by Anthology
He was rejoiced to hear that the pain of the bandaged wing fell rapidly in intensity.
PARENTHESIS ON ANGELS.
IX.
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 patiently, therefore, with his scattered remiges, and be not hasty with your charge of irreverence before the story is read.
AT THE VICARAGE.
X.
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.
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.
XI.
"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.
"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!"
XII.
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 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, apropos of 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."
"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.
THE MAN OF SCIENCE.
XIII.
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, 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. 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 e
xtraordinary Dream!"
XIV.
"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.
"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."
