we promise complete submission. All the labor, all humiliations, all
sacrifices we take upon ourselves; but we will not judge and decide.” And
now, according to Sergey Ivanovitch’s account, the people had foregone this
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.
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.”
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
