High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories

by Robertson Davies

  But his companion! No Neo-Victorian she. I thought at first that she was completely topless, but this was not qtiite true. Braless she certainly was, and her movement was like the waves of ocean. As for her mini, it was a minissima, nay, a parvula. She was a girl of altogether striking appearance.

  “Allow me to present Miss Angelica Crumhorn,” said Weatherwax, making a flourishing bow to my wife and myself; “assuredly she is the brightest ornament of our local stage. But tonight I have tempted her from the footlights and the plaudits of her ravished admirers to grace our academic festivities with beauty and wit. Come, my angel, shall we take the floor?”

  “Aw, crap!” said Miss Crumhorn,”where’s the gin at?”

  I knew her. She was very widely known. Indeed, she was notorious, but not as Angelica Crumhorn, which I assume was her real name, but as Gates Ajar Honeypot, star of the Victory Burlesque. She was the leader of an accomplished female group called the Topless Tossers.

  If there is one point that has been made amply clear by the university revolt of the past few years, it is this: students will no longer tolerate an educational institution which professes to stand in loco parentis; good advice is absolutely out. Therefore I did not call young Weatherwax to me the following morning and tell him that he stood on the brink of an abyss, though I knew that this was the case. It was not that, at the dance, he had eyes for no one but Gates Ajar Honeypot; in that he was simply like all the rest of us, for as she danced, Miss Crumhorn gave a stunning exhibition of the accordion-like opening and closing of her bosom by means of which she had won the professional name of Gates Ajar. No, what was wrong was that when he looked at her he seemed to be seeing someone else—some charming girl of the Regency period, all floating tendrils of hair, pretty ribbons, modest but witty speech, and flirtatious but essentially chaste demeanour. I saw trouble ahead for Tubfast Weatherwax III, but I held my peace.

  I thought, you see, that he was trying to be like Charles Dickens. This happens very often in the graduate school; a young man chooses a notable literary figure to work on, and his subject is so much more vital, so infinitely more charged with life than he himself, that he begins to model himself on the topic of his thesis, and until he has gained his Ph.D.—and sometimes even after—he acts the role of that great literary man. You notice it everywhere. If you were to throw an orange in any English graduate seminar you would hit a foetal Henry James, or an embryo James Joyce; road-company Northrop Fryes and Hallowe’en versions of Marshal McLuhan are to be found everywhere. This has nothing to do with these eminent men; it is part of the theopathetic nature of graduate studies; the aspirant to academic perfection so immerses himself in the works of his god that he inevitably takes on something of his quality, at least in externals. It is not the fault of the god. Not at all.

  Very well, I thought. Let Tubfast Weatherwax III take his fair hour; he has heard of Dickens’ early infatuation with Maria Beadneil; let him try on Dickens’ trousers and see how they fit.

  This meant no small sacrifice on my part. Whenever I met him, I said, as I should, “Good-day, Mr. Weatherwax;” and then I had to listen to him shout, “Oh, capital, capital! The very best of days, Master! Whoop! Halloo! God bless us every one!” Or if perhaps I said, “Not a very fine day, Mr. Weatherwax,” he would reply: “What is the odds so long as the fire of soul is kindled at the taper of conviviality, and the wing of friendship never moults a feather!” I began to avoid encounters with Weatherwax. The only Dickensian reply to this sort of thing that I could think of was, “Bah! Hambug!” but I shrink from giving pain.

  But I saw him. Oh, indeed, I saw him crossing the quad, his step as light as a fairy’s, with that notable strumpet Gates Ajar Honeypot upon his arm. “Angelica” he insisted on calling her, poor unhappy purblind youth. I longed to speak, but my Wiser Self—who is, I regret to tell you, a cynical, slangy spirit whom I call the Ghost of Experience Past, would intervene, snarling, “Nix on the loco parentis,” and I would refrain.

  Even when he came, last Spring, to ask permission to marry Angelica Crumhorn in the Chapel, late in August, I merely gave formal assent. “I shall fill the little Chapel with flowers,” he rhapsodized; “flowers for her whose every thought is pure and fragrant as earth’s fairest blossom.” I repressed a comment that a bridal bouquet of Venus’ fly-trap would be pretty and original.

  I prepared the required page in the College Register, but August came and went, and as nothing had happened I made a notation—Cancelled—on that page, and waited the event.

  Poor Weatherwax pined, and I ceased to avoid him and began to pity him. I enquired how his Dickens studies went on? He asked me to his rooms in the College and when I visited him I was astonished to find how Victorian, how like chambers in some early nineteenth century Inn of Court he had contrived to make them. He even had a bird in a cage: inevitably it was a linnet. The most prominent objects of ornament were a large white plaster bust of Dickens—very large, positively dominant—and a handsome full set of Dickens’ Works in twenty-five volumes. I recognized it at once as the Nonesuch Dickens, a very costly set of books for a student, but I knew that Weatherwax had money. He languished in an armchair in a long velvet dressing-gown, his hair hanging over his face, the picture of romantic misery. I decided that—prudent or not—the time had come for me to speak.

  “Rally yourself, Mr. Weatherwax,” cried I; “marshal your powers, recruit your energies, sir!” I started to hear myself give utterance to these unaccustomed phrases, but with that bust of Dickens looking at me from a high shelf, I could not speak in any other way. So I told him, in good round Victorian prose that he was making an ass of himself, that he was well quit of Gates Ajar Honeypot, and that he must positively stop trying to be Charles Dickens. “Eating your god,” I cried, raising my hand in admonition, “cannot make you into your god. Stop aping Dickens, and read him like a scholar.”

  To my dismay, he broke down and wept. “Oh, good old man,” he sobbed, “you come too late. For I am not eating my god; I fear that my god is eating me! But bless you, bless your snowy locks! You have sought to succour me, but alas, I know that I am doomed!”

  I rose to leave him, and as I did so—I tell you this knowing how incredible it must seem—the bust of Dickens seemed to smile, baring sharp, cruel teeth. I shrieked. It was a mental shriek, which is the only kind of shriek permitted to a professor in the modern university, but I gave a mental shriek, and fled the room.

  Of course I returned. I know my duty. I know what I owe to the men of Massey College, to the spirit of university education, to that sense of decency which is one of the holiest possessions of our changing world. And as autumn wore on—it was this autumn just past, but as I look back upon it, it seems far, far away—the conviction grew upon me that Weatherwax’s trouble was greater than I had supposed; it was not that he thought he was Dickens, but that he thought he was one of Dickens’ characters, and by that abandonment of personality he had set his foot upon a shadowed and sinister path. One of Dickens’ characters? Yes, but which? One of the doomed ones, clearly. But which? Which? For me this past autumn was a season of painful obligation, for not only had I to care for Weatherwax—oh yes, it reached a point where I took him his meals, and fed him such scant mouthfuls as he could ingest, with my own hands—but I had to adapt myself to the only kind of language he seemed now to understand.

  One day—it was in early November—I took him his usual bowl of gruel, and found him lying on his little bed, asleep.

  “Mr. Weatherwax,” I whispered, “nay, let me call you Tubfast; arouse yourself; you must eat something.”

  “Is it you, Grandfather?” he asked, as he opened his eyes, and across his lips stole a smile so sweet, so innocent, so wholly feminine, that in an instant I had the answer to my question. Tubfast Weatherwax III thought he was Little Nell.

  His decline from that moment was swift. I spent all the time with him I could. Sometimes his mind wandered, and seemed to dwell upon Gates Ajar Honeypot. “I never nursed
a dear Gazelle, to glad me with its soft black eye, but when it came to know me well and love me, it was sure to prefer the advances of a fat wholesale furrier on Spadina Avenue,” he would murmur. But more often he talked of graduate studies, and of that great Convocation on High where the Chancellor of the Universe confers Ph.D.s, magna cum angelic laude, on all who kneel before his throne.

  When I could no longer conceal from myself that the end was near, I dressed his couch here and there with some winter berries and green leaves, gathered in a secluded portion of the parking-lot. He knew why. “When I die, put me near to something that has loved the light, and had sky above it always,” he murmured. I knew he meant our College quadrangle, for though the new Graduate Library will shortly throw upon our little garden its eternal pall of shadow, it had been while he knew it a place of sunshine and of the laughter of the careless youths who play croquet there.

  Then, one drear November night, just at the stroke of midnight, the end came. He was dead. Dear, patient, noble Tubfast Weatherwax III was dead. His little bird—a poor slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed—was stirring nimbly in its cage; and the strong heart of its child-owner was mute and motionless for ever.

  Where were the traces of his early cares, the pangs of despised love, of scholarly tasks too heavy for his feeble mind? All gone. Sorrow was dead indeed in him, but peace and perfect happiness were born; imaged in his tranquil beauty and profound repose. So shall we know the angels in their majesty, after death.

  I wept for a solitary hour, but there was much to be done. I hastened to the quad, lifted one of the paving stones at the north-east end, where—until the Graduate Library is completed—the sun strikes warmest and stays longest. For such a man as I, burdened with years and sorrow, the digging of a six-foot grave was heavy work, and it took me all of ten minutes.

  With the little chisel in my handy pocket-knife, it was the work of an instant to incribe the stone—

  Hic jacet

  STABILIS WEATHERWAX TERTIUS

  and then, as my Latin is not inexhaustible, I continued—

  He bit off more than he could chew.

  It was my intention to place the stone over the grave, with the inscription downward, so that no unhallowed eye might read it. Now all that remained was to wrap the poor frail body in the velvet dressing-gown and lay it to rest. Or rather, I should be compelled to stand it to rest, for the grave had to be dug straight down.

  It was only then I raised my eyes toward the windows of Weatherwax’s room, which lay on the other side of the quad. What light was that, which flickered with an eerie effulgence from the casement? Had I, stunned by my grief, forgotten to turn off the electricity? But no; this light was not the bleak glare of a desk-lamp. It was a bluish light, and it seemed to ebb and flow. Fire? I sped up the stairs, and threw open the door.

  Oh, what a sight was there revealed to my starting eyes? My hair lifted upward upon my head, as if it were fanned by a cold breath. The bust of Charles Dickens, before so white, so plaster-like, was now grossly flushed with the colours of life. The Nonesuch Dickens, which had hitherto worn its original binding of many-coloured buckram was—Oh, horror, horror!—bound freshly in leather, and that leather—would that I had no need to reveal it—was human skin! And that smell—why did it so horribly remind me of a dining-room in which some great feast had just been completed? I knew. I knew at once. For the body—the body was gone!

  As I swooned the scarlet lips of the Dickens bust parted in a terrible smile, and its beard stirred in a hiccup of repletion.

  It was a few days later—last Friday, indeed—when a young colleague in the Department of English—a very promising Joyce man—said to me, “It is astounding how Dickens studies are picking up; quite a few theses have been registered in the past three months.” I knew he despised Dickens and all the Victorians, so I was not surprised when he added, “Wonderful how the old wizard keeps life in him! Upon what meat doth this our Charlie feed, that he is grown so great?”

  He smiled, pleased at his little literary joke. But I did not smile, because I knew.

  Yes, I knew.

  The Kiss of Krushchev

  Any invasion of this College by uncanny and irrational elements is a source of distress to me. We have here an institution devoted to scholarship; we toil in Massey College to raise what I like to think of as a Temple of Reason. But, alas, from time to time I am forced to recognize that nowhere, not even here, is Apollo the sole shaper of human existence. Dionysian forces are also at work. But there is one element in our college community which, I consoled myself until recently, had never suffered painful invasions from the realm of unreason; that was our College Choir.

  They have been with us from the beginning. A merry, highhearted group, they have for eight years welcomed our summers with their song, lent a sombre splendour to our Chapel services, and, on such occasions as this, they have marked the season with the widest variety of Christmas music. Nor have they stood apart from the ideal of scholarship which is the chief purpose of the College. They recover, from manuscripts or rare publications, choral music which has been unjustly neglected; they dust it off, and bring it into the world again. And that is just how this whole grotesque incident began.

  Many of you, I know, find delight in the music of Henry Purcell, who is still regarded as the greatest of English composers. He wrote superbly for the human voice, because he was himself a singer, and in his time, as Organist of the Chapel Royal, he drew great singers around him. One of these was a remarkable bass called John Gostling; not only was his voice of dark beauty, but it was of extraordinary compass. His lowest note was an F—not the F below the bass clef, which any bass can sing, but the F an octave below that—which only a very few exceptional basses can sing. Now, our organist, Giles Bryant, discovered an anthem of Purcell’s in MS in the British Museum; it had quite passed out of the choral repertory because of its exceptional difficulty. It is a setting of the passage from the Book of Job which contains the words, “He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: He maketh the sea like a pot of ointment.” Obviously Purcell had written this for his favourite John Gostling, because when the sea boils like a pot the bass soloist is called upon to perform an exceedingly long trill on that low F, and when the sea becomes like a pot of ointment an excruciatingly difficult legato passage in the deepest registers of the bass voice is called for, to produce an effect of heaving greasiness which would, properly performed, arouse nausea in every musically sensitive hearer.

  Giles Bryant found it last summer, and he and Gordon Wry longed with all their musical souls to revive it in our Chapel. But where were they to find the necessary bass?

  We have some good basses, but there have been few Gostlings. Our choir directors were in an anguish of frustrated desire, and the refrain of their conversation was: “If only Igor were here now!”

  I should explain that although the male members of our Choir are never wholly drawn from the members of the College, several Junior Fellows have, at one time and another, sung with them. Unquestionably the finest of these was one of our Russian exchange students, Igor Lvov. But Lvov disappeared from the College several years ago, on the 15th of December, and we never heard of him again. Russian exchange students are sometimes summoned home on short notice, for political reasons into which it would be tedious to penetrate now. So, when Igor vanished, we sighed, but accepted the situation with philosophy.

  It was on a Sunday night two weeks ago that I was walking with Gordon and Giles along one of the corridors on the lowest floor of this College, listening to their plaints for the lost Igor.

  “Igor could have boiled like a pot,” sighed Gordon.

  “And how he would have handled that pot of ointment,” said Giles, almost sobbing.

  “I can hear him now,” said Gordon, his face beautified by the light of happy recollection.

  It was merely a figure of speech, but it filled me with terror. No, not terror; what overwhelmed me was that sense of doom, of real
ization that once again the forces of unreason had invaded Massey College. Here we go again, I thought to myself; O, ye powers that protect colleges from all that threatens them, let it not be! This year, just for this year alone, let no uncanny thing drag its trail of loathsome slime across our chronicle! But even as I prayed, I knew that it was hopeless. For although Gordon thought he heard Igor’s voice only in memory, I was horribly aware that I had heard it in reality! It was just as we were passing a locked door marked Service 6.

  As quickly as I could, I hurried Gordon and Giles to the gate, and bade them good-night. They walked away, happily talking about music, as I had seen them do a hundred times, and I, with heavy, doomed steps, dragged myself back to the cellarage, to the door marked Service 6. With my master-key I unlocked it, and went in, shuddering but with the courage of resignation.

  “Igor, where are you?” I whispered. “Igor, speak to me.”

  “I am here, little father,” said a deep, velvety voice that seemed to come from the farthest depths of the room. For Service 6, because of the purpose for which it is used, extends far under the quadrangle. Guided by the sound of the voice, I felt my way into its cave-like recesses.

  I don’t know what I expected to find, but I knew Igor was there, for I never forget a voice. Names I forget, as a thousand humiliations every year makes clear, but never voices. If I had heard Igor, Igor it must be.

  “Where?” I whispered, as I crept deeper and deeper into the cave.

  “Here,” said Igor’s voice, seemingly at the level of my knees.

  What had happened? What was Igor’s fate? Had he refused to return to Russia at command, and was he dragging out a fugitive’s life in this darkest, most neglected, almost forgotten portion of the College? Dreading whatever it was I might see, I lit a match.

  Oh, horror, horror, horror! There, in a dank tank, squatted a gigantic frog!