A Wet Day

As we grow older it becomes more and more apparent that our moments
are the ghosts of old moments, our days but pale repetitions of days
that we have known in the past. It might almost be said that after a
certain age we never meet a stranger or win to a new place. The
palace of our soul, grown larger let us hope with the years, is
haunted by little memories that creep out of corners to peep at us
wistfully when we are most sure that we are alone. Sometimes we
cannot hear the voice of the present for the whisperings of the past;
sometimes the room is so full of ghosts that we can hardly breathe.
And yet it is often difficult to find the significance of these dead
days, restored to us to disturb our sense of passing time. Why have
our minds kept secret these trivial records so many years to give
them to us at last when they have no apparent consequence? Perhaps it
is only that we are not clever enough to read the riddle; perhaps
these trifles that we have remembered unconsciously year after year
are in truth the tremendous forces that have made our lives what they
are.

Standing at the window this morning and watching the rain, I suddenly
became conscious of a wet morning long ago when I stood as I stood
now and saw the drops sliding one after another down the steamy
panes. I was a boy of eight years old, dressed in a sailor suit, and
with my hair clipped quite short like a French boy's, and my right
knee was stiff with a half-healed cut where I had fallen on the
gravel path under the schoolroom window, it was a really wet, grey
day. I could hear the rain dripping from the fir-trees on to the
scullery roof, and every now and then a gust of wind drove the rain
down on the soaked lawn with a noise like breaking surf. I could hear
the water gurgling in the pipe that was hidden by the ivy, and I saw
with interest that one of the paths was flooded, so that a canal ran
between the standard rose bushes and recalled pictures of Venice. I
thought it would be nice if it rained truly hard and flooded the
house, so that we should all have to starve for three weeks, and then
be rescued excitingly in boats; but I had not really any hope. Behind
me in the schoolroom my two brothers were playing chess, but had not
yet started quarrelling, and in a corner my little sister was
patiently beating a doll. There was a fire in the grate, but it was
one of those sombre, smoky fires in which it is impossible to take
any i