But I rushed after the, old man.
A few steps from the shop, through a gate on the right, there is an alley, dark and narrow, shut in by huge houses.
Something told me that the old man must have turned in there.
A second house was being built here on the right hand, and was surrounded with scaffolding.
The fence round the house came almost into the middle of the alley, and planks had been laid down to walk round the fence.
In a dark corner made by the fence and the house I found the old man.
He was sitting on the edge of the wooden pavement and held his head propped in both hands, with his elbows on his knees.
I sat down beside him.
“Listen,” said I, hardly knowing how to begin. “Don’t grieve over Azorka.
Come along, I’ll take you home.
Don’t worry.
I’ll go for a cab at once.
Where do you live?”
The old man did not answer.
I could not decide what to do.
There were no passersby in the alley.
Suddenly he began clutching me by the arm.
“Stifling!” he said, in a husky, hardly audible voice, “Stifling!”
“Let’s go to your home,” I cried, getting up and forcibly lifting him up. “ You’ll have some tea and go to bed. . . . I’ll get a cab.
I’ll call a doctor.... I know a doctor. . . .”
I don’t know what else I said to him.
He tried to get up, but fell back again on the ground and began muttering again in the same hoarse choking voice.
I bent down more closely and listened.
“In Vassilyevsky Island,” the old man gasped. “The sixth street. The six ... th stre ... et”
He sank into silence.
“You live in Vassilyevsky Island?
But you’ve come wrong then. That would be to the left, and you’ve come to the right.
I’ll take you directly . . .”
The old man did not stir.
I took his hand; the hand dropped as though it were dead.
I looked into his face, touched him – he was dead.
I felt as though it had all happened in a dream.
This incident caused me a great deal of trouble, in the course of which my fever passed off of itself.
The old man’s lodging was discovered.
He did not, however, live in Vassilyevsky Island, but only a couple of paces from the spot where he died, in Klugen’s Buildings, in the fifth storey right under the roof, in a separate flat, consisting of a tiny entry and a large lowpitched room, with three slits by way of windows.
He had lived very poorly.
His furniture consisted of a table, two chairs, and a very very old sofa as hard as a stone, with hair sticking out of it in all directions ; and even these things turned out to be the landlord’s.
The stove had evidently not been heated for a long while, and no candles were found either.
I seriously think now that the old man went to Muller’s simply to sit in a lighted room and get warm.
On the table stood an empty earthenware mug, and a stale crust of bread lay beside it.
No money was found, not a farthing.
There was not even a change of linen in which to bury him; someone gave his own shirt for the purpose.
It was clear that he could not have lived like that, quite isolated, and no doubt someone must have visited him from time to time.
In the table drawer they found his passport.
The dead man turned out to be of foreign birth, though a Russian subject. His name was Jeremy Smith, and he was a mechanical engineer, seventyeight years old.
There were two books lying on the table, a short geography and the New Testament in the Russian translation, pencilmarked in the margin and scored by the fingernail.
These books I took for myself.
The landlord and the other tenants were questioned – they all knew scarcely anything about him.
There were numbers of tenants in the building, almost all artisans or German women who let lodgings with board and attendance.
The superintendent of the block, a superior man, was also unable to say much about the former tenant, except that the lodging was let at six roubles a month, that the deceased had lived in it for four months, but had not paid a farthing, for the last two, so that he would have had to turn him out.