k the
receipt from me. The following month the rent was brought by his
mother; she only brought me half, and promised to bring the remainder
a week later. The third month, I did not get a farthing, and the
porter complained to me that the lodgers in No. 23 were "not behaving
like gentlemen."

These were ominous symptoms.

Picture this scene. A sombre Petersburg morning looks in at the
dingy windows. By the stove, the granny is pouring out the children's
tea. Only the eldest, Vassya, drinks out of a glass, for the others
the tea is poured out into saucers. Yegoritch is squatting on his
heels before the stove, thrusting a bit of iron into the fire. His
head is heavy and his eyes are lustreless from yesterday's
drinking-bout; he sighs and groans, trembles and coughs.

"He has quite put me off the right way, the devil," he grumbles;
"he drinks himself and leads others into sin."

Putohin sits in his room, on the bedstead from which the bedclothes
and the pillows have long ago disappeared, and with his hands
straying in his hair looks blankly at the floor at his feet. He is
tattered, unkempt, and ill.

"Drink it up, make haste or you will be late for school," the old
woman urges on Vassya, "and it's time for me, too, to go and scrub
the floors for the Jews. . . ."

The old woman is the only one in the flat who does not lose heart.
She thinks of old times, and goes out to hard dirty work. On Fridays
she scrubs the floors for the Jews at the crockery shop, on Saturdays
she goes out washing for shopkeepers, and on Sundays she is racing
about the town from morning to night, trying to find ladies who
will help her. Every day she has work of some sort; she washes and
scrubs, and is by turns a midwife, a matchmaker, or a beggar. It
is true she, too, is not disinclined to drown her sorrows, but even
when she has had a drop she does not forget her duties. In Russia
there are many such tough old women, and how much of its welfare
rests upon them!

When he has finished his tea, Vassya packs up his books in a satchel
and goes behind the stove; his greatcoat ought to be hanging there
beside his granny's clothes. A minute later he comes out from behind
the stove and asks:

"Where is my greatcoat?"

The grandmother and the other children look for the greatcoat
together, they waste a long time in looking for it, but the greatcoat
has utterly vanished. Where is it? The grandmother and Vassya are
pale and frightened. Even Yegori