Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [28]
The people packed into the nook dispersed. Pasha, who had been afraid to call out, rushed to the old woman.
They walked home. Marfa Gavrilovna grumbled all the while. “Cursed murderers, fiendish butchers! People are rejoicing, the tsar has given them freedom, and they can’t stand it. They’ve got to muck it all up, turn every word inside out.”
She was angry with the dragoons, with the whole world around her, and at that moment even with her own son. In this moment of passion it seemed to her that everything going on now was all the tricks of Kuprinka’s blunderers, whom she nicknamed duds and smart alecks.
“Wicked vipers! What do the loudmouths want? They’ve got no brains! Nothing but barking and squabbling. And that speechifier, how about him, Pashenka? Show me, dear, show me. Oh, I’ll die, I’ll die! It’s perfect, it’s him to a tee! Yackety-yack-yack-yack. Ah, you buzzing little gadfly!”
At home she fell upon her son with reproaches, that it was not for her, at her age, to be taught with a whip on the behind by a shaggy, pockmarked blockhead on a horse.
“For God’s sake, mama, what’s got into you? As if I really was some Cossack officer or sheik of police!”
9
Nikolai Nikolaevich was standing at the window when the fleeing people appeared. He understood that they were from the demonstration, and for some time he looked into the distance to see if Yura or anyone else was among the scattering people. However, no acquaintances appeared, only once he fancied he saw that one (Nikolai Nikolaevich forgot his name), Dudorov’s son, pass by quickly—a desperate boy, who just recently had had a bullet extracted from his left shoulder and who was again hanging about where he had no business to be.
Nikolai Nikolaevich had arrived in the fall from Petersburg. He had no lodgings of his own in Moscow, and he did not want to go to a hotel. He stayed with the Sventitskys, his distant relations. They put him in the corner study upstairs on the mezzanine.
This two-storied wing, too big for the childless Sventitsky couple, had been rented from the Princes Dolgoruky by Sventitsky’s late parents from time immemorial. The Dolgoruky domain, with three courtyards, a garden, and a multitude of variously styled buildings scattered over it in disorder, gave onto three lanes and bore the old name of Flour Town.
Despite its four windows, the study was rather dark. It was cluttered with books, papers, rugs, and etchings. On the outside, the study had a balcony that ran in a semicircle around that corner of the building. The double glass door to the balcony had been sealed off for the winter.
Through two of the study windows and the glass of the balcony door, the whole length of the lane was visible—a sleigh road running into the distance, little houses in a crooked line, crooked fences.
Violet shadows reached from the garden into the study. Trees peered into the room, looking as if they wanted to strew the floor with their branches covered with heavy hoarfrost, which resembled lilac streams of congealed stearine.
Nikolai Nikolaevich was looking into the lane and remembering the last Petersburg winter, Gapon, Gorky, the visit of Witte, the fashionable contemporary writers.7 From that turmoil he had fled here, to the peace and quiet of the former capital, to write the book he had in mind. Forget it! He had gone from the frying pan into the fire. Lectures and talks every day—he had no time to catch his breath. At the Women’s Institute, at the Religious-Philosophical Society, for the benefit of the Red Cross, for the Fund of the Strike Committee. Oh, to go to Switzerland, to the depths of some wooded canton. Peace and serenity over a lake, the sky and the mountains, and the vibrant, ever-echoing, alert air.
Nikolai Nikolaevich turned away from the window. He had an urge to go and visit someone or simply to go outside with no purpose. But then he