High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories

by Robertson Davies

“I can’t say,” he replied; “as I told you, I’ve never been asked back since my difference of opinion with my Father, such a long time ago. Christmas didn’t begin until aeons after that.”

  “Ah, I think I understand your situation,” I said. “No wonder you are so wicked. It’s not your fault at all. You are what we now call the product of a broken home.”

  The Devil gave me a look which made me profoundly uneasy. “Just because I am enjoying your sympathy, don’t imagine that I cannot read you like a book,” he said. “You think you are cleverer than I; it is a very common academic delusion.”

  “I certainly do not think I am cleverer than you,” said I; “I know only too well what happens to professors who get that idea; the unfortunate Dr. Faustus, for instance. But I do think you might play fair with me; you ask for my sympathy, and when I do the best I can you threaten me and accuse me of hypocrisy. Please let us talk on terms of intellectual honesty.”

  Once again the Chapel resounded with that startling and lewd raspberry, and I became aware that though the Devil chose to appear in the guise of a gentleman of impeccable contemporary taste, all those other aspects of his personality, including the one with the seven dragons’ heads and the one with the unconventionally placed tongue, were present, though invisible.

  “Intellectual honesty just means playing by your rules,” said he, “and I like to play by my own, which I make up as we go along. Do you think I am so stupid I can only hold one point of view at a time? Why, even you foolish creatures of earth can do better than that. I enjoy being sentimental about Christmas; after all, it is my Younger Brother’s birthday. But don’t imagine that because of that I don’t take every opportunity to make it distasteful.”

  He paused, and I could see that he was in a mood both reminiscent and boastful, so I held my peace, and very soon he continued.

  “I think the Christmas card was one of my best inventions,” he said. “Yes, I think the Christmas card has done as much to put Christmas to the bad as any other single thing. And I began it so cleverly; just a few pretty Victorian printed greetings, and then—well, you know what it is today.”

  I nodded, and rubbed my arm, which was still aching with writer’s cramp.

  “Gifts, too,” he mused. “Of course they originated with the Gifts of the Magi. I knew the Magi well, you know. Gaspar, Balthazar and Melchior—very good chaps and their offerings of gold, frankincense and myrrh were characteristic of their noble hearts. But when I got to work on their idea and spread the notion that everybody ought to give a Christmas gift to virtually everybody else I was really at the top of my form. The cream of it is, you see, that most people want to give presents to people they like, but I have made it obligatory for them to give presents to people they don’t like, as well. Look at it any way you will, that was subtle—downright subtle.”

  It sickened me to see that the breakdown in his style of conversation was accompanied by a coarsening in his appearance. He was now red-faced, heavy-jowled and wet-lipped. And somewhere in the background I could hear the seven heads of the red dragon hissing like great serpents.

  “Santa Claus,—yes, Santa Claus is all mine,” he continued. “Look at his picture here on your reredos—St. Nicholas the Wonder Worker. A fine old chap. I knew him very well when he was bishop of Myra. Loved giving gifts. Lavish and open-handed as only a saint knows how to be. But when I went to work, and advertising got into high gear, the job was done. Now you see his picture everywhere—a boozy old bum in a red suit peddling everything you can think of; magazine subscriptions, soft drinks, junk jewellery, dairy products, electric hair driers, television sets, Wettums Dolls—you name it, Santa’s got it. I meet Saint Nicholas now and then; he’s still in existence, trying to rescue Christmas, and I don’t mind telling you that when we meet I’m almost ashamed to look him in the face. Almost, but not quite.”

  By this time the degeneration of the Devil had gone very far indeed. His beautiful dress suit was a crumpled mess, his hair had become thin and greasy, his stomach and also his posterior had swollen so that he was positively pear-shaped, and the handkerchief he pulled out to wipe tears of cruel mirth from his eyes was disgustingly dirty.

  I had no idea what to do. I felt that the situation was desperate. And then I had an idea.

  There is a form of activity very popular now in education, called “counselling”. Several times each year I receive letters which say, “What counselling staff do you provide in your College?” and I always reply with a monosyllable—”Me”. Obviously this was the moment for some counselling, and all that held me back was a strong conviction that counselling, too, had been invented by the Devil. Would he fall for his own nonsense? I could but try.

  “You came here to look at our reredos,” said I, putting my arm around his shoulders in what I hoped was a fatherly, yet respectful manner. “Look at it now, and think of your old home, of your family. Unfortunately we have no likeness of your Father—”

  “The Michelangelo portrait is by far the best,” he interrupted; “catches Him to a T.”

  “—but look here, at your brothers—the Archangel Michael, the Archangel Gabriel. How handsome they are! Observe what fine physical condition they are in, despite an age almost equal to your own. Remember that you too were once like that—”

  I quickly removed my embracing arm; all the disgusting symptoms of spiritual and physical degeneration had fled in that instant, and he stood beside me, naked as the dawn, and equipped with splendid black wings. “I am like that now,” he said proudly. But to my astonishment, I saw that the Devil was a richly endowed hermaphrodite. Still, five years of Massey College has prepared me for any unusual development.

  “Good—ah—archangel!” I cried. And then I brought out the tried-and-true counsellor’s phrase of encouragement. “You see, you can do anything if only you will try. Now, this dreadful assault on Christmas is unworthy of you. Don’t you think you’ve done enough? People still celebrate Christmas, you know, in a spirit quite outside the reach of the Christmas card, the perfunctory gift, the degraded figure of Santa Claus—” I was set to go on, for I was thinking of tonight, and of all of us here, but the Devil looked balefully at me.

  “Yes, but it is all for Him—my Younger Brother, you know. One would imagine nobody else had ever had a birthday. Nobody celebrates my birthday.” I looked, and I assure you he was pouting.

  I am not a professor of drama for nothing: I know a cue when I hear one.

  “Grieve no more,” I said; “I will celebrate your birthday.”

  “Pooh,” he said; “who are you?”

  “Aha,” said I; “you are trying to trap me into the sin of Pride. Nevertheless, without my telling you, you know very well who I am.”

  He had the grace to look somewhat abashed. “Well, be that as it may, who’s going to know?”

  “The whole College will know,” said I.

  “Pooh! The College!” said he, rudely, but he was wavering.

  “It’s a graduate College,” said I; “more than that, it’s a think-tank.” I knew the Devil could not resist a really up-to-the-minute bit of jargon.

  “It’s a bargain,” he said. “What will you do?”

  “I’ll fly the College banner and the St. Catharine bell will ring twenty-one times.”

  “Just as if I were one of the Fellows?” he asked, and there was a gleam in his eyes which looked very much like pleasure.

  “Precisely the same,” I replied. “Now, what is the date?”

  He hesitated, but only for a moment. “Do you know, I’ve never told a soul. It’s—” and he whispered the date into my ear. His breath made my ear disagreeably hot, but today I notice I hear better with it than the other.

  Everybody says the Devil has a vulgar streak, but they are the very same people who will say, on other occasions, that he is a gentleman. This was the side of his character he chose to show now.

  “You are really most considerate,” he continued, “and I should like to make some suitab
le return. What would you like—don’t restrict your ambitions, please.”

  Not a word would I say, and almost at once the Devil laughed again—that silvery laugh I had heard before. “Of course, I quite understand, you are thinking of Faust. But he only gave me a rather shopworn soul; you have given me something nobody ever offered me before—the most cherished privilege of a Fellow of Massey College. But come—if you won’t have anything for yourself, will you accept something for the College? What about a handsome endowment? Academics always want money. Name your figure!”

  But the Devil had underestimated me. I know what makes colleges, and it isn’t money—delightful though money is. This time it was my eyes that were fixed on the reredos. At the extreme of the third row of pictures is one that very few people recognize. It is a symbol so extraordinary, so deep in significance and broad in application that even Professor Marshall McLuhan has not been able to explode it. It is the Santa Sophia, the Ultimate Wisdom.

  The Devil knew what I was looking at.

  “I’ll say this for you,” said he, “you certainly know how to ask.”

  “It is for the College, after all,” I replied.

  He sighed. “Very well,” said he; “but you must understand that I have only half that commodity you ask for—Ultimate Wisdom—in my possession. You shall have it for the College, and it is a considerable gift. When you’ll get the other half I can’t say.”

  “I can,” I replied; “I shall expect it promptly the very first time you go home for Christmas.”

  He laughed for the last time, folded his splendid wings, and disappeared.

  I made my way reflectively toward my study, to make a note of yet one more day when—perhaps until the end of time—we shall display our banner, and ring twenty-one strokes of the Catharine bell. Once again, under circumstances I could not have foreseen or prevented, the College had been visited by—not precisely a ghost, for he was plainly of an order of being vastly more energetic and powerful than our own—but by a spirit of the highest distinction. I sighed for the egalitarians who would confine us to ghosts drawn from the petit bourgeoisie. The dance, I observed, was over, and our Christmas celebrations were well begun.

  Refuge of Insulted Saints

  “I see you have guests,” said the youngest of the Fellows, when we met last week at High Table. As he said it I thought he winked.

  I made no answer, but I was conscious of turning pale.

  “I noticed them in your guest-room a couple of times last week when I was at breakfast,” he persisted.

  Of course he would have noticed them. He is an almost professionally observant young man. When he goes back to New Zealand I hope he puts his gift at the disposal of the Secret Service.

  The design of this College is such that when the Fellows are taking their leisurely breakfast in the private dining-room they can look directly into the windows of my guest-chamber. Guests have often complained about it. Two or three ladies have used a disagreeable term: ogling. But the guests who are there now I had hoped—trusting, unworldly creature that I am—to keep from the eyes of the College, and if they have been seen it must be taken as evidence that whatever influence I once had over them is now dispelled. I long ago accepted the fact that this College is haunted, but until recently it has been my determination to keep apparitions out of my own Lodging. But I know now that I have been cruelly betrayed by what, in justice to myself, I must call the nobility and overflowing compassion of my own nature.

  It all began this autumn, on the thirty-first of October. To be more accurate, it was a few minutes after midnight, and was therefore the first of November. The date and time are important, for of course the Eve of All Hallows, when evil spirits roam the earth, extends only until midnight, after which it is succeeded by All Hallows itself—All Saints’ Day, in fact. I was lying in bed reading an appropriate book—the Bardo Thödol. For those of you whose Tibetan may have grown rusty I should explain that it is the great Tibetan Book of the Dead, a kind of guide book to the adventures of the spirit after it leaves this world. I had just reached the description of the Chonyid State, which is full of blood-drinking, brain-pulping and bone-gnawing by the Lord of Death, and as I read, I munched an apple. Then I became aware of a rattling at the College gate.

  This happens often when the Porter has gone off duty and I have retired for the night. I frequently vow that never again will I get up and put on a dressing-gown and slippers and traipse out into the cold to see who it is. But I always do so. It is the compassion I have already spoken of as amounting almost to a weakness in my character that makes me do it. The rattler is often some girl who assures me that she simply must get back a paper that is being marked by one of the Teaching Fellows in the College. Or it may be that some young man has ordered a pizza and is too utterly fatigued by his studies to go down to the gate and get it for himself. It would be heartless to disregard such pathetic evidences of what it is now fashionable to call the Human Condition. So up I got and down I traipsed.

  The night was cold and wet and dark, and as I peered through the gate—for of course I was on the inside—I could just make out the form of a girl, who seemed to have a bicycle with her.

  “Make haste to open gate,” she said in a peremptory voice and with a marked foreign accent. “I vant to see priest at vonce.”

  “If you want a priest, young woman, you had better try Trinity,” said I.

  “Pfui for Trinity,” she snapped, insofar as an expression like ‘Pfui’ may be snapped. “Is here the Massey College, no? I vant Massey College priest. Be very quick, please.”

  I was a prey to conflicting emotions. Who was this undeniably handsome, rudely demanding girl? And whom could she mean by the Massey College priest? Our Chaplain lives out. Could it be our Hall Don? A priest undoubtedly but—was he leading a double life? Or was this girl a bait to lure him forth on an errand of mercy, so that he might be destroyed? I would defend him.

  “We have no priest here,” said I, and turned away. But I was frozen to the spot by the girl’s compelling cry.

  “Babs!” she shouted; “show this rude porter what you have!”

  Who could Babs be? Suddenly, there she was, right behind the other, with what I thought was another bicycle. But oh! (I hate using these old-fashioned and high-flown expressions, but there are no others that properly express my emotions at this instant) as I looked I became transfixed, nay, rooted to the spot. For what Babs had—and it seemed to make it worse that Babs was no less a beauty than the other, with splendid red hair instead of black—was a cannon, and it was pointed straight at the College gates! Babs looked as if she meant business, for she had a flaming linstock in her hand, dangerously close to the touch-hole of the cannon.

  “Now,” said the dark girl, drawing a huge sword—a horrible two-handed weapon—from the folds of her cloak, “will you open the gate, or will Babs blow it off its hinges, as she very well knows how to do?”

  Here was student power as even our President has never encountered it! But my mind worked with lightning swiftness. All that I had ever read of von Clausewitz came back to me in a flash: “If the enemy’s attack cannot be resisted, lure him forward, and then attack his rear.” I would admit these girls, then, and with a sudden rearward sally I would shove them and their cannon into the pool. I flung open the gate.

  “Enter, ladies,” said I, with false geniality, “and welcome to Massey College, home of chivalry and courtesy.”

  But they did not rush forward as I had hoped. Babs, who really looked a rather jolly girl, turned and waved her linstock in what seemed to be a signal, and the other one—the dark one who spoke English so clumsily—cried aloud in unimpeachable Latin, “Adeste, fideles!”

  Suddenly the whole of Devonshire Place was filled with a turbulent rabble that I, still under the delusion that these were students, took to be the New Left Caucus in more than their usual extravagance of dress. Half-naked, hairy men, dirty girls whose hair blew wildly in the wind, girls carrying roses, lili
es and flowers I could not identify, men carrying objects which I took to be the abortive creations of ill-mastered handicrafts, people with every sort of flag and banner—you never saw such a gang. They rushed the gate, and I was forced to retreat before them, shouting “Stop! Wait!” as loudly as I could.

  You may imagine how relieved I was to hear another voice, unmistakably English, crying “Stop! Wait!” as well. Suddenly, right through the middle of the crowd rode a man in full armour, on a splendid horse; it is true he had a naked girl, not very effectively wrapped in his cloak, clasped in one arm, but in these permissive days such things are not unknown in our university, and whoever he was, he brought with him an atmosphere of trustworthiness that contrasted very favourably with the hostile spirit of Babs and her friend. He looked down at me, and I knew at once I was in the presence of an officer of Staff rank.

  “You are the seneschal, I suppose,” he said.

  “No,” I replied, “the seneschal is at home in Leaside, and at this moment I would to God that I were with him. But I am the Master of this College, and I will defend it with all my strength, though it be but that of a poor old man, sore stricken in years; and I shall defend it also with all my art and craft, which is virtually unlimited. Now, sir, who in Hell are you?”

  “It is to avoid Hell that I, and all this rabble (for I know no other way to describe most of them) seek your hospitality,” said he. “I am Saint George of Cappadocia, formerly patron saint of England. This lady, with the wheel and the great Sword of Truth, is Saint Catherine of Alexandria. This other lady—the redhead with the cannon—is Saint Barbara, patroness of artillery. And we are all, every one of us here, deposed, degraded, denuded, despoiled, defeased, debauched, and defamed by that arch tyrant Giovanni Batista Montini, pseudonymously describing himself as Supreme Pontiff, Servant of the Servants of God, Bishop of Rome and Pope Paul the Sixth!”

  There is something about other people’s rhetoric that reduces my own language to the lowest common denominator. I regret my reply. It was unworthy of an academic. But history is history and truth must out.