The Wonderful Visit - H. G. Wells (snow like ashes series TXT) 📗

our food,” said the Vicar. “What?” said the Angel. “Is not obtained without inflicting Pain,” said the Vicar.

The Angel’s face went so white that the Vicar checked himself suddenly. Or he was just on the very verge of a concise explanation of the antecedents of a leg of lamb. There was a pause.

“By the by,” said the Angel, suddenly. “Have you been pithed? Like the common people.”

XXXIV The Angel’s Debut

When Lady Hammergallow made up her mind, things happened as she resolved. And though the Vicar made a spasmodic protest, she carried out her purpose and got audience, Angel, and violin together, at Siddermorton House before the week was out. “A genius the Vicar has discovered,” she said; so with eminent foresight putting any possibility of blame for a failure on the Vicar’s shoulders. “The dear Vicar tells me,” she would say, and proceed to marvellous anecdotes of the Angel’s cleverness with his instrument. But she was quite in love with her idea⁠—she had always had a secret desire to play the patroness to obscure talent. Hitherto it had not turned out to be talent when it came to the test.

“It would be such a good thing for him,” she said. “His hair is long already, and with that high colour he would be beautiful, simply beautiful on a platform. The Vicar’s clothes fitting him so badly makes him look quite like a fashionable pianist already. And the scandal of his birth⁠—not told, of course, but whispered⁠—would be⁠—quite an inducement⁠—when he gets to London, that is.”

The Vicar had the most horrible sensations as the day approached. He spent hours trying to explain the situation to the Angel, other hours trying to imagine what people would think, still worse hours trying to anticipate the Angel’s behaviour. Hitherto the Angel had always played for his own satisfaction. The Vicar would startle him every now and then by rushing upon him with some new point of etiquette that had just occurred to him. As for instance: “It’s very important where you put your hat, you know. Don’t put it on a chair, whatever you do. Hold it until you get your tea, you know, and then⁠—let me see⁠—then put it down somewhere, you know.” The journey to Siddermorton House was accomplished without misadventure, but at the moment of introduction the Vicar had a spasm of horrible misgivings. He had forgotten to explain introductions. The Angel’s naive amusement was evident, but nothing very terrible happened.

“Rummy looking greaser,” said Mr. Rathbone Slater, who devoted considerable attention to costume. “Wants grooming. No manners. Grinned when he saw me shaking hands. Did it chic enough, I thought.”

One trivial misadventure occurred. When Lady Hammergallow welcomed the Angel she looked at him through her glasses. The apparent size of her eyes startled him. His surprise and his quick attempt to peer over the brims was only too evident. But the Vicar had warned him of the ear trumpet.

The Angel’s incapacity to sit on anything but a music stool appeared to excite some interest among the ladies, but led to no remarks. They regarded it perhaps as the affectation of a budding professional. He was remiss with the teacups and scattered the crumbs of his cake abroad. (You must remember he was quite an amateur at eating.) He crossed his legs. He fumbled over the hat business after vainly trying to catch the Vicar’s eye. The eldest Miss Papaver tried to talk to him about continental watering places and cigarettes, and formed a low opinion of his intelligence.

The Angel was surprised by the production of an easel and several books of music, and a little unnerved at first by the sight of Lady Hammergallow sitting with her head on one side, watching him with those magnified eyes through her gilt glasses.

Mrs. Jehoram came up to him before he began to play and asked him the name of the charming piece he was playing the other afternoon. The Angel said it had no name, and Mrs. Jehoram thought music ought never to have any names and wanted to know who it was by, and when the Angel told her he played it out of his head, she said he must be “quite a genius” and looked open (and indisputably fascinating) admiration at him. The Curate from Iping Hanger (who was professionally a Kelt and who played the piano and talked colour and music with an air of racial superiority) watched him jealously.

The Vicar, who was presently captured and set down next to Lady Hammergallow, kept an anxious eye ever Angelward while she told him particulars of the incomes made by violinists⁠—particulars which, for the most part, she invented as she went along. She had been a little ruffled by the incident of the glasses, but had decided that it came within the limits of permissible originality.

So figure to yourself the Green Saloon at Siddermorton Park; an Angel thinly disguised in clerical vestments and with a violin in his hands, standing by the grand piano, and a respectable gathering of quiet nice people, nicely dressed, grouped about the room. Anticipatory gabble⁠—one hears scattered fragments of conversation.

“He is incog.”; said the very eldest Miss Papaver to Mrs. Pirbright. “Isn’t it quaint and delicious. Jessica Jehoram says she saw him at Vienna, but she can’t remember the name. The Vicar knows all about him, but he is so close⁠—”

“How hot and uncomfortable the dear Vicar is looking,” said Mrs. Pirbright. “I’ve noticed it before when he sits next to Lady Hammergallow. She simply will not respect his cloth. She goes on⁠—”

“His tie is all askew,” said the very eldest Miss Papaver, “and his hair! It really hardly looks as though he had brushed it all day.”

“Seems a foreign sort of chap. Affected. All very well in a drawing-room,” said George Harringay, sitting apart with the younger Miss Pirbright. “But for my part give me a masculine man and a feminine woman. What do you think?”

“Oh!⁠—I think so too,” said the younger Miss Pirbright.

“Guineas and