“He’s sold it for drink,” Yegoritch declares.

Putohin says nothing, so it is the truth.  Vassya is overcome with horror.  His greatcoat, his splendid greatcoat, made of his dead mother’s cloth dress, with a splendid calico lining, gone for drink at the tavern!  And with the greatcoat is gone too, of course, the blue pencil that lay in the pocket, and the note-book with “Nota bene” in gold letters on it!  There’s another pencil with india-rubber stuck into the note-book, and, besides that, there are transfer pictures lying in it.

Vassya would like to cry, but to cry is impossible.  If his father, who has a headache, heard crying he would shout, stamp with his feet, and begin fighting, and after drinking he fights horribly.  Granny would stand up for Vassya, and his father would strike granny too; it would end in Yegoritch getting mixed up in it too, clutching at his father and falling on the floor with him.  The two would roll on the floor, struggling together and gasping with drunken animal fury, and granny would cry, the children would scream, the neighbours would send for the porter.  No, better not cry.

Because he mustn’t cry, or give vent to his indignation aloud, Vassya moans, wrings his hands and moves his legs convulsively, or biting his sleeve shakes it with his teeth as a dog does a hare.  His eyes are frantic, and his face is distorted with despair.  Looking at him, his granny all at once takes the shawl off her head, and she too makes queer movements with her arms and legs in silence, with her eyes fixed on a point in the distance.  And at that moment I believe there is a definite certainty in the minds of the boy and the old woman that their life is ruined, that there is no hope. . . .

Putohin hears no crying, but he can see it all from his room.  When, half an hour later, Vassya sets off to school, wrapped in his grandmother’s shawl, he goes out with a face I will not undertake to describe, and walks after him.  He longs to call the boy, to comfort him, to beg his forgiveness, to promise him on his word of honour, to call his dead mother to witness, but instead of words, sobs break from him.  It is a grey, cold morning.  When he reaches the town school Vassya untwists his granny’s shawl, and goes into the 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: