Anna Karenina - Part 8

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.