Chapter XIV
THE rains have come. They were due on the fifteenth of June and they are late; this is the twentieth. The whole of yesterday afternoon we could see them beating up the valleys, and punctually at midnight they arrived, firing their own salute with a great clap of thunder and a volley on the roof—it is a galvanized roof—that left no room for doubt. You will notice that it is the rains that have come and not the rain; there is more difference than you would imagine between water and water. The rain is a gentle thing and descends in England; the rains are untamed, torrential, and visit parts of the East. They come to stay; for three good months they are with us, pelting the garden, beating at the panes. It would be difficult for persons living in the temperate zone to conceive how wet, during this period, our circumstances are.
One always hears them burst with a feeling of apprehension; it is such a violent movement of nature, potential of damage, certain of change; and life is faced next morning at breakfast with a gloom which is not assumed. A dripping dulness varied by deluges, that is the prospect for the next ninety days. The emotions of one who will be expected to support it under an umbrella, with the further protection of a conifer only, are offered, please, to your kind consideration. I dreamed as the night wore on of shipwreck in a sea of mountains on a cane chair, and when I awoke, salvaged in my bed, it was raining as hard as ever.
At breakfast Tiglath-Pileser said, uneasily, that it would probably clear up in half an hour. “It simply can’t go on like this,” remarked Thisbe, and I saw that they were thinking of me, under the conifer. When you suspect commiseration the thing to do is to enhance it. “Clear up?” said I with indifference. “Why should it clear up? It has only just begun.”
“It is all very well to sit out in the rainin England,” said Thisbe; “but this is quite a different thing.”
“Oh dear, no,” said I. “There is only a little more of it.”
“Well, if it continues to pelt like this, of course—” began Tiglath-Pileser.
“I shall take the old green gamp,” I put in, “it’s the biggest.”
They glanced at each other; I perceived the glance though my attention was supposed to be given to a curried egg. A word of petition would have installed me at once by the drawing-room fire; but a commanding pride rose up in me and forbade the word. Tiglath-Pileser, who holds to carrying out a system thoroughly, asked me thoughtfully if I wouldn’t have a little marmalade with my egg; and the matter dropped.
Half an hour afterwards I was encamped under the pencil-cedar and the old green umbrella. You cannot screen your whole person in a long chair with these two things, and I added to myself a water-proof sheet. It was a magnificent moment. The rain was coming down straight and thick with a loud,steady drum, small flat puddles were dancing all about me, and brooks were running under my chair—I sat calm and regardless. I was really quite dry and not nearly so uncomfortable as I looked; but I presented a spectacle of misery that afforded me a subtle joy. The only drawback was that there was nobody to witness it; Thisbe and Tiglath-Pileser seemed by common consent to withdraw themselves to the back parts. Only Dumboo circulated disconsolately about the verandah, with the heavy knowledge that now without doubt it was proved that the mistress was mad; and I wished to be thought indifferent only, not insane. He seemed to think that I required surveillance, and kept an anxious eye upon me until I sent him about his business.
It was a day of great affairs in the garden; I could hear them going on all round me. To everybody there it meant a radical change of housekeeping; some families were coming out and some going in, some moving up and some down, while others would depart, almost at once, for the season. No wonderthey all talked at once in an excited murmur under the rain. I could hear the murmur, but I could not distinguish the voices; between the rain and the umbrella, most of the garden was hidden from me, and it is a curious fact that if you cannot see a flower you cannot hear what it says. Only the pansy beds came within eyesight and ear-shot, and there I could see that consternation and confusion reigned. It is the beginning of the end for the pansies; they love rain in watering-pots, morning and evening, and a bright sun all day, and this downpour disconcerts them altogether. They cry out, every one of them, against the waste and improvidence of it. For another month they will go on opening fresh buds and uttering fresh protests, plainly disputing among themselves whether, under such adverse circumstances, life is worth living; and one sad day I shall find that they have decided it is not. I am always sorry to see the last pansy leave the garden; it goes with such regret.
I intended to be undisturbed and normal,and to accomplish pages; but I find that you cannot think in heavy rain. It is too fierce, too attacking. You know that it will not do you any harm, but your nerves are not convinced; you can only wait in a kind of physical suspense, like the cows in the fields, whose single idea I am sure is, “How soon will it be over?”
Well, I knew it would not be over for ninety days, and already there were drops on the inside of the green umbrella. I was seriously weighing the situation when Tiglath-Pileser appeared upon the verandah. He had come out to say that the rains always broke with thunder-storms, that this was practically a thunder-storm, and that he considered my situation, under the tallest tree in the neighbourhood, too exposed. He had to think of something; that was what he thought of, and I was pleased to find it convincing. “Shall I take it for granted,” I inquired blandly, “whenever it comes down in bucketfuls like this, that there is thunder in the air, and come in?” and Tiglath-Pileser said that he thought it would be as well.
So I am in—in to spend the day. It does not sound in any way remarkable, which shows how entirely custom is our measure for the significance of things. It is really an excursion into the known and familiar, become unusual and exciting by banishment; and it brings one fresh sense of how easy it would be to make life—almost any—vivid and interesting by a discreet and careful use of abstinence. I am not praising the pleasures of the anchorite; his is an undiscriminating experience upon quite a lower plane; but, oh, restraint, the discipline of the greedy instinct, how it brings out the colours of life! To have learnt this lesson only makes it worth while to have come through the world. People to whom a roof is normal have never, I venture to say, known the sense of shelter I feel to-day, the full enclosure of the four walls, the independence of the dry floor. The hill-man who watches the long slant of the rain into the valley from a cave out there on the road to Thibet, where a little heap of cold embers often tell of such a one’s refuging, may offerme intelligent sympathy—I should criticise any one else’s.
Meanwhile I have been criticising other things. The house is a place of shelter; it is also a place of confinement, and there are corners where the blessed air does not sufficiently circulate. This as an abstraction is generally accepted, but unless you pass a good deal of time out-of-doors you can never know it as a fact. It is not perhaps the happiest result of living in the open air that to the nose thus accustomed there are twice as many smells in the world as there were before. I have been discovering them in various places this morning, here a suggestion of kerosene, there a flavour of cheese, in another spot a reminiscence of Tiglath-Pileser’s pipe. I even pretend to know that it was his meerschaum and not his brier, though Thisbe thinks this preposterous. Thisbe thinks me preposterous altogether, vainly sniffing for the odours which offend me, and begging me to desist from opening windows and letting in the rain. Dumboo, more practical, goes carefullyround after me, and closes each in turn as soon as I have left the room, with an air of serious perturbation,—who can bejewabdeh—answer-giving—for the acts of a mad mistress? I have finally subsided as near as possible to the window in the breakfast-room, with the garden and the rain outside. It has been given me to understand that I am to have a present shortly, and I may choose my present. For some time I have been vainly revolving the matter; the world seems so full of desirable articles that one does not want; but here an inspiration visits me—I will have another window in the breakfast-room. There is plenty of room for it, nothing but a wall in the way. Where this blank wall, covered with wall-paper, now blocks the vision, another square of garden shall appear; it will let in a line of blue hill, most of the pencil-cedar, a corner of the rose-bushes, and a whole company of poppies and corn-bottles. A carpenter from Jullunder will make it in a week,—Jullunder thrives upon the export of carpenters to the hills,—and itwill be a most delicious present, giving a pleasure every morning freshly new, much better than anything that would have to be locked up in a drawer. Also, when we go away I shall be able, without a pang of self-sacrifice, to leave it behind for the enjoyment of other people, which is quite the most pleasing kind of benefit to confer.
Very heavily it descends, this first burst of the rains. The garden is bowed under it; from far and near comes the sound of rushing water down the khud-sides. The great valleys beyond the paling are brimful of grey, impenetrable vapour, as if the clouds, even in dissolving, were too heavy to carry themselves. From my asylum nothing appears to stir or speak except the rain. The day weeps fast and stormily, as if night might fall before she had half deplored enough.
It would be dull at the window but for the discovery I have made in the banksia over the arched trellis which stands, for no purpose at all, across the garden walk that runs round the roses. Here I stronglysuspect the brown bird has an establishment, and a sitting hen. So long as I myself sat in the garden I never guessed it, he was too clever; but he did not dream, I suppose, that I would take to spying upon him in ambush like this, and from here his conduct looks most husbandly. The brown bird joined us one afternoon about a fortnight ago, while we were having tea on the verandah. He perched on a flower-pot, and hinted, in the most engaging way, that the ground was baked and worms were scarce, and we made him feel so welcome to crumbs that he has constantly dropped in upon us since. He is most venturesome with us; he will run under our chairs and under the table, and he loves to slip in and out of hiding among the flower-pots. He goes with little leaps and bounds, like a squirrel; and he whistles with such melody that one might very well think him a thrush. I thought him a thrush, until one afternoon Tiglath-Pileser said aggressively, “I don’t believe that bird is a thrush.”
“Pray, then,” said I, “what is he?”
“He belongs, nevertheless,” said Tiglath-Pileser judicially, “to thePasseres.”
“If I asked your name,” said Delia, who was there, “I should not be grateful to be told that you were one of the primates,” and we laughed at the master of the house.
“Wait a bit,” said he, “I should call him a robin.”
“He’s got no red breast,” I brought forth, out of the depth of my ignorance.
“He has a reddish spot under each ear,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “and mark how his tail turns up.”
“I am no ornithologist,” I said. “His tail turns up.”
“How little one realizes,” quoth Thisbe, pensively, “that a bird has ears.”
“I think,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “that I can decide this matter,” and disappeared into the house.
“He has gone to get a book,” said Delia, “that will settleyou, dear lady, you and your thrush,” and presently he came out triumphant, as she said, with “Wanderings of a Naturalist in India.”
“‘Although differing altogether in the colour of its plumage from the European robin,’” he read aloud, “‘there is great similarity in their habits. It frisks before the door, and picks up crumbs, jerking its tail as it hops along. How often have associations of home been brought to mind by seeing this pretty little warbler pursuing its gambols before the door of an Eastern bungalow!’”
“Well,” said I, “not often, because of course we didn’t recognize it, but in future they always will be,” and at that moment the pretty little warbler put himself in profile on the paling before us, and threw out his little waistcoat, and threw back his little head and whistled, and we all cried out that he had established his identity, there could not be any doubt of it, in face of that brave and dainty attitude. There are some things a bird never could pick up.
So it is a robin that has gone to housekeeping there in the close-cut banksia. He is a devoted mate; he knows by heart, perhaps by experience, how necessary it is toencourage, dull little wives on the nest; and, neglectful of the hard-beating storm, he perches as near her as may be and sends out every dulcet variation he can think of. To the prisoner in the house it seems a supreme note of hope, this bird singing in the rain.