“Then let’s be moving along, Sandy; we don’t want to miss any of this
thing, you know.”
“Keep your seat,” he says; “he is only just telegraphed, that is all.”
“How?”
“That blast only means that he has been sighted from the signal-station.
He is off Sandy Hook. The committees will go down to meet him, now, and
escort him in. There will be ceremonies and delays; they won’t he coming
up the Bay for a considerable time, yet. It is several billion miles
away, anyway.”
“_I_ could have been a barkeeper and a hard lot just as well as not,”
says I, remembering the lonesome way I arrived, and how there wasn’t any
committee nor anything.
“I notice some regret in your voice,” says Sandy, “and it is natural
enough; but let bygones be bygones; you went according to your lights,
and it is too late now to mend the thing.”
“No, let it slide, Sandy, I don’t mind. But you’ve got a Sandy Hook
_here_, too, have you?”
“We’ve got everything here, just as it is below. All the States and
Territories of the Union, and all the kingdoms of the earth and the
islands of the sea are laid out here just as they are on the globe—all
the same shape they are down there, and all graded to the relative size,
only each State and realm and island is a good many billion times bigger
here than it is below. There goes another blast.”
“What is that one for?”
“That is only another fort answering the first one. They each fire
eleven hundred and one thunder blasts at a single dash—it is the usual
salute for an eleventh-hour guest; a hundred for each hour and an extra
one for the guest’s sex; if it was a woman we would know it by their
leaving off the extra gun.”
“How do we know there’s eleven hundred and one, Sandy, when they all go
off at once?—and yet we certainly do know.”
“Our intellects are a good deal sharpened up, here, in some ways, and
that is one of them. Numbers and sizes and distances are so great, here,
that we have to be made so we can _feel_ them—our old ways of counting
and measuring and ciphering wouldn’t ever give us an idea of them, but
would only confuse us and oppress us and make our heads ache.”
After some more talk about this, I says: “Sandy, I notice that I hardly
ever see a white angel; where I run across one white angel, I strike as
many as a hundred million copper-colored ones—people that can’t speak
English. How is that?”
“Well, you will find it the same in any State or Territory of the
American corner of heaven you choose to go to. I have shot along, a
whole week on a stretch, and gone millions and millions of miles, through
perfect swarms of angels, without ever seeing a single white one, or
hearing a word I could understand. You see, America was occupied a
billion years and more, by Injuns and Aztecs, and that sort of folks,
before a white man ever set his foot in it. During the first three
hundred years after Columbus’s discovery, there wasn’t ever more than one
good lecture audience of white people, all put together, in America—I
mean the whole thing, British Possessions and all; in the beginning of
our century there were only 6,000,000 or 7,000,000—say seven; 12,000,000
or 14,000,000 in 1825; say 23,000,000 in 1850; 40,000,000 in 1875. Our
death-rate has always been 20 in 1000 per annum. Well, 140,000 died the
first year of the century; 280,000 the twenty-fifth year; 500,000 the
fiftieth year; about a million the seventy-fifth year. Now I am going to
be liberal about this thing, and consider that fifty million whites have
died in America from the beginning up to to-day—make it sixty, if you
want to; make it a hundred million—it’s no difference about a few
millions one way or t’other. Well, now, you can see, yourself, that when
you come to spread a little dab of people like that over these hundreds
of billions of miles of American territory here in heaven, it is like
scattering a ten-cent box of homoeopathic pills over the Great Sahara and
expecting to find them again. You can’t expect us to amount to anything
in heaven, and we _don’t_—now that is the simple fact, and we have got to
do the best we can with it. The learned men from other planets and other
systems come here and hang around a while, when they are touring around
the Kingdom, and then go back to their own section of heaven and write a
book of travels, and they give America about five lines in it. And what
do they say about us? They say this wilderness is populated with a
scattering few hundred thousand billions of red angels, with now and then
a curiously complected _diseased_ one. You see, they think we whites and
the occasional nigger are Injuns that have been bleached out or blackened
by some leprous disease or other—for some peculiarly rascally _sin_, mind
you. It is a mighty sour pill for us all, my friend—even the modestest
of us, let alone the other kind, that think they are going to be received
like a long-lost government bond, and hug Abraham into the bargain. I
haven’t asked you any of the particulars, Captain, but I judge it goes
without saying—if my experience is worth anything—that there wasn’t much
of a hooraw made over you when you arrived—now was there?”
“Don’t mention it, Sandy,” says I, coloring up a little; “I wouldn’t have
had the family see it for any amount you are a mind to name. Change the
subject, Sandy, change the subject.”
“Well, do you think of settling in the California department of bliss?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t calculating on doing anything really definite in
that direction till the family come. I thought I would just look around,
meantime, in a quiet way, and make up my mind. Besides, I know a good
many dead people, and I was calculating to hunt them up and swap a little
gossip with them about friends, and old times, and one thing or another,
and ask them how they like it here, as far as they have got. I reckon my
wife will want to camp in the California range, though, because most all
her departed will be there, and she likes to be with folks she knows.”
“Don’t you let her. You see what the Jersey district of heaven is, for
whites; well, the Californian district is a thousand times worse. It
swarms with a mean kind of leather-headed mud-colored angels—and your
nearest white neighbor is likely to be a million miles away. _What a man
mostly misses_, _in heaven_, _is company_—company of his own sort and
color and language. I have come near settling in the European part of
heaven once or twice on that account.”
“Well, why didn’t you, Sandy?”
“Oh, various reasons. For one thing, although you _see_ plenty of whites
there, you can’t understand any of them, hardly, and so you go about as
hungry for talk as you do here. I like to look at a Russian or a German
or an Italian—I even like to look at a Frenchman if I ever have the luck
to catch him engaged in anything that ain’t indelicate—but _looking_
don’t cure the hunger—what you want is talk.”
“Well, there’s England, Sandy—the English district of heaven.”
“Yes, but it is not so very much better than this end of the heavenly
domain. As long as you run across Englishmen born this side of three
hundred years ago, you are all right; but the minute you get back of
Elizabeth’s time the language begins to fog up, and the further back you
go the foggier it gets. I had some talk with one Langland and a man by
the name of Chaucer—old-time poets—but it was no use, I couldn’t quite
understand them, and they couldn’t quite understand me. I have had
letters from them since, but it is such broken English I can’t make it
out. Back of those men’s time the English are just simply foreigners,
nothing more, nothing less; they talk Danish, German, Norman French, and
sometimes a mixture of all three; back of _them_, they talk Latin, and
ancient British, Irish, and Gaelic; and then back of these come billions
and billions of pure savages that talk a gibberish that Satan himself
couldn’t understand. The fact is, where you strike one man in the
English settlements that you can understand, you wade through awful
swarms that talk something you can’t make head nor tail of. You see,
every country on earth has been overlaid so often, in the course of a
billion years, with different kinds of people and different sorts of
languages, that this sort of mongrel business was bound to be the result
in heaven.”
“Sandy,” says I, “did you see a good many of the great people history
tells about?”
“Yes—plenty. I saw kings and all sorts of distinguished people.”
“Do the kings rank just as they did below?”
“No; a body can’t bring his rank up here with him. Divine right is a
good-enough earthly romance, but it don’t go, here. Kings drop down to
the general level as soon as they reach the realms of grace. I knew
Charles the Second very well—one of the most popular comedians in the
English section—draws first rate. There are better, of course—people
that were never heard of on earth—but Charles is making a very good
reputation indeed, and is considered a rising man. Richard the
Lion-hearted is in the prize-ring, and coming into considerable favor.
Henry the Eighth is a tragedian, and the scenes where he kills people are
done to the very life. Henry the Sixth keeps a religious-book stand.”
“Did you ever see Napoleon, Sandy?”
“Often—sometimes in the Corsican range, sometimes in the French. He
always hunts up a conspicuous place, and goes frowning around with his
arms folded and his field-glass under his arm, looking as grand, gloomy
and peculiar as his reputation calls for, and very much bothered because
he don’t stand as high, here, for a soldier, as he expected to.”
“Why, who stands higher?”
“Oh, a _lot_ of people _we_ never heard of before—the shoemaker and
horse-doctor and knife-grinder kind, you know—clodhoppers from goodness
knows where that never handled a sword or fired a shot in their lives—but
the soldiership was in them, though they never had a chance to show it.
But here they take their right place, and Cæsar and Napoleon and
Alexander have to take a back seat. The greatest military genius our
world ever produced was a brick-layer from somewhere back of Boston—died
during the Revolution—by the name of Absalom Jones. Wherever he goes,
crowds flock to see him. You see, everybody knows that if he had had a
chance he would have shown the world some generalship that would have
made all generalship before look like child’s play and ’prentice work.
But he never got a chance; he tried heaps of times to enlist as a
private, but he had lost both thumbs and a couple of front teeth, and the
recruiting sergeant wouldn’t pass him. However, as I say, everybody
knows, now, what he _would_ have been,—and so they flock by the million
to get a glimpse of him whenever they hear he is going to be anywhere.
Cæsar, and Hannibal, and Alexander, and Napoleon are all on his staff,
and ever so many more great generals; but the public hardly care to look
at _them_ when _he_ is around. Boom! There goes another salute. The
barkeeper’s off quarantine now.”
* * * * *
Sandy and I put on our things. Then we made a wish, and in a second we
were at the reception-place. We stood on the edge of the ocean of space,
and looked out over the dimness, but couldn’t make out anything. Close
by us was the Grand Stand—tier on tier of dim thrones rising up toward
the zenith. From each side of it spread away the tiers of seats for the
general public. They spread away for leagues and leagues—you couldn’t
see the ends. They were empty and still, and hadn’t a cheerful look, but
looked dreary, like a theatre before anybody comes—gas turned down.
Sandy says,—
“We’ll sit down here and wait. We’ll see the head of the procession come
in sight away off yonder pretty soon, now.”