The Genius. Margaret Horton Potter
perhaps, his single remaining shred of religion. For the rest, a huge table, a single chair, and two bookcases filled with a small, but remarkably well-chosen collection of reference-books, finished the characteristic arrangement of the room.
Here, this morning, the gray light of a winter dawn mingled with the dull flare of the hanging-lamp increasing the ghastliness of his appearance, sat Michael Gregoriev, in the stale bitterness of a night-old rage and mortification. On the floor, in an unceremonious heap, lay his heavily embroidered coat, with its medals still upon it. In its stead the Prince had wrapped himself in a worn robe of old brocade, fur-lined. Heavy felt slippers shod his feet. His hair was tumbled over his head in a leonine mass. His features were gray; but his eyes still glowed above the dark, purplish circles that shadowed his cheeks. His documents were finished. He had sat for two hours and more in this present brown study; and, tested as his endurance had been, his concentration was still absolute. On the table, near at hand, stood a flask of vodka, nearly empty, and a jar of water scarcely touched.
Nevertheless, the Prince of the lonely house was not drunk: was not even misty-headed. At a quarter after eight there came a knock at the door, and his hoarse, "Enter!" was as immediate as was the return to his reverie. Nor did he lift his eyes as Piotr entered softly, arranged the steaming samovar at his master's elbow, placed bread, fresh butter, and a dish of lentils beside it, and then departed as noiselessly as he had come.
For five minutes the man beside the table did not stir. Then he rose, still preoccupied, crossed the room to his cipher map, and ran his finger down a certain line of hieroglyphics till he found what he sought, and paused to read one passage carefully, twice. Then, when his face had straightened till his lips actually stretched themselves into the semblance of a sardonic smile, he dropped the subject of his thoughts, returned to the table, and made himself some tea. Glass after glass of this he drank, steaming hot. But no solid food passed his lips; and in twenty minutes he reseated himself and set about the writing of two letters, on the envelope of each of which he placed, in the lower corner, a peculiar mark—a sign of the Third Section, known to a few men, and signifying privacy and importance.
These letters were the result of his recent cogitation; and both concerned the affair of the previous night. He had realized his situation to the full; and he knew that it must be faced. His sensations were unfamiliar, however; for it was many years since he had had to acknowledge a defeat so absolute and so grave. Never before, however, had he pitted himself against a force that strong men will not take seriously because it is never to be logically reckoned with. Nevertheless, that force must, sooner or later, be acknowledged by every human being. Michael Gregoriev especially should have taken it into consideration long before; for it was many years since he began his preparations for what last night was to have brought him: a place in the last unconquered world of power. His preparation, however, had led him only through ways peopled by men: and for men and their deeds he was more than a match. Their caprices, their follies, their faithlessness, their treachery even, he had learned long since to calculate and to cope with. Women, also, he had known: many women; experienced, innocent, negative, or wicked. And those who had ventured upon his ground, he had not failed to conquer. It was in the knowledge of these experiences that he had stood; by its light preparing a coup that was to carry the last fortress of that upper world which still held out against him: that peculiar body of women and men called "society."
Years before, with this same purpose in his mind, he had married a daughter of this class, whose only dower was her birth, and whose only covetable possession her place among her kind. And this effort had failed, entirely. Sophia Blashkov, a quiet, gentle, blue-blooded, little débutante, had found herself utterly unequal to the task either of forcing a place in those glittering, scornful ranks for her black-blooded, much-condemned husband, or of keeping her own, now that she bore his name. True, her marriage had, probably, made possible her younger sister's exceptional and unhoped-for match. But Michael himself felt that he had sadly bungled a most important affair. Perceiving his wife's uselessness for his purpose, all the little admiration he had ever had for the fragile girl changed speedily into an angry despite. For the moment, he put her and his social ambitions away together, and turned back to that world of official intrigue and promotion which had actually occupied him from that distant time until within the last few weeks. The old defeat had long since been buried under a heap of newly gained official honors. But of these, alas! he had now had his fill. For the first time he was tasting to the full a measure of bitterness as rank as any the world has to offer. For there is something in the deliberate rejection by one's kind: a mortification, a sickening sense of helplessness, of rage, of revolt, that belongs to this experience alone. It is a kind of suffering in which women frequently become connoisseurs. But its taste is none the less nauseous to the man on whom Fate forces it.
Michael Gregoriev, then, a furious man of men, was to-day enduring that which has turned many a woman soul-sick and weary of existence. All the amazement of unforeseen repulse: the agonized acceptance of an unjust superiority, a scorn, a pitiless disdain; the totally capricious setting of one's self apart from one's fellows as something too despicable for consideration; above all, one's utter powerlessness against this arbitrary judgment—all these things he felt, and every one of them cut him to the quick. For Michael Gregoriev's egotism had grown with every year.
In his black hour he did not fail to indulge in the usual, useless revilement of the superior class: an act as natural as it is ridiculous. Was that society that he had sought out and thought to grasp so pure, so free from corruption, so spotlessly fair, that his, Prince Gregoriev's peccadilloes must needs bar him from its gatherings? Certainly this reputation of his was one thing that had kept the door he knocked on closed. But there were other reasons—innumerable ones, in fact; some of them adequate, others entirely inconsistent, that Princess Mirski or Madame Apúkhtin might have named. Yet, in the final summing-up, there would probably have been a traditional indefiniteness about the wherefore of the Gregoriev ostracism. It was simply understood, instinctively, throughout Moscow, that no person of that name was knowable. And this fact, mirabile dictu, had, after long cogitation, been at last borne in upon Michael—man as he was.
Prince Gregoriev, though he was generally looked upon as a parvenu, had not, like most of that type, been born in the gutter. On the contrary, there was behind him a long line of recluses, eccentrics, hermits almost, bearing the strongest resemblance to one another by reason of their oddities. One special trait, stronger than any other, served to bind them all together, father and son, through generations. This was their constant and unconquerable sense of personal isolation: of loneliness. Crowds of friends and sycophants might surround the Gregoriev. He was none the less bitterly alone. It was, perhaps, a morbid perception of individuality, of the inevitable isolation of every soul. But whatever its cause, this sense, in more than one of the race, had developed into extreme stages of melancholia.
The palace in Konnaia Square had been founded in the year 1679, by the third of the line, Alexis Gregorievitch, who had purposely placed the dwelling of his race in this far corner of the city, out of the possible range of decent dwellings. And none of the succession of Peters and Mikhails that followed, ever thought to reproach this act of their ancestor. The details of the life of one of these men would have sufficed for all, until the breaking of the direct line. But the last Prince had died childless; and the estate descended by entail to Michael, eldest son of the dead Prince's dead brother. And though in the present Gregoriev the instincts of his race survived, they had been in a large measure altered and redirected. For when, at the age of twenty, Michael had come into his inheritance, he had, in the first hour of his new estate, set himself a certain goal, at the same time turning an iron will and dire traits towards its attainment. Russia was then just entering upon the rule of the Iron Czar. Iron men, therefore, were soon in demand, to replace the more vacillating officials who had served the first Alexander. Prince Gregoriev came forward at once with the request for a position. And immediately he became involved in that species of underhand, almost underground, business (necessary to most governments and to all absolute monarchies) which reached its extreme depth in the tyranny that ruled Russia during the next thirty years.
It did not take many months for Nicholas to perceive that there lived in Moscow a supreme performer of questionable transactions. Upon test, the man showed himself to be all the Czar had thought—and more. He was a man without a conscience. And the