"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.