WHEN IT RAINS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21450, 25 March 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

WHEN IT RAINS

SOME IMPRESSIONS

BY G.A

It had seemed an ideal afternoon for being lazy in the garden, and there after lunch tho grown-ups retreated. We followed them, but more purposefully with baskets for snails and slugs, marketable at twopence a hundred to Aunt Jenny, who presided over the garden. Tho air was filled with lilac and the warm, sweetly rank smell of new-cut grass lying in sunny heaps. In the hedge among the honeysuckle a whole populaco of bees plied tl;oir noisy trafficking, a buzzing not disturbing but so unvaried and unbroken as to seem a necessary constituent of the air, a latent rhythm made audible. The afternoon was languorous and heavy and every flower drooped. We could not help observing, even in tho plenitude of our labours, where the quarry was thickest, how languidly their stems inclined, weightod by tho fragile heads.

We were never fond of these very hot summer days. The air, though sweet with the scent of our favourite flowers, was flat and insipid, and we missed the bracing flavour of its more inclement moods. Adventure rarely stalked abroad on sultry Sabbath afternoons, and the garden, appropriated by the grown-ups and gathering from their presence an artificial and ill-fitting sobriety, became an ordinary place. So we were not sorry ''to see gathering above the crcst3 of the hills and filling the interspaces of the ridges a billow of cloud-like mist, but thicker, and hinting by a vertical grain in its texture at rain not far distant. Tho silence became heavier. The bees droned no longer among the honeysuckle, and we saw that the small gnats seizing on Uncle Henry had _ drawn attention to tho threatening rain. The grown-ups returned to the house. Uncertain whether the afternoon was ruined as a commercial enterprise or redeemed as a hope of excitement, we left our slugging and climbed on to the gateposts. On the River

The rain was steadily advancing. It was unlike a midsummer rain that comes in one dark, ominous cloud to break in a steady downpour and clear up again in sunshine. Ihis rain came stealthily, blurring though not. obscuring familiar landscapes, something like smoke but less dense and more evenly distributed. Very high above the hills from which the first warnings came the sky was clearer and of an opaque but wavering blue, so that the upper edges of the rain-cloud seemed almost visible. It lay along the hills against the sky like the pall of an industrial city, belched from unseen chimney-stacks. It washed against the foothills _ like a smooth and leaden river, sootied and crimed around factory weirs and jetties. And it brought back with startling clearness an impression of Tilbury_ as I first saw it some years before, with a gentle, smoky rain blowing down _ the river, muffling sound, obscuring vision and charged with a queer, electric mvstery. I had almost forgotten the experience after two more years filled with new sensations and impressions, and all the more vividly I heard again the grey gulls talking among the piles, the rare, distant hoot of a siren, and around the tug's hull the splashing and sucking or oozy grey waters. If I had ever kept record of "fcho cltiys ■fchcit' lijiv© most deeply moved within me sensations and tremors of uncomprehending ecstasy I think that most of them would be days of rain or mist. It is more often the strange, bewildering things that striko responsive chords in us, fancies unformulated but deep in the core of being and rooted there stronger than fact. These persist, dormant, ineradicable, seizing at test 011 our unguarded consciousness to stalk unabashed through the forbidden reaches of the mind, and call like a spectre from the tomb that tantalising enigma, the everlasting mystery of things. t The Artist

I remember such a day in winter, with the afternoon light ebbing away before a great wall of rain. A feeble western gleam filtered through it, making momentarily light the darkening pastures, but quenched by the first heavy drops. Such a wind brought the rain as sobs around the chimneys of deserted houses, such a wind as witches love to ride upon, grey and gaunt, astride a ghostly broomstick. They rode above us now, flung by the wind in wild bacchanalian abandon. They swept recklessly onward, over hedges and hurdles of mist, across an invisible, aerial turf. Wo were climbing a hill and the country fell away behind and around us through gulfs and glooms of rain to emerge distantly in unsubstantial uplands. Wo were in Quest of a view, and at the hilltop, where a belt of pine trees promised shelter, we came suddenly upon it. It filled at first the whole valley, of which the limits could be discerned only by a change in texture, where tho solider darkness of the rising land frayed into a profounder but less dominant grey. As tho rain passed over, the shouldors of the hills emerged, gathering mass and distance. . Then, as the water fell away from their flanks they narrowed in and were no longer magnified, but the white cottages on their sides stood out vividly, almost to the tiles on their roofs, and the crops in tho well-tilled gardens. Another storm was eddying up with dis* tant reverberations of thunder beyond tho hills. Between the two banks of cloud on either side tho country came out in bold relief, every detail compelling through newly-washed air. A lake lay full in the centre of the valley, shaped like a spoon and heavily wooded at the lower end. Suddenly out of the trees came a flock of largo birds, hung circling above the centre of the lake, dipped, roso again, swerved and returned into the trees . . . the eleven bewitched brothers of tho fairy tale, now eleven swans in the homing twilight. And somewhere, jjerhaps, by the rusty lakeside a girl sat sowing nettles. A Dramatis Persona Rain and wind and eerie earthly things suit best with fairy tales, whether it bo in their personnel or scenery, for fairy tales have more in them of mystery and emotion and of that queer, thrilling half-knowledge of "things beyond things" than any other tale ever told, or whether it be in tho tolling of them on rainy evenings, with a ghost of a wind prowling unchained from chink to chink, and the shadows closing in. For the rain is a great artist, a fanciful, whimsical, vivid, elfin, mournful, macabre artist, artist, musician, story-teller, master of colours and forms and otchings, capricious, versatile, threatening, soothing, the Proteus of tho elements and of them tho most lovable. And I would sooner live with him than any other in that far fairv country, where winds are men and walk and talk, and streams and rivers and mountains live to help heroes and rescue princesses. And when the nights drew in cold and bleak I would lie on a deep and dim hearthrug before a red firo and listen to the rain, to_ a talo half-told, a song half-sung, its whisper on the panes. For so we listened as children, to firolight voices reading from Hans Andersen and Grimm, in darkening wintor evenings botween tea and bedtime, and blessed tho rain for bringing his sad accompaniment when wo liked it best.; ,