Chapter 26

‘Well, Kapitonitch?’ said Seryozha, coming back rosy and goodhumored from his walk the day before his birthday, and giving his overcoat to the tall old hall porter, who smiled down at the little person from the height of his long figure. ‘Well, has the bandaged clerk been here today? Did papa see him?’

‘He saw him. The minute the chief secretary came out, I announced him,’ said the hall porter with a good-humored wink. ‘Here, I’ll take it off.’

‘Seryozha!’ said the tutor, stopping in the doorway leading to the inner rooms. ‘Take it off yourself.’ But Seryozha, though he heard his tutor’s feeble voice, did not pay attention to it. He stood keeping hold of the hall porter’s belt, and gazing into his face.

‘Well, and did papa do what he wanted for him?’

The hall porter nodded his head affirmatively. The clerk with his face tied up, who had already been seven times to ask some favor of Alexey Alexandrovitch, interested both Seryozha and the hall porter. Seryozha had come upon him in the hall, and had heard him plaintively beg the hall porter to announce him, saying that he and his children had death staring them in the face.

Since then Seryozha, having met him a second time in the hall, took great interest in him.

‘Well, was he very glad?’ he asked.

‘Glad? I should think so! Almost dancing as he walked away.’

‘And has anything been left?’ asked Seryozha, after a pause.

‘Come, sir,’ said the hall-porter; then with a shake of his head he whispered, ‘Something from the countess.’

Seryozha understood at once that what the hall porter was speaking of was a present from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for his birthday.

‘What do you say? Where?’

‘Korney took it to your papa. A fine plaything it must be too!’

‘How big? Like this?’

‘Rather small, but a fine thing.’

‘A book.’

‘No, a thing. Run along, run along, Vassily Lukitch is calling you,’ said the porter, hearing the tutor’s steps approaching, and carefully taking away from his belt the little hand in the glove half pulled off, he signed with his head towards the tutor.

‘Vassily Lukitch, in a tiny minute!’ answered Seryozha with that gay and loving smile which always won over the conscientious Vassily Lukitch.

Seryozha was too happy, everything was too delightful for him to be able to help sharing with his friend the porter the family good fortune of which he had heard during his walk in the public gardens from Lidia Ivanovna’s niece. This piece of good news seemed to him particularly important from its coming at the same time with the gladness of the bandaged clerk and his own gladness at toys having come for him. It seemed to Seryozha that this was a day on which everyone ought to be glad and happy.

‘You know papa’s received the Alexander Nevsky today?’

‘To be sure I do! People have been already to congratulate him.’

‘And is he glad?’

‘Glad at the Tsar’s gracious favor! I should think so! It’s a proof he’s deserved it,’ said the porter severely and seriously.

Seryozha fell to dreaming, gazing up at the face of the porter, which he had thoroughly studied in every detail, especially the chin that hung down between the gray whiskers, never seen by anyone but Seryozha, who saw him only from below.

‘Well, and has your daughter been to see you lately?’

The porter’s daughter was a ballet dancer.

‘When is she to come on week-days? They’ve their lessons to learn too. And you’ve your lesson, sir; run along.’

On coming into the room, Seryozha, instead of sitting down to his lessons, told his tutor of his supposition that what had been brought him must be a machine. ‘What do you think?’ he inquired.

But Vassily Lukitch was thinking of nothing but the necessity of learning the grammar lesson for the teacher, who was coming at two.

‘No, do just tell me, Vassily Lukitch,’ he asked suddenly, when he was seated at their work table with the book in his hands, ‘what is greater than the Alexander Nevsky? You know papa’s received the Alexander Nevsky?’

Vassily Lukitch replied that the Vladimir was greater than the Alexander Nevsky.

‘And higher still?’

‘Well, highest of all is the Andrey Pervozvanny.’

‘And higher than the Andrey?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘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.