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?”