began listening on the
stairs.

"Do you want to see that person yourself?"

"That's just what I wanted, but how is it to be done?" I cried,
delighted.

"Let's simply go down while she's alone. When he comes in he'll beat
her horribly if he finds out we've been there. I often go in on the sly.
I went for him this morning when he began beating her again."

"What do you mean?"

"I dragged him off her by the hair. He tried to beat me, but I
frightened him, and so it ended. I'm afraid he'll come back drunk, and
won't forget it--he'll give her a bad beating because of it."

We went downstairs at once.

The Lebyadkins' door was shut but not locked, and we were able to go in.
Their lodging consisted of two nasty little rooms, with smoke-begrimed
walls on which the filthy wall-paper literally hung in tatters. It
had been used for some years as an eating-house, until Filipov, the
tavern-keeper, moved to another house. The other rooms below what had
been the eating-house were now shut up, and these two were all the
Lebyadkins had. The furniture consisted of plain benches and deal
tables, except for an old arm-chair that had lost its arms. In the
second room there was the bedstead that belonged to Mlle. Lebyadkin
standing in the corner, covered with a chintz quilt; the captain himself
went to bed anywhere on the floor, often without undressing. Everything
was in disorder, wet and filthy; a huge soaking rag lay in the middle
of the floor in the first room, and a battered old shoe lay beside it
in the wet. It was evident that no one looked after anything here. The
stove was not heated, food was not cooked; they had not even a samovar
as Shatov told me. The captain had come to the town with his sister
utterly destitute, and had, as Liputin said, at first actually gone from
house to house begging. But having unexpectedly received some money, he
had taken to drinking at once, and had become so besotted that he was
incapable of looking after things.

Mlle. Lebyadkin, whom I was so anxious to see, was sitting quietly at
a deal kitchen table on a bench in the corner of the inner room, not
making a sound. When we opened the door she did not call out to us or
even move from her place. Shatov said that the door into the passage
would not lock and it had once stood wide open all night. By the dim
light of a thin candle in an iron candlestick, I made out a woman of
about thirty, perhaps, sickly and emaciated, wearing an old dress of