Prayers for Rain

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THE time was when I thought that praying for rain was an indelicacy and intrusion, but I am now ready to engage in any concerted action for either the early or the latter rain. Since I have found out what it does for my soul, and how it enters upon its best and most intelligible passages on a rainy day, my mind is wholly changed. It took me years to realize and confess that a secret and modest delight thrills through mv whole being when the day is bad. Let it mount to a storm and my happiness is complete. Each fresh gust against the pane means that one more kind friend will leave me alone to-day, and as it wanders through the town it will smite other windows and bring a lively hope to my fellows that they will not be bothered with me. I could never brave conventionality enough to shut them off myself. If any one wants me I am powerless to say No, because of the number of baccalaureate sermons I have listened to, and an obsession of serviceableness which they have produced in me; but the rain or snow can absolve me without appearance of neglect. So, though I have come late to the conflict, is it any wonder that I am now ready to pray for rain and a lot of it ?

Every one testifies to the pleasant sensations produced by the sound of rain on the roof. Strict poetry requires a shingle roof, but it sounds good even on a tin roof. And the banging shutter produces a sense of peace and contentment which we do not analyze as we ought. It is due to the assurance that nobody will come. And some assurance of that sort is what all the world ’s a-seeking nowadays. It is the hunger for some such assurance that makes us hunt up sanatoriums and other mechanical contrivances for solitude. Sometimes I have wondered if we might not need a new reign of the monastery. All these things I have turned over in my mind, canvassing all the feasible forms of taking to the woods, and lo and behold I find that a good drizzling day will do most of the things I require of a monastery. That anything so millennial in character could be achieved by just an ordinary downpour of two days’ duration makes me feel that when the world was set going it was well supplied with all recuperative agencies. Give me health and enough rainy days and I will make the monastery look ridiculous.

Here I was thinking that things would never be any better until we had hit upon a brand-new and perfect economic system. But a little sleet or the promise of an all-day storm I find composes the human spirit in a way that economics is unable to approach. Results which I supposed impossible except on the basis of a trained nurse and a sanatorium and a nut diet, I find ensue naturally in the presence of sufficient rainfall. I was nerving myself up to chew every mouthful thirty-three times, but in a good drippingday I quite forget all these nostrums because of the growing tide of contentment and cheerfulness which rises in my heart. My straying faculties of mind, which had become more and more centrifugal, are now drawn in and centralized. I go like an arrow to the thing I like best to do and have been meaning to do all these months. The deferred task comes quietly out of the drawer and I go to work upon it as if I had never stopped. I feel condensed and drawm together. I luxuriate in minding my own business instead of trying to run the whole world. My very being relaxes and my fussiness departs. The world seems ample, generous, and good-natured.

They noticed this at Concord long ago when Emerson spoke of " the tumultuous privacy of storm.” and Thoreau said that he was never happier than when it rained. I suppose that when the blast howled around his casement Emerson felt morally certain that Bronson Alcott could not get over in such a night as that. You may think that a man has the greatest intellect since Plato without wanting him running in all the time. Thoreau did not propose to do what people wanted him to do in any case, but it was a relief to him now and then to know that they could not justly expect that he should. It eased his conscience.

Even if you decide to go out on the street you meet people on a natural and pleasant basis. They will continue to say what is not true from sheer force of habit, but underneath their complaint of the weather you detect that they are enjoying it hugely and wishing it would never let up.

It consolidates and glorifies the home, and on such days I am most keenly aware that I have one. The telephone, which ordinarily stirs my apprehension, now brings nothing but good news. Three of the societies to which our wife and mother belongs intimate that they will not convene to-day, and this was the day when all three of them came together. The Society of Scratchers for Promiscuous Knowledge (knitting allowed) will forego the pleasure of reunion and reedification this morning. This is a boon. Nothing but rain was ever able to stop that coterie yet. The Lunch Club, a limited organization for the exchange and discussion of picturesque edibles, at whose sessions the father and children eat furtively and untimely in the kitchen and use the backstairs, will not foregather to-day, and the time usually spent in telling each other how little time they have will thus be saved. So far the spirits of the whole household have steadily risen. Our four walls bid fair to become a home if we have much more of this sort of thing. But the keystone is dropped firmly into our domestic arch when word arrives that the Pontifical Society for the Promotion of Literary Awe (knitting and all cognate forms of relief sternly prohibited) adjourns for two weeks. There was to have been a symposium on Pestalozzi with an addendum on Horace Mann and Antioch College, but no one will ever care to know what she has missed. The worst is over and joy settles over the house. The children do not ask to be entertained. In every room is a happy and contented being absorbed in some satisfying occupation. The world is rung off. The rain did it. And if any one is “sair hauden doon ” it is only by the occasional dark thought that such things cannot last forever.

If the denudation of our forests is to result in an impoverished rainfall and an increased impossibility of staying at home I shall join in the outcry for preservation of the forests. Humanity will be too much for itself without forests. Nothing breaks up the mob spirit like water. And hereafter I shall not laugh at the preacher who closed a fervent appeal by saying, " Brethren, you have a spark! Water it! The dear man was a better psychologist than I am. My spark would amount to something if I could water it oftener.