There was a young American, Stephen Crane, who wrote, a few years ago, a little volume called "Wounds in the Rain." You may have read it. It was rather a grim book, but written with a good deal of power, and a promise of more to come that the author, alas, never lived to fulfil. And not the worst part of it was its title, with its suggestion of grey suffering, the aftermath alike of victory and defeat. And yet I am not sure that "Wounds in the Sun" would not literally have stood for a far greater sum of misery. Only he would never have made us feel it.
For there's an implicit sadness in the monosyllable rain—in the very sound of it—that depends, I think, when you come to analyse it, less upon the ideas of water and wetness and possible chill that it conjures up, than upon an underlying suggestion of something falling. It's a little hard to account for it—I would commend the subject to a metaphysician if I could be certain that it hasn't already been dealt with by him—and yet it's a fact, I think, that we have invested all falling things with a certain quality of tragedy, with at any rate no single idea of cheerfulness. Think of what you will, from little Susan's tear to Lucifer, son of the Morning, and of all the more material phenomena that lie between them—cascades, avalanches, autumn leaves—and you will find that while your vision perceives in them pity, or solemnity, or terror, or even disgust, it clothes no falling thing with actual joy. And the swifter the fall the more profound are these sentiments that it engenders.
Thus the sheer waterfall, spilling itself unbroken over some brooding crag into a pit of blackness, contains just so much more gloom than the torrent, leaping down from rock to rock, as its descent is more vertical and headlong. The thistledown, sliding earthwards upon the wind, is less tragic than the rain-sodden beech-leaf by just the measure of its longer passage through the air. While the rain that drives horizontally against one's Burberry may be a good deal more penetrating, but is seldom so dismal as that which drops down undisturbed from the drab sky to earth.
I believe that there is a sermon in all this somewhere—in the universal instinct with which we find sorrow, or at least some factor of it, in all that falls; and joy, or at any rate its suggestion, in most things that rise up, and open, and turn themselves towards the heavens. But I'll spare you the preaching of it, since these reflections merely spring to my mind as the result, last Saturday, of a particularly wet tramp from Beer to Sidmouth.
I had been called down in consultation on Friday, and having spent the night in the sick man's house, decided next morning to walk the eight miles along the coast. It was one of those baffling Devonshire mornings of rain and mist with rhythmical promises, never fulfilled, of a watery sunshine to come; and both my hostess and the local doctor were fain to press motor-cars upon me. But I had made up my mind, and assured them that I was one of those many people—possibly foolish—who rather enjoyed a walk in the rain.
My host, who was by way of being a philosopher as well as an invalid, looked at me with a twinkle.
"So you really think you like it?" he asked me.
"Yes," I told him. "I really do like it."
He put a hand on my shoulder.