The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol Read Online Free PDF Page A

drinking there tonight!” Choub continued, with a grin on his face.“We’d better not be late.”
    With that, Choub straightened the belt that tightly girded his coat, pulled his hat down hard, clutched his knout—a terror and threat to bothersome dogs—but, looking up, he stopped …
    “What the devil!Look, look, Panas!…”
    “What?” said his chum, and also threw his head back.
    “How, what?There’s no moon!”
    “What the deuce!It’s a fact, there’s no moon.”
    “None at all,” said Choub, somewhat vexed at the chum’s unfailing indifference.“Not that you care, I suppose.”
    “But what can I do?”
    “It had to happen,” Choub went on, wiping his mustache on his sleeve, “some devil—may the dog have no glass of vodka in the morning—had to interfere!… Really, as if for a joke … I looked out the window on purpose as I sat inside: a wonder of a night!Clear, snow shining in the moonlight.Everything bright as day.The moment I step out the door—it’s pitch-dark!”
    Choub spent a long time grumbling and swearing, all the while pondering what to decide.He was dying to chatter about all sorts of nonsense at the deacon’s, where, without any doubt, the headman was already sitting, and the visiting bass, and the tar dealer Mikita, who went off to the Poltava market every two weeks and cracked such jokes that good people held their sides from laughter.Choub could already picture mentally the spiced vodka standing on the table.All this was tempting, it’s true; but the darkness of the night reminded him of the laziness so dear to all Cossacks.How good it would be to lie on the stove now, with his knees bent, calmly smoking his pipe and listening, through an entrancing drowsiness, to the carols and songs of the merry lads and girls coming in crowds to the windows.He would, without any doubt, have decided on the latter if he had been alone, but now for the two of them it would not be so boring or scary to walk through the dark night, and he did not really want to appear lazy or cowardly before the others.Having finished swearing, he again turned to the chum:
    “So there’s no moon, chum?”
    “No.”
    “It’s odd, really!Give me a pinch.Fine snuff you’ve got there, chum!Where do you get it?”
    “The devil it’s fine,” replied the chum, closing the birchbark pouch all covered with pinpricked designs.“It wouldn’t make an old hen sneeze!”
    “I remember,” Choub went on in the same way, “the late tavern keeper Zozulia once brought me some snuff from Nezhin.Ah, what snuff that was!such good snuff!So, then, chum, what are we going to do?It’s dark out.”
    “Let’s stay home, then, if you like,” said the chum, grasping the door handle.
    If the chum hadn’t said it, Choub would certainly have decided to stay home, but now something seemed to tug at him to do the contrary.
    “No, chum, let’s go!It’s impossible, we have to go!”
    Having said that, he was already annoyed with himself for it.He very much disliked dragging himself anywhere on such a night; but it was a comfort to him that he himself had purposely wanted it and was not doing as he had been advised.
    The chum, showing not the least vexation on his face, like a man to whom it was decidedly all the same whether he stayed home or dragged himself out, looked around, scratched his shoulderswith the butt of his whip, and the two chums set out on their way.
    N OW LET’S HAVE a look at what the beautiful daughter was doing, left alone.Oksana had not yet turned seventeen, but already in almost all the world, on this side of Dikanka and on the other, the talk was of nothing but her.The young lads, one and all, declared that there had never been, nor ever would be, a better girl in the village.Oksana knew and heard all that was said about her, and was capricious, as beauties will be.If she had gone about not in a checkered wraparound and a woolen apron, but in some sort of capote, she would have sent all her maids