Anna Karenina
observance of that law of right and wrong which has been revealed to
every man, and therefore he could not wish for war or advocate war for
any general objects whatever. He said as Mihalitch did and the people,
who had expressed their feeling in the traditional invitations of the
Varyagi: “Be princes and rule over us. Gladly 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 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, 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.
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 everyone
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.
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 remembered. “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 gave her a beaming smile, propped his little hands on
the sponge and chirruped, making such a queer little contented sound
with his lips, that Kitty and the nurse were not alone in their
admiration. Levin, too, was surprised and delighted.
The baby was taken out of the bath, drenched with water, wrapped in
towels, dried, and after a piercing scream, handed to his mother.
“Well, I am glad you are beginning to love him,” said Kitty to her
husband, when she had settled herself comfortably in her usual place,
with the baby at her breast. “I am so glad! It had begun to distress
me. You said you had no feeling for him.”
“No; did I say that? I only said I was disappointed.”
“What! disappointed in him?”
“Not disappointed in him, but in my own feeling; I had expected more. I
had expected a rush of new delightful emotion to come as a surprise.
And then instead of that—disgust, pity....”
She listened attentively, looking at him over the baby, while she put
back on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off while giving
Mitya his bath.
“And most of all, at there being far more apprehension and pity than
pleasure. Today, after that fright during the storm, I understand how I
love him.”
Kitty’s smile was radiant.
“Were you very much frightened?” she said. “So was I too, but I feel it
more now that it’s over. I’m going to look at the oak. How nice
Katavasov is! And what a happy day we’ve had altogether. And you’re so