Suddenly the knocking at the door, which had ceased for a long time, started again. Someone needed help and was knocking desperately and rapidly. The wind picked up again. More rain poured down.
“One moment!” Mademoiselle cried out, not knowing to whom, and frightened herself with her own voice.
An unexpected surmise dawned on her. Lowering her feet from the bed and putting on her slippers, she threw her house robe over her and ran to awaken Zhivago, so as not to feel so frightened alone. But he, too, had heard the knocking and was himself coming down to meet her with a candle. They had made the same assumptions.
“Zhivagó, Zhivagó! There’s knocking at the outside door, I’m afraid to open it by myself,” she cried in French, and added in Russian: “ ’Ave a luke. Ees Lar or Lieutenant Gaioul.”
Yuri Andreevich had also been awakened by the knocking, and thought that it must be someone they knew, either Galiullin, be hidden by something and coming back to the refuge where he could hide, or the nurse Antipova, forced by some difficulties to turn back from her journey.
In the front hall, the doctor handed Mademoiselle the candle, while he turned the key in the door and unbolted it. A gust of wind tore the door from his hand, blew out the candle, and showered them both with a cold spray of rain from outside.
“Who’s there? Who’s there? Is anybody there?” Mademoiselle and the doctor called out in turn into the darkness, but nobody answered. Suddenly they heard the former knocking in another place, from the back entrance, or, as it now seemed to them, at the window to the garden.
“It’s evidently the wind,” said the doctor. “But for the sake of a clear conscience, go to the back door anyway, to make sure, and I’ll wait here, so that we don’t cross each other, if it really is someone, and not from some other cause.”
Mademoiselle went off into the depths of the house, and the doctor went outside under the roof of the porch. His eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness, made out signs of the coming dawn.
Over the town, like halfwits, clouds raced swiftly, as if escaping pursuit. Their tatters flew so low that they almost caught in the trees leaning in the same direction, so that it looked as if someone were sweeping the sky with them, as if with bending besoms. Rain lashed at the wooden wall of the house, turning it from gray to black.
“Well?” the doctor asked Mademoiselle when she came back.
“You’re right. There’s nobody.” And she told him that she had gone around the whole house. In the butler’s pantry a window had been broken by a piece of a linden branch that struck the glass, and there were huge puddles on the floor, and it was the same in the room Lara had left behind, a sea, a veritable sea, a whole ocean.
“And here’s a shutter torn loose and beating against the window frame. You see? That’s the whole explanation.”
They talked a little more, locked the door, and went their ways to bed, both sorry that the alarm had proved false.
They had been certain that they would open the front door and the woman they knew so well would come in, wet to the skin and freezing, and they would bombard her with questions while she shook herself off. And then, having changed her clothes, she would come to dry herself by the lingering heat of the stove in the kitchen and would tell them about her countless misadventures, smoothing her hair and laughing.
They were so certain of it that, when they locked the door, the traces of their certainty remained by the corner of the house outside, in the form of the woman’s watermark or image, which continued to appear to them from around the turning.
10
The one considered to be indirectly responsible for the soldiers’ riot at the station was the Biriuchi telegraphist Kolya Frolenko.
Kolya was the son of a well-known Meliuzeevo watchmaker. He had been known in Meliuzeevo from the cradle. As a boy, he had visited someone among the Razdolnoe house staff and, under the surveillance of Mademoiselle, had played with her two charges, the countess’s daughters. Mademoiselle knew Kolya well. It was then that he had begun to understand a little French.
People in Meliuzeevo were used to seeing Kolya lightly dressed in any weather, without a hat, in canvas summer shoes, on a bicycle. Letting go of the handlebars, his body thrown back and his arms crossed on his chest, he rolled down the main street and around town and glanced at the poles and wires, checking the state of the network.
Some houses in town were connected with the station through a branch line of the railway telephone. The management of this line was in Kolya’s hands at the station control room.
There he was up to his ears in work: the railway telegraph, the telephone, and occasionally, in moments of the station chief Povarikhin’s brief absences, the signals and the block system, the apparatus for which was also in the control room.
The necessity of keeping an eye on the operation of several mechanisms at once made Kolya develop a special manner of speaking, obscure, abrupt, and full of riddles, to which Kolya resorted when he had no wish to answer someone or get into conversation. The word was that he had made too broad a use of this right on the day of the disorders.
By his omissions he had, in fact, deprived of force all of Galiullin’s good intentions in his phone calls from town, and, perhaps against his will, had given a fatal turn to the subsequent events.
Galiullin had asked to speak to the commissar, who was somewhere at the station or nearby, in order to tell him that he would soon come to join him at the clearing and to ask that he wait for him and undertake nothing without him. Kolya had refused Galiullin’s request to call Gintz to the phone, on the pretext that he had the line busy transmitting signals to the train approaching Biriuchi, while he himself was at the same time trying by hook or by crook to hold the train, which was bringing the summoned Cossacks to Biriuchi, at the previous junction.
When the troop train arrived after all, Kolya could not hide his displeasure.
The engine slowly crept under the dark roof of the platform and stopped just in front of the huge window of the control room. Kolya opened wide the heavy railway station curtains of dark blue broadcloth with railway monograms woven into the borders. On the stone windowsill stood a huge carafe of water and a thick, simply cut glass on a big tray. Kolya poured water into the glass, took several gulps, and looked out the window.
The engineer noticed Kolya and gave him a friendly nod from the cab. “Ooh, you stinking trash, you wood louse!” Kolya thought with hatred, stuck his tongue out at the engineer, and shook his fist at him. The engineer not only understood Kolya’s miming, but, by shrugging his shoulders and turning his head in the direction of the carriages, was able to convey: “What can I do? Try it yourself. He’s in charge.” “You’re trash and filth all the same,” Kolya mimed back.
They began leading the horses out of the freight cars. They balked, refusing to move. The hollow thud of hooves on the wooden gangways changed to the clanging of horseshoes against the stone of the platform. The rearing horses were led across several lines of tracks.
They ended up by two rows of discarded cars on two pairs of rusty rails overgrown with grass. The degradation of the wood, stripped of paint by the rain and rotted by worms and dampness, had restored to these broken-down cars their original kinship with the damp forest that began on the other side of the tracks, with the tinder fungus that ailed the birches, with the clouds piling up over it.
At the edge of the forest, the Cossacks mounted up on command and rode to the clearing.
The mutineers of the 212th were surrounded. Horsemen always look taller and more imposing among trees than in the open. They impressed the soldiers, though they had rifles in their dugouts. The Cossacks drew their sabers.