High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories

by Robertson Davies

  “Bertie, my boy,” he sobbed; “you’ve found it! Good fella! Oh, good fella!”

  But my distress was greater than before. “You can’t take it away!” I cried. “You mustn’t!”

  “Who’s going to stop me?” said King George the Fifth.

  Who, indeed? Consider: this was a ghost; the ghost of a king, armed with a sword that seemed to have the very unghostly property of being able to cut real objects. Such a threat was more than enough to daunt me. In my anguish I cried aloud: “Oh help!” I sighed, and then, remembering my national obligation to be fully bilingual I added “Au secours! Au secours!”

  I like to think it was the bilingualism that did it. A soft, self-possessed voice behind me said, “Perhaps I might be of assistance?”

  All three of us turned to see who had spoken. It was George the Sixth, oddly enough, who spoke first.

  “Mr. Prime Minister,” said he.

  Yes, that was who it was. Not any Prime Minister, but preeminently and solely the Prime Minister. That lock of hair that always dangled over the forehead; the lips parted in childlike wonderment; those exquisitely beautiful brown eyes, of which an Edwardian beauty might have been vain; the expensive clothes so negligently worn; above all that air of imperturbable, toad-like dignity: it could be but one person. It was William Lyon Mackenzie King.

  “There are a great many letters from me here,” said Mr. King, “and when I sensed that I might be of assistance to my dear old friend and colleague, Vincent Massey, I made haste to come.”

  For a moment my senses swam. But as rapidly as I could I explained the situation.

  “It is clear that the ahnvelope must remain where it is,” said Mackenzie King.

  “What!” roared George the Fifth, in such a Navy bellow as I had not yet heard. “Look here, Mr. Prime Minister: I know just as much about constitutional monarchy, and Dominion status, and the Statute of Westminster and all that frightful bilge as you do, but fair’s fair. It’s my stamp, and I want it.”

  “Your Majesty has failed to remember that in the case of a letter, only the literary content continues to be the property of the writer; the physical letter—paper, ink, and of course the stamp—become the indisputable property of the receiver. Your Majesty would not wish to rob one of his subjects of a personal possession. You would not think, for instance, of taking Mr. Massey’s cufflinks, or his cigarette case.”

  “But it’s a stamp,” murmured the King; it was not the voice of a monarch, or of an Admiral, but of a collector, and it was so wistful that my heart ached toward him. For I too am a collector, though not of stamps.

  “He’s got you up a tree, Father,” said George the Sixth, hardly less dejected.

  “He always had us all up trees,” murmured his father.

  But Mackenzie King was magnanimous in victory. “Canada would not wish to be ungenerous. Perhaps you might come back from time to time and look at it, finger it, play with it—even perhaps lick it,” said he.

  This last was an unhappy inspiration. The senior monarch fixed him with a look of fathomless scorn.

  “Anybody who would lick a unique specimen would fabricate a constitutional issue,” said he, and Mackenzie King veiled his beautiful eyes and moved his lips, as though in silent explanation of some old, unhappy, far-off thing. “Still—could I come here once a year?”

  “I think that is for the Master to say,” said Mackenzie King.

  It was at this moment that I was visited with an inspiration. “Will your Majesty grant me a favour?” said I.

  “Anything in reason,” said George the Fifth. “What would you like? What do you college-wallahs fancy? Star of India? Posthumous, naturally. You’d get it when you became one of us.”

  I knew why he was so generous; he wanted to get at that stamp. But before I could speak, Mackenzie King intervened.

  “Your Majesty has forgotten that Canadians are not permitted to accept titles, even posthumously.”

  King George the Fifth spoke at length on that subject, in terms I shall not repeat. His simple, sailor’s eloquence burned like a refiner’s fire. I was lost in wonder at some of the uses he made of the simplest Anglo-Saxon words, but Mackenzie King’s eyes were once more closed. I sensed that he was thinking of his mother. When the King had finished, I spoke again.

  “It was not a personal favour I sought, but something for the College. We have had some ghosts here—shabby, detrimental spooks who ran the place down. Now, if your Majesty—and of course you also, sir,” said I, looking at George the Sixth, “wish to come here to look at this remarkable stamp, you are welcome at any time. All I ask is that for some part of your yearly visit you will permit yourselves to be seen. It would do so much to establish a good College tone.”

  Before the King could answer, Mackenzie King had spoken again. “If any monarch, or monarchs, are to set foot—even posthumous foot—upon Canadian soil, it is desirable that a Canadian Minister of the Crown should be with them at all times,” said he. And because ghosts are not always careful to conceal their thoughts, I could hear, passing through his mind, the objectionable phrase, “to keep an eye on them”.

  It was at this moment that my inspiration completed itself in a dazzling flash. I spoke in a courtier-like tone which I had not found necessary with the two Georges. “Mr. Prime Minister,” said I; “you were certainly included in the invitation.”

  He seemed dubious, even then, and closed his eyes. In that instant I winked at the two kings; like the sailors they were at heart, they winked back.

  “When shall we manifest ourselves?” said George the Fifth.

  “I question if it is at all desirable to manifest ourselves,” said Mackenzie King. “There are a great many young scientists living in this college, and it would be discourteous—nay, wantonly cruel—to do anything that would tamper with their simple faith in materialism.”

  “Oh, come on,” said the senior monarch. “Let’s do the thing properly. I hate all this invisible hooting and rattling windows and so forth. That is for the lower order of ghosts. Be a sport, man; everybody knows you were a keen spiritualist. We’ll manifest ourselves.”

  “Yes,” I assented, eagerly; “if you would consent to walk around the quadrangle at midnight, for instance—”

  “Capital!” said the old King. “We’ll walk ahead, Bertie, arm-in-arm, and the P.M. can follow us, three paces in the rear. How’s that?”

  Mr. King looked sour. “We shall see,” said he. “Let us leave it at this: manifestation if necessary, but not necessarily manifestation.”

  “Oh, it will be necessary,” said George the Fifth. “When shall we come?” he asked, eagerly. I could see that his mind was on the stamp.

  “Would January the sixth be agreeable to your Majesties?” said I. It was clear by now that Mr. King did not count. The collectors were only too ready to cooperate.

  “You may depend upon us,” said the old King. “Now Bertie, we must go, or we shall be late for the haunted chart-room at Greenwich.” And as he began to fade before my eyes, he drew from some inner recess of his uniform a handsome and completely real cigar and pressed it upon me.

  A few minutes later I was strolling about the quad, smoking that admirable Hoyo de Monterey, as contented as any man in Canada, I suppose. For I had managed something for the College which I do not think had been apparent to my distinguished guests. Why should they know what I knew—two men educated as Naval officers, and a statesman of Presbyterian background and spiritualist leanings? But I knew that by far the most appropriate day for their manifestation was January the sixth, which, is, of course, the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas, and the Feast of the Three Kings.

  The Charlottetown Banquet

  The range of guests who come to our fortnightly High Table dinners is wide, and provides us with extraordinarily good company. Sometimes we get a surprise—an economist who turns out to be a poet, for instance. (I mean a poet in the formal sense: all economists are rapt, fanciful creatures; it is necessary to the
ir profession.) Only last Friday we had a visitor whom I found a most delightful and illuminating companion. I shall not tell you what his profession is, or you will immediately identify him, and I shall have betrayed his secret, which is that he is a medium.

  He does not like being a medium. He finds it embarrassing. But the gift, like being double-jointed or having the power to wiggle one’s ears, can neither be acquired by study nor abdicated by an act of will. His particular power lies in the realm of psychometry; that is to say that sometimes—not always—he finds that when he is near to an object that has strong and remarkable associations, he becomes aware of those associations with an intensity that is troublesome to him. And occasionally psychic manifestations follow.

  He confided this to me just as we were leaving the small upstairs dining-room, where we assemble after dinner for conversation and a reasonable consumption of port and Madeira. We were standing at the end of the room by the sideboard, for he had been looking at our College grant-of-arms; he put his hand on the wall to the left of the frame, to enable him to lean forward for a closer look, and then he turned to me, rather white around the mouth, I thought, and said—

  “Let’s go downstairs. It’s terribly close in here.”

  I thought it was the cigar smoke that was troubling him. Excellent as the Bursar’s cigars undoubtedly are, the combustion of a couple of dozen of them within an hour does make the air rather heavy. So I went downstairs with him, and thought no more about the matter.

  It must have been a couple of hours later that I was taking a turn around the quad for a breath of air before bed, when I saw something I did not like. The window of the small dining room was lighted up, but not by electricity. It was a low, flickering light that seemed to rise and fall in its intensity, and I thought at once of fire. I dashed up the stairs with a burst of speed that any of the Junior Fellows might envy, and opened the door. Sure enough, there was light in the room.

  But—! Now you must understand that we had left the room in the usual sort of disorder; the table had been covered with the debris of our frugal academic pleasures—nutshells, the parings of fruit, soiled wine-glasses, filled ashtrays, crumpled napkins, and all that sort of thing. But now—!

  I have never seen the room looking as it looked at that moment. How shall I describe it?

  To begin, the table was covered with a cloth of that refulgent bluey-whiteness that speaks of the finest linen. And, what is more, there was not a crease in it; obviously it had been ironed on the table. The pattern that was woven into it was of maple leaves, entwined with lilies and roses. At every place—and it was set for twenty-four—was a napkin folded into the intricate shape known to Victorian butlers as Crown Imperial. At either end of the table was a soup tureen, and my heightened senses immediately discerned that the eastern tureen contained Mock Turtle, while that at the western end was filled with a Consommé enriched with a julienne of truffles—that is to say, Consommé Britannia. A noble boiled salmon of the Restigouche variety was displayed on one platter, with a vessel of Lobster Sauce in waiting, and on another was a selection of Fillets of the most splendid Nova Scotia mackerel, each gleaming with the pearls of a Sauce Maitre d’Hotel.

  And the Entrees! Petites Bouches a la Reine, and Grenadine de Veau with a Pique Sauce Tomate—and none of your nasty bottled tomato sauce, either, but the genuine fresh article. There was a Lapin Sauté which had been made to stand upright, its paws raised as though in delight at its own beauty, and a charming fluff of cauliflower sprigs where its tail had been a few hours before; you could see that it was served au Champignons, for two button mushrooms gleamed where its eyes had once been. There was a Côtellete d’Agneau with, naturally, Petits Pois. There was a Coquette de Volaille, and a Timbale de Macaroni which had been moulded into the form of—of all things—a Beaver.

  In addition there were roasted turkeys, chickens, a saddle of mutton and a sirloin of beef, and there were boiled turkeys, hams, corned beef and mutton cutlets. And it was all piping hot.

  The flickering soft light I had seen through the window came from a gasolier that hung over the table, and through its alabaster globes gleamed the gaslight—surely one of the loveliest forms of illumination ever devised by man.

  You have recognized the meal, of course. Every gourmet has that menu by heart. It was the Grand Banquet in Honour of the Colonial Delegates which was held at the Halifax Hotel in Charlottetown on September 12, 1864. This was the authentic food of Confederation. A specimen of the menu, elegantly printed on silk, and the gift of Professor Maurice Careless, one of our Senior Fellows, hangs on the wall of our small dining-room, just at the point where our guest, the medium, had laid his hand.

  Nor was this all. What I have described to you at some length leapt to my eye in an instant, and my gaze had turned to the sideboard, which was laden with bottles of wine.

  And what bottles! Tears came into my eyes, just to look at them. For these were not our ugly modern bottles, with their disagreeable Government stickers adhering to them, and their high shoulders, and their uniformity of shape, and their self-righteous airs, as though in the half-literate, nasal drone of politicians, they were declaiming: “We are the support of paved roads, general education and public health; we are the pillars of society.” No, no; these were smaller bottles, in a multiplicity of shapes and colours. There were the slim pale-green maidens of hock; the darkly opalescent romantic ports; the sturdily gay clarets and the high-nosed aristocrats of Burgundy; there were champagnes that almost danced, yet were not gassy impostors; and they were all bottles of the old shapes and the old colours—dark, merry and wicked.

  My knees gave a little, and I sat down in the nearest chair.

  It was then that I noticed the figure by the sideboard. His back was toward me, and whether he was somewhat clouded in outline, or whether my eyes were dazzled by the table, I cannot say, but I could not quite make him out. He was hovering—I might almost say gloating—over a dozen of sherry. That should have given me a clue, but you will understand that I was not fully myself. And, furthermore, I had at that instant recalled that the menu given to us by Professor Careless was said by him to have been the property of the Honourable George Brown. On such a matter one does not doubt the word of Maurice Careless.

  “Mr. Brown! I believe?” I said, in what I hoped was a hospitable tone.

  “God forbid that I should cast doubt on any man’s belief,” said the figure, still with its back to me, “but I cannot claim the distinction you attribute to me.” He picked up a bottle of sherry and drew the cork expertly. Then he drew the cork of another, and turned toward me with a wicked chuckle, a bottle in either hand;

  “These are Clan Alpine’s warriors true,

  And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu—”

  said he, and I was so astonished that I quite overlooked the disagreeable experience of being addressed as a Saxon. For it was none other than Old Tomorrow himself!

  Yes, it was Sir John A. Macdonald in his habit as he lived. Or rather, not precisely as we are accustomed to seeing him, but in Victorian evening dress, with a red silk handkerchief thrust into the bosom of his waistcoat. But that head of somewhat stringy ringlets, that crumpled face which seemed to culminate and justify itself in the bulbous, coppery nose, that watery, rolling, merry eye, the accordion pleating of the throat, those moist, mobile lips, were unmistakable.

  “If you were expecting Brown, I am truly sorry,” he continued. “But, you see, I was the owner of this menu.” (He pronounced it, in the Victorian manner, meenoo.) “Brown pocketed it as we left the table. It was a queer little way he had, of picking up odds and ends; we charitably assumed he took them home to his children. But it’s mine, right enough. Look, you can see my thumb-mark on it still.”

  But I was not interested in thumb-prints. I was deep in awe of the shade before me. I started to my feet. In a voice choking with emotion I cried: “The Father of my country!”

  “Hookey Walker!” said Sir John, with a wink. “Tuck in your napk
in, Doctor, and let us enjoy this admirable repast.”

  I had no will of my own. I make no excuses. Who, under such circumstances, would have done other than he was bidden? I sat. Sir John, with remarkable grace, uncovered the Mock Turtle, and gave me a full plate. I ate it. Then he gave me a plate of the Consommé Britannia. I ate it. Then I had quite a lot of the salmon. Then a substantial helping of mackerel. I ate busily, humbly, patriotically.

  I have always heard of the extraordinary gustatory zest of the Victorians. They ate hugely. But it began to be borne in upon me, as Sir John plied me with one good thing after another, that I was expected to eat all, or at least some, of everything on the table. My gorge rose. But, I said to myself, when will you, ever again, eat such a meal in such company? And my gorge subsided. I began to be aware that my appetite was unimpaired. The food I placed in my mouth, and chewed, and swallowed, seemed to lose substance somewhere just behind my necktie. I had no sense of repletion. And little by little it came upon me that I was eating a ghostly meal, in ghostly company, and that under such circumstances I could go on indefinitely. Not even my jaws ached. But the taste—ah, the taste was as palpable as though the viands were of this earth.

  Meanwhile Sir John was keeping pace with me, bite for bite. But rather more than glass for glass. He had asked me to name my poison, which I took to be a Victorian jocularity for choosing my wine, and I had taken a Moselle—a fine Berncasteler—with the soup and fish, and had then changed to a St. Emilion with the entrees. (It was particularly good with the rabbit, a dish of which I am especially fond; Sir John did not want any, and I ate that rabbit right down to the ground, and sucked its ghostly bones.) But Sir John stuck to sherry. Never have I seen a man put away so much sherry. And none of your whimpering dry sherries, either, but a brown sherry that looked like liquefied plum pudding. He threw it off a glass at a time, and he got through bottle after bottle.