yourself!’ I sat drunk and then he seized me by the hair suddenly and holding me by the hair he shoved me down. ‘Dance,’ says he, ‘Akulka’s husband! I’ll hold you by your hair and you dance to amuse me!’ ‘You are a scoundrel,’ I shouted. And he says to me, ‘I shall come to you with companions and thrash Akulka, your wife, before you, as much as I like.’ Then I, would you believe it, was afraid to go out of the house for a whole month. I was afraid he’d come and disgrace me. And just for that I began beating her. . . .”
“But what did you beat her for! You can tie a man’s hands but you can’t stop his tongue. You shouldn’t beat your wife too much. Show her, give her a lesson, and then be kind to her. That’s what she is for.”
Shishkov was silent for some time.
“It was insulting,” he began again. “Besides, I got into the habit of it some days I’d beat her from morning till night; everything she did was wrong. If I didn’t beat her, I felt bored. She would sit without saying a word, looking out of the window and crying. . . . She was always crying, I’d feel sorry for her, but I’d beat her. My mother was always swearing at me about her: ‘You are a scoundrel,’ she’d say, ‘you’re a jail bird!’ ‘I’ll kill her,’ I cried, ‘and don’t let anyone dare to speak to me; for they married me by a trick.’ At first old Ankudim stood up for her, he’d come himself: ‘You are no one of much account,’ says he, ‘I’ll find a law for you.’ But he gave it up. Marya Stepanovna humbled herself completely. One day she came and prayed me tearfully, ‘I’ve come to entreat you, Ivan Semyonovitch, it’s a small matter, but a great favour. Bid me hope again,’ she bowed down, ‘soften your heart, forgive her. Evil folk slandered our daughter. You know yourself she was innocent when you married her.’ And she bowed down to my feet and cried. But I lorded it over her. ‘I won’t hear you now! I shall do just what I like to you all now, for I am no longer master of myself. Filka Morozov is my mate and my best friend. . . .”
“So you were drinking together again then?”
“Nothing like it! There was no approaching him. He was quite mad with drink. He’d spent all he had and hired himself out to a storekeeper to replace his eldest son, and in our part of the country when a man sells himself for a soldier, up to the very day he is taken away, everything in the house has to give way to him, and he is master over all. He gets the sum in full
