now in the land of the angels, so the vicar learnt in the course of many conversations, there is neither pain nor trouble nor death, marrying nor giving in marriage, birth nor forgetting. only at times new things begin. it is a land without hill or dale, a wonderfully level land, glittering with strange buildings, with incessant sunlight or full moon, and with incessant breezes blowing through the æolian traceries of the trees. it is wonderland, with glittering seas hanging in the sky, across which strange fleets go sailing, none know whither. there the flowers glow in heaven and the stars shine about one's feet and the breath of life is a delight. the land goes on for ever—there is no solar system nor interstellar space such as there is in our universe—and the air goes upward past the sun into the uttermost abyss of their sky. and there is nothing but beauty there—all the beauty in our art is but[pg 29] feeble rendering of faint glimpses of that wonderful world, and our composers, our original composers, are those who hear, however faintly, the dust of melody that drives before its winds. and the angels, and wonderful monsters of bronze and marble and living fire, go to and fro therein.
it is a land of law—for whatever is, is under the law—but its laws all, in some strange way, differ from ours. their geometry is different because their space has a curve in it so that all their planes are cylinders; and their law of gravitation is not according to the law of inverse squares, and there are four-and-twenty primary colours instead of only three. most of the fantastic things of our science are commonplaces there, and all our earthly science would seem to them the maddest dreaming. there are no flowers upon their plants, for instance, but jets of coloured fire. that, of course, will seem mere nonsense to you because you do not understand most of what the angel told the vicar, indeed the vicar could not realise, because his own experiences, being only of this world of matter,[pg 30] warred against his understanding. it was too strange to imagine.
what had jolted these twin universes together so that the angel had fallen suddenly into sidderford, neither the angel nor the vicar could tell. 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 to the vicar of siddermorton about the plurality of worlds. the author will swear to the angel, if need be; and there he draws the line.
