Mark Twain - The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (Illustrated)

“Look here,” says I, “do you know what you’re doing?”

“Well, what am I doing?”

“You are making heaven pretty comfortable in one way, but you are playing the mischief with it in another.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Well,” I says, “take a young mother that’s lost her child, and—”

“Sh!” he says. “Look!”

It was a woman. Middle-aged, and had grizzled hair. She was walking slow, and her head was bent down, and her wings hanging limp and droopy; and she looked ever so tired, and was crying, poor thing! She passed along by, with her head down, that way, and the tears running down her face, and didn’t see us. Then Sandy said, low and gentle, and full of pity:

“ She’s hunting for her child! No, found it, I reckon. Lord, how she’s changed! But I recognized her in a minute, though it’s twenty-seven years since I saw her. A young mother she was, about twenty two or four, or along there; and blooming and lovely and sweet? oh, just a flower! And all her heart and all her soul was wrapped up in her child, her little girl, two years old. And it died, and she went wild with grief, just wild! Well, the only comfort she had was that she’d see her child again, in heaven – ‘never more to part,’ she said, and kept on saying it over and over, ‘never more to part.’ And the words made her happy; yes, they did; they made her joyful, and when I was dying, twenty-seven years ago, she told me to find her child the first thing, and say she was coming – ‘soon, soon, very soon, she hoped and believed!’”

“Why, it’s pitiful, Sandy.”

He didn’t say anything for a while, but sat looking at the ground, thinking. Then he says, kind of mournful:

“And now she’s come!”

“Well? Go on.”

“Stormfield, maybe she hasn’t found the child, but I think she has. Looks so to me. I’ve seen cases before. You see, she’s kept that child in her head just the same as it was when she jounced it in her arms a little chubby thing. But here it didn’t elect to stay a child. No, it elected to grow up, which it did. And in these twenty-seven years it has learned all the deep scientific learning there is to learn, and is studying and studying and learning and learning more and more, all the time, and don’t give a damn for anything but learning; just learning, and discussing gigantic problems with people like herself.”

“Well?”

“Stormfield, don’t you see? Her mother knows cranberries , and how to tend them, and pick them, and put them up, and market them; and not another blamed thing! Her and her daughter can’t be any more company for each other now than mud turtle and bird o’ paradise. Poor thing, she was looking for a baby to jounce; I think she’s struck a disapp’intment.”

“Sandy, what will they do – stay unhappy forever in heaven?”

“No, they’ll come together and get adjusted by and by. But not this year, and not next. By and by.”

Table of Contents

I had been having considerable trouble with my wings. The day after I helped the choir I made a dash or two with them, but was not lucky. First off, I flew thirty yards, and then fouled an Irishman and brought him down – brought us both down, in fact. Next, I had a collision with a Bishop – and bowled him down, of course. We had some sharp words, and I felt pretty cheap, to come banging into a grave old person like that, with a million strangers looking on and smiling to themselves.

I saw I hadn’t got the hang of the steering, and so couldn’t rightly tell where I was going to bring up when I started. I went afoot the rest of the day, and let my wings hang. Early next morning I went to a private place to have some practice. I got up on a pretty high rock, and got a good start, and went swooping down, aiming for a bush a little over three hundred yards off; but I couldn’t seem to calculate for the wind, which was about two points abaft my beam. I could see I was going considerable to looard of the bush, so I worked my starboard wing slow and went ahead strong on the port one, but it wouldn’t answer; I could see I was going to broach to, so I slowed down on both, and lit. I went back to the rock and took another chance at it. I aimed two or three points to starboard of the bush – yes, more than that – enough so as to make it nearly a head-wind. I done well enough, but made pretty poor time. I could see, plain enough, that on a head-wind, wings was a mistake. I could see that a body could sail pretty close to the wind, but he couldn’t go in the wind’s eye. I could see that if I wanted to go a-visiting any distance from home, and the wind was ahead, I might have to wait days, maybe, for a change; and I could see, too, that these things could not be any use at all in a gale; if you tried to run before the wind, you would make a mess of it, for there isn’t anyway to shorten sail – like reefing, you know – you have to take it all in – shut your feathers down flat to your sides. That would land you, of course. You could lay to, with your head to the wind – that is the best you could do, and right hard work you’d find it, too. If you tried any other game, you would founder, sure.

I judge it was about a couple of weeks or so after this that I dropped old Sandy McWilliams a note one day – it was a Tuesday – and asked him to come over and take his manna and quails with me next day; and the first thing he did when he stepped in was to twinkle his eye in a sly way, and say:

“Well, Cap, what you done with your wings?”

I saw in a minute that there was some sarcasm done up in that rag somewheres, but I never let on. I only says:

“Gone to the wash.”

“Yes,” he says, in a dry sort of way, “they mostly go to the wash – about this time – I’ve often noticed it. Fresh angels are powerful neat. When do you look for ’em back?”

“Day after tomorrow,” says I.

He winked at me, and smiled.

Says I:

“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.