Chapter XI: Part 11

I must acknowledge that I was disappointed in his appearance. He was a very polite, affable person, and, apparently, a perfect gentleman. There were certainly no claws upon his fingers. His feet were not cloven. There were no horns upon his head. Neither did I, after a rather secret and anxious scrutiny, discover any indications of a tail. He greeted me as if he knew me well, and at once put me at ease with himself. I made bold to congratulate him upon his personal appearance, whereat he smiled and said: "Yes, the old story--horns, hoofs and tail, I suppose. I know it is the custom for you people on that little planet, which is called, I think, the Earth, when you wish to represent anything infamous or abominable, to paint the Devil, and you generally paint him very black. Now we know a thing or two here, and we always return the compliment, for when we wish to represent anything infamous or abominable we paint Man in his natural colors. I assure you sir, I am not so black as they paint me. Why, sir, I have been obliged to blush more than once at the crimes which some men have committed who come here for cleansing."

I acknowledged the justness of his remarks and then, anxious to settle a suspicion which had been troubling me, I asked him where the fire was. He smiled again, and said:

"Fire? It is all round you. Hell-fire is by no means a falsehood. Look at these people. They have brought all their passions with them. We cannot manufacture a fire which can burn and consume like the fires of passion in man's breast. We know of no hell so terrible as the hell in a man's bosom. Let me tell you there isn't a man or woman on your Earth without a tiger chained in his breast. Let him but once unloose the beast and hell has broken loose in himself. These tides of passion never ebb. They are resistless in their flow, and they burn and kill, as they flow, like a stream of molten lava running down the side of the volcano into the fertile plains. That man there, who killed his brother is none the less a murderer now, only that his passion to kill is intensified without the means of its gratification; and you will notice that he carries the skeleton of that brother tied to him, from which he cannot escape. Do you think fire would be any such punishment to him? That miser, who was eaten up with avarice in his mortal life, is doubly the miser now, only the gains which he hoards are forever swept from him. So with them all. They bring their passions with them here only to have them intensified, to have their capacities for passion correspondingly increased, and never to have the opportunities of gratifying them. That is the kind of hell-fire we have here, and it burns until the victim is burnt out, and purified, and regenerated, and rendered capable of receiving pure enjoyment. We who are placed in charge of them have no sympathy with them, for we have no passions. We have living brains, but dead hearts.

"And yet," I remarked, "many of these people seem to be very quiet and calm. They do not look as if they were troubled at all by passions."

"There is where you make a great mistake," the Devil replied. "Appearances are as deceitful here as they are on Earth. Outward quietness is no sign of inward peace. The ocean, which is in continual war with the elements, lashing its surface into ungovernable fury, is secret and silent in its depth, while some hidden lake in the mountains, or some pool in the valleys, which never feels the ocean storm blowing over its surface, yet mirrors every storm-cloud in its breast and is disturbed in its depths by violent currents. Appearances are deceitful, even here, you see."

The Devil then offered to show me about his dominions, and we trudged along together. I was surprised to find so many people there I had known on Earth and supposed were saints; men whom I had known with serene faces, and upturned eyes, and saintly expressions, who were all the time deprecating the sinfulness of Earth; who held up their hands in holy horror at pleasures and snuffed evil in every wind that blew; and among them some whose names had been blown abroad loud and long, and who had mounted upon the top of popular opinion by means of the step-ladders of piety. The Devil noticed my surprise and said: "Yes! we have a good many of that sort. They are all entered on the books as hypocrites. One of our choicest vintages, which we serve on State occasions, is their tears bottled up. They are much superior in flavor to the tears of the crocodile."

He took me further on and showed me the men who had been cruel to animals, each of whom was tormented by the animals he had tormented in life. Brutal cartmen, who had lashed their horses to death, were in harness, and the horses were lashing them. In one place, there was an entire horse-railroad company drawing overloaded cars. A man who was cruel to his dog was pursued and constantly bitten by a howling pack of them. Another, who had wantonly killed a little bird, was chained to a rock, like Prometheus, and vultures were forever pecking at him. Nero, who took delight in killing flies, was forever stung by swarms of insects. This one, who had been cruel to his ox, was harnessed to a plow, and the ox was goading him along. That one, who had been unnecessarily cruel to a fish, was forever swimming in bottomless waters, pursued by sharks. Thus each was punished in kind, and cruelty to the dumb beast brought its own compensation. Whereat I rejoiced, and quietly pressed the hand of the Devil in token of satisfaction.

And he said to me: "Even we devils, bad as we are supposed to be, hardly know a crime so wicked as the crime of cruelty to the animal, from man down to the insect. We have no worse punishments than that for violations of the law of kindness, which is the law of love."

We wandered on, and found several other classes of persons, each of whom was punished in some unique manner. There were pot-house politicians by the multitude, who were chasing after offices which constantly eluded their grasp just as they thought they had them. There was an army of street-corner organ-grinders condemned to wander for a term of years and never to cease grinding "Captain Jinks," while the man who wrote "Captain Jinks" was condemned to follow them and listen to it as long as they played it. There was a large multitude of people from Cincinnati, condemned to sit for a thousand years upon a bank of a river and read the daily papers of Chicago. There was a crowd of tradesmen, who cheated with false weights, condemned to trudge for centuries with their weights hung about their necks; and others, who mixed sand with sugar, and turmeric with butter, and sold other villainous compounds for the genuine article, who were forced to eat their own abominable adulterations incessantly. And thus we went on until we came to a spot where there was a fearful chattering and screaming. The Devil stopped his ears as we approached, and I immediately discovered a crowd of able-bodied, stout-armed women chasing a piece of paper which was fluttering through the air. Every time that they were on the point of seizing it, a puff of wind would blow it away again. And on the paper was written the single word "Ballot." I smiled as I recognized some of them.

Thus we went on, but it was everywhere the same story. Those who had bad passions on Earth brought their bad passions along with them, and made their own hells. Those who were foolish on Earth were foolish here, and everyone was punished in kind. Each person had his crime fastened upon him, and whatever chalice he had forced others to drink was now commended to his own lips.

And as we retraced our steps, I asked the Devil if there was no cessation from these punishments, and he answered: "Love will finally triumph at last, for it is the law of laws, both on the Earth and in the Heavens."

We again reached the River Lethe, and I asked him what word he wished to send to Earth. He smiled, as he answered: "Nothing special. My business is doing well there, and I have no fault to find with your representation. The supply quite exceeds the demand."

He paused a minute, and said: "And yet I think I might send some advice by you. A great many good souls upon Earth are troubled about the meaning of life. There was one poor fool named Dr. Faust, who once sold himself to me, in order to get at the meaning of the riddle. Tell them that any one who can appreciate the littleness of life and not lose his own dignity has come near enough to solving the problem. Tell them, also, to realize, if they can, that their condition is human, and that, whenever they try to ape the divine, they are opposing the eternal fitness of things. The best happiness, and glory, and virtue they can reach is in being _men_, and loving their fellow-men. If they become angels on Earth, they have nothing left to do when they get up there. That old poet whom you are accustomed to style a heathen was just right when he said: 'I am human, and I deem nothing human a stranger to me.'"

I promised the Devil I would take his message to Earth, and then said: "I have but one more question to ask."

"What is that?" he replied.

"Do editors come here often?"

"No! they have quite enough of this place where they are."

I thanked him from my heart of hearts, and bade him good-bye as one not utterly bereft of comfort and consolation.

As the old ferryman landed I noticed that his boat was full of stock speculators, and that the Devil looked utterly disgusted when they stepped into his dominions.

We passed over the river in silence. I climbed the hill and crossed the blank moors, passed through the golden sea again, and then on through the systems until I reached Earth and awaked.

It may be barely possible that a quarter section of hot mince pie had something to do with this visit.

September 19, 1869.

_L'ENVOI._

It is only a few brief lines, and I must say good-bye to the reader, and the book closes. You and I have kept company together through nearly three years of pleasant intercourse--a brief time as numbered by years, but long enough in the calendar of words and deeds. I trust neither of us is the worse for the company, and that we shall part with kindly words, good wishes and mutual blessings, until we see each other again. I trust that in these preceding pages, each one of you may have found some thought you will deem worthy to lay away for preservation among the locks of hair and old letters and faded flowers and other souvenirs which each of you keep and look at when the world presses heavily upon you with its cares and anxieties.

I trust that you may have found something that is beautiful in the lives of each one of our little family with whom you have been made acquainted, in your companionship with me. I frankly confess to you that I have a tender regard for them all, and that I shall be disappointed if you do not share the same, as I have only been their mouthpiece when they have spoken. I know that they regret the parting with you as much as I, and that if we ever meet again, they will extend to you the same warm welcome as I.

And now the book closes, just as the birds are flying to the warmer South and the groves are growing strangely silent; just as the flowers are fading in the gardens and in the fields; just as the leaves are falling in the forests, and the hill-sides are beginning to drape themselves in the melancholy and tender beauty of the Autumn. I cannot make this parting without a feeling of regret and a certain sadness; and, as I extend my hand to each and all of you--to some whom I have met daily, to some whose faces have grown familiar, and to some whom I have never seen and may never see, and yet have sent me precious words of sympathy and encouragement during these past three years--I should be ungrateful were I not to acknowledge the constant kindness which has greeted these careless letters as they have appeared in the columns of the TRIBUNE.

Hoping that, in some future time, we may meet together again as now, it only remains to say Farewell, and to write those saddest of all words--

THE END.

September 22, 1869.

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Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious typographical errors were repaired.

Archaic or variant stylistic spellings, and hyphenation inconsistencies, were retained.

Redundant title page at the beginning--displaying only "Letters of Peregrine Pickle"--was removed.

Table on P. 260, "E-flat" and "B-flat" are displayed as the note name followed by the musical "flat" symbol in the original.

End of Project Gutenberg's Letters of Peregrine Pickle, by George P. Upton