The porter had no sooner opened the rear door with a pass key and thrown the doctor’s things onto the platform, than he had to face a brief fight with the conductor, who immediately wanted to get rid of them, but, mollified by Yuri Andreevich, he effaced himself and vanished into thin air.
The mysterious train was of special purpose and went rather quickly, with brief stops and some sort of guard. The cars were quite vacant.
The compartment Zhivago entered was brightly lit by a guttering candle on a little table, its flame wavering in the stream of air from a half-lowered window.
The candle belonged to the sole passenger in the compartment. He was a fair-haired youth, probably very tall, judging by his long arms and legs. They flexed extremely freely at the joints, like poorly fastened component parts of folding objects. The young man was sitting on the seat by the window, leaning back casually. When Zhivago appeared, he politely rose and changed his half-reclining position to a more appropriate sitting one.
Under his seat lay something like a floor rag. Suddenly the end of the rag moved and a flop-eared hound bustled herself up and came out. She sniffed Yuri Andreevich, looked him over, and started running from corner to corner of the compartment, her legs flexing as freely as her lanky master’s when he crossed them. Soon, at the latter’s command, she bustled herself back under the seat and assumed her former look of a crumpled floor-polishing cloth.
Only then did Yuri Andreevich notice a double-barreled shotgun in a case, a leather cartridge belt, and a game bag tightly stuffed with shot birds, hanging on hooks in the compartment.
The young man was a hunter.
He was distinguished by an extreme garrulousness and with an amiable smile hastened to get into conversation with the doctor. As he did so he looked the doctor in the mouth all the while, not figuratively but in the most direct sense.
The young man turned out to have an unpleasantly high voice, at its highest verging on a metallic falsetto. Another oddity: by all tokens a Russian, he pronounced one vowel, namely the
“Only yesterday morning I was shuting wudcock.”
At moments, when he obviously watched himself more carefully, he overcame this irregularity, but he had only to forget himself and it would creep in again.
“What is this bedevilment?” thought Zhivago. “It’s something familiar, I’ve read about it. As a doctor, I ought to know, but it’s skipped my mind. Some phenomenon of the brain that provokes a speech defect. But this mewling is so funny, it’s hard to remain serious. Conversation is utterly impossible. I’d better climb up and get in bed.”
And so the doctor did. When he began to settle himself on the upper berth, the young man asked if he should put out the candle, which might bother Yuri Andreevich. The doctor gratefully accepted the offer. His neighbor put out the light. It became dark.
The window in the compartment was half lowered.
“Shouldn’t we close the window?” asked Yuri Andreevich. “Aren’t you afraid of thieves?”
His neighbor made no reply. Yuri Andreevich repeated the question very loudly, but again the man did not respond.
Then Yuri Andreevich lit a match so as to see what his neighbor was up to, whether he had left the compartment in such a brief space of time, or was asleep, which would be still more incredible.
But no, he was sitting open-eyed in his place and smiled when the doctor hung his head down.
The match went out. Yuri Andreevich lit another and by its light repeated for the third time what he wished to ascertain.
“Do as you think best,” the hunter answered at once. “I’ve got nothing worth stealing. However, it would be better not to close it. It’s stuffy.”
“Fancy that,” thought Zhivago. “The strange fellow’s apparently used to talking only in full light. And how clearly he pronounced it all just now, without his irregularities! Inconceivable to the mind!”
15
The doctor felt broken by the events of the past week, the agitation before departure, the preparations for the road, and boarding the train in the morning. He thought he would fall asleep the moment he stretched out in a comfortable place. Not so. Excessive exhaustion made him sleepless. He dozed off only towards morning.
Chaotic as was the whirlwind of thoughts swarming in his head during those long hours, there were, essentially speaking, two spheres of them, two persistent balls, which kept winding up and then unwinding.
One sphere consisted of thoughts of Tonya, home, and the former smooth-running life, in which everything down to the smallest details was clothed in poetry and imbued with warmth and purity. The doctor worried about that life and wished it to be preserved intact, and, flying through the night on the speeding train, he longed impatiently to be back in that life after more than two years of separation.
Faithfulness to the revolution and admiration for it also belonged to that sphere. This was the revolution in the sense in which it was taken by the middle classes, and in that understanding imparted to it by the student youth of the year 1905, who worshipped Blok.
To that sphere, intimate and habitual, also belonged those signs of the new, those promises and presages, which had appeared on the horizon before the war, between the years 1912 and 1914, in Russian thought, Russian art, and Russian destiny, the destiny of all Russia and of himself, Zhivago.
After the war, he wanted to go back to that spirit, to its renewal and continuation, just as he longed to be back home after his absence.
The new was likewise the subject of his thoughts in the second sphere, but how differently, how distinctly new! This was not his own habitual new, prepared for by the old, but a spontaneous, irrevocable new, prescribed by reality, sudden as a shock.
