The Wonderful Visit quotes

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.

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.

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.

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 eyewitnesses of the Strange Bird.

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!

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 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!

“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.

Put yourself in his place, my dear Athenaeum. 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.

There may be world upon world, universe upon universe. It’s perfectly possible.

There’s nothing so incredible as the absolutely possible.

But I wonder how you came to fall out of your world into mine. …”

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 …

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.”

“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.”

“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—”

“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—”

But at any rate 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 moment—“I cannot but believe you are an angel. … Surely I can believe my own eyes.”

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.”

“

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.

“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 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.

… 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;

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 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!”

’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.

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.

“Got something very like the ’ump,” said the carter from Upmorton. “Daa-a-amned 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.

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.

“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.

”

“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.”

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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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 battlefield⁠—the whole world.

We are driven by pain. Here. How it lies on the surface! This Angel sees it in a day!”

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!”

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.

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.

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.

Crump was getting out his pouch. “You are a strange man,” said the Angel. “

Your beliefs are like⁠—a steel trap.

”

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. …”

“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 about me and troubles me. That is all. Even your departure—. Am I not dreaming that you must go?”

“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 about me and troubles me. That is all. Even your departure—. Am I not dreaming that you must go?”