s 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