Part 14

We decided to put an end to these night watches. Long were the discussions, and the higher forms were consulted as to what was to be done. At last the decision came: ‘Refuse, all of you, to keep the watch; and when they begin to beat you, which they are sure to do, go, as many of you as you can, in a block, and call in Girardot. He knows it all, but then he will be bound to stop it.’ The question whether that would not be ‘reporting’ was settled in the negative by experts in matters of honour: the pages de chambre did not behave towards the others like comrades.

The turn to watch fell that night to a Prince Shahovskóy, an old hand, and to Selánoff, a new-comer, an extremely timid boy, who even spoke in a girlish voice. The old hand was called upon first, but refused to go, and was left alone. Then two pages de chambre went to the timid new-comer, who was in bed; and as he refused to obey, they began to flog him brutally with heavy leather braces. Shahovskóy woke up several comrades who were near at hand, and they all ran to find Girardot.

I was also in bed when the two came upon me, ordering me to take the watch. I refused. Thereupon, seizing two pairs of braces--we always used to put our clothes in perfect order on a bench by the bedside, braces uppermost, and the necktie across them--they began to flog me. Sitting up in bed, I fenced with my hands, and had already received several heavy blows, when a command resounded, ‘The first form to the Colonel!’ The fierce fighters became tame at once, and hurriedly put my things in order.

‘Don’t say a word,’ they whispered.

‘The necktie across, in good order,’ I said to them, while my shoulders and arms burned from the blows.

What Girardot’s talk with the first form was we did not know; but next day, as we stood in the ranks before marching downstairs to the dining-room, he addressed us in a minor key, saying how sad it was that pages de chambre should have fallen upon a boy who was right in his refusal. And upon whom? A new-comer, and so timid a boy as Selánoff was! The whole school was disgusted at this Jesuitic speech.

* * * * *

It surely was also a blow to Girardot’s authority, and he resented it very much. He regarded our form, and me especially, with great dislike (the roundabout affair had been reported to him), and he manifested it at every opportunity.

During the first winter I was a frequent inmate of the hospital. After suffering from typhoid fever, during which the director and the doctor bestowed on me a really parental care, I had very bad and persistently recurring gastric attacks. Girardot, as he made his daily rounds of the hospital, seeing me so often there, began to say to me every morning, half-jokingly, in French, ‘Here is a young man who is as healthy as the New Bridge, and loiters in the hospital.’ Once or twice I replied jestingly, but at last, seeing malice in this constant repetition, I lost patience and grew very angry.

‘How dare you say that?’ I exclaimed. ‘I shall ask the doctor to forbid your entering this room,’ and so on.

Girardot recoiled two steps; his dark eyes glittered, his thin lip became still thinner. At last he said, ‘I have offended you, have I? Well, we have in the hall two artillery guns: shall we have a duel?’

‘I don’t make jokes, and I tell you that I shall bear no more of your insinuations’, I continued.

He did not repeat his joke, but regarded me with even more dislike than before.

Happily enough, there was little opportunity for punishing me. I did not smoke; my clothes were always hooked and buttoned, and properly folded at night. I liked all sorts of games, but, plunged as I was in reading and in a correspondence with my brother, I could hardly find time to play a laptá match (a sort of cricket) in the garden, and always hurried back to my books. But when I was caught in fault, it was not I that Girardot punished, but the page de chambre who was my superior. Once, for instance, at dinner, I made a physical discovery: I noticed that the sound given out by a tumbler depends on the amount of water it contains, and at once tried to obtain a chord with four glasses. But there stood Girardot behind me, and without saying a word to me he ordered my page de chambre under arrest. It so happened that this young man was an excellent fellow, a third cousin of mine, who refused even to listen to my excuses, saying, ‘All right. I know he dislikes you.’ His comrades, though, gave me a warning. ‘Take care, naughty boy; we are not going to be punished for you,’ they said; and if reading had not been my all-absorbing occupation, they probably would have made me pay dearly for my physical experiment.

Everyone spoke of Girardot’s dislike for me; but I paid no attention to it, and probably increased it by my indifference. For full eighteen months he refused to give me the epaulettes, which were usually given to newly entered boys after one or two months’ stay at the school, when they had learned some of the rudiments of military drill; but I felt quite happy without that military decoration. At last, an officer--the best teacher of drill in the school, a man simply enamoured of drill--volunteered to teach me; and when he saw me performing all the tricks to his entire satisfaction, he undertook to introduce me to Girardot. The Colonel refused again, twice in succession, so that the officer took it as a personal offence; and when the director of the corps once asked him why I had no epaulettes yet, he bluntly answered, ‘The boy is all right; it is the Colonel who does not want him;’ whereupon, probably after the remark of the director, Girardot himself asked to examine me again, and gave me the epaulettes that very day.

But the Colonel’s influence was rapidly vanishing. The whole character of the school was changing. For twenty years Girardot had realized his ideal, which was to have the boys nicely combed, curled, and girlish looking, and to send to the court pages as refined as courtiers of Louis XIV. Whether they learned or not, he cared little; his favourites were those whose clothes-basket was best filled with all sorts of nail-brushes and scent-bottles, whose ‘private’ uniform (which could be put on when we went home on Sundays) was of the best make, and who knew how to make the most elegant salut oblique. Formerly, when Girardot had held rehearsals of court ceremonies, wrapping up a page in a striped red cotton cover taken from one of our beds, in order that he might represent the Empress at a baisemain, the boys almost religiously approached the imaginary Empress, seriously performed the ceremony of kissing the hand, and retired with a most elegant oblique bow; but now, though they were very elegant at court, they would perform at the rehearsals such bearlike bows that all roared with laughter, while Girardot was simply raging. Formerly, the younger boys who had been taken to a court levee, and had been curled for that purpose, used to keep their curls as long as they would last; now, on returning from the palace, they hurried to put their heads under the cold water tap, to get rid of the curls. An effeminate appearance was laughed at. To be sent to a levee, to stand there as a decoration, was now considered a drudgery rather than a favour. And when the small boys who were occasionally taken to the palace to play with the little grand dukes remarked that one of the latter used, in some game, to make a hard whip out of his handkerchief, and use it freely, one of our boys did the same, and so whipped the grand duke that he cried. Girardot was terrified, while the old Sebastopol admiral who was tutor of the grand duke only praised our boy.

A new spirit, studious and serious, developed in the corps, as in all other schools. In former years, the pages, being sure in one way or another that they would get the necessary marks for being promoted officers of the Guard, spent the first years in the school hardly learning at all, and only began to study more or less in the last two forms; now the lower forms learned very well. The moral tone also became quite different from what it was a few years before. Oriental amusements were looked upon with disgust, and an attempt or two to revert to old manners resulted in scandals which reached the St. Petersburg drawing-rooms. Girardot was dismissed. He was only allowed to retain his bachelor apartment in the building of the corps, and we often saw him afterward, wrapped in his long military cloak, pacing along, plunged in reflections--sad, I suppose, because he could not but condemn the new spirit which rapidly developed in the corps of pages.

All over Russia people were talking of education. As soon as peace had been concluded at Paris, and the severity of censorship had been slightly relaxed, educational matters began to be eagerly discussed. The ignorance of the masses of the people, the obstacles that had hitherto been put in the way of those who wanted to learn, the absence of schools in the country, the obsolete methods of teaching, and the remedies for these evils became favourite themes of discussion in educated circles, in the press, and even in the drawing-rooms of the aristocracy. The first high schools for girls had been opened in 1857, on an excellent plan and with a splendid teaching staff. As by magic a number of men and women came to the front who have not only devoted their lives to education, but have proved to be remarkable practical pedagogists: their writings would occupy a place of honour in every civilized literature, if they were known abroad.

The corps of pages also felt the effect of that revival. Apart from a few exceptions, the general tendency of the three younger forms was to study. The head of the educational department, the inspector, Winkler, who was a well-educated colonel of artillery, a good mathematician, and a man of progressive opinions, hit upon an excellent plan for stimulating that spirit. Instead of the indifferent teachers who formerly used to teach in the lower forms, he endeavoured to secure the best ones. In his opinion, no professor was too good to teach the very beginnings of a subject to the youngest boys. Thus, to teach the elements of algebra in the fourth form he invited a first-rate mathematician and a born teacher, Captain Sukhónin, and the form took at once to mathematics. By the way, it so happened that this captain was a tutor of the heir of the throne (Nikolái Alexándrovich, who died at the age of twenty-two), and the heir-apparent was brought once a week to the corps of pages to be present at the algebra lessons of Captain Sukhónin. The Empress Marie Alexándrovna, who was an educated woman, thought that perhaps the contact with studious boys would stimulate her son to learning. He sat among us, and had to answer questions like all the others. But he managed mostly, while the teacher spoke, to make drawings, very nicely, or to whisper all sorts of droll things to his neighbours. He was good-natured and very gentle in his behaviour, but superficial in learning and still more so in his affections.

For the fifth form the inspector secured two remarkable men. He entered our class-room, one day, quite radiant, and told us that we should have a rare chance. Professor Klasóvsky, a great classical scholar and expert in Russian literature, had consented to teach us Russian grammar, and would take us through all the five forms in succession, shifting with us every year to the next form. Another university professor, Herr Becker, librarian of the imperial (national) library, would do the same in German. Professor Klasóvsky, he added, was in weak health that winter, but the inspector was sure that we would be very quiet in his class. The chance of having such a teacher was too good to be lost.

He had thought aright. We became very proud of having university professors for teachers, and although there came voices from the Kamchátka (in Russia, the back benches of each class bear the name of that remote and uncivilized peninsula) to the effect that ‘the sausage-maker’--that is, the German--must be kept by all means in obedience, public opinion in our form was decidedly in favour of the professors.

‘The sausage-maker’ won our respect at once. A tall man, with an immense forehead and very kind, intelligent eyes, slightly veiled by his spectacles, came into our class, and told us in quite good Russian that he intended to divide our form into three sections. The first section would be composed of Germans, who already knew the language, and from whom he would require more serious work; to the second section he would teach grammar, and later on German literature, in accordance with the established programmes; and the third section, he concluded with a charming smile, would be the Kamchátka, ‘From you,’ he said, ‘I shall only require that at each lesson you copy four lines which I will choose for you from a book. The four lines copied, you can do what you like; only do not hinder the rest. And I promise you that in five years you will learn something of German and German literature. Now, who joins the Germans? You, Stackelberg? You, Lamsdorf? Perhaps some one of the Russians? And who joins the Kamchátka?’ Five or six boys, who knew not a word of German, took residence in the peninsula. They most conscientiously copied their four lines--a dozen or a score of lines in the higher forms--and Becker chose the lines so well, and bestowed so much attention upon the boys that by the end of the five years they really knew something of the language and its literature.

I joined the Germans. My brother Alexander insisted so much in his letters upon my acquiring German, which possesses so rich a literature and into which every book of value is translated, that I set myself assiduously to learn it. I translated and studied most thoroughly one page of a rather difficult poetical description of a thunderstorm; I learned by heart, as the professor had advised me, the conjugations, the adverbs, and the prepositions--and began to read. A splendid method it is for learning languages. Becker advised me, moreover, to subscribe to a cheap illustrated weekly, and its illustrations and short stories were a continual inducement to read a few lines or a column. I soon mastered the language.

Toward the end of the winter I asked Herr Becker to lend me a copy of Goethe’s ‘Faust.’ I had read it in a Russian translation; I had also read Turguéneff’s beautiful novel, ‘Faust’; and I now longed to read the great work in the original. ‘You will understand nothing in it; it is too philosophical,’ Becker said, with his gentle smile; but he brought me, nevertheless, a little square book, with the pages yellowed by age, containing the immortal drama. He little knew the unfathomable joy that that small square book gave me. I drank in the sense and the music of every line of it, beginning with the very first verses of the ideally beautiful dedication, and soon knew full pages by heart. Faust’s monologue in the forest, and especially the lines in which he speaks of his understanding of nature,

Thou Not only cold, amazed acquaintance yield’st, But grantest that in her profoundest breast I gaze, as in the bosom of a friend,

simply put me in ecstasy, and till now it has retained its power over me. Every verse gradually became a dear friend. And then, is there a higher æsthetic delight than to read poetry in a language which one does not quite thoroughly understand? The whole is veiled with a sort of slight haze, which admirably suits poetry. Words, the trivial meanings of which, when one knows the language colloquially, sometimes interfere with the poetical image they are intended to convey, retain but their subtle, elevated sense; while the music of the poetry is only the more strongly impressed upon the ear.

* * * * *

Professor Klasóvsky’s first lesson was a revelation to us. He was a small man, about fifty years of age, very rapid in his movements, with bright, intelligent eyes, a slightly sarcastic expression, and the high forehead of a poet. When he came in for his first lesson, he said in a low voice that, suffering from a protracted illness, he could not speak loud enough, and asked us, therefore, to sit closer to him. He placed his chair near the first row of tables, and we clustered round him like a swarm of bees.