第225章

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 her as she came toward them along the path. The lady had not come up to them, but had disappeared somewhere. That day, more intensely than ever, Seriozha 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 thinking of her.

`Here is your papa,' Vassilii Lukich diverted him.

Seriozha 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 Alexandre Nevsky.

`Did you have a good walk?' said Alexei Alexandrovich, sitting down in his easy chair, pulling the volume of the Old Testament to him and opening it. Although Alexei Alexandrovich had more than once told Seriozha that every Christian ought to know Scripture history thoroughly, he often referred to the Bible himself during the lesson, and Seriozha observed this.

`Yes, it was very good indeed, papa,' said Seriozha, 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 Alexei Alexandrovich.

`And secondly, it's not the reward that's precious, but the work itself.

And I could have wished you had 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' (Alexei Alexandrovich, 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 for it.'

Seriozha's eyes hitherto 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 Seriozha had learned by now to fall in with it. His father always talked to him - so Seriozha felt - as though he were addressing some boy of his own imagination, one of those boys who exist in books, utterly unlike himself. And Seriozha always tried, before his father, to pretend being this storybook boy.

`You understand that, I hope?' said his father.

`Yes, papa,' answered Seriozha, acting the part of the imaginary boy.

The lesson consisted of learning by heart several verses out of the Evangel and the repetition of the beginning of the Old Testament. The verses from the Evangel Seriozha 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. It was evident to Alexei Alexandrovich that he did not understand what he was saying, and this irritated him.

He frowned, and began explaining what Seriozha 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. Seriozha 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 Seriozha 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. Seriozha 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 tell of 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, Seriozha 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 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 Seriozha. Bad people - that is, those Seriozha did not like - 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. Seriozha, very bad.

If you don't try to learn what is most necessary of all for a Christian,'

said his father, getting up, `whatever can interest you? I am displeased with you, and Piotr Ignatich' (this was the chief pedagogue) `is displeased with you.... I shall have to punish you.'