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

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 At the Vicarage (Continued)

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.

XIII 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,