"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

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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.




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