For eight months I had occasion to comment on the weather and seldom in terms of congratulation. The expatriated English and the few porteños of British parentage with whom I came into frequent contact were strangely prone to ask me what I thought of the weather, whenever it happened to be a really fine day.
“Compare this,” they would say, “with the weeks of fog in London when the gas has to be lighted all day long and one can’t breathe.”
“My dear sir,” (or “lady,” as the case more often was), I might timorously make answer, “you speak of what is as much a tradition as the red wig and beard for the part of Shylock, and moreover you speak to one who has seen as great variety of weather in Buenos Ayres as in London. Your memory is so short that you forget it rained monstrously for three days last week, and for the other four days there was a white chilling vapour over all the town, so that you could not see the length of two squares in the forenoon, and when the vapour had cleared it was as though you were walking on vaselined sidewalks.”
“Oh, but that was exceptional.”
“And so, it may be, are the fogs of London. But I’d much prefer a real old London ‘particler’ to this marrow-searching, flesh-chilling, white plague that comes up from the River Plate in your winter-time and gets one by the throat.”
That fine line of Tennyson’s,
All in a death-dumb, autumn-dripping gloom,
comes to mind in Buenos Ayres on one of these days, but, alas, the autumn dripping is not from branchy trees to fragrant, leaf-laden loam, nor is it “death-dumb.” It drips from gaunt iron frames, from broken plastered walls, from tram-cars, from horses’ harness. A billiard cue taken from the rack will feel as though it had been lying in the bath, and the boots which you have not been wearing for a few days will show patches of white and green mould.
But it is true that between April and November there may be many days of sunshine; nay, even weeks of it at a stretch. And these days are delicious. There is a tang of freshness in the air such as comes to one on a fine frosty autumn morning on the heights of uptown New York.