Doctor Zhivago by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak Read Free Book Online Page B

crowd, bored with the speaker ' s droning voice, stood up as one man and forgetting all about him poured out in a body—cap to cap and row after row—down the stairs and out into the street. The procession was resumed.
    While the meeting was on, it had begun to snow. The street was white. The snow fell thicker and thicker.
    When the dragoons charged, the marchers at the rear first knew nothing of it. A swelling noise rolled back to them as of great crowds shouting " Hurrah, " and individual screams of " Help! " and " Murder " were lost in the uproar. Almost at the same moment, and borne, as it were, on this wave of sound along the narrow corridor that formed as the crowd divided, the heads and manes of horses, and their saber-swinging riders, rode by swiftly and silently.
    Half a platoon galloped through, turned, re-formed, and cut into the tail of the procession. The massacre began.
    A few minutes later the avenue was almost deserted. People were scattering down the side streets. The snow was lighter. The afternoon was dry like a charcoal sketch. Then the sun, setting behind the houses, pointed as though with a finger at everything red in the street—the red tops of the dragoons ' caps, a red flag trailing on the ground, and the red specks and threads of blood on the snow.
    A groaning man with a split skull was crawling along the curb. From the far end of the street to which the chase had taken them several dragoons were riding back abreast at a walk. Almost at the horses ' feet Marfa Tiverzina, her shawl knocked to the back of her head, was running from side to side screaming wildly: " Pasha! Pasha! "
    Pasha had been with her all along, amusing her by cleverly mimicking the last speaker at the meeting, but had vanished suddenly in the confusion when the dragoons charged.
    A blow from a nagaika had fallen on her back, and though she had hardly felt it through her thickly quilted coat she swore and shook her fist at the retreating horsemen, indignant that they had dared to strike an old woman like herself, and in public at that.
    Looking anxiously from side to side, she had the luck finally to spot the boy across the street. He stood in a recess between a grocer ' s shop and a private stone house, where a group of chance passers-by had been hemmed in by a horseman who had mounted the sidewalk. Amused by their terror, the dragoon was making his horse perform volts and pirouettes, backing it into the crowd and making it rear slowly as in a circus turn. Suddenly he saw his comrades riding back, spurred his mount, and in a couple of bounds took his place in the file.
    The crowd dispersed and Pasha, who had been too frightened to utter a sound, rushed to Marfa Gavrilovna.
    The old woman grumbled all the way home. " Accursed murderers! People are happy because the Tsar has given them freedom, but these damned killers can ' t stand it. They must spoil everything, twist every word inside out. "
    She was furious with the dragoons, furious with the whole world, and at the moment even with her own son. When she was in a temper it seemed to her that all the recent troubles were the fault of " Kuprinka ' s bunglers and fumblers, " as she called them.
    " What do they want, the half-wits? They don ' t know themselves, just so long as they can make mischief, the vipers. Like that chatterbox. Pasha dear, show me again how he went on, show me, darling. Oh! I ' ll die laughing. You ' ve got him to the life. Buzz, buzz, buzz—a real bumblebee! "
    At home she fell to scolding her son. Was she of an age to have a curly-headed oaf on a horse belt her on her behind?
    " Really, Mother, who d ' you take me for? You ' d think I was the Cossack captain or the Chief of Police. "
9
    Nikolai Nikolaievich saw the fleeing demonstrators from his window. He realized who they were and watched to see if Yura were among them. But none of his friends seemed to be there though he thought that he had caught sight of the Dudorov boy—he could not quite remember