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