Read Online The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol by Nikolái Gógol - Free Book Online Page A

women, praised and ate with great appetite, and fought with her husband only in the mornings, which was the one time she occasionally saw him.Their cottage was twice as old as the local scrivener’s balloon trousers, the roof lacked straw in some places.Only remnants of the wattle fence were to be seen, because no one ever took a stick along against dogs when leaving the house, intending to pass by the chum’s kitchen garden instead and pull one out of his fence.Three days would go by without the stove being lit.Whatever the tender spouse wheedled out of good people she hid the best she could from her husband, and she often arbitrarily took his booty if he hadn’t managed to drink it up in the tavern.The chum, despite his perennial sangfroid, did not like yielding to her, and therefore almost always left the house with two black eyes, and his dear better half trudged off to tell the old women about her husband’s outrages and the beatings she suffered from him.
    Now, you can picture to yourself how thrown off the weaver and the chum were by her unexpected appearance.Setting the sack down, they stepped in front of it, covering it with their coat skirts; but it was too late: the chum’s wife, though she saw poorly with her old eyes, nevertheless noticed the sack.
    “Well, that’s good!” she said, with the look of an exultant hawk.“It’s good you got so much for your caroling!That’s what good people always do; only, no, I suspect you picked it up somewhere.Show me this minute!Do you hear?Show me your sack right this minute!”
    “The hairy devil can show it to you, not us,” said the chum, assuming a dignified air.
    “What business is it of yours?” said the weaver.“We got it for caroling, not you.”
    “No, you’re going to show it to me, you worthless drunkard!” the wife exclaimed, hitting the tall chum on the chin with her fist and going for the sack.
    But the weaver and the chum valiantly defended the sack and forced her to retreat.Before they had time to recover, the spouse came running back to the front hall, this time with a poker in her hands.She nimbly whacked her husband on the hands and the weaver on the back with the poker, and was now standing beside the sack.
    “What, we let her get to it?” said the weaver, coming to his senses.
    “Eh, what do you mean we let her—why did you let her?” the chum said with sangfroid.
    “Your poker must be made of iron!” the weaver said after a short silence, rubbing his back.“My wife bought a poker at the fair last year, paid twenty-five kopecks—it’s nothing … doesn’t even hurt …”
    Meanwhile the triumphant spouse, setting a tallow lamp on the floor, untied the sack and peeked into it.But her old eyes, which had made out the sack so well, must have deceived her this time.
    “Eh, there’s a whole boar in there!” she cried out, clapping her hands for joy.
    “A boar!do you hear, a whole boar!” the weaver nudged the chum.“It’s all your fault!”
    “No help for it!” the chum said, shrugging.
    “No help?Don’t stand there, let’s take the sack from her!Come on!Away with you!away!it’s our boar!” the weaver shouted, bearing down on her.
    “Get out, get out, cursed woman!It’s not your goods!” the chum said, coming closer.
    The spouse again took hold of the poker, but just then Choub climbed out of the sack and stood in the middle of the hall, stretching, like a man who has just awakened from a long sleep.
    The chum’s wife gave a cry, slapping her skirts, and they all involuntarily opened their mouths.
    “Why did she say a boar, the fool!That’s not a boar!” said the chum, goggling his eyes.
    “See what a man got thrown into the sack!” said the weaver, backing away in fear.“Say what you like, you can even burst, but it’s the doing of the unclean powers.He wouldn’t even fit through the window!”
    “It’s my chum!” cried the chum, looking closer.
    “And who did you think it was?” said Choub,