The Argonauts
dustry, inventiveness, and energy were inexhaustible. To
him business seemed to be what water is to a fish: the element which gives delight and freedom. What was his business? Great and complicated enterprises: the erection of
public edifices, the purchase, sale, and exchange of values
of various descriptions, exchanges in many markets and
corporations. To finish all this business it was necessary to
possess qualities of the most opposite character: the courage
of the lion and the caution of the fox, the talons of the falcon and the elasticity of the cat. His life was passed at a
gaming-table, composed of the whole surface of a gigantic
State; that life was a species of continuous punting at a
bank kept by blind chance rather frequently; for calculation and skill, which meant very much in his career, could
not eliminate chance altogether, that power which appears
independently. Hence, he must not let chance overthrow
him; he might drop to the earth before its thrusts and
contract a muscle, but only to parry, make an elastic spring,
and seize new booty. His career was success rising and falling like a river, it was also a fever, ceaselessly bathed in cool
calculation and reckoning.
As to the rest, post-wagons, railways, bells at railway stations, urging to haste, glittering snows of the distant North, mountains towering on the boundary between two parts of the world, rivers cutting through uninhabited regions, horizons marked with the gloomy lines of Siberian forests, sohtary since the beginning of ages. Then, as a change: noise, glitter, throngs, the brilliancy of capitals, and in those capitals a multitude of doors, some of which open with freedom, while others are closed hermetically; before doors of the second sort the pliancy of the cat's paw is needed; this finds a hole where the broad way is impossible.
