(^12781279)
In that brief interval of time the storm clouds had moved on, cover-
ing 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 sepa-
rated 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 tim-
idly 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.
barré
(Barré)
#1