privilege they had bought at such a costly price.
He wanted to say too that if public opinion were an infallible guide, then why were not revolutions and the commune
as lawful as the movement in favor of the Slavonic peoples?
But these were merely thoughts that could settle nothing.
One thing could be seen beyond doubt—that was that at the
actual moment the discussion was irritating Sergey Ivanovitch, and so it was wrong to continue it. And Levin ceased
speaking and then called the attention of his guests to the
fact that the storm clouds were gathering, and that they had
better be going home before it rained.
1410
Anna Karenina
Chapter 17
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.’
1411
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 treetops. 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 in1412
Anna Karenina
stantaneous 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,
1413
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.
1414
Anna Karenina
Chapter 18
During the whole of that day, in the extremely different
conversations in which he took part, only as it were with the
top layer of his mind, in spite of the disappointment of not
finding the change he expected in himself, Levin had been
all the while joyfully conscious of the fulness of his heart.
After the rain it was too wet to go for a walk; besides,
the storm clouds still hung about the horizon, and gathered
here and there, black and thundery, on the rim of the sky.
The whole party spent the rest of the day in the house.
No more discussions sprang up; on the contrary, after
dinner every one was in the most amiable frame of mind.
At first Katavasov amused the ladies by his original
jokes, which always pleased people on their first acquaintance with him. Then Sergey Ivanovitch induced him to tell
them about the very interesting observations he had made
on the habits and characteristics of common houseflies, and
their life. Sergey Ivanovitch, too, was in good spirits, and at
tea his brother drew him on to explain his views of the future of the Eastern question, and he spoke so simply and so
well, that everyone listened eagerly.
Kitty was the only one who did not hear it all—she was
summoned to give Mitya his bath.
A few minutes after Kitty had left the room she sent for
Levin to come to the nursery.
1415
Leaving his tea, and regretfully interrupting the interesting conversation, and at the same time uneasily wondering
why he had been sent for, as this only happened on important occasions, Levin went to the nursery.
Although he had been much interested by Sergey Ivanovitch’s views of the new epoch in history that would be
created by the emancipation of forty millions of men of
Slavonic race acting with Russia, a conception quite new to
him, and although he was disturbed by uneasy wonder at
being sent for by Kitty, as soon as he came out of the drawing room and was alone, his mind reverted at once to the
thoughts of the morning. And all the theories of the significance of the Slav element in the history of the world seemed
to him so trivial compared with what was passing in his
own soul, that he instantly forgot it all and dropped back
into the same frame of mind that he had been in that morning.
He did not, as he had done at other times, recall the
whole train of thought—that he did not need. He fell back
at once into the feeling which had guided him, which was
connected with those thoughts, and he found that feeling in
his soul even stronger and more definite than before. He did
not, as he had had to do with previous attempts to find comforting arguments, need to revive a whole chain of thought
to find the feeling. Now, on the contrary, the feeling of joy
and peace was keener than ever, and thought could not keep
pace with feeling.
He walked across the terrace and looked at two stars that
had come out in the darkening sky, and suddenly he re1416
Anna Karenina
membered. ‘Yes, looking at the sky, I thought that the dome
that I see is not a deception, and then I thought something,
I shirked facing something,’ he mused. ‘But whatever it was,
there can be no disproving it! I have but to think, and all
will come clear!’
Just as he was going into the nursery he remembered
what it was he had shirked facing. It was that if the chief
proof of the Divinity was His revelation of what is right,
how is it this revelation is confined to the Christian church
alone? What relation to this revelation have the beliefs of
the Buddhists, Mohammedans, who preached and did good
too?
It seemed to him that he had an answer to this question;
but he had not time to formulate it to himself before he went
into the nursery.
Kitty was standing with her sleeves tucked up over the
baby in the bath. Hearing her husband’s footstep, she turned
towards him, summoning him to her with her smile. With
one hand she was supporting the fat baby that lay floating
and sprawling on its back, while with the other she squeezed
the sponge over him.
‘Come, look, look!’ she said, when her husband came up
to her. ‘Agafea Mihalovna’s right. He knows us!’
Mitya had on that day given unmistakable, incontestable
signs of recognizing all his friends.
As soon as Levin approached the bath, the experiment
was tried, and it was completely successful. The cook, sent
for with this object, bent over the baby. He frowned and
shook his head disapprovingly. Kitty bent down to him, he
1417
gave her a beaming smile, propped his
