its best, for there’s where his enjoyment is best, and his ways
most set and established.”
“Does a chap of twenty-five stay always twenty-five, and look it?”
“If he is a fool, yes. But if he is bright, and ambitious and
industrious, the knowledge he gains and the experiences he has,
change his ways and thoughts and likings, and make him find his
best pleasure in the company of people above that age; so he allows
his body to take on that look of as many added years as he needs to
make him comfortable and proper in that sort of society; he lets
his body go on taking the look of age, according as he progresses,
and by and by he will be bald and wrinkled outside, and wise and
deep within.”
“Babies the same?”
“Babies the same. Laws, what asses we used to be, on earth, about
these things! We said we’d be always young in heaven. We didn’t
say HOW young – we didn’t think of that, perhaps – that is, we
didn’t all think alike, anyway. When I was a boy of seven, I
suppose I thought we’d all be twelve, in heaven; when I was twelve,
I suppose I thought we’d all be eighteen or twenty in heaven; when
I was forty, I begun to go back; I remember I hoped we’d all be
about THIRTY years old in heaven. Neither a man nor a boy ever
thinks the age he HAS is exactly the best one – he puts the right
age a few years older or a few years younger than he is. Then he
makes that ideal age the general age of the heavenly people. And
he expects everybody TO STICK at that age – stand stock-still – and
expects them to enjoy it! – Now just think of the idea of standing
still in heaven! Think of a heaven made up entirely of hoop-
rolling, marble-playing cubs of seven years! – or of awkward,
diffident, sentimental immaturities of nineteen! – or of vigorous
people of thirty, healthy-minded, brimming with ambition, but
chained hand and foot to that one age and its limitations like so
many helpless galley-slaves! Think of the dull sameness of a
society made up of people all of one age and one set of looks,
habits, tastes and feelings. Think how superior to it earth would
be, with its variety of types and faces and ages, and the
enlivening attrition of the myriad interests that come into
pleasant collision in such a variegated society.”
“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!'”