The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  “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 equal 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 knifegrinder 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 shoemakers 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—whereas 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 lived 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 Haley’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 whe
n 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 spirtitualism, 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.”

  I jumped up and says,—

  “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 be 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 homœopathic 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 California district is a thousand times worse. It swarms with a mean kind of leather-headed mud-colored angels—and your nearest white neighbors 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.”