THE HERMIT
The issue of the Moscow _Journal_ for March 26, 1887, announced the
return of Prince Ivan Gregoriev to Russia after a thirty-month absence
abroad; adding that he was in Moscow for a few days only, before
proceeding to his country-place of Maidonovo, near Klin. As a matter of
fact, Ivan, after a railway journey of sixty hours, arrived in Moscow on
the evening of one day, and remained at the Slaviansky Bazaar until the
afternoon of the next. During this brief period, he was besieged by
visitors of every description, from the barest acquaintances, to men
like Balakirev and Ostrovsky; and, to the general chagrin, all were
alike refused. Ivan was in his blackest mood. When, three hours before
the departure of the Klin train, Piotr, taking his life in his hands,
did admit Kashkine, it was half an hour before that rarest of
diplomatists could bring the gleam of one faint smile across his old
friend's face. In his memoirs the admirable Constantine has left a
picture of Gregoriev as he was at this period--in his forty-eighth year:
"A figure lean, not very tall, giving the dual impression of wiry
fortitude, and a delicacy that was rather _spiritual_ than physical,
Gregoriev's body formed a marked contrast to his face--at sight of
which, on the day of his return, I confess to having been shocked, so
changed had it become since my last view of it. From black, with a
slight silvering only at the temples, his hair and beard were now almost
pure white. The lines of care in his face had deepened incredibly. The
skin had something of that parchment look that I had supposed to be the
special mark of the recluse; but Ivan told me he had been a good deal
out-of-doors in the last months. Without asking, I perceived at once
that he was under his special morbid scourge; and when I learned that he
intended retiring to Klin for a period of complete isolation, I was less
astonished than dismayed. I think I had even a momentary presentiment
that from this retirement he was destined never to emerge; though I knew
that he was still some years removed from his fiftieth birthday.
However, with Ivan Mikhailovitch, time was never a thing to be
considered. He was a man of eternity."
Into their two hours together on that last Moscow day, the friends
crowded much important conversation. Ivan unfolded his plans for the
future; and discussed those manuscripts he had brought back, and which
he afterwards intrusted to Kashkine to be delivered to his publishers.
Immediately upon the first printing, they were to be sent to the Musical
Society, to be passed or rejected for the next season's concert series.
This business finished, Ivan plunged into an impulsive account of the
bizarre history of his last months in Florence. But when he had reached
a half-way point, he as suddenly halted; and, Piotr a moment later
announcing that the carriage waited to drive him to his train, Ivan bade
his friend a hurried farewell. Kashkine only learned the end of the tale
that interested him so deeply, some fourteen months later.
Once more, as on the first day of his possession, Ivan reached his
hermitage in the late afternoon of a spring day. But this home-coming
was not like the first; for, among the little throng of servants
gathered in the hall to meet their Prince, one face was missing. After
hasty greetings, Ivan, with a sudden sense of the truth, asked
haltingly for the old servitor whom he had sent back to Russia, nine
months before, from Naples. The reply, anticipated by but one moment,
was a great shock to him. Old Sósha had been buried yesterday; his last
words being a greeting to the master he had so longed to see again.--And
Ivan might have been present at the funeral of this dearly-loved old
man!--But he made no rebuke; for he knew that the humility of these poor
creatures would never have permitted them to disturb his pleasure for
one of themselves.
It was, perhaps, only morbidness that Ivan should have allowed the death
of Sósha, a man of eighty-four, to affect him as it did. Yet the
following weeks taught him that all his recent gloomy meditations and
self-analyses had had in them an element of affectation incompatible
with real grief. Was it not real grief, then, that he was suffering now?
For weeks he lived in the blackness that was horrible to those who
watched him. And finally Piotr, who dared anything for his master, sent,
secretly, for Kashkine--whom he believed endowed with miraculous powers
wherever his Prince was concerned. But for once Kashkine's presence
seemed powerless to rouse the composer from his lassitude: a feat which
was eventually accomplished by one who knew him more intimately than any
man.
It was now many years since his cousin and true companion first began to
make her deeply affectionate study of Ivan's moods. In May, according to
a former custom, Nathalie came down to Maidonovo, unaccompanied by her
daughters. And Kashkine, after watching her during one day and night,
retreated, gallantly leaving the field to her. It was one of the few
times on which she came alone to Ivan's home; and her excuse for the act
was one newly characteristic of her:
"My dear Ivan, I am forty-four years old: a safe age, if ever woman is
to attain to one. I now, therefore, insist upon the comfort of personal
freedom. It is the one compensation permitted for the loss of the youth
which can make freedom dangerous."
Ivan's reply to the theory was a smile. For neither by him nor by
herself could the graceful, beautifully groomed, _chic_ little woman
possibly have been regarded as she chose to describe herself. At the
same time, it would have been a person utterly beyond the pale who would
have admitted the possibility of impropriety in the behavior of the
Princess Féodoreff, one of the greatest ladies of Petersburg. She had
long since recovered any ground lost during the few months of her
separation from her dissolute Prince. And within the last eighteen
months rather a signal honor had been offered her in the intimate
friendship of the Grand-Duchess Catharine:--most irreproachable,
unapproachable, and, at the same time, most popular, of the imperial
women of Russia. Perhaps her friendship with this Princess was the more
genuine and the more truly sympathetic in that, as she was well aware,
her own history and that of her Imperial Highness bore many points of
resemblance. For the great-granddaughter of Constantine the Abdicator
was the wife of one of the most dissolute of the Grand-Dukes, whose
abuses of manhood no ingenuity of his proud wife was able to conceal.
Hence Nathalie, herself so intimately acquainted with this poignant form
of suffering, was just now very full of her friendship with the
beautiful Princess; and she poured into Ivan's half-listening ears all
that she knew of this exquisite woman, married at seventeen, left alone
in her cold and unapproachable state, to learn all the dire details of a
state marriage: and now mother of a son who, in very boyhood, was
already believed to be gazing with interest down the path his father had
trod. Even Nathalie herself could not guess the anguish with which this
secret dread had already filled the mother's heart; nor the struggle
she was prepared to make before her motherhood should be dishonored as
her wifehood had always been.
In time the story of this Princess, told, day by day, in semi-accidental
snatches, laid hold of Ivan's imagination. By degrees he began to enter
into the life that was being laid bare before him with all the intimate
understanding that is part of the Creator's gift. For many weeks after
the departure of his cousin, indeed, Ivan mused upon the subject of the
royal lady, dowered, apparently, with every enviable possession of
wealth and power, and yet one of the most truly unfortunate of
humankind. The immediate result of this was the writing of the "Three
Studies," unnamed, so long left in manuscript, and so persistently
misunderstood. It is only, indeed, within the last five years that they
have been discovered to bear a direct relationship to the last three
movements of his greatest symphony. To-day they form the treasure of
that small but expanding cult who have been so mocked at for their
serious study of the connection between various harmonies and the mental
emotions, from which has grown the dream of establishing a perfect
musical law.
It was the spring of 1889 before Ivan at last began to work seriously
upon his "Sixth Symphony": that which had been growing in his mind for
more than ten years; and which, while it forms, perhaps, his greatest
claim to immortality, was the first to open the eyes of Philistia to the
splendors of his powers. 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.
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. He had heard the
low-calling voices of departed Shades. He had been given misty glimpses
of the Elysian land that lay beyond those high black bars. Long and long
was it before he could turn his face from that vision back to the grays
and glooms of his worn routine. And when at last it became patent to him
that this must be, he still clung to the erratic and feverish fancies
for the abnormal, that had come to him in his illness. By May the
Maidonovo household stood aghast at the incomprehensible manner of their
silent master's renewed life. Those who knew him well surmised his
mental condition; but even Kashkine could not fathom the depth to which
his thoughts had sunk. Certainly none but a Russian could, or can,
comprehend the terrible reality of what must, to the inhabitants of the
sunshine lands, seem the mere wilful depression of a hypochondriac. 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. And not one of them but had felt, to some degree, the
same, deep, passionless, revulsive anger that was working in him, and
turning him from the old, secret habits of spiritual meditation and high
thought, into passions of blasphemy and atheism which burned ever deeper
into his brain.
It was in this final phase of inward revolt against the submissive
religions that are permitted to govern the world, that Ivan, nearly
recovered from bodily weakness, took up the history of religion and
began to search, diligently, through all the forms of anthropomorphism,
for that one which should display the most artistic beauty and formal
grace. It was impossible to hesitate long. There is no paganism of
obscure antiquity that can compare, in poetic beauty, with the
scarce-forgotten rites of the Hellenic Pantheon. Fired by an
unlooked-for enthusiasm in his chosen task of apostasy, he finally took
for his protective deity that least divine, weakest, and most exquisite
of the gods of the Greeks:--Aphrodite.
Mad Ivan! Far indeed went he in his bitter defiance of High God! His
attendants looked on in frightened mystification at the changes now
preparing in the inner of the two up-stairs rooms in which their master
had been wont to work. Some simple carpentry; a large number of unusual
articles commanded from Moscow: one, more expensive than all the others,
brought in a coffin-like box from France; the transferrence of all his
paraphernalia of work into the outer room; and behold the fane of Ivan's
new goddess!--a semicircular chamber hung in deep violet; in the centre
of the jut a low, circular pedestal, draped in black, and flanked on
either side by two high church candlesticks of wrought silver,
containing painted candles kept always alight, the windowless room
containing, beside these, only one, silver lamp hanging from the centre
of the sombre ceiling. Opposite the altar-pedestal, stood the single
piece of furniture in this strange room: a long, low couch of Spanish
leather, violet in color, placed so that the occupant could gaze
directly upon the figure finally lifted to the pedestal prepared for
her: an exquisite modern statue of Aphrodite of old, which had won a
young Frenchman the Prix de Rome, and was compared by those authorities
not inimical to the sculptor, to be worthy of the chisel of Praxiteles.
Ivan had taken advantage of the quarrel among the committee who were
considering it for purchase for the Luxembourg, and had bought it from
its affronted creator for one hundred thousand francs.
Three workmen and Piotr had, during its preparation, gained glimpses of
this room. Afterwards Piotr entered it once or twice in the month for
the purpose of cleaning. But, barring this, once the door was shut on
the completed shrine, no one save Ivan beheld it; though he soon knew it
to be the chief reason why he was spoken of with bated breath by his own
servants; and called by the inhabitants of Klin a madman. And, truly,
there were days when his appearance and behavior might have brought that
thought to other minds than those of illiterate peasants. But these were
only the hours when he was dominated by the fantastic spirit inherent in
the pungent paste which he kept in a golden, jewel-studded tube at the
feet of the goddess. For, when the black butterfly of his melancholy now
danced before his eyes, Ivan reverted remorselessly to that opium which
he had for years abstained from. These days were irregular, however, and
the act voluntary, being not as yet compelled by physical craving. And,
in the intervals, he pursued his ordinary occupations of reading and
composing, to which he had now added the transcribing of his own memoirs
and a self-instituted office of beauty-worship at the statue-shrine,
inaugurated in a fit of angry repudiation of Christian rites, and
continued in that spirit of half-ironical defiance that was now his most
salient characteristic. So, month by month, he dwelt alone, withdrawing
daily more and more within himself, and by degrees lessening personal
contact as much as possible even with his servants. Nevertheless he
retained one means of communication with the world beyond, in a
correspondence maintained with half a dozen representatives of as many
different grades of life: Nathalie, of whom he constantly demanded
further details of the story of the Grand-Duchess Catharine; Balakirev,
now long since in Zaremba's chair at the Petersburg Conservatoire;
Avélallement in Hamburg; an odd little Parisian journalist--through whom
he had eventually obtained the Thébaud Venus; and, lastly, there
departed from Maidonovo, twice a month, letters addressed to the inmate
of a certain convent in the Arno Valley near Florence, whence replies as
regularly arrived, giving quaintly monotonous accounts of the life and
welfare of one Vittoria Lodi, at present merely a dependant in the
convent and the special penitent of the writer: a little old priest, the
only man ever allowed within those sacred walls.
In every one of these people Ivan, despite his distaste for personal
contact with men, took the keenest interest. Their welfare was of
genuine moment to him; though wherefore, he could not himself have said.
Probably this form of communion with his fellow-beings satisfied the
hunger for social intercourse without which man cannot exist as man. And
by degrees his memoirs--the continuation of a sporadic journal long kept
up, which was, however, merely a mass of disconnected thoughts, flashes
of perception, remarks on personal events, and endless reflections on
the unrevealed Alpha and Omega of life--began to be filled with other
matter: chapter after chapter containing nothing but accounts of and
speculations concerning two beings as far apart as the poles of the
earth, and bearing no such similarity: the history and surmised
character of Nathalie's beloved patroness, the Grand-Duchess Catharine,
and those of the child of the wild romance of Alexandrine Nikitenko and
Vittorio Lodi.
As to the mental atmosphere in which Ivan passed these strange days and
nights of his, it was indescribable, but peculiarly powerful. For, just
as there are certain incidents or periods in our lives which, for no
perceptible reason, stand out in our memory with marked vividness, so
these last weeks of Ivan's were so fraught with nervous electricity that
each smallest incident took on the importance of an event. And Ivan,
considering, became gradually convinced that these were the last days of
his life.
Gregoriev was fifty years old; a man ordinarily normal, robust,
unweakened by excesses of any description or by any irregularities of
life. High-strung nervously though he was, there was still no doctor but
would have given him many years yet to live. Nevertheless, his
hallucination of approaching death remained unshaken; and he looked
forward to the end quite calmly, as the sure conclusion of a prescribed
term of study and work: the beginning of a rest of undetermined
duration.
Unnatural as his life had become, the months from May to October were
nevertheless fertile in production. All the works of this time, however,
are so peculiar in style that they remained in manuscript long after his
death, and the general public are still unfamiliar with that which is
probably the greatest, though no doubt the strangest of them all: the
"Pagan Fantasia," after the first reading of which Kashkine and
Balakirev, who were alone together, looked angrily from each other to
the fire, from which nothing but the memory of their friend's dead face
saved that composition which afterwards came to exercise so powerful a
fascination over both of them. At the same time, the spell which those
unparalleled harmonies casts over the auditor is considered so
unhealthy, that this flower of Ivan's madness is not yet in print.
Others of the works of this time, the "Songs of the Herzeleide," the
"House of Life," and the "Hymn to Pan" (both these last written for
organ and orchestra), together with the "Serenade to Death," are
gradually acquiring a public who listen in disorganized astonishment to
these records of a soul in the strangest travail ever revealed to
fellow-men.--But enough! Another paragraph, and Gregoriev is lost
forever to Philistia!
Not only Kashkine, but all those who heard of Ivan at this time,
believed that, behind his eccentricities, there still lurked a sardonic
grin at his own behavior; than which there can surely be no healthier
sign! Yet, towards the very end, he committed an act which once more
plunged the most indulgent of his friends into exasperated anger with
his folly.
Since his passing, the baton of Nicholas the well-beloved had been
wielded by Brodsky, who had acquitted himself through two seasons of
symphony concerts with considerable credit. The date of the first
concert of the series of 1890-1891, had been set for October 9th; and
its _pièce de résistance_ was the "Sixth Symphony" of Gregoriev, whose
fiftieth birthday was to be celebrated by the playing of this, his
greatest work, with whose praises Moscow was already mysteriously
a-murmur; and afterwards by a supper, to be given that evening by his
old confrères of the Conservatoire. It was really Russia's capitulation
to her greatest musician, in whose universal acclaim there was to be not
one dissentient voice.
On the first day of the month Ivan received a letter from Kashkine,
explaining these things, giving a minute plan of the arrangements, and
eagerly congratulating Ivan on his assured triumph. For, well as he
knew his friend's instability, Constantine never for an instant doubted
that Ivan would consent to appear at a reunion for which, as Kashkine
knew, he had been longing, bitterly, ever since the sudden accession to
his father's wealth and title had barred him from the old-time
fellowship.--Wherefore Constantine's letter was couched not in terms of
pleading, but in sentences of joyous satisfaction at the prospect of
Ivan's delight. This was the reply:
"MAIDONOVO, _October 2nd_.
"MY DEAR CONSTANTINE CONSTANTINOVITCH,--Many thanks. Unfortunately,
I have now endured about thirty years of concerts; and I fear that
the thousand-and-first will hardly tempt me to Moscow. Appropriate
all applause to yourself; for verily I think you are the man who
has kept me at it for the past ten years. Also, do not give up your
_festa_ afterwards. It will be far better than if I were present to
silence the mirth with my morose presence. Drink me one toast, if
you will; for it is borne in upon me that that day will be one of
transformation for me. Therefore wish me, while I wish you
"Success and happiness!
"IVAN BLASHKOV-GREGORIEV."
And Kashkine, crushing the letter savagely into a ball, muttered,
between his teeth: "Ah! 'transformation'! we'll all drink to that! But,
by God, it'll never come to him now!"
* * * * *
By a quarter before two o'clock on the afternoon of October 9, 1890, the
Symphony Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire was filled to the doors. The
winter season had doubly begun; for, outside, sleighs were flying
joyously through the first snow-storm. All the inhabitants of the
Kremlin and Equerries' quarters were back from estate and resort; and
most of the ladies of their families were seated in the wreath of boxes
that crowned the amphitheatre of the hall. Indeed, from a fashionable
and musical point of view, it was an audience such as has seldom been
surpassed in the old Russian city; and, to _mondaine_ and musician
alike, the Gregoriev symphony was the event of the afternoon. For was
not its composer a Prince, a millionaire, and his composition the
masterpiece of Russian musical literature?
In the left-hand stage-box were gathered a little group of his own, old
circle, about the empty chair which had been reserved, in case--faintly
possible--the erratic one should suddenly appear. Kashkine, Laroche,
Ostrovsky, and Ivan's passionate young admirer Rimsky-Korsakow, sat
there in silence, all of them thinking the same half-bitter,
half-resentful thoughts. In their own minds they were persuaded that the
success of the symphony meant more to them than to any other persons
either in the audience or in the city. But they were oddly wrong. Near
them were seated two women, one in a box, amid a little group of people
of the extreme of fashion; the other by herself, in a stall in the
parquet. Both of them were secretly and nervously afire. Both looked
anxiously for Ivan's appearance, longing eagerly for a sight of his
face. And the two of them were at opposite ends of the feminine world;
for one was the Princess Nathalie Féodoreff; the other, a white-faced,
worn-looking, plainly dressed woman, seemingly of the lower
middle-class, was Irina Petrovna; finished, now, with the active
degradations of her life; living in a great silence, upon the scanty
savings of her years of mad extravagance. For her, this was to have been
a day of days: a daring expense, to be paid for by the sacrifice of
luncheon and supper, little missed in the joys of anticipation and
memory. Her worn-out emotions had fired again at the dream of meeting
the one man who had for years remained the unshattered idol of her
heart. Her comprehension of his music--life-music as it was--was fuller,
perhaps, than that of the delicate Princess; to whom Ivan's unexpected
absence was but a passing disappointment. She had come down from
Petersburg to hear the symphony; and, since he was evidently not to be
present, she suddenly decided to be the first to carry him the news of
his triumph. As she considered the plan, her excitement grew; and she
resolved to take the train which left at six o'clock for Klin: daring
her cousin to turn her from his inhospitable door in the late evening.
Every one knows what happened at the concert, when, for the first time,
the notes of that matchless symphony fell upon the ears of the world:
when the supreme desolation of the magnificent, crashing retrogression
of the finale held a thousand people in breathless, trembling stillness;
the tears of Ivan's boundless yearning: the passions of the true
_Weldschmerz_ glazing every eye. Accounts of the mad storm of applause
which finally rose into a chorus of shouts for Ivan, are still preserved
in the scrap-books of those who were there. And, though Ivan came not
and the noise was finally stilled, two hours later, when the audience
trooped out into the snowy darkness, but one name was on every lip: one
regret in every heart. Had he but known it, Ivan's act in not coming was
an unconscious but complete revenge for his years of neglect.
At the entrance to the hall the Princess Féodoreff parted from her
astonished hostess, saying that she intended passing the night at the
house of the Grand-Duchess--wife of the Governor-General. And, leaving
her friends appeased by this sufficient but rather unexpected excuse,
Nathalie hurried into a public droschky, and was presently flying
through the streets towards the Petersburg station--and Ivan.
* * * * *
Thus was Ivan finally, and for all time, established in his own land.
Thenceforward, while music shall endure, his name must be written among
those who have advanced their most perfect of the arts to a higher
standard. His work was done: his battle over. His name was blazoned for
eternity on the roster of the Russian Great.
But the man? Where was he, what was he doing, upon this, his day?
It was half-past three when the first movement of the "Tosca Symphony"
ended in the concert-hall. At that hour Ivan returned to his house from
a long walk through the whitened fields, and, donning dressing-gown and
slippers, went up to his work-room and shut the door. Moved by a most
unusual impulse, he seated himself at the piano and began to play, from
memory, some strains from the last act of "die Götterdämmerung." At the
point where Brunhild, carried beyond herself and her abhorred mortality
back to the heights of immortal perception and abnegation, sings, with
divine calm, the words: "Ruhe, Ruhe, du Gott!"--Ivan paused. The phrase
caught him up. The majesty of the chords in which the great German has
framed it, suddenly fired him with longing: "Rest thee, Rest thee, thou
God!" He played it over and over, meditatively, humming the words in the
rich, low notes of the score. And in those moments his final hour was
ushered in.
All day, struggle as he would, Ivan had been keyed to a pitch of nervous
excitement by speculations concerning the concert in Moscow. Finally, at
noon, he had gone out, determined upon attaining an animal fatigue which
would rest his brain. His struggle with the wind and snow accomplished
the first end, but not the second. Now, however, those words of the
dying goddess--she who stood quietly awaiting her chosen death, brought
a great calm to his mind. As he lingered over them his face changed, and
a new look came into those eyes which had striven so many times, of
late, to pierce the shadows that enshroud the future.
"Rest thee, oh God!"
Rest--for _him_! How often had he demanded it, in vain? Now, at last, he
was enjoined to _take_ it--for himself.
Rising from the piano he went to the door which led into the outer hall,
locked it, and drew the bolt fast. Then, in the wall on the right, he
pressed the spring which opened the invisible door to the room of the
goddess. Entering there, he lighted the two candles at the flame of the
burning lamp, and filled the little golden censer that swung before the
statue, with incense; noting, the while, with his customary delight, the
delicate transparency of the pure Carrara against the soft violet of the
hangings behind her and the shadowy black at her feet. Finally, when the
thin, fragrant smoke had begun to fill the room with its soft haze, he
took the golden tube from its place on the pedestal, and prepared for
himself the largest dose of the narcotic that he had ever dreamed of
taking. After that he returned, quietly, to his piano.
Darkness had nearly come, and the unlighted music-room was lapped in a
pleasant twilight, broken only by the faint gleam from the candles,
which entered through the open doorway. The odor of the incense was
everywhere; and the mystic scent and warmth of the inner air contrasted
well with the shrieking of the demon-ridden wind outside the house. The
atmosphere perfectly suited Ivan's state of mind. All anxiety about the
concert had gone. Some inkling of success floated through his brain; but
the matter now seemed infinitesimally small. The world, with its
struggling millions of unknown men and women, was farther away from him
now than the shadowland of the departed. For he was almost face to face
with the problem of Eternity.
Alas! In the life he knew, how small a part did justice, that law innate
in every human heart, play? How much less seemed the justice of God
towards his creatures, good and bad, than the justice, or the pity, of
these creatures for one another? 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. And the question,
repeated for the last time in the great _motif_ of the _finale_, was
still unanswered.
He sat, now, drearily playing fragments of various works, his brain
teeming with memories: of his mother, in her sweetness and purity, bound
for life to the brute force that had crushed her youth away in the first
days of her married life; of Nathalie and her husband, the husband who
had been the--admirer--of her own mother; of that shadowy Princess whose
grave eyes he beheld overflowing with her secret woe, as they overlooked
the vast and misty throng of mismated womanhood; lastly of the daughter
of a woman who had rebelled against her lot; the nameless child of
Alexandrine Nikitenko, who, filled as she was with the vivid life of her
passionate heritage, was about to be shrouded away from the world she
loved in the coif and robe of the cloistered nun. Gentle women: pure
men; God's world! Why are the two first so unfitted for the last? To God
we apply the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence. If
these attributes be true, whence the evil that rules the world?--Is our
God a demon? It is the logical inference.
To-day, for the hundredth time, Ivan cast away his defences of sarcasm,
mockery, sophistry, and faced that question that has gone unanswered
from generation to generation. As he meditated, his face lost its
recently acquired harshness; his deep eyes grew sadder even than their
wont; the look of a vast, ineffaceable weariness settled upon him. With
face uplifted he continued to play, drifting through his own many forms
of that unanswered question into final silence. Then, rising, he passed,
a little unsteadily, into the inner room, and ate once more of the thick
black paste in its golden tube.
Twilight had now long since merged into darkness. In the work-room Ivan
lighted two lamps, and then, going to the fireplace, which he had here
substituted for the traditional stove, and wherein a low fire burned, he
threw on half a dozen blocks of peat. Then, turning to the high bookcase
near at hand, he drew down, with fumbling hands, the sixteen red-leather
books that constituted his journal and newly-written memoirs. Standing
there, he read certain passages of this transcription of his mental
life. Finally, with a straightening of his figure, he took the books one
by one, tore off the covers, and stuffed the closely written sheets into
the flames. Afterwards, like one in a daze, he returned to the piano.
It was his own, strange "Invocation to Death" to which his half-numbed
fingers turned. The sound of the notes reached his ears as if from a
great distance. Also, he was conscious of a feeling of nausea which told
him that the fatal narcotic was working, powerfully. After a time, his
fingers fell from the keys. Out of the enclosing mists he heard a voice
calling: the clear, sweet voice of one distant, but coming nearer. It
was the voice of Sophia, his mother.
His face was uplifted, and he smiled as he echoed her words:
"Rest thee, Rest thee, thou God!"
With some difficulty he rose to his feet, and stumbled, heavily, into
the inner room, where Aphrodite gleamed through her incense cloud. Here,
with the air of one tired unto death, he sank down upon the leathern
couch. And so the heavy eyelids closed over his weary, weary eyes.
EPILOGUE
THE TRANSLATION
An hour went by. 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. He was immediately sensible that all the
heaviness of the opiate had passed from him; and that his being was
possessed by a singular lightness and freedom. Then he perceived that,
at his side, in close contact, indeed, with his new self, was his
mother: tenderness incarnate, as of old, yet with undoubted anxiety
about her.
"Smile for me, mother! Welcome me home!" he cried; filled now with a
deep, expanding joy, wholly new and wonderful.
Sophia, looking down upon him, smiled, indeed, but pitifully, and with
less of joy than of anxiety in her gentle look. Starting back from this,
he turned to look about him, and found himself surrounded by
shadow-shapes of many that he had known of old: 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."
"But not without reason," he answered, quietly, with a dignity that
seemed to her adequate. "There is a question I have died to ask."
"It shall be heard, then," said a voice: a voice inexplicable; resonant;
divine.
Immediately Sophia and all the silent throng melted away. Ivan, no
longer bound to the empty shell upon the couch, prostrated himself,
instinctively, before the figure that appeared, framed in the oaken
doorway of the outer room: the figure of a man white-robed, whose face,
luminous and gently strong, was turned to him in tranquil majesty.
"Ask thy question, O Mortal," repeated the Christ-voice.
So Ivan, lifting his head, replied: "I came to ask it; being unable
longer to reconcile myself to a life inconsistent with all logic.
"O King! Tell me how it is that a world, God-conceived, therefore
inevitably perfect, became corrupt, filled with, and governed by, evil?
wherein great burdens are borne by the good; and wickedness, vice,
injustice, flourish unrebuked and unpunished. Whence comes this evil,
and why?"
The question was spoken bravely and unfalteringly, for Ivan could
perceive no sign of displeasure in the thoughtful countenance of the Man
Divine. There was an impressive pause; and Ivan had his answer.
"You have demanded a knowledge that is far beyond your present mortal
understanding. But be assured that he who asks this question shall
receive, in due time, its answer.--Yet know you so little of divine law
that you desire truth without a struggle to gain it? that you demand the
most priceless boon of creation as a favor, thinking to give naught in
return? Nay, more: you have broken a law written at creation in the
heart of every man; and thus, by the destruction of your earthly
fetters, have sought a good end by evil means. This, then, shall be my
judgment of your sin: In the punishment for your act of suicide, you
shall obtain the truth, the knowledge, that you have died to seek.
"And let this be your appointed task, whereby you may reach that season
of rest given each soul in the intervals between its experiences: Take
first four years among your fellows here. Then return to the world of
mortals where, in mortal guise, yet not in true confinement within the
bounds of the flesh, you shall find a path appointed you to travel.
There shall you cross the lives of two women, both of whom shall be
known to you: the secrets of their hearts and souls laid bare to your
transmortal mind. To these twain, dwellers in the provinces of good and
of evil, you shall seek to give what aid your wisdom can devise for
them. And in that attempt--the attempt to swerve them from the paths
dictated by their own temperaments, you shall learn the reason for the
ills you deprecate.--I have spoken. Obey the word; and in this labor
find thy reward."
"Master, I will obey!--But--the four years--"
The trembling question halted; for, heeding his voice no longer, the
Divine Figure passed beyond sight. And presently Ivan, lost in new
meditation, perceived that he was floating softly upward, through space.
About him, close as in his long-past babyhood, were clasped his
mother's arms; which drew him at last into that peace that passeth
understanding.
* * * * *
It was nine o'clock when the little household of Maidonovo was thrown
into a ferment over the unexpected arrival of Princess Féodoreff, who
came without either luggage or maid. After she had entered the little
library, Piotr and young Ivan held a hurried conference in the hall, the
question of which the Princess herself speedily solved. Coming out of
the room, she bade the young man conduct her, without ceremony, to the
retreat of her ogre.
Five minutes later she ceased to bruise her knuckles upon that locked,
unyielding door.--What in the world was Ivan about?--Never, truly, had
man slept through such noise as this!--And Ivan's sleep was notably
light!
With a chill of premonition, she ran down the hall to call the men.
When at last Piotr, young Ivan, and Makár, working in a frenzy of dread,
had torn the door from its hinges, Nathalie passed through, alone, into
that inner room over which Ivan reigned no longer. She was the first to
look upon his dead face, illumined by the candle-light--and by something
more. It was also she--the one great love of his loveless life--who
closed, at last, those staring, questioning eyes.