"MASTER" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolstoy Leo)

MASTER AND MAN

by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
1895

In the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude
Distributed by the Tolstoy Library
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I

It happened in the 'seventies in winter, on the day after St. Nicholas's Day. There was a fete
in the parish and the innkeeper, Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov, a Second Guild merchant, being a
church elder had to go to church, and had also to entertain his relatives and friends at home.
But when the last of them had gone he at once began to prepare to drive over to see a
neighbouring proprietor about a grove which he had been bargaining over for a long time. He was
now in a hurry to start, lest buyers from the town might forestall him in making a profitable purchase.
The youthful landowner was asking ten thousand rubles for the grove simply because Vasili
Andreevich was offering seven thousand. Seven thousand was, however, only a third of its real value.
Vasili Andreevich might perhaps have got it down to his own price, for the woods were in his district
and he had a long-stand agreement with the other village dealers that no one should run up the price
in another's district, but he had now learnt that some timber dealers from town meant to bid for the
Goryachkin grove, and he resolved to go at once and get the matter settled. So as soon as the feast
was over, he took seven hundredrubles from his strong box, added to them two thousand three
hundred rubles of church money he had in his keeping, so as to make up the sum to three thousand;
carefully counted the notes, and having put them into his pocketbook made haste to start.
Nikita, the only one of Vasili Andreevich's labourers who was not drunk that day, ran to
harness the horse. Nikita, though an habitual drunkard, was not drunk that day because since the last
day before the fast, when he had drunk his coat and leather boots, he had sworn off drink and had
kept his vow for two months, and was still keeping it despite the temptation of the vodka that had
been drunk everywhere during the first two days of the feast.
Nikita was a peasant of about fifty from a neighbouring village, "nat a manager" as the
peasants said of him, meaning that he was not the thrifty head of a household but lived most of his
time away from home as a labourer. He was valued everywhere for his industry, dexterity, and
strength at work, and still more for his kindly and pleasant temper. But he never settled down
anywhere for long because about twice a year, or even oftener, he had a drinking bout, and then
besides spending all his clothes on drink he became turbulent and quarrelsome. Vasili Andreevich
himself had turned him away several times, but had afterwards taken him back again -- valuing his
honesty, his kindness to animals, and especially his cheapness. Vasili Andreevich did not pay Nikita
the eighty rubles a year such a man was worth, but only about forty, which he gave him haphazard,
in small sums, and even that mostly not in cash but in goods from his own shop and at high prices.
Nikita's wife Martha, who had once been a handsome vigorous woman, managed the
homestead with the help of her son and two daughters, and did not urge Nikita to live at home: first
because she had been living for some twenty years already with a cooper, a peasant from another
village who lodged in their house; and secondly because though she managed her husband as she
pleased when he was sober, she feared him like fire when he was drunk. Once when he had got drunk
at home, Nikita, probably to make up for his submissiveness when sober, broke open her box, took
out her best clothes, snatched up an axe, and chopped all her undergarments and dresses to bits. All