“Sandy, out with it. Come—no secrets among friends. I notice you don’t
ever wear wings—and plenty others don’t. I’ve been making an ass of
myself—is that it?”
“That is about the size of it. But it is no harm. We all do it at
first. It’s perfectly natural. You see, on earth we jump to such
foolish conclusions as to things up here. In the pictures we always saw
the angels with wings on—and that was all right; but we jumped to the
conclusion that that was their way of getting around—and that was all
wrong. The wings ain’t anything but a uniform, that’s all. When they
are in the field—so to speak,—they always wear them; you never see an
angel going with a message anywhere without his wings, any more than you
would see a military officer presiding at a court-martial without his
uniform, or a postman delivering letters, or a policeman walking his
beat, in plain clothes. But they ain’t to _fly_ with! The wings are for
show, not for use. Old experienced angels are like officers of the
regular army—they dress plain, when they are off duty. New angels are
like the militia—never shed the uniform—always fluttering and floundering
around in their wings, butting people down, flapping here, and there, and
everywhere, always imagining they are attracting the admiring eye—well,
they just think they are the very most important people in heaven. And
when you see one of them come sailing around with one wing tipped up and
t’other down, you make up your mind he is saying to himself: ‘I wish Mary
Ann in Arkansaw could see me now. I reckon she’d wish she hadn’t shook
me.’ No, they’re just for show, that’s all—only just for show.”
“I judge you’ve got it about right, Sandy,” says I.
“Why, look at it yourself,” says he. “_You_ ain’t built for wings—no man
is. You know what a grist of years it took you to come here from the
earth—and yet you were booming along faster than any cannon-ball could
go. Suppose you had to fly that distance with your wings—wouldn’t
eternity have been over before you got here? Certainly. Well, angels
have to go to the earth every day—millions of them—to appear in visions
to dying children and good people, you know—it’s the heft of their
business. They appear with their wings, of course, because they are on
official service, and because the dying persons wouldn’t know they were
angels if they hadn’t wings—but do you reckon they fly with them? It
stands to reason they don’t. The wings would wear out before they got
half-way; even the pin-feathers would be gone; the wing frames would be
as bare as kite sticks before the paper is pasted on. The distances in
heaven are billions of times greater; angels have to go all over heaven
every day; could they do it with their wings alone? No, indeed; they
wear the wings for style, but they travel any distance in an instant by
_wishing_. The wishing-carpet of the Arabian Nights was a sensible
idea—but our earthly idea of angels flying these awful distances with
their clumsy wings was foolish.
“Our young saints, of both sexes, wear wings all the time—blazing red
ones, and blue and green, and gold, and variegated, and rainbowed, and
ring-streaked-and-striped ones—and nobody finds fault. It is suitable to
their time of life. The things are beautiful, and they set the young
people off. They are the most striking and lovely part of their outfit—a
halo don’t _begin_.”
“Well,” says I, “I’ve tucked mine away in the cupboard, and I allow to
let them lay there till there’s mud.”
“Yes—or a reception.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you can see one to-night if you want to. There’s a barkeeper from
Jersey City going to be received.”
“Go on—tell me about it.”
“This barkeeper got converted at a Moody and Sankey meeting, in New York,
and started home on the ferry-boat, and there was a collision and he got
drowned. He is of a class that think all heaven goes wild with joy when
a particularly hard lot like him is saved; they think all heaven turns
out hosannahing to welcome them; they think there isn’t anything talked
about in the realms of the blest but their case, for that day. This
barkeeper thinks there hasn’t been such another stir here in years, as
his coming is going to raise.—And I’ve always noticed this peculiarity
about a dead barkeeper—he not only expects all hands to turn out when he
arrives, but he expects to be received with a torchlight procession.”
“I reckon he is disappointed, then.”
“No, he isn’t. No man is allowed to be disappointed here. Whatever he
wants, when he comes—that is, any reasonable and unsacrilegious thing—he
can have. There’s always a few millions or billions of young folks
around who don’t want any better entertainment than to fill up their
lungs and swarm out with their torches and have a high time over a
barkeeper. It tickles the barkeeper till he can’t rest, it makes a
charming lark for the young folks, it don’t do anybody any harm, it don’t
cost a rap, and it keeps up the place’s reputation for making all comers
happy and content.”
“Very good. I’ll be on hand and see them land the barkeeper.”
“It is manners to go in full dress. You want to wear your wings, you
know, and your other things.”
“Which ones?”
“Halo, and harp, and palm branch, and all that.”
“Well,” says I, “I reckon I ought to be ashamed of myself, but the fact
is I left them laying around that day I resigned from the choir. I
haven’t got a rag to wear but this robe and the wings.”
“That’s all right. You’ll find they’ve been raked up and saved for you.
Send for them.”
“I’ll do it, Sandy. But what was it you was saying about unsacrilegious
things, which people expect to get, and will be disappointed about?”
“Oh, there are a lot of such things that people expect and don’t get.
For instance, there’s a Brooklyn preacher by the name of Talmage, who is
laying up a considerable disappointment for himself. He says, every now
and then in his sermons, that the first thing he does when he gets to
heaven, will be to fling his arms around Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and
kiss them and weep on them. There’s millions of people down there on
earth that are promising themselves the same thing. As many as sixty
thousand people arrive here every single day, that want to run straight
to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and hug them and weep on them. Now mind
you, sixty thousand a day is a pretty heavy contract for those old
people. If they were a mind to allow it, they wouldn’t ever have
anything to do, year in and year out, but stand up and be hugged and wept
on thirty-two hours in the twenty-four. They would be tired out and as
wet as muskrats all the time. What would heaven be, to _them_? It would
be a mighty good place to get out of—you know that, yourself. Those are
kind and gentle old Jews, but they ain’t any fonder of kissing the
emotional highlights of Brooklyn than you be. You mark my words, Mr.
T.’s endearments are going to be declined, with thanks. There are limits
to the privileges of the elect, even in heaven. Why, if Adam was to show
himself to every new comer that wants to call and gaze at him and strike
him for his autograph, he would never have time to do anything else but
just that. Talmage has said he is going to give Adam some of his
attentions, as well as A., I. and J. But he will have to change his mind
about that.”
“Do you think Talmage will really come here?”
“Why, certainly, he will; but don’t you be alarmed; he will run with his
own kind, and there’s plenty of them. That is the main charm of
heaven—there’s all kinds here—which wouldn’t be the case if you let the
preachers tell it. Anybody can find the sort he prefers, here, and he
just lets the others alone, and they let him alone. When the Deity
builds a heaven, it is built right, and on a liberal plan.”
Sandy sent home for his things, and I sent for mine, and about nine in
the evening we begun to dress. Sandy says,—
“This is going to be a grand time for you, Stormy. Like as not some of
the patriarchs will turn out.”
“No, but will they?”
“Like as not. Of course they are pretty exclusive. They hardly ever
show themselves to the common public. I believe they never turn out
except for an eleventh-hour convert. They wouldn’t do it then, only
earthly tradition makes a grand show pretty necessary on that kind of an
occasion.”
“Do they an turn out, Sandy?”
“Who?—all the patriarchs? Oh, no—hardly ever more than a couple. You
will be here fifty thousand years—maybe more—before you get a glimpse of
all the patriarchs and prophets. Since I have been here, Job has been to
the front once, and once Ham and Jeremiah both at the same time. But the
finest thing that has happened in my day was a year or so ago; that was
Charles Peace’s reception—him they called ‘the Bannercross Murderer’—an
Englishman. There were four patriarchs and two prophets on the Grand
Stand that time—there hasn’t been anything like it since Captain Kidd
came; Abel was there—the first time in twelve hundred years. A report
got around that Adam was coming; well, of course, Abel was enough to
bring a crowd, all by himself, but there is nobody that can draw like
Adam. It was a false report, but it got around, anyway, as I say, and it
will be a long day before I see the like of it again. The reception was
in the English department, of course, which is eight hundred and eleven
million miles from the New Jersey line. I went, along with a good many
of my neighbors, and it was a sight to see, I can tell you. Flocks came
from all the departments. I saw Esquimaux there, and Tartars, Negroes,
Chinamen—people from everywhere. You see a mixture like that in the
Grand Choir, the first day you land here, but you hardly ever see it
again. There were billions of people; when they were singing or
hosannahing, the noise was wonderful; and even when their tongues were
still the drumming of the wings was nearly enough to burst your head, for
all the sky was as thick as if it was snowing angels. Although Adam was
not there, it was a great time anyway, because we had three archangels on
the Grand Stand—it is a seldom thing that even one comes out.”
“What did they look like, Sandy?”
“Well, they had shining faces, and shining robes, and wonderful rainbow
wings, and they stood eighteen feet high, and wore swords, and held their
heads up in a noble way, and looked like soldiers.”
“Did they have halos?”
“No—anyway, not the hoop kind. The archangels and the upper-class
patriarchs wear a finer thing than that. It is a round, solid, splendid
glory of gold, that is blinding to look at. You have often seen a
patriarch in a picture, on earth, with that thing on—you remember it?—he
looks as if he had his head in a brass platter. That don’t give you the
right idea of it at all—it is much more shining and beautiful.”
“Did you talk with those archangels and patriarchs, Sandy?”
“Who—_I_? Why, what can you be thinking about, Stormy? I ain’t worthy
to speak to such as they.”
“Is Talmage?”
“Of course not. You have got the same mixed-up idea about these things
that everybody has down there. I had it once, but I got over it. Down
there they talk of the heavenly King—and that is right—but then they go
right on speaking as if this was a republic and everybody was on a dead
level with everybody else, and privileged to fling his arms around
anybody he comes across, and be hail-fellow-well-met with all the elect,
from the highest down. How tangled up and absurd that is! How are you
going to have a republic under a king? How are you going to have a
republic at all, where the head of the government is absolute, holds his
place forever, and has no parliament, no council to meddle or make in his
affairs, nobody voted for, nobody elected, nobody in the whole universe
with a voice in the government, nobody asked to take a hand in its
matters, and nobody _allowed_ to do it? Fine republic, ain’t it?”
“Well, yes—it _is_ a little different from the idea I had—but I thought I
might go around and get acquainted with the grandees, anyway—not exactly
splice the main-brace with them, you know, but shake hands and pass the
time of day.”
“Could Tom, Dick and Harry call on the Cabinet of Russia and do that?—on
Prince Gortschakoff, for instance?”
“I reckon not, Sandy.”
“Well, this is Russia—only more so. There’s not the shadow of a republic
about it anywhere. There are ranks, here. There are viceroys, princes,
governors, sub-governors, sub-sub-governors, and a hundred orders of
nobility, grading along down from grand-ducal archangels, stage by stage,
till the general level is struck, where there ain’t any titles. Do you
know what a prince of the blood is, on earth?”
“No.”
“Well, a prince of the blood don’t belong to the royal family exactly,
and he don’t belong to the mere nobility of the kingdom; he is lower than
the one, and higher than t’other. That’s about the position of the
patriarchs and prophets here. There’s some mighty high nobility
here—people that you and I ain’t worthy to polish sandals for—and _they_
ain’t worthy to polish sandals for the patriarchs and prophets. That
gives you a kind of an idea of their rank, don’t it? You begin to see
how high up they are, don’t you? just to get a two-minute glimpse of one
of them is a thing for a body to remember and tell about for a thousand
years. Why, Captain, just think of this: if Abraham was to set his foot
down here by this door, there would be a railing set up around that
foot-track right away, and a shelter put over it, and people would flock
here from all over heaven, for hundreds and hundreds of years, to look at
it. Abraham is one of the parties that Mr. Talmage, of Brooklyn, is
going to embrace, and kiss, and weep on, when he comes. He wants to lay
in a good stock of tears, you know, or five to one he will go dry before
he gets a chance to do it.”
“Sandy,” says I, “I had an idea that _I_ was going to be equals with
everybody here, too, but I will let that drop. It don’t matter, and I am
plenty happy enough anyway.”
“Captain, you are happier than you would be, the other way. These old
patriarchs and prophets have got ages the start of you; they know more in
two minutes than you know in a year. Did you ever try to have a sociable
improving-time discussing winds, and currents and variations of compass
with an undertaker?”
“I get your idea, Sandy. He couldn’t interest me. He would be an
ignoramus in such things—he would bore me, and I would bore him.”
“You have got it. You would bore the patriarchs when you talked, and
when they talked they would shoot over your head. By and by you would
say, ‘Good morning, your Eminence, I will call again’—but you wouldn’t.
Did you ever ask the slush-boy to come up in the cabin and take dinner
with you?”
“I get your drift again, Sandy. I wouldn’t be used to such grand people
as the patriarchs and prophets, and I would be sheepish and tongue-tied
in their company, and mighty glad to get out of it. Sandy, which is the
highest rank, patriarch or prophet?”
“Oh, the prophets hold over the patriarchs. The newest prophet, even, is
of a sight more consequence than the oldest patriarch. Yes, sir, Adam
himself has to walk behind Shakespeare.”
“Was Shakespeare a prophet?”
“Of course he was; and so was Homer, and heaps more. But Shakespeare and
the rest have to walk behind a common tailor from Tennessee, by the name
of Billings; and behind a horse-doctor named Sakka, from Afghanistan.
Jeremiah, and Billings and Buddha walk together, side by side, right
behind a crowd from planets not in our astronomy; next come a dozen or
two from Jupiter and other worlds; next come Daniel, and Sakka and
Confucius; next a lot from systems outside of ours; next come Ezekiel,
and Mahomet, Zoroaster, and a knife-grinder from ancient Egypt; then
there is a long string, and after them, away down toward the bottom, come
Shakespeare and Homer, and a shoemaker named Marais, from the back
settlements of France.”
“Have they really rung in Mahomet and all those other heathens?”
“Yes—they all had their message, and they all get their reward. The man
who don’t get his reward on earth, needn’t bother—he will get it here,
sure.”
“But why did they throw off on Shakespeare, that way, and put him away
down there below those shoe-makers and horse-doctors and knife-grinders—a
lot of people nobody ever heard of?”
“That is the heavenly justice of it—they warn’t rewarded according to
their deserts, on earth, but here they get their rightful rank. That
tailor Billings, from Tennessee, wrote poetry that Homer and Shakespeare
couldn’t begin to come up to; but nobody would print it, nobody read it
but his neighbors, an ignorant lot, and they laughed at it. Whenever the
village had a drunken frolic and a dance, they would drag him in and
crown him with cabbage leaves, and pretend to bow down to him; and one
night when he was sick and nearly starved to death, they had him out and
crowned him, and then they rode him on a rail about the village, and
everybody followed along, beating tin pans and yelling. Well, he died
before morning. He wasn’t ever expecting to go to heaven, much less that
there was going to be any fuss made over him, so I reckon he was a good
deal surprised when the reception broke on him.”
“Was you there, Sandy?”
“Bless you, no!”
“Why? Didn’t you know it was going to come off?”
“Well, I judge I did. It was the talk of these realms—not for a day,
like this barkeeper business, but for twenty years before the man died.”
“Why the mischief didn’t you go, then?”
“Now how you talk! The like of me go meddling around at the reception of
a prophet? A mudsill like me trying to push in and help receive an awful
grandee like Edward J. Billings? Why, I should have been laughed at for
a billion miles around. I shouldn’t ever heard the last of it.”
“Well, who did go, then?”
“Mighty few people that you and I will ever get a chance to see, Captain.
Not a solitary commoner ever has the luck to see a reception of a
prophet, I can tell you. All the nobility, and all the patriarchs and
prophets—every last one of them—and all the archangels, and all the
princes and governors and viceroys, were there,—and _no_ small fry—not a
single one. And mind you, I’m not talking about only the grandees from
_our_ world, but the princes and patriarchs and so on from _all_ the
worlds that shine in our sky, and from billions more that belong in
systems upon systems away outside of the one our sun is in. There were
some prophets and patriarchs there that ours ain’t a circumstance to, for
rank and illustriousness and all that. Some were from Jupiter and other
worlds in our own system, but the most celebrated were three poets, Saa,
Bo and Soof, from great planets in three different and very remote
systems. These three names are common and familiar in every nook and
corner of heaven, clear from one end of it to the other—fully as well
known as the eighty Supreme Archangels, in fact—where as our Moses, and
Adam, and the rest, have not been heard of outside of our world’s little
corner of heaven, except by a few very learned men scattered here and
there—and they always spell their names wrong, and get the performances
of one mixed up with the doings of another, and they almost always locate
them simply _in our solar system_, and think that is enough without going
into little details such as naming the particular world they are from.
It is like a learned Hindoo showing off how much he knows by saying
Longfellow lives in the United States—as if he lived all over the United
States, and as if the country was so small you couldn’t throw a brick
there without hitting him. Between you and me, it does gravel me, the
cool way people from those monster worlds outside our system snub our
little world, and even our system. Of course we think a good deal of
Jupiter, because our world is only a potato to it, for size; but then
there are worlds in other systems that Jupiter isn’t even a mustard-seed
to—like the planet Goobra, for instance, which you couldn’t squeeze
inside the orbit of Halley’s comet without straining the rivets.
Tourists from Goobra (I mean parties that lived and died there—natives)
come here, now and then, and inquire about our world, and when they find
out it is so little that a streak of lightning can flash clear around it
in the eighth of a second, they have to lean up against something to
laugh. Then they screw a glass into their eye and go to examining us, as
if we were a curious kind of foreign bug, or something of that sort. One
of them asked me how long our day was; and when I told him it was twelve
hours long, as a general thing, he asked me if people where I was from
considered it worth while to get up and wash for such a day as that.
That is the way with those Goobra people—they can’t seem to let a chance
go by to throw it in your face that their day is three hundred and
twenty-two of our years long. This young snob was just of age—he was six
or seven thousand of his days old—say two million of our years—and he had
all the puppy airs that belong to that time of life—that turning-point
when a person has got over being a boy and yet ain’t quite a man exactly.
If it had been anywhere else but in heaven, I would have given him a
piece of my mind. Well, anyway, Billings had the grandest reception that
has been seen in thousands of centuries, and I think it will have a good
effect. His name will be carried pretty far, and it will make our system
talked about, and maybe our world, too, and raise us in the respect of
the general public of heaven. Why, look here—Shakespeare walked
backwards before that tailor from Tennessee, and scattered flowers for
him to walk on, and Homer stood behind his chair and waited on him at the
banquet. Of course that didn’t go for much _there_, amongst all those
big foreigners from other systems, as they hadn’t heard of Shakespeare or
Homer either, but it would amount to considerable down there on our
little earth if they could know about it. I wish there was something in
that miserable spiritualism, so we could send them word. That Tennessee
village would set up a monument to Billings, then, and his autograph
would outsell Satan’s. Well, they had grand times at that reception—a
small-fry noble from Hoboken told me all about it—Sir Richard Duffer,
Baronet.”
“What, Sandy, a nobleman from Hoboken? How is that?”
“Easy enough. Duffer kept a sausage-shop and never saved a cent in his
life because he used to give all his spare meat to the poor, in a quiet
way. Not tramps,—no, the other sort—the sort that will starve before
they will beg—honest square people out of work. Dick used to watch
hungry-looking men and women and children, and track them home, and find
out all about them from the neighbors, and then feed them and find them
work. As nobody ever saw him give anything to anybody, he had the
reputation of being mean; he died with it, too, and everybody said it was
a good riddance; but the minute he landed here, they made him a baronet,
and the very first words Dick the sausage-maker of Hoboken heard when he
stepped upon the heavenly shore were, ‘Welcome, Sir Richard Duffer!’ It
surprised him some, because he thought he had reasons to believe he was
pointed for a warmer climate than this one.”
* * * * *
All of a sudden the whole region fairly rocked under the crash of eleven
hundred and one thunder blasts, all let off at once, and Sandy says,—
“There, that’s for the barkeep.”