Читать книгу The Genius - Margaret Horton Potter - Страница 9

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Up to the time of Prince Gregoriev's marriage, that peculiar man had used his huge dwelling as a gypsy uses a moor: he had wandered about, living for three months in the west wing, three more in the east, again for six high up in the central portion of the great building, taking with him the rather simple impedimenta of his state, and arranging them as he chose. The presence of Sophia had, however, made at least one change in his existence. Little either of time or attention as he gave her, Michael was driven, by mere consciousness of her proximity, to fix upon some certain suite of rooms for the pursuit of his personal labors and his peculiar recreations. And, after the first irritation of necessity had worn away, he found the arrangement to possess unforeseen advantages. Unlike his class, he was a man of simple, even austere habits in his working hours. Luxury at such times meant annoyance to him; and only the barest necessities of furniture and attire were admitted to his periods of solitary labor. Upon his establishment in his now permanently arranged suite in the eastern wing of the palace, he found that certain papers and written references—kept hitherto under lock and key, and guarded from every eye—could at last find a permanent place in that work-room which no one was permitted to enter, even for purposes of cleaning. For twenty-eight years, now, this had formed one of his six rooms, of which two on the second floor were connected with those below by a private staircase. By degrees, his habits had become as fixed at those of a woman. His many vices were as strong, as severe, as his few virtues; and more than one man had remarked that, so far as was known, there was not a single balancing weakness in the nature of this iron man.

At two o'clock on the morning after the ball, Michael had seated himself at the great table in his sanctum, and prepared for work. He had no idea of bed; for sleep in his present state, his brain afire with the fury of unwonted defeat, would have been impossible. But he could still pin his thoughts down to the composition of two or three state documents—reports requiring a liberal use of imagination—before allowing himself the luxury of setting about arranging his plan of retaliation: retaliation upon the great Czar, his master. Thus it was that dawn, the late, wintry dawn, rising seven hours later, fell upon his dishevelled figure stretched out in a chair beside the paper-piled table, his heavy brows drawn down in deep thought, his lungs filled with deep draughts of smoke drawn from the pipe between his teeth.

The passage which led down to this dread room of his, opened also into the office in which he conducted business with his colleagues, and which was decorated and furnished with Oriental magnificence. The inner room, of which only Piotr, his body-servant, had ever had so much as a glimpse—the room that had sheltered this master of men and of evil at the ebb and the flood of his power—was bare of ornament, and held not one unnecessary article. The two windows were uncurtained; but outside the customary double panes, the cracks of which were filled with pounded wool, stretched a significant iron net-work which was embedded far in the stones at the window-edges. Within, the four walls were covered with staring, yellow plaster; only one side of it, that opposite the working-chair, being partly covered—and that only by two big maps: one of the Russian Empire, with its dependencies; the other covered with a mass of line-tracery and unreadable jottings, written in what was evidently a cipher. The key to this was hidden in the brain of the man who had composed it.

Michael himself had dubbed this square of parchment a map: his map of men. And it contained mention of some members in almost every great family in the Empire. Nicholas himself was there, side by side with his valet—a man, indeed, of vast importance in that ministerial world to which a Gregoriev still aspired.

Finally, beside these things, high up in a corner of the east wall, was the inevitable, dingy little daub meant for the blessed and blessing Virgin: a superstitious but universal custom which even Michael submitted to, and which represented, 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 official world rejoiced, and put much work upon him: so much, that lo! a Gregoriev soon became necessary to the governmental world. And Michael had worked to more purposes than one. His great master had no fault to find with his performance of duty. Thus it was not until too late that more than one of the ministers discovered the fact that it may be better to have certain things bungled than to have them carried through by a man so clever that he can put knowledge amassed by the way to double—sometimes triple, uses. This was what Gregoriev could, and did, do. He was, par excellence, a man of his time: in many ways even in advance of it. And he had by no means begun to approach his goal before all the men with whom he came in daily contact, and many of those considerably above him, had come to stand in terrible fear of his accurate and tabulated knowledge of things they had believed to be unsuspected by any human being beyond themselves.

But there was one man in the Empire who, as yet, remained in ignorance of this trait of his official: who had never felt the faintest scratch beneath the velvet of his favorite cat's-paw. Thus it was that Michael's momentary defeat had come about. Czar Nicholas crossed him openly; put upon him an affront unbearable; lowered him in the eyes of three hundred puny men and women over whom he had no power for revenge. It was, then, as a result of this, that treason had begun to surge through the mind of a brilliantly wicked man. And had he been able to read certain thoughts passing through his subject's head, it is possible that the Iron One might have felt a certain uneasiness of mind at possibilities of the future; and a rather poignant regret at his negligence of the evening before.

Two hours had gone by since Piotr had carried his master's first meal to that master's work-room. Michael had finished his letters. His first anger was gone and his plan of "payment" already under way. With his mind thus relieved, then, he suddenly began to feel the fatigue of thirty hours of sleeplessness. With a comforting sense of relaxation, he ascended to his bedroom, partly undressed himself, lay down on the bed, and within five minutes had fallen into a sound sleep.

And it was two hours later and Ivan Veliki had rung the hour of eleven, when the silence of the room was broken by the entrance of Piotr, who, at sight of his master asleep at this unwonted hour, halted in surprise and confusion. It took him ten minutes to nerve himself to the waking of the Prince. But it was only ten more before Michael, who had sworn at his valet steadily, meantime, for the delay, entered his public office, fully dressed, to greet General Ryúmin, a member of the Imperial staff, just now sent as an envoy from the Kremlin. Michael, who chose to greet him with all the courtesy he could command, hurried forward, his hands out-stretched, and gave the greetings of the day.

"So! I roused you from sleep, Prince? However, I come direct from the Kremlin; and his Majesty commands an audience of you at half-past noon. He is here ex-officio, of course, with only Alderberg, Zelanoi, and ourselves, on the matter of the forestry ukase. But about you—there's another matter he wants you for: the petition for the families of convict-exiles to follow them to Siberia. The Council has rejected it twice; but Benckendorf is still agitating the question. His Majesty still seems to object, strongly. You, too, I suppose?"

"If the wife or the daughter be pretty—of course," returned Gregoriev, lightly. And Ryúmin, seeing that he was not to be drawn, hastily forced a laugh.

They passed thence into a discussion of local affairs in which they had recently acted as allies when Ryumin had been Lieutenant-Governor of the Moscow province. No undercurrent of enmity marred their intercourse. Gregoriev was certainly an adept at applying or loosening his screws. His guest had felt them sharply once or twice before to-day. He knew Gregoriev's power; and Michael asked no more. He had soon made the General entirely at his ease, and the half-hour passed most agreeably. At last, however, Ryúmin rose, tacitly to remind his host of the Imperial audience. They had now, indeed, by driving as fast as possible, barely time to reach the Kremlin. Gregoriev, nevertheless, paid no attention to the other's movement.

"Come, Boris Vassilyitch, one more cigar! We may as well settle now the details of this Pahlen affair. You wish a conviction in any case, I understand?"

"My dear Prince, it can wait. His Majesty's wishes are more important than mine, you know."

Gregoriev leaned back in his chair and took three leisurely puffs before he observed, lazily: "I don't agree with you. However, I must not keep you if you have some other appointment. I shall hardly start for the Kremlin before one.

"But—but my dear Gregoriev! The Czar! Your audience!—You see you forget, my good fellow!"

"I forget nothing whatever, General: not even promises that are not kept."

Ryúmin stared, open-mouthed, as Gregoriev's gloomy eyes met his. Then, with a thrill of wonder, he understood that the man before him had the superb audacity thus openly to rebuke his Emperor.

Certainly Gregoriev's suggestion was no empty threat. Nicholas Romanoff actually waited something more than an hour for the arrival of the Moscow police official. When at last Prince Gregoriev was ushered into the royal presence, the voice of the master of ceremonies shook as he announced the name; and, while he closed the door that shut this madman from his sight, he longed and yet dreaded to hear his Majesty's first words. Should he—had he time to—rush forth and spread abroad the news of Gregoriev's fall, before the broken man should issue from that ominously quiet room? Fortunately for himself, the master of ceremonies was hardly of an adventurous disposition. He cogitated the matter till he felt it too late to perform the errand and get back in time to see Gregoriev's expression as he emerged from the Presence. Nevertheless, minute after minute went by, till an hour had passed: time for a comprehensive reproof and dismissal, truly! But the feeble-minded one was prepared for anything by the time the miracle happened. It was three o'clock before he beheld, issuing from the audience-chamber, side by side and chatting together in tones of intimacy, Michael Petrovitch Gregoriev and Nicholas I., Emperor of Russia. Nor was that all. For it was the face not of the official but of his Imperial Majesty, that wore an expression of uneasiness, of disquietude, almost—of alarm.

Gregoriev left the Kremlin, by the Gate of the Saviour, on foot. He had dismissed his sleigh upon his arrival. But, though the afternoon was yet young, the light of the brief winter day was almost gone. Lights were appearing in the shop-windows of the Tverskaia as Michael, muffled comfortably in his sables, entered the celebrated street and walked along it, leisurely, in a direction leading directly away from his distant palace. He had no definite goal in mind. He was in the high humor of immediate success. Many-colored Moscow lay all about him: his city, wherein he was known to and feared by, nearly every man. Labyrinth though it was, there was scarcely a corner, an alley, a court-yard in that most jumbled of cities that he did not know. Moscow belonged to him as London to Dickens, Paris to Balzac. And, like the great novelists, his walks, always a delight, played also an important part in his profession. It was, however, rare that he issued forth in his present guise. The Iákiminskaia, for instance, saw him oftenest as a petty merchant; the Piatnitskaia as a Jewish or Tátar trader; the Basmanaia as a soldier, or petty officer off duty; other quarters as a member of a workingman's artel, a university hanger-on, or a loafer, as the neighborhood demanded. To-day, however, being himself, he directed his steps towards the fashionable part of the town, passing from the shopping district into the old Equerries' quarter lying behind, and west of, the Kremlin hill. It was possible that he had some hazy idea of startling his wife's family by an unwelcome visit; and from them gaining the latest gossip concerning last night's ball. But the idea remained nebulous. Nicholas had responded too readily to his touch, the few lines of cipher on his map had proved too disturbing to the royal mind, for the tormentor's pride not to have been restored by such evidence of his power. He knew well that their recent talk, in which he had played his difficult part with genius, had left his Majesty fearful, not of revelations concerning mere peculations or juggled laws, but of something touching his very seat upon the throne; a certain disclosure that might bring up again that old, forgotten matter of his unnatural accession to the throne in place of his elder brother Constantine. And Michael had an unfounded belief that the Czar would, therefore, in some unknown way, bring him, peaceably, the social power he now trebly desired. Therefore it was not difficult to turn him from his half-formed purpose.

Leaving the great street for the comparatively quiet Nikolskaia, he presently encountered one of the unofficial companions of his leisure hours: a retired army officer, with a reputation at cards which few gamblers cared to ignore. Colonel Lodoroff greeted the Prince with a customary effusion, and found little difficulty in drawing him on to a certain small club, maintained by twenty members, of which the very existence was unknown to outsiders. Here, by day or by night, could be found companions for any carousal, partners for any known game of skill or chance; in short, that species of person which the ordinary club does its best to exclude. The small building's exquisitely decorated rooms were not, however, unfamiliar to the eyes of certain members of the opposite sex, whose eligibility to admittance consisted only in certain powers of attraction and entertainment.

Within the discreet recesses of this nameless organization, Michael Petrovitch spent two or three agreeable hours. And finally, at six o'clock—more than an hour after despatching a short message to Piotr, in Konnaia Square—Gregoriev, with Lodoroff, three other men, and Mesdames Nathalie, Anna, and Celéstine, whose last names were as changeable as their complexions, set off, in four public droschkies, for the Gregoriev palace.

Piotr, on receipt of his master's note, carried it at once to his wife, who was one of the half-dozen serfs educated through the influence of Princess Sophia. And upon her explanation of its contents he rushed off to set the kitchens in a hum of preparation. It was no novelty, this order: a dinner for eight to be served at an hour's notice in his excellency's dining-room, that the Princess need not be "disturbed." The chef—a Frenchman, not a serf, chattered with excitement and displeasure while he composed his hurried menu. Piotr and Sósha, the major-domo, set to work together in the round dining-room in the Prince's wing, both of them thinking drearily of the task that must be theirs in that same room on the following morning. And all through the servants' quarters might be heard, from time to time, a certain blasphemous little prayer, uttered in the expressionless tone that bespoke long familiarity: "God be merciful to us!"—the sign of the cross made in the air—"and cause the devil soon to take unto himself his own!"

But the lord of the underworld had evidently no present need of the soul of the head of the Gregoriev house. It was a quarter before seven when the Prince's special suite was invaded by the noisy party, already in the first state of reckless exhilaration induced by an extravagant use of golden fluid so dear to the Russian palate. Piotr, Sósha, and three or four of the older serfs who were accustomed to these entertainments, were in attendance, all of them drooping with the fatigue of the previous day, but none of them pausing to marvel at the vitality of their master. The table was satisfactorily decorated. The ladies were pleased to praise their corsage bouquets of camellias so hurriedly obtained; and all the party partook heartily of the hors d'œuvres and liqueurs served on a side-table, according to the old Muscovite custom. Gregoriev was the only one of them all who appeared to be quite unaffected by what he had drunk. But he was, nevertheless, the evil genius of the company, flattering the women, taunting the men, to continually increasing libations.

Meantime, on the second floor of the palace, not far away from that dining-room beneath, a very different meal was in progress. Princess Gregoriev, her sister, and Ivan, her boy, sat together at a small, round table, waited on by women. Only one of the three made much pretence at eating. Madame Gregoriev, red-eyed, but very calm, sat beside her sister, whose face also bore traces of recent tears. Both of the ladies continually pressed food upon the boy, who, as he ate with boyish heartiness, talked to them with the pleasant and wonderful unconsciousness of childhood. The difficult hour was nearly over before sounds of the affair below first began to be audible to them. But at the first, muffled scream of laughter, Madame Gregoriev started, violently, all the color flying from her face, and a ghastly pallor taking its place. The Countess Dravikine, after one instant of puzzled consideration, leaned forward, and began a hastily animated conversation with her nephew, upon all sorts of boyish affairs. Fortunately the effort was needed only for a moment or two, for presently, Alexei, Ivan's special serf, a combination of playfellow and valet, who had been summoned by the tactful Másha appeared in the doorway, waiting an order to remove his young master. It was time. Madame Dravikine's voice could no longer override the noise from below. Moreover, Ivan had now ceased to eat, and was sitting motionless, his mouth drawn into a pitiful line, a spot of vivid red flaming from each pale cheek, his great eyes wistfully, anxiously, seeking those of his mother, which as persistently avoided them. Suddenly there came from below a piercing scream: a scream holding in it a note at which Caroline, forgetting everything else, sprang suddenly to her feet, crying:

"Sophia, the thing is unbearable! How can you possibly permit yourself to endure it? For God's sake, pull yourself up, and leave this—"

"Ivan! Alexei is waiting for you. Go at once!" broke in the Princess, sharply, her eyes fixed upon her sister with a light of bitter reproof in their weary depths. At the same time, she held out both hands to her son.

Without a word, the boy rose and went to his mother. A kiss passed between them. Then he turned and walked straight to the door. He did not once look back. But neither woman failed to perceive that his delicate hands were clinched so tightly that the bloodless knuckles were tinged with blue.

When the door closed behind him, Sophia Ivanovna answered her sister's unfinished question: "You think I should leave this house. Do you for an instant imagine that he would permit his son to go with me? Am I then to leave my child here—to that?"

With a low exclamation, Caroline went forward and fell upon her knees beside her sister, asking for pardon between her shaking sobs.