Page:Tolstoy - Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/53

Rh still oftener, he fell a-drinking, and then, besides drinking away all he had, he became noisy and quarrelsome likewise. Vasily Andreich had also driven him away once or twice, but taken him on again afterwards—he valued him for his honesty, for his love of animals, and principally for his cheapness. Vasily Andreich paid Nikita not at the rate of eighty roubles, as such a workman was well worth, but at the rate of forty roubles, which he gave him without any strict account, in driblets, and for the most part not in cash, but in wares out of his store, and at a dear rate.

The wife of Nikita, Martha, at one time a beauty, was a smart old woman, kept house at home, with a little lad and two girls to look after, and she did not call on Nikita to live at home, first because for twenty years she had been living with a cooper, a muzhik out of another village who dwelt with them in the house; and in the second place because, although she worried her husband as she willed when he was sober, she feared him like fire when he was drunk. Once when he had drunk himself mad drunk at home, Nikita, no doubt to revenge himself for all his sober submissiveness, had broken open her clothes' chest, dragged out all her most precious dresses, and catching up a chopper, chopped all her gowns and other garments into little pieces on the chopping-block. All the wages earned by Nikita went to his wife, and to this he made no objection. So now, too, two days before the feast, Martha had gone to Vasily Andreich and received from him white meal, tea, sugar, and a small flask of wine—the whole worth about three 3