The Wonderful Visit, H. G. Wells [me reader txt] 📗

“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?”

“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 Caesar.⁠ ⁠… 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.”

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.

“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 aether 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.