And, in fact, a week afterwards the notary quite unexpectedly dismissed Putohin, and engaged a young lady in his place.  And would you believe it, Putohin was not so much put out at the loss of his job as at being superseded by a young lady and not by a man.  Why a young lady?  He so resented this that on his return home he thrashed his children, swore at his mother, and got drunk.  Yegoritch got drunk, too, to keep him company.

Putohin brought me the rent, but did not apologise this time, though it was eighteen days overdue, and said nothing when he took 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 Yegoritch is surprised.  Putohin is the only one who does not move.  Though he is quick to notice anything irregular or disorderly, this time he makes a pretence of hearing and seeing nothing.  That is suspicious.