For the root and soul of him was that he was greatly ambitious.  He had been born, I learnt, in some small town in the Moscow province, and his father had been a schoolmaster in the place—­a kind of Perodonov, I should imagine, from the things that Markovitch told me about him.  The father, at any rate, was a mean, malicious, and grossly sensual creature, and he finally lost his post through his improper behaviour towards some of his own small pupils.  The family then came to evil days, and at a very early age young Markovitch was sent to Petrograd to earn what he could with his wits.  He managed to secure the post of a secretary to an old fellow who was engaged in writing the life of his grandfather—­a difficult book, as the grandfather had been a voluminous letter-writer, and this correspondence had to be collected and tabulated.  For months, and even years, young Markovitch laboriously endeavoured to arrange these old yellow letters, dull, pathetic, incoherent.  His patron grew slowly imbecile, but through the fogs that increasingly besieged him saw only this one thing clearly, that the letters must be arranged.  He kept Markovitch relentlessly at his table, allowing him no pleasures, feeding him miserably and watching him personally undress every evening lest he should have secreted certain letters somewhere on his body.  There was something almost sadist apparently in the old gentleman’s observation of Markovitch’s labours.

It was during these years that Markovitch’s ambitions took flame.  He was always as he told me having “amazing ideas.”  I asked him—­What kind of ideas?  “Ideas by which the world would be transformed....  Those letters were all old, you know, and dusty, and yellow, and eaten, some of them, by rats, and they’d lie on the floor and I’d try to arrange them in little piles according to their dates....  There’d be rows of little packets all across the floor..., and then somehow, when one’s back was turned, they’d move, all of their own wicked purpose—­and one would have to begin all over again, bending with one’s back aching, and seeing always the stupid handwriting....  I hated it, Ivan Andreievitch, of course I hated it, but I had to do it for the money.  And I lived in his house, too, and as he got madder it wasn’t pleasant.  He wanted me to sleep with him because he saw things in the middle of the night, and he’d catch hold of me and scream and twist his fat legs round me... no, it wasn’t agreeable. On ne sympatichne saff-szem.  He wasn’t a nice man at all.  But while I was sorting the letters these ideas would come to me and I would be on fire....  It seemed to me that I was to save the world, and that it would not be difficult if only one might be resolute enough.  That was the trouble—­to be resolute.  One might say to oneself, ’On Friday October 13th I will do so and so, and then on Saturday November 3rd I will do so and so, and then on December 24th it will be finished.’  But then on October 13th one is, may be, in quite another