""To Coney Island to see the sights," I replied. "Won"t you join me?"
""Not I," he replied. "Coney Island is tame. When I first joined the spectre band, it seemed to me that nothing could delight me more than an eternal round of gayety like that; but, Austin, I have changed. I have developed a good deal since you and I were parted at the grave."
""I should say you had," I answered. "I doubt if many of your old friends would know you."
""You seem to have had difficulty in so doing yourself, Austin," he replied, regretfully; "but see here, old chap, give up Coney Island, and spend the evening with me at the club. You"ll have a good time, I can a.s.sure you."
""The club?" I said. "You don"t mean to say you visions have a club?"
""I do indeed; the Ghost Club is the most flourishing a.s.sociation of choice spirits in the world. We have rooms in every city in creation; and the finest part of it is there are no dues to be paid. The membership list holds some of the finest names in history--Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Napoleon Bonaparte, Caesar, George Washington, Mozart, Frederick the Great, Marc Antony--Ca.s.sius was black-balled on Caesar"s account--Galileo, Confucius."
[Ill.u.s.tration]
""You admit the Chinese, eh?" I queried.
""Not always," he replied. "But Con was such a good fellow they hadn"t the heart to keep him out; but you see, Austin, what a lot of fine fellows there are in it."
""Yes, it"s a magnificent list, and I should say they made a pretty interesting set of fellows to hear talk," I put in.
""Well, rather," Hawley replied. "I wish you could have heard a debate between Shakespeare and Caesar on the resolution, "The Pen is mightier than the Sword;" it was immense."
""I should think it might have been," I said. "Which won?"
""The sword party. They were the best fighters; though on the merits of the argument Shakespeare was "way ahead."
""If I thought I"d stand a chance of seeing spooks like that, I think I"d give up Coney Island and go with you," I said.
""Well," replied Hawley, "that"s just the kind of a chance you do stand.
They"ll all be there to-night, and as this is ladies" day, you might meet Lucretia Borgia, Cleopatra, and a few other feminine apparitions of considerable note."
""That settles it. I am yours for the rest of the day," I said, and so we adjourned to the rooms of the Ghost Club.
"These rooms were in a beautiful house on Fifth Avenue; the number of the house you will find on consulting the court records. I have forgotten it.
It was a large, broad, brown-stone structure, and must have been over one hundred and fifty feet in depth. Such fittings I never saw before; everything was in the height of luxury, and I am quite certain that among beings to whom money is a measure of possibility no such magnificence is attainable. The paintings on the walls were by the most famous artists of our own and other days. The rugs on the superbly polished floors were worth fortunes, not only for their exquisite beauty, but also for their extreme rarity. In keeping with these were the furniture and bric-a-brac.
In short, my dear sir, I had never dreamed of anything so dazzlingly, so superbly magnificent as that apartment into which I was ushered by the ghost of my quondam friend Hawley Hicks.
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"At first I was speechless with wonder, which seemed to amuse Hicks very much.
""Pretty fine, eh?" he said, with a short laugh.
""Well," I replied, in a moment, "considering that you can get along without money, and that all the resources of the world are at your disposal, it is not more than half bad. Have you a library?"
"I was always fond of books," explained 5010 in parenthesis to me, "and so was quite anxious to see what the club of ghosts could show in the way of literary treasures. Imagine my surprise when Hawley informed me that the club had no collection of the sort to appeal to the bibliophile.
""No," he answered, "we have no library."
""Rather strange," I said, "that a club to which men like Shakespeare, Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, and other deceased literati belong should be deficient in that respect."
""Not at all," said he. "Why should we want books when we have the men themselves to tell their tales to us? Would you give a rap to possess a set of Shakespeare if William himself would sit down and rattle off the whole business to you any time you chose to ask him to do it? Would you follow Scott"s printed narratives through their devious and tedious periods if Sir Walter in spirit would come to you on demand, and tell you all the old stories over again in a tenth part of the time it would take you to read the introduction to one of them?"
""I fancy not," I said. "Are you in such luck?"
""I am," said Hawley; "only personally I never send for Scott or Shakespeare. I prefer something lighter than either--Douglas Jerrold or Marryat. But best of all, I like to sit down and hear Noah swap animal stories with Davy Crockett. Noah"s the brightest man of his age in the club. Adam"s kind of slow."
""How about Solomon?" I asked, more to be flippant than with any desire for information. I was much amused to hear Hawley speak of these great spirits as if he and they were chums of long standing.
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""Solomon has resigned from the club," he said, with a sad sigh. "He was a good fellow, Solomon was, but he thought he knew it all until old Doctor Johnson got hold of him, and then he knuckled under. It"s rather rough for a man to get firmly established in his belief that he is the wisest creature going, and then, after a couple of thousand years, have an Englishman come along and tell him things he never knew before, especially the way Sam Johnson delivers himself of his opinions. Johnson never cared whom he hurt, you know, and when he got after Solomon, he did it with all his might.""
"I wonder if Boswell was there?" I ventured, interrupting 5010 in his extraordinary narrative for an instant.
"Yes, he was there," returned the prisoner. "I met him later in the evening; but he isn"t the spook he might be. He never had much spirit anyhow, and when he died he had to leave his nose behind him, and that settled him."
"Of course," I answered. "Boswell with no nose to stick into other people"s affairs would have been like _Oth.e.l.lo_ with Desdemona left out.
But go on. What did you do next?"
"Well," 5010 resumed, "after I"d looked about me, and drunk my fill of the magnificence on every hand, Hawley took me into the music-room, and introduced me to Mozart and Wagner and a few other great composers. In response to my request, Wagner played an impromptu version of "Daisy Bell" on the organ. It was great; not much like "Daisy Bell," of course; more like a collision between a cyclone and a simoom in a tin-plate mining camp, in fact, but, nevertheless, marvellous. I tried to remember it afterwards, and jotted down a few notes, but I found the first bar took up seven sheets of fool"s-cap, and so gave it up. Then Mozart tried his hand on a banjo for my amus.e.m.e.nt, Mendelssohn sang a half-dozen of his songs without words, and then Gottschalk played one of Poe"s weird stories on the piano.
"Then Carlyle came in, and Hawley introduced me to him. He was a gruff old gentleman, and seemingly anxious to have Froude become an eligible, and I judged from the rather fierce manner in which he handled a club he had in his hand, that there were one or two other men of prominence still living he was anxious to meet. d.i.c.kens, too, was desirous of a two-minute interview with certain of his at present purely mortal critics; and, between you and me, if the wink that Bacon gave Shakespeare when I spoke of Ignatius Donnelly meant anything, the famous cryptogrammarian will do well to drink a bottle of the elixir of life every morning before breakfast, and stave off dissolution as long as he can. There"s no getting around the fact, sir," Surrennes added, with a significant shake of the head, "that the present leaders of literary thought with critical tendencies are going to have the hardest kind of a time when they cross the river and apply for admission to the Ghost Club. _I_ don"t ask for any better fun than that of watching from a safe distance the initiation ceremonies of the next dozen who go over. And as an Englishman, sir, who thoroughly believes in and admires Lord Wolseley, if I were out of jail and able to do it, I"d write him a letter, and warn him that he would better revise his estimates of certain famous soldiers no longer living if he desires to find rest in that mysterious other world whither he must eventually betake himself. They"ve got their swords sharpened for him, and he"ll discover an instance when he gets over there in which the sword is mightier than the pen.
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"After that, Hawley took me up-stairs and introduced me to the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte, with whom I pa.s.sed about twenty-five minutes talking over his victories and defeats. He told me he never could understand how a man like Wellington came to defeat him at Waterloo, and added that he had sounded the Iron Duke on the subject, and found him equally ignorant.
"So the afternoon and evening pa.s.sed. I met quite a number of famous ladies--Catherine, Marie Louise, Josephine, Queen Elizabeth, and others.
Talked architecture with Queen Anne, and was surprised to learn that she never saw a Queen Anne cottage. I took Peg Woffington down to supper, and altogether had a fine time of it."
[Ill.u.s.tration]
"But, my dear Surrennes," I put in at this point, "I fail to see what this has to do with your defence in your trial for stealing spoons."
"I am coming to that," said 5010, sadly. "I dwell on the moments pa.s.sed at the club because they were the happiest of my life, and am loath to speak of what followed, but I suppose I must. It was all due to Queen Isabella that I got into trouble. Peg Woffington presented me to Queen Isabella in the supper-room, and while her majesty and I were talking, I spoke of how beautiful everything in the club was, and admired especially a half-dozen old Spanish spoons upon the side-board. When I had done this, the Queen called to Ferdinand, who was chatting with Columbus on the other side of the room, to come to her, which he did with alacrity. I was presented to the King, and then my troubles began.
""Mr. Surrennes admires our spoons, Ferdinand," said the Queen.
"The King smiled, and turning to me observed, "Sir, they are yours.
Er--waiter, just do these spoons up and give them to Mr. Surrennes."
"Of course," said 5010, "I protested against this; whereupon the King looked displeased.
""It is a rule of our club, sir, as well as an old Spanish custom, for us to present to our guests anything that they may happen openly to admire.
You are surely sufficiently well acquainted with the etiquette of club life to know that guests may not with propriety decline to be governed by the regulations of the club whose hospitality they are enjoying."
""I certainly am aware of that, my dear King," I replied, "and of course I accept the spoons with exceeding deep grat.i.tude. My remonstrance was prompted solely by my desire to explain to you that I was unaware of any such regulation, and to a.s.sure you that when I ventured to inform your good wife that the spoons had excited my sincerest admiration, I was not hinting that it would please me greatly to be accounted their possessor."
""Your courtly speech, sir," returned the King, with a low bow, "is ample a.s.surance of your sincerity, and I beg that you will put the spoons in your pocket and say no more. They are yours. _Verb. sap_."