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

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.”

“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.

“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.

XXX Further Adventures of the Angel in the Village (Continued)

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 wildflowers. 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?”

“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