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

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 today – 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 homeopathic 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 Caesar 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. Caesar, 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.”