Stormin’ H

As promised, with patience, here is the storm from p33 of Bertrand Sinclair’s The Hidden Places. (1922)

“He sat now staring out the window. A storm had broken over Vancouver that day. To-night it was still gathering force. The sky was a lowering, slate-coloured mass of clouds, spitting squally bursts of rain that drove in wet lines against his window and made the street below a glistening area shot with tiny streams and shallow puddles that were splashed over the curb by rolling motor wheels. The wind droned its ancient, melancholy chant among the telephone wires, shook with its unseen, powerful hands a row of bare maples across the way, rattled the windows in their frames. Now and then, in a momentary lull of the wind, a brief cessation fo the city noises, Hollister could hear far off the beat of the Gulf seas bursting on the beach at English Bay, snoring in the mouth of False Creek. A dreadry, threantening night that fitted his mood. ”

The storm then gives way to more from our operatic male (common place in BC literature of this & later periods it seems)
“He sat pondering over the many-horned dilemma upon which he hung impaled. He had done all that a man could do. He had given the best that was in him, played the game faithfully., according to the rules. And the net result had been for him the most complete disaster.”

I must pause here and interrupt this programming to give you a 7 hour respite before we hear Hollister continue his aria into the verdant moss of his wife!