THE WONDERFUL VISIT

BY
H. G. WELLS
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. The Night Of The Strange Bird
Chapter 2. The Coming Of The Strange Bird
Chapter 3. The Hunting Of The Strange Bird
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6. The Vicar And The Angel
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9. Parenthesis on Angels
Chapter 10. At The Vicarage
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13. The Man Of Science
Chapter 14
Chapter 15. The Curate
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18. After Dinner
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22. Morning
Chapter 23. The Violin
Chapter 24. The Angel Explores The Village
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28. Lady Hammergallow's View
Chapter 29. Further Adventures Of The Angel In The Village
Chapter 30
Chapter 31. Mrs Jehoram's Breadth Of View
Chapter 32. A Trivial Incident
Chapter 33. The Warp And The Woof Of Things
Chapter 34. The Angel's Debut
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38. The Trouble Of The Barbed Wire
Chapter 39
Chapter 40. Delia
Chapter 41. Doctor Crump Acts
Chapter 42. Sir John Gotch Acts
Chapter 43. The Sea Cliff
Chapter 44. Mrs Hinijer Acts
Chapter 45. The Angel In Trouble
Chapter 46
Chapter 47. The Last Day Of The Visit
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
The Epilogue
 1

CHAPTER 1. THE NIGHT OF THE STRANGE BIRD

On the Night of the Strange Bird, many people at Sidderton (and some
nearer) saw a Glare on the Sidderford moor. But no one in Sidderford saw it,
for most of Sidderford was abed.

All day the wind had been rising, so that the larks on the moor chirruped
fitfully near the ground, or rose only to be driven like leaves before the
wind. The sun set in a bloody welter of clouds, and the moon was hidden.
The glare, they say, was golden like a beam shining out of the sky, not a
uniform blaze, but broken all over by curving flashes like the waving of
swords. It lasted but a moment and left the night dark and obscure. There
were letters about it in Nature, and a rough drawing that no one thought
very like. (You may see it for yourself—the drawing that was unlike the
glare—on page 42 of Vol. cclx. of that publication.)

None in Sidderford saw the light, but Annie, Hooker Durgan's wife, was lying
awake, and she saw the reflection of it—a flickering tongue of gold—
dancing on the wall.

She, too, was one of those who heard the sound. The others who heard the
sound were Lumpy Durgan, the half-wit, and Amory's mother. They said it
was a sound like children singing and a throbbing of harp strings, carried on
a rush of notes like that which sometimes comes from an organ. It began
and ended like the opening and shutting of a door, and before and after
they heard nothing but the night wind howling over the moor and the noise
of the caves under Sidderford cliff. Amory's mother said she wanted to cry
when she heard it, but Lumpy was only sorry he could hear no more.

That is as much as anyone can tell you of the glare upon Sidderford Moor
and the alleged music therewith. And whether these had any real connexion
with the Strange Bird whose history follows, is more than I can say. But I set
it down here for reasons that will be more apparent as the story proceeds.
 2

CHAPTER 2. THE COMING OF THE STRANGE BIRD

Sandy Bright was coming down the road from Spinner's carrying a side of
bacon he had taken in exchange for a clock. He saw nothing of the light but
he heard and saw the Strange Bird. He suddenly heard a flapping and a voice
like a woman wailing, and being a nervous man and all alone, he was
alarmed forthwith, and turning (all a-tremble) saw something large and
black against the dim darkness of the cedars up the hill. It seemed to be
coming right down upon him, and incontinently he dropped his bacon and
set off running, only to fall headlong.

He tried in vain—such was his state of mind—to remember the beginning of

the Lord's Prayer. The strange bird flapped over him, something larger than
himself, with a vast spread of wings, and, as he thought, black. He screamed
and gave himself up for lost. Then it went past him, sailing down the hill,
and, soaring over the vicarage, vanished into the hazy valley towards
Sidderford.

And Sandy Bright lay upon his stomach there, for ever so long, staring into
the darkness after the strange bird. At last he got upon his knees and began
to thank Heaven for his merciful deliverance, with his eyes downhill. He
went on down into the village, talking aloud and confessing his sins as he
went, lest the strange bird should come back. All who heard him thought
him drunk. But from that night he was a changed man, and had done with
drunkenness and defrauding the revenue by selling silver ornaments
without a licence. And the side of bacon lay upon the hillside until the
tallyman from Portburdock found it in the morning.

The next who saw the Strange Bird was a solicitor's clerk at Iping Hanger,
who was climbing the hill before breakfast, to see the sunrise. Save for a
few dissolving wisps of cloud the sky had been blown clear in the night. At
first he thought it was an eagle he saw. It was near the zenith, and incredibly
remote, a mere bright speck above the pink cirri, and it seemed as if it
fluttered and beat itself against the sky, as an imprisoned swallow might do
against a window pane. Then down it came into the shadow of the earth,
 3

sweeping in a great curve towards Portburdock and round over the Hanger,
and so vanishing behind the woods of Siddermorton Park. It seemed larger
than a man. Just before it was hidden, the light of the rising sun smote over
the edge of the downs and touched its wings, and they flashed with the
brightness of flames and the colour of precious stones, and so passed,
leaving the witness agape.

A ploughman going to his work, along under the stone wall of Siddermorton
Park, saw the Strange Bird flash over him for a moment and vanish among
the hazy interstices of the beech trees. But he saw little of the colour of the
wings, witnessing only that its legs, which were long, seemed pink and bare
like naked flesh, and its body mottled white. It smote like an arrow through
the air and was gone.

These were the first three eye-witnesses of the Strange Bird.

Now in these days one does not cower before the devil and one's own
sinfulness, or see strange iridiscent wings in the light of dawn, and say
nothing of it afterwards. The young solicitor's clerk told his mother and
sisters at breakfast, and, afterwards, on his way to the office at
Portburdock, spoke of it to the blacksmith of Hammerpond, and spent the
morning with his fellow clerks marvelling instead of copying deeds. And
Sandy Bright went to talk the matter over with Mr Jekyll, the "Primitive"
minister, and the ploughman told old Hugh and afterwards the vicar of
Siddermorton.

"They are not an imaginative race about here," said the Vicar of
Siddermorton, "I wonder how much of that was true. Barring that he thinks
the wings were brown it sounds uncommonly like a Flamingo."
 4

CHAPTER 3. THE HUNTING OF THE STRANGE BIRD

The Vicar of Siddermorton (which is nine miles inland from Siddermouth as

the crow flies) was an ornithologist. Some such pursuit, botany, antiquity,
folk-lore, is almost inevitable for a single man in his position. He was given to
geometry also, propounding occasionally impossible problems in
the Educational Times, but ornithology was his forte. He had already added
two visitors to the list of occasional British birds. His name was well-known
in the columns of the Zoologist (I am afraid it may be forgotten by now, for
the world moves apace). And on the day after the coming of the Strange
Bird, came first one and then another to confirm the ploughman's story and
tell him, not that it had any connection, of the Glare upon Sidderford moor.

Now, the Vicar of Siddermorton had two rivals in his scientific pursuits; Gully
of Sidderton, who had actually seen the glare, and who it was sent the
drawing to Nature, and Borland the natural history dealer, who kept the
marine laboratory at Portburdock. Borland, the Vicar thought, should have
stuck to his copepods, but instead he kept a taxidermist, and took
advantage of his littoral position to pick up rare sea birds. It was evident to
anyone who knew anything of collecting that both these men would be
scouring the country after the strange visitant, before twenty-four hours
were out.

The Vicar's eye rested on the back of Saunders' British Birds, for he was in
his study at the time. Already in two places there was entered: "the only
known British specimen was secured by the Rev. K. Hilyer, Vicar of
Siddermorton." A third such entry. He doubted if any other collector had
that.

He looked at his watch—two. He had just lunched, and usually he "rested" in

the afternoon. He knew it would make him feel very disagreeable if he went
out into the hot sunshine—both on the top of his head and generally. Yet
Gully perhaps was out, prowling observant. Suppose it was something very
good and Gully got it!
 5

His gun stood in the corner. (The thing had iridiscent wings and pink legs!
The chromatic conflict was certainly exceedingly stimulating). He took his
gun.

He would have gone out by the glass doors and verandah, and down the
garden into the hill road, in order to avoid his housekeeper's eye. He knew
his gun expeditions were not approved of. But advancing towards him up
the garden, he saw the curate's wife and her two daughters, carrying tennis
rackets. His curate's wife was a young woman of immense will, who used to
play tennis on his lawn, and cut his roses, differ from him on doctrinal
points, and criticise his personal behaviour all over the parish. He went in
abject fear of her, was always trying to propitiate her. But so far he had
clung to his ornithology....

However, he went out by the front door.

 6

CHAPTER 4

If it were not for collectors England would be full, so to speak, of rare birds
and wonderful butterflies, strange flowers and a thousand interesting
things. But happily the collector prevents all that, either killing with his own
hands or, by buying extravagantly, procuring people of the lower classes to
kill such eccentricities as appear. It makes work for people, even though
Acts of Parliament interfere. In this way, for instance, he is killing off the
chough in Cornwall, the Bath white butterfly, the Queen of Spain Fritillary;
and can plume himself upon the extermination of the Great Auk, and a
hundred other rare birds and plants and insects. All that is the work of the
collector and his glory alone. In the name of Science. And this is right and as
it should be; eccentricity, in fact, is immorality—think over it again if you do
not think so now—just as eccentricity in one's way of thinking is madness (I
defy you to find another definition that will fit all the cases of either); and if
a species is rare it follows that it is not Fitted to Survive. The collector is after
all merely like the foot soldier in the days of heavy armour—he leaves the
combatants alone and cuts the throats of those who are overthrown. So
one may go through England from end to end in the summer time and see
only eight or ten commonplace wild flowers, and the commoner butterflies,
and a dozen or so common birds, and never be offended by any breach of
the monotony, any splash of strange blossom or flutter of unknown wing.
All the rest have been "collected" years ago. For which cause we should all
love Collectors, and bear in mind what we owe them when their little
collections are displayed. These camphorated little drawers of theirs, their
glass cases and blotting-paper books, are the graves of the Rare and the
Beautiful, the symbols of the Triumph of Leisure (morally spent) over the
Delights of Life. (All of which, as you very properly remark, has nothing
whatever to do with the Strange Bird.)
 7

CHAPTER 5

There is a place on the moor where the black water shines among the
succulent moss, and the hairy sundew, eater of careless insects, spreads its
red-stained hungry hands to the God who gives his creatures—one to feed
another. On a ridge thereby grow birches with a silvery bark, and the soft
green of the larch mingles with the dark green fir. Thither through the
honey humming heather came the Vicar, in the heat of the day, carrying a
gun under his arm, a gun loaded with swanshot for the Strange Bird. And
over his disengaged hand he carried a pocket handkerchief wherewith, ever
and again, he wiped his beady face.

He went by and on past the big pond and the pool full of brown leaves
where the Sidder arises, and so by the road (which is at first sandy and then
chalky) to the little gate that goes into the park. There are seven steps up to
the gate and on the further side six down again—lest the deer escape—so
that when the Vicar stood in the gateway his head was ten feet or more
above the ground. And looking where a tumult of bracken fronds filled the
hollow between two groups of beech, his eye caught something parti-
coloured that wavered and went. Suddenly his face gleamed and his
muscles grew tense; he ducked his head, clutched his gun with both hands,
and stood still. Then watching keenly, he came on down the steps into the
park, and still holding his gun in both hands, crept rather than walked
towards the jungle of bracken.

Nothing stirred, and he almost feared that his eyes had played him false,
until he reached the ferns and had gone rustling breast high into them. Then
suddenly rose something full of wavering colours, twenty yards or less in
front of his face, and beating the air. In another moment it had fluttered
above the bracken and spread its pinions wide. He saw what it was, his heart
was in his mouth, and he fired out of pure surprise and habit.

There was a scream of superhuman agony, the wings beat the air twice, and
the victim came slanting swiftly downward and struck the ground—a
 8

struggling heap of writhing body, broken wing and flying bloodstained

plumes—upon the turfy slope behind.

The Vicar stood aghast, with his smoking gun in his hand. It was no bird at
all, but a youth with an extremely beautiful face, clad in a robe of saffron
and with iridescent wings, across whose pinions great waves of colour,
flushes of purple and crimson, golden green and intense blue, pursued one
another as he writhed in his agony. Never had the Vicar seen such gorgeous
floods of colour, not stained glass windows, not the wings of butterflies, not
even the glories of crystals seen between prisms, no colours on earth could
compare with them. Twice the Angel raised himself, only to fall over
sideways again. Then the beating of the wings diminished, the terrified face
grew pale, the floods of colour abated, and suddenly with a sob he lay
prone, and the changing hues of the broken wings faded swiftly into one
uniform dull grey hue.

"Oh! what has happened to me?" cried the Angel (for such it was),
shuddering violently, hands outstretched and clutching the ground, and
then lying still.

"Dear me!" said the Vicar. "I had no idea." He came forward cautiously.
"Excuse me," he said, "I am afraid I have shot you."

It was the obvious remark.

The Angel seemed to become aware of his presence for the first time. He
raised himself by one hand, his brown eyes stared into the Vicar's. Then,
with a gasp, and biting his nether lip, he struggled into a sitting position and
surveyed the Vicar from top to toe.

"A man!" said the Angel, clasping his forehead; "a man in the maddest black
clothes and without a feather upon him. Then I was not deceived. I am
indeed in the Land of Dreams!"
 9

CHAPTER 6. THE VICAR AND THE ANGEL

Now there are some things frankly impossible. The weakest intellect will
admit this situation is impossible. The Athenæum will probably say as much
should it venture to review this. Sunbespattered ferns, spreading beech
trees, the Vicar and the gun are acceptable enough. But this Angel is a
different matter. Plain sensible people will scarcely go on with such an
extravagant book. And the Vicar fully appreciated this impossibility. But he
lacked decision. Consequently he went on with it, as you shall immediately
hear. He was hot, it was after dinner, he was in no mood for mental
subtleties. The Angel had him at a disadvantage, and further distracted him
from the main issue by irrelevant iridescence and a violent fluttering. For the
moment it never occurred to the Vicar to ask whether the Angel was
possible or not. He accepted him in the confusion of the moment, and the
mischief was done. Put yourself in his place, my dear Athenæum. You go out
shooting. You hit something. That alone would disconcert you. You find you
have hit an Angel, and he writhes about for a minute and then sits up and
addresses you. He makes no apology for his own impossibility. Indeed, he
carries the charge clean into your camp. "A man!" he says, pointing. "A man
in the maddest black clothes and without a feather upon him. Then I was
not deceived. I am indeed in the Land of Dreams!" You must answer him.
Unless you take to your heels. Or blow his brains out with your second
barrel as an escape from the controversy.

"The Land of Dreams! Pardon me if I suggest you have just come out of it,"
was the Vicar's remark.

"How can that be?" said the Angel.

"Your wing," said the Vicar, "is bleeding. Before we talk, may I have the
pleasure—the melancholy pleasure—of tying it up? I am really most
sincerely sorry...." The Angel put his hand behind his back and winced.

The Vicar assisted his victim to stand up. The Angel turned gravely and the
Vicar, with numberless insignificant panting parentheses, carefully examined
 10

the injured wings. (They articulated, he observed with interest, to a kind of

second glenoid on the outer and upper edge of the shoulder blade. The left
wing had suffered little except the loss of some of the primary wing-quills,
and a shot or so in the ala spuria, but the humerus bone of the right was
evidently smashed.) The Vicar stanched the bleeding as well as he could and
tied up the bone with his pocket handkerchief and the neck wrap his
housekeeper made him carry in all weathers.

"I'm afraid you will not be able to fly for some time," said he, feeling the
bone.

"I don't like this new sensation," said the Angel.

"The Pain when I feel your bone?"

"The what?" said the Angel.

"The Pain."

"'Pain'—you call it. No, I certainly don't like the Pain. Do you have much of
this Pain in the Land of Dreams?"

"A very fair share," said the Vicar. "Is it new to you?"

"Quite," said the Angel. "I don't like it."

"How curious!" said the Vicar, and bit at the end of a strip of linen to tie a
knot. "I think this bandaging must serve for the present," he said. "I've
studied ambulance work before, but never the bandaging up of wing
wounds. Is your Pain any better?"

"It glows now instead of flashing," said the Angel.

"I am afraid you will find it glow for some time," said the Vicar, still intent on
the wound.

The Angel gave a shrug of the wing and turned round to look at the Vicar
again. He had been trying to keep an eye on the Vicar over his shoulder
during all their interview. He looked at him from top to toe with raised
eyebrows and a growing smile on his beautiful soft-featured face. "It seems
so odd," he said with a sweet little laugh, "to be talking to a Man!"
 11

"Do you know," said the Vicar, "now that I come to think of it, it is equally
odd to me that I should be talking to an Angel. I am a somewhat matter-of-
fact person. A Vicar has to be. Angels I have always regarded as—artistic
conceptions——"

"Exactly what we think of men."

"But surely you have seen so many men——"

"Never before to-day. In pictures and books, times enough of course. But I
have seen several since the sunrise, solid real men, besides a horse or so—
those Unicorn things you know, without horns—and quite a number of
those grotesque knobby things called 'cows.' I was naturally a little
frightened at so many mythical monsters, and came to hide here until it was
dark. I suppose it will be dark again presently like it was at first. Phew! This
Pain of yours is poor fun. I hope I shall wake up directly."

"I don't understand quite," said the Vicar, knitting his brows and tapping his
forehead with his flat hand. "Mythical monster!" The worst thing he had
been called for years hitherto was a 'mediaeval anachronism' (by an
advocate of Disestablishment). "Do I understand that you consider me as—
as something in a dream?"

"Of course," said the Angel smiling.

"And this world about me, these rugged trees and spreading fronds——"

"Is all so very dream like," said the Angel. "Just exactly what one dreams
of—or artists imagine."

"You have artists then among the Angels?"

"All kinds of artists, Angels with wonderful imaginations, who invent men
and cows and eagles and a thousand impossible creatures."

"Impossible creatures!" said the Vicar.

"Impossible creatures," said the Angel. "Myths."

"But I'm real!" said the Vicar. "I assure you I'm real."
 12

The Angel shrugged his wings and winced and smiled. "I can always tell
when I am dreaming," he said.

"You—dreaming," said the Vicar. He looked round him.

"You dreaming!" he repeated. His mind worked diffusely.

He held out his hand with all his fingers moving. "I have it!" he said. "I begin
to see." A really brilliant idea was dawning upon his mind. He had not
studied mathematics at Cambridge for nothing, after all. "Tell me please.
Some animals of your world ... of the Real World, real animals you know."

"Real animals!" said the Angel smiling. "Why—there's Griffins and

Dragons—and Jabberwocks—and Cherubim—and Sphinxes—and the
Hippogriff—and Mermaids—and Satyrs—and...."

"Thank you," said the Vicar as the Angel appeared to be warming to his
work; "thank you. That is quite enough. I begin to understand."

He paused for a moment, his face pursed up. "Yes ... I begin to see it."

"See what?" asked the Angel.

"The Griffins and Satyrs and so forth. It's as clear...."

"I don't see them," said the Angel.

"No, the whole point is they are not to be seen in this world. But our men
with imaginations have told us all about them, you know. And even I at
times ... there are places in this village where you must simply take what
they set before you, or give offence—I, I say, have seen in my dreams
Jabberwocks, Bogle brutes, Mandrakes.... From our point of view, you
know, they are Dream Creatures...."

"Dream Creatures!" said the Angel. "How singular! This is a very curious
dream. A kind of topsy-turvey one. You call men real and angels a myth. It
almost makes one think that in some odd way there must be two worlds as
it were...."

"At least Two," said the Vicar.

"Lying somewhere close together, and yet scarcely suspecting...."

 13

"As near as page to page of a book."

"Penetrating each other, living each its own life. This is really a delicious
dream!"

"And never dreaming of each other."

"Except when people go a dreaming!"

"Yes," said the Angel thoughtfully. "It must be something of the sort. And
that reminds me. Sometimes when I have been dropping asleep,
or drowsing under the noon-tide sun, I have seen strange corrugated faces
just like yours, going by me, and trees with green leaves upon them, and
such queer uneven ground as this.... It must be so. I have fallen into another
world."

"Sometimes," began the Vicar, "at bedtime, when I have been just on the
edge of consciousness, I have seen faces as beautiful as yours, and the
strange dazzling vistas of a wonderful scene, that flowed past me, winged
shapes soaring over it, and wonderful—sometimes terrible—forms going to
and fro. I have even heard sweet music too in my ears.... It may be that as
we withdraw our attention from the world of sense, the pressing world
about us, as we pass into the twilight of repose, other worlds.... Just as we
see the stars, those other worlds in space, when the glare of day recedes....
And the artistic dreamers who see such things most clearly...."

They looked at one another.

"And in some incomprehensible manner I have fallen into this world of yours
out of my own!" said the Angel, "into the world of my dreams, grown real."

He looked about him. "Into the world of my dreams."

"It is confusing," said the Vicar. "It almost makes one think there may be
(ahem) Four Dimensions after all. In which case, of course," he went on
hurriedly—for he loved geometrical speculations and took a certain pride in
his knowledge of them—"there may be any number of three dimensional
universes packed side by side, and all dimly dreaming of one another. There
may be world upon world, universe upon universe. It's perfectly possible.
 14

There's nothing so incredible as the absolutely possible. But I wonder how

you came to fall out of your world into mine...."

"Dear me!" said the Angel; "There's deer and a stag! Just as they draw them
on the coats of arms. How grotesque it all seems! Can I really be awake?"

He rubbed his knuckles into his eyes.

The half-dozen of dappled deer came in Indian file obliquely through the
trees and halted, watching. "It's no dream—I am really a solid concrete
Angel, in Dream Land," said the Angel. He laughed. The Vicar stood
surveying him. The Reverend gentleman was pulling his mouth askew after a
habit he had, and slowly stroking his chin. He was asking himself whether he
too was not in the Land of Dreams.
 15

CHAPTER 7

Now in the land of the Angels, so the Vicar learnt in the course of many
conversations, there is neither pain nor trouble nor death, marrying nor
giving in marriage, birth nor forgetting. Only at times new things begin. It is
a land without hill or dale, a wonderfully level land, glittering with strange
buildings, with incessant sunlight or full moon, and with incessant breezes
blowing through the Æolian traceries of the trees. It is Wonderland, with
glittering seas hanging in the sky, across which strange fleets go sailing,
none know whither. There the flowers glow in Heaven and the stars shine
about one's feet and the breath of life is a delight. The land goes on for
ever—there is no solar system nor interstellar space such as there is in our
universe—and the air goes upward past the sun into the uttermost abyss of
their sky. And there is nothing but Beauty there—all the beauty in our art is
but feeble rendering of faint glimpses of that wonderful world, and our
composers, our original composers, are those who hear, however faintly,
the dust of melody that drives before its winds. And the Angels, and
wonderful monsters of bronze and marble and living fire, go to and fro
therein.

It is a land of Law—for whatever is, is under the law—but its laws all, in
some strange way, differ from ours. Their geometry is different because
their space has a curve in it so that all their planes are cylinders; and their
law of Gravitation is not according to the law of inverse squares, and there
are four-and-twenty primary colours instead of only three. Most of the
fantastic things of our science are commonplaces there, and all our earthly
science would seem to them the maddest dreaming. There are no flowers
upon their plants, for instance, but jets of coloured fire. That, of course, will
seem mere nonsense to you because you do not understand Most of what
the Angel told the Vicar, indeed the Vicar could not realise, because his own
experiences, being only of this world of matter, warred against his
understanding. It was too strange to imagine.
 16

What had jolted these twin universes together so that the Angel had fallen
suddenly into Sidderford, neither the Angel nor the Vicar could tell. Nor for
the matter of that could the author of this story. The author is concerned
with the facts of the case, and has neither the desire nor the confidence to
explain them. Explanations are the fallacy of a scientific age. And the
cardinal fact of the case is this, that out in Siddermorton Park, with the glory
of some wonderful world where there is neither sorrow nor sighing, still
clinging to him, on the 4th of August 1895, stood an Angel, bright and
beautiful, talking to the Vicar of Siddermorton about the plurality of worlds.
The author will swear to the Angel, if need be; and there he draws the line.
 17

CHAPTER 8

"I have," said the Angel, "a most unusual feeling—here. Have had since
sunrise. I don't remember ever having any feeling—here before."

"Not pain, I hope," said the Vicar.

"Oh no! It is quite different from that—a kind of vacuous feeling."

"The atmospheric pressure, perhaps, is a little different," the Vicar began,

feeling his chin.

"And do you know, I have also the most curious sensations in my mouth—
almost as if—it's so absurd!—as if I wanted to stuff things into it."

"Bless me!" said the Vicar. "Of course! You're hungry!"

"Hungry!" said the Angel. "What's that?"

"Don't you eat?"

"Eat! The word's quite new to me."

"Put food into your mouth, you know. One has to here. You will soon learn.
If you don't, you get thin and miserable, and suffer a great deal—pain, you
know—and finally you die."

"Die!" said the Angel. "That's another strange word!"

"It's not strange here. It means leaving off, you know," said the Vicar.

"We never leave off," said the Angel.

"You don't know what may happen to you in this world," said the Vicar,
thinking him over. "Possibly if you are feeling hungry, and can feel pain and
have your wings broken, you may even have to die before you get out of it
again. At anyrate you had better try eating. For my own part—ahem!—there
are many more disagreeable things."
 18

"I suppose I had better Eat," said the Angel. "If it's not too difficult. I don't
like this 'Pain' of yours, and I don't like this 'Hungry.' If your 'Die' is anything
like it, I would prefer to Eat. What a very odd world this is!"

"To Die," said the Vicar, "is generally considered worse than either pain or
hunger.... It depends."

"You must explain all that to me later," said the Angel. "Unless I wake up. At
present, please show me how to eat. If you will. I feel a kind of urgency...."

"Pardon me," said the Vicar, and offered an elbow. "If I may have the
pleasure of entertaining you. My house lies yonder—not a couple of miles
from here."

"Your House!" said the Angel a little puzzled; but he took the Vicar's arm
affectionately, and the two, conversing as they went, waded slowly through
the luxuriant bracken, sun mottled under the trees, and on over the stile in
the park palings, and so across the bee-swarming heather for a mile or
more, down the hillside, home.

You would have been charmed at the couple could you have seen them. The
Angel, slight of figure, scarcely five feet high, and with a beautiful, almost
effeminate face, such as an Italian old Master might have painted. (Indeed,
there is one in the National Gallery [Tobias and the Angel, by some artist
unknown] not at all unlike him so far as face and spirit go.) He was robed
simply in a purple-wrought saffron blouse, bare kneed and bare-footed, with
his wings (broken now, and a leaden grey) folded behind him. The Vicar was
a short, rather stout figure, rubicund, red-haired, clean-shaven, and with
bright ruddy brown eyes. He wore a piebald straw hat with a black ribbon, a
very neat white tie, and a fine gold watch-chain. He was so greatly
interested in his companion that it only occurred to him when he was in
sight of the Vicarage that he had left his gun lying just where he had
dropped it amongst the bracken.

He was rejoiced to hear that the pain of the bandaged wing fell rapidly in
intensity.
 19

CHAPTER 9. PARENTHESIS ON ANGELS

Let us be plain. The Angel of this story is the Angel of Art, not the Angel that
one must be irreverent to touch—neither the Angel of religious feeling nor
the Angel of popular belief. The last we all know. She is alone among the
angelic hosts in being distinctly feminine: she wears a robe of immaculate,
unmitigated white with sleeves, is fair, with long golden tresses, and has
eyes of the blue of Heaven. Just a pure woman she is, pure maiden or pure
matron, in her robe de nuit, and with wings attached to her shoulder blades.
Her callings are domestic and sympathetic, she watches over a cradle or
assists a sister soul heavenward. Often she bears a palm leaf, but one would
not be surprised if one met her carrying a warming-pan softly to some poor
chilly sinner. She it was who came down in a bevy to Marguerite in prison, in
the amended last scene in Faust at the Lyceum, and the interesting and
improving little children that are to die young, have visions of such angels in
the novels of Mrs Henry Wood. This white womanliness with her
indescribable charm of lavender-like holiness, her aroma of clean,
methodical lives, is, it would seem after all, a purely Teutonic invention. Latin
thought knows her not; the old masters have none of her. She is of a piece
with that gentle innocent ladylike school of art whereof the greatest
triumph is "a lump in one's throat," and where wit and passion, scorn and
pomp, have no place. The white angel was made in Germany, in the land of
blonde women and the domestic sentiments. She comes to us cool and
worshipful, pure and tranquil, as silently soothing as the breadth and
calmness of the starlit sky, which also is so unspeakably dear to the Teutonic
soul.... We do her reverence. And to the angels of the Hebrews, those spirits
of power and mystery, to Raphael, Zadkiel, and Michael, of whom only
Watts has caught the shadow, of whom only Blake has seen the splendour,
to them too, do we do reverence.

But this Angel the Vicar shot is, we say, no such angel at all, but the Angel of
Italian art, polychromatic and gay. He comes from the land of beautiful
dreams and not from any holier place. At best he is a popish creature. Bear
 20

patiently, therefore, with his scattered remiges, and be not hasty with your
charge of irreverence before the story is read.
 21

CHAPTER 10. AT THE VICARAGE

The Curate's wife and her two daughters and Mrs Jehoram were still playing
at tennis on the lawn behind the Vicar's study, playing keenly and talking in
gasps about paper patterns for blouses. But the Vicar forgot and came in
that way.

They saw the Vicar's hat above the rhododendrons, and a bare curly head
beside him. "I must ask him about Susan Wiggin," said the Curate's wife. She
was about to serve, and stood with a racket in one hand and a ball between
the fingers of the other. "He really ought to have gone to see her—being
the Vicar. Not George. I——Ah!"

For the two figures suddenly turned the corner and were visible. The Vicar,
arm in arm with——

You see, it came on the Curate's wife suddenly. The Angel's face being
towards her she saw nothing of the wings. Only a face of unearthly beauty
in a halo of chestnut hair, and a graceful figure clothed in a saffron garment
that barely reached the knees. The thought of those knees flashed upon the
Vicar at once. He too was horrorstruck. So were the two girls and Mrs
Jehoram. All horrorstruck. The Angel stared in astonishment at the
horrorstruck group. You see, he had never seen anyone horrorstruck before.

"Mis—ter Hilyer!" said the Curate's wife. "This is too much!" She stood
speechless for a moment. "Oh!"

She swept round upon the rigid girls. "Come!" The Vicar opened and shut his
voiceless mouth. The world hummed and spun about him. There was a
whirling of zephyr skirts, four impassioned faces sweeping towards the
open door of the passage that ran through the vicarage. He felt his position
went with them.

"Mrs Mendham," said the Vicar, stepping forward. "Mrs Mendham. You
don't understand——"

"Oh!" they all said again.

 22

One, two, three, four skirts vanished in the doorway. The Vicar staggered
half way across the lawn and stopped, aghast. "This comes," he heard the
Curate's wife say, out of the depth of the passage, "of having an unmarried
vicar——." The umbrella stand wobbled. The front door of the vicarage
slammed like a minute gun. There was silence for a space.

"I might have thought," he said. "She is always so hasty."

He put his hand to his chin—a habit with him. Then turned his face to his
companion. The Angel was evidently well bred. He was holding up Mrs
Jehoram's sunshade—she had left it on one of the cane chairs—and
examining it with extraordinary interest. He opened it. "What a curious little
mechanism!" he said. "What can it be for?"

The Vicar did not answer. The angelic costume certainly was—the Vicar
knew it was a case for a French phrase—but he could scarcely remember it.
He so rarely used French. It was not de trop, he knew. Anything but de trop.
The Angel was de trop, but certainly not his costume. Ah! Sans culotte!

The Vicar examined his visitor critically—for the first time. "He will be
difficult to explain," he said to himself softly.

The Angel stuck the sunshade into the turf and went to smell the sweet
briar. The sunshine fell upon his brown hair and gave it almost the
appearance of a halo. He pricked his finger. "Odd!" he said. "Pain again."

"Yes," said the Vicar, thinking aloud. "He's very beautiful and curious as he
is. I should like him best so. But I am afraid I must."

He approached the Angel with a nervous cough.

 23

CHAPTER 11

"Those," said the Vicar, "were ladies."

"How grotesque," said the Angel, smiling and smelling the sweet briar. "And
such quaint shapes!"

"Possibly," said the Vicar. "Did you, ahem, notice how they behaved?"

"They went away. Seemed, indeed, to run away. Frightened? I, of course,

was frightened at things without wings. I hope—— they were not
frightened at my wings?"

"At your appearance generally," said the Vicar, glancing involuntarily at the
pink feet.

"Dear me! It never occurred to me. I suppose I seemed as odd to them as

you did to me." He glanced down. "And my feet. You have hoofs like a
hippogriff."

"Boots," corrected the Vicar.

"Boots, you call them! But anyhow, I am sorry I alarmed——"

"You see," said the Vicar, stroking his chin, "our ladies, ahem, have peculiar
views—rather inartistic views—about, ahem, clothing. Dressed as you are, I
am afraid, I am really afraid that—beautiful as your costume certainly is—
you will find yourself somewhat, ahem, somewhat isolated in society. We
have a little proverb, 'When in Rome, ahem, one must do as the Romans do.'
I can assure you that, assuming you are desirous to, ahem, associate with
us—during your involuntary stay——"

The Angel retreated a step or so as the Vicar came nearer and nearer in his
attempt to be diplomatic and confidential. The beautiful face grew
perplexed. "I don't quite understand. Why do you keep making these noises
in your throat? Is it Die or Eat, or any of those...."

"As your host," interrupted the Vicar, and stopped.

 24

"As my host," said the Angel.

"Would you object, pending more permanent arrangements, to invest

yourself, ahem, in a suit, an entirely new suit I may say, like this I have on?"

"Oh!" said the Angel. He retreated so as to take in the Vicar from top to toe.
"Wear clothes like yours!" he said. He was puzzled but amused. His eyes
grew round and bright, his mouth puckered at the corners.

"Delightful!" he said, clapping his hands together. "What a mad, quaint

dream this is! Where are they?" He caught at the neck of the saffron robe.

"Indoors!" said the Vicar. "This way. We will change—indoors!"

 25

CHAPTER 12

So the Angel was invested in a pair of nether garments of the Vicar's, a shirt,
ripped down the back (to accommodate the wings), socks, shoes—the
Vicar's dress shoes—collar, tie, and light overcoat. But putting on the latter
was painful, and reminded the Vicar that the bandaging was temporary. "I
will ring for tea at once, and send Grummet down for Crump," said the Vicar.
"And dinner shall be earlier." While the Vicar shouted his orders on the
landing rails, the Angel surveyed himself in the cheval glass with immense
delight. If he was a stranger to pain, he was evidently no stranger—thanks
perhaps to dreaming—to the pleasure of incongruity.

They had tea in the drawing-room. The Angel sat on the music stool (music
stool because of his wings). At first he wanted to lie on the hearthrug. He
looked much less radiant in the Vicar's clothes, than he had done upon the
moor when dressed in saffron. His face shone still, the colour of his hair and
cheeks was strangely bright, and there was a superhuman light in his eyes,
but his wings under the overcoat gave him the appearance of a hunchback.
The garments, indeed, made quite a terrestrial thing of him, the trousers
were puckered transversely, and the shoes a size or so too large.

He was charmingly affable and quite ignorant of the most elementary facts
of civilization. Eating came without much difficulty, and the Vicar had an
entertaining time teaching him how to take tea. "What a mess it is! What a
dear grotesque ugly world you live in!" said the Angel. "Fancy stuffing things
into your mouth! We use our mouths just to talk and sing with. Our world,
you know, is almost incurably beautiful. We get so very little ugliness, that I
find all this ... delightful."

Mrs Hinijer, the Vicar's housekeeper, looked at the Angel suspiciously when
she brought in the tea. She thought him rather a "queer customer." What
she would have thought had she seen him in saffron no one can tell.

The Angel shuffled about the room with his cup of tea in one hand, and the
bread and butter in the other, and examined the Vicar's furniture. Outside
 26

the French windows, the lawn with its array of dahlias and sunflowers
glowed in the warm sunlight, and Mrs Jehoram's sunshade stood thereon
like a triangle of fire. He thought the Vicar's portrait over the mantel very
curious indeed, could not understand what it was there for. "You have
yourself round," he said, aproposof the portrait, "Why want yourself flat?"
and he was vastly amused at the glass fire screen. He found the oak chairs
odd—"You're not square, are you?" he said, when the Vicar explained their
use. "We never double ourselves up. We lie about on the asphodel when we
want to rest."

"The chair," said the Vicar, "to tell you the truth, has always puzzled me. It
dates, I think, from the days when the floors were cold and very dirty. I
suppose we have kept up the habit. It's become a kind of instinct with us to
sit on chairs. Anyhow, if I went to see one of my parishioners, and suddenly
spread myself out on the floor—the natural way of it—I don't know what
she would do. It would be all over the parish in no time. Yet it seems the
natural method of reposing, to recline. The Greeks and Romans——"

"What is this?" said the Angel abruptly.

"That's a stuffed kingfisher. I killed it."

"Killed it!"

"Shot it," said the Vicar, "with a gun."

"Shot! As you did me?"

"I didn't kill you, you see. Fortunately."

"Is killing making like that?"

"In a way."

"Dear me! And you wanted to make me like that—wanted to put glass eyes
in me and string me up in a glass case full of ugly green and brown stuff?"

"You see," began the Vicar, "I scarcely understood——"

"Is that 'die'?" asked the Angel suddenly.

"That is dead; it died."

 27

"Poor little thing. I must eat a lot. But you say you killed it. Why?"

"You see," said the Vicar, "I take an interest in birds, and I (ahem) collect
them. I wanted the specimen——"

The Angel stared at him for a moment with puzzled eyes. "A beautiful bird
like that!" he said with a shiver. "Because the fancy took you. You wanted
the specimen!"

He thought for a minute. "Do you often kill?" he asked the Vicar.
 28

CHAPTER 13. THE MAN OF SCIENCE

Then Doctor Crump arrived. Grummet had met him not a hundred yards
from the vicarage gate. He was a large, rather heavy-looking man, with a
clean-shaven face and a double chin. He was dressed in a grey morning coat
(he always affected grey), with a chequered black and white tie. "What's the
trouble?" he said, entering and staring without a shadow of surprise at the
Angel's radiant face.

"This—ahem—gentleman," said the Vicar, "or—ah—Angel"—the Angel

bowed—"is suffering from a gunshot wound."

"Gunshot wound!" said Doctor Crump. "In July! May I look at it, Mr—Angel, I
think you said?"

"He will probably be able to assuage your pain," said the Vicar. "Let me
assist you to remove your coat?"

The Angel turned obediently.

"Spinal curvature?" muttered Doctor Crump quite audibly, walking round

behind the Angel. "No! abnormal growth. Hullo! This is odd!" He clutched
the left wing. "Curious," he said. "Reduplication of the anterior limb—bifid
coracoid. Possible, of course, but I've never seen it before." The angel
winced under his hands. "Humerus. Radius and Ulna. All there. Congenital,
of course. Humerus broken. Curious integumentary simulation of feathers.
Dear me. Almost avian. Probably of considerable interest in comparative
anatomy. I never did!——How did this gunshot happen, Mr Angel?"

The Vicar was amazed at the Doctor's matter-of-fact manner.

"Our friend," said the Angel, moving his head at the Vicar.

"Unhappily it is my doing," said the Vicar, stepping forward, explanatory. "I

mistook the gentleman—the Angel (ahem)—for a large bird——"

"Mistook him for a large bird! What next? Your eyes want seeing to," said
Doctor Crump. "I've told you so before." He went on patting and feeling,
 29

keeping time with a series of grunts and inarticulate mutterings.... "But this
is really a very good bit of amateur bandaging," said he. "I think I shall leave
it. Curious malformation this is! Don't you find it inconvenient, Mr Angel?"

He suddenly walked round so as to look in the Angel's face.

The Angel thought he referred to the wound. "It is rather," he said.

"If it wasn't for the bones I should say paint with iodine night and morning.
Nothing like iodine. You could paint your face flat with it. But the osseous
outgrowth, the bones, you know, complicate things. I could saw them off,
of course. It's not a thing one should have done in a hurry——"

"Do you mean my wings?" said the Angel in alarm.

"Wings!" said the Doctor. "Eigh? Call 'em wings! Yes—what else should I
mean?"

"Saw them off!" said the Angel.

"Don't you think so? It's of course your affair. I am only advising——"

"Saw them off! What a funny creature you are!" said the Angel, beginning to
laugh.

"As you will," said the Doctor. He detested people who laughed. "The things
are curious," he said, turning to the Vicar. "If inconvenient"—to the Angel. "I
never heard of such complete reduplication before—at least among
animals. In plants it's common enough. Were you the only one in your
family?" He did not wait for a reply. "Partial cases of the fission of limbs are
not at all uncommon, of course, Vicar—six-fingered children, calves with six
feet, and cats with double toes, you know. May I assist you?" he said,
turning to the Angel who was struggling with the coat. "But such a
complete reduplication, and so avian, too! It would be much less remarkable
if it was simply another pair of arms."

The coat was got on and he and the Angel stared at one another.

"Really," said the Doctor, "one begins to understand how that beautiful
myth of the angels arose. You look a little hectic, Mr Angel—feverish.
Excessive brilliance is almost worse as a symptom than excessive pallor.
 30

Curious your name should be Angel. I must send you a cooling draught, if
you should feel thirsty in the night...."

He made a memorandum on his shirt cuff. The Angel watched him

thoughtfully, with the dawn of a smile in his eyes.

"One minute, Crump," said the Vicar, taking the Doctor's arm and leading
him towards the door.

The Angel's smile grew brighter. He looked down at his black-clad legs. "He
positively thinks I am a man!" said the Angel. "What he makes of the wings
beats me altogether. What a queer creature he must be! This is really a most
extraordinary Dream!"
 31

CHAPTER 14

"That is an Angel," whispered the Vicar. "You don't understand."

"What?" said the Doctor in a quick, sharp voice. His eyebrows went up and
he smiled.

"But the wings?"

"Quite natural, quite ... if a little abnormal."

"Are you sure they are natural?"

"My dear fellow, everything that is, is natural. There is nothing unnatural in
the world. If I thought there was I should give up practice and go into Le
Grand Chartreuse. There are abnormal phenomena, of course. And——"

"But the way I came upon him," said the Vicar.

"Yes, tell me where you picked him up," said the Doctor. He sat down on the
hall table.

The Vicar began rather hesitatingly—he was not very good at story telling—
with the rumours of a strange great bird. He told the story in clumsy
sentences—for, knowing the Bishop as he did, with that awful example
always before him he dreaded getting his pulpit style into his daily
conversation—and at every third sentence or so, the Doctor made a
downward movement of his head—the corners of his mouth tucked away,
so to speak—as though he ticked off the phases of the story and so far
found it just as it ought to be. "Self-hypnotism," he murmured once.

"I beg your pardon?" said the Vicar.

"Nothing," said the Doctor. "Nothing, I assure you. Go on. This is extremely
interesting."

The Vicar told him he went out with his gun.

"After lunch, I think you said?" interrupted the Doctor.

 32

"Immediately after," said the Vicar.

"You should not do such things, you know. But go on, please."

He came to the glimpse of the Angel from the gate.

"In the full glare," said the Doctor, in parenthesis. "It was seventy-nine in the
shade."

When the Vicar had finished, the Doctor pressed his lips together tighter
than ever, smiled faintly, and looked significantly into the Vicar's eyes.

"You don't ..." began the Vicar, falteringly.

The Doctor shook his head. "Forgive me," he said, putting his hand on the
Vicar's arm.

"You go out," he said, "on a hot lunch and on a hot afternoon. Probably over
eighty. Your mind, what there is of it, is whirling with avian expectations. I
say, 'what there is of it,' because most of your nervous energy is down
there, digesting your dinner. A man who has been lying in the bracken
stands up before you and you blaze away. Over he goes—and as it
happens—as it happens—he has reduplicate fore-limbs, one pair being not
unlike wings. It's a coincidence certainly. And as for his iridescent colours
and so forth——. Have you never had patches of colour swim before your
eyes before, on a brilliant sunlight day?... Are you sure they were confined to
the wings? Think."

"But he says he is an Angel!" said the Vicar, staring out of his little round
eyes, his plump hands in his pockets.

"Ah!" said the Doctor with his eye on the Vicar. "I expected as much." He
paused.

"But don't you think ..." began the Vicar.

"That man," said the Doctor in a low, earnest voice, "is a mattoid."

"A what?" said the Vicar.

 33

"A mattoid. An abnormal man. Did you notice the effeminate delicacy of his
face? His tendency to quite unmeaning laughter? His neglected hair? Then
consider his singular dress...."

The Vicar's hand went up to his chin.

"Marks of mental weakness," said the Doctor. "Many of this type of

degenerate show this same disposition to assume some vast mysterious
credentials. One will call himself the Prince of Wales, another the Archangel
Gabriel, another the Deity even. Ibsen thinks he is a Great Teacher, and
Maeterlink a new Shakespeare. I've just been reading all about it—in
Nordau. No doubt his odd deformity gave him an idea...."

"But really," began the Vicar.

"No doubt he's slipped away from confinement."

"I do not altogether accept...."

"You will. If not, there's the police, and failing that, advertisement; but, of
course, his people may want to hush it up. It's a sad thing in a family...."

"He seems so altogether...."

"Probably you'll hear from his friends in a day or so," said the Doctor, feeling
for his watch. "He can't live far from here, I should think. He seems harmless
enough. I must come along and see that wing again to-morrow." He slid off
the hall table and stood up.

"Those old wives' tales still have their hold on you," he said, patting the
Vicar on the shoulder. "But an angel, you know—Ha, ha!"

"I certainly did think...." said the Vicar dubiously.

"Weigh the evidence," said the Doctor, still fumbling at his watch. "Weigh
the evidence with our instruments of precision. What does it leave you?
Splashes of colour, spots of fancy—muscae volantes."

"And yet," said the Vicar, "I could almost swear to the glory on his wings...."

"Think it over," said the Doctor (watch out); "hot afternoon—brilliant

sunshine—boiling down on your head.... But really I must be going. It is a
 34

quarter to five. I'll see your—angel (ha, ha!) to-morrow again, if no one has
been to fetch him in the meanwhile. Your bandaging was really very good. I
flatter myself on that score. Our ambulance classes were a success you
see.... Good afternoon."
 35

CHAPTER 15. THE CURATE

The Vicar opened the door half mechanically to let out Crump, and saw
Mendham, his curate, coming up the pathway by the hedge of purple vetch
and meadowsweet. At that his hand went up to his chin and his eyes grew
perplexed. Suppose he was deceived. The Doctor passed the Curate with a
sweep of his hand from his hat brim. Crump was an extraordinarily clever
fellow, the Vicar thought, and knew far more of anyone's brain than one did
oneself. The Vicar felt that so acutely. It made the coming explanation
difficult. Suppose he were to go back into the drawing-room, and find just a
tramp asleep on the hearthrug.

Mendham was a cadaverous man with a magnificent beard. He looked,

indeed, as though he had run to beard as a mustard plant does to seed. But
when he spoke you found he had a voice as well.

"My wife came home in a dreadful state," he brayed out at long range.

"Come in," said the Vicar; "come in. Most remarkable occurrence. Please
come in. Come into the study. I'm really dreadfully sorry. But when I
explain...."

"And apologise, I hope," brayed the Curate.

"And apologise. No, not that way. This way. The study."

"Now what was that woman?" said the Curate, turning on the Vicar as the
latter closed the study door.

"What woman?"

"Pah!"

"But really!"

"The painted creature in light attire—disgustingly light attire, to speak

freely—with whom you were promenading the garden."

"My dear Mendham—that was an Angel!"

 36

"A v e r y p r e t t y Angel?"

"The world is getting so matter-of-fact," said the Vicar.

"The world," roared the Curate, "grows blacker every day. But to find a man
in your position, shamelessly, openly...."

"Bother!" said the Vicar aside. He rarely swore. "Look here, Mendham, you
really misunderstand. I can assure you...."

"Very well," said the Curate. "Explain!" He stood with his lank legs apart, his
arms folded, scowling at his Vicar over his big beard.

(Explanations, I repeat, I have always considered the peculiar fallacy of this

scientific age.)

The Vicar looked about him helplessly. The world had all gone dull and dead.
Had he been dreaming all the afternoon? Was there really an angel in the
drawing-room? Or was he the sport of a complicated hallucination?

"Well?" said Mendham, at the end of a minute.

The Vicar's hand fluttered about his chin. "It's such a round-about story," he
said.

"No doubt it will be," said Mendham harshly.

The Vicar restrained a movement of impatience.

"I went out to look for a strange bird this afternoon.... Do you believe in
angels, Mendham, real angels?"

"I'm not here to discuss theology. I am the husband of an insulted woman."

"But I tell you it's not a figure of speech; this is an angel, a real angel with
wings. He's in the next room now. You do misunderstand me, so...."

"Really, Hilyer—"

"It is true I tell you, Mendham. I swear it is true." The Vicar's voice grew
impassioned. "What sin I have done that I should entertain and clothe
angelic visitants, I don't know. I only know that—inconvenient as it
undoubtedly will be—I have an angel now in the drawing-room, wearing my
 37

new suit and finishing his tea. And he's stopping with me, indefinitely, at my
invitation. No doubt it was rash of me. But I can't turn him out, you know,
because Mrs Mendham——I may be a weakling, but I am still a gentleman."

"Really, Hilyer—"

"I can assure you it is true." There was a note of hysterical desperation in the
Vicar's voice. "I fired at him, taking him for a flamingo, and hit him in the
wing."

"I thought this was a case for the Bishop. I find it is a case for the Lunacy
Commissioners."

"Come and see him, Mendham!"

"But there are no angels."

"We teach the people differently," said the Vicar.

"Not as material bodies," said the Curate.

"Anyhow, come and see him."

"I don't want to see your hallucinations," began the Curate.

"I can't explain anything unless you come and see him," said the Vicar. "A
man who's more like an angel than anything else in heaven or earth. You
simply must see if you wish to understand."

"I don't wish to understand," said the Curate. "I don't wish to lend myself to
any imposture. Surely, Hilyer, if this is not an imposition, you can tell me
yourself.... Flamingo, indeed!"
 38

CHAPTER 16

The Angel had finished his tea and was standing looking pensively out of the
window. He thought the old church down the valley lit by the light of the
setting sun was very beautiful, but he could not understand the serried
ranks of tombstones that lay up the hillside beyond. He turned as Mendham
and the Vicar came in.

Now Mendham could bully his Vicar cheerfully enough, just as he could bully
his congregation; but he was not the sort of man to bully a stranger. He
looked at the Angel, and the "strange woman" theory was disposed of. The
Angel's beauty was too clearly the beauty of the youth.

"Mr Hilyer tells me," Mendham began, in an almost apologetic tone, "that
you—ah—it's so curious—claim to be an Angel."

"Are an Angel," said the Vicar.

The Angel bowed.

"Naturally," said Mendham, "we are curious."

"Very," said the Angel. "The blackness and the shape."

"I beg your pardon?" said Mendham.

"The blackness and the flaps," repeated the Angel; "and no wings."

"Precisely," said Mendham, who was altogether at a loss. "We are, of

course, curious to know something of how you came into the village in such
a peculiar costume."

The Angel looked at the Vicar. The Vicar touched his chin.

"You see," began the Vicar.

"Let him explain," said Mendham; "I beg."

"I wanted to suggest," began the Vicar.

 39

"And I don't want you to suggest."

"Bother!" said the Vicar.

The Angel looked from one to the other. "Such rugose expressions flit
across your faces!" he said.

"You see, Mr—Mr—I don't know your name," said Mendham, with a certain
diminution of suavity. "The case stands thus: My wife—four ladies, I might
say—are playing lawn tennis, when you suddenly rush out on them, sir; you
rush out on them from among the rhododendra in a very defective costume.
You and Mr Hilyer."

"But I—" said the Vicar.

"I know. It was this gentleman's costume was defective. Naturally—it is my

place in fact—to demand an explanation." His voice was growing in volume.
"And I must demand an explanation."

The Angel smiled faintly at his note of anger and his sudden attitude of
determination—arms tightly folded.

"I am rather new to the world," the Angel began.

"Nineteen at least," said Mendham. "Old enough to know better. That's a

poor excuse."

"May I ask one question first?" said the Angel.

"Well?"

"Do you think I am a Man—like yourself? As the chequered man did."

"If you are not a man—"

"One other question. Have you never heard of an Angel?"

"I warn you not to try that story upon me," said Mendham, now back at his
familiar crescendo.

The Vicar interrupted: "But Mendham—he has wings!"

"Please let me talk to him," said Mendham.

 40

"You are so quaint," said the Angel; "you interrupt everything I have to say."

"But what have you to say?" said Mendham.

"That I really am an Angel...."

"Pshaw!"

"There you go!"

"But tell me, honestly, how you came to be in the shrubbery of

Siddermorton Vicarage—in the state in which you were. And in the Vicar's
company. Cannot you abandon this ridiculous story of yours?..."

The Angel shrugged his wings. "What is the matter with this man?" he said
to the Vicar.

"My dear Mendham," said the Vicar, "a few words from me...."

"Surely my question is straightforward enough!"

"But you won't tell me the answer you want, and it's no good my telling you
any other."

"Pshaw!" said the Curate again. And then turning suddenly on the Vicar,
"Where does he come from?"

The Vicar was in a dreadful state of doubt by this time.

"He says he is an Angel!" said the Vicar. "Why don't you listen to him?"

"No angel would alarm four ladies...."

"Is that what it is all about?" said the Angel.

"Enough cause too, I should think!" said the Curate.

"But I really did not know," said the Angel.

"This is altogether too much!"

"I am sincerely sorry I alarmed these ladies."

 41

"You ought to be. But I see I shall get nothing out of you two." Mendham
went towards the door. "I am convinced there is something discreditable at
the bottom of this business. Or why not tell a simple straightforward story? I
will confess you puzzle me. Why, in this enlightened age, you should tell this
fantastic, this far-fetched story of an Angel, altogether beats me. What
good can it do?..."

"But stop and look at his wings!" said the Vicar. "I can assure you he has
wings!"

Mendham had his fingers on the door-handle. "I have seen quite enough,"
he said. "It may be this is simply a foolish attempt at a hoax, Hilyer."

"But Mendham!" said the Vicar.

The Curate halted in the doorway and looked at the Vicar over his shoulder.
The accumulating judgment of months found vent. "I cannot understand,
Hilyer, why you are in the Church. For the life of me I cannot. The air is full of
Social Movements, of Economic change, the Woman Movement, Rational
Dress, The Reunion of Christendom, Socialism, Individualism—all the great
and moving Questions of the Hour! Surely, we who follow the Great
Reformer.... And here you are stuffing birds, and startling ladies with your
callous disregard...."

"But Mendham," began the Vicar.

The Curate would not hear him. "You shame the Apostles with your levity....
But this is only a preliminary enquiry," he said, with a threatening note in his
sonorous voice, and so vanished abruptly (with a violent slam) from the
room.
 42

CHAPTER 17

"Are all men so odd as this?" said the Angel.

"I'm in such a difficult position," said the Vicar. "You see," he said, and
stopped, searching his chin for an idea.

"I'm beginning to see," said the Angel.

"They won't believe it."

"I see that."

"They will think I tell lies."

"And?"

"That will be extremely painful to me."

"Painful!... Pain," said the Angel. "I hope not."

The Vicar shook his head. The good report of the village had been the breath
of his life, so far. "You see," he said, "it would look so much more plausible if
you said you were just a man."

"But I'm not," said the Angel.

"No, you're not," said the Vicar. "So that's no good."

"Nobody here, you know, has ever seen an Angel, or heard of one—except
in church. If you had made your debut in the chancel—on Sunday—it might
have been different. But that's too late now.... (Bother!) Nobody, absolutely
nobody, will believe in you."

"I hope I am not inconveniencing you?"

"Not at all," said the Vicar; "not at all. Only——. Naturally it may be
inconvenient if you tell a too incredible story. If I might suggest (ahem)——
."

"Well?"
 43

"You see, people in the world, being men themselves, will almost certainly
regard you as a man. If you say you are not, they will simply say you do not
tell the truth. Only exceptional people appreciate the exceptional. When in
Rome one must—well, respect Roman prejudices a little—talk Latin. You
will find it better——"

"You propose I should feign to become a man?"

"You have my meaning at once."

The Angel stared at the Vicar's hollyhocks and thought.

"Possibly, after all," he said slowly, "I shall become a man. I may have been
too hasty in saying I was not. You say there are no angels in this world. Who
am I to set myself up against your experience? A mere thing of a day—so far
as this world goes. If you say there are no angels—clearly I must be
something else. I eat—angels do not eat. I may be a man already."

"A convenient view, at any rate," said the Vicar.

"If it is convenient to you——"

"It is. And then to account for your presence here."

"If," said the Vicar, after a hesitating moment of reflection, "if, for instance,
you had been an ordinary man with a weakness for wading, and you had
gone wading in the Sidder, and your clothes had been stolen, for instance,
and I had come upon you in that position of inconvenience; the explanation I
shall have to make to Mrs Mendham——would be shorn at least of the
supernatural element. There is such a feeling against the supernatural
element nowadays—even in the pulpit. You would hardly believe——"

"It's a pity that was not the case," said the Angel.

"Of course," said the Vicar. "It is a great pity that was not the case. But at
anyrate you will oblige me if you do not obtrude your angelic nature. You
will oblige everyone, in fact. There is a settled opinion that angels do not do
this kind of thing. And nothing is more painful—as I can testify—than a
decaying settled opinion.... Settled opinions are mental teeth in more ways
than one. For my own part,"—the Vicar's hand passed over his eyes for a
 44

moment—"I cannot but believe you are an angel.... Surely I can believe my
own eyes."

"We always do ours," said the Angel.

"And so do we, within limits."

Then the clock upon the mantel chimed seven, and almost simultaneously
Mrs Hinijer announced dinner.
 45

CHAPTER 18. AFTER DINNER

The Angel and the Vicar sat at dinner. The Vicar, with his napkin tucked in at
his neck, watched the Angel struggling with his soup. "You will soon get into
the way of it," said the Vicar. The knife and fork business was done
awkwardly but with effect. The Angel looked furtively at Delia, the little
waiting maid. When presently they sat cracking nuts—which the Angel
found congenial enough—and the girl had gone, the Angel asked: "Was that
a lady, too?"

"Well," said the Vicar (crack). "No—she is not a lady. She is a servant."

"Yes," said the Angel; "she had rather a nicer shape."

"You mustn't tell Mrs Mendham that," said the Vicar, covertly satisfied.

"She didn't stick out so much at the shoulders and hips, and there was more
of her in between. And the colour of her robes was not discordant—simply
neutral. And her face——"

"Mrs Mendham and her daughters had been playing tennis," said the Vicar,
feeling he ought not to listen to detraction even of his mortal enemy. "Do
you like these things—these nuts?"

"Very much," said the Angel. Crack.

"You see," said the Vicar (Chum, chum, chum). "For my own part I entirely
believe you are an angel."

"Yes!" said the Angel.

"I shot you—I saw you flutter. It's beyond dispute. In my own mind. I admit
it's curious and against my preconceptions, but—practically—I'm assured,
perfectly assured in fact, that I saw what I certainly did see. But after the
behaviour of these people. (Crack). I really don't see how we are to
persuade people. Nowadays people are so very particular about evidence.
So that I think there is a great deal to be said for the attitude you assume.
Temporarily at least I think it would be best of you to do as you propose to
 46

do, and behave as a man as far as possible. Of course there is no knowing

how or when you may go back. After what has happened
(Gluck, gluck, gluck—as the Vicar refills his glass)—after what has happened
I should not be surprised to see the side of the room fall away, and the hosts
of heaven appear to take you away again—take us both away even. You
have so far enlarged my imagination. All these years I have been forgetting
Wonderland. But still——. It will certainly be wiser to break the thing gently
to them."

"This life of yours," said the Angel. "I'm still in the dark about it. How do you
begin?"

"Dear me!" said the Vicar. "Fancy having to explain that! We begin existence
here, you know, as babies, silly pink helpless things wrapped in white, with
goggling eyes, that yelp dismally at the Font. Then these babies grow larger
and become even beautiful—when their faces are washed. And they
continue to grow to a certain size. They become children, boys and girls,
youths and maidens (Crack), young men and young women. That is the
finest time in life, according to many—certainly the most beautiful. Full of
great hopes and dreams, vague emotions and unexpected dangers."

"That was a maiden?" said the Angel, indicating the door through which
Delia had disappeared.

"Yes," said the Vicar, "that was a maiden." And paused thoughtfully.

"And then?"

"Then," said the Vicar, "the glamour fades and life begins in earnest. The
young men and young women pair off—most of them. They come to me shy
and bashful, in smart ugly dresses, and I marry them. And then little pink
babies come to them, and some of the youths and maidens that were, grow
fat and vulgar, and some grow thin and shrewish, and their pretty
complexions go, and they get a queer delusion of superiority over the
younger people, and all the delight and glory goes out of their lives. So they
call the delight and glory of the younger ones, Illusion. And then they begin
to drop to pieces."

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

 47

"Their hair comes off and gets dull coloured or ashen grey," said the Vicar.
"I, for instance." He bowed his head forward to show a circular shining
patch the size of a florin. "And their teeth come out. Their faces collapse and
become as wrinkled and dry as a shrivelled apple. 'Corrugated' you called
mine. They care more and more for what they have to eat and to drink, and
less and less for any of the other delights of life. Their limbs get loose in the
joints, and their hearts slack, or little 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 do not
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 have
a Legend—perhaps it is not a legend. One may be a churchman and
disbelieve. Stokes says there is nothing in it...." The Vicar shook his head 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 too poor to be
radiant, and with a timid heart. I studied hard and pored over the dying
thoughts of men long dead. So I lost the glory, and no maiden came to me,
and the dulness of life began too soon."
 48

"And you have your little pink babies?"

"None," said the Vicar with a scarce perceptible pause. "Yet all the same, as
you see, I am beginning to drop to pieces. Presently my back will droop like
a wilting flowerstalk. And then, in a few thousand days more 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 very
disagreeable things in this world called Cold and Rain. And the other people
here—how and why is too long a story—have made me a kind of chorus to
their lives. They bring their little pink babies to me and I have to say a name
and some other things over each new pink baby. And when the children
have grown to be youths and maidens, they come again and are confirmed.
You will understand that better later. Then before they may join in couples
and have pink babies of their own, they must come again and hear me read
out of a book. They would be outcast, and no other maiden would speak to
the maiden who had a little pink baby without I had read over her for twenty
minutes out of my book. It's a necessary thing, as you will see. Odd as it may
seem to you. And afterwards when they are falling to pieces, I try and
persuade them of a strange world in which I scarcely believe myself, where
life is altogether different from what they have had—or desire. And in the
end, I bury them, and read out of my book to those who will presently
follow into the unknown land. I stand at the beginning, and at the zenith,
and at the setting of their lives. And on every seventh day, I who am a man
myself, I who see no further than they do, talk to them of the Life to
Come—the life of which we know nothing. If such a life there 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 it
strange to me is new. I had taken it as a matter of course until you came into
my life."

"This life of ours is so insistent," said the Vicar. "It, and its petty needs, its
temporary pleasures (Crack) swathe our souls about. While I am preaching
 49

to these people of mine of another life, some are ministering to one

appetite and eating sweets, others—the old men—are slumbering, the
youths glance at the maidens, the grown men protrude white waistcoats
and gold chains, pomp and vanity on a substratum of carnal substance, their
wives flaunt garish bonnets at one another. And I go on droning away of the
things unseen and unrealised—'Eye hath not seen,' I read, 'nor ear heard,
nor hath it entered into the imagination of man to conceive,' and I look up
to catch an adult male immortal admiring the fit of a pair of three and
sixpenny gloves. It is damping year after year. When I was ailing in my youth
I felt almost the assurance of vision that beneath this temporary phantasm
world was the real world—the enduring world of the Life Everlasting. But
now——"

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

"I have changed and developed very much. The battle of the Flesh and Spirit
does not trouble me as it did. Every day I feel less confidence in 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 of mathematical trifling. My times are
in His hands——"

The Vicar sighed and became pensive. The Angel watched him, and the
Angel's eyes were troubled with the puzzle of him. "Gluck, gluck, gluck,"
went the decanter as the Vicar refilled his glass.
 50

CHAPTER 19

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

"Yah——oh!" said the Angel suddenly. "Dear me! A higher power seemed
suddenly to stretch my mouth open and a great breath of air went rushing
down my throat."

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

"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. (The
Angels, it seems sleep only in order to dream, and dream, like primitive man,
with their foreheads on their knees. And they sleep among the white poppy
meadows in the heat of the day.) The Angel found the bedroom
arrangements quaint enough.

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

"He's very beautiful," said the Vicar, descending the staircase, quite tired
out; "and he's a real angel no doubt. But I am afraid he will be a dreadful
anxiety, all the same, before he gets into our earthly way with things."
 51

He seemed quite worried. He helped himself to an extra glass of sherry

before he put away the wine in the cellaret.
 52

CHAPTER 20

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

"I never heard a more fantastic story," said Mrs Mendham from the basket
chair. "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 in it."

"Precisely, my dear."

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

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

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

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

"But why should he be about the shrubbery ... in that dreadful costume?"

"I don't know. The Vicar gave me no explanation. He simply said, 'Mendham,
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 on his
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——"
 53

"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 is staying
at the Vicarage?"

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

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

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

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

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

"It's the only way of explaining it in a sensible way," said Mrs Mendham.
[Pause.]

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

"That is perfectly true."

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

 54

Mendham coughed. "No, I shan't write to the Bishop," said Mendham. "I
think 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 the Bishop, you
know. And you must remember, my dear——"

"That Hilyer can dismiss you, you were going to say. My dear, the man's
much 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 end to end. I do
not know what would become of the poor if it was not for me. They'd have
free quarters in the Vicarage to-morrow. There is that Goody Ansell——"

"I know, my dear," said the Curate, turning away and proceeding with his
undressing. "You were telling me about her only this afternoon."
 55

CHAPTER 21

And thus in the little bedroom over the gable we reach a first resting place in
this story. And as we have been hard at it, getting our story spread 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 blaze
of light "not uniform but broken all over by curving flashes like the waving
of swords," and the sound of a mighty harping, and the advent of an 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 the Angel
made for all practical purposes a man, under a suspicion of being either a
lunatic or an impostor. You have heard too, or at least been able to judge,
what the Vicar and the Doctor and the Curate's wife thought of the
strange arrival. And further remarkable opinions are to follow.

The afterglow of the summer sunset in the north-west darkens into night
and the Angel sleeps, dreaming himself back in the wonderful world where
it is always light, and everyone is happy, where fire does not burn and ice
does not chill; where rivulets of starlight go streaming through the
amaranthine meadows, out to the seas of Peace. He dreams, and it seems to
him that once more his wings glow with a thousand colours and flash
through 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 the evening's talk
has opened strange vistas in his mind, and he is stimulated by a sense as of
something seen darkly by the indistinct vision of a hitherto unsuspected
wonderland lying about his world. For twenty years now he has held his
village living and lived his daily life, protected by his familiar creed, by the
clamour of the details of life, from any mystical dreaming. But now
interweaving with the familiar bother of his persecuting neighbour, is an
altogether unfamiliar sense of strange new things.
 56

There was something ominous in the feeling. Once, indeed, it rose above all
other considerations, and in a kind of terror he blundered out of bed,
bruised his shins very convincingly, found the matches at last, and lit a
candle to assure himself of the reality of his own customary world again. But
on the whole the more tangible trouble was the Mendham avalanche. Her
tongue seemed to be hanging above him like the sword of Damocles. What
might she not say of this business, before her indignant imagination came to
rest?

And while the successful captor of the Strange Bird was sleeping thus
uneasily, Gully of Sidderton was carefully unloading his gun after a
wearisome blank day, and Sandy Bright was on his knees in prayer, with the
window carefully fastened. Annie Durgan was sleeping hard with her mouth
open, and Amory's mother was dreaming of washing, and both of them had
long since exhausted the topics of the Sound and the Glare. Lumpy Durgan
was sitting up in his bed, now crooning the fragment of a tune and now
listening intently for a sound he had heard once and longed to hear again.
As for the solicitor's clerk at Iping Hanger, he was trying to write poetry
about a confectioner's girl at Portburdock, and the Strange Bird was quite
out of his head. But the ploughman who had seen it on the confines of
Siddermorton Park had a black eye. That had been one of the more tangible
consequences of a little argument about birds' legs in the "Ship." It is
worthy of this passing mention, since it is probably the only known instance
of an Angel causing anything of the kind.
 57

CHAPTER 22. MORNING

The Vicar going to call the Angel, found him dressed and leaning out of his
window. It was a glorious morning, still dewy, and the rising sunlight
slanting round the corner of the house, struck warm and yellow upon the
hillside. The birds were astir in the hedges and shrubbery. Up the hillside—
for it was late in August—a plough drove slowly. The Angel's chin rested
upon his hands and he did not turn as the Vicar came up 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, you know. 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 division of
labour in this world. Exchange is no robbery."

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

"What do you do for him?"

 58

"That seems an easy question to you," said the Vicar, "but really!—it's
difficult. Our social arrangements are rather complicated. It's impossible to
explain these things all at once, before breakfast. Don't you feel hungry?"

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

"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 complicated

organisation."

"Yes?"

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

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

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

"I'm puzzled," said the Angel.

"The drink I'm sending you is called coffee," said the Vicar. "I daresay you
are. When I was a young man I was puzzled in the same way. But afterwards
comes a Broader View of Things. (These black things are called mushrooms;
they look beautiful.) Other Considerations. All men are brothers, of course,
but some are younger brothers, so to speak. There is work that requires
culture and refinement, and work in which culture and refinement would be
an impediment. And the rights of property must not be forgotten. One must
render unto Cæsar.... Do you know, instead of explaining this matter now
(this is yours), I think I will lend you a little book to read
(chum, chum, chum—these mushrooms are well up to their appearance),
which sets the whole thing out very clearly."
 59

CHAPTER 23. THE VIOLIN

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

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

"You play?" said the Vicar.

The Angel had the bow in his hand, and by way of answer drove it across the
strings. The quality of the note made the Vicar turn suddenly.

The Angel's hand tightened on the instrument. The bow flew back and
flickered, and an air the Vicar had never heard before danced in his ears. The
Angel shifted the fiddle under his dainty chin and went on playing, and as he
played his eyes grew bright and his lips smiled. At first he looked at the
Vicar, then his expression became abstracted. He seemed no longer to look
at the Vicar, but through him, at something beyond, something in his
memory or his imagination, something infinitely remote, undreamt of
hitherto....

The Vicar tried to follow the music. The air reminded him of a flame, it
rushed up, shone, flickered and danced, passed and reappeared. No!—it did
not reappear! Another air—like it and unlike it, shot up after it, wavered,
vanished. Then another, the same and not the same. It reminded him of the
flaring tongues that palpitate and change above a newly lit fire. There are
two airs—or motifs, which is it?—thought the Vicar. He knew remarkably
little of musical technique. They go dancing up, one pursuing the other, out
of the fire of the incantation, pursuing, fluctuating, turning, up into the sky.
There below was the fire burning, a flame without fuel upon a level space,
and there two flirting butterflies of sound, dancing away from it, up, one
over another, swift, abrupt, uncertain.
 60

"Flirting butterflies were they!" What was the Vicar thinking of? Where was
he? In the little room next to his study, of course! And the Angel standing in
front of him smiling into his face, playing the violin, and looking through him
as though he was only a window——. That motif again, a yellow flare,
spread fanlike by a gust, and now one, then with a swift eddying upward
flight the other, the two things of fire and light pursuing one another again
up into that clear immensity.

The study and the realities of life suddenly faded out of the Vicar's eyes,
grew thinner and thinner like a mist that dissolves into air, and he and the
Angel stood together on a pinnacle of wrought music, about which
glittering melodies circled, and vanished, and reappeared. He was in the land
of Beauty, and once more the glory of heaven was upon the Angel's face,
and the glowing delights of colour pulsated in his wings. Himself the Vicar
could not see. But I cannot tell you of the vision of that great and spacious
land, of its incredible openness, and height, and nobility. For there is no
space there like ours, no time as we know it; one must needs speak by
bungling metaphors and own in bitterness after all that one has failed. And
it was only a vision. The wonderful creatures flying through the æther saw
them not as they stood there, flew through them as one might pass through
a whisp of mist. The Vicar lost all sense of duration, all sense of necessity—
—

"Ah!" said the Angel, suddenly putting down the fiddle.

The Vicar had forgotten the book on Political Economy, had forgotten
everything until the Angel had done. For a minute he sat quite still. Then he
woke up with a start. He was sitting on the old iron-bound chest.

"Really," he said slowly, "you are very clever."

He looked about him in a puzzled way. "I had a kind of vision while you were
playing. I seemed to see——. What did I see? It has gone."

He stood up with a dazzled expression upon his face. "I shall never play the
violin again," he said. "I wish you would take it to your room—and keep it—
—. And play to me again. I did not know anything of music until I heard you
play. I do not feel as though I had ever heard any music before."
 61

He stared at the Angel, then about him at the room. "I have never felt
anything of this kind with music before," he said. He shook his head. "I shall
never play again."
 62

CHAPTER 24. THE ANGEL EXPLORES THE VILLAGE

Very unwisely, as I think, the Vicar allowed the Angel to go down into the
village by himself, to enlarge his ideas of humanity. Unwisely, because how
was he to imagine the reception the Angel would receive? Not
thoughtlessly, I am afraid. He had always carried himself with decorum in
the village, and the idea of a slow procession through the little street with all
the inevitable curious remarks, explanations, pointings, was too much for
him. The Angel might do the strangest things, the village was certain to
think them. Peering faces. "Who's he got now?" Besides, was it not his duty
to prepare his sermon in good time? The Angel, duly directed, went down
cheerfully by himself—still innocent of most of the peculiarities of the
human as distinguished from the angelic turn of mind.

The Angel walked slowly, his white hands folded behind his hunched back,
his sweet face looking this way and that. He peered curiously into the eyes
of the people he met. A little child picking a bunch of vetch and honeysuckle
looked in his face, and forthwith came and put them in his hand. It was
about the only kindness he had from a human being (saving only the Vicar
and one other). He heard Mother Gustick scolding that granddaughter of
hers as he passed the door. "You Brazen Faggit—you!" said Mother Gustick.
"You Trumpery Baggage!"

The Angel stopped, startled at the strange sounds of Mother Gustick's

voice. "Put yer best clo'es on, and yer feather in yer 'at, and off you goes to
meet en, fal lal, and me at 'ome slaving for ye. 'Tis a Fancy Lady you'll be
wantin' to be, my gal, a walkin' Touch and Go, with yer idleness and finery—
—"

The voice ceased abruptly, and a great peace came upon the battered air.
"Most grotesque and strange!" said the Angel, still surveying this wonderful
box of discords. "Walking Touch and Go!" He did not know that Mrs Gustick
had suddenly become aware of his existence, and was scrutinizing his
appearance through the window-blind. Abruptly the door flew open, and
she stared out into the Angel's face. A strange apparition, grey and dusty
 63

hair, and the dirty pink dress unhooked to show the stringy throat, a
discoloured gargoyle, presently to begin spouting incomprehensible abuse.

"Now, then, Mister," began Mrs Gustick. "Have ye nothin' better to do than
listen at people's doors for what you can pick up?"

The Angel stared at her in astonishment.

"D'year!" said Mrs Gustick, evidently very angry indeed. "Listenin'."

"Have you any objection to my hearing...."

"Object to my hearing! Course I have! Whad yer think? You aint such a
Ninny...."

"But if ye didn't want me to hear, why did you cry out so loud? I thought...."

"You thought! Softie—that's what you are! You silly girt staring Gaby, what
don't know any better than to come holding yer girt mouth wide open for all
that you can catch holt on? And then off up there to tell! You great Fat-
Faced, Tale-Bearin' Silly-Billy! I'd be ashamed to come poking and peering
round quiet people's houses...."

The Angel was surprised to find that some inexplicable quality in her voice
excited the most disagreeable sensations in him and a strong desire to
withdraw. But, resisting this, he stood listening politely (as the custom is in
the Angelic Land, so long as anyone is speaking). The entire eruption was
beyond his comprehension. He could not perceive any reason for the
sudden projection of this vituperative head, out of infinity, so to speak. And
questions without a break for an answer were outside his experience
altogether.

Mrs Gustick proceeded with her characteristic fluency, assured him he was
no gentleman, enquired if he called himself one, remarked that every tramp
did as much nowadays, compared him to a Stuck Pig, marvelled at his
impudence, asked him if he wasn't ashamed of himself standing there,
enquired if he was rooted to the ground, was curious to be told what he
meant by it, wanted to know whether he robbed a scarecrow for his clothes,
suggested that an abnormal vanity prompted his behaviour, enquired if his
 64

mother knew he was out, and finally remarking, "I got somethin'll move you,
my gentleman," disappeared with a ferocious slamming of the door.

The interval struck the Angel as singularly peaceful. His whirling mind had
time to analyse his sensations. He ceased bowing and smiling, and stood
merely astonished.

"This is a curious painful feeling," said the Angel. "Almost worse than
Hungry, and quite different. When one is hungry one wants to eat. I suppose
she was a woman. Here one wants to get away. I suppose I might just as
well go."

He turned slowly and went down the road meditating. He heard the cottage
door re-open, and turning his head, saw through intervening scarlet runners
Mrs Gustick with a steaming saucepan full of boiling cabbage water in her
hand.

"'Tis well you went, Mister Stolen Breeches," came the voice of Mrs Gustick
floating down through the vermilion blossoms. "Don't you come peeping
and prying round this yer cottage again or I'll learn ye manners, I will!"

The Angel stood in a state of considerable perplexity. He had no desire to

come within earshot of the cottage again—ever. He did not understand the
precise import of the black pot, but his general impression was entirely
disagreeable. There was no explaining it.

"I mean it!" said Mrs Gustick, crescendo. "Drat it!—I mean it."

The Angel turned and went on, a dazzled look in his eyes.

"She was very grotesque!" said the Angel. "Very. Much more than the little
man in black. And she means it.—— But what she means I don't know!..."
He became silent. "I suppose they all mean something,", he said, presently,
still perplexed.
 65

CHAPTER 25

Then the Angel came in sight of the forge, where Sandy Bright's brother was
shoeing a horse for the carter from Upmorton. Two hobbledehoys were
standing by the forge staring in a bovine way at the proceedings. As the
Angel approached these two and then the carter turned slowly through an
angle of thirty degrees and watched his approach, staring quietly and
steadily at him. The expression on their faces was one of abstract interest.

The Angel became self-conscious for the first time in his life. He drew nearer,
trying to maintain an amiable expression on his face, an expression that
beat in vain against their granitic stare. His hands were behind him. He
smiled pleasantly, looking curiously at the (to him) incomprehensible
employment of the smith. But the battery of eyes seemed to angle for his
regard. Trying to meet the three pairs at once, the Angel lost his alertness
and stumbled over a stone. One of the yokels gave a sarcastic cough, and
was immediately covered with confusion at the Angel's enquiring gaze,
nudging his companion with his elbow to cover his disorder. None spoke,
and the Angel did not speak.

So soon as the Angel had passed, one of the three hummed this tune in an
aggressive tone.

Then all three of them laughed. One tried to sing something and found his
throat contained phlegm. The Angel proceeded on his way.

"Who's e then?" said the second hobbledehoy.

 66

"Ping, ping, ping," went the blacksmith's hammer.

"Spose he's one of these here foweners," said the carter from Upmorton.
"Däamned silly fool he do look to be sure."

"Tas the way with them foweners," said the first hobbledehoy sagely.

"Got something very like the 'ump," said the carter from Upmorton. "Dää-ä-
ämned if 'E ent."

Then the silence healed again, and they resumed their quiet expressionless
consideration of the Angel's retreating figure.

"Very like the 'ump et is," said the carter after an enormous pause.
 67

CHAPTER 26

The Angel went on through the village, finding it all wonderful enough.
"They begin, and just a little while and then they end," he said to himself in a
puzzled voice. "But what are they doing meanwhile?" Once he heard some
invisible mouth chant inaudible words to the tune the man at the forge had
hummed.

"That's the poor creature the Vicar shot with that great gun of his," said
Sarah Glue (of 1, Church Cottages) peering over the blind.

"He looks Frenchified," said Susan Hopper, peering through the interstices
of that convenient veil on curiosity.

"He has sweet eyes," said Sarah Glue, who had met them for a moment.

The Angel sauntered on. The postman passed him and touched his hat to
him; further down was a dog asleep in the sun. He went on and saw
Mendham, who nodded distantly and hurried past. (The Curate did not care
to be seen talking to an angel in the village, until more was known about
him). There came from one of the houses the sound of a child screaming in a
passion, that brought a puzzled look to the angelic face. Then the Angel
reached the bridge below the last of the houses, and stood leaning over the
parapet watching the glittering little cascade from the mill.

"They begin, and just a little while, and then they end," said the weir from
the mill. The water raced under the bridge, green and dark, and streaked
with foam.

Beyond the mill rose the square tower of the church, with the churchyard
behind it, a spray of tombstones and wooden headboards splashed up the
hillside. A half dozen of beech trees framed the picture.

Then the Angel heard a shuffling of feet and the gride of wheels behind him,
and turning his head saw a man dressed in dirty brown rags and a felt hat
grey with dust, who was standing with a slight swaying motion and fixedly
 68

regarding the Angelic back. Beyond him was another almost equally dirty,
pushing a knife grinder's barrow over the bridge.

"Mornin'," said the first person smiling weakly. "Goomorn'." He arrested an

escaping hiccough.

The Angel stared at him. He had never seen a really fatuous smile before.
"Who are you?" said the Angel.

The fatuous smile faded. "No your business whoaaam. Wishergoomorn."

"Carm on:" said the man with the grindstone, passing on his way.

"Wishergoomorn," said the dirty man, in a tone of extreme aggravation.

"Carncher Answerme?"

"Carm on you fool!" said the man with the grindstone—receding.

"I don't understand," said the Angel.

"Donunderstan'. Sim'l enough. Wishergoomorn'. Willyanswerme? Wontchr?

gemwishergem goomorn. Cusom answer goomorn. No gem.
Haverteachyer."

The Angel was puzzled. The drunken man stood swaying for a moment, then
he made an unsteady snatch at his hat and threw it down at the Angel's
feet. "Ver well," he said, as one who decides great issues.

"Carm on!" said the voice of the man with the grindstone—stopping
perhaps twenty yards off.

"You wan fight, you ——" the Angel failed to catch the word. "I'll show yer,
not answer gem's goomorn."

He began to struggle with his jacket. "Think I'm drun," he said, "I show yer."
The man with the grindstone sat down on the shaft to watch. "Carm on," he
said. The jacket was intricate, and the drunken man began to struggle about
the road, in his attempts to extricate himself, breathing threatenings and
slaughter. Slowly the Angel began to suspect, remotely enough, that these
demonstrations were hostile. "Mur wun know yer when I done wi' yer," said
the drunken man, coat almost over his head.
 69

At last the garment lay on the ground, and through the frequent interstices
of his reminiscences of a waistcoat, the drunken tinker displayed a fine hairy
and muscular body to the Angel's observant eyes. He squared up in masterly
fashion.

"Take the paint off yer," he remarked, advancing and receding, fists up and
elbows out.

"Carm on," floated down the road.

The Angel's attention was concentrated on two huge hairy black fists, that
swayed and advanced and retreated. "Come on d'yer say? I'll show yer," said
the gentleman in rags, and then with extraordinary ferocity; "My crikey! I'll
show yer."

Suddenly he lurched forward, and with a newborn instinct and raising a

defensive arm as he did so, the Angel stepped aside to avoid him. The fist
missed the Angelic shoulder by a hairsbreadth, and the tinker collapsed in a
heap with his face against the parapet of the bridge. The Angel hesitated
over the writhing dusty heap of blasphemy for a moment, and then turned
towards the man's companion up the road. "Lemmeget up," said the man
on the bridge: "Lemmeget up, you swine. I'll show yer."

A strange disgust, a quivering repulsion came upon the Angel. He walked

slowly away from the drunkard towards the man with the grindstone.

"What does it all mean?" said the Angel. "I don't understand it."

"Dam fool!... say's it's 'is silver weddin'," answered the man with the
grindstone, evidently much annoyed; and then, in a tone of growing
impatience, he called down the road once more; "Carm on!"

"Silver wedding!" said the Angel. "What is a silver wedding?"

"Jest is rot," said the man on the barrow. "But 'E's always avin' some 'scuse
like that. Fair sickenin it is. Lars week it wus 'is bloomin' birthday, and then 'e
ad'nt ardly got sober orf a comlimentary drunk to my noo barrer. (Carm on,
you fool.)"
 70

"But I don't understand," said the Angel. "Why does he sway about so? Why
does he keep on trying to pick up his hat like that—and missing it?"

"Why!" said the tinker. "Well this is a blasted innocent

country! Why! Because 'E's blind! Wot else? (Carm on—Dam yer). Because
'E's just as full as 'E can 'old. That's why!"

The Angel noticing the tone of the second tinker's voice, judged it wiser not
to question him further. But he stood by the grindstone and continued to
watch the mysterious evolutions on the bridge.

"Carm on! I shall 'ave to go and pick up that 'at I suppose.... 'E's always at it. I
ne'er 'ad such a blooming pard before. Always at it, 'e is."

The man with the barrow meditated. "Taint as if 'e was a gentleman and
'adnt no livin' to get. An' 'e's such a reckless fool when 'e gets a bit on. Goes
offerin out everyone 'e meets. (There you go!) I'm blessed if 'e didn't offer
out a 'ole bloomin' Salvation Army. No judgment in it.
(Oh! Carm on! Carm on!). 'Ave to go and pick this bloomin' 'at up now I
s'pose. 'E don't care, wot trouble 'e gives."

The Angel watched the second tinker walk back, and, with affectionate
blasphemy, assist the first to his hat and his coat. Then he turned, absolutely
mystified, towards the village again.
 71

CHAPTER 27

After that incident the Angel walked along past the mill and round behind
the church, to examine the tombstones.

"This seems to be the place where they put the broken pieces," said the
Angel—reading the inscriptions. "Curious word—relict! Resurgam! Then
they are not done with quite. What a huge pile it requires to keep her
down.... It is spirited of her."

"Hawkins?" said the Angel softly,.... "Hawkins? The name is strange to me....
He did not die then.... It is plain enough,—Joined the Angelic Hosts, May 17,
1863. He must have felt as much out of place as I do down here. But I
wonder why they put that little pot thing on the top of this monument.
Curious! There are several others about—little stone pots with a rag of stiff
stone drapery over them."

Just then the boys came pouring out of the National School, and first one
and then several stopped agape at the Angel's crooked black figure among
the white tombs. "Ent 'e gart a bääk on en!" remarked one critic.

"'E's got 'air like a girl!" said another.

The Angel turned towards them. He was struck by the queer little heads
sticking up over the lichenous wall. He smiled faintly at their staring faces,
and then turned to marvel at the iron railings that enclosed the Fitz-Jarvis
tomb. "A queer air of uncertainty," he said. "Slabs, piles of stone, these
railings.... Are they afraid?... Do these Dead ever try and get up again?
There's an air of repression—fortification——"

"Gét yer 'air cut, Gét yer 'air cut," sang three little boys together.

"Curious these Human Beings are!" said the Angel. "That man yesterday
wanted to cut off my wings, now these little creatures want me to cut off
my hair! And the man on the bridge offered to take the 'paint' off me. They
will leave nothing of me soon."
 72

"Where did you get that 'at?" sang another little boy. "Where did you get
them clo'es?"

"They ask questions that they evidently do not want answered," said the
Angel. "I can tell from the tone." He looked thoughtfully at the little boys. "I
don't understand the methods of Human intercourse. These are probably
friendly advances, a kind of ritual. But I don't know the responses. I think I
will go back to the little fat man in black, with the gold chain across his
stomach, and ask him to explain. It is difficult."

He turned towards the lych gate. "Oh!" said one of the little boys, in a shrill
falsetto, and threw a beech-nut husk. It came bounding across the
churchyard path. The Angel stopped in surprise.

This made all the little boys laugh. A second imitating the first, said "Oh!"
and hit the Angel. His astonishment was really delicious. They all began
crying "Oh!" and throwing beechnut husks. One hit the Angel's hand,
another stung him smartly by the ear. The Angel made ungainly movements
towards them. He spluttered some expostulation and made for the
roadway. The little boys were amazed and shocked at his discomfiture and
cowardice. Such sawney behaviour could not be encouraged. The pelting
grew vigorously. You may perhaps be able to imagine those vivid moments,
daring small boys running in close and delivering shots, milder small boys
rushing round behind with flying discharges. Milton Screever's mongrel dog
was roused to yelping ecstacy at the sight, and danced (full of wild
imaginings) nearer and nearer to the angelic legs.

"Hi, hi!" said a vigorous voice. "I never did! Where's Mr Jarvis? Manners,
manners! you young rascals."

The youngsters scattered right and left, some over the wall into the
playground, some down the street.

"Frightful pest these boys are getting!" said Crump, coming up. "I'm sorry
they have been annoying you."

The Angel seemed quite upset. "I don't understand," he said. "These Human
ways...."
 73

"Yes, of course. Unusual to you. How's your excrescence?"

"My what?" said the Angel.

"Bifid limb, you know. How is it? Now you're down this way, come in. Come
in and let me have a look at it again. You young roughs! And meanwhile
these little louts of ours will be getting off home. They're all alike in these
villages. Can't understand anything abnormal. See an odd-looking stranger.
Chuck a stone. No imagination beyond the parish.... (I'll give you physic if I
catch you annoying strangers again.) ... I suppose it's what one might
expect.... Come along this way."

So the Angel, horribly perplexed still, was hurried into the surgery to have
his wound re-dressed.
 74

CHAPTER 28. LADY HAMMERGALLOW'S VIEW

In Siddermorton Park is Siddermorton House, where old Lady

Hammergallow lives, chiefly upon Burgundy and the little scandals of the
village, a dear old lady with a ropy neck, a ruddled countenance and
spasmodic gusts of odd temper, whose three remedies for all human
trouble among her dependents are, a bottle of gin, a pair of charity blankets,
or a new crown piece. The House is a mile-and-a-half out of Siddermorton.
Almost all the village is hers, saving a fringe to the south which belongs to
Sir John Gotch, and she rules it with an autocratic rule, refreshing in these
days of divided government. She orders and forbids marriages, drives
objectionable people out of the village by the simple expedient of raising
their rent, dismisses labourers, obliges heretics to go to church, and made
Susan Dangett, who wanted to call her little girl 'Euphemia,' have the infant
christened 'Mary-Anne.' She is a sturdy Broad Protestant and disapproves of
the Vicar's going bald like a tonsure. She is on the Village Council, which
obsequiously trudges up the hill and over the moor to her, and (as she is a
trifle deaf) speaks all its speeches into her speaking trumpet instead of a
rostrum. She takes no interest now in politics, but until last year she was an
active enemy of "that Gladstone." She has parlour maids instead of footmen
to do her waiting, because of Hockley, the American stockbroker, and his
four Titans in plush.

She exercises what is almost a fascination upon the village. If in the bar-
parlour of the Cat and Cornucopia you swear by God no one would be
shocked, but if you swore by Lady Hammergallow they would probably be
shocked enough to turn you out of the room. When she drives through
Siddermorton she always calls upon Bessy Flump, the post-mistress, to hear
all that has happened, and then upon Miss Finch, the dressmaker, to check
back Bessy Flump. Sometimes she calls upon the Vicar, sometimes upon Mrs
Mendham whom she snubs, and even sometimes on Crump. Her sparkling
pair of greys almost ran over the Angel as he was walking down to the
village.
 75

"So that's the genius!" said Lady Hammergallow, and turned and looked at
him through the gilt glasses on a stick that she always carried in her
shrivelled and shaky hand. "Lunatic indeed! The poor creature has rather a
pretty face. I'm sorry I've missed him."

But she went on to the vicarage nevertheless, and demanded news of it all.
The conflicting accounts of Miss Flump, Miss Finch, Mrs Mendham, Crump,
and Mrs Jehoram had puzzled her immensely. The Vicar, hard pressed, did
all he could to say into her speaking trumpet what had really happened. He
toned down the wings and the saffron robe. But he felt the case was
hopeless. He spoke of his protégé as "Mr" Angel. He addressed pathetic
asides to the kingfisher. The old lady noticed his confusion. Her queer old
head went jerking backwards and forwards, now the speaking trumpet in
his face when he had nothing to say, then the shrunken eyes peering at him,
oblivious of the explanation that was coming from his lips. A great many
Ohs! and Ahs! She caught some fragments certainly.

"You have asked him to stop with you—indefinitely?" said Lady

Hammergallow with a Great Idea taking shape rapidly in her mind.

"I did—perhaps inadvertently—make such—"

"And you don't know where he comes from?"

"Not at all."

"Nor who his father is, I suppose?" said Lady Hammergallow mysteriously.

"No," said the Vicar.

"Now!" said Lady Hammergallow archly, and keeping her glasses to her eye,
she suddenly dug at his ribs with her trumpet.

"My dear Lady Hammergallow!"

"I thought so. Don't think I would blame you, Mr Hilyer." She gave a corrupt
laugh that she delighted in. "The world is the world, and men are men. And
the poor boy's a cripple, eh? A kind of judgment. In mourning, I noticed. It
reminds me of the Scarlet Letter. The mother's dead, I suppose. It's just as
 76

well. Really—I'm not a narrow woman—I respect you for having him. Really I
do."

"But, Lady Hammergallow!"

"Don't spoil everything by denying it. It is so very, very plain, to a woman of

the world. That Mrs Mendham! She amuses me with her suspicions. Such
odd ideas! In a Curate's wife. But I hope it didn't happen when you were in
orders."

"Lady Hammergallow, I protest. Upon my word."

"Mr Hilyer, I protest. I know. Not anything you can say will alter my opinion
one jot. Don't try. I never suspected you were nearly such an interesting
man."

"But this suspicion is unendurable!"

"We will help him together, Mr Hilyer. You may rely upon me. It is most
romantic." She beamed benevolence.

"But, Lady Hammergallow, I must speak!"

She gripped her ear-trumpet resolutely, and held it before her and shook her
head.

"He has quite a genius for music, Vicar, so I hear?"

"I can assure you most solemnly—"

"I thought so. And being a cripple—"

"You are under a most cruel—"

"I thought that if his gift is really what that Jehoram woman says."

"An unjustifiable suspicion that ever a man—"

("I don't think much of her judgment, of course.")

"Consider my position. Have I gained no character?"

"It might be possible to do something for him as a performer."

 77

"Have I—(Bother! It's no good!)"

"And so, dear Vicar, I propose to give him an opportunity of showing us

what he can do. I have been thinking it all over as I drove here. On Tuesday
next, I will invite just a few people of taste, and he shall bring his violin. Eigh?
And if that goes well, I will see if I can get some introductions and
really push him."

"But Lady, Lady Hammergallow."

"Not another word!" said Lady Hammergallow, still resolutely holding her
speaking trumpet before her and clutching her eyeglasses. "I really must not
leave those horses. Cutler is so annoyed if I keep them too long. He finds
waiting tedious, poor man, unless there is a public-house near." She made
for the door.

"Damn!" said the Vicar, under his breath. He had never used the word since
he had taken orders. It shows you how an Angel's visit may disorganize a
man.

He stood under the verandah watching the carriage drive away. The world
seemed coming to pieces about him. Had he lived a virtuous celibate life for
thirty odd years in vain?

The things of which these people thought him capable! He stood and stared
at the green cornfield opposite, and down at the straggling village. It
seemed real enough. And yet for the first time in his life there was a queer
doubt of its reality.

He rubbed his chin, then turned and went slowly upstairs to his dressing-
room, and sat for a long time staring at a garment of some yellow texture.
"Know his father!" he said. "And he is immortal, and was fluttering about his
heaven when my ancestors were marsupials.... I wish he was there now."

He got up and began to feel the robe.

"I wonder how they get such things," said the Vicar. Then he went and
stared out of the window. "I suppose everything is wonderful, even the
rising and setting of the sun. I suppose there is no adamantine ground for
any belief. But one gets into a regular way of taking things. This disturbs it. I
 78

seem to be waking up to the Invisible. It is the strangest of uncertainties. I

have not felt so stirred and unsettled since my adolescence."
 79

CHAPTER 29. FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE ANGEL IN

THE VILLAGE

"That's all right," said Crump when the bandaging was replaced. "It's a trick
of memory, no doubt, but these excrescences of yours don't seem nearly so
large as they did yesterday. I suppose they struck me rather forcibly. Stop
and have lunch with me now you're down here. Midday meal, you know.
The youngsters will be swallowed up by school again in the afternoon."

"I never saw anything heal so well in my life," he said, as they walked into
the dining-room. "Your blood and flesh must be as clean and free from
bacteria as they make 'em. Whatever stuff there is in your head," he
added sotto voce.

At lunch he watched the Angel narrowly, and talked to draw him out.

"Journey tire you yesterday?" he said suddenly.

"Journey!" said the Angel. "Oh! my wings felt a little stiff."

("Not to be had,") said Crump to himself. ("Suppose I must enter into it.")

"So you flew all the way, eigh? No conveyance?"

"There wasn't any way," explained the Angel, taking mustard. "I was flying
up a symphony with some Griffins and Fiery Cherubim, and suddenly
everything went dark and I was in this world of yours."

"Dear me!" said Crump. "And that's why you haven't any luggage." He drew
his serviette across his mouth, and a smile flickered in his eyes.

"I suppose you know this world of ours pretty well? Watching us over the
adamantine walls and all that kind of thing. Eigh?"

"Not very well. We dream of it sometimes. In the moonlight, when the

Nightmares have fanned us to sleep with their wings."
 80

"Ah, yes—of course," said Crump. "Very poetical way of putting it. Won't
you take some Burgundy? It's just beside you."

"There's a persuasion in this world, you know, that Angels' Visits are by no
means infrequent. Perhaps some of your—friends have travelled? They are
supposed to come down to deserving persons in prisons, and do refined
Nautches and that kind of thing. Faust business, you know."

"I've never heard of anything of the kind," said the Angel.

"Only the other day a lady whose baby was my patient for the time being—
indigestion—assured me that certain facial contortions the little creature
made indicated that it was Dreaming of Angels. In the novels of Mrs Henry
Wood that is spoken of as an infallible symptom of an early departure. I
suppose you can't throw any light on that obscure pathological
manifestation?"

"I don't understand it at all," said the Angel, puzzled, and not clearly
apprehending the Doctor's drift.

("Getting huffy,") said Crump to himself. ("Sees I'm poking fun at him.")
"There's one thing I'm curious about. Do the new arrivals complain much
about their medical attendants? I've always fancied there must be a good
deal of hydropathic talk just at first. I was looking at that picture in the
Academy only this June...."

"New Arrivals!" said the Angel. "I really don't follow you."

The Doctor stared. "Don't they come?"

"Come!" said the Angel. "Who?"

"The people who die here."

"After they've gone to pieces here?"

"That's the general belief, you know."

"People, like the woman who screamed out of the door, and the blackfaced
man and his volutations and the horrible little things that threw husks!—
certainly not. I never saw such creatures before I fell into this world."
 81

"Oh! but come!" said the Doctor. "You'll tell me next your official robes are
not white and that you can't play the harp."

"There's no such thing as white in the Angelic Land," said the Angel. "It's
that queer blank colour you get by mixing up all the others."

"Why, my dear Sir!" said the doctor, suddenly altering his tone, "you
positively know nothing about the Land you come from. White's the very
essence of it."

The Angel stared at him. Was the man jesting? He looked perfectly serious.

"Look here," said Crump, and getting up, he went to the sideboard on which
a copy of the Parish Magazine was lying. He brought it round to the Angel
and opened it at the coloured supplement. "Here's some real angels," he
said. "You see it's not simply the wings make the Angel. White you see, with
a curly whisp of robe, sailing up into the sky with their wings furled. Those
are angels on the best authority. Hydroxyl kind of hair. One has a bit of a
harp, you see, and the other is helping this wingless lady—kind of larval
Angel, you know—upward."

"Oh! but really!" said the Angel, "those are not angels at all."

"But they are," said Crump, putting the magazine back on the sideboard and
resuming his seat with an air of intense satisfaction. "I can assure you I have
the best authority...."

"I can assure you...."

Crump tucked in the corners of his mouth and shook his head from side to
side even as he had done to the Vicar. "No good," he said, "can't alter our
ideas just because an irresponsible visitor...."

"If these are angels," said the Angel, "then I have never been in the Angelic
Land."

"Precisely," said Crump, ineffably self-satisfied; "that was just what I was
getting at."

The Angel stared at him for a minute round-eyed, and then was seized for
the second time by the human disorder of laughter.
 82

"Ha, ha, ha!" said Crump, joining in. "I thought you were not quite so mad as
you seemed. Ha, ha, ha!"

And for the rest of the lunch they were both very merry, for entirely
different reasons, and Crump insisted upon treating the Angel as a "dorg" of
the highest degree.
 83

CHAPTER 30

After the Angel had left Crump's house he went up the hill again towards
the Vicarage. But—possibly moved by the desire to avoid Mrs Gustick—he
turned aside at the stile and made a detour by the Lark's Field and Bradley's
Farm.

He came upon the Respectable Tramp slumbering peacefully among the

wild-flowers. He stopped to look, struck by the celestial tranquillity of that
individual's face. And even as he did so the Respectable Tramp awoke with a
start and sat up. He was a pallid creature, dressed in rusty black, with a
broken-spirited crush hat cocked over one eye. "Good afternoon," he said
affably. "How are you?"

"Very well, thank you," said the Angel, who had mastered the phrase.

The Respectable Tramp eyed the Angel critically. "Padding the Hoof,
matey?" he said. "Like me."

The Angel was puzzled by him. "Why," asked the Angel, "do you sleep like
this instead of sleeping up in the air on a Bed?"

"Well I'm blowed!" said the Respectable Tramp. "Why don't I sleep in a bed?
Well, it's like this. Sandringham's got the painters in, there's the drains up in
Windsor Castle, and I 'aven't no other 'ouse to go to. You 'aven't the price of
a arf pint in your pocket, 'ave yer?"

"I have nothing in my pocket," said the Angel.

"Is this here village called Siddermorton?" said the Tramp, rising creakily to
his feet and pointing to the clustering roofs down the hill.

"Yes," said the Angel, "they call it Siddermorton."

"I know it, I know it," said the Tramp. "And a very pretty little village it is
too." He stretched and yawned, and stood regarding the place. "'Ouses," he
said reflectively; "Projuce"—waving his hand at the cornfields and orchards.
"Looks cosy, don't it?"
 84

"It has a quaint beauty of its own," said the Angel.

"It 'as a quaint beauty of its own—yes.... Lord! I'd like to sack the blooming
place.... I was born there."

"Dear me," said the Angel.

"Yes, I was born there. Ever heard of a pithed frog?"

"Pithed frog," said the Angel. "No!"

"It's a thing these here vivisectionists do. They takes a frog and they cuts
out his brains and they shoves a bit of pith in the place of 'em. That's a
pithed frog. Well—that there village is full of pithed human beings."

The Angel took it quite seriously. "Is that so?" he said.

"That's so—you take my word for it. Everyone of them 'as 'ad their brains
cut out and chunks of rotten touchwood put in the place of it. And you see
that little red place there?"

"That's called the national school," said the Angel.

"Yes—that's where they piths 'em," said the Tramp, quite in love with his
conceit.

"Really! That's very interesting."

"It stands to reason," said the Tramp. "If they 'ad brains they'd 'ave ideas,
and if they 'ad ideas they'd think for themselves. And you can go through
that village from end to end and never meet anybody doing as much. Pithed
human beings they are. I know that village. I was born there, and I might be
there now, a toilin' for my betters, if I 'adnt struck against the pithin'."

"Is it a painful operation?" asked the Angel.

"In parts. Though it aint the heads gets hurt. And it lasts a long time. They
take 'em young into that school, and they says to them, 'come in 'ere and
we'll improve your minds,' they says, and in the little kiddies go as good as
gold. And they begins shovin' it into them. Bit by bit and 'ard and dry,
shovin' out the nice juicy brains. Dates and lists and things. Out they comes,
no brains in their 'eads, and wound up nice and tight, ready to touch their
 85

'ats to anyone who looks at them. Why! One touched 'is 'at to me yesterday.
And they runs about spry and does all the dirty work, and feels thankful
they're allowed to live. They take a positive pride in 'ard work for its own
sake. Arter they bin pithed. See that chap ploughin'?"

"Yes," said the Angel; "is he pithed?"

"Rather. Else he'd be paddin' the hoof this pleasant weather—like me and
the blessed Apostles."

"I begin to understand," said the Angel, rather dubiously.

"I knew you would," said the Philosophical Tramp. "I thought you was the
right sort. But speaking serious, aint it ridiculous?—centuries and centuries
of civilization, and look at that poor swine there, sweatin' 'isself empty and
trudging up that 'ill-side. 'E's English, 'e is. 'E belongs to the top race in
creation, 'e does. 'E's one of the rulers of Indjer. It's enough to make a
nigger laugh. The flag that's braved a thousand years the battle an' the
breeze—that's 'is flag. There never was a country was as great and glorious
as this. Never. And that's wot it makes of us. I'll tell you a little story about
them parts as you seems to be a bit of a stranger. There's a chap called
Gotch, Sir John Gotch they calls 'im, and when 'ewas a young gent from
Oxford, I was a little chap of eight and my sister was a girl of seventeen.
Their servant she was. But Lord! everybody's 'eard that story—it's common
enough, of 'im or the likes of 'im."

"I haven't," said the Angel.

"All that's pretty and lively of the gals they chucks into the gutters, and all
the men with a pennorth of spunk or adventure, all who won't drink what
the Curate's wife sends 'em instead of beer, and touch their hats
promiscous, and leave the rabbits and birds alone for their betters, gets
drove out of the villages as rough characters. Patriotism! Talk about
improvin' the race! Wot's left aint fit to look a nigger in the face, a Chinaman
'ud be ashamed of 'em...."

"But I don't understand," said the Angel. "I don't follow you."
 86

At that the Philosophic Tramp became more explicit, and told the Angel the
simple story of Sir John Gotch and the kitchen-maid. It's scarcely necessary
to repeat it. You may understand that it left the Angel puzzled. It was full of
words he did not understand, for the only vehicle of emotion the Tramp
possessed was blasphemy. Yet, though their tongues differed so, he could
still convey to the Angel some of his own (probably unfounded) persuasion
of the injustice and cruelty of life, and of the utter detestableness of Sir John
Gotch.

The last the Angel saw of him was his dusty black back receding down the
lane towards Iping Hanger. A pheasant appeared by the roadside, and the
Philosophical Tramp immediately caught up a stone and sent the bird
clucking with a viciously accurate shot. Then he disappeared round the
corner.
 87

CHAPTER 31. MRS JEHORAM'S BREADTH OF VIEW

"I heard some one playing the fiddle in the Vicarage, as I came by," said Mrs
Jehoram, taking her cup of tea from Mrs Mendham.

"The Vicar plays," said Mrs Mendham. "I have spoken to George about it,
but it's no good. I do not think a Vicar should be allowed to do such things.
It's so foreign. But there, he ...."

"I know, dear," said Mrs Jehoram. "But I heard the Vicar once at the
schoolroom. I don't think this was the Vicar. It was quite clever, some of it,
quite smart, you know. And new. I was telling dear Lady Hammergallow this
morning. I fancy—"

"The lunatic! Very likely. These half-witted people.... My dear, I don't think I
shall ever forget that dreadful encounter. Yesterday."

"Nor I."

"My poor girls! They are too shocked to say a word about it. I was telling
dear Lady Ham——"

"Quite proper of them. It was dreadful, dear. For them."

"And now, dear, I want you to tell me frankly—Do you really believe that
creature was a man?"

"You should have heard the violin."

"I still more than half suspect, Jessie ——" Mrs Mendham leant forward as if
to whisper.

Mrs Jehoram helped herself to cake. "I'm sure no woman could play the
violin quite like I heard it played this morning."

"Of course, if you say so that settles the matter," said Mrs Mendham.
 88

Mrs Jehoram was the autocratic authority in Siddermorton upon all

questions of art, music and belles-lettres. Her late husband had been a
minor poet. Then Mrs Mendham added a judicial "Still—"

"Do you know," said Mrs Jehoram, "I'm half inclined to believe the dear
Vicar's story."

"How good of you, Jessie," said Mrs Mendham.

"But really, I don't think he could have had any one in the Vicarage before
that afternoon. I feel sure we should have heard of it. I don't see how a
strange cat could come within four miles of Siddermorton without the
report coming round to us. The people here gossip so...."

"I always distrust the Vicar," said Mrs Mendham. "I know him."

"Yes. But the story is plausible. If this Mr Angel were someone very clever
and eccentric—"

"He would have to be very eccentric to dress as he did. There are degrees
and limits, dear."

"But kilts," said Mrs Jehoram.

"Are all very well in the Highlands...."

Mrs Jehoram's eyes had rested upon a black speck creeping slowly across a
patch of yellowish-green up the hill.

"There he goes," said Mrs Jehoram, rising, "across the cornfield. I'm sure
that's him. I can see the hump. Unless it's a man with a sack. Bless me,
Minnie! here's an opera glass. How convenient for peeping at the
Vicarage!... Yes, it's the man. He is a man. With such a sweet face."

Very unselfishly she allowed her hostess to share the opera glass.

For a minute there was a rustling silence.

"His dress," said Mrs Mendham, "is quite respectable now."

"Quite," said Mrs Jehoram.

Pause.
 89

"He looks cross!"

"And his coat is dusty."

"He walks steadily enough," said Mrs Mendham, "or one might think.... This
hot weather...."

Another pause.

"You see, dear," said Mrs Jehoram, putting down the lorgnette. "What I was
going to say was, that possibly he might be a genius in disguise."

"If you can call next door to nothing a disguise."

"No doubt it was eccentric. But I've seen children in little blouses, not at all
unlike him. So many clever people are peculiar in their dress and manners. A
genius may steal a horse where a bank-clerk may not look over the hedge.
Very possibly he's quite well known and laughing at our Arcadian simplicity.
And really it wasn't so improper as some of these New Women bicycling
costumes. I saw one in one of the Illustrated Papers only a few days ago—
the New Budget I think—quite tights, you know, dear. No—I cling to the
genius theory. Especially after the playing. I'm sure the creature is original.
Perhaps very amusing. In fact, I intend to ask the Vicar to introduce me."

"My dear!" cried Mrs Mendham.

"I'm resolute," said Mrs Jehoram.

"I'm afraid you're rash," said Mrs Mendham. "Geniuses and people of that
kind are all very well in London. But here—at the Vicarage."

"We are going to educate the folks. I love originality. At any rate I mean to
see him."

"Take care you don't see too much of him," said Mrs Mendham. "I've heard
the fashion is quite changing. I understand that some of the very best
people have decided that genius is not to be encouraged any more. These
recent scandals...."

"Only in literature, I can assure you, dear. In music...."

 90

"Nothing you can say, my dear," said Mrs Mendham, going off at a tangent,
"will convince me that that person's costume was not extremely suggestive
and improper."
 91

CHAPTER 32. A TRIVIAL INCIDENT

The Angel came thoughtfully by the hedge across the field towards the
Vicarage. The rays of the setting sun shone on his shoulders, and touched
the Vicarage with gold, and blazed like fire in all the windows. By the gate,
bathed in the sunlight, stood little Delia, the waiting maid. She stood
watching him under her hand. It suddenly came into the Angel's mind that
she, at least, was beautiful, and not only beautiful but alive and warm.

She opened the gate for him and stood aside. She was sorry for him, for her
elder sister was a cripple. He bowed to her, as he would have done to any
woman, and for just one moment looked into her face. She looked back at
him and something leapt within her.

The Angel made an irresolute movement. "Your eyes are very beautiful," he
said quietly, with a remote wonder in his voice.

"Oh, sir!" she said, starting back. The Angel's expression changed to
perplexity. He went on up the pathway between the Vicar's flower-beds,
and she stood with the gate held open in her hand, staring after him. Just
under the rose-twined verandah he turned and looked at her.

She still stared at him for a moment, and then with a queer gesture turned
round with her back to him, shutting the gate as she did so, and seemed to
be looking down the valley towards the church tower.
 92

CHAPTER 33. THE WARP AND THE WOOF OF THINGS

At the dinner table the Angel told the Vicar the more striking of his day's
adventures.

"The strange thing," said the Angel, "is the readiness of you Human
Beings—the zest, with which you inflict pain. Those boys pelting me this
morning——"

"Seemed to enjoy it," said the Vicar. "I know."

"Yet they don't like pain," said the Angel.

"No," said the Vicar; "they don't like it."

"Then," said the Angel, "I saw some beautiful plants rising with a spike of
leaves, two this way and two that, and when I caressed one it caused the
most uncomfortable——"

"Stinging nettle!" said the Vicar.

"At any rate a new sort of pain. And another plant with a head like a
coronet, and richly decorated leaves, spiked and jagged——"

"A thistle, possibly."

"And in your garden, the beautiful, sweet-smelling plant——"

"The sweet briar," said the Vicar. "I remember."

"And that pink flower that sprang out of the box——"

"Out of the box?" said the Vicar.

"Last night," said the Angel, "that went climbing up the curtains——
Flame!"

"Oh!—the matches and the candles! Yes," said the Vicar.

 93

"Then the animals. A dog to-day behaved most disagreeably——. And these
boys, and the way in which people speak——. Everyone seems anxious—
willing at any rate—to give this Pain. Every one seems busy giving pain——"

"Or avoiding it," said the Vicar, pushing his dinner away before him. "Yes—
of course. It's fighting everywhere. The whole living world is a battle-field—
the whole world. We are driven by Pain. Here. How it lies on the surface!
This Angel sees it in a day!"

"But why does everyone—everything—want to give pain?" asked the Angel.

"It is not so in the Angelic Land?" said the Vicar.

"No," said the Angel. "Why is it so here?"

The Vicar wiped his lips with his napkin slowly. "It is so," he said. "Pain," said
he still more slowly, "is the warp and the woof of this life. Do you know," he
said, after a pause, "it is almost impossible for me to imagine ... a world
without pain.... And yet, as you played this morning——

"But this world is different. It is the very reverse of an Angelic world. Indeed,
a number of people—excellent religious people—have been so impressed
by the universality of pain that they think, after death, things will be even
worse for a great many of us. It seems to me an excessive view. But it's a
deep question. Almost beyond one's power of discussion——"

And incontinently the Vicar plumped into an impromptu dissertation upon

"Necessity," how things were so because they were so, how one had to do
this and that. "Even our food," said the Vicar. "What?" said the Angel. "Is not
obtained without inflicting Pain," said the Vicar.

The Angel's face went so white that the Vicar checked himself suddenly. Or
he was just on the very verge of a concise explanation of the antecedents of
a leg of lamb. There was a pause.

"By-the-bye," said the Angel, suddenly. "Have you been pithed? Like the
common people."
 94

CHAPTER 34. THE ANGEL'S DEBUT

When Lady Hammergallow made up her mind, things happened as she

resolved. And though the Vicar made a spasmodic protest, she carried out
her purpose and got audience, Angel, and violin together, at Siddermorton
House before the week was out. "A genius the Vicar has discovered," she
said; so with eminent foresight putting any possibility of blame for a failure
on the Vicar's shoulders. "The dear Vicar tells me," she would say, and
proceed to marvellous anecdotes of the Angel's cleverness with his
instrument. But she was quite in love with her idea—she had always had a
secret desire to play the patroness to obscure talent. Hitherto it had not
turned out to be talent when it came to the test.

"It would be such a good thing for him," she said. "His hair is long already,
and with that high colour he would be beautiful, simply beautiful on a
platform. The Vicar's clothes fitting him so badly makes him look quite like a
fashionable pianist already. And the scandal of his birth—not told, of course,
but whispered—would be—quite an Inducement——when he gets to
London, that is."

The Vicar had the most horrible sensations as the day approached. He spent
hours trying to explain the situation to the Angel, other hours trying to
imagine what people would think, still worse hours trying to anticipate the
Angel's behaviour. Hitherto the Angel had always played for his own
satisfaction. The Vicar would startle him every now and then by rushing
upon him with some new point of etiquette that had just occurred to him.
As for instance: "It's very important where you put your hat, you know.
Don't put it on a chair, whatever you do. Hold it until you get your tea, you
know, and then—let me see—then put it down somewhere, you know."
The journey to Siddermorton House was accomplished without
misadventure, but at the moment of introduction the Vicar had a spasm of
horrible misgivings. He had forgotten to explain introductions. The Angel's
naïve amusement was evident, but nothing very terrible happened.
 95

"Rummy looking greaser," said Mr Rathbone Slater, who devoted

considerable attention to costume. "Wants grooming. No manners. Grinned
when he saw me shaking hands. Did it chic enough, I thought."

One trivial misadventure occurred. When Lady Hammergallow welcomed

the Angel she looked at him through her glasses. The apparent size of her
eyes startled him. His surprise and his quick attempt to peer over the brims
was only too evident. But the Vicar had warned him of the ear trumpet.

The Angel's incapacity to sit on anything but a music stool appeared to

excite some interest among the ladies, but led to no remarks. They regarded
it perhaps as the affectation of a budding professional. He was remiss with
the teacups and scattered the crumbs of his cake abroad. (You must
remember he was quite an amateur at eating.) He crossed his legs. He
fumbled over the hat business after vainly trying to catch the Vicar's eye.
The eldest Miss Papaver tried to talk to him about continental watering
places and cigarettes, and formed a low opinion of his intelligence.

The Angel was surprised by the production of an easel and several books of
music, and a little unnerved at first by the sight of Lady Hammergallow
sitting with her head on one side, watching him with those magnified eyes
through her gilt glasses.

Mrs Jehoram came up to him before he began to play and asked him the
Name of the Charming Piece he was playing the other afternoon. The Angel
said it had no name, and Mrs Jehoram thought music ought never to have
any names and wanted to know who it was by, and when the Angel told her
he played it out of his head, she said he must be Quite a Genius and looked
open (and indisputably fascinating) admiration at him. The Curate from Iping
Hanger (who was professionally a Kelt and who played the piano and talked
colour and music with an air of racial superiority) watched him jealously.

The Vicar, who was presently captured and set down next to Lady
Hammergallow, kept an anxious eye ever Angelward while she told him
particulars of the incomes made by violinists—particulars which, for the
most part, she invented as she went along. She had been a little ruffled by
the incident of the glasses, but had decided that it came within the limits of
permissible originality.
 96

So figure to yourself the Green Saloon at Siddermorton Park; an Angel thinly

disguised in clerical vestments and with a violin in his hands, standing by the
grand piano, and a respectable gathering of quiet nice people, nicely
dressed, grouped about the room. Anticipatory gabble—one hears
scattered fragments of conversation.

"He is incog."; said the very eldest Miss Papaver to Mrs Pirbright. "Isn't it
quaint and delicious. Jessica Jehoram says she saw him at Vienna, but she
can't remember the name. The Vicar knows all about him, but he is so
close——"

"How hot and uncomfortable the dear Vicar is looking," said Mrs Pirbright.
"I've noticed it before when he sits next to Lady Hammergallow. She simply
will not respect his cloth. She goes on——"

"His tie is all askew," said the very eldest Miss Papaver, "and his hair! It really
hardly looks as though he had brushed it all day."

"Seems a foreign sort of chap. Affected. All very well in a drawing-room,"

said George Harringay, sitting apart with the younger Miss Pirbright. "But
for my part give me a masculine man and a feminine woman. What do you
think?"

"Oh!—I think so too," said the younger Miss Pirbright.

"Guineas and guineas," said Lady Hammergallow. "I've heard that some of
them keep quite stylish establishments. You would scarcely credit it——"

"I love music, Mr Angel, I adore it. It stirs something in me. I can scarcely
describe it," said Mrs Jehoram. "Who is it says that delicious antithesis: Life
without music is brutality; music without life is—— Dear me! perhaps you
remember? Music without life——it's Ruskin I think?"

"I'm sorry that I do not," said the Angel. "I have read very few books."

"How charming of you!" said Mrs Jehoram. "I wish I didn't. I sympathise
with you profoundly. I would do the same, only we poor women——I
suppose it's originality we lack—— And down here one is driven to the most
desperate proceedings——"
 97

"He's certainly very pretty. But the ultimate test of a man is his strength,"
said George Harringay. "What do you think?"

"Oh!—I think so too," said the younger Miss Pirbright.

"It's the effeminate man who makes the masculine woman. When the glory
of a man is his hair, what's a woman to do? And when men go running about
with beautiful hectic dabs——"

"Oh George! You are so dreadfully satirical to-day," said the younger Miss
Pirbright. "I'm sure it isn't paint."

"I'm really not his guardian, my dear Lady Hammergallow. Of course it's very
kind indeed of you to take such an interest——"

"Are you really going to improvise?" said Mrs Jehoram in a state of cooing
delight.

"SSsh!" said the curate from Iping Hanger.

Then the Angel began to play, looking straight before him as he did so,
thinking of the wonderful things of the Angelic Land, and yet insensibly
letting the sadness he was beginning to feel, steal over the fantasia he was
playing. When he forgot his company the music was strange and sweet;
when the sense of his surroundings floated into his mind the music grew
capricious and grotesque. But so great was the hold of the Angelic music
upon the Vicar that his anxieties fell from him at once, so soon as the Angel
began to play. Mrs Jehoram sat and looked rapt and sympathetic as hard as
she could (though the music was puzzling at times) and tried to catch the
Angel's eye. He really had a wonderfully mobile face, and the tenderest
shades of expression! And Mrs Jehoram was a judge. George Harringay
looked bored, until the younger Miss Pirbright, who adored him, put out her
mousy little shoe to touch his manly boot, and then he turned his face to
catch the feminine delicacy of her coquettish eye, and was comforted. The
very eldest Miss Papaver and Mrs Pirbright sat quite still and looked churchy
for nearly four minutes.

Then said the eldest Miss Papaver in a whisper, "I always Enjoy violin music
so much." And Mrs Pirbright answered, "We get so little Nice music down
 98

here." And Miss Papaver said, "He plays Very nicely." And Mrs Pirbright,
"Such a Delicate Touch!" And Miss Papaver, "Does Willie keep up his
lessons?" and so to a whispered conversation.

The Curate from Iping Hanger sat (he felt) in full view of the company. He
had one hand curled round his ear, and his eyes hard and staring fixedly at
the pedestal of the Hammergallow Sèvres vase. He supplied, by the
movements of his mouth, a kind of critical guide to any of the company who
were disposed to avail themselves of it. It was a generous way he had. His
aspect was severely judicial, tempered by starts of evident disapproval and
guarded appreciation. The Vicar leaned back in his chair and stared at the
Angel's face, and was presently rapt away in a wonderful dream. Lady
Hammergallow, with quick jerky movements of the head and a low but
insistent rustling, surveyed and tried to judge of the effect of the Angelic
playing. Mr Rathbone-Slater stared very solemnly into his hat and looked
very miserable, and Mrs Rathbone-Slater made mental memoranda of Mrs
Jehoram's sleeves. And the air about them all was heavy with exquisite
music—for all that had ears to hear.

"Scarcely affected enough," whispered Lady Hammergallow hoarsely,

suddenly poking the Vicar in the ribs. The Vicar came out of Dreamland
suddenly. "Eigh?" shouted the Vicar, startled, coming up with a jump.
"Sssh!" said the Curate from Iping Hanger, and everyone looked shocked at
the brutal insensibility of Hilyer. "So unusual of the Vicar," said the very
eldest Miss Papaver, "to do things like that!" The Angel went on playing.

The Curate from Iping Hanger began making mesmeric movements with his
index finger, and as the thing proceeded Mr Rathbone-Slater got amazingly
limp. He solemnly turned his hat round and altered his view. The Vicar lapsed
from an uneasy discomfort into dreamland again. Lady Hammergallow
rustled a great deal, and presently found a way of making her chair creak.
And at last the thing came to an end. Lady Hammergallow exclaimed "De—
licious!" though she had never heard a note, and began clapping her hands.
At that everyone clapped except Mr Rathbone-Slater, who rapped his hat
brim instead. The Curate from Iping Hanger clapped with a judicial air.
 99

"So I said (clap, clap, clap), if you cannot cook the food my way (clap, clap,
clap) you must go," said Mrs Pirbright, clapping vigorously. "(This music is a
delightful treat.)"

"(It is. I always revel in music,)" said the very eldest Miss Papaver. "And did
she improve after that?"

"Not a bit of it," said Mrs Pirbright.

The Vicar woke up again and stared round the saloon. Did other people see
these visions, or were they confined to him alone? Surely they must all see ...
and have a wonderful command of their feelings. It was incredible that such
music should not affect them. "He's a trifle gauche," said Lady
Hammergallow, jumping upon the Vicar's attention. "He neither bows nor
smiles. He must cultivate oddities like that. Every successful executant is
more or less gauche."

"Did you really make that up yourself?" said Mrs Jehoram, sparkling her eyes
at him, "as you went along. Really, it is wonderful! Nothing less than
wonderful."

"A little amateurish," said the Curate from Iping Hanger to Mr Rathbone-
Slater. "A great gift, undoubtedly, but a certain lack of sustained training.
There were one or two little things ... I would like to talk to him."

"His trousers look like concertinas," said Mr Rathbone-Slater. "He ought to

be told that. It's scarcely decent."

"Can you do Imitations, Mr Angel?" said Lady Hammergallow.

"Oh do, do some Imitations!" said Mrs Jehoram. "I adore Imitations."

"It was a fantastic thing," said the Curate of Iping Hanger to the Vicar of
Siddermorton, waving his long indisputably musical hands as he spoke; "a
little involved, to my mind. I have heard it before somewhere—I forget
where. He has genius undoubtedly, but occasionally he is—loose. There is a
certain deadly precision wanting. There are years of discipline yet."

"I don't admire these complicated pieces of music," said George Harringay.
"I have simple tastes, I'm afraid. There seems to me no tune in it. There's
 100

nothing I like so much as simple music. Tune, simplicity is the need of the
age, in my opinion. We are so over subtle. Everything is far-fetched. Home
grown thoughts and 'Home, Sweet Home' for me. What do you think?"

"Oh! I think so—quite," said the younger Miss Pirbright.

"Well, Amy, chattering to George as usual?" said Mrs Pirbright, across the
room.

"As usual, Ma!" said the younger Miss Pirbright, glancing round with a bright
smile at Miss Papaver, and turning again so as not to lose the next utterance
from George.

"I wonder if you and Mr Angel could manage a duet?" said Lady
Hammergallow to the Curate from Iping Hanger, who was looking
preternaturally gloomy.

"I'm sure I should be delighted," said the Curate from Iping Hanger,
brightening up.

"Duets!" said the Angel; "the two of us. Then he can play. I understood—the
Vicar told me—"

"Mr Wilmerdings is an accomplished pianist," interrupted the Vicar.

"But the Imitations?" said Mrs Jehoram, who detested Wilmerdings.

"Imitations!" said the Angel.

"A pig squeaking, a cock crowing, you know," said Mr Rathbone-Slater, and
added lower, "Best fun you can get out of a fiddle—my opinion."

"I really don't understand," said the Angel. "A pig crowing!"

"You don't like Imitations," said Mrs Jehoram. "Nor do I—really. I accept the
snub. I think they degrade...."

"Perhaps afterwards Mr Angel will Relent," said Lady Hammergallow, when

Mrs Pirbright had explained the matter to her. She could scarcely credit her
ear-trumpet. When she asked for Imitations she was accustomed to get
Imitations.
 101

Mr Wilmerdings had seated himself at the piano, and had turned to a

familiar pile of music in the recess. "What do you think of that Barcarole
thing of Spohr's?" he said over his shoulder. "I suppose you know it?" The
Angel looked bewildered.

He opened the folio before the Angel.

"What an odd kind of book!" said the Angel. "What do all those crazy dots
mean?" (At that the Vicar's blood ran cold.)

"What dots?" said the Curate.

"There!" said the Angel with incriminating finger.

"Oh come!" said the Curate.

There was one of those swift, short silences that mean so much in a social
gathering.

Then the eldest Miss Papaver turned upon the Vicar. "Does not Mr Angel
play from ordinary.... Music—from the ordinary notation?"

"I have never heard," said the Vicar, getting red now after the first shock of
horror. "I have really never seen...."

The Angel felt the situation was strained, though what was straining it he
could not understand. He became aware of a doubtful, an unfriendly look
upon the faces that regarded him. "Impossible!" he heard Mrs Pirbright say;
"after that beautiful music." The eldest Miss Papaver went to Lady
Hammergallow at once, and began to explain into her ear-trumpet that Mr
Angel did not wish to play with Mr Wilmerdings, and alleged an ignorance of
written music.

"He cannot play from Notes!" said Lady Hammergallow in a voice of

measured horror. "Non—sense!"

"Notes!" said the Angel perplexed. "Are these notes?"

"It's carrying the joke too far—simply because he doesn't want to play with
Wilmerdings," said Mr Rathbone-Slater to George Harringay.
 102

There was an expectant pause. The Angel perceived he had to be ashamed

of himself. He was ashamed of himself.

"Then," said Lady Hammergallow, throwing her head back and speaking
with deliberate indignation, as she rustled forward, "if you cannot play with
Mr Wilmerdings I am afraid I cannot ask you to play again." She made it
sound like an ultimatum. Her glasses in her hand quivered violently with
indignation. The Angel was now human enough to appreciate the fact that
he was crushed.

"What is it?" said little Lucy Rustchuck in the further bay.

"He's refused to play with old Wilmerdings," said Tommy Rathbone-Slater.

"What a lark! The old girl's purple. She thinks heaps of that ass,
Wilmerdings."

"Perhaps, Mr Wilmerdings, you will favour us with that delicious Polonaise

of Chopin's," said Lady Hammergallow. Everybody else was hushed. The
indignation of Lady Hammergallow inspired much the same silence as a
coming earthquake or an eclipse. Mr Wilmerdings perceived he would be
doing a real social service to begin at once, and (be it entered to his credit
now that his account draws near its settlement) he did.

"If a man pretend to practise an Art," said George Harringay, "he ought at
least to have the conscience to study the elements of it. What do you...."

"Oh! I think so too," said the younger Miss Pirbright.

The Vicar felt that the heavens had fallen. He sat crumpled up in his chair, a
shattered man. Lady Hammergallow sat down next to him without
appearing to see him. She was breathing heavily, but her face was terribly
calm. Everyone sat down. Was the Angel grossly ignorant or only grossly
impertinent? The Angel was vaguely aware of some frightful offence, aware
that in some mysterious way he had ceased to be the centre of the
gathering.

He saw reproachful despair in the Vicar's eye. He drifted slowly towards the
window in the recess and sat down on the little octagonal Moorish stool by
the side of Mrs Jehoram. And under the circumstances he appreciated at
 103

more than its proper value Mrs Jehoram's kindly smile. He put down the
violin in the window seat.
 104

CHAPTER 35

Mrs Jehoram and the Angel (apart)—Mr Wilmerdings playing.

"I have so longed for a quiet word with you," said Mrs Jehoram in a low
tone. "To tell you how delightful I found your playing."

"I am glad it pleased you," said the Angel.

"Pleased is scarcely the word," said Mrs Jehoram. "I was moved—
profoundly. These others did not understand.... I was glad you did not play
with him."

The Angel looked at the mechanism called Wilmerdings, and felt glad too.
(The Angelic conception of duets is a kind of conversation upon violins.) But
he said nothing.

"I worship music," said Mrs Jehoram. "I know nothing about it technically,
but there is something in it—a longing, a wish...."

The Angel stared at her face. She met his eyes.

"You understand," she said. "I see you understand." He was certainly a very
nice boy, sentimentally precocious perhaps, and with deliciously liquid eyes.

There was an interval of Chopin (Op. 40) played with immense precision.

Mrs Jehoram had a sweet face still, in shadow, with the light falling round
her golden hair, and a curious theory flashed across the Angel's mind. The
perceptible powder only supported his view of something infinitely bright
and lovable caught, tarnished, coarsened, coated over.

"Do you," said the Angel in a low tone. "Are you ... separated from
... your world?"

"As you are?" whispered Mrs Jehoram.

"This is so—cold," said the Angel. "So harsh!" He meant the whole world.

"I feel it too," said Mrs Jehoram, referring to Siddermorton Home.

 105

"There are those who cannot live without sympathy," she said after a
sympathetic pause. "And times when one feels alone in the world. Fighting a
battle against it all. Laughing, flirting, hiding the pain of it...."

"And hoping," said the Angel with a wonderful glance.—"Yes."

Mrs Jehoram (who was an epicure of flirtations) felt the Angel was more
than redeeming the promise of his appearance. (Indisputably he worshipped
her.) "Do you look for sympathy?" she said. "Or have you found it?"

"I think," said the Angel, very softly, leaning forward, "I think I have found
it."

Interval of Chopin Op. 40. The very eldest Miss Papaver and Mrs Pirbright
whispering. Lady Hammergallow (glasses up) looking down the saloon with
an unfriendly expression at the Angel. Mrs Jehoram and the Angel
exchanging deep and significant glances.

"Her name," said the Angel (Mrs Jehoram made a movement) "is Delia. She
is...."

"Delia!" said Mrs Jehoram sharply, slowly realising a terrible

misunderstanding. "A fanciful name.... Why!... No! Not that little housemaid
at the Vicarage—?..."

The Polonaise terminated with a flourish. The Angel was quite surprised at
the change in Mrs Jehoram's expression.

"I never did!" said Mrs Jehoram recovering. "To make me your confidant in
an intrigue with a servant. Really Mr Angel it's possible to be too original...."

Then suddenly their colloquy was interrupted.

 106

CHAPTER 36

This section is (so far as my memory goes) the shortest in the book.

But the enormity of the offence necessitates the separation of this section
from all other sections.

The Vicar, you must understand, had done his best to inculcate the
recognised differentiae of a gentleman. "Never allow a lady to carry
anything," said the Vicar. "Say, 'permit me' and relieve her." "Always stand
until every lady is seated." "Always rise and open a door for a lady...." and so
forth. (All men who have elder sisters know that code.)

And the Angel (who had failed to relieve Lady Hammergallow of her teacup)
danced forward with astonishing dexterity (leaving Mrs Jehoram in the
window seat) and with an elegant "permit me" rescued the tea-tray from
Lady Hammergallow's pretty parlour-maid and vanished officiously in front
of her. The Vicar rose to his feet with an inarticulate cry.
 107

CHAPTER 37

"He's drunk!" said Mr Rathbone-Slater, breaking a terrific silence. "That's the

matter with him."

Mrs Jehoram laughed hysterically.

The Vicar stood up, motionless, staring. "Oh! I forgot to explain servants to
him!" said the Vicar to himself in a swift outbreak of remorse. "I thought
he did understand servants."

"Really, Mr Hilyer!" said Lady Hammergallow, evidently exercising enormous

self-control and speaking in panting spasms. "Really, Mr Hilyer!—Your
genius is too terrible. I must, I really must, ask you to take him home."

So to the dialogue in the corridor of alarmed maid-servant and well-meaning

(but shockingly gauche) Angel—appears the Vicar, his botryoidal little face
crimson, gaunt despair in his eyes, and his necktie under his left ear.

"Come," he said—struggling with emotion. "Come away.... I.... I am

disgraced for ever."

And the Angel stared for a second at him and obeyed—meekly, perceiving
himself in the presence of unknown but evidently terrible forces.

And so began and ended the Angel's social career.

In the informal indignation meeting that followed, Lady Hammergallow took

the (informal) chair. "I feel humiliated," she said. "The Vicar assured me he
was an exquisite player. I never imagined...."

"He was drunk," said Mr Rathbone-Slater. "You could tell it from the way he
fumbled with his tea."

"Such a fiasco!" said Mrs Mergle.

"The Vicar assured me," said Lady Hammergallow. "'The man I have staying
with me is a musical genius,' he said. His very words."
 108

"His ears must be burning anyhow," said Tommy Rathbone-Slater.

"I was trying to keep him Quiet," said Mrs Jehoram. "By humouring him. And
do you know the things he said to me—there!"

"The thing he played," said Mr Wilmerdings,"—I must confess I did not like
to charge him to his face. But really! It was merely drifting."

"Just fooling with a fiddle, eigh?" said George Harringay. "Well I thought it
was beyond me. So much of your fine music is—"

"Oh, George!" said the younger Miss Pirbright.

"The Vicar was a bit on too—to judge by his tie," said Mr Rathbone-Slater.
"It's a dashed rummy go. Did you notice how he fussed after the genius?"

"One has to be so very careful," said the very eldest Miss Papaver.

"He told me he is in love with the Vicar's housemaid!" said Mrs Jehoram. "I
almost laughed in his face."

"The Vicar ought never to have brought him here," said Mrs Rathbone-Slater
with decision.
 109

CHAPTER 38. THE TROUBLE OF THE BARBED WIRE

So, ingloriously, ended the Angel's first and last appearance in Society. Vicar
and Angel returned to the Vicarage; crestfallen black figures in the bright
sunlight, going dejectedly. The Angel, deeply pained that the Vicar was
pained. The Vicar, dishevelled and desperate, intercalating spasmodic
remorse and apprehension with broken explanations of the Theory of
Etiquette. "They do not understand," said the Vicar over and over again.
"They will all be so very much aggrieved. I do not know what to say to them.
It is all so confused, so perplexing." And at the gate of the Vicarage, at the
very spot where Delia had first seemed beautiful, stood Horrocks the village
constable, awaiting them. He held coiled up about his hand certain short
lengths of barbed wire.

"Good evening, Horrocks," said the Vicar as the constable held the gate
open.

"Evenin', Sir," said Horrocks, and added in a kind of mysterious undertone,

"Could I speak to you a minute, Sir?"

"Certainly," said the Vicar. The Angel walked on thoughtfully to the house,
and meeting Delia in the hall stopped her and cross-examined her at length
over differences between Servants and Ladies.

"You'll excuse my taking the liberty, Sir," said Horrocks, "but there's trouble
brewin' for that crippled gent you got stayin' here."

"Bless me!" said the Vicar. "You don't say so!"

"Sir John Gotch, Sir. He's very angry indeed, Sir. His language, Sir——. But I
felt bound to tell you, Sir. He's certain set on taking out a summons on
account of that there barbed wire. Certain set, Sir, he is."

"Sir John Gotch!" said the Vicar. "Wire! I don't understand."

"He asked me to find out who did it. Course I've had to do my duty, Sir.
Naturally a disagreeable one."
 110

"Barbed wire! Duty! I don't understand you, Horrocks."

"I'm afraid, Sir, there's no denying the evidence. I've made careful enquiries,
Sir." And forthwith the constable began telling the Vicar of a new and
terrible outrage committed by the Angelic visitor.

But we need not follow that explanation in detail—or the subsequent

confession. (For my own part I think there is nothing more tedious than
dialogue). It gave the Vicar a new view of the Angelic character, a vignette
of the Angelic indignation. A shady lane, sun-mottled, sweet hedges full of
honeysuckle and vetch on either side, and a little girl gathering flowers,
forgetful of the barbed wire which, all along the Sidderford Road, fenced in
the dignity of Sir John Gotch from "bounders" and the detested "million."
Then suddenly a gashed hand, a bitter outcry, and the Angel sympathetic,
comforting, inquisitive. Explanations sob-set, and then—altogether novel
phenomenon in the Angelic career—passion. A furious onslaught upon the
barbed wire of Sir John Gotch, barbed wire recklessly handled, slashed, bent
and broken. Yet the Angel acted without personal malice—saw in the thing
only an ugly and vicious plant that trailed insidiously among its fellows.
Finally the Angel's explanations gave the Vicar a picture of the Angel alone
amidst his destruction, trembling and amazed at the sudden force, not
himself, that had sprung up within him, and set him striking and cutting.
Amazed, too, at the crimson blood that trickled down his fingers.

"It is still more horrible," said the Angel when the Vicar explained the
artificial nature of the thing. "If I had seen the man who put this silly-cruel
stuff there to hurt little children, I know I should have tried to inflict pain
upon him. I have never felt like this before. I am indeed becoming tainted
and coloured altogether by the wickedness of this world."

"To think, too, that you men should be so foolish as to uphold the laws that
let a man do such spiteful things. Yes—I know; you will say it has to be so.
For some remoter reason. That is a thing that only makes me angrier. Why
cannot an act rest on its own merits?... As it does in the Angelic Land."

That was the incident the history of which the Vicar now gradually learnt,
getting the bare outline from Horrocks, the colour and emotion
 111

subsequently from the Angel. The thing had happened the day before the
musical festival at Siddermorton House.

"Have you told Sir John who did it?" asked the Vicar. "And are you sure?"

"Quite sure, Sir. There can be no doubting it was your gentleman, Sir. I've
not told Sir John yet, Sir. But I shall have to tell Sir John this evening.
Meaning no offence to you, Sir, as I hopes you'll see. It's my duty, Sir.
Besides which—"

"Of course," said the Vicar, hastily. "Certainly it's your duty. And what will Sir
John do?"

"He's dreadful set against the person who did it—destroying property like
that—and sort of slapping his arrangements in the face."

Pause. Horrocks made a movement. The Vicar, tie almost at the back of his
neck now, a most unusual thing for him, stared blankly at his toes.

"I thought I'd tell you, Sir," said Horrocks.

"Yes," said the Vicar. "Thanks, Horrocks, thanks!" He scratched the back of
his head. "You might perhaps ... I think it's the best way ... Quite sure Mr
Angel did it?"

"Sherlock 'Omes, Sir, couldn't be cocksurer."

"Then I'd better give you a little note to the Squire."

 112

CHAPTER 39

The Vicar's table-talk at dinner that night, after the Angel had stated his
case, was full of grim explanations, prisons, madness.

"It's too late to tell the truth about you now," said the Vicar. "Besides, that's
impossible. I really do not know what to say. We must face our
circumstances, I suppose. I am so undecided—so torn. It's the two worlds. If
your Angelic world were only a dream, or if this world were only a dream—
or if I could believe either or both dreams, it would be all right with me. But
here is a real Angel and a real summons—how to reconcile them I do not
know. I must talk to Gotch.... But he won't understand. Nobody will
understand...."

"I am putting you to terrible inconvenience, I am afraid. My appalling

unworldliness—"

"It's not you," said the Vicar. "It's not you. I perceive you have brought
something strange and beautiful into my life. It's not you. It's myself. If I had
more faith either way. If I could believe entirely in this world, and call you an
Abnormal Phenomenon, as Crump does. But no. Terrestrial Angelic, Angelic
Terrestrial.... See-Saw."

"Still, Gotch is certain to be disagreeable, most disagreeable. He always is. It

puts me into his hands. He is a bad moral influence, I know. Drinking.
Gambling. Worse. Still, one must render unto Cæsar the things that are
Cæsar's. And he is against Disestablishment...."

Then the Vicar would revert to the social collapse of the afternoon. "You are
so very fundamental, you know," he said—several times.

The Angel went to his own room puzzled but very depressed. Every day the
world had frowned darker upon him and his angelic ways. He could see how
the trouble affected the Vicar, yet he could not imagine how he could avert
it. It was all so strange and unreasonable. Twice again, too, he had been
pelted out of the village.
 113

He found the violin lying on his bed where he had laid it before dinner. And
taking it up he began to play to comfort himself. But now he played no
delicious vision of the Angelic Land. The iron of the world was entering into
his soul. For a week now he had known pain and rejection, suspicion and
hatred; a strange new spirit of revolt was growing up in his heart. He played
a melody, still sweet and tender as those of the Angelic Land, but charged
with a new note, the note of human sorrow and effort, now swelling into
something like defiance, dying now into a plaintive sadness. He played
softly, playing to himself to comfort himself, but the Vicar heard, and all his
finite bothers were swallowed up in a hazy melancholy, a melancholy that
was quite remote from sorrow. And besides the Vicar, the Angel had
another hearer of whom neither Angel nor Vicar was thinking.
 114

CHAPTER 40. DELIA

She was only four or five yards away from the Angel in the westward gable.
The diamond-paned window of her little white room was open. She knelt on
her box of japanned tin, and rested her chin on her hands, her elbows on the
window-sill. The young moon hung over the pine trees, and its light, cool
and colourless, lay softly upon the silent-sleeping world. Its light fell upon
her white face, and discovered new depths in her dreaming eyes. Her soft
lips fell apart and showed the little white teeth.

Delia was thinking, vaguely, wonderfully, as girls will think. It was feeling
rather than thinking; clouds of beautiful translucent emotion drove across
the clear sky of her mind, taking shape that changed and vanished. She had
all that wonderful emotional tenderness, that subtle exquisite desire for
self-sacrifice, which exists so inexplicably in a girl's heart, exists it seems only
to be presently trampled under foot by the grim and gross humours of daily
life, to be ploughed in again roughly and remorselessly, as the farmer
ploughs in the clover that has sprung up in the soil. She had been looking
out at the tranquillity of the moonlight long before the Angel began to
play,—waiting; then suddenly the quiet, motionless beauty of silver and
shadow was suffused with tender music.

She did not move, but her lips closed and her eyes grew even softer. She
had been thinking before of the strange glory that had suddenly flashed out
about the stooping hunchback when he spoke to her in the sunset; of that
and of a dozen other glances, chance turns, even once the touching of her
hand. That afternoon he had spoken to her, asking strange questions. Now
the music seemed to bring his very face before her, his look of half curious
solicitude, peering into her face, into her eyes, into her and through her,
deep down into her soul. He seemed now to be speaking directly to
her, telling her of his solitude and trouble. Oh! that regret, that longing! For
he was in trouble. And how could a servant-girl help him, this soft-spoken
gentleman who carried himself so kindly, who played so sweetly. The music
was so sweet and keen, it came so near to the thought of her heart, that
 115

presently one hand tightened on the other, and the tears came streaming
down her face.

As Crump would tell you, people do not do that kind of thing unless there is
something wrong with the nervous system. But then, from the scientific
point of view, being in love is a pathological condition.

I am painfully aware of the objectionable nature of my story here. I have

even thought of wilfully perverting the truth to propitiate the Lady Reader.
But I could not. The story has been too much for me. I do the thing with my
eyes open. Delia must remain what she really was—a servant girl. I know
that to give a mere servant girl, or at least an English servant girl, the refined
feelings of a human being, to present her as speaking with anything but an
intolerable confusion of aspirates, places me outside the pale of respectable
writers. Association with servants, even in thought, is dangerous in these
days. I can only plead (pleading vainly, I know), that Delia was a very
exceptional servant girl. Possibly, if one enquired, it might be found that her
parentage was upper middle-class—that she was made of the finer upper
middle-class clay. And (this perhaps may avail me better) I will promise that
in some future work I will redress the balance, and the patient reader shall
have the recognised article, enormous feet and hands, systematic aspiration
of vowels and elimination of aspirates, no figure (only middle-class girls have
figures—the thing is beyond a servant-girl's means), a fringe (by
agreement), and a cheerful readiness to dispose of her self-respect for half-
a-crown. That is the accepted English servant, the typical English woman
(when stripped of money and accomplishments) as she appears in the
works of contemporary writers. But Delia somehow was different. I can only
regret the circumstance—it was altogether beyond my control.
 116

CHAPTER 41. DOCTOR CRUMP ACTS

Early the next morning the Angel went down through the village, and
climbing the fence, waded through the waist-high reeds that fringe the
Sidder. He was going to Bandram Bay to take a nearer view of the sea,
which one could just see on a clear day from the higher parts of
Siddermorton Park. And suddenly he came upon Crump sitting on a log and
smoking. (Crump always smoked exactly two ounces per week—and he
always smoked it in the open air.)

"Hullo!" said Crump, in his healthiest tone. "How's the wing?"

"Very well," said the Angel. "The pain's gone."

"I suppose you know you are trespassing?"

"Trespassing!" said the Angel.

"I suppose you don't know what that means," said Crump.

"I don't," said the Angel.

"I must congratulate you. I don't know how long you will last, but you are
keeping it up remarkably well. I thought at first you were a mattoid, but
you're so amazingly consistent. Your attitude of entire ignorance of the
elementary facts of Life is really a very amusing pose. You make slips of
course, but very few. But surely we two understand one another."

He smiled at the Angel. "You would beat Sherlock Holmes. I wonder who
you really are."

The Angel smiled back, with eyebrows raised and hands extended. "It's
impossible for you to know who I am. Your eyes are blind, your ears deaf,
your soul dark, to all that is wonderful about me. It's no good my telling that
I fell into your world."
 117

The Doctor waved his pipe. "Not that, please. I don't want to pry if you have
your reasons for keeping quiet. Only I would like you to think of Hilyer's
mental health. He really believes this story."

The Angel shrugged his dwindling wings.

"You did not know him before this affair. He's changed tremendously. He
used to be neat and comfortable. For the last fortnight he's been hazy, with
a far-away look in his eyes. He preached last Sunday without his cuff links,
and something wrong with his tie, and he took for his text, 'Eye hath not
seen nor ear heard.' He really believes all this nonsense about the Angel-
land. The man is verging on monomania!"

"You will see things from your own standpoint," said the Angel.

"Everyone must. At any rate, I think it jolly regrettable to see this poor old
fellow hypnotized, as you certainly have hypnotized him. I don't know
where you come from nor who you are, but I warn you I'm not going to see
the old boy made a fool of much longer."

"But he's not being made a fool of. He's simply beginning to dream of a
world outside his knowledge——"

"It won't do," said Crump. "I'm not one of the dupe class. You are either of
two things—a lunatic at large (which I don't believe), or a knave. Nothing
else is possible. I think I know a little of this world, whatever I do of yours.
Very well. If you don't leave Hilyer alone I shall communicate with the police,
and either clap you into a prison, if you go back on your story, or into a
madhouse if you don't. It's stretching a point, but I swear I'd certify you
insane to-morrow to get you out of the village. It's not only the Vicar. As you
know. I hope that's plain. Now what have you to say?"

With an affectation of great calm, the Doctor took out his penknife and
began to dig the blade into his pipe bowl. His pipe had gone out during this
last speech.

For a moment neither spoke. The Angel looked about him with a face that
grew pale. The Doctor extracted a plug of tobacco from his pipe and flung it
 118

away, shut his penknife and put it in his waistcoat pocket. He had not meant
to speak quite so emphatically, but speech always warmed him.

"Prison," said the Angel. "Madhouse! Let me see." Then he remembered the
Vicar's explanation. "Not that!" he said. He approached Crump with eyes
dilated and hands outstretched.

"I knew you would know what those things meant—at any rate. Sit down,"
said Crump, indicating the tree trunk beside him by a movement of the
head.

The Angel, shivering, sat down on the tree trunk and stared at the Doctor.

Crump was getting out his pouch. "You are a strange man," said the Angel.
"Your beliefs are like—a steel trap."

"They are," said Crump—flattered.

"But I tell you—I assure you the thing is so—I know nothing, or at least
remember nothing of anything I knew of this world before I found myself in
the darkness of night on the moorland above Sidderford."

"Where did you learn the language then?"

"I don't know. Only I tell you—But I haven't an atom of the sort of proof
that would convince you."

"And you really," said Crump, suddenly coming round upon him and looking
into his eyes; "You really believe you were eternally in a kind of glorious
heaven before then?"

"I do," said the Angel.

"Pshaw!" said Crump, and lit his pipe. He sat smoking, elbow on knee, for
some time, and the Angel sat and watched him. Then his face grew less
troubled.

"It is just possible," he said to himself rather than to the Angel, and began
another piece of silence.

"You see;" he said, when that was finished. "There is such a thing as double
personality.... A man sometimes forgets who he is and thinks he is someone
 119

else. Leaves home, friends, and everything, and leads a double life. There
was a case in Nature only a month or so ago. The man was sometimes
English and right-handed, and sometimes Welsh and left-handed. When he
was English he knew no Welsh, when he was Welsh he knew no English....
H'm."

He turned suddenly on the Angel and said "Home!" He fancied he might

revive in the Angel some latent memory of his lost youth. He went on
"Dadda, Pappa, Daddy, Mammy, Pappy, Father, Dad, Governor, Old Boy,
Mother, dear Mother, Ma, Mumsy.... No good? What are you laughing at?"

"Nothing," said the Angel. "You surprised me a little,—that is all. A week

ago I should have been puzzled by that vocabulary."

For a minute Crump rebuked the Angel silently out of the corner of his eye.

"You have such an ingenuous face. You almost force me to believe you. You
are certainly not an ordinary lunatic. Your mind—except for your isolation
from the past—seems balanced enough. I wish Nordau or Lombroso or
some of these Saltpetriere men could have a look at you. Down here one
gets no practice worth speaking about in mental cases. There's one idiot—
and he's just a damned idiot of an idiot—; all the rest are thoroughly sane
people."

"Possibly that accounts for their behaviour," said the Angel thoughtfully.

"But to consider your general position here," said Crump, ignoring his
comment, "I really regard you as a bad influence here. These fancies are
contagious. It is not simply the Vicar. There is a man named Shine has caught
the fad, and he has been in the drink for a week, off and on, and offering to
fight anyone who says you are not an Angel. Then a man over at Sidderford
is, I hear, affected with a kind of religious mania on the same tack. These
things spread. There ought to be a quarantine in mischievous ideas. And I
have heard another story...."

"But what can I do?" said the Angel. "Suppose I am (quite unintentionally)
doing mischief...."

"You can leave the village," said Crump.

 120

"Then I shall only go into another village."

"That's not my affair," said Crump. "Go where you like. Only go. Leave these
three people, the Vicar, Shine, the little servant girl, whose heads are all
spinning with galaxies of Angels...."

"But," said the Angel. "Face your world! I tell you I can't. And leave Delia! I
don't understand.... I do not know how to set about getting Work and Food
and Shelter. And I am growing afraid of human beings...."

"Fancies, fancies," said Crump, watching him, "mania."

"It's no good my persisting in worrying you," he said suddenly, "but certainly

the situation is impossible as it stands." He stood up with a jerk.

"Good-morning, Mr—Angel," he said, "the long and the short of it is—I say
it as the medical adviser of this parish—you are an unhealthy influence. We
can't have you. You must go."

He turned, and went striding through the grass towards the roadway,
leaving the Angel sitting disconsolately on the tree trunk. "An unhealthy
influence," said the Angel slowly, staring blankly in front of him, and trying
to realise what it meant.
 121

CHAPTER 42. SIR JOHN GOTCH ACTS

Sir John Gotch was a little man with scrubby hair, a small, thin nose sticking
out of a face crackled with wrinkles, tight brown gaiters, and a riding whip.
"I've come, you see," he said, as Mrs Hinijer closed the door.

"Thank you," said the Vicar, "I'm obliged to you. I'm really obliged to you."

"Glad to be of any service to you," said Sir John Gotch. (Angular attitude.)

"This business," said the Vicar, "this unfortunate business of the barbed
wire—is really, you know, a most unfortunate business."

Sir John Gotch became decidedly more angular in his attitude. "It is," he
said.

"This Mr Angel being my guest—"

"No reason why he should cut my wire," said Sir John Gotch, briefly.

"None whatever."

"May I ask who this Mr Angel is?" asked Sir John Gotch with the abruptness
of long premeditation.

The Vicar's fingers jumped to his chin. What was the good of talking to a
man like Sir John Gotch about Angels?

"To tell you the exact truth," said the Vicar, "there is a little secret—"

"Lady Hammergallow told me as much."

The Vicar's face suddenly became bright red.

"Do you know," said Sir John, with scarcely a pause, "he's been going about
this village preaching Socialism?"

"Good heavens!" said the Vicar, "No!"

"He has. He has been buttonholing every yokel he came across, and asking
them why they had to work, while we—I and you, you know—did nothing.
 122

He has been saying we ought to educate every man up to your level and
mine—out of the rates, I suppose, as usual. He has been suggesting that
we—I and you, you know—keep these people down—pith 'em."

"Dear me!" said the Vicar, "I had no idea."

"He has done this wire-cutting as a demonstration, I tell you, as a Socialistic

demonstration. If we don't come down on him pretty sharply, I tell you, we
shall have the palings down in Flinders Lane next, and the next thing will be
ricks afire, and every damned (I beg your pardon, Vicar. I know I'm too fond
of that word), every blessed pheasant's egg in the parish smashed. I know
these—"

"A Socialist," said the Vicar, quite put out, "I had no idea."

"You see why I am inclined to push matters against our gentleman though
he is your guest. It seems to me he has been taking advantage of your
paternal—"

"Oh, not paternal!" said the Vicar. "Really—"

"(I beg your pardon, Vicar—it was a slip.) Of your kindness, to go mischief-
making everywhere, setting class against class, and the poor man against his
bread and butter."

The Vicar's fingers were at his chin again.

"So there's one of two things," said Sir John Gotch. "Either that Guest of
yours leaves the parish, or—I take proceedings. That's final."

The Vicar's mouth was all askew.

"That's the position," said Sir John, jumping to his feet, "if it were not for
you, I should take proceedings at once. As it is—am I to take proceedings or
no?"

"You see," said the Vicar in horrible perplexity.

"Well?"

"Arrangements have to be made."

 123

"He's a mischief-making idler.... I know the breed. But I'll give you a week—
—"

"Thank you," said the Vicar. "I understand your position. I perceive the
situation is getting intolerable...."

"Sorry to give you this bother, of course," said Sir John.

"A week," said the Vicar.

"A week," said Sir John, leaving.

The Vicar returned, after accompanying Gotch out, and for a long time he
remained sitting before the desk in his study, plunged in thought. "A week!"
he said, after an immense silence. "Here is an Angel, a glorious Angel, who
has quickened my soul to beauty and delight, who has opened my eyes to
Wonderland, and something more than Wonderland, ... and I have promised
to get rid of him in a week! What are we men made of?... How can I tell him?"

He began to walk up and down the room, then he went into the dining-
room, and stood staring blankly out at the cornfield. The table was already
laid for lunch. Presently he turned, still dreaming, and almost mechanically
helped himself to a glass of sherry.
 124

CHAPTER 43. THE SEA CLIFF

The Angel lay upon the summit of the cliff above Bandram Bay, and stared
out at the glittering sea. Sheer from under his elbows fell the cliff, five
hundred and seven feet of it down to the datum line, and the sea-birds
eddied and soared below him. The upper part of the cliff was a greenish
chalky rock, the lower two-thirds a warm red, marbled with gypsum bands,
and from half-a-dozen places spurted jets of water, to fall in long cascades
down its face. The swell frothed white on the flinty beach, and the water
beyond where the shadows of an outstanding rock lay, was green and
purple in a thousand tints and marked with streaks and flakes of foam. The
air was full of sunlight and the tinkling of the little waterfalls and the slow
soughing of the seas below. Now and then a butterfly flickered over the
face of the cliff, and a multitude of sea birds perched and flew hither and
thither.

The Angel lay with his crippled, shrivelled wings humped upon his back,
watching the gulls and jackdaws and rooks, circling in the sunlight, soaring,
eddying, sweeping down to the water or upward into the dazzling blue of
the sky. Long the Angel lay there and watched them going to and fro on
outspread wings. He watched, and as he watched them he remembered
with infinite longing the rivers of starlight and the sweetness of the land
from which he came. And a gull came gliding overhead, swiftly and easily,
with its broad wings spreading white and fair against the blue. And suddenly
a shadow came into the Angel's eyes, the sunlight left them, he thought of
his own crippled pinions, and put his face upon his arm and wept.

A woman who was walking along the footpath across the Cliff Field saw only
a twisted hunchback dressed in the Vicar of Siddermorton's cast-off clothes,
sprawling foolishly at the edge of the cliff and with his forehead on his
arm. She looked at him and looked again. "The silly creature has gone to
sleep," she said, and though she had a heavy basket to carry, came towards
him with an idea of waking him up. But as she drew near she saw his
shoulders heave and heard the sound of his sobbing.
 125

She stood still a minute, and her features twitched into a kind of grin. Then
treading softly she turned and went back towards the pathway. "'Tis so hard
to think of anything to say," she said. "Poor afflicted soul!"

Presently the Angel ceased sobbing, and stared with a tear-stained face at
the beach below him.

"This world," he said, "wraps me round and swallows me up. My wings grow
shrivelled and useless. Soon I shall be nothing more than a crippled man,
and I shall age, and bow myself to pain, and die.... I am miserable. And I am
alone."

Then he rested his chin on his hands upon the edge of the cliff, and began to
think of Delia's face with the light in her eyes. The Angel felt a curious desire
to go to her and tell her of his withered wings. To place his arms about her
and weep for the land he had lost. "Delia!" he said to himself very softly. And
presently a cloud drove in front of the sun.
 126

CHAPTER 44. MRS HINIJER ACTS

Mrs Hinijer surprised the Vicar by tapping at his study door after tea.
"Begging your pardon, Sir," said Mrs Hinijer. "But might I make so bold as to
speak to you for a moment?"

"Certainly, Mrs Hinijer," said the Vicar, little dreaming of the blow that was
coming. He held a letter in his hand, a very strange and disagreeable letter
from his bishop, a letter that irritated and distressed him, criticising in the
strongest language the guests he chose to entertain in his own house. Only
a popular bishop living in a democratic age, a bishop who was still half a
pedagogue, could have written such a letter.

Mrs Hinijer coughed behind her hand and struggled with some respiratory
disorganisation. The Vicar felt apprehensive. Usually in their interviews he
was the most disconcerted. Invariably so when the interview ended.

"Well?" he said.

"May I make so bold, sir, as to arst when Mr Angel is a-going?" (Cough.)

The Vicar started. "To ask when Mr Angel is going?" he repeated slowly to
gain time. "Another!"

"I'm sorry, sir. But I've been used to waitin' on gentlefolks, sir; and you'd
hardly imagine how it feels quite to wait on such as 'im."

"Such as ... 'im! Do I understand you, Mrs Hinijer, that you don't like Mr
Angel?"

"You see, sir, before I came to you, sir, I was at Lord Dundoller's seventeen
years, and you, sir—if you will excuse me—are a perfect gentleman
yourself, sir—though in the Church. And then...."

"Dear, dear!" said the Vicar. "And don't you regard Mr Angel as a
gentleman?"

"I'm sorry to 'ave to say it, sir."

 127

"But what...? Dear me! Surely!"

"I'm sorry to 'ave to say it, sir. But when a party goes turning vegetarian
suddenly and putting out all the cooking, and hasn't no proper luggage of
his own, and borry's shirts and socks from his 'ost, and don't know no better
than to try his knife at peas (as I seed my very self), and goes talking in odd
corners to the housemaids, and folds up his napkin after meals, and eats
with his fingers at minced veal, and plays the fiddle in the middle of the
night keeping everybody awake, and stares and grins at his elders a-getting
upstairs, and generally misconducts himself with things that I can scarcely
tell you all, one can't help thinking, sir. Thought is free, sir, and one can't
help coming to one's own conclusions. Besides which, there is talk all over
the village about him—what with one thing and another. I know a
gentleman when I sees a gentleman, and I know a gentleman when I don't
see a gentleman, and me, and Susan, and George, we've talked it over,
being the upper servants, so to speak, and experienced, and leaving out that
girl Delia, who I only hope won't come to any harm through him, and
depend upon it, sir, that Mr Angel ain't what you think he is, sir, and the
sooner he leaves this house the better."

Mrs Hinijer ceased abruptly and stood panting but stern, and with her eyes
grimly fixed on the Vicar's face.

"Really, Mrs Hinijer!" said the Vicar, and then, "Oh Lord!"

"What have I done?" said the Vicar, suddenly starting up and appealing to
the inexorable fates. "What HAVE I done?"

"There's no knowing," said Mrs Hinijer. "Though a deal of talk in the village."

"Bother!" said the Vicar, going and staring out of the window. Then he
turned. "Look here, Mrs Hinijer! Mr Angel will be leaving this house in the
course of a week. Is that enough?"

"Quite," said Mrs Hinijer. "And I feel sure, sir...."

The Vicar's eyes fell with unwonted eloquence upon the door.
 128

CHAPTER 45. THE ANGEL IN TROUBLE

"The fact is," said the Vicar, "this is no world for Angels."

The blinds had not been drawn, and the twilight outer world under an
overcast sky seemed unspeakably grey and cold. The Angel sat at table in
dejected silence. His inevitable departure had been proclaimed. Since his
presence hurt people and made the Vicar wretched he acquiesced in the
justice of the decision, but what would happen to him after his plunge he
could not imagine. Something very disagreeable certainly.

"There is the violin," said the Vicar. "Only after our experience——"

"I must get you clothes—a general outfit.—— Dear me! you don't
understand railway travelling! And coinage! Taking lodgings! Eating-
houses!—— I must come up at least and see you settled. Get work for you.
But an Angel in London! Working for his living! That grey cold wilderness of
people! What will become of you?—— If I had one friend in the world I could
trust to believe me!"

"I ought not to be sending you away——"

"Do not trouble overmuch for me, my friend," said the Angel. "At least this
life of yours ends. And there are things in it. There is something in this life of
yours—— Your care for me! I thought there was nothing beautiful at all in
life——"

"And I have betrayed you!" said the Vicar, with a sudden wave of remorse.
"Why did I not face them all—say, 'This is the best of life'? What do these
everyday things matter?"

He stopped suddenly. "What do they matter?" he said.

"I have only come into your life to trouble it," said the Angel.

"Don't say that," said the Vicar. "You have come into my life to awaken me. I
have been dreaming—dreaming. Dreaming this was necessary and that.
Dreaming that this narrow prison was the world. And the dream still hangs
 129

about me and troubles me. That is all. Even your departure——. Am I not
dreaming that you must go?"

When he was in bed that night the mystical aspect of the case came still
more forcibly before the Vicar. He lay awake and had the most horrible
visions of his sweet and delicate visitor drifting through this unsympathetic
world and happening upon the cruellest misadventures. His guest was an
Angel assuredly. He tried to go over the whole story of the past eight days
again. He thought of the hot afternoon, the shot fired out of sheer surprise,
the fluttering iridescent wings, the beautiful saffron-robed figure upon the
ground. How wonderful that had seemed to him! Then his mind turned to
the things he had heard of the other world, to the dreams the violin had
conjured up, to the vague, fluctuating, wonderful cities of the Angelic Land.
He tried to recall the forms of the buildings, the shapes of the fruits upon
the trees, the aspect of the winged shapes that traversed its ways.
They grew from a memory into a present reality, grew every moment just a
little more vivid and his troubles a little less immediate; and so, softly and
quietly, the Vicar slipped out of his troubles and perplexities into the Land of
Dreams.
 130

CHAPTER 46

Delia sat with her window open, hoping to hear the Angel play. But that
night there was to be no playing. The sky was overcast, yet not so thickly
but that the moon was visible. High up a broken cloud-lace drove across the
sky, and now the moon was a hazy patch of light, and now it was darkened,
and now rode clear and bright and sharply outlined against the blue gulf of
night. And presently she heard the door into the garden opening, and a
figure came out under the drifting pallor of the moonlight.

It was the Angel. But he wore once more the saffron robe in the place of his
formless overcoat. In the uncertain light this garment had only a colourless
shimmer, and his wings behind him seemed a leaden grey. He began taking
short runs, flapping his wings and leaping, going to and fro amidst the
drifting patches of light and the shadows of the trees. Delia watched him in
amazement. He gave a despondent cry, leaping higher. His shrivelled wings
flashed and fell. A thicker patch in the cloud-film made everything obscure.
He seemed to spring five or six feet from the ground and fall clumsily. She
saw him in the dimness crouching on the ground and then she heard him
sobbing.

"He's hurt!" said Delia, pressing her lips together hard and staring. "I ought
to help him."

She hesitated, then stood up and flitted swiftly towards the door, went
slipping quietly downstairs and out into the moonlight. The Angel still lay
upon the lawn, and sobbed for utter wretchedness.

"Oh! what is the matter?" said Delia, stooping over him and touching his
head timidly.

The Angel ceased sobbing, sat up abruptly, and stared at her. He saw her
face, moonlit, and soft with pity. "What is the matter?" she whispered. "Are
you hurt?"
 131

The Angel stared about him, and his eyes came to rest on her face. "Delia!"
he whispered.

"Are you hurt?" said Delia.

"My wings," said the Angel. "I cannot use my wings."

Delia did not understand, but she realised that it was something very
dreadful. "It is dark, it is cold," whispered the Angel; "I cannot use my
wings."

It hurt her unaccountably to see the tears on his face. She did not know
what to do.

"Pity me, Delia," said the Angel, suddenly extending his arms towards her;
"pity me."

Impulsively she knelt down and took his face between her hands. "I do not
know," she said; "but I am sorry. I am sorry for you, with all my heart."

The Angel said not a word. He was looking at her little face in the bright
moonlight, with an expression of uncomprehending wonder in his eyes.
"This strange world!" he said.

She suddenly withdrew her hands. A cloud drove over the moon. "What can
I do to help you?" she whispered. "I would do anything to help you."

He still held her at arm's length, perplexity replacing misery in his face. "This
strange world!" he repeated.

Both whispered, she kneeling, he sitting, in the fluctuating moonlight and

darkness of the lawn.

"Delia!" said Mrs Hinijer, suddenly projecting from her window; "Delia, is
that you?"

They both looked up at her in consternation.

"Come in at once, Delia," said Mrs Hinijer. "If that Mr Angel was a gentleman
(which he isn't), he'd feel ashamed of hisself. And you an orphan too!"
 132

CHAPTER 47. THE LAST DAY OF THE VISIT

On the morning of the next day the Angel, after he had breakfasted, went
out towards the moor, and Mrs Hinijer had an interview with the Vicar. What
happened need not concern us now. The Vicar was visibly disconcerted.
"He mustgo," he said; "certainly he must go," and straightway he forgot the
particular accusation in the general trouble. He spent the morning in hazy
meditation, interspersed by a spasmodic study of Skiff and Waterlow's price
list, and the catalogue of the Medical, Scholastic, and Clerical Stores. A
schedule grew slowly on a sheet of paper that lay on the desk before him.
He cut out a self-measurement form from the tailoring department of the
Stores and pinned it to the study curtains. This was the kind of document he
was making:

"1 Black Melton Frock Coat, patts? £3, 10s.

"? Trousers. 2 pairs or one.

"1 Cheviot Tweed Suit (write for patterns. Self-meas.?)"

The Vicar spent some time studying a pleasing array of model gentlemen.
They were all very nice-looking, but he found it hard to imagine the Angel so
transfigured. For, although six days had passed, the Angel remained without
any suit of his own. The Vicar had vacillated between a project of driving the
Angel into Portbroddock and getting him measured for a suit, and his
absolute horror of the insinuating manners of the tailor he employed. He
knew that tailor would demand an exhaustive explanation. Besides which,
one never knew when the Angel might leave. So the six days had passed,
and the Angel had grown steadily in the wisdom of this world and shrouded
his brightness still in the ample retirement of the Vicar's newest clothes.

"1 Soft Felt Hat, No. G. 7 (say), 8s 6d.

"1 Silk Hat, 14s 6d. Hatbox?"

("I suppose he ought to have a silk hat," said the Vicar; "it's the correct thing
up there. Shape No. 3 seems best suited to his style. But it's dreadful to
 133

think of him all alone in that great city. Everyone will misunderstand him,
and he will misunderstand everybody. However, I suppose it must be. Where
was I?)"

"1 Toothbrush. 1 Brush and Comb. Razor?

"½ doz. Shirts (? measure his neck), 6s ea.

"Socks? Pants?

"2 suits Pyjamas. Price? Say 15s.

"1 doz. Collars ('The Life Guardsman'), 8s.

"Braces. Oxon Patent Versatile, 1s 11½d."

("But how will he get them on?" said the Vicar.)

"1 Rubber Stamp, T. Angel, and Marking Ink in box complete, 9d.

("Those washerwomen are certain to steal all his things.")

"1 Single-bladed Penknife with Corkscrew, say 1s 6d.

"N.B.—Don't forget Cuff Links, Collar Stud, &c." (The Vicar loved "&c.", it gave
things such a precise and business-like air.)

"1 Leather Portmanteau (had better see these)."

And so forth—meanderingly. It kept the Vicar busy until lunch time, though
his heart ached.

The Angel did not return to lunch. This was not so very remarkable—once
before he had missed the midday meal. Yet, considering how short was the
time they would have together now, he might perhaps have come back.
Doubtless he had excellent reasons, though, for his absence. The Vicar made
an indifferent lunch. In the afternoon he rested in his usual manner, and did
a little more to the list of requirements. He did not begin to feel nervous
about the Angel till tea-time. He waited, perhaps, half an hour before he
took tea. "Odd," said the Vicar, feeling still more lonely as he drank his tea.

As the time for dinner crept on and no Angel appeared the Vicar's
imagination began to trouble him. "He will come in to dinner, surely," said
 134

the Vicar, caressing his chin, and beginning to fret about the house upon
inconsiderable errands, as his habit was when anything occurred to break
his routine. The sun set, a gorgeous spectacle, amidst tumbled masses of
purple cloud. The gold and red faded into twilight; the evening star gathered
her robe of light together from out the brightness of the sky in the West.
Breaking the silence of evening that crept over the outer world, a corncrake
began his whirring chant. The Vicar's face grew troubled; twice he went and
stared at the darkening hillside, and then fretted back to the house again.
Mrs Hinijer served dinner. "Your dinner's ready," she announced for the
second time, with a reproachful intonation. "Yes, yes," said the Vicar, fussing
off upstairs.

He came down and went into his study and lit his reading lamp, a patent
affair with an incandescent wick, dropping the match into his waste-paper
basket without stopping to see if it was extinguished. Then he fretted into
the dining-room and began a desultory attack on the cooling dinner....

(Dear Reader, the time is almost ripe to say farewell to this little Vicar of
ours.)
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CHAPTER 48

Sir John Gotch (still smarting over the business of the barbed wire) was
riding along one of the grassy ways through the preserves by the Sidder,
when he saw, strolling slowly through the trees beyond the undergrowth,
the one particular human being he did not want to see.

"I'm damned," said Sir John Gotch, with immense emphasis; "if this isn't
altogether too much."

He raised himself in the stirrups. "Hi!" he shouted. "You there!"

The Angel turned smiling.

"Get out of this wood!" said Sir John Gotch.

"Why?" said the Angel.

"I'm ———," said Sir John Gotch, meditating some cataclysmal expletive.
But he could think of nothing more than "damned." "Get out of this wood,"
he said.

The Angel's smile vanished. "Why should I get out of this wood?" he said,
and stood still.

Neither spoke for a full half minute perhaps, and then Sir John Gotch
dropped out of his saddle and stood by the horse.

(Now you must remember—lest the Angelic Hosts be discredited hereby—

that this Angel had been breathing the poisonous air of this Struggle for
Existence of ours for more than a week. It was not only his wings and the
brightness of his face that suffered. He had eaten and slept and learnt the
lesson of pain—had travelled so far on the road to humanity. All the length
of his Visit he had been meeting more and more of the harshness and
conflict of this world, and losing touch with the glorious altitudes of his
own.)
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"You won't go, eigh!" said Gotch, and began to lead his horse through the
bushes towards the Angel. The Angel stood, all his muscles tight and his
nerves quivering, watching his antagonist approach.

"Get out of this wood," said Gotch, stopping three yards away, his face
white with rage, his bridle in one hand and his riding whip in the other.

Strange floods of emotion were running through the Angel. "Who are you,"
he said, in a low quivering voice; "who am I—that you should order me out
of this place? What has the World done that men like you...."

"You're the fool who cut my barbed wire," said Gotch, threatening, "If you
want to know!"

"Your barbed wire," said the Angel. "Was that your barbed wire? Are you the
man who put down that barbed wire? What right have you...."

"Don't you go talking Socialist rot," said Gotch in short gasps. "This wood's
mine, and I've a right to protect it how I can. I know your kind of muck.
Talking rot and stirring up discontent. And if you don't get out of it jolly
sharp...."

"Well!" said the Angel, a brimming reservoir of unaccountable energy.

"Get out of this damned wood!" said Gotch, flashing into the bully out of
sheer alarm at the light in the Angel's face.

He made one step towards him, with the whip raised, and then something
happened that neither he nor the Angel properly understood. The Angel
seemed to leap into the air, a pair of grey wings flashed out at the Squire, he
saw a face bearing down upon him, full of the wild beauty of passionate
anger. His riding whip was torn out of his hand. His horse reared behind him,
pulled him over, gained his bridle and fled.

The whip cut across his face as he fell back, stung across his face again as he
sat on the ground. He saw the Angel, radiant with anger, in the act to strike
again. Gotch flung up his hands, pitched himself forward to save his eyes,
and rolled on the ground under the pitiless fury of the blows that rained
down upon him.
 137

"You brute," cried the Angel, striking wherever he saw flesh to feel. "You
bestial thing of pride and lies! You who have overshadowed the souls of
other men. You shallow fool with your horses and dogs! To lift your face
against any living thing! Learn! Learn! Learn!"

Gotch began screaming for help. Twice he tried to clamber to his feet, got to
his knees, and went headlong again under the ferocious anger of the Angel.
Presently he made a strange noise in his throat, and ceased even to writhe
under his punishment.

Then suddenly the Angel awakened from his wrath, and found himself
standing, panting and trembling, one foot on a motionless figure, under the
green stillness of the sunlit woods.

He stared about him, then down at his feet where, among the tangled dead
leaves, the hair was matted with blood. The whip dropped from his hands,
the hot colour fled from his face. "Pain!" he said. "Why does he lie so still?"

He took his foot off Gotch's shoulder, bent down towards the prostrate
figure, stood listening, knelt—shook him. "Awake!" said the Angel. Then still
more softly, "Awake!"

He remained listening some minutes or more, stood up sharply, and looked

round him at the silent trees. A feeling of profound horror descended upon
him, wrapped him round about. With an abrupt gesture he turned. "What
has happened to me?" he said, in an awe-stricken whisper.

He started back from the motionless figure. "Dead!" he said suddenly, and
turning, panic stricken, fled headlong through the wood.
 138

CHAPTER 49

It was some minutes after the footsteps of the Angel had died away in the
distance that Gotch raised himself on his hand. "By Jove!" he said. "Crump's
right."

"Cut at the head, too!"

He put his hand to his face and felt the two weals running across it, hot and
fat. "I'll think twice before I lift my hand against a lunatic again," said Sir
John Gotch.

"He may be a person of weak intellect, but I'm damned if he hasn't a pretty
strong arm. Phew! He's cut a bit clean off the top of my ear with that infernal
lash."

"That infernal horse will go galloping to the house in the approved dramatic
style. Little Madam'll be scared out of her wits. And I ... I shall have to
explain how it all happened. While she vivisects me with questions.

"I'm a jolly good mind to have spring guns and man-traps put in this
preserve. Confound the Law!"
 139

CHAPTER 50

But the Angel, thinking that Gotch was dead, went wandering off in a
passion of remorse and fear through the brakes and copses along the
Sidder. You can scarcely imagine how appalled he was at this last and
overwhelming proof of his encroaching humanity. All the darkness, passion
and pain of life seemed closing in upon him, inexorably, becoming part of
him, chaining him to all that a week ago he had found strange and pitiful in
men.

"Truly, this is no world for an Angel!" said the Angel. "It is a World of War, a
World of Pain, a World of Death. Anger comes upon one ... I who knew not
pain and anger, stand here with blood stains on my hands. I have fallen. To
come into this world is to fall. One must hunger and thirst and be tormented
with a thousand desires. One must fight for foothold, be angry and strike—
—"

He lifted up his hands to Heaven, the ultimate bitterness of helpless remorse

in his face, and then flung them down with a gesture of despair. The prison
walls of this narrow passionate life seemed creeping in upon him, certainly
and steadily, to crush him presently altogether. He felt what all we poor
mortals have to feel sooner or later—the pitiless force of the Things that
Must Be, not only without us but (where the real trouble lies) within, all the
inevitable tormenting of one's high resolves, those inevitable seasons when
the better self is forgotten. But with us it is a gentle descent, made by
imperceptible degrees over a long space of years; with him it was the
horrible discovery of one short week. He felt he was being crippled, caked
over, blinded, stupefied in the wrappings of this life, he felt as a man might
feel who has taken some horrible poison, and feels destruction spreading
within him.

He took no account of hunger or fatigue or the flight of time. On and on he

went, avoiding houses and roads, turning away from the sight and sound of
a human being in a wordless desperate argument with Fate. His thoughts
did not flow but stood banked back in inarticulate remonstrance against his
 140

degradation. Chance directed his footsteps homeward and, at last, after

nightfall, he found himself faint and weary and wretched, stumbling along
over the moor at the back of Siddermorton. He heard the rats run and
squeal in the heather, and once a noiseless big bird came out of the
darkness, passed, and vanished again. And he saw without noticing it a dull
red glow in the sky before him.
 141

CHAPTER 51

But when he came over the brow of the moor, a vivid light sprang up before
him and refused to be ignored. He came on down the hill and speedily saw
more distinctly what the glare was. It came from darting and trembling
tongues of fire, golden and red, that shot from the windows and a hole in
the roof of the Vicarage. A cluster of black heads, all the village in fact,
except the fire-brigade—who were down at Aylmer's Cottage trying to find
the key of the machine-house—came out in silhouette against the blaze.
There was a roaring sound, and a humming of voices, and presently a furious
outcry. There was a shouting of "No! No!"—"Come back!" and an
inarticulate roar.

He began to run towards the burning house. He stumbled and almost fell,
but he ran on. He found black figures running about him. The flaring fire
blew gustily this way and that, and he smelt the smell of burning.

"She went in," said one voice, "she went in."

"The mad girl!" said another.

"Stand back! Stand back!" cried others.

He found himself thrusting through an excited, swaying crowd, all staring at

the flames, and with the red reflection in their eyes.

"Stand back!" said a labourer, clutching him.

"What is it?" said the Angel. "What does this mean?"

"There's a girl in the house, and she can't get out!"

"Went in after a fiddle," said another.

"'Tas hopeless," he heard someone else say.

"I was standing near her. I heerd her. Says she: 'I can get his fiddle.' I heerd
her—Just like that! 'I can get his fiddle.'"
 142

For a moment the Angel stood staring. Then in a flash he saw it all, saw this
grim little world of battle and cruelty, transfigured in a splendour that
outshone the Angelic Land, suffused suddenly and insupportably glorious
with the wonderful light of Love and Self-Sacrifice. He gave a strange cry,
and before anyone could stop him, was running towards the burning
building. There were cries of "The Hunchback! The Fowener!"

The Vicar, whose scalded hand was being tied up, turned his head, and he
and Crump saw the Angel, a black outline against the intense, red glare of
the doorway. It was the sensation of the tenth of a second, yet both men
could not have remembered that transitory attitude more vividly had it been
a picture they had studied for hours together. Then the Angel was hidden by
something massive (no one knew what) that fell, incandescent, across the
doorway.
 143

CHAPTER 52

There was a cry of "Delia" and no more. But suddenly the flames spurted out
in a blinding glare that shot upward to an immense height, a blinding
brilliance broken by a thousand flickering gleams like the waving of swords.
And a gust of sparks, flashing in a thousand colours, whirled up and
vanished. Just then, and for a moment by some strange accident, a rush of
music, like the swell of an organ, wove into the roaring of the flames.

The whole village standing in black knots heard the sound, except Gaffer
Siddons who is deaf—strange and beautiful it was, and then gone again.
Lumpy Durgan, the idiot boy from Sidderford, said it began and ended like
the opening and shutting of a door.

But little Hetty Penzance had a pretty fancy of two figures with wings, that
flashed up and vanished among the flames.

(And after that it was she began to pine for the things she saw in her
dreams, and was abstracted and strange. It grieved her mother sorely at the
time. She grew fragile, as though she was fading out of the world, and her
eyes had a strange, far-away look. She talked of angels and rainbow colours
and golden wings, and was for ever singing an unmeaning fragment of an air
that nobody knew. Until Crump took her in hand and cured her with
fattening dietary, syrup of hypophosphites and cod liver oil.)
 144

THE EPILOGUE

And there the story of the Wonderful Visit ends. The Epilogue is in the
mouth of Mrs Mendham. There stand two little white crosses in the
Siddermorton churchyard, near together, where the brambles come
clambering over the stone wall. One is inscribed Thomas Angel and the
other Delia Hardy, and the dates of the deaths are the same. Really there is
nothing beneath them but the ashes of the Vicar's stuffed ostrich. (You will
remember the Vicar had his ornithological side.) I noticed them when Mrs
Mendham was showing me the new De la Beche monument. (Mendham has
been Vicar since Hilyer died.) "The granite came from somewhere in
Scotland," said Mrs Mendham, "and cost ever so much—I forget how
much—but a wonderful lot! It's quite the talk of the village."

"Mother," said Cissie Mendham, "you are stepping on a grave."

"Dear me!" said Mrs Mendham, "How heedless of me! And the cripple's
grave too. But really you've no idea how much this monument cost them."

"These two people, by the bye," said Mrs Mendham, "were killed when the
old Vicarage was burnt. It's rather a strange story. He was a curious person,
a hunchbacked fiddler, who came from nobody knows where, and imposed
upon the late Vicar to a frightful extent. He played in a pretentious way by
ear, and we found out afterwards that he did not know a note of music—
not a note. He was exposed before quite a lot of people. Among other
things, he seems to have been 'carrying on,' as people say, with one of the
servants, a sly little drab.... But Mendham had better tell you all about it. The
man was half-witted and curiously deformed. It's strange the fancies girls
have."

She looked sharply at Cissie, and Cissie blushed to the eyes.

"She was left in the house and he rushed into the flames in an attempt to
save her. Quite romantic—isn't it? He was rather clever with the fiddle in his
uneducated way.
 145

"All the poor Vicar's stuffed skins were burned at the same time. It was
almost all he cared for. He never really got over the blow. He came to stop
with us—for there wasn't another house available in the village. But he
never seemed happy. He seemed all shaken. I never saw a man so changed. I
tried to stir him up, but it was no good—no good at all. He had the queerest
delusions about angels and that kind of thing. It made him odd company at
times. He would say he heard music, and stare quite stupidly at nothing for
hours together. He got quite careless about his dress.... He died within a
twelvemonth of the fire."

THE END.