V + 

Do you remember yourself as a little child when you lived with your father in a faraway forgotten village? He was an unhappy man, your father, but he loved you more than all else in the world. Do you remember how you would sit together in the long winter evenings, he busy with accounts, you with your books, the tallow-dipped candle with its reddish flame burning more and more dimly, until, arming yourself with snuffers, you trimmed it? That was your duty, and you performed it with such importance that your father each time would raise his eyes from the big ledger, and with customary pathetic and caressing smile, look at you. Your eyes would meet. + 

“Look, papa, how much I have already read,” you would say, and show the pages you had read, holding them together with your fingers. + 

“Read, read, my little friend,” your father would say approvingly, and again bury himself in accounts. + 

He allowed you to read anything, because only good could remain in the mind of his adored little boy. And you read and read, understanding nothing of the arguments, but, nevertheless, taking it all in accordance with childish ideas. + 

Yes, red was red then, and not the reflection of red rays. Then everything was as it appeared. Then there were not ready-made receptacles for impressions, for ideas into which a man poured forth all that he felt, not troubling whether the receptacle was a fit one or sound. And if he loved someone, he knew without a doubt that he loved. + 

A pretty, laughing face rose before his eyes and vanished. + 

And she? You also loved her? I must acknowledge that, at all events, we played sufficiently with feeling. And it would seem that at least I spoke and thought sincerely at that time.⁠ ⁠… What torture it was! And when happiness came it did not seem at all like happiness, and if I had been able then actually to say to time. Stop! wait a little! here it is good⁠—I should have still thought⁠—Shall I order it to stop or not? And afterwards, very soon afterwards, it became necessary to drive time ahead.⁠ ⁠… But it is no use to think of that now. I must think of what was and not of what it appeared to be. + 

And there was very little to think of, only childhood. + 

And of that there remained in his memory only disjointed fragments which Alexei Petrovich began to collect with avidity. + 

He recalled the little house, the bedroom in which he slept opposite his father. He remembered the red canopy hanging above his father’s bed. Every evening, as he fell asleep, he gazed at these curtains, and always found fresh figures in its fantastic patterns⁠—flowers, birds, and faces of people. He remembered the early morning smell of the straw with which they warmed the house. The faithful Nicholas, the good man had already filled the passage with straw, which he had dragged in from outside, and was pushing whole bundles of it into the mouth of the stove. It used to burn brightly and clearly, and the smoke had a pleasing, but somewhat acrid smell. Alesha was ready to sit whole hours before the stove, but his father would call him to come and drink his morning tea, after which lessons would begin. He remembered how he could not understand decimals, and that his father would get rather hot, and try his utmost to explain them to him. + 

“I fancy he was not altogether clear about them himself,” reflected Alexei Petrovich. + 

Then afterwards Biblical history. Alesha loved that more than all the other lessons. Wonderful, gigantic, and extravagant characters. Cain, the history of Joseph, the Pharaohs, the wars. How the ravens carried food to the prophet Elijah. And there was a picture of it. Elijah sitting on a stone with a large book on his knees, and two birds flying to him holding something round in their beaks. + 

“Papa, look, the ravens took bread to Elijah, but our Worka takes everything from us.” + 

A tame raven with red beak and claws dyed with red paint, so Nicholas imagined, would jump sideways along the back of the sofa, and, stretching out his neck, try to drag a shiny bronze frame from the wall. In this frame there was a miniature water-coloured portrait of a young man with a very smooth forehead, dressed in a dark green uniform with epaulets, and a very high red collar, and a cross attached to a buttonhole. This was the same papa twenty-five years ago. + 

The raven and portrait flashed up and disappeared. + 

“And afterwards what? Afterwards a star, a shed, manger. I remember that this word manger was quite a new one to me, although I had known of the manger in our stables and cow-house. But those stalls seemed something special.” + 

They did not study the New Testament like the Old, not from a thick book with pictures. His father used to tell Alesha of Jesus Christ, and often read out to him whole chapters from the Gospels. + 

“ ‘But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ Do you understand, Alesha?” And the father began a long explanation to which Alesha did not listen, but suddenly interrupted his teacher by saying: “Papa, do you remember when Uncle Dmitri Ivanovich arrived? That’s exactly what happened. He struck Thomas in the face, and Thomas stood still, and then Uncle Dmitri Ivanovich struck him from the other side, and still Thomas did not move. I was sorry for him, and cried.” + 

“Yes, then I cried,” murmured Alexei Petrovich, rising from the armchair and commencing to pace the room. “Then I cried.” + 

He became dreadfully sorry for these tears of a sixteen-year-old boy, sorry for that time when he could cry because a defenceless human being was struck in his presence. + 