XVII.

The old Prince and Sergei Ivanovich got into the wagonette and drove off; the rest of the party hastened homeward 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 clinging 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 Agathya Mikhailovna, who met them with shawls and plaids in the hall.

“We thought she was with you,” she said.

“And Mitia?”

“In Kolok, he must be, and the nurse with him.”

Levin snatched up the plaids and ran toward 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 linden trees and stripping the white birch branches into strange unseemly nakedness, it twisted everything to 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 smelled 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 linden 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 toward him, and she smiled timidly under her shapeless sopping 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 intending to go, when he made such a to-do that we had to change him. We were just . . .” Kitty began defending herself.

Mitia 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.