The room was so filthy that even she, who did not know and did not recognize any demands of comfort, began to feel awkward. The ceiling was smutty, the wall paper in many places was hanging in tatters, the window-sills were black with a thick layer of tobacco ashes, pillows were lying about on the floor beslimed with viscous mud, on the bed lay a crumpled sheet, gray with accumulated dirt. In one window the winter frame had been taken, or, rather, torn out, and the window itself was left half open. Apparently it was through this opening that Simple Simon had disappeared. Arina Petrovna instinctively looked out on the road and became more frightened. It was already the first of November, but the autumn that year had lasted long, and the cold spells had not yet arrived. Both the road and the field were one black sea of mud. How had he got away? Where had he gone to? Here it occurred to her that he had nothing on but a dressing-gown and a slipper. The other slipper had been found under the window. And the night before it had been pouring ceaselessly. "It's a long, long time since I've been here," she said, inhaling instead of air a foul mixture of vodka, tobacco and sheepskin evaporations. All day long, while the servants were searching the forest, she stood at the window staring dully out upon the naked fields unrolled before her eyes. So much ado on account of Simple Simon! It seemed like a preposterous dream. She had _said_ he ought to have been shipped off to the Vologda village. "No," that cursed Yudushka had wheedled, "leave him here, dearest mother, at Golovliovo." Now handle him, if you please, Yudushka. "I wish he had lived there, out of my sight, as he pleased--Christ be with him!" Arina Petrovna mused. "But I did my part. If he wasted one good thing, well, I would throw him another. If he'd have wasted the other, too, well, what could I do then? Even God can't fill a bottomless belly. Everything would have been peaceful and quiet here. But now--who knows what he has been up to? Go, look in the forest and whistle for him. It would be good if he were brought home alive, but with drunken eyes one is liable to run into a noose--take a rope, tie it to a branch, put it round his neck, and no more Stiopka. His mother denied herself sleep and food, and he has invented a new style--hanging himself. There would be some excuse for him if he had had it hard here. But goodness, what did he have to do but walk about in his room all day and eat and drink? Another son would not have known how to thank his mother enough. And how does this precious son repay his mother? Goes and hangs himself. The idea!" Arina Petrovna's surmises about Simple Simon's violent death were not justified. Toward evening he was brought back in a peasant wagon, still alive. He was in a semi-conscious state, all bruised and cut, his face blue and swollen. He had been found at the Dubrovino estate, twenty miles away.