Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy
Chapter 241
836 words | Chapter 241
The old prince and Sergey Ivanovitch got into the trap and drove off;
the rest of the party hastened homewards on foot.
But the storm-clouds, turning white and then black, moved down so
quickly that they had to quicken their pace to get home before the
rain. The foremost clouds, lowering and black as soot-laden smoke,
rushed with extraordinary swiftness over the sky. They were still two
hundred paces from home and a gust of wind had already blown up, and
every second the downpour might be looked for.
The children ran ahead with frightened and gleeful shrieks. Darya
Alexandrovna, struggling painfully with her skirts that clung round her
legs, was not walking, but running, her eyes fixed on the children. The
men of the party, holding their hats on, strode with long steps beside
her. They were just at the steps when a big drop fell splashing on the
edge of the iron guttering. The children and their elders after them
ran into the shelter of the house, talking merrily.
“Katerina Alexandrovna?” Levin asked of Agafea Mihalovna, who met them
with kerchiefs and rugs in the hall.
“We thought she was with you,” she said.
“And Mitya?”
“In the copse, he must be, and the nurse with him.”
Levin snatched up the rugs and ran towards the copse.
In that brief interval of time the storm clouds had moved on, covering
the sun so completely that it was dark as an eclipse. Stubbornly, as
though insisting on its rights, the wind stopped Levin, and tearing the
leaves and flowers off the lime trees and stripping the white birch
branches into strange unseemly nakedness, it twisted everything on one
side—acacias, flowers, burdocks, long grass, and tall tree-tops. The
peasant girls working in the garden ran shrieking into shelter in the
servants’ quarters. The streaming rain had already flung its white veil
over all the distant forest and half the fields close by, and was
rapidly swooping down upon the copse. The wet of the rain spurting up
in tiny drops could be smelt in the air.
Holding his head bent down before him, and struggling with the wind
that strove to tear the wraps away from him, Levin was moving up to the
copse and had just caught sight of something white behind the oak tree,
when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on fire, and the
vault of heaven seemed crashing overhead. Opening his blinded eyes,
Levin gazed through the thick veil of rain that separated him now from
the copse, and to his horror the first thing he saw was the green crest
of the familiar oak-tree in the middle of the copse uncannily changing
its position. “Can it have been struck?” Levin hardly had time to think
when, moving more and more rapidly, the oak tree vanished behind the
other trees, and he heard the crash of the great tree falling upon the
others.
The flash of lightning, the crash of thunder, and the instantaneous
chill that ran through him were all merged for Levin in one sense of
terror.
“My God! my God! not on them!” he said.
And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that they
should not have been killed by the oak which had fallen now, he
repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than utter this
senseless prayer.
Running up to the place where they usually went, he did not find them
there.
They were at the other end of the copse under an old lime-tree; they
were calling him. Two figures in dark dresses (they had been light
summer dresses when they started out) were standing bending over
something. It was Kitty with the nurse. The rain was already ceasing,
and it was beginning to get light when Levin reached them. The nurse
was not wet on the lower part of her dress, but Kitty was drenched
through, and her soaked clothes clung to her. Though the rain was over,
they still stood in the same position in which they had been standing
when the storm broke. Both stood bending over a perambulator with a
green umbrella.
“Alive? Unhurt? Thank God!” he said, splashing with his soaked boots
through the standing water and running up to them.
Kitty’s rosy wet face was turned towards him, and she smiled timidly
under her shapeless sopped hat.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? I can’t think how you can be so
reckless!” he said angrily to his wife.
“It wasn’t my fault, really. We were just meaning to go, when he made
such a to-do that we had to change him. We were just....” Kitty began
defending herself.
Mitya was unharmed, dry, and still fast asleep.
“Well, thank God! I don’t know what I’m saying!”
They gathered up the baby’s wet belongings; the nurse picked up the
baby and carried it. Levin walked beside his wife, and, penitent for
having been angry, he squeezed her hand when the nurse was not looking.
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