It
was raining. A fine rain, a gentle shower, was peppering the pavements and
making them greasy. Was it worth while opening an umbrella, was it necessary to
hail a hansom, people coming out from the theatres asked themselves, looking up
at the mild, milky sky in which the stars were blunted. Where it fell on earth,
on fields and gardens, it drew up the smell of earth. Here a drop poised on a
grass-blade; there filled the cup of a wild flower, till the breeze stirred and
the rain was spilt. Was it worth while to shelter under the hawthorn, under the
hedge, the sheep seemed to question; and the cows, already turned out in the
grey fields, under the dim hedges, munched on, sleepily chewing with raindrops
on their hides. Down on the roofs it fell--here in Westminster, there in the
Ladbroke Grove; on the wide sea a million points pricked the blue monster like
an innumerable shower bath. Over the vast domes, the soaring spires of
slumbering University cities, over the leaded libraries, and the museums, now
shrouded in brown holland, the gentle rain slid down, till, reaching the mouths
of those fantastic laughers, the many-clawed gargoyles, it splayed out in a
thousand odd indentations. A drunken man slipping in a narrow passage outside
the public house, cursed it. Women in childbirth heard the doctor say to the
midwife, "It's raining." And the walloping Oxford bells, turning over
and over like slow porpoises in a sea of oil, contemplatively intoned their
musical incantation. The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the
mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of
rain, if there were a god, was thinking Let it not be restricted to the very
wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind, the munchers and chewers, the
ignorant, the unhappy, those who toil in the furnace making innumerable copies
of the same pot, those who bore red hot minds through contorted letters, and
also Mrs Jones in the alley, share my bounty.
The Years (44-5)
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