H. Wells - Selected Stories of H. G. Wells

Everybody was laughing. Even the prophet of the Lord whom the Wicked Man had tortured had a smile on his face. The Wicked Man was really such a preposterous little fellow.

“And then,” read the Recording Angel, with a smile that set us all agog, “one day, when he was a little irascible from over-eating, he—”

“Oh, not that, ” cried the Wicked Man, nobody knew of that.

“It didn’t happen,” screamed the Wicked Man. “I was bad—I was really bad. Frequently bad, but there was nothing so silly—so absolutely silly—”

The angel went on reading.

“O God!” cried the Wicked Man. “Don’t let them know that! I’ll repent! I’ll apologise…”

The Wicked Man on God’s hand began to dance and weep. Suddenly shame overcame him. He made a wild rush to jump off the ball of God’s little finger, but God stopped him by a dexterous turn of the wrist. Then he made a rush for the gap between hand and thumb, but the thumb closed. And all the while the angel went on reading—reading. The Wicked Man rushed to and fro across God’s palm, and then suddenly turned about and fled up the sleeve of God.

I expected God would turn him out, but the mercy of God is infinite.

The Recording Angel paused.

“Eh?” said the Recording Angel.

“Next,” said God, and before the Recording Angel could call upon the name a hairy creature in filthy rags stood upon God’s palm.

“Has God got Hell up his sleeve then?” said the little man beside him.

“Is there a Hell?” I asked.

“If you notice,” he said—he peered between the feet of the great angels—“there’s no particular indication of the Celestial City.”

“’Ssh!” said a little woman near us, scowling. “Hear this blessed Saint!”

“He was Lord of the Earth, but I was the prophet of the God of Heaven,” cried the Saint, “and all the people marvelled at the sign. For I, O God, knew of the glories of thy Paradise. No pain, no hardship, gashing with knives, splinters thrust under my nails, stripes of flesh flayed off, all for the glory and honour of God.”

God smiled.

“And at last I went, I in my rags and sores, smelling of my holy discomforts—”

Gabriel laughed abruptly.

“And lay outside his gates, as a sign, as a wonder—”

“As a perfect nuisance,” said the Recording Angel, and began to read, heedless of the fact that the Saint was still speaking of the gloriously unpleasant things he had done that Paradise might be his.

And behold, in that book the record of the Saint also was a revelation, a marvel.

It seemed not ten seconds before the Saint also was rushing to and fro over the great palm of God. Not ten seconds! And at last he also shrieked beneath that pitiless and cynical exposition, and fled also, even as the Wicked Man had fled, into the shadow of the sleeve. And it was permitted us to see into the shadow of the sleeve. And the two sat side by side, stark of all delusions, in the shadow of the robe of God’s charity, like brothers.

And thither also I fled in my turn.

“And now,” said God, as he shook us out of his sleeve upon the planet he had given us to live upon, the planet that whirled about green Sirius for a sun, “now that you understand me and each other a little better, …try again.”

Then he and his great angels turned themselves about and suddenly had vanished.

The Throne had vanished.

All about me was a beautiful land, more beautiful than any I had ever seen before—waste, austere, and wonderful; and all about me were the enlightened souls of men in new clean bodies…

The story of the Last Trump begins in Heaven and it ends in all sorts of places round about the world…

Heaven, you must know, is a kindly place, and the blessed ones do not go on for ever singing Alleluia, whatever you may have been told. For they too are finite creatures, and must be fed with their eternity in little bits, as one feeds a chick or a child. So that there are mornings and changes and freshness, there is time to condition their lives. And the children are still children, gravely eager about their playing and ready always for new things; just children they are, but blessèd as you see them in the pictures beneath the careless feet of the Lord God. And one of these blessèd children routing about in an attic—for Heaven is, of course, full of the most heavenly attics, seeing that it has children—came upon a number of instruments stored away, and laid its little chubby hands upon them…

Now indeed I cannot tell what these instruments were, for to do so would be to invade mysteries… But one I may tell of, and that was a great brazen trumpet which the Lord God had made when He made the world—for the Lord God finishes all His jobs—to blow when the time for our Judgement came round. And He had made it and left it; there it was, and everything was settled exactly as the Doctrine of Predestination declares. And this blessèd child conceived one of those unaccountable passions of childhood for its smoothness and brassiness, and he played with it and tried to blow it, and trailed it about with him out of the attic into the gay and golden streets, and, after many fitful wanderings, to those celestial battlements of crystal of which you have doubtless read. And there the blessèd child fell to counting the stars, and forgot all about the Trumpet beside him until a flourish of his elbow sent it over…

Down fell the trump, spinning as it fell, and for a day or so, which seemed but moments in Heaven, the blessèd child watched its fall until it was a glittering little speck of brightness…

When it looked a second time the trump was gone…

I do not know what happened to that child when at last it was time for Judgement Day and that shining trumpet was missed. I know that Judgement Day is long overpassed, because of the wickedness of the world; I think perhaps it was in AD 1000 when the expected Day should have dawned that never came, but no other heavenly particulars do I know at all, because now my scene changes to the narrow ways of this Earth…

And the Prologue in Heaven ends.

And now the scene is a dingy little shop in Caledonian Market, where things of an incredible worthlessness lie in wait for such as seek after an impossible cheapness. In the window, as though it had always been there and never anywhere else, lies a long, battered discoloured trumpet of brass that no prospective purchaser has ever been able to sound. In it mice shelter, and dust and fluff have gathered after the fashion of this world. The keeper of the shop is a very old man, and he bought the shop long ago, but already this trumpet was there; he has no idea whence it came, nor its country of origin, nor anything about it. But once in a moment of enterprise that led to nothing he decided to call it an Ancient Ceremonial Shawm, though he ought to have known that whatever a shawm may be the last thing it was likely to be is a trumpet, seeing that they are always mentioned together. And above it hung concertinas and melodeons and cornets and tin whistles and mouth-organs and all that rubbish of musical instruments which delight the hearts of the poor. Until one day two blackened young men from the big motor works in the Pansophist Road stood outside the window and argued.

They argued about these instruments in stock and how you made these instruments sound, because they were fond of argument, and one asserted and the other denied that he could make every instrument in the place sound a note. And the argument rose high, and led to a bet.