weeks.
He had the day to ponder over this news: reserving the greater pain of
it for the night: when, happily, he should be unmolested. But he never
came to this; for, at the end of the evening study-period, he was called
from the assembly-hall by no less a person than Colonel Becker himself,
at the door of whose dreaded room stood Piotr, white-faced and red-eyed.
At his appearance Ivan halted for one, heart-stilling instant. Then he
muttered, in a hoarse, dry voice:
"My mother!--She is dead?"
Piotr slowly shook his head, replying: "Not yet.--They have sent for
you."