High Spirits

by Robertson Davies

  This was the sorriest excuse for a ghost I had ever met. Failure in the spirit world is particularly chilling, and I was beginning to shiver. But I couldn’t break away. It would have been unfeeling.

  “But you have apparently achieved some success after death,” said I. “You are a ghost, and you are far from home. How have you got leave to travel?”

  “That is the saddest part of my story,” said he. “But you must hear me out. Don’t bustle me.”

  I groaned, but I had not the heart to leave him.

  “It came to a head this very night, two hundred and fifty years ago,” said the ghost. “It was on December the ninth, in 1728. Our good King George II had just entered the eleventh year of his long reign—”

  “Yes, yes,” said I; “I know a little history myself. Do make haste.”

  “What a fidget you are,” said the ghost, rather sharply I thought for a Poor Relation. “Then hear me. My cousin, the squire, and his lady had gone to Sudeley Castle, to a ball. I was not invited. Of course not. I was a nobody and I had no fine clothes. I was left at home without even a word of apology. Nor had any dinner been ordered. My cousin’s wife, who was inclined to be mean, said that doubtless I could get something in the kitchen with the servants.

  “That would not have been so bad, because the servants saw to it that they ate very well, but it meant that I had to brave my greatest enemy, the butler; he took every chance to make me feel my position as a Poor Relation. And that night he was particularly tyrannous, because he was drunk. We quarrelled. He killed me.”

  “Stabbed you?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Shot you? The great kitchen blunderbuss, kept above the chimney, loaded in case of burglars? In his drunken rage the butler tore it from its place and shot you while the womenfolk screamed?”

  “You have been seeing too much television,” said the ghost. “The eighteenth century wasn’t like that at all.”

  I continued to be hopeful and romantic. “But the quarrel,” I said; “he insulted you, spoke slightingly of your birth, and your good blood was aroused. You lunged at him with your sword, but lost your footing, and he seized the sword and stabbed you to the heart. Please say it was like that.”

  “I never owned a sword in my life,” said the ghost. “Nasty, dangerous things. No: I’ll tell you exactly how it was. I was rather drunk myself, you see, and we were having a dispute about how to make boot-blacking. I had complained that the blacking he used had too much brown sugar in it. You know, the secret of good boot-blacking is the proportion of brown sugar to the amount of soot and vinegar. It’s the butler’s work to make it. And I said he put in too much brown sugar. I said my boots were always sticky. He said I lied. I said he forgot himself in the presence of his betters. He said what betters, and I was no more than a servant myself and begged the Squire’s old wigs. Then I absent-mindedly picked up a table fork and stuck it into his right buttock. He must have had very soft flesh because it went much farther in than I had expected. Right up to the handle. Then he picked up a pewter tankard and hit me over the head, and to my surprise and indignation I fell to the floor, dead as a nit.”

  This was the lowest ghost I had ever been pestered by. A wearer of second-hand wigs! Brained in a kitchen brawl with a pewter pot! And he had the gall to haunt Massey College! Nevertheless, as a tale of low-life, this had its interest.

  “What happened then?” I asked.

  “That was the cream of the whole thing,” said the ghost, as near to laughter as a ghost can get. “You see, as soon as the butler hit me with that pot, I found myself about nine inches above the ground, watching everything—myself stretched out on the floor, the cook trying to staunch the blood from my head with a towel, all the maids in hysterics, the footman saying he knew it would come to this some day, and the butler, as white as a sheet, blubbering: ‘Oh zur, come back I beg ’ee. I never went fur to do it, zur. Come back and I’ll go light on the brown sugar as long as I live, indeed zur, I will.’ But it was hopeless. I was gone, so far as they were concerned. The butler ran off and became a highwayman, but he was too fat and stupid for the work, and he was caught and hanged within a year.

  “But there was one thing about the affair that was truly impressive. The cook was a wise woman, in her fashion, and before the butler ran off she begged him to taste my blood—just a little, just to dip his finger in the blood and lick it. He refused. She took a few licks herself, to show him that there was nothing really unpleasant about it, but of course she was professionally accustomed to tasting uncooked substances. Why? Because, you see, she knew that if he did that my ghost would never be able to appear. Now you remember that, if ever you kill anybody; swallow some of his blood, or you’ll be sorry. But of course in these days so many murderers are careless and ignorant that what I am telling you has almost been forgotten. I have always been glad that butler was thoroughly stupid; otherwise my fine career, my real achievement, would have been impossible.”

  The ghost was markedly more cheerful, now. “Do you know, that was the best thing that ever happened to me? From being a Poor Relation, I was suddenly promoted to Family Ghost. My cousin and his wife were proud of me, and as succeeding generations appeared in the manor I became quite a celebrity. I was once investigated by the Society for Psychical Research, and Harry Price himself gave me the coveted three-star rating: Accredited Spectre, First Class.”

  I continued to be patient, under difficulties. “But what brings you here?” I asked. A ghost from Gloucestershire with a nice little local reputation—what sent him travelling?

  He groaned. All ghosts groan, and it is a very disquieting sound. This ghost was a first-rate groaner.

  “You read the newspapers, I suppose?” he said.

  “Unfailingly,” I replied.

  “Zena Cherry?” said he.

  “Religiously,” said I, and made the sign of the gossip columnist—one hand cupped to the ear, the other reaching for the pencil.

  “Then surely you remember her account of the old English manor house that had been bought by a Toronto entrepreneur and re-built, stone by stone, in Don Mills, near the Bridle Path?”

  I did remember it.

  “It was, literally, an uprooting,” said the ghost. “But I took it philosophically. The trouble with a ghost’s situation, you see, is the sameness of it. After two hundred and fifty years I was beginning to feel housebound, and I thought a new country, new people to frighten, new people to boast about me, would be an adventure. So I didn’t mind the move to Toronto; the journey by airline freight wasn’t bad, in spite of the delays by strikes. But when I arrived at last, all sorts of terrible things began to happen.”

  “Climate unfavourable, I suppose?” said I, sympathetically.

  “Not that, so much as the structural changes,” said the ghost. “Our splendid old manorhouse kitchen was thought too big for a Canadian dwelling. To begin, it was a good hundred and forty feet from the dining-room, and there was a flight of stone stairs on the way. You should have heard what the real-estate people had to say about that! And it had a flagstone floor, which was hard and cold to Canadian feet. Further, our house was a proper gentleman’s residence, and without a butler and a footman and six maids and a cook and a scullion nothing more ambitious than sandwiches could be managed. So the real estate people decided that an entirely new kitchen should be built, and the old kitchen should become something called a rumpus room, where the children of the family could be at a suitable distance from their elders. I gather that ‘rumpus’ is the modern word for what in my day was called hullabaloo.

  “To accommodate the new kitchen, the contractor bought in England and transferred to Don Mills an object that would never be seen attached to a respectable manor. It was an oast-house. You know what an oast-house is?”

  I didn’t.

  “It’s a kiln for drying hops, a great tower-like building with a pointed roof. An unseemly object. But they stuck it to the side of the manor, right by the dining-room, and
put a modern kitchen in it.

  “A modern kitchen is no place for a ghost. Crackling with electric current, cold things, hot things, and cramped so that one miserable servant can do the work of five. Where is the ingle-nook, where visiting grooms and coachmen can dry themselves in bad weather? Where is the cheerful fire, and the spit, the dogs, the cat and her kittens, the hens running in and out, the ducks peeping in at the door, and, in winter, the shadowy corners for haunting? But the worst thing of all was that the builders and the contractor couldn’t get the name right, and they called the horrid thing an oaf-house. Who wants to haunt an oaf-house, I ask you? A Poor Relation I may have been, but an oaf—never!

  “Nevertheless, I determined to make the best of it. All immigrants have a hard time in a new country, for a few hundred years. I decided to divide my time between the oaf-house, on the housekeeper’s day off, and the rumpus room when the children weren’t doing whatever children do in a rumpus room, which is something I never found out.

  “Because, you see, the house didn’t sell. Even with all the tinkering and destruction and costly misery and modern convenience it somehow failed to catch on. So the people who were trying to sell it hit on a great idea; they would let the public visit it.

  “That was the end, for me. We phantoms have our feelings, and I never undertook to haunt wholesale, so to speak. Servants I will frighten—yes, gladly. Gentlefolk of my own kindred I will provide with the thrill of a true family phantom, though I have always drawn the line at manifesting myself to more than two at a time—usually a man and his wife or better still, somebody who ought to be his wife. But haunt I must. It is part of my condition of existence, you see. Unless I make an appearance at least once a year, I am in serious trouble with—well, never you mind who. But appearing to people who have paid admission on behalf of a charity—no, no, the thing is not to be thought of.”

  “I suppose a great many people visited the house?” said I. I knew what had happened, but I wanted to hear his version of it.

  “They came by scores and hundreds,” said he. “And what they did to our family manor beggars description, as Old Shakespeare says. They invited Toronto decorators to refurbish it, a room to each decorator, and the decorators themselves made my eyes start out of my head. They were men of an affected elegance—what in my day might have been called exquisites or beaux, except that these were not gentlemen—they worked for their living, and what they sold was Taste. As if anyone of any consequence ever had taste, or wanted any! They filled our comfortable old manor with spindly walnut and mahogany that might have done well enough in a fashionable bawdy-house in London, but was not to be compared with our comfortable old oak and chairs stuffed with the wool of our own sheep. They brought in pictures of people nobody had ever heard of, and declared they were by Sir Peter Lely and later masters. They stuck up curtains and threw down carpets of horrid gaudy colours, as if brown were not the only colour a lady of good family would endure in her rooms. But there was worse to come, much worse.

  “They did up some of the rooms in what they called ‘contemporary taste’ and that was Chaos and Old Night, I assure you. They papered the floors, and stuck fur to the walls, and hung pictures by madmen, and set out furniture in which even I, as a weightless spectre, could not have sat with any comfort. And when all this was done the procession of viewers appeared. They were the friends of the Women’s Committees of the charities that were to be benefited by this dreadful rape of my dear old manor, and they tramped everywhere and poked into everything.

  “They seemed to have no idea of the comforts of an eighteenth-century house, and so they admired all the po-boxes in the bedrooms and said what charming little bedside tables they were, and they admired the silver chamber-pot my cousin had kept in the dining-room sideboard, for his convenience after dinner, and to my shame it was kept in full sight, filled with flowers. They loved all the modern rooms because they reminded them of their own homes. Best of all they liked the new kitchen, and said how wonderful it was that an inconvenient old manor could be so elegantly adapted for really civilized living. There were blue-haired ladies who came in aid of the Art Gallery and there were ladies with hair of improbable shades who came in aid of the Ballet, and noisy stout ladies who were patrons of Opera, and there were garden ladies who came to see the dreadful tropical plants that the decorators called ‘growies’ which were stuck up everywhere—as if garden rubbish didn’t belong outside a respectable gentleman’s house.”

  “And you couldn’t bear it?” said I, sympathetically.

  “I could bear everything,” said he, and I swear that if ever a ghost had tears in his eyes, it was at that moment. “Everything, that is, except the air-conditioning. Would you believe that they filled the fine old walls with metal guts that conveyed jets of air that stank of mice to every part of that dear old place—jets that squirted out where one least expected, blowing me about like a leaf in a storm and playing merry hell with my ectoplasm until I developed the worst case of phantom arthritis that has ever been seen at any of our Hallowe’en meetings. That was the finish. That settled the matter forever. I had to leave or I should have become a mere knotted bundle of malice, and would probably have dwindled into a Poltergeist of the lowest class. It was leave my home or lose countenance irreparably in the phantom world.

  “So will you take me in? You are a modern foundation, I know, but your College has some of what I regard as the comforts of home. Draughts, mostly; I miss normal, healthy draughts more than you can imagine.”

  I pondered, and that is always fatal, for when I ponder my resolution leaks away. He was a humble creature, as ghosts go, but his story had gone to my heart. Still—where on earth was I to put him?

  “I could make myself useful,” he said, wistfully. “I have heard that a trade flourishes on this continent—that of a Ghost Writer, and I know a lot of writing is done here. Yourself, for instance. I know you write romances, and though I despise romances perhaps, in time, I could grind out a three-volume novel about an unfortunate young man who wanted to be a College fellow, and then wanted to take holy orders, but who was slain untimely in an affair of honour with an aristocratic adversary. I promise to put in lots of theology. You could sign it, of course.”

  “No,” I said firmly, “that wouldn’t do at all.”

  He looked very forlorn, and he seemed to grow more transparent as grief overcame him. “Could I copy manuscripts?” he pleaded.

  I had a flash of illumination! Our Xerox machine in the College is terribly inadequate, and a copyist would be a great benefit to us—especially a copyist who was cheap.

  But where was I to put him? I cudgelled my brains and then—another flash—I had the answer.

  Years ago, when this College building was completed, the architect, Mr. Thom, presented me with a set of plans. I counted the rooms for occupation by Junior Fellows—and I paused. Then I went through the College with the Bursar and we counted, and counted again, and however carefully we counted there were three rooms in the plan which could not be found in the building. I made enquiry of Mr. Thom. “Yes,” he said, in the abstracted manner which is characteristic of architects, “when I had made all the alterations the founders called for, three rooms somehow got mislaid. Walls were moved, and jogs and corners were eliminated, and somehow or other three rooms disappeared. They are there, in a way, and yet in another way they aren’t there.”

  Without a word, I led the ghost up to the top of staircase number three, until we confronted a blank wall. “Here is your room,” said I; “I don’t pretend that I can see it myself, but perhaps you can.”

  It was a risk on my part, and it worked. The ghost vanished through the wall, but I could hear his voice, and for the first time since we met, its tone was cheerful.

  “Of course,” he cried; “the very thing I’ve always wanted. Commodious, a charming view of the quad, several strong draughts, and no modern conveniences whatever. Bless you, sir, bless you.”

  I was rid of him, for the mome
nt. I made a chalk mark on the wall where his door seemed to be. In a day or two I would hunt him up and instruct him in his new duties as an unseen and unrequited Xerox.

  As I walked back through the quad with a light heart I suddenly saw—my heart leapt into my mouth—I suddenly saw a figure, familiar to me from a score of nineteenth-century photographs, standing near the gate, looking about him with an air of deep disapproval. That barrel-shaped body in the impeccable frock coat; that tall silk hat of surpassing splendour. It must be he! I was to be rewarded for my good deed! I rushed forward, my hand outstretched.

  “Dr. Ibsen!” I cried; “you have come at last. Do stay a while! Do come inside! Have a glass of acquavit! Let us have a really splendid talk about your work! And will you honour me by inscribing my copy of your great drama, Ghosts?”

  Ibsen—for indeed it was he—bent upon me a gaze that was like being transfixed by two little knives. His thin lips parted, and a single word escaped the prison-house of his formidable countenance.

  “Tvertimot,” said he, and without another word he vanished through the bars of our gate.

  Tvertimot! Tvertimot—that supremely characteristic utterance had been the last word he spoke on his deathbed! I rushed into my study, dragged down my great Dictionary of the Norwegian Tongue and looked it up with trembling hands.

  “Tvertimot,” said the entry: “Quite the contrary, or colloquially, Not on your Nellie.”

  Well, I reflected, not a bad year for ghosts after all. We had acquired an additional Xerox, and Ibsen had dropped in for a sneer.