The middle classes of modern England are quite fanatically fond of washing;
and are often enthusiastic for teetotalism. I cannot therefore
comprehend why it is that they exhibit a mysterious dislike of rain.
Rain, that inspiring and delightful thing, surely combines the qualities
of these two ideals with quite a curious perfection. Our philanthropists
are eager to establish public baths everywhere. Rain surely is a public
bath; it might almost be called mixed bathing. The appearance of persons
coming fresh from this great natural lustration is not perhaps polished or
dignified; but for the matter of that, few people are dignified when
coming out of a bath. But the scheme of rain in itself is one of an
enormous purification. It realises the dream of some insane hygienist: it
scrubs the sky. Its giant brooms and mops seem to reach the starry
If the Englishman is really fond of cold baths, he ought not to grumble at
the English climate for being a cold bath. In these days we are
constantly told that we should leave our little special possessions and
join in the enjoyment of common social institutions and a common social
machinery. I offer the rain as a thoroughly Socialistic institution. It
disregards that degraded delicacy which has hitherto led each gentleman to
take his shower-bath in private. It is a better shower-bath, because it
is public and communal; and, best of all, because somebody else pulls the
string.
As for the fascination of rain for the water drinker, it is a fact the
neglect of which I simply cannot comprehend. The enthusiastic water
drinker must regard a rainstorm as a sort of universal banquet and debauch
of his own favourite beverage. Think of the imaginative intoxication of
the wine drinker if the crimson clouds sent down claret or the golden
clouds hock. Paint upon primitive darkness some such scenes of apocalypse,
towering and gorgeous skyscapes in which champagne falls like fire from
heaven or the dark skies grow purple and tawny with the terrible colours
of port. All this must the wild abstainer feel, as he rolls in the long
soaking grass, kicks his ecstatic heels to heaven, and listens to the
roaring rain. It is he, the water drinker, who ought to be the true
bacchanal of the forests; for all the forests are drinking water.
Moreover, the forests are apparently enjoying it: the trees rave and reel
to and fro like drunken giants; they clash boughs as revellers clash cups;
they roar undying thirst and howl the health of the world.
All around me as I write is a noise of Nature drinking: and Nature makes a
noise when she is drinking, being by no means refined. If I count it
Christian mercy to give a cup of cold water to a sufferer, shall I
complain of these multitudinous cups of cold water handed round to all
living things; a cup of water for every shrub; a cup of water for every
weed? I would be ashamed to grumble at it. As Sir Philip Sidney said,
their need is greater than mine--especially for water.
There is a wild garment that still carries nobly the name of a wild
Highland clan: a elan come from those hills where rain is not so much an
incident as an atmosphere. Surely every man of imagination must feel a
tempestuous flame of Celtic romance spring up within him whenever he puts
on a mackintosh. I could never reconcile myself to carrying all umbrella;
it is a pompous Eastern business, carried over the heads of despots in the
dry, hot lands. Shut up, an umbrella is an unmanageable walkingstick;
open, it is an inadequate tent. For my part, I have no taste for
pretending to be a walking pavilion; I think nothing of my hat, and
precious little of my head. If I am to be protected against wet, it must
be by some closer and more careless protection, something that I can
forget altogether. It might be a Highland plaid. It might be that yet
more Highland thing, a mackintosh.
And there is really something in the mackintosh of the military qualities
of the Highlander. The proper cheap mackintosh has a blue and white sheen
as of steel or iron; it gleams like armour. I like to think of it as the
uniform of that ancient clan in some of its old and misty raids. I like
to think of all the Macintoshes, in their mackintoshes, descending on some
doomed Lowland village, their wet waterproofs flashing in the sun or moon.
For indeed this is one of the real beauties of rainy weather, that while
the amount of original and direct light is commonly lessened, the number
of things that reflect light is unquestionably increased. There is less
sunshine; but there are more shiny things; such beautifully shiny things
as pools and puddles and mackintoshes. It is like moving in a world of
mirrors.
And indeed this is the last and not the least gracious of the casual works
of magic wrought by rain: that while it decreases light, yet it doubles it.
If it dims the sky, it brightens the earth. It gives the roads (to the
sympathetic eye) something of the beauty of Venice. Shallow lakes of
water reiterate every detail of earth and sky; we dwell in a double
universe. Sometimes walking upon bare and lustrous pavements, wet under
numerous lamps, a man seems a black blot on all that golden looking-glass,
and could fancy he was flying in a yellow sky. But wherever trees and
towns hang head downwards in a pigmy puddle, the sense of Celestial
topsy-turvydom is the same. This bright, wet, dazzling confusion of shape
and shadow, of reality and reflection, will appeal strongly to any one
with the transcendental instinct about this dreamy and dual life of ours.
It will always give a man the strange sense of looking down at the skies.
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