“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 out of the wash-house he went into the service of one of the young ladies, used to run about at night on errands of some sort, and began to be spoken of as “a dangerous customer.”

What has happened to him since I don’t know.

And in this room here a street musician lived for ten years.  When he died they found twenty thousand roubles in his feather bed.

IN PASSION WEEK

“Go along, they are ringing already; and mind, don’t be naughty in church or God will punish you.”

My mother thrusts a few copper coins upon me, and, instantly forgetting about me, runs into the kitchen with an iron that needs reheating.  I know well that after confession I shall not be allowed to eat or drink, and so, before leaving the house, I force myself to eat a crust of white bread, and to drink two glasses of water.  It is quite spring in the street.  The roads are all covered with brownish slush, in which future paths are already beginning to show; the roofs and side-walks are dry; the fresh young green is piercing through the rotting grass