school with nothing over his jacket for fear the boys should
say he looks like a woman. And when he gets home Putohin sobs,
mutters some incoherent words, bows down to the ground before his
mother and Yegoritch, and the locksmith's table. Then, recovering
himself a little, he runs to me and begs me breathlessly, for God's
sake, to find him some job. I give him hopes, of course.

"At last I am myself again," he said. "It's high time, indeed, to
come to my senses. I've made a beast of myself, and now it's over."

He is delighted and thanks me, while I, who have studied these
gentry thoroughly during the years I have owned the house, look at
him, and am tempted to say:

"It's too late, dear fellow! You are a dead man already."

From me, Putohin runs to the town school. There he paces up and
down, waiting till his boy comes out.

"I say, Vassya," he says joyfully, when the boy at last comes out,
"I have just been promised a job. Wait a bit, I will buy you a
splendid fur-coat. . . . I'll send you to the high school! Do you
understand? To the high school! I'll make a gentleman of you! And
I won't drink any more. On my honour I won't."

And he has intense faith in the bright future. But the evening comes
on. The old woman, coming back from the Jews with twenty kopecks,
exhausted and aching all over, sets to work to wash the children's
clothes. Vassya is sitting doing a sum. Yegoritch is not working.
Thanks to Putohin he has got into the way of drinking, and is feeling
at the moment an overwhelming desire for drink. It's hot and stuffy
in the room. Steam rises in clouds from the tub where the old woman
is washing.

"Are we going?" Yegoritch asks surlily.

My lodger does not answer. After his excitement he feels insufferably
dreary. He struggles with the desire to drink, with acute depression
and . . . and, of course, depression gets the best of it. It is a
familiar story.

Towards night, Yegoritch and Putohin go out, and in the morning
Vassya cannot find granny's shawl.

That is the drama that took place in that flat. After selling the
shawl for drink, Putohin did not come home again. Where he disappeared
to I don't know. After he disappeared, the old woman first got
drunk, then took to her bed. She was taken to the hospital, the
younger children were fetched by relations of some sort, and Vassya
went into the wash-house here. In the day-time he handed the irons,
and at night fetched the beer. When he was turned ou