“Wrath, sir!” the captain chimed in, “wrath indeed, sir! A small creature, but a great wrath, sir! You don’t know all of it. Allow me to explain the story more particularly. The thing is that after that event all the children at school began calling him whiskbroom. Schoolchildren are merciless people: separately they’re God’s angels, but together, especially in school, they’re quite often merciless. They began teasing him, and a noble spirit arose in Ilyusha. An ordinary boy, a weak son, would have given in, would have felt ashamed of his father, but this one stood up for his father, alone against everyone. For his father, and for the truth, sir, for justice, sir. Because what he suffered then, as he kissed your brother’s hand and cried to him: ‘Forgive my papa, forgive my papa’—that only God alone knows, and I, sir. And that is how our children—I mean, not yours but ours, sir, the children of the despised but noble poor—learn the truth on earth when they’re just nine years old, sir. The rich ones—what do they know? In their whole lives they never sound such depths, and my Ilyushka, at that very moment in the square, sir, when he kissed his hand, at that very moment he went through the whole truth, sir. This truth, sir, entered into him and crushed him forever,” the captain said fervently, again as if in a frenzy, hitting his left palm with his right fist, as if he wished to show physically how “the truth” had crushed his Ilyusha. “That same day he came down with a fever, he was delirious all night. All that day he hardly spoke to me, he was even quite silent, only I noticed him looking, looking at me from the corner, but he kept leaning more towards the window, pretending he was doing his homework, but I could see that he didn’t have homework on his mind. The next day I did some drinking, sir, and forgot a lot, I’m a sinful man, from grief, sir. Mama there also began crying—and I love mama very much, sir—well, from grief I had a drop on my last few kopecks. Don’t despise me, my good sir: in Russia, drunks are our kindest people. Our kindest people are also the most drunk. So I was lying there and I didn’t much remember Ilyusha that day, and it was precisely that day when the boys started jeering at him in school, that morning, sir: ‘Whiskbroom,’ they shouted at him, ‘your father was dragged out of the tavern by his whiskbroom, and you ran along asking forgiveness.’ On the third day he came home from school, and I saw that he looked pale, awful. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. Silence. Well, there was no talking about it in our castle, otherwise mama and the girls would immediately take part—and besides, the girls already knew all about it even on the first day. Varvara Nikolaevna was already grumbling: ‘Clowns, buffoons, can you never be reasonable?’ ‘Right,’ I said, ‘Varvara Nikolaevna, we can never be reasonable. ‘ I got off with that at the time. So, sir, towards evening I took my boy out for a walk. And you should know, sir, that even before that, every evening he and I used to take a walk, just the same way we’re going now, from our gate to that big stone over there, standing like an orphan in the road near the wattle fence, where the town common begins: the place is deserted and beautiful, sir. We were walking along, Ilyusha and I, his little hand in my hand, as usual; he has such a tiny hand, his little fingers are so thin and cold—my boy suffers from a weak chest. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa! ‘ ‘What?’ I said to him, and I could see that his eyes were flashing. ‘Papa, the way he treated you, papa!’ ‘It can’t be helped, Ilyusha,’ I said. ‘Don’t make peace with him, papa, don’t make peace. The boys say he gave you ten roubles for it.’ ‘No, Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘I won’t take any money from him, not for anything.’ Then he started shaking all over, seized my hand in both his hands, and kissed it again. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa, challenge him to a duel; they tease me at school, they say you’re a coward and won’t challenge him to a duel, but you’ll take his ten roubles.’ ‘It’s not possible for me to challenge him to a duel, Ilyusha,’ I answered, and explained to him briefly all that I just explained to you about that. He listened. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa, even so, don’t make peace with him: I’ll grow up, I’ll challenge him myself, and I’ll kill him!’ And his eyes were flashing and shining. Well, I’m still his father for all that, I had to tell him the right thing. ‘It’s sinful to kill,’ I said, ‘even in a duel.’ ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa, I’ll throw him down when I’m big, I’ll knock the sword out of his hand with my sword, I’ll rush at him, throw him down, hold my sword over him and say: I could kill you now, but I forgive you, so there! ‘ You see, sir, you see what a process went on in his little head over those two days! Day and night he was thinking precisely about that revenge with the sword, and that must have been in his delirium at night, sir. Only he started coming home from school badly beaten up, I learned of it the day before yesterday, and you’re right, sir, I won’t send him to that school any more. When I learned that he was going alone against the whole class, and was challenging everyone, and that he was so bitter, that his heart was burning-—I was afraid for him. Again we went for a walk. ‘Papa,’ he asked, ‘papa, is it true that the rich are stronger than anybody in the world?’ ‘Yes, Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘no one in the world is stronger than the rich.’ ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘I’ll get rich, I’ll become an officer, and I’ll beat everybody, and the tsar will reward me. Then I’ll come back, and nobody will dare . . .’He was silent for a while, then he said, and his little lips were still trembling as before: ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘our town is not a good town, papa!”Yes, Ilyushechka,’ I said, ‘it’s really not a very good town.”Papa, let’s move to another town, a good one,’ he said, ‘a town where they don’t know about us.”We will,’ I said, ‘we will move, Ilyusha, as soon as I save some money.’ I was glad to be able to distract him from his dark thoughts, and so we began dreaming of how we’d move to another town, how we’d buy our own horse and cart. ‘We’ll sit mama and your sisters in the cart and cover them, and we ourselves will walk beside it, and from time to time you’ll get in and ride and I’ll walk beside, because we must spare our horse, we shouldn’t all ride, and so we’ll set off.’ He was delighted with that, most of all because we’d have our own horse and he could ride it. Everyone knows that a Russian boy is born with a horse. We chattered for a long time: thank God, I thought, I’ve diverted him, comforted him. That was two days ago, in the evening, but by yesterday evening it all turned out differently. That morning he went to school again and came back gloomy, much too gloomy. In the evening I took him by the hand, we went for a walk; he was silent, he didn’t speak. The breeze picked up, the sun clouded over, there was autumn in the air, and dusk was already coming—we walked along, both feeling sad. ‘Well, my boy,’ I said, ‘how are we going to get ourselves ready for the road?’—thinking to bring him around to our conversation of the day before. Silence. But I could feel his little fingers trembling in my hand. Eh, I thought, that’s bad, there’s something new. We came to this very stone, just as we are now, I sat on the stone, and in the sky there were kites humming and flapping on their strings, about thirty of them. It’s the season for kites, sir. ‘Look, Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘it’s time we flew our kite from last year. I’ll mend it. Where do you keep it?’ My boy was silent, he looked away, turned aside from me. And suddenly the wind whistled and blew up some sand ... He rushed to me suddenly, threw his little arms around my neck, and hugged me. You know, when children are silent and proud, and have been holding back their tears for a long time, when they suddenly burst out, if a great grief comes, the tears don’t just flow, sir, they pour out in streams. With these warm streams he suddenly wet my whole face. He suddenly sobbed as if he were in convulsions, and began shaking and pressing me to him as I sat there on the stone. ‘Papa,’ he cried, ‘papa, dear papa, how he humiliated you! ‘Then I began weeping, too, sir. We were sitting, holding each other, and sobbing. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘dear papa! ‘ ‘Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘dear Ilyusha! ‘ No one saw us then, sir, only God saw us—let’s hope he’ll enter it into my record, sir. Thank your good brother, Alexei Fyodorovich. No, sir, I will not whip my boy for your satisfaction, sir!”
