THE HESITANT ANGEL

Originally published in Fantastic Adventures, October 1947.

Celestial radiance.

A thing like that makes one want to talk, and Gorski was the only one I could think of. Gorski didn’t have a sense of humor, but he had everything else. Even money, though heaven knows where it came from. He didn’t try to paint like the rest of us. You might say he made a career of not painting in a studio.

“Gorski,” I said to him, “if a man thinks he’s going crazy, that’s pretty good proof he isn’t, huh?”

“So they say,” he said.

He took a long look at me, and then produced an amber bottle plugged with a piece of candle. He put it and two goblets on the table between us.

I’d been merely toying with the idea of confiding, but now I knew that I would. Not abruptly, though. With Gorski, the shortest distance between two points was a long curve with several tangents.

“So they say,” I echoed. “But is it really so?”

He filled our goblets, and then pushed the hair back off his forehead before answering. “What ‘crazy’ means you tell me first. Then I tell you whether a man knows he is going.”

I was ready for that. “Not to be technical,” I began, “Let’s say ‘crazy’ means seeing things that aren’t there.” He jerked his thumb at a canvas standing in the corner, one I’d painted myself and brought over for his opinion.

“What see you there?” he asked.

“A warped, stunted tree overhanging a vertical cliff, against a background of drifting—”

He waved me imperiously to silence. “Not there. Not there at all. Flat canvas stretched over a frame and daubed with various oily pigments. No tree. No cliff. But you see them; crazy that makes you, no?”

I grinned. Tangent one; I’d have to backtrack to the main curve. “Those things I see subjectively,” I argued. “They are matters of interpretation. Other things I see objectively. But—” I felt myself nearing the last bend of the curve “—what I’m talking about is a celestial radiance. That’s neither subjective nor objective, or else both.” Gorski let the radiance alone and lit on the “both,” which was just like him. So I explained: “The radiance part seems objective, but the celestial part is certainly subjective. I mean you can see a radiance objectively, but if it conveys the idea of being celestial that part is certainly— Oh, you know what I mean.”

“Perhaps,” sad Gorski. He picked up his glass and took a long drink. “And now that we have beaten the bush about, suppose you tell me of what you speak.”

I absentmindedly reached out for my own glass, and there was that dratted shimmer again, to the left of the table this time. It might merely have been imagination, but anyway I pulled back my hand and didn’t take the drink.

“A month ago it started,” I told him. “That night after the party at Rene’s place. Remember? I got drunk, stinkingly drunk.”

“So bad you didn’t seem when you left, my friend.”

“That was just about when I started drinking seriously. And I had an edge even then. Maybe I didn’t show it. Anyway, I went on to—oh, let’s skip the details. I got drunker than I’d ever been before. But I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t seeing things, get that.”

“Except celestial radiances?”

“Well, yes, but that wasn’t because I was drunk. I’ve been sober ever since and—”

“When last did you see it?”

“Just now. When I reached out to pick up that glass of wine. She won’t let me drink, Gorski. It’s an outrage, a damned— Ouch!”

Gorski was looking at me somberly. “First, why do you say ‘she’? And second, why do you say ‘Ouch?’”

“Well, I don’t know exactly—I mean in answer to your first question. But I’ve a hunch that she’s a she. I just sort of feel it, that’s all.”

“You mean that she won’t let you drink, so she must be a she, and that if he wouldn’t let you drink, it would be a he?”

His expression was so deadly serious that I burst out laughing. “Gorski, old man, that’s it exactly. Although it’s sure a hell of a—Ouch! Damn—Ouch! Swear for me, Gorski.”

“It would be useless. But hurt where does it?”

I leaned back in the chair and concentrated with my eyes closed, trying my best to give him a coherent answer. “Nowhere,” I said, “and everywhere. It’s—it’s like somebody sticks a pin into you only you don’t know where.” No, that didn’t express it at all, and I tried again. “It’s like—” I bogged down completely; that just wasn’t any simile for a pain that one gets psychically and feels physically.

“Your conscience, perhaps maybe?”

I snorted. “Conscience? Phooey! That’s silly, and you know it. There’s nothing wrong with taking—”

“Go back to going home from Rene’s. Drunk you were. Then?”

“I staggered right smack in front of a truck. A big trailer van. And—”

Gorski tapped the table with a spatulate fingertip. “And missed being run over by an eyelash,” he said. “A quick feeling you had as though something or someone pulled you from the wheels away. There was a flash of radiance and— No?”

I was gawking at him. “How the hell could you know?”

He stood up and waved his arms. “But it was obvious. Celestial radiances, you talk about. And swear you can’t. You haven’t dared drink. And then, it comes out a truck and a narrow escape, with celestial aid! My friend, what but a guardian angel could you have?”

I closed my eyes again. I’d known it myself. But in words, in English—even Gorski’s English—it scared me stiff to hear it.

“But you know that’s silly,” I protested. My voice must have sounded plaintive. “There aren’t—there can’t be, literally, I mean— It’s impossible. They don’t—”

“Why not?”

“Well, because—” I grasped at a straw. “If there are, why can’t other people see them?”

“I know a man who has web toes,” said Gorski seriously, “So why can’t other people have them?”

“But other people do have web toes, occasionally. Not often, but there are cases.”

“And what leads you to think you are unique completely? Many people have angels seen. Jeanne d’Arc. Robert Wescott. Elijah.”

“Yes, but that’s—”

“Oh, there are modern cases, maybe, too. Most of them, like you, do not talk about, except possibly to a friend like myself. The others—in asylums they are.”

I shuddered. “Then if they’re crazy, I am too.”

“No, no, no! But crazy you would be to talk about it to others. They might not in angels believe.”

“Do you, Gorski?”

“I would if one I saw. And you say one you’ve seen.”

“You mean you don’t believe yourself, but you believe if I believe, then you’d—” I gave it up. Arguing with Gorski always gets me going in circles.

I went down to the street and tried walking in circles instead. I wished that I’d had the courage to tell him all of it, once I’d started. But, close a friend as Gorski was, I’d known him only a couple of months.

And if I told him, he’d know I was mad. Stark, raving—

I walked down Race Street to Third, and down Third to South, and down South to Twentieth, and back again to Race, and there again was the building that held Gorski’s studio.

I walked past it, got half way around my loop again, went into a drug store, and called him up. “Listen, Gorski,” I said.

“I listen.”

“Listen, I didn’t tell you all of it; I didn’t even tell you the worst of it.”

“I know,” he said calmly. “In love with her you are.”

I stood there looking at the telephone for about a minute, and then I hung the receiver back on the hook.

I went around the loop again. This time I got to South Avenue before I went into another store and dialed Gorski’s number. He didn’t answer by saying “Hello.” He just said, “Even though she won’t a drink let you take or swear?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “It’s just that way. Look, Gorski, no matter what she did to me, it would be that way. I—I just don’t know the words for it, but she’s beautiful beyond anything I could compare her to. Like—like nothing else at all. She’s radiant, wonderful, marvelous, and her eyes are—”

“Then you’ve seen her?”

“Just once. The first time, the time I was stinko and she pulled me out from under the truck, Gorski. And then it was just a glimpse, but—”

“And since then?”

“No. The flash of radiance, a glow, but nothing more. It’s, well, it’s like a rainbow with more colors in it than there are, but that isn’t like seeing her like I did the first time.”

“And you want again to see her? That your trouble is?”

“Yes.” An inadequate monosyllable.

“Then drunk why not get again?”

“But she—I told you about the pain I get when I even reach for a glass with something alcoholic in it!”

“But, my friend, too excruciating is it to bear? It hurts to go to a dentist, and one goes. Purely as a scientific experiment, try why not to see—”

“Gorski!” I yelled. “You’re a genius!”

This time I didn’t bother to hang up the receiver at all.

There was a tavern next door. I gave my order to the wizened little bartender as I rushed in. “Loch Lommond and a beer for wash!”

“Vurra good, sorr. Unco fine taste ye have for so young a gentleman. Except, sorr, for the wash. Beer with a fine whusky like—”

He was right, of course, but not for the reason he had in mind. Just as Gorski had been right about the pain not being too great to bear, when I was ready for it. There was a stab when I picked up the glass and downed it, but dentists have done worse to me. Yes, I could take it.

But wherein the bartender was right was that the beer, being alcoholic, brought the same reaction as the Loch Lommond. Unfairly, the pain was not justly proportioned to the alcoholic percentage. It was as bad for the lamb as for the sheep.

“You’re right, Scotty,” I told him. “No more beer. But make the Loch Lommond double this time.” If the percentage failed to work one way, it would fail the other. No worse for a double Scotch than for a single.

“’Tis mighty fast, sorr, to be downing such strong drink.”

“Triple then, Scotty, and if you think I’ll explode just stand aside.”

He poured it reluctantly. “Are ye thinking of getting drunk, sorr?”

“Of nothing else,” I admitted. “Uggh!” A triple Scotch, sans chaser, is something to uggh about even without psychic repercussions. But it works quickly. There was a stuffed raccoon on the shelf back of the bar, and I could have sworn it winked at me in a way I didn’t like.

“Scotty,” I asked, “did you ever see an angel?”

“See one, sorr? I married one.”

I gripped the edge of the bar. “Quick man, tell me—how’d you meet her?” He smiled. “’Twas at Coney Island, on a hot summer night. She’d gone there with her folks and—”

“Oh,” I said, in bitter disappointment. Then my sense of humor returned and I winked at the raccoon—and ordered another triple Scotch.

He paused with the bottle half raised. “If ye’re bounden to get drunk, sorr; that’s yer business, and if I chase ye oot, ye’d get it elsewhere. But hadna ye better give me the telephone number of some friend who can come around and—”

I gave him Rene Clair’s. I figured I’d bothered Gorski enough for the day, and anyway Rene owed me a few cab rides. Then I braced myself for the psychic and physical jolt and downed the drink. The room was beginning to move, not in circles, but slowly back and forth like an undulating pendulum, if there is such a thing as an undulating pendulum.

I reached for another drink that had got there somehow.

“Shcotty,” I said, “The world ish a shnare and a delusion and there are more thingsh in and around it than Horatio Alger ever dreamed of in hish philo—philoshol—ah, you know what I mean.”

“Yuss,” he said, nodding gravely. “You mean, it willna be long noo.” The stuffed raccoon jumped from the shelf onto the bartender’s shoulder and perched there twittering, then jumped down on the bar. I had an idea I was going to have trouble with it.

It was dark when I opened my eyes but an alternate glow of red and green light coming in at the window told me where I was. There is an alternating neon sign across from my studio that gives it a Dantean effect when the room is otherwise darkened.

I seemed to be dressed, except for my shoes and coat and tie, and my head felt like the devil was in there trying to get out.

I sat on the edge of the bed and groaned. It hadn’t worked. I’d gotten drunk—drunker than I’d ever been before, and it hadn’t worked.

I said, “Damn— Owww!” Well, I still had a guardian angel.

I got up and turned on the light. It was four a.m., almost dawn. My mouth felt like the inside of a sewer after a long drought. I felt a little better when I’d brushed my teeth and washed and put the rest of my clothes back on.

I called up Rene. “Thanks, pal,” I said.

“You drunk again?”

“What do you mean, again? It couldn’t have been more than six hours ago you brought me home.”

“Six? You mean thirty; twenty-four and six. And listen, I took a fiver out of your wallet to square with a guy for a raccoon, a stuffed one. You tore it up because it bit you.”

“Uh,” I said. “Listen, Rene, any angels around?”

“My God, Bill, you still got ’em? That’s all you raved about. Look, pal, over at Hillcrest they got a psych ward that’s a dilly. Up to date and—”

“Thanks, Rene; I’ll see you there.” I hung up and sat down on the edge of the bed again.

There had to be an answer. I’d seen her once, it could, it must happen again.

My studio is reasonably soundproof if the windows are closed, and I went over and closed them. Then I said, “Listen, Angel, you’re around somewhere, and maybe you can hear me. Won’t you show yourself again? Please,” I implored. “I won’t hurt you. I—I wouldn’t harm you for anything. I—why, da—darn it, I love you! You’re more beautiful than anything on Earth. You’re what people think they mean when they say ‘heavenly’ but they don’t know really and I do because I saw you.

“I—I know I don’t deserve it, and that I’m just a louse and all that, but I want to see you again, Angel. Please.”

And still nothing happened.

I called up Gorski, hoping I’d waken him out of a sound sleep, but doubting it. Gorski seldom sleeps; anyway I’ve never caught him at it.

“Hello, Brain,” I said. “It didn’t work.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Drunk did you get?”

“One could call it that.”

“In front of a truck did you stagger again?”

“No, you dope. Why should I— Wow! Gorski, that’s what happened before, wasn’t it? And that is what a guardian angel is really for, mostly. Gorski, you’re a wonder. You’re a genius!”

“Of course.”

“I mean it.”

“My friend, so do I.”

I replaced the receiver and tried to calm down. I thought I had it, but the question was—what was I going to do with it? I’d gone off half-cocked before and all I’d succeeded in doing was losing a day and a half out of my life. This time I was going to think it out first.

I went to the window and looked out. My studio is on quiet a side street, with no traffic at that hour of the morning. By walking two blocks to an arterial, I could find all the traffic I wanted, but was that the best answer?

I hoped there was a better one. If I ran across in front of a car, would she appear—in visible, tangible form, as before—to save me from danger? Yes, I thought she would, but it would be just another momentary glimpse.

The danger I’d be in would be great, but it would be of brief duration. There wouldn’t be time to talk to her. And unless the driver of the car was a hit-runner, he’d be coming back to see if I was all right, and—

No, there must be some form of sustained danger that would give me time to look at her, to talk to her. Perhaps something that could be accomplished right here in my own room, in privacy. Yes, this time, I was going to think out a course of action without going off half-cocked and—

Half cocked! That was it. I had a hair-trigger automatic in the top drawer of my desk, one I’d purchased a few years ago when I’d become interested in target shooting and had joined a gun club.

I took it out of the drawer, and got out the rod and rags and oil for cleaning it, and the box of bullets that fitted it. I took out the clip and loaded it, then slid it back into the gun, as though to be sure that it fitted perfectly.

Then, as though inadvertently and trying to keep even myself from realizing what I was doing, I pulled the slide back and forth—which pulled one cartridge up into the firing chamber of the gun. Then I removed the clip—to all intents and purposes unloading the gun, but actually leaving it cocked with one bullet in the chamber. All set for cleaning—by a fool who needed a guardian angel.

I worked a bit of rag into the slot of the cleaning rod, and poked it down into the muzzle. I thought I saw, before me, just a faint shimmer of that celestial radiance. I glanced up out of the corner of my eye—just a glow, and I wanted more than that.

I swung the muzzle around so it pointed toward me, swabbing the rod up and down in the barrel. The spot of brightness became brighter. Well, I was on the right track, but not in enough danger yet.

My blood was pounding in my ears as I swabbed that rod up and down, this time hard enough to strike little blows against the nose of the bullet in the gun.

I thought I heard a faint sound that might have been a gasp, but I kept on. This time without looking up at all, I reached around with my left hand and changed my grip on the gun so that one finger rested lightly—ever so lightly—against the hair trigger.

And, as I worked the swabbing rod, I made the pressure just a bit less light. And this time there was a gasp, and it was a feminine gasp, and a hand came out and touched the muzzle of the gun, pushing it aside so it no longer pointed exactly at my head.

For a moment I didn’t quite dare move or breathe. It was a hand more beautiful than a hand can be—delicate, exquisite, tapering. And real or not, it looked quite solid in an ethereal sort of way.

It felt real, too. One finger touched one of mine and from the point of contact a flow of something like electricity, but profoundly more exciting and pleasant, seemed to come over me. Something that I had never felt before.

There was a wrist beyond that perfect hand, and a white, rounded arm. My eyes followed it and I looked up into her eyes, and the universe stood very, very still.

Her voice was not like tinkling silver bells or like anything else except her voice. “Why do you do a dangerous thing like that?”

“I—to see you. I thought you’d come.”

“I heard you talking to me before, but I couldn’t come then. You—you talked about love. What is that?”

There was something in my throat that kept me from answering for a moment. I could merely look at her.

And then, wondering at my own courage, but not caring what might happen to me because of it, I reached out and took her other hand in my free one—my free hand because I knew I had to keep my finger on the trigger of that gun or she might vanish.

I said, finally, “Love is—” And then I ran out of words again. But she must have been at least slightly telepathic, for her eyes grew very, very round and wide, and her lips parted slightly and she said, “Oh!” Probably as Eve said it once, in Eden.

And it was I, not the gun, that exploded. The sight of her lips that way was just too much. Angel or not, I stood up and took her into my arms and kissed her as probably no angel had ever been kissed before. She said, “Oh,” again, but naturally in a smothered sort of way, and then her arms went around my shoulders and began to tighten, and—

And, well that was all. She was gone. Utterly, completely gone, and there I stood with my arms around nothing.

Nothing whatever.

Not anything.

I sank slowly back down on the bed, in a dazed sort of way, just beginning to realize what I’d done. She was lost to me now, forever. I’d never see her again.

Experimentally, I swore mildly. Nothing happened.

I picked up the gun once more, but I knew there was no use trying to repeat that experiment. Not until, and if another guardian angel was assigned to me. Anyway, I didn’t want “a” guardian angel. I wanted one particular one, and her only.

Still in a daze, I called up Gorski.

He said, “Hello,” and I said, “This is Bill.”

“My friend, what is it you want?”

I said, “Nothing,” and hung up. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder why I’d called him.

Just to have something to do, I picked up the automatic to put it away. I reached for it blindly and one of my fingers must have gone through the trigger guard, for there was a noise that sounded like the clap of doom. I’d not only pulled the trigger, but I’d fired the gun with the swabbing rod in the barrel, and it had exploded.

And then a matronly nurse with buck teeth was bending over me, adjusting a bandage on my forehead. I closed my eyes again and then opened them and tried to sit up. She pushed me back and I stayed pushed; it didn’t matter.

She said, “You’re not seriously hurt, Mr. Benton, but you are to stay here another twenty-four hours before you leave.”

“Another?” I asked, without any particular interest. “How many twenty-four hours have I been here?”

“Just one. A very mild concussion from a piece of flying steel that just grazed your head. You must have a guardian—

It was too much. I let out a howl and sat up, and she stepped back, looking at me fearfully. “Are you all right?” she asked, and obviously thought I wasn’t. “I’d better call—”

“No, no,” I said, and tried to make my voice calm and soothing. There was no use ending up in the psychopathic ward now. Not that it mattered much if I did, but I wanted just to lie here and think this out and not have a lot of doctors asking fool questions.

“You had a sudden pain?” she wanted to know.

“Yes. That was it. Now leave me; I’ll be all right.” I tried to keep out of my voice the blank despair, the emptiness, that echoed through my mind. Somehow, I knew, I’d have to pretend that this had just never happened, gather up the paltry threads of life and try to keep on going.

She looked at me uncertainly, but she left. I think I cried a little. Yes, I’m sure I did.

They told me Gorski had phoned, and twelve hours or so later he came in a cab to take me home. He didn’t say anything until the meter started clicking.

“My friend, someone there is I want you to meet,” he told me.

“Nuts.”

“Do not take it so,” he said earnestly. “Of what good is an angel? You need a woman, a real woman, of flesh and blood. One I know you must meet.”

“To hell with it.”

“Ah, but unusual she is. An exquisite type of blonde beauty one but meets rarely. In the park, in Washington Square, I found her only yesterday. What you call amnesia she had. For hours about she had wandered, where to go not knowing. Since in fact four-thirty Tuesday morning.”

“Four-thirty Tuesday morn— Why, that’s when—”

Gorski nodded. “To Lila I took her. In her apartment she is staying; else I could only have turned her over to the authorities. Of course they might have found out from where she came, but then they might not. And—”

“Gorski! It’s impossible; crazy; it’s unbelievable. It just can’t be—why aren’t we going to Lila’s?”

“That is the address I gave the driver. We are, in fact, here.”

I was out of the cab even before it had stopped rolling, and running up the stairs. I was in the apartment probably before Gorski had paid the driver. She was sitting on Lila’s divan. “Angel!” I choked.

“Bill!” So she did remember. I was on my knees on the floor before the divan with my arms around her and my head against her breast.

“It’s—it’s not impossible? You really are with me now? You—you won’t leave again—ever?”

“Ever?” She laughed and it was a tinkling sound of music. “Not ever, because I’m mortal now… But even after we leave here we’ll be together… You see, when you kissed me they decided that I couldn’t—”

I motioned her into silence. Gorski had just come in. I got up, facing him. A haunting question rose in my mind.

“Gorski,” I said seriously. “How did you happen to know all the answers? Why did you believe my story right from the start? And why was it you out of the entire populace of the city that found her?”

A smile scudded across his features. “My friend, do you really want to know?”

Maybe it was the way he said it. Maybe it was because I was afraid Angel would leave me somehow, again. But I shook my head. “No! No, Gorski, I don’t want to know…”

He nodded, and turned to Angel. “It is perhaps best this way. Someday he will learn the truth. If I have not made a mistake, you will be with him when he learns. It is too bad we can choose only so few…”

I looked at Gorski. Something caught in my throat. There seemed to be a dancing halo of radiance hovering behind him—no—it wasn’t behind him, it was all around him, like—I turned to Angel. She was on one knee with her hands crossed over her breast, her head bowed. I was suddenly afraid. For no reason, but I was afraid. I ran to her and pulled her to her feet and into my arms.

Then I looked back at Gorski. But he was gone…