Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [27]
“To the auditorium, to the auditorium!” solitary voices shouted behind them, but the crowd continued to flow further on, dispersing through the separate corridors and classrooms.
When they managed to bring the public back and they were all seated on chairs, the leaders tried several times to announce to the assembly that a trap had been set for them ahead, but no one listened to them. This stopping and going into the building was taken as an invitation to an improvised meeting, which began at once.
After all the marching and singing, people wanted to sit silently for a while and have someone else do the work and strain his throat for them. Compared to the chief pleasure of resting, the insignificant disagreements among the speakers, who were at one with each other in almost everything, seemed a matter of indifference.
Therefore the greatest success fell to the worst orator, who did not weary his listeners with the necessity of following him. His every word was accompanied by a roar of sympathy. No one regretted that his speech was drowned out by the noise of approval. They hastened to agree with him out of impatience, cried “Shame,” composed a telegram of protest, then suddenly, bored by the monotony of his voice, they all rose to a man and, forgetting all about the orator, hat after hat, row after row, thronged down the stairs and poured outside. The march continued.
While they were meeting, it had begun to snow. The pavement turned white. The snow fell more and more heavily.
When the dragoons came flying at them, those in the back rows did not suspect it at first. Suddenly a swelling roar rolled over them from the front, as when a crowd cries “Hurrah!” Cries of “Help!” and “Murder!” and many others merged into something indistinguishable. At almost the same moment, on the wave of those sounds, down a narrow pass formed in the shying crowd, horses’ manes and muzzles and saber-brandishing riders raced swiftly and noiselessly.
Half a platoon galloped by, turned around, re-formed, and cut from behind into the tail of the march. The massacre began.
A few minutes later the street was almost empty. People fled into the side streets. The snow fell more lightly. The evening was dry as a charcoal drawing. Suddenly the sun, setting somewhere behind the houses, began poking its finger from around the corner at everything red in the street: the red-topped hats of the dragoons, the red cloth of the fallen flag, the traces of blood scattered over the snow in red threads and spots.
Along the edge of the pavement, dragging himself with his hands, crawled a moaning man with a split skull. A row of several horsemen rode up at a walk. They were coming back from the end of the street, where they had been drawn by the pursuit. Almost under their feet, Marfa Gavrilovna was rushing about, her kerchief shoved back on her neck, and in a voice not her own was shouting for the whole street to hear: “Pasha! Patulya!”
He had been walking with her all the while, amusing her with a highly skillful imitation of the last orator, and had suddenly vanished in the turmoil when the dragoons fell upon them.
In the skirmish, Marfa Gavrilovna herself got hit in the back by a whip, and though her thick, cotton-quilted coat kept her from feeling the blow, she cursed and shook her fist at the retreating cavalry, indignant that they had dared to lash her, an old woman, with a whip before the eyes of all honest people.
Marfa Gavrilovna cast worried glances down both sides of the street. Luckily, she suddenly saw the boy on the opposite sidewalk. There, in the narrow space between a colonial shop and a projecting town house, crowded a bunch of chance gawkers.
A dragoon who had ridden up onto the sidewalk was pressing them into that nook with the rump and flanks of his horse. He was amused by their terror and, barring their way out, performed capers and pirouettes under their noses,