LIKE LITTLE TWITTERING SNOW BIRDS ON A LIMB
“LIKE LITTLE TWITTERING SNOW BIRDS ON A LIMB”
“Waters said that the Savior would not have been admitted to Trinity Church on Sunday on account of his clothes, and if he should appear and stand at the corner of Broad and Wall for two minutes somebody would take away his halo, his sandals and his robe. He would be divested of everything that was his and be cast adrift in the darkness when the day was done.
“I may say, parenthetically, there was one Spirit we never met in the neighborhood. In fact none of our party ever seemed to have been in its presence at any time.
“At night we saw troops of sinister and ravenous shades prowling among the gloomy evil hives in this lair of Mammon like famished wolves upon ground where they had once killed.
“Waters continued his revelations, with few interruptions, for a month or more, for it took a long timeto communicate his extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the up-to-date methods of gold accumulation. When he had finished I must admit that we shuddered at the damnable realities he portrayed. At one point we who had head coverings removed them reverently and bowed to Waters. Teach threw his semblance of a black wide brimmed hat into the air, with a hollow ghastly yell that brought many curious, pale peering faces up from among the old crumbling stones in the church yard.
“Captain Morgan observed that all these operations were evidently conducted without bodily risk—in other words, without the exercise of personal courage—and the necessary murder involved was accomplished by slow drawn out processes that inflicted needless suffering and misery on entirely too many people. The cutlass, the plank walking, and the ‘Long Tom’, loaded with grape-shot, were much more merciful, although less effective as profit producers. He made the point that old fashioned piracy was to a certain extent redeemed by the individual valor of the pirates. They took brave men’s chances and carried their lives in their hands, and that, at least, was one feature of their business that was entitled to respect. He considered on the whole that, from an ethical standpoint, modern methods were much more reprehensible than the old.
“Waters’ continued narrations were like tales from the Arabian Nights. They made all of us feel so insignificant that after a while we concluded that we didn’t like him. Somehow we didn’t feel very prominent when he was about, and we began to avoid him. We spent much of our time in the sub-treasury and bank vaults watching new shades vainly clutching at the money stacks with their pale fingers.
“The insane strife of the hordes of mortals to see who can die beside the biggest gold pile has always been considered a rich joke in the spirit world, for when they come among us they are unable to bring any of it with them. The accumulation in the sub-treasury is very convenient for them to gloat over and it continues their worldly illusions perfectly. As a matter of fact it is just as consistent for them to gloat over this vaulted gold in their spiritual state as it was for them to strut and swell with pride over the earthly wealth on which they had their short leases during life.
“You might be interested in knowing something of the present state of a few well known shades. Washington, Lincoln, and many other translated statesmen are no longer here. Most of the mighty dead were men of settled convictions. Long ago a lot of these potent and highly respected phantoms became disgusted with political developments and with mundane conditions generally.They left the earth’s atmosphere and are now flocking about on the moon, where there are no politics whatever and plenty of big holes and extinct craters to crawl into when perfect seclusion is desired.
“Since Pharaoh left the Red Sea he has been on Mars. Many of those who became famous in the world for murdering on a large scale are now there. They find the redness of that planet most congenial. Napoleon still remains in the earth’s atmosphere for he still hopes that some day he will come back. Socrates, Sir Isaac Newton, Columbus, and numerous other worthy shades, are on one of the satellites of Jupiter where finally they are beyond the reach of hostile criticism. Nebuchadnezzar, who built and worshipped an image of gold, and who was dethroned by the Lord and sent into the fields to eat grass, is now at the North Pole. In that frigid silence there is no grass or gold and there will he stay forever.
“This reminds me that great multitudes of shades are waiting eagerly for Bill Hohenzollern. While it is true that, in your modern and expressive slang, he is what might be called a ‘dead one’, he has not yet been actually translated.
“In suggesting the proper disposition of a particularly offensive public malefactor, one of your American orators once advised casting him out of the universethrough ‘the hole in the sky’. This hole in the sky, astronomers tell us, is somewhere off down near the Southern Cross. It is a vast void in the firmament in which there is no planet, star or other heavenly body. No starry worlds, in their eternal orbits, ever intersect that awful abyss. No stellar lights ever twinkle there—no meteors ever stream through that Stygian darkness, where creation has left an appalling and dismal blank. When William Hohenzollern comes among us there will be a gala event in the spirit world. He will be rolled up into a misty wad, loaded into a long pale tube with millions of feet of poison gas, and shot out of the cosmos through that awful hiatus among the constellations—that frightful chasm in the universe, where he will forever be beyond infinity itself—and where even the Almighty, whom he once claimed as his partner, may never again be able to find him for consultation. He will be beyond the limits of communication, and even the music of the spheres can never reach him. It’s the hole in the sky for Bloody Bill, and we are all looking forward in pleasurable anticipation to a day of great spiritual exaltation and rarefied enjoyment.
“During his eruptive period he probably acted no worse than a great many other humans would with the same opportunities—he was one of the results of a bad system—the point of a much aggravated protuberance that had to be lanced. We all realize thathistory has finally demonstrated that autocracy is wrong. We greatly envy you who live in an age that is beholding the dawn of cohesive democracy, and the passing of conditions that have made it possible for one man to hold the destiny of millions in the hollow of his hand. Bill will be forgiven—but after he is projected.
“One night Kinisi and I were alone in the belfry. Out in the moonlight we saw Sidi ben Musa, Red Beard, Morgan, Teach and Kidd, lined up among the tombstones in the church yard. They appeared to be making unfamiliar movements. I asked Kinisi what he thought they were doing and he replied that they seemed to be kicking themselves, and that they had been acting that way every night for a week. He thought that, like the robins in autumn, they had flocked and were preparing to migrate.
“These shades, who, in life, had been relentless highwaymen of the seas—blood bespattered, remorseless, steeped in murder, arson, theft and unnamable crimes—the heels of whose boots had dripped with human gore on a thousand decks—held their spectral hands aloft and were aghast when they realized the pitiful inconsequence and puny achievement of their futile careers.
MY OLD TOWER IN HUNGARY
“MY OLD TOWER IN HUNGARY”
“There was a big storm one night and we never saw them again. The valiant and hardy little band mayhave drifted out over the sea with the heavy off-shore wind and rolling mists, and may now be peacefully haunting the scenes of their former tame profiteering and modest killings, where spiritual life is not as strenuous as we found it in the twentieth century Gomorrah that we contemplated from the belfry of Trinity.
“Kinisi wanted to stay with Waters for a while longer, but I had had enough of modern money centers. I left one night in a freight car that was loaded with light wines and moving westward. Although it was marked for Atchison, Kansas, I had no difficulty in turning it up into Michigan, to where I seemed impelled by some unaccountable instinct. I may say incidentally that many wandering freight cars with spirits on board are now being diverted over strange routes by ghostly direction, and much of the present freight confusion is due to that cause. That was several years ago, and, so far as I know, the car is still at Benton Harbor.
“I drifted along the lake shore and around in the hills for some time, and one night I was amazed to see what looked like my old tower in Hungary. I promptly decided to haunt this place, after I had investigated it, on account of the old associations it brought to mind. It was impossible for me to go back to my old tower, for things have changed so much in Hungary that I wouldtake no comfort there, so you see I have turned over a new leaf and here I am.
“A little while after you came in you were doubtless surprised, and possibly startled, by certain sounds that it was necessary for me to make in the top of the tower. I was communicating with Kinisi, who at that moment was in the belfry of Trinity, and I have no doubt that he got my message and will be here before long. You see that in the spiritual world we have always used the Hertzian waves. You have only recently found them with your wireless telegraphy and telephony. By certain peculiar sound modulations, properly keyed, we are enabled to utilize the waves in a way that your modern science has not yet discovered. I imagine such communications might properly be called phantograms. Before many years you will be able to talk to friends in New York—if you have any—by simply raising a third story window and pitching your tones into the exact harmonic, as you heard me do tonight. It’s all quite simple when you know how. That heavy thumping in the pipes was just a local manifestation and it had nothing to do with the message to Kinisi.
THE CORNFIELDS IN OCTOBER
THE CORNFIELDS IN OCTOBER
“Any spiritual sound or demonstration, in which ghostly noise of any kind is produced, is known among us as a ‘skreek’. Skreeks have a wide range of utility.They may be vibrated over vast distances, as I just exemplified from the tower top, or used in a merely local way, like the expression in the pipes.
“In the summer time you often hear funny squeaky noises and loud thumps in the water pipes that connect with the guest tents on the bluff. Well, that’s me. While I am among the tents a great deal in the summer, I play the pipes from the tower, so whenever you hear these skreeks after this you will understand the cause. I tried the main pipes tonight just to see if they were keeping their tonality in cold weather.
“Since I’ve been here I’ve greatly enjoyed myself. I take much pleasure in wandering about the farm at night. I spend considerable time in our friend’s cornfields during the warm summer nights where I meet many Indian shades. They are among the stalks in the dark, cracking the joints to make them grow faster. In October they stay in the shocks and rustle the dry leaves at night. They used to live all over these bluffs in their little wigwams. Sometimes I spend hours in the farm house between the walls, listening to our friend Jacobs and his guests. A lot of friends come to see him who interest me, and some of them I would like to meet in the way I have met you tonight. Please remember me to Professor Dientsbach, who has charge of the children’s saxophone band, when you see him, and get himup here some Christmas eve if you can. He has had the band in the tower on several occasions, and it afforded me much pleasure. Give my regards to the small boy you call the ‘Hot Spot’, and assure him and his little sister Gertie that there is nothing at all in the tower for them to be afraid of, and I am always glad to have them come up here and play.
“Sometimes I go up to Thunder Knob, the big sand dune north of here. The shades of an Indian hunter and a large sand bear have been fighting inside of this dune off and on for many years. When they are quiet too long I go in and stir them up.
“I often visit the little chapel on the next hill during winter nights, and sit there until early morning—in fact it is one of my favorite haunts when I am outside of the tower. I also find much diversion in drifting about in the dark through the winter woods and along the lake shore when everything is frozen up. This winter I have spent several nights in the deserted pavilion on the beach, amusing myself with the phonograph records in the corner. Sometime they will learn to can heat and cold as they do sound. The winds down there in the winter are very wheezy and I like it.”
THE ROAD THROUGH THE WINTER WOODS
THE ROAD THROUGH THE WINTER WOODS
There was a long silence after this. I changed my position on the box against the wall and thought possibly that I must have dozed for a few minutes andmissed part of the story, but was not sure of it. I looked up on the stairway, but apparently my ghost was not there. Evidently he had faded with the first gray morning light that was now stealing into the tower, and had taken his long lingering thirst down below to his phantom flagon of musty wine.
I waited for some time, but remembering what he had said about a possible sudden disappearance, I concluded that it was useless to remain longer.
I arrived at the farm house just in time for breakfast, and, immediately afterward I began this tale of what I had seen and heard in the tower, while the facts were still fresh in my mind.
Up to that memorable Christmas eve I was entirely unfamiliar with Hungarian history, and did not know whether anybody by the name of Emric Szapolyia had ever lived or not. Naturally I was very curious on the subject and anxious to convince myself that I had not been dreaming in the tower.
I obtained a copy of Godkin’s “History of Hungary and the Magyars,” and succeeded in locating my ghostly friend in a chapter devoted to the career of King Mathias Corvinus, who reigned between 1457 and 1480. The account given of him coincided with what he had told me as far as it went. While he was referred to as a general and duke, it did not mention his tower, or thefact that he had ever been a “robber baron,” but the omission of such trifling details in a brief summary of his period was to be expected. He was mentioned as “an able and experienced officer, never at a loss for an expedient in the midst of the most unpromising circumstances, always cool and collected.”
His friend Paul Kinisi was alluded to as “the Murat of the Magyar army—fiery, brilliant, ostentatious, galloping to the charge with flashing sabre and in splendid costume.” I also found confirmation of Kinisi’s exploit with the three Turks, related by the ghost. As the historical allusions in his narrative corresponded with such authentic fragments as I was able to find concerning him and his friend Kinisi, I assumed that the rest of his story was equally reliable. While I was unable to verify all of his statements, any doubts as to the reality of the interview were dissipated.
I carefully searched such piratical lore as I had access to and found that there was nothing in the tale in the tower that was inconsistent with recorded facts relating to piracy on the high seas from Szapolyia’s time on earth down to that of the sojourn of the ghostly crew on the Island of Manhattan. In “The Book of Pirates” I found the life stories of nearly all of the sea faring Wizards of Finance with whom he stated that he had associated. There appears to be no record of any ofthem having been haunted at any time, but the haunter was of course much better qualified to tell of this than some skeptical, and perhaps careless, historian who was not there at the time.
One of our illustrations is from an old photograph of Wall Street and Trinity Church, probably taken some time before the ghost left New York. It is unfortunate that it could not have been made at night and possibly have revealed at least some of the filmy forms of the piratical crew on the sub-treasury steps. It would then be a welcome bit of corroborative evidence in case the specter’s veracity should ever be questioned.
I thought that some of the strictures and comparisons made by my phantom friend were somewhat severe, but I have included them in this chronicle for the sake of accuracy. We all have different points of view, and I suppose, from his standpoint, the elucidation of present day business methods by the shade of the case-hardened Mr. Waters, did make that spectral little band of freebooters feel rather cheap and disgruntled. The contrasts between their times and ours of course shocked them, but they should have remembered that in an age of progress everything must advance, and human villainy would naturally be deeper and greater now than during their periods. I thoughtthat Waters might have been a little more tactful and considerate. He should have revealed the situation in a way that would not have humiliated the gentle little crew in the belfry by making them feel that they had been out classed and, that if they had been alive, they would have been without professional distinction.
THE END