the grandmother used to be with the four children; there they used to cook, sleep, receive their visitors, and even dance.  This was Putohin’s own room; he had a table in it, at which he used to work doing private jobs, copying parts for the theatre, advertisements, and so on.  This room on the right was let to his lodger, Yegoritch, a locksmith—­a steady fellow, but given to drink; he was always too hot, and so used to go about in his waistcoat and barefoot.  Yegoritch used to mend locks, pistols, children’s bicycles, would not refuse to mend cheap clocks and make skates for a quarter-rouble, but he despised that work, and looked on himself as a specialist in musical instruments.  Amongst the litter of steel and iron on his table there was always to be seen a concertina with a broken key, or a trumpet with its sides bent in.  He paid Putohin two and a half roubles for his room; he was always at his work-table, and only came out to thrust some piece of iron into the stove.

On the rare occasions when I went into that flat in the evening, this was always the picture I came upon:  Putohin would be sitting at his little table, copying something; his mother and his wife, a thin woman with an exhausted-looking face, were sitting near the lamp, sewing; Yegoritch would be making a rasping sound with his file.  And the hot, still smouldering embers in the stove filled the room with heat and fumes; the heavy air smelt of cabbage soup, swaddling-clothes, and Yegoritch.  It was poor and stuffy, but the working-class faces, the children’s little drawers hung up along by the stove, Yegoritch’s bits of iron had yet an air of peace, friendliness, content. . . .  In the corridor outside the children raced about with well-combed heads, merry and profoundly convinced that everything was satisfactory in this world, and would be so endlessly, that one had only to say one’s prayers every morning and at bedtime.

Now imagine in the midst of that same room, two paces from the stove, the coffin in which Putohin’s wife is lying.  There is no husband whose wife will live for ever, but there was something special about this death.  When, during the requiem service, I glanced at the husband’s grave face, at his stern eyes, I thought:  “Oho, brother!”

It seemed to me that he himself, his children, the grandmother and Yegoritch, were already marked down by that unseen being which lived with them in that flat.  I am a thoroughly superstitious man, perhaps, because I am a houseowner and for forty years have had to do with lodgers.  I believe if you don’t win at cards from the beginning you will go on losing to the end; when fate wants to wipe you and your family off the face of the earth, it remains inexorable in its persecution, and the first misfortune is commonly only the first of a long series. . . .  Misfortunes are like stones.  One stone has only to drop from a high cliff for others to be set rolling after it.  In short, as I came away from the requiem service at Putohin’s, I believed that he and his family were in a bad way.