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.
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