Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 0a censer. All this he did on the sly, with the greatest secrecy.
Grigory caught him once at this diversion and gave him a
sound beating. He shrank into a corner and sulked there for
a week. ‘He doesn’t care for you or me, the monster,’ Grigo-
ry used to say to Marfa, ‘and he doesn’t care for anyone. Are
you a human being?’ he said, addressing the boy directly.
‘You’re not a human being. You grew from the mildew in the
bath-house. That’s what you are,’ Smerdyakov, it appeared
afterwards, could never forgive him those words. Grigory
taught him to read and write, and when he was twelve years
old, began teaching him the Scriptures. But this teaching
came to nothing. At the second or third lesson the boy sud-
denly grinned.
‘What’s that for?’ asked Grigory, looking at him threat-
eningly from under his spectacles.
‘Oh, nothing. God created light on the first day, and the
sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day. Where did the light
come from on the first day?’
Grigory was thunderstruck. The boy looked sarcastically
at his teacher. There was something positively condescend-
ing in his expression. Grigory could not restrain himself.
‘I’ll show you where!’ he cried, and gave the boy a violent
slap on the cheek. The boy took the slap without a word, but
withdrew into his corner again for some days. A week later
he had his first attack of the disease to which he was subject
all the rest of his life — epilepsy. When Fyodor Pavlovitch
heard of it, his attitude to the boy seemed changed at once.
Till then he had taken no notice of him, though he never
scolded him, and always gave him a copeck when he met