The Man Who Was Afraid | Page 4

fate, bruised and wounded in the battle-field of life, still like Byron and
like Lermontov,
"--seeks the storm As though the storm contained repose."
And in a leonine voice he cries defiantly:
"Let the storm rage with greater force and fury!"
HERMAN BERNSTEIN.
September 20, 1901.

FOMA GORDYEEF
Dedicated to
ANTON P. CHEKHOV
By
Maxim Gorky

CHAPTER I
ABOUT sixty years ago, when fortunes of millions had been made on
the Volga with fairy-tale rapidity, Ignat Gordyeeff, a young fellow, was
working as water-pumper on one of the barges of the wealthy merchant
Zayev.
Built like a giant, handsome and not at all stupid, he was one of those
people whom luck always follows everywhere--not because they are
gifted and industrious, but rather because, having an enormous stock of
energy at their command, they cannot stop to think over the choice of
means when on their way toward their aims, and, excepting their own
will, they know no law. Sometimes they speak of their conscience with
fear, sometimes they really torture themselves struggling with it, but
conscience is an unconquerable power to the faint-hearted only; the
strong master it quickly and make it a slave to their desires, for they
unconsciously feel that, given room and freedom, conscience would
fracture life. They sacrifice days to it; and if it should happen that
conscience conquered their souls, they are never wrecked, even in
defeat--they are just as healthy and strong under its sway as when they
lived without conscience.
At the age of forty Ignat Gordyeeff was himself the owner of three
steamers and ten barges. On the Volga he was respected as a rich and
clever man, but was nicknamed "Frantic," because his life did not flow
along a straight channel, like that of other people of his kind, but now
and again, boiling up turbulently, ran out of its rut, away from gain--
the prime aim of his existence. It looked as though there were three
Gordyeeffs in him, or as though there were three souls in Ignat's body.
One of them, the mightiest, was only greedy, and when Ignat lived
according to its commands, he was merely a man seized with
untamable passion for work. This passion burned in him by day and by
night, he was completely absorbed by it, and, grabbing everywhere
hundreds and thousands of roubles, it seemed as if he could never have
enough of the jingle and sound of money. He worked about up and
down the Volga, building and fastening nets in which he caught gold:
he bought up grain in the villages, floated it to Rybinsk on his barges;

he plundered, cheated, sometimes not noticing it, sometimes noticing,
and, triumphant, be openly laughed at by his victims; and in the
senselessness of his thirst for money, he rose to the heights of poetry.
But, giving up so much strength to this hunt after the rouble, he was not
greedy in the narrow sense, and sometimes he even betrayed an
inconceivable but sincere indifference to his property. Once, when the
ice was drifting down the Volga, he stood on the shore, and, seeing that
the ice was breaking his new barge, having crushed it against the bluff
shore, he ejaculated:
"That's it. Again. Crush it! Now, once more! Try!"
"Well, Ignat," asked his friend Mayakin, coming up to him, "the ice is
crushing about ten thousand out of your purse, eh?"
"That's nothing! I'll make another hundred. But look how the Volga is
working! Eh? Fine? She can split the whole world, like curd, with a
knife. Look, look! There you have my 'Boyarinya!' She floated but
once. Well, we'll have mass said for the dead."
The barge was crushed into splinters. Ignat and the godfather, sitting in
the tavern on the shore, drank vodka and looked out of the window,
watching the fragments of the "Boyarinya" drifting down the river
together with the ice.
"Are you sorry for the vessel, Ignat?" asked Mayakin.
"Why should I be sorry for it? The Volga gave it to me, and the Volga
has taken it back. It did not tear off my hand."
"Nevertheless."
"What--nevertheless? It is good at least that I saw how it was all done.
It's a lesson for the future. But when my 'Volgar' was burned--I was
really sorry--I didn't see it. How beautiful it must have looked when
such a woodpile was blazing on the water in the dark night! Eh? It was
an enormous steamer."

"Weren't you sorry for that either?"
"For the steamer? It is true, I did feel sorry for the steamer. But then it
is mere foolishness to feel sorry! What's the use? I might have cried;
tears cannot extinguish fire. Let the steamers burn. And even though
everything be burned down, I'd spit upon it! If