'Lyovin snatched up the lap-robes and coats and ran towards the grove.
'In that brief interval of time the thunderhead had engulfed the sun so completely that the day was as dark as during an eclipse. Stubbornly the wind tried to stop him as though insisting on its rights [the pathetic fallacy of the wind, as on Anna's train trip; but direct imagery will now turn into a comparison], and tearing the leaves and flowers off lime-trees, and turning back the foliage of the white birch branches so as to reveal, hideously and strangely, their nakedness, the wind twisted and tossed everything to one side—acacias, flowers, burdocks, long grass, tall tree-tops. The peasant girls working in the garden ran shrieking into the shelter of the servants' quarters. The downpour had already flung its livid veil over all the distant forest and over half the near fields, and was rapidly swooping down upon the grove. The wet of the rain as it spurted up in tiny drops upon touching the ground could be smelled in the air. Bending his head* and struggling with the wind that strove to snatch the wraps he was carrying away from him [pathetic fallacy continued], Lyovin was nearing the grove, and had just caught sight of something white from behind an oak-tree, when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on fire, and the sky seemed to split in two. Opening his blinded eyes, Lyovin gazed through the thick veil of rain and to his horror the first thing he saw was the uncannily changed position of the green crest of the familiar oak-tree in the middle of the grove. [Compare the scene of the race, Vronski feeling 'his changed position' when his horse broke its back while jumping an obstacle in the race.]
' 'Can it have been struck?' he hardly had time to think when, moving more and more rapidly, the foliage of the oak vanished behind other trees, and he heard the crash of the great tree falling upon the others.
'The blaze of lightning, the sound of thunder and the sudden chill that ran through him were all merged for him in one pang of terror. 'My God, my God, not on them,' he said.
'And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that the falling oak should not have killed them since it had already fallen, he repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than utter this senseless prayer. . . .
'They were at the other end of the grove, under an old lime-tree; they were calling him. Two figures in dark dresses (the dresses had been of a light color when they had started out)† stood bending over something. They were Kitty and the nurse. The rain had almost stopped. It was beginning to clear up when he reached them. The nurse's skirt was dry but Kitty was drenched, and her soaked clothes clung to her. Both stood bending in the same position as when the storm broke, over a baby carriage protected by a green umbrella. 'Alive? Safe? Thank God,' he said. His soaked boots slipped and sloshed in the puddles as he ran up to them. . . . [He was angry with his wife.] They gathered up the baby's wet diapers.' [Wet from the rain? This is not clear. Note how Jove's shower has been transformed into a beloved babe's wet diaper. The forces of nature have surrendered to the power of family life. The pathetic fallacy has been replaced by the smile of a happy family.]
*
The Garnett translation reads: 'Holding his head bent down before him,' on which VN fastidiously notes, 'Mark that Mrs. Garnett has decapitated the man.' Ed.
†
VN interjects: 'The point of this is of course messed up by Garnett,' who writes, 'they had been light summer dresses when they started out.' Ed.
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The nurse supporting him with one hand under his little belly, lifted him out of the bath, poured a jugful of water over him, he was wrapped in towels, dried and after some piercing screams handed over to his mother.
' 'Well, I am glad you are beginning to love him,' said Kitty to her husband, when she had settled comfortably in her usual place, with the baby at her breast. 'You remember you said you had no feeling for him.'
' 'Really? Did I say that? Oh—I only said I was sort of disappointed.'
' 'In him?'
' 'Not in him but well—in my own feeling. I had somehow expected more, some new delightful emotion, a big surprise, and then instead—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 the baby his bath. . . . [Tolstoy never misses a gesture.]
'Lyovin on leaving the nursery and finding himself alone,* went back in thought to the blurry something in his mind.
Instead of going into the drawing-room where he heard voices, he stopped on the terrace and leaning his elbows on the parapet gazed at the sky. It was quite dark now. The south was free of clouds which had drifted on towards the opposite side. There were flashes of lightning and distant rumbles from that quarter. He listened to the measured drip-drip from the lime-trees in the garden and looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well and the milky way with all its ramifications.
[Now comes a delightful comparison to be marked with love and foresight.] At each flash the Milky Way and even the bright stars vanished but as soon as the lightning died away, they reappeared in their places as though a hand had thrown them back with careful aim. [Is this delightful comparison clear?]
' 'Well, what is perplexing me?' Lyovin said to himself. 'I am wondering about the relationship to God of all the different religions of all mankind. But why do I bother? [Why indeed, murmurs the good reader.] To me individually, personally, to my own heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by reason, and here am I obstinately trying to use my reason.... The question of other creeds and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide, no possibility of deciding.'
' 'Oh, you have not gone in,' said Kitty's voice all at once as she went by through the terrace on her way to the drawing-room. 'What is the matter?' she said, looking intently at his face in the starlight.
'But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not hidden the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face clearly and seeing him happy and calm, she smiled at him. [This is the functional after effect of the delightful comparison we have noticed. It helps to clear matters.]
' 'She understands,' he thought. 'Shall I tell her? Yes.' But at that moment she began speaking. 'Do me a favor,' she said. 'Go into that guest room and see if they have fixed it right for Sergey [his half brother]. I can't very well. See if they have put the new wash-stand there.'
' 'O.K.,' said Lyovin and gave her a kiss. 'No, I had better not speak of it,' he thought. 'It is strictly for me alone, vitally for me alone, and not to be put into words.
'This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy as I had dreamt it would in regard to that feeling for my child. No surprise in this either. But faith or no faith this feeling has come to stay.'
*
In a note VN objects to Mrs. Garnett's phrasing of this opening, 'Going out of the nursery and being alone again.' Ed.
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'I shall go on, in the same old way, losing my temper with the coachman, falling into angry discussions, being tactless.
There will still be the same wall of reticence between my soul and other people, even between me and my wife. I shall still go on blaming her for my own fears and regretting it. I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my whole life now, apart from anything that may happen to me, every minute of it is no longer meaningless as it was before. It has acquired now the positive meaning of good which
Thus the book ends, on a mystic note which seems to me rather a part of Tolstoy's own diary than that of the
