The Wonderful Visit Read online

  "Drop to pieces!" said the Angel. "How grotesque!"

  "Their hair comes off and gets dull coloured or ashen grey," said theVicar. "_I_, for instance." He bowed his head forward to show a circularshining patch the size of a florin. "And their teeth come out. Theirfaces collapse and become as wrinkled and dry as a shrivelled apple.'Corrugated' you called mine. They care more and more for what they haveto eat and to drink, and less and less for any of the other delights oflife. Their limbs get loose in the joints, and their hearts slack, orlittle pieces from their lungs come coughing up. Pain...."

  "Ah!" said the Angel.

  "Pain comes into their lives more and more. And then they go. They donot like to go, but they have to--out of this world, very reluctantly,clutching its pain at last in their eagerness to stop...."

  "Where do they go?"

  "Once I thought I knew. But now I am older I know I do not know. We havea Legend--perhaps it is not a legend. One may be a churchman anddisbelieve. Stokes says there is nothing in it...." The Vicar shook hishead at the bananas.

  "And you?" said the Angel. "Were you a little pink baby?"

  "A little while ago I was a little pink baby."

  "Were you robed then as you are now?"

  "Oh no! Dear me! What a queer idea! Had long white clothes, I suppose,like the rest of them."

  "And then you were a little boy?"

  "A little boy."

  "And then a glorious youth?"

  "I was not a very glorious youth, I am afraid. I was sickly, and toopoor to be radiant, and with a timid heart. I studied hard and poredover the dying thoughts of men long dead. So I lost the glory, and nomaiden came to me, and the dulness of life began too soon."

  "And you have your little pink babies?"

  "None," said the Vicar with a scarce perceptible pause. "Yet all thesame, as you see, I am beginning to drop to pieces. Presently my backwill droop like a wilting flowerstalk. And then, in a few thousand daysmore I shall be done with, and I shall go out of this world of mine....Whither I do not know."

  "And you have to eat like this every day?"

  "Eat, and get clothes and keep this roof above me. There are some verydisagreeable things in this world called Cold and Rain. And the otherpeople here--how and why is too long a story--have made me a kind ofchorus to their lives. They bring their little pink babies to me and Ihave to say a name and some other things over each new pink baby. Andwhen the children have grown to be youths and maidens, they come againand are confirmed. You will understand that better later. Then beforethey may join in couples and have pink babies of their own, they mustcome again and hear me read out of a book. They would be outcast, and noother maiden would speak to the maiden who had a little pink babywithout I had read over her for twenty minutes out of my book. It's anecessary thing, as you will see. Odd as it may seem to you. Andafterwards when they are falling to pieces, I try and persuade them of astrange world in which I scarcely believe myself, where life isaltogether different from what they have had--or desire. And in theend, I bury them, and read out of my book to those who will presentlyfollow into the unknown land. I stand at the beginning, and at thezenith, and at the setting of their lives. And on every seventh day, Iwho am a man myself, I who see no further than they do, talk to them ofthe Life to Come--the life of which we know nothing. If such a lifethere be. And slowly I drop to pieces amidst my prophesying."

  "What a strange life!" said the Angel.

  "Yes," said the Vicar. "What a strange life! But the thing that makes itstrange to me is new. I had taken it as a matter of course until youcame into my life."

  "This life of ours is so insistent," said the Vicar. "It, and its pettyneeds, its temporary pleasures (_Crack_) swathe our souls about. While Iam preaching to these people of mine of another life, some areministering to one appetite and eating sweets, others--the old men--areslumbering, the youths glance at the maidens, the grown men protrudewhite waistcoats and gold chains, pomp and vanity on a substratum ofcarnal substance, their wives flaunt garish bonnets at one another. AndI go on droning away of the things unseen and unrealised--'Eye hath notseen,' I read, 'nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the imaginationof man to conceive,' and I look up to catch an adult male immortaladmiring the fit of a pair of three and sixpenny gloves. It is dampingyear after year. When I was ailing in my youth I felt almost theassurance of vision that beneath this temporary phantasm world was thereal world--the enduring world of the Life Everlasting. But now----"

  He glanced at his chubby white hand, fingering the stem of his glass. "Ihave put on flesh since then," he said. [_Pause_].

  "I have changed and developed very much. The battle of the Flesh andSpirit does not trouble me as it did. Every day I feel less confidencein my beliefs, and more in God. I live, I am afraid, a quiescent life,duties fairly done, a little ornithology and a little chess, a trifle ofmathematical trifling. My times are in His hands----"

  The Vicar sighed and became pensive. The Angel watched him, and theAngel's eyes were troubled with the puzzle of him. "Gluck, gluck,gluck," went the decanter as the Vicar refilled his glass.

  XIX.

  So the Angel dined and talked to the Vicar, and presently the night cameand he was overtaken by yawning.

  "Yah----oh!" said the Angel suddenly. "Dear me! A higher power seemedsuddenly to stretch my mouth open and a great breath of air went rushingdown my throat."

  "You yawned," said the Vicar. "Do you never yawn in the angeliccountry?"

  "Never," said the Angel.

  "And yet you are immortal!----I suppose you want to go to bed."

  "Bed!" said the Angel. "Where's that?"

  So the Vicar explained darkness to him and the art of going to bed. (TheAngels, it seems sleep only in order to dream, and dream, like primitiveman, with their foreheads on their knees. And they sleep among the whitepoppy meadows in the heat of the day.) The Angel found the bedroomarrangements quaint enough.

  "Why is everything raised up on big wooden legs?" he said. "You have thefloor, and then you put everything you have upon a wooden quadruped. Whydo you do it?" The Vicar explained with philosophical vagueness. TheAngel burnt his finger in the candle-flame--and displayed an absoluteignorance of the elementary principles of combustion. He was merelycharmed when a line of fire ran up the curtains. The Vicar had todeliver a lecture on fire so soon as the flame was extinguished. He hadall kinds of explanations to make--even the soap needed explaining. Itwas an hour or more before the Angel was safely tucked in for the night.

  "He's very beautiful," said the Vicar, descending the staircase, quitetired out; "and he's a real angel no doubt. But I am afraid he will be adreadful anxiety, all the same, before he gets into our earthly way withthings."

  He seemed quite worried. He helped himself to an extra glass of sherrybefore he put away the wine in the cellaret.

  XX.

  The Curate stood in front of the looking-glass and solemnly divestedhimself of his collar.

  "I never heard a more fantastic story," said Mrs Mendham from the basketchair. "The man must be mad. Are you sure----."

  "Perfectly, my dear. I've told you every word, every incident----."

  "_Well!_" said Mrs Mendham, and spread her hands. "There's no sense init."

  "Precisely, my dear."

  "The Vicar," said Mrs Mendham, "must be mad."

  "This hunchback is certainly one of the strangest creatures I've seenfor a long time. Foreign looking, with a big bright coloured face andlong brown hair.... It can't have been cut for months!" The Curate puthis studs carefully upon the shelf of the dressing-table. "And a kind ofstaring look about his eyes, and a simpering smile. Quite a sillylooking person. Effeminate."

  "But who _can_ he be?" said Mrs Mendham.

  "I can't imagine, my dear. Nor where he came from. He might be achorister or something of that sort."

  "But _why_ should he be about the shrubbery ... in that dreadfulcostume?"

  "I don't know. The Vicar gave me no explanation. He simply said,'Mend
ham, this is an Angel.'"

  "I wonder if he drinks.... They may have been bathing near the spring,of course," reflected Mrs Mendham. "But I noticed no other clothes onhis arm."

  The Curate sat down on his bed and unlaced his boots.

  "It's a perfect mystery to me, my dear." (Flick, flick of laces.)"Hallucination is the only charitable----"

  "You are sure, George, that it was _not_ a woman."

  "Perfectly," said the Curate.

  "I know what men are, of course."

  "It was a young man of nineteen or twenty," said the Curate.

  "I can't understand it," said Mrs Mendham. "You say the creature isstaying at the Vicarage?"

  "Hilyer is simply mad," said the Curate. He got up and went paddinground the room to the door to put out his boots. "To judge by his manneryou would really think he believed this cripple was an Angel." ("Areyour shoes out, dear?")

  ("They're just by the wardrobe"), said Mrs Mendham. "He always was alittle queer, you know. There was always something childish abouthim.... An Angel!"

  The Curate came and stood by the fire, fumbling with his braces. MrsMendham liked a fire even in the summer. "He shirks all the seriousproblems in life and is always trifling with some new foolishness," saidthe Curate. "Angel indeed!" He laughed suddenly. "Hilyer _must_ be mad,"he said.

  Mrs Mendham laughed too. "Even that doesn't explain the hunchback," shesaid.

  "The hunchback must be mad too," said the Curate.

  "It's the only way of explaining it in a sensible way," said MrsMendham. [_Pause._]

  "Angel or no angel," said Mrs Mendham, "I know what is due to me. Evensupposing the man thought he _was_ in the company of an angel, that isno reason why he should not behave like a gentleman."

  "That is perfectly true."

  "You will write to the Bishop, of course?"

  Mendham coughed. "No, I shan't write to the Bishop," said Mendham. "Ithink it seems a little disloyal.... And he took no notice of the last,you know."

  "But surely----"

  "I shall write to Austin. In confidence. He will be sure to tell theBishop, you know. And you must remember, my dear----"

  "That Hilyer can dismiss you, you were going to say. My dear, the man'smuch too weak! _I_ should have a word to say about that. And besides,you do all his work for him. Practically, we manage the parish from endto end. I do not know what would become of the poor if it was not forme. They'd have free quarters in the Vicarage to-morrow. There is thatGoody Ansell----"

  "I know, my dear," said the Curate, turning away and proceeding with hisundressing. "You were telling me about her only this afternoon."

  XXI.

  And thus in the little bedroom over the gable we reach a first restingplace in this story. And as we have been hard at it, getting our storyspread out before you, it may be perhaps well to recapitulate a little.

  Looking back you will see that much has been done; we began with a blazeof light "not uniform but broken all over by curving flashes like thewaving of swords," and the sound of a mighty harping, and the advent ofan Angel with polychromatic wings.

  Swiftly, dexterously, as the reader must admit, wings have been clipped,halo handled off, the glory clapped into coat and trousers, and theAngel made for all practical purposes a man, under a suspicion of beingeither a lunatic or an impostor. You have heard too, or at least beenable to judge, what the Vicar and the Doctor and the Curate's wifethought of the strange arrival. And further remarkable opinions are tofollow.

  The afterglow of the summer sunset in the north-west darkens into nightand the Angel sleeps, dreaming himself back in the wonderful world whereit is always light, and everyone is happy, where fire does not burn andice does not chill; where rivulets of starlight go streaming through theamaranthine meadows, out to the seas of Peace. He dreams, and it seemsto him that once more his wings glow with a thousand colours and flashthrough the crystal air of the world from which he has come.

  So he dreams. But the Vicar lies awake, too perplexed for dreaming.Chiefly he is troubled by the possibilities of Mrs Mendham; but theevening's talk has opened strange vistas in his mind, and he isstimulated by a sense as of something seen darkly by the indistinctvision of a hitherto unsuspected wonderland lying about his world. Fortwenty years now he has held his village living and lived his dailylife, protected by his familiar creed, by the clamour of the details oflife, from any mystical dreaming. But now interweaving with thefamiliar bother of his persecuting neighbour, is an altogetherunfamiliar sense of strange new things.

  There was something ominous in the feeling. Once, indeed, it rose aboveall other considerations, and in a kind of terror he blundered out ofbed, bruised his shins very convincingly, found the matches at last, andlit a candle to assure himself of the reality of his own customary worldagain. But on the whole the more tangible trouble was the Mendhamavalanche. Her tongue seemed to be hanging above him like the sword ofDamocles. What might she not say of this business, before her indignantimagination came to rest?

  And while the successful captor of the Strange Bird was sleeping thusuneasily, Gully of Sidderton was carefully unloading his gun after awearisome blank day, and Sandy Bright was on his knees in prayer, withthe window carefully fastened. Annie Durgan was sleeping hard with hermouth open, and Amory's mother was dreaming of washing, and both of themhad long since exhausted the topics of the Sound and the Glare. LumpyDurgan was sitting up in his bed, now crooning the fragment of a tuneand now listening intently for a sound he had heard once and longed tohear again. As for the solicitor's clerk at Iping Hanger, he was tryingto write poetry about a confectioner's girl at Portburdock, and theStrange Bird was quite out of his head. But the ploughman who had seenit on the confines of Siddermorton Park had a black eye. That had beenone of the more tangible consequences of a little argument about birds'legs in the "Ship." It is worthy of this passing mention, since it isprobably the only known instance of an Angel causing anything of thekind.

  MORNING.

  XXII.

  The Vicar going to call the Angel, found him dressed and leaning out ofhis window. It was a glorious morning, still dewy, and the risingsunlight slanting round the corner of the house, struck warm and yellowupon the hillside. The birds were astir in the hedges and shrubbery. Upthe hillside--for it was late in August--a plough drove slowly. TheAngel's chin rested upon his hands and he did not turn as the Vicar cameup to him.

  "How's the wing?" said the Vicar.

  "I'd forgotten it," said the Angel. "Is that yonder a man?"

  The Vicar looked. "That's a ploughman."

  "Why does he go to and fro like that? Does it amuse him?"

  "He's ploughing. That's his work."

  "Work! Why does he do it? It seems a monotonous thing to do."

  "It is," admitted the Vicar. "But he has to do it to get a living, youknow. To get food to eat and all that kind of thing."

  "How curious!" said the Angel. "Do all men have to do that? Do you?"

  "Oh, no. He does it for me; does my share."

  "Why?" asked the Angel.

  "Oh! in return for things I do for him, you know. We go in for divisionof labour in this world. Exchange is no robbery."

  "I see," said the Angel, with his eyes still on the ploughman's heavymovements.

  "What do you do for him?"

  "That seems an easy question to you," said the Vicar, "but really!--it'sdifficult. Our social arrangements are rather complicated. It'simpossible to explain these things all at once, before breakfast. Don'tyou feel hungry?"

  "I think I do," said the Angel slowly, still at the window; and thenabruptly, "Somehow I can't help thinking that ploughing must be far fromenjoyable."

  "Possibly," said the Vicar, "very possibly. But breakfast is ready.Won't you come down?"

  The Angel left the window reluctantly.

  "Our society," explained the Vicar on the staircase, "is a complicatedorganisation."

  "Yes?"

  "And it is so arranged that some do one thing and some a
nother."

  "And that lean, bent old man trudges after that heavy blade of ironpulled by a couple of horses while we go down to eat?"

  "Yes. You will find it is perfectly just. Ah! mushrooms and poachedeggs! It's the Social System. Pray be seated. Possibly it strikes you asunfair?"

  "I'm puzzled," said the Angel.

  "The drink I'm sending you is called coffee," said the Vicar. "I daresayyou are. When I was a young man I was puzzled in the same way. Butafterwards comes a Broader View of Things. (These black things arecalled mushrooms; they look beautiful.) Other Considerations. All menare brothers, of course, but some are younger brothers, so to speak.There is work that requires culture and refinement, and work in whichculture and refinement would be an impediment. And the rights ofproperty must not be forgotten. One must render unto Caesar.... Do youknow, instead of explaining this matter now (this is yours), I think Iwill lend you a little book to read (_chum_, _chum_, _chum_--thesemushrooms are well up to their appearance), which sets the whole thingout very clearly."

  THE VIOLIN.

  XXIII.

  After breakfast the Vicar went into the little room next his study tofind a book on Political Economy for the Angel to read. For the Angel'ssocial ignorances were clearly beyond any verbal explanations. The doorstood ajar.

  "What is that?" said the Angel, following him. "A violin!" He took itdown.

  "You play?" said the Vicar.