“What, you don’t know?” and Seryozha, leaning on his elbows, sank into
deep meditation.
His meditations were of the most complex and diverse character. He
imagined his father’s having suddenly been presented with both the
Vladimir and the Andrey today, and in consequence being much better
tempered at his lesson, and dreamed how, when he was grown up, he would
himself receive all the orders, and what they might invent higher than the
Andrey. Directly any higher order were invented, he would win it. They
would make a higher one still, and he would immediately win that too.
The time passed in such meditations, and when the teacher came, the
lesson about the adverbs of place and time and manner of action was not
ready, and the teacher was not only displeased, but hurt. This touched
Seryozha. He felt he was not to blame for not having learned the lesson;
however much he tried, he was utterly unable to do that. As long as the
teacher was explaining to him, he believed him and seemed to comprehend,
but as soon as he was left alone, he was positively unable to recollect and to
understand that the short and familiar word “suddenly” is an adverb of
manner of action. Still he was sorry that he had disappointed the teacher.
He chose a moment when the teacher was looking in silence at the book.
“Mihail Ivanitch, when is your birthday?” he asked all, of a sudden.
“You’d much better be thinking about your work. Birthdays are of no
importance to a rational being. It’s a day like any other on which one has to
do one’s work.”
Seryozha looked intently at the teacher, at his scanty beard, at his
spectacles, which had slipped down below the ridge on his nose, and fell
into so deep a reverie that he heard nothing of what the teacher was
explaining to him. He knew that the teacher did not think what he said; he
felt it from the tone in which it was said. “But why have they all agreed to
speak just in the same manner always the dreariest and most useless stuff?
Why does he keep me off; why doesn’t he love me?” he asked himself
mournfully, and could not think of an answer.
Chapter 27
After the lesson with the grammar teacher came his father’s lesson.
While waiting for his father, Seryozha sat at the table playing with a
penknife, and fell to dreaming. Among Seryozha’s favorite occupations was
searching for his mother during his walks. He did not believe in death
generally, and in her death in particular, in spite of what Lidia Ivanovna had
told him and his father had confirmed, and it was just because of that, and
after he had been told she was dead, that he had begun looking for her when
out for a walk. Every woman of full, graceful figure with dark hair was his
mother. At the sight of such a woman such a feeling of tenderness was
stirred within him that his breath failed him, and tears came into his eyes.
And he was on the tiptoe of expectation that she would come up to him,
would lift her veil. All her face would be visible, she would smile, she
would hug him, he would sniff her fragrance, feel the softness of her arms,
and cry with happiness, just as he had one evening lain on her lap while she
tickled him, and he laughed and bit her white, ring-covered fingers. Later,
when he accidentally learned from his old nurse that his mother was not
dead, and his father and Lidia Ivanovna had explained to him that she was
dead to him because she was wicked (which he could not possibly believe,
because he loved her), he went on seeking her and expecting her in the
same way. That day in the public gardens there had been a lady in a lilac
veil, whom he had watched with a throbbing heart, believing it to be she as
she came towards them along the path. The lady had not come up to them,
but had disappeared somewhere. That day, more intensely than ever,
Seryozha felt a rush of love for her, and now, waiting for his father, he
forgot everything, and cut all round the edge of the table with his penknife,
staring straight before him with sparkling eyes and dreaming of her.
“Here is your papa!” said Vassily Lukitch, rousing him.
Seryozha jumped up and went up to his father, and kissing his hand,
looked at him intently, trying to discover signs of his joy at receiving the
Alexander Nevsky.
“Did you have a nice walk?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, sitting down in
his easy chair, pulling the volume of the Old Testament to him and opening
it. Although Alexey Alexandrovitch had more than once told Seryozha that
every Christian ought to know Scripture history thoroughly, he often
referred to the Bible himself during the lesson, and Seryozha observed this.
“Yes, it was very nice indeed, papa,” said Seryozha, sitting sideways on
his chair and rocking it, which was forbidden. “I saw Nadinka” (Nadinka
was a niece of Lidia Ivanovna’s who was being brought up in her house).
“She told me you’d been given a new star. Are you glad, papa?”
“First of all, don’t rock your chair, please,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“And secondly, it’s not the reward that’s precious, but the work itself. And I
could have wished you understood that. If you now are going to work, to
study in order to win a reward, then the work will seem hard to you; but
when you work” (Alexey Alexandrovitch, as he spoke, thought of how he
had been sustained by a sense of duty through the wearisome labor of the
morning, consisting of signing one hundred and eighty papers), “loving
your work, you will find your reward in it.”
Seryozha’s eyes, that had been shining with gaiety and tenderness, grew
dull and dropped before his father’s gaze. This was the same long-familiar
tone his father always took with him, and Seryozha had learned by now to
fall in with it. His father always talked to him—so Seryozha felt—as though
he were addressing some boy of his own imagination, one of those boys
that exist in books, utterly unlike himself. And Seryozha always tried with
his father to act being the story-book boy.
“You understand that, I hope?” said his father.
“Yes, papa,” answered Seryozha, acting the part of the imaginary boy.
The lesson consisted of learning by heart several verses out of the Gospel
and the repetition of the beginning of the Old Testament. The verses from
the Gospel Seryozha knew fairly well, but at the moment when he was
saying them he became so absorbed in watching the sharply protruding,
bony knobbiness of his father’s forehead, that he lost the thread, and he
transposed the end of one verse and the beginning of another. So it was
evident to Alexey Alexandrovitch that he did not understand what he was
saying, and that irritated him.
He frowned, and began explaining what Seryozha had heard many times
before and never could remember, because he understood it too well, just as
that “suddenly” is an adverb of manner of action. Seryozha looked with
scared eyes at his father, and could think of nothing but whether his father
would make him repeat what he had said, as he sometimes did. And this
thought so alarmed Seryozha that he now understood nothing. But his father
did not make him repeat it, and passed on to the lesson out of the Old
Testament. Seryozha recounted the events themselves well enough, but
when he had to answer questions as to what certain events prefigured, he
knew nothing, though he had already been punished over this lesson. The
passage at which he was utterly unable to say anything, and began fidgeting
and cutting the table and swinging his chair, was where he had to repeat the
patriarchs before the Flood. He did not know one of them, except Enoch,
who had been taken up alive to heaven. Last time he had remembered their
names, but now he had forgotten them utterly, chiefly because Enoch was
the personage he liked best in the whole of the Old Testament, and Enoch’s
translation to heaven was connected in his mind with a whole long train of
thought, in which he became absorbed now while he gazed with fascinated
eyes at his father’s watch-chain and a half-unbuttoned button on his
waistcoat.
In death, of which they talked to him so often, Seryozha disbelieved
entirely. He did not believe that those he loved could die, above all that he
himself would die. That was to him something utterly inconceivable and
impossible. But he had been told that all men die; he had asked people,
indeed, whom he trusted, and they too, had confirmed it; his old nurse, too,
said the same, though reluctantly. But Enoch had not died, and so it
followed that everyone did not die. “And why cannot anyone else so serve
God and be taken alive to heaven?” thought Seryozha. Bad people, that is
those Seryozha did not like, they might die, but the good might all be like
Enoch.
“Well, what are the names of the patriarchs?”
“Enoch, Enos—”
“But you have said that already. This is bad, Seryozha, very bad. If you
don’t try to learn what is more necessary than anything for a Christian,”
said his father, getting up, “whatever can interest you? I am displeased with
you, and Piotr Ignatitch” (this was the most important of his teachers) “is
displeased with you…. I shall have to punish you.”
His father and his teacher were both displeased with Seryozha, and he
certainly did learn his lessons very badly. But still it could not be said he
was a stupid boy. On the contrary, he was far cleverer than the boys his
teacher held up as examples to Seryozha. In his father’s opinion, he did not
want to learn what he was taught. In reality he could not learn that. He
could not, because the claims of his own soul were more binding on him
than those claims his father and his teacher made upon him. Those claims
were in opposition, and he was in direct conflict with his education. He was
nine years old; he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was precious to
him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love
he let no one into his soul. His teachers complained that he would not learn,
while his soul was brimming over with thirst for knowledge. And he learned
from Kapitonitch, from his nurse, from Nadinka, from Vassily Lukitch, but
not from his teachers. The spring his father and his teachers reckoned upon
to turn their mill-wheels had long dried up at the source, but its waters did
their work in another channel.
His father punished Seryozha by not letting him go to see Nadinka, Lidia
Ivanovna’s niece; but this punishment turned out happily for Seryozha.
Vassily Lukitch was in a good humor, and showed him how to make
windmills. The whole evening passed over this work and in dreaming how
to make a windmill on which he could turn himself—clutching at the sails
or tying himself on and whirling round. Of his mother Seryozha did not
think all the evening, but when he had gone to bed, he suddenly
remembered her, and prayed in his own words that his mother tomorrow for
his birthday might leave off hiding herself and come to him.
“Vassily Lukitch, do you know what I prayed for tonight extra besides
the regular things?”
“That you might learn your lessons better?”
“No.”
“Toys?”
“No. You’ll never guess. A splendid thing; but it’s a secret! When it
comes to pass I’ll tell you. Can’t you guess!”
“No, I can’t guess. You tell me,” said Vassily Lukitch with a smile, which
was rare with him. “Come, lie down, I’m putting out the candle.”
“Without the candle I can see better what I see and what I prayed for.
There! I was almost telling the secret!” said Seryozha, laughing gaily.
When the candle was taken away, Seryozha heard and felt his mother.
She stood over him, and with loving eyes caressed him. But then came
windmills, a knife, everything began to be mixed up, and he fell asleep.
