Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [463]
XVII
The prince and Sergei Ivanovich got into the gig and drove; the rest of the company, quickening their pace, went home on foot.
But the storm clouds, now white, now black, came on so quickly that they had to walk still faster to get home ahead of the rain. The advancing clouds, low and dark as sooty smoke, raced across the sky with extraordinary speed. They were still about two hundred paces from the house, but the wind had already risen, and a downpour could be expected at any moment.
The children ran ahead with frightened, joyful shrieks. Darya Alexandrovna, struggling hard with the skirts that clung to her legs, no longer walked but ran, not taking her eyes off the children. The men, holding on to their hats, walked with long strides. They were just at the porch when a big drop struck and broke up on the edge of the iron gutter. The children, and the grown-ups after them, ran under the cover of the roof with merry chatter.
‘Katerina Alexandrovna?’ Levin asked Agafya Mikhailovna, who met them in the front hall with cloaks and wraps.
‘We thought she was with you.’
‘And Mitya?’
‘They must be in Kolok, and the nanny’s with them.’
Levin seized the wraps and ran to Kolok.
During that short period of time the centre of the cloud had covered the sun so that it became as dark as during a solar eclipse. The stubborn wind, as if insisting on its own, kept stopping Levin and, tearing off leaves and linden blossoms and baring the white birch boughs in an ugly and strange way, bent everything in one direction: acacias, flowers, burdock, grass and treetops. Farm girls who had been working in the garden ran squealing under the roof of the servants’ quarters. The white curtain of pouring rain had already invaded all the distant forest and half the nearby field and was moving quickly towards Kolok. The dampness of rain breaking up into fine drops filled the air.
Lowering his head and struggling against the wind, which tore the shawls from his arms, Levin was already running up to Kolok and could see something white showing beyond an oak, when suddenly everything blazed, the whole earth caught fire and the vault of the sky seemed to crack overhead. Opening his dazzled eyes and peering through the thick curtain of rain that now separated him from Kolok, Levin first saw with horror the strangely altered position of the familiar oak’s green crown in the middle of the wood. ‘Can it have snapped off?’ Levin barely managed to think, when, moving more and more quickly, the oak’s crown disappeared behind the other trees, and he heard the crash of a big tree falling.
The flash of the lightning, the sound of the thunder, and the feeling of his body being instantly doused with cold, merged in Levin into one impression of horror.
‘My God! My God, not on them!’ he said.
And though he immediately thought how senseless his request was that they should not be killed by an oak that had already fallen, he repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than this senseless prayer.
He ran to the spot where they usually went, but did not find them there.
They were at the other end of the wood, under an old linden, and calling to him. Two figures in dark dresses (they were actually light) stood bending over something. They were Kitty and the nanny. The rain was already letting up and it was growing lighter as Levin raced towards them. The lower part of the nanny’s dress was dry, but Kitty’s dress was soaked through and clung to her body all over. Though it was no longer raining, they went on standing in the same position they had assumed when the storm broke, bent over the carriage, holding a green umbrella.
‘Alive? Safe? Thank God!’ he said, splashing through the puddles in his flopping, water-filled shoes, and running up to them.
Kitty’s rosy and wet face was turned to him and smiled timidly from under her now shapeless hat.
‘Well, aren’t you ashamed?