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Tema: Robertson Davies ~ Robertson Dejvies  (Pročitano 18641 puta)
07. Sep 2005, 03:09:15
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High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories

Robertson Davies

How the High Spirits Came about—
Revelation from a Smoky Fire
The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees
The Great Queen Is Amused
The Night of the Three Kings
The Charlottetown Banquet
When Satan Goes Home for Christmas
Refuge of Insulted Saints
Dickens Digested
The Kiss of Krushchev
The Cat that Went to Trinity
The Ugly Spectre of Sexism
The Pit Whence Ye are Digged
The Perils of the Double Sign
Conversations with the Little Table
The King Enjoys His Own Again
The Xerox in the Lost Room
Einstein and the Little Lord
Offer of Immortality
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Robertson Davies
High Spirits:
A Collection of Ghost Stories

How the High Spirits Came about—
A Chapter of Autobiography

   Ghost stories came into my life before I could read. How well I remember the first one; it was at a party given by my parents, and it was not yet time for me to go to bed, because I remember that the sun was sinking outside the windows, and as the guests ate tulip jellies—they were streaked red and yellow and topped with whipped cream of a deliciousness that seems to have departed from the earth—Mrs. Currie told the strange tale of the Disappearance of Oliver Lurch. He was a farm youth in Kentucky who had gone out one night from a gathering just like ours, to fetch some wood for the fire, had not returned and when the others went to seek him he could be heard calling from the sky, “Here I am! Here I am! Help me! I am Oliver Lurch!” The cries became fainter and fainter, and Oliver was heard and seen no more. There were those who said he had been carried off by a great eagle but—a grown man? What sort of eagle was that? It must have been Something Else.
   I fell asleep that night fearing the Mighty Clutch. And since then I have always felt that any party would be the better for a ghost story.
   The first uncanny tale I read, when I was ten, was Frankenstein, which terrified me unforgettably and gloriously. None of the film versions, in my opinion, comes near the effect Mary Shelley produces by her special quality of prose. A story in this collection, The Cat That Went To Trinity, obviously owes much to this favourite of mine, and although it is far from serious, it is not meant to be derisive of the great original. No disrespect toward serious spectres is intended herein.
   Although I have read tales of ghosts and the supernatural eagerly all my life I never thought of writing one until I went to Massey College in the University of Toronto, in 1963. The college had a Christmas party for its members and their friends, and some sort of entertainment was needed. There were lots.of gifted people to call on—poets and musicians—but I was expected to make a contribution, and I decided on a ghost story, the one which appears first in this book. For the eighteen years I was at the college a story was called for every Christmas, and here they are, gathered together, in the hope that other enthusiasts for this sort of tale will enjoy them.
   It was never my intention to frighten anyone. Indeed I do not think that would have been possible; the audience was too big and to me, at least, terror is best when the group of listeners is small. No, these stories were to amuse, and perhaps to add a dimension to a building and a community that was brand-new. University College has a ghost, of which it is justifiably proud, and doubtless there are others around the University which have not yet found their chroniclers. Massey College is a building of great architectural beauty, and few things become architecture so well as a whiff of the past, and a hint of the uncanny. Canada needs ghosts, as a dietary supplement, a vitamin taken to stave off that most dreadful of modern ailments, the Rational Rickets.
   Let no one suppose that I was the first to think that a few hauntings might be acceptable in the new college. Very early in its first autumn I was told that a figure had taken to appearing on the stairs, and in dark corners, who frightened some people, and disappeared when bolder people pursued it. I have never thought of myself as a ghost-catcher, but my work at the college demanded some unusual tasks, and I accepted this one as part of the job. I captured the ghost at last—sneaked up on him from behind—and he proved to be one of the students who, with a sheet and an ugly rubber mask, was trying to cheer the place up. That was his explanation, but there was a gleam in his eye that suggested to me that the ghost game fulfilled some need in his own character. That was not hard to understand, for he was engaged in a particularly rational and hard-headed form of study, and too much rationality, as I have suggested, calls for a balancing element.
   Writing ghost stories, and in particular, cheerful ghost stories, set me to the task of examining the literature of the ghost story, and its technique. There are some very famous ghost stories, and perhaps the acknowledged masterpiece is Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. James casts it in the form of a tale read at Christmas time to a party of friends in an English country house; what could be better? It is without doubt the best of James’ substantial and distinguished contribution to this branch of literature. There are also the fine stories written by Montague Rhodes James, which he composed and at first read aloud to groups of friends at King’s, Cambridge, and later at Eton, where he was Provost. My father-in-law heard him on a few of these occasions and many years later described to me the special pleasure they gave. Parties of friends, college occasions: yes, we could provide these elements at the Massey College Gaudy Nights; the word comes from the Latin gaude, and has long been applied to college parties. But what about style?
   Ghost stories tend to be very serious affairs. Who has ever heard of a ghost cracking a joke? I wanted my ghosts to be light-hearted, if not in themselves, at least as they appeared to my hearers. No new style would suit a ghost story, so it would be necessary to parody the usual style. And the parody would have to be affectionate, for cruel parody is distasteful in itself, and utterly outside the spirit of a party.
   I think I know the traditional ghost story style pretty thoroughly. It is solemn, and it frequently makes use of unusual words, designed to strike awe into the minds of the reader or the hearer. It is a style that can very easily become ridiculous, and even such a great master of the ghost story as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu does not always escape this peril. Poor LeFanu not only wrote uncanny tales, he lived one. The story has been told many times that he suffered from a recurrent nightmare, in which he stood at the foot of a macabre and menacing house which towered high in the air, and which he knew was about to collapse on him. When he died in 1873, of a heart seizure, his physician remarked dryly that the house had fallen at last.
   It is one of the regrets of my life that I missed seeing, and perhaps even having some conversation with, a man who was a great scholar in the realm of magic, uncanny happenings, and of course ghost stories. He was, to give him his full resounding title and name, the Reverend Father Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers, chiefly known for his work in the realm of Restoration drama, but also the author of The History of Witchcraft and many other books about werewolves, Satanism and the supernatural. He was a rum customer. He had left his home in Oxford shortly before I went there in 1936 and was remembered with affection, some mirth, and now and then with unexpected venom. He appeared in the streets dressed like a European priest, in cassock and shovel-hat, with a cloak and a bulky umbrella; some stories insisted that he always walked in the gutter, for no determinable reason. But—and it was this that raised eyebrows—he was invariably accompanied on his afternoon walk either by a pallid youth dressed in black, who was supposed to be his secretary, or by a large black dog, but never by both! Tongues wagged.
   Although I never met Father Summers, I have all my life collected his books, among which are several collections of ghost stories, some of which he wrote himself, and to all of which he appends learned discussions of the kind of literature he knew and loved so well. His prose style, which sets the teeth of more austere readers on edge, fills me with delight. He had read so many tales of the supernatural, pored over so many old manuscripts and grimoires, that his writing had been infected by them, and displays a fruit cakyness and port-winyness that makes for very rich literary feeding. He delights in words like ‘sepulture’ and ‘charnel’ which it would be a pity to allow to fall out of the language. So when I set to work to write some ghost stories, with a glint of parody in my eye, I determined also to lay a few laurels on the tomb of that not always wholly admired scholar, Montague Summers. I shall be pleased if those who know his work feel that I have not altogether failed.
   My ghosts are sufficiently traditional, in that they all appear in search of something. This is the usual reason for ghostly appearances; something has been lost, or some revenge or justice is sought, and the spirit cannot rest until this unfinished business is concluded. If that is established, it is obvious that the proper greeting to a ghost is not a shriek of terror but a courteous “What can I do for you?” It was Shelley who wrote—and I echo him—


While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlit wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.


   In my ghost stories I have tried to explore where such high talk might lead.
   Anybody who writes ghost stories is sure to be asked: Do you believe in ghosts? And the answer to that must be, I believe in them precisely as Shakespeare believed in them. People who want further discussion may be referred to that model of good sense, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who said:


   It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.


   All belief? The Doctor speaks with his accustomed certainty. Much belief, undoubtedly, for in 1954-55 the popular Swiss fortnightly Schweizerischer Beobachter published a series of articles on prophetic dreams, coincidences, premonitions and ghosts, and then asked readers who had any experience of such things to write to the Editor. The response was overwhelming; more than 1200 readers wrote in, giving more than 1500 cases of personal experience; and these writers were people of education and discretion. It is interesting that most of the letter-writers confided their names to the Editor but asked that they be not made public; few people will admit to all the world that they believe in the supernatural. These letters were confided by the paper to the late Dr. C. G. Jung, whose secretary, Mrs. Aniela Jaffe, published them with psychological comment, and extremely interesting reading they make. So it may be said that if not everybody believes in ghosts, there are a great many people who certainly do not disbelieve in them.
   One word remains to be said: I have not edited these stories specifically for the reader; they remain in the form in which they were first spoken aloud, and I beg you—you readers—to grant them the attention of the ear, as well as of the eye. Perhaps, as in my case, your first ghost story was heard.
   The names of several living people, associated in one way or another with Massey College, appear in these stories. Never, let me say, are they mentioned in anything except an affectionate and genial spirit, as befits a Gaudy Night, and I hope that the bearers of these names will not feel that I have beenimpudently free with them, or suggested an acceptance of the supernatural which they may disclaim. These are, after all, party-ghosts, emanating from high spirits.
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Revelation from a Smoky Fire

   At the outset of a personal ghost story, it is accepted practice to say that one is the least fanciful person in the world, that one has not a nerve in one’s body, doesn’t believe in ghosts, and can’t understand how it happened. I am therefore at a disadvantage, for I am a more than ordinarily fanciful person, I am extremely nervous, I don’t find anything intrinsically improbable in the notion of a ghost, and I have a pretty shrewd idea how it happened. Therefore I am more likely to distress myself than to alarm you by what I am going to recount; I know that in the ghost controversy you are all overwhelmingly of the anti-ghost party. But I can assure you that I found it a disquieting experience.
   The fire in my study smokes. It is not merely that the Bursar buys green wood; something is amiss with the chimney. Sometimes it smokes so much that I feel like those Jesuit missionaries who used to fling themselves on the floor in the longhouses of the Canadian Indians, because only within six inches of the floor could one breathe the air without tearing the lungs.
   My fire was smoking yesterday afternoon at dusk, as I sat reading the précis of an M.A. thesis. My nerves would have been quieter had I been reading a ghost story; thesis abstracts are, with a very few exceptions, the least credible and most horrifying productions of imaginative literature. Nevertheless you will understand that I was not in the least disposed to see a ghost, though I was rather far advanced in asphyxiation.
   At last, reluctantly, like a man approaching a task he knows to be outside human power, I went to the fire and knelt to poke it, thinking perhaps I might alter the quality of the smoke, and thus secure change, if not relief. Of course I simply made it worse. I grew impatient, and, holding my breath, put my head into the worst of the smother, to see if anything—a bird’s nest, or a dead squirrel, or anything of that sort, might have stuck in the chimney.
   Nothing. Defeated, and with the disgruntled resignation of one used to such defeats, I crawled backward into the room, and stood up.
   There was a man sitting at my desk.
   Nothing in the least alarming about that. People quite often come into my study without being heard; when I am busy I often do not notice what is happening around me. I assumed he was a visitor. He looked like a senior faculty member—a tall, rather lean, bald man, with professorial eyebrows. He was wearing his gown, but so was I, for that matter for, though smoky, my study was cold.
   “Good afternoon,” I said; “Can I help you?”
   “You can help me by doing something about that smoking chimney,” he replied.
   He smiled as he spoke, and I assumed that this was some form of donnish humour. Nevertheless, I thought it rather cool of him to complain about what was, after all, my chimney. I decided to take the line of extreme and disarming courtesy, which sometimes works well with impudent people.
   “I assure you I am doing the best I can,” said I.
   “Not a very good best,” said he; “take another look up the flue.”
   I obeyed. Not, you understand, because I was awed by him, but because I wanted time to think. Slowly I knelt, and poked my head into the fireplace again, and thought.
   Who the devil is he? There is something familiar about his face, but what is his name? I wish I could either forget both faces and names, or remember both. It is this perpetual dealing with nameless faces that makes my life a muddle of uncertainty. Is he one of those architectural critics who still push their way into the college, and take on airs? How dare he give me orders? I must have met him somewhere. Is he one of those dons who suffers from the delusion that he is Dr. Johnson, and is rude on principle?
   By this time I had thought all I could, without drawing in huge breaths of smoke, so I crawled back into the room and stood up again.
   “If I were you I’d go up on the roof and put a rod down that chimney,” said the stranger. “Or why don’t you come down it again?”
   “Down the chimney?” said I. Aha, this was the clue. Here was a madman.
   “Yes,” said he; “you didn’t knock at the door, so I assume you must have come down the chimney. You weren’t here a minute ago.”
   One of my cardinal rules in life is always to humour madmen. It is second nature to me. I do it several times every day. “Quite so,” said I. “I came down the chimney.”
   He looked at me closely, and I thought somewhat insultingly.
   “Tight squeeze, wasn’t it?” said he.
   “Not in the least,” I replied. “A chimney with a good clear draught might be a little swift for a man of my age and quiet habit of life, but this is a superbly smoky chimney—and the smoke, as you readily understand, gives just that density to the atmosphere in the flue which permits me to float down as gently as a feather. Science, you observe.” I said this airily, for I was beginning to enjoy myself.
   “Look here,” said he; “I don’t believe you’re a chimney sweep at all.”
   “Your perception is in perfect order,” said I. “I am not a chimney sweep; I am the Master of this College. Now may I ask who you are?”
   “Aha,” he cried, “just as I thought. You’re a madman. I don’t believe in humouring madmen. Out you go!”
   “As you please,” said I. He looked as though he might become violent, and I wanted time to edge myself toward the bell which calls the Porter. “But before I go, would you have the goodness to tell me who you are?”
   “I?” he shouted, working the tremendous eyebrows in a way which I could tell had been effective in quelling undergraduates. “Certainly I’ll tell you. I am Master of this College.”
   “Of course,” said I, in my silkiest tones, “but which Master are you?”
   “Damn your impudence,” he roared, “I’m the ninth Master.”
   I confess this made me feel very unwell. I can’t tell why, but it did, and although I cannot fully describe the sensation, I thought I was going to faint; for a time my consciousness seemed to come and go in rhythmic waves; it was like vertigo, only more intense; I was horribly distressed. But my visitor seemed even more so.
   “Stop! Stop!” he cried; “for God’s sake don’t fade and reappear like that. You make me giddy.” And to my astonishment he fell back into my chair and closed his eyes, as white as—well, as white as a ghost. I forgot all about the Porter, and hurried to his side. I put out my hand to feel his brow, just as he opened his eyes. I was amazed to see unmistakable fear in his face, and he shrank from my touch.
   “Don’t be afraid,” I said, “I only want to help you.” His voice was faint, and came from a dry mouth. “Who did you say you were?” he asked.
   “I am the first Master,” said I. Presumably I was distressed more than I realized, for though I was trying to reassure him my voice sounded sad and eerie, even to myself.
   “Then you are—Finch?” he said.
   Again the inexplicable malaise overcame me, and I could tell by the fear in his eyes that, to his vision, I must be fading and reappearing again. My sensations were mingled; to be mistaken for Robert Finch—painter, poet, musician, scholar, wit and distinguished diner-out—presented me with an extreme of temptation. Should I risk all, and bask for a moment in another’s glory? But decency prevailed. I denied, reluctantly, that I was Finch.
   “Good God! Then—you must be the other fellow who was here, briefly, even before Finch,” said he.
   Condemn me, if you will, as an egotist, but in such a situation which of you could have contained his curiosity? “What became of him—that other fellow who was here, briefly, before Finch?’ I asked. And again I heard in my own voice that hollow, eerie note.
   He shook his head. “I don’t really know,” he said; “it was whispered that something happened that occasionally happened to professors in those days; something called ‘making a composition with his creditors’, or some quaint phrase of the kind, and he went.”
   “Where did he go?” I persisted. The man looked as if he needed fresh air, but the subject was of such importance to me that I put my own interest first.
   “I don’t think anybody knew,” he said. “The story that has come down to us is that there was a full-dress enquiry in the Round Room, and it is presumed that the Visitor broke the Master, for when it was over he stumbled out into the quad, and it was seen that the russet rosette had been torn from his gown. After that—well, some said it was the pool, and some said he leapt from the tower, and some said”—here his voice thickened with repugnance—”that he went off and got a job at York. The College behaved very well toward the wife and girls; they kept going by taking in washing for some of the Junior Fellows who couldn’t afford the Coin Wash. Finch was a man of very delicate feeling, by all accounts, and he saw to it. But it was all so long ago…”
   My concern for his suffering had considerably abated. Madman he might be, but… “How long ago?” I asked.
   “A century, at least,” said he. “Let’s see—this is Christmas, 2063—oh, yes; a full century.”
   “A century, and nine Masters?” said I. And again that dreadful sensation, like going down too rapidly in an elevator.
   “A distinguished group,” said he, with complacency, “Let’s see—before me—I’m in my fourth year now—there was Kasabowszki for twenty-one years, poor Sawyers who died after three, Taschereau who made it for ten, Gamble for twelve, Meyer for seven, Duruset for fifteen, poor Polanyi—worn out with waiting, really,—for three, and of course Finch’s glorious first mastership of twenty-five long, sunny years. Yes, nine Masters from the beginning.”
   I knew I was dealing with a madman. I knew that I was behaving foolishly, but I couldn’t help myself. “Nine, you idiot!” I shouted. “Ten, ten, ten! I was first Master—” I stopped, shocked at what I had said, and hurried to change the dreadful word. “I am first Master,” I screamed.
   I suppose I must have looked dreadful, waving my arms and shouting, for he shrank back into my chair, and covered his face with his hands. But I could hear him muttering.
   “It isn’t true,” he was whispering to himself. “Reason and science—everything I have lived by—are against it. I’m not seeing a ghost. I utterly deny that I am seeing a ghost.”
   These words affected me dreadfully. I felt as though every fibre and bone of my body were melting into something insubstantial, and my control of myself deserted me utterly. “Ghost!” I screamed; “ghost yourself! Ghost yourself!” But even as I protested a fearful sickness of doubt was mounting to my heart. I needed help, not for the madman in my chair but for myself. I pushed the bell for the Porter; that way lay sanity; an old army man would know what to do.
   The Porter came faster than I could have hoped—but what a Porter! Six feet four of ex-naval man, a bo’sun if ever I saw one. He went at once to the figure in my chair.
   “I heard you shouting, sir,” said he; “anything I can do?”
   “Get rid of that thing there by the fireplace,” said the impostor, pointing toward me, but keeping his eyes closed.
   “Nothing there, sir,” said the Porter. “Better let me help you out into the air, sir. Terrible smoky fire you have today.”
   Nothing there! The words struck me like a heavy blow, and I swooned.
   How long it was I do not know, but some time later I was aroused to find Mr. McCracken helping me to my feet.
   “Better let me help you out into the air, sir,” he said. “Terrible smoky fire you have today.”
   “Yes,” I said; “we must ask the Bursar for some seasoned wood.”
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The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees

   Some of you may have wondered what became of our College Ghost. Because we had a ghost, and there are people in this room who saw him. He appeared briefly last year at the College Dance on the stairs up to this Hall, and at the Gaudy he was seen to come and go through that door, while I was reading an account of another strange experience of mine. I did not see him then, but several people did so. What became of him?
   I know. I am responsible for his disappearance. I think I may say without unwarrantable spiritual pride that I laid him. And, as is always the case in these psychic experiences, it was not without great cost to myself.
   When first the ghost was reported to me, I assumed that we had a practical joker within the College. Yet the nature of the joke was against any such conclusion. We had had plenty of jokes—socks in the pool, fish in the pool, funny notices beside the pool, pumpkins on the roofs, ringing the bell at strange hours—all the wild exuberance, the bubbling, ungovernable high spirits and gossamer fantasy one associates with the Graduate School of the University of Toronto. The wit of a graduate student is like champagne—Canadian champagne—but this joke had a different flavour, a dash of wormwood, in its nature.
   You see, the ghost was so unlike a joker. He did not appear in a white sheet and shout “Boo!” He spoke to no one, though a Junior Fellow—the one who met him on the stairs—told me that the Ghost passed him, softly laying a finger on its lips to caution him to silence. On its lips, did I say? Now this is of first importance: it laid its finger where its lips doubtless were, but its lips could not be seen, nor any of its features. Everybody who saw it said that the Ghost had a head, and a place where its face ought to be—but no face that anybody could see or recognize or remember. Of course there are scores of people like that around the university, but they are not silent; they are clamouring to establish some sort of identity; the Ghost cherished his anonymity, his facelessness. So, perversely I determined to find out who he was.
   The first time I spotted him was in the Common Room. I went in from my Study after midnight to turn out the lights, and he was just to be seen going along the short passage to the Upper Library. I gave chase, but when I reached the Upper Library he had gone, and when I ran into the entry, he was not to be seen. But at last I was on his trail, and I kept my eyes open from that time.
   All of this took place, you should know, last Christmas, between the Gaudy and New Year. Our Gaudy last year was on December the seventeenth; I first saw the Ghost, and lost him, on the twenty-first. He came again on the twenty-third. I woke in the night with an odd sensation that someone was watching me, and as this was in my own bedroom I was very angry; if indeed it were a joker he lacked all discretion. I heard a stirring and—I know this sounds like the shabbiest kind of nineteenth century romance, but I swear it is true—I heard a sigh, and then on the landing outside my door, a soft explosion, and a thud, as though something had fallen. I ran out of my room, but there was nothing to be seen. Over Christmas Day and Boxing Day I had no news of the Ghost, but on the twenty-eighth of December matters came to a head.
   December the twenty-eighth, as some of you may know, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, traditionally the day on which King Herod slaughtered the children of Bethlehem. In the Italian shops in this city you can buy very pretty little babies, made of sugar, and eat them, in grisly commemoration of Herod’s whimsical act.
   I was sitting in my study at about eleven o’clock that night, reflectively nibbling at the head of a sugarbaby and thinking about money, when I noticed that the lights were on in the Round Room. It troubles me to see electric current wasted, so I set out for the Round Room in a bad humour. As I walked across the quad, it seemed that the glow from the skylight in the Round Room was more blue and cold than it should be, and seemed to waver. I thought it must be a trick of the snow, which was falling softly, and the moonlight which played so prettily upon it.
   I unlocked the doors, walked into the Round Room, and there he was, standing under the middle of the skylight.
   He bowed courteously. “So you have come at last,” said he.
   “I have come to turn out the lights,” said I, and realized at once that the lights were not on. The room glowed with a fitful bluish light, not disagreeable but inexpressibly sad. And the stranger spoke in a voice which was sad, yet beautiful.
   It was his voice which first told me who he was. It had a compelling, ‘cello-like note which was unlike anything I was accustomed to hear inside the College, though our range is from the dispirited quack of Ontario to the reverberant splendours of Nigeria. The magnificent voice came from the part of his head where a face should be—but there was no face there, only a shadow, which seemed to change a little in density as I looked at it. It was unquestionably the Ghost!
   This was no joker, no disguised Junior Fellow. He was our Ghost, and like every proper ghost he was transporting and other-worldly, rather than merely alarming. I felt no fear as I looked at him, but I was deeply uneasy.
   “You have come at last,” said the Ghost. “I have waited for you long—but of course you are busy. Every professor in this university is busy. He is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth. But none has time for an act of mercy.”
   It pleased me to hear the Ghost quote Scripture; if we must have apparitions, by all means let them be literate.
   “You have come here for mercy?” said I.
   “I have come for the ordeal, which is also the ultimate mercy,” he replied.
   “But we don’t go in for ordeals,” said I. “Perhaps you can tell me a little more plainly what it is you want?”
   “Is this not the Graduate School?” said he.
   “No indeed,” said I; “this is a graduate college, but the offices of the Graduate School are elsewhere.”
   “Don’t trifle with me,” said the Ghost sternly. “Many things are growing very dim to me, but I have not wholly lost my sense of place; this is the Graduate School; this is the Examination Room. And yet”—the voice faltered – “it seemed to me that it used to be much higher in the air, much less handsome than this. I remember stairs—very many stairs…”
   “You had been climbing stairs when you came to me in my bedroom,” said I.
   “Yes,” he said eagerly. “I climbed the stairs—right to the top—and went into the Examination Room—and there you lay in bed, and I knew I had missed it again. And so there was nothing for it but to kill myself again.”
   That settled it. Now I knew who he was, and I had a pretty shrewd idea where, so far as he was concerned, we both were.
   Every university has its secrets—things which are nobody’s fault, but which are open to serious misunderstanding. Thirty or more years ago a graduate student was ploughed on his Ph.D. oral; he must have expected something of the kind because when he had been called before his examiners and given the bad news he stepped out on the landing and shot himself through the head. It is said, whether truly or not I cannot tell, that since that time nobody is allowed to proceed to the presentation and defence of his thesis unless there is a probability amounting to a certainty that he will get his degree.
   Here, obviously, was that unfortunate young man, standing with me in the Round Room. Why here? Because, before Massey College was built, the Graduate School was housed in an old dwelling on this land, and the Examination Room was at the top of the house, as nearly as possible where my bedroom is now. Before that time the place had been the home of one of the Greek-letter fraternities—the Mu Kau Mu, I believe it was called.
   “The Examination Room you knew has gone,” said I. “If you are looking for it, I fear you must go to Teperman’s wrecking yard, for whatever remains of it is there.”
   “But is this not an Examination Room?” said the Ghost. I nodded. “Then I beg you, by all that is merciful, to examine me,” he cried, and to my embarrassed astonishment, threw himself at my feet.
   “Examine you for what?” I said.
   “For my Ph.D.”, wailed the Ghost, and the eerie, agonized tone in which it uttered those commonplace letters made me, for the first time, afraid. “I must have it. I knew no rest when I was in the world of men, because I was seeking it; I know no rest now, as I linger on the threshold of another life, because I lack it. I shall never be at peace without it.”
   I have often heard it said that the Ph.D. is a vastly overvalued degree, but I had not previously thought that it might stand between a man and his eternal rest. I was becoming as agitated as the Ghost.
   “My good creature,” said I, rather emotionally, “if I can be of any assistance—”
   “You can,” cried the Ghost, clawing at the knees of my trousers with its transparent hands; “examine me, I beg of you. Examine me now and set me free. I’m quite ready.”
   “But, just a moment,” said I; “the papers—the copies of your thesis—”
   “All ready,” said the Ghost, in triumph. And, though I swear that they were not there before, I now saw that all the circle of tables in the Round Room was piled high with those dismal, unappetizing volumes—great wads of typewritten octavo paper—which are Ph.D. theses.
   “Be reasonable,” said I. “I don’t suppose for a minute I can examine you. What is your field?”
   “What’s yours?” said the Ghost, and if a Ghost can speak cunningly, that is exactly what this one did now.
   “English literature,” I said; “more precisely, the drama of the nineteenth century, with special emphasis on the popular drama of the transpontine London theatres between 1800 and 1850.”
   Most people find that discouraging, and change the subject. But the Ghost positively frisked to one of the heaps, drew out an especially thick thesis, and handed it to me.
   “Shall I sit here?” he asked, pointing to the red chair, which, as you know, has a place of special prominence in that room.
   “By no means,” said I, shocked by such an idea.
   “Oh, I had so hoped I might,” said the Ghost.
   “My dear fellow, you have been listening to University gossip,” said I. “There are people who pretend that we put the examinee in that chair and sit around the room in a ring, baiting him till he bursts into tears. It is the sort of legend in which scientists and other mythomaniacs take delight. No, no; if you will go away for a few hours—say until tomorrow at ten o’clock—I shall have the room set up for an examination. You shall have a soft chair, cheek by jowl with your examiners, with lots of cigarettes, unlimited water to drink, a fan, and a trained nurse in attendance to take you to the Examinees’ W.C. and bring you back again, should the need occur. We are very well aware here that Ph.D. candidates are delicate creatures, subject to unaccountable metaphysical ills—”
   The Ghost broke in, impatiently. “Rubbish,” he said; “I’m quite ready. Let’s get to work. You sit in the red chair. I’m perfectly happy to stand. I think I’m pretty well prepared”—and as he said this I swear that something like a leer passed over the shadow that should have been a face—”and I’m ready as soon as you are.”
   There was nothing for it. The Ghost had taken command. I sat down in the red chair—my chair—and opened the thesis. Prolegomena to the Study of the Christ Symbol in the Plays of Thomas Egerton Wilks, I read, and my heart, which had been sinking for the last few moments now plunged so suddenly that I almost lost consciousness. I have heard of Wilks—it is my job to have heard of him—but of his fifty-odd melodramas, farces and burlesque extravaganzas I have not read a line. However, I have my modest store of professor-craft. I opened the thesis, riffled through the pages, hummed and hawed a little, made a small mark in the margin of one page, and said—”Well, suppose for a beginning, you give me a general outline of your argument.”
   He did.
   Forty-five minutes later, when I could get a word in, I asked him just where he thought the Christ symbol made its first appearance in My Wife’s Dentist, or The Balcony Beau which is one of Wilks’ dreary farces.
   He told me.
   Before he had finished he had also given me more knowledge than I really wanted about the Christ symbol in Woman’s Love or Kate Wynsley the Cottage Girl, Raffaelle the Reprobate, or the Secret Mission and the Signet Ring, The Ruby Ring, or The Murder at Sadlers Wells, and another farce named, more simply, Bamboozling.
   By this time I felt that I had been sufficiently bamboozled myself, so I asked him to retire, while the examination board—me, me, and only me, as the old song puts it—considered his case. When I was alone I sought to calm myself with a drink of water, and after a decent interval I called him back.
   ‘There are a few minor errors in this thesis which you will undoubtedly notice during a calm re-reading, and a certain opaqueness of style which might profitably be amended. I am surprised that you have made so little use of the great Variorum Edition of Wilks published by Professors Fawcett and Pale, of the University of Bitter End, Idaho. Nevertheless I find it to be a piece of research of real, if limited value, which, if published, might be—yes, I shall go so far as to say, will be—seminal in the field of nineteenth century drama studies,” said I. “I congratulate you, and it will be a pleasure to recommend that you receive your degree.”
   I don’t know what I expected then. Perhaps I hoped that he would disappear, with a seraphic smile. True enough, there was an atmosphere as of a smile, but it was the smile of a giant refreshed. “Good,” he said; “now we can get on to my other subjects.”
   “Do you mean to say that nineteenth century drama isn’t your real subject?” I cried, and when I say ‘I cried,’ I really mean it; my voice came out in a loud, horrified croak.
   “Sir,” said he; “it is so long ago since my unfortunate experience at my first examination that I have utterly forgotten what my subject was. But I have had time since then to prepare myself for any eventuality. I have written theses on everything. Shall we go on now to History?”
   I was too astonished, and horrified, and by this time afraid, to say anything. We went on to History.
   My knowledge of History is that of a layman. Academically, there is nothing worse, of course, that can be said. But professor-craft did not wholly desert me. The first principle, when you don’t know anything about the subject of a thesis, is to let the candidate talk, nodding now and then with an ambiguous smile. He thinks you know, and are counting his mistakes, and it unnerves him. The Ghost was an excellent examinee; that is to say, he fell for it, and I think I shook his confidence once with a little laugh, when he was talking about Canada’s encouragement of the arts under the premiership of W. L. Mackenzie King. But finally the two hours was up, and I graciously gave him his Ph.D. in History.
   Next came classics. His thesis was on The Concept of Pure Existence in Plotinus. You don’t want to hear about it, but I must pause long enough to say that I scored rather heavily by my application of the second principle of conducting an oral, which is to pretend ignorance, and ask for explanations of very simple points. Of course your ignorance is real, but the examinee thinks you are being subtle, and that he is making an ass of himself, and this rattles him.
   And so, laboriously, we toiled through the Liberal Arts, and some of the Arts which are not so liberal. I examined him in Computer Science, and Astronomy, and Mediaeval Studies, and I rather enjoyed examining him in Fine Art. One of my best examinations was in Mathematics, though personally my knowledge stops short at the twelve-times table.
   Every examination took two hours, but my watch did not record them. The night seemed endless. As it wore on I remembered that at cockcrow all ghosts must disappear, and I cudgelled my brain trying to remember whether the kosher butchers on Spadina keep live cocks, and if so what chance we had of hearing one in the Round Room. I was wilting under my ordeal, but the Ghost was as fresh as a daisy.
   “Science, now!: he positively shouted, as a whole new mountain of theses appeared from—I suppose from Hell. Now I know nothing whatever of Science, in any of its forms. If Sir Charles Snow wants a prime example of the ignorant Arts man, who has not even heard of that wretched law of thermodynamics, which is supposed to be as fine as Shakespeare, he is at liberty to make free with my name. I don’t know and I don’t care. When the Ghost moved into Science I thought my reason would desert me.
   I needn’t have worried. The Ghost was as full of himself as a Ghost can possibly be, and he hectored and bullied and badgered me about things I had never heard of, while my head swam. But little by little—it was when the Ghost was chattering animatedly about his work on the rate of decay of cosmic rays when they are brought in contact with mesons—that I realized the truth. The Ghost did not care whether I knew what he was talking about or not. The Ghost was a typical examinee, and he wanted two things and two things only—an ear into which he could pour what he believed to be unique and valuable knowledge, and a licence to go elsewhere and pour it into the ears of students. Once I grasped this principle, my spirits rose. I began to nod, to smile, to murmur appreciatively. When the Ghost said something especially spirited about the meiosis-function in the formation of germ-cells, I even allowed myself to say “Bravo”—as if he had come upon something splendid that I had always suspected myself but had never had time to prove in my laboratory. It was a great success; I knew that dawn could not be far away, for as each examination was passed, the Ghost seemed to become a little less substantial. I could see through him, now, and I was happily confident that he could not, and never would, see through me. As he completed his last defense of a doctoral dissertation, I was moved to be generous.
   “A distinguished showing,” I said. “With a candidate of such unusual versatility I am tempted to go a little beyond the usual congratulations. Is there anything else you fancy—a Diploma in Public Health, for instance, or perhaps something advanced in Household Science?”
   But the Ghost shook his head. “I want a Ph.D. and that only,” said he. “I want a Ph.D. in everything.”
   “Consider it yours,” said I.
   “You mean that I may present myself at the next Convocation?”
   “Yes; when the Registrar kneels to take upon him the degrees granted to those who are forced by circumstances to be absent, I suggest that you momentarily invest him with your ectoplasm—or whatever it is that people in your situation do,” said I.
   “I shall; Oh, I shall,” he cried, ecstatically, and as he faded before my eyes I heard his voice from above the skylight in the Round Room, saying, “I go to a better place than this, confident that as a Ph.D. I shall have it in my power to make it better still.”
   So at last, as dawn stole over the College, I was alone in the Round Room. The night of the Holy Innocents had passed. Musing, my hand stole to my pocket and, pulling out the sugarbaby, I crunched off its head. Was it those blessed children, I wondered, who had hovered over me, protecting me from being found out? Or had it perhaps been the spirit of King Herod, notoriously the patron of examiners?
   All things considered, I think it was both great spiritual forces, watching over me during the long night. Happy in the thought that I was so variously protected, I stepped out into the first light, the last crumbs of the sugarbaby still sweet upon my lips.
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The Great Queen Is Amused

   The first Christmas we celebrated in College I told a Ghost Story on this occasion because I had had an odd experience just before the Gaudy, and thought it might amuse you. The second Christmas I told another, only because it was true and a footnote to the first. It was never my intention that these stories should multiply. The last thing I desire for Massey College is the shabby notoriety of being haunted. I am not a man who particularly likes, or seeks, ghosts: I never saw a ghost till I came here—came to a brand-new building, every brick of which I had seen set in place, and all the furnishings of which have been known to me since they came from the makers. I had always thought that ghosts were superstitions. I wish I thought so still.
   It happened a week ago last Sunday. I perceive that you have gone at once to the heart of the matter; it is a pleasure to address a truly perceptive audience. You have recognized immediately that the date was December the fifth—the Vigil of Saint Nicholas, patron of scholars, and therefore an unseen but real presence in this College. It was near to midnight, and I lay in my bed, reading myself to sleep, when I felt stealing over me that special uneasiness which I have learned—but only since I came here—to associate with a particular kind of trouble. In university life one quickly becomes expert in identifying several sorts of disquiet; I have one which I believe is all my own, and I call it the Ghost Chill. My temperature drops suddenly; my breathing is laboured; my vision is disturbed so that stable objects seem to advance and retreat before my eyes, and I feel a stirring in my scalp, as though my hair were rising. I see some medical men in the audience smirking; simple fright, they think. Oh no, nothing so easy as that; I am not frightened, but disagreeably aware. I know that something quite out of the ordinary—something untoward—something both inescapable and exhausting—is about to happen to me. I know that I have slipped out of the groove of one sort of life and am trapped for a time in an alien realm.
   The Ghost Chill also makes one sensitive to sounds which other people do not hear. As I lay in my bed I became conscious of sobbing and sighing and wailing—as of a great number of people shaken with grief and despair and (this was the worst of it) expecting something of me. How did I know this? I cannot tell you. But I knew it, quite clearly. I was not frightened, but I was deeply disturbed and depressed. I knew that things would be worse before they were better, and I knew also that I could not escape whatever lay before me. So I rolled up my book, put it back in its locked case, put on my dressing-gown and slippers, and set out for the scene of the disturbance.
   How did I know where to look? That is another of the characteristics of the Ghost Chill. One knows where to go. I do not make any pretentious claim that one is guided to a particular spot; one just knows where to go. So I trudged downstairs, and through the passage on the lowest floor that leads to the Lower Library.
   The lights are always burning there, with a hard, charmless blaze that should be enough to discourage the most insensitive ghost. I could see at once that there was nobody in the Reference Room, but from the room which is marked “Press Room and Stacks” the sound that was drawing me was audible—to my sensitive ear, you understand—in dreadful volume. As I unlocked the door I felt fear for the first time.
   How does fear manifest itself in you? With me it is like being stAbbed with a cruelly cold knife; for an instant it is a paralysis, then a pain, then a shock. Why was I afraid now? Because I had remembered something that was in the stacks.
   Our library has, from time to time, been given generous gifts of books. Even before the College opened one gift came to us of a hundred or more volumes, of which all but five were works of Canadian literature. We are already modestly famous for our collection of Canadian literature, you know. But those five were books to which the Librarian paid scant attention, because they did not fit into any of the categories of our collection. They were the works of a man of whom some of you will have heard, and whose name may raise a smile. It was Aleister Crowley; he died not long ago, putting an end to a life that had been spent in trying to impose himself on the world as a magician. Most people laughed at him, but there is no doubt that his career was an unsavoury one, and he was involved in scandals that were disastrous, and sometimes fatal, to people who had come under his influence. There were five of Aleister Crowley’s books in the stacks, piled together on a shelf of unclassified volumes, and once or twice I had suggested to the Librarian that we should get rid of them, or put them in the vault. But I had forgotten them, and so had he. I remembered them now with the terrible onset of fear that I have already described.
   But as I have told you, when the Ghost Chill is upon me, I have to do what lies before me, afraid or not. So I turned the key in the lock, pushed back the heavy door, and walked inside.
   There I saw a scene of such complex disorder that I do not know where to begin to describe it. The light was extraordinary, to begin with; it was not the electric glare of the Reference Room, but a wavering blue light, as though I stood in the middle of a gas flame. There was one other living creature in the stacks, and I recognized her with dismay. I cannot reveal her name, for she is well-known to many of you, and I do not wish to involve her in unseemly gossip. I must say, however, that she knows our library well, for she has spent many hours in the stacks, doing some research in Canadian literature for her husband. She stood, tall, straight and unafraid, looking about her in wonder, and as the door slammed into place she turned to look at me.
   “You had better step inside this circle if you don’t want to get into trouble,” she said, in the soft, yet deliberate and pleasing accents which tell of a childhood spent in the Hebrides. I saw that she stood in a chalk circle that had been carefully drawn on the floor, and I hastened to her side. She was calm in the midst of the frantic disturbance that surrounded us. I suppose President’s wives are always calm before scenes of despair and tumult; they learn that art at faculty receptions.
   “What on earth are you doing?” I demanded.
   “I’m afraid I’ve been careless with the books,” she replied, and in her hand I recognized one of Crowley’s volumes, opened at a drawing that looked like a mathematical diagram. “I just wanted to see if this recipe worked as well as the author said it did, and it seems to have caused a little trouble.”
   A little trouble! I detest understatement; it always seems to me to be dangerous frivolity. A little trouble! My eyes were now accustomed to the strange light, and I could see that the whole area of the stacks was filled with agitated, insubstantial figures; each one was clear to the eye, but it was also transparent. The floor stood thick with them, leaping, writhing, shoving and jostling as they attempted to stand on their hands and fell to the floor every time with shrieks of despair. Some others danced about on their hands, laughing in derisive triumph, and still others crowded all the space immediately below the ceiling. These were even stranger than the dervishes on the floor, for they were curled into balls, their heads tucked into their stomachs, their legs drawn up toward their bodies, and their hands clasped loosely before them, as they bobbed, somersaulted and turned gently in the air, like hideous balloons. And, most extraordinary circumstance of all, every one of these figures was stark naked.
   What does one say under such circumstances? Almost any remark one can think of is unequal to the occasion. Undoubtedly mine was so. “What in the world have you done?” I said.
   “Well, I’ve been reading a lot of these Canadian books, getting together material for Claude’s anthology,” she replied. “I got a bit curious about some of the authors—thought what fun it would be to talk to them, and all that—foolishness, I suppose. Then today I came across this book by this man Crowley, and he says it isn’t hard to bring back the dead if you go about it in a respectful and proper manner. For the past two weeks I’ve been wishing I could have a word or two with Sara Jeanette Duncan; there’s a bit in The Imperialist that always sounds to me as if something had been cut out of it and the gap never properly patched, and I thought—”
   “You thought you’d get hold of Miss Duncan and ask her,” I interrupted. The leisureliness of the beautiful anthologist’s explanation nettled me.
   “Well, Crowley didn’t seem to think there was much to it,” she said.
   “I think that before monkeying with Crowley you might have had the courtesy to speak to me,” said I.
   “Oh don’t be so pompous,” said she.
   Women always think that if they tell a man not to be pompous they will shut him up, but I am an old hand at that game. I know that if a man bides his time his moment will come. “Well,” I said, “if you and Crowley are such a great pair, suppose you explain what has happened.”
   “That’s just the difficulty,” she said, with terrible Scottish patience; “I don’t understand what has happened. I did all the right things, and called the name of Sara Jeanette Duncan, and these articles began to appear. Look at them, would you! Did you ever see such a sight in your life? What do you suppose they are?”
   This was my moment of triumph. You see, I knew what they were.
   It has been a lifelong habit of mine to read myself to sleep. Some people read light books—mystery stories and the like—in bed, but my custom has always been to read works of greater substance before sleeping. And not just to read them once, carelessly, but to read and re-read a group of selected classics over and over again, year in and year out, for in this way they become a part of oneself. For many years a bedtime favourite of mine has been that very famous commentary on the Pentateuch, the Midrash of Rabbi Tanhuma bar Abba, most learned of the fourth century Talmudic mystics and sages. My copy of the Midrash is rather a nice one—a fine tenth century scroll, beautifully illuminated though not particularly suited to reading in bed, because it is fourteen feet long, and as it must be read from right to left this means a lot of winding and rewinding. It is encased at both ends in copper and gold; the rubies on the casing scratch my hands now and then, but I don’t greatly mind. It is a small price to pay for keeping my Hebrew alive. As luck would have it, I had been reading the scroll of Rabbi Tanhuma when the Ghost Chill came upon me.
   Of course you have guessed what the explanation was. Not all of you will have read the great Midrash, but certainly you have read Louis Ginzberg’s seven volume compilation of Jewish legends, and will have formed your own conclusions. But Hebrew studies are neglected in the Hebrides and so, for the sake of completeness, I must continue exactly as if you were as much in the dark as was my companion.
   She had asked me what I supposed these apparitions were. “Why,” I said, “this is hell, and these are spirits of the dead.”
   “Don’t be silly,” she replied, “it isn’t a bit like hell, except perhaps for the noise.”
   “What do you suppose hell to be?” said I. “The word merely means a dark and enclosed place, inhabited by spirits. A perfect description of the stacks in Massey College Library. Rabbi Tanhuma says it is indistinguishable from Paradise; both damned and saved pass a few millennia there. I suppose you called up a single spirit, and have received a wholesale delivery; Crowley is a most untrustworthy guide.”
   “But who are they?” said she.
   “It is only too clear that they are the ghosts of the Canadian authors whose books are here,” said I.
   “Then why are they so noisy?” she asked. Every time I think of it, I realize what a wealth of national feeling was compressed into that one enquiry.
   “They are clamouring to be reborn,” I explained, for my long acquaintance with Rabbi Tanhuma was at last showing its practical applicability. “Look, you see those who are floating in that strange, curled-up posture; they have placed themselves in the foetal position, so that, when a child is conceived, they are ready at once to take possession of it in the womb, and come to earth again.”
   “Whatever for?” said she.
   “Perhaps they hope that this time they might be born American authors,” said I.
   Our conversation had not been unnoticed by the spirits, who now began to float uncomfortably near us. Ernest Thompson Seton, though foetal in posture, was still clearly recognizable by the obstreperous outdoorsiness of his appearance; one spirit, naked like the rest, was walking on her hands, and it was only by the invincible dignity of her person, back and front, that I recognized Mrs. Susanna Moodie. Robert Ban looked particularly smug, and I knew why; a Junior Fellow of Massey College is making a fullscale study of him, and he was flattered. A floating foetus bumped me—though spectrally—and I turned just in time to see that it was Nellie McClung, avid for rebirth. It was an eerie experience, I can tell you. I had just time to reflect that Canadian authors appeared, on the whole, to have been neglectful of their physiques.
   “You don’t suppose they mean us any harm, do you?” said my companion, with the first show of nervousness that I had observed in her.
   I do not think that I am a cruel man, but I confess that there is a streak of austerity in my character, and it showed itself now. “They certainly do not mean me any harm,” I replied; “I have not disturbed their rest; I have not frivolously routed them out of Paradise. What their intentions may be toward you I have no way of telling.”
   “What are you going to do to get us out of here?” she asked, as if I had not spoken. It is thus that women rule the world.
   “There is a practical difficulty,” I said. ‘These ghosts can be put to rest only by the command of a king—a Hebrew king. They are uncommon nowadays, even in Massey College. We have one or two men of aristocratic birth, but they are unfortunately Aryan. We have a man whom I strongly suspect of being a chieftain in his homeland, but I am quite sure that an African chief would not fill the bill. Even a royal ghost might help us, but you know Canadian literature—no use looking there.”
   “I’m not so sure,” said she. From the triumph in her voice I knew that she had an idea. The circle in which we stood was not too far from the stacks for her to reach over into what the Librarian calls the Matthews Collection, and this is what she did now, handing me two weighty volumes bound in half-calf. I looked at the title. It was Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in The Highlands; the date, 1868.
   “But this is by Queen Victoria,” said I.
   “Of course,” said she; “and a queen worth a dozen ordinary kings, and I’m pretty certain that she even qualifies as a Hebrew ruler. Disraeli used to tell her that she was descended from King David, and I doubt if a rabble of middle-class Canadian ghosts can say she wasn’t. What’s more, she also qualifies as a Canadian author. Wasn’t she Queen of Canada?”
   Women are very, very remarkable people.
   “Come on,” she said; “get to work. See what you can do.”
   I was glad of my long acquaintance with the works of the great Rabbi Tanhuma; it meant that I knew how to raise a spirit without resorting to the slipshod conjurations of Aleister Crowley. I did what was necessary with, I think I may say, a certain style, and gently and slowly there appeared, between me and the beautiful anthologist that small, immensely dignified figure, familiar from a hundred portraits and statues. She wore the well-known tiny crown, from the back of which depended a beautiful veil; across her bosom was a sash of a splendid blue, and on her left shoulder was pinned the Order of the Garter.
   I am a democrat. All of my family have been persons of peasant origin, who have wrung a meagre sufficiency from a harsh world by the labour of their hands. I acknowledge no one my superior merely on grounds of a more fortunate destiny, a favoured birth. I did what any such man would do when confronted with Queen Victoria; I fell immediately to my knees.
   “Rise at once,” said the silvery voice with the beautiful, actress-like clarity of articulation, which has been so often described that it sounded almost familiar in my ears. “We have work to do that cannot wait. We presume that you wish to set at rest this disorderly group of my colonial subjects.”
   “If you would be so good, Your Majesty,” said I. “These are Canadian writers, and here in Massey College our library is, it appears, a Paradise for the repose of all such as are represented on our shelves. The blessed in Paradise invariably appear to mortals either walking on their hands, or in a posture convenient for re-birth—”
   “Master,” said Queen Victoria; “do not presume to teach the great-great-grandmother of your Sovereign how to suck eggs—or to lay ghosts either. We shall have these spirits right-side up and safely at rest in the squeezing of a lemon—to use an expression dear to our faithful ghillie, John Brown. But look what has happened. We wish an explanation.”
   I had been so occupied with Queen Victoria (who, even though I could see right through her, was, I assure you, much the most imposing and awesome person I have ever seen through in this world or any other) that I had not noticed what was going on among the ghosts. I saw that there had been a great reversal; those who had formerly been standing on their hands were now on their feet; those who had formerly been foetal in posture were now normally postnatal: but the others—those who had been trying to stand on their hands before—were now standing on their heads, and bitter tears were pouring from their eyes.
   “Who can they be?” I murmured to myself.
   “Those, Master,” said Queen Victoria, “are impostors in Paradise—persons loosely attached to literature who are not themselves authors but who fatten upon authors. What place have they in Paradise? Surely you recognize them? Those, when they lived, were literary critics!”
   I looked more closely, and indeed it was so. I saw—never mind who, and with him was—but the less said, the better. They were critics, all right.
   “Away with them,” cried the Queen, and the effect of her words was horrible. There was a roaring, as of a mighty rushing wind, and a tumult filled the room. I was thrown to the ground, but even as I fell I saw a figure, black and glistening, as of a naked man of extraordinary but frightening beauty, carrying a cruel scourge, who swooped upon the unfortunate critics. I thought I heard Queen Victoria say “Good evening, Rhadamanthus,” in a tone of genial politeness, as one monarch to another, but I cannot be sure, for the howls of the critics mounted to a scream. “No!” they shrieked, “it’s unfair. We really were authors. We too were creative! Living critics say so!” But it was unavailing. In an instant the critics were gone, and stillness filled the room. But, in our shelves, there were smoking, blackened gaps where their books had stood.
   Then the great Queen made a splendid gesture of dismissal, and all the Canadian authors made their farewell. It took a long time, for they did so one by one, basking in the royal presence. The ladies curtsied—some like Sarah Jeanette Duncan and Frances Brooke with quite a fashionable air, and others—as though they were improvising. Nakedness is unfriendly to a clumsy curtsy. The men bowed—all sorts of bows, from Kerby’s splendid gesture with hand on heart and his right foot advanced, to Ralph Connor’s strange giving at the knees. But at last all of them had gone back into the shelves, and there we stood—Queen Victoria, the beautiful anthologist and myself, in a room cleansed and calmed.
   “You may leave us,” said the Queen.
   I bowed. “I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude—” I began but as I spoke a smile of extraordinary sweetness broke over the royal features, which had already begun to fade, and before she vanished altogether there came to my ears, unmistakably—”The Queen was very much amused.”
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The Night of the Three Kings

   A fortnight ago I prepared a Ghost Story to read to you on this occasion. It was a lame affair, because I had to manufacture the whole thing. For three years at this time I have told you of things that really happened—of supernatural visitations to the College which I deeply regretted (because being haunted is considered unseemly in an institution dedicated to truth and scholarship) but which nevertheless provided me with a story to tell. This year I waited, half hopeful that another ghost would turn up, half fearful that our corporate image might receive yet another brutal blow from the unseen world. As nothing happened, I wrote a story, as I said, to pass a few minutes this evening; perhaps I had better be quite frank and admit that I stole a story out of an old volume of Chums, and adapted it clumsily to a College setting. I was sorry for the plagiarism, but there seemed no other way out. And then—
   But it would not do to raise your expectation too high. It is not of a haunting that I shall tell you tonight. Rather, I must inform you of a haunting that is yet to come. I was there when it was planned. Indeed I—but let me not anticipate.
   It happened last night, which as those of you who live in the College know, was one of our High Table nights. There had been guests at dinner, and a great deal of general conversation, and finally an adjournment to the rooms of one of our Senior Fellows for one of those convivial gatherings which are such an enlarging aspect of College life. When the guests had gone, I walked about the College, as I often do on such occasions, expecting to finish with a stroll in the quadrangle. A little fresh air helps one to organize one’s recollection of the brilliant and pithy observations on life with which High Table conversation invariably teems. I began with a tour of the lower floor—the sous sol as Professor Finch so elegantly calls it; we deplore the word “basement”. And as I was walking through the corridor on the north side of the building, I smelled, unmistakably, the aroma of a cigar.
   Nothing in that, you will say. That is what I said. Indeed, I had been smoking a cigar myself not long before, and traces of it may yet have hung about me. So I went on, humming the Antiphon for the Day, which as you will recall, is the one that begins O Sapientia. But as I was peeping into the Chapel, an uneasiness began to assert itself. A cigar—but not any cigar that I had smoked. A cigar, rather, that raised a question in the mind’s nose. What was that scent? I sat down in the Chapel and mused. Then it came to me; it was the fragrance of a Hoyo de Monterey, and it was quite fresh. Well!
   I see that you share my astonishment. Still, in case there are a few of the ladies present who have led very sheltered lives, or who perhaps have never known any really first-rate men, I shall explain. The Hoyo de Monterey was certainly one of the finest cigars ever manufactured, but it was exported only to England and none has been made since 1939!
   I retraced my steps. I paced up and down the north corridor sniffing like a great hound. Who had a Hoyo de Monterey? Who, having such a treasure, was smoking it after midnight in our sous sol? I sniffed… and sniffed… and my sniffs brought me to a locked door.
   You know the door; it is to what will be called the Muniment Room when it is completed. It is the room which will contain the personal papers of our Visitor. Great quantities of those papers are in there now, in roped and sealed filing cabinets, waiting to be catalogued. Who was smoking a Hoyo de Monterey in there, among those inflammable papers? The Visitor himself? Doesn’t smoke cigars. The Librarian? Smokes a pipe, of what had better be called a characteristic odour. It was my duty to unravel this mystery. I have a master-key. I unlocked the door.
   There he was, the scoundrel, crouched behind a row of filing cabinets. These cabinets are sealed, but he appeared to have broken a seal and was rooting in a drawer. The Hoyo de Monterey, in all its tawny magnificence, was nestling between the silkiest moustache and the most elegantly spiked Navy beard you ever saw; he was wearing the full dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, and on top of the filing cabinet rested a gold-laced admiral’s fore-and-aft hat. He spotted me. I insist upon the term; he did not see, or observe, or take notice; he spotted me.
   “You, there,” he called, much more loudly than was necessary in a small room; “do you work here?”
   Of course I do work here. I work like a dog—nay, like a Trojan. But one of the necessary fictions of Massey College—what Ibsen would have called the Life-Giving Lie—is that I am a person of limitless scholarly leisure. I replied sternly.
   “I am the Master of this College,” said I. “What do you think you are doing?”
   “I don’t think anything about it, my good man,” said he. “I’m looking for a valuable stamp.”
   I do not like being called “my good man”; in the particular minority of which I am a member, it is a discriminatory and offensive term.
   “Who are you?” said I. But I knew. Already I knew.
   My question made him hesitate for a moment. “Oh—I’m Baron Killarney,” he replied, trying to make it sound like John Smith.
   “So you are,” said I, courteously, I hope, “and you are also the late George the Fifth, King of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, and Emperor of India. Now sir, what are you doing snooping in Mr. Massey’s papers?”
   He looked at me closely for the first time. Never have I looked into eyes of so bright a blue.
   “You’re not as big a fool as you look,” said he. I acknowledged the compliment with a half-bow; I didn’t think it called for a whole bow. “Well, I wrote a letter to Vincent Massey in 1934 and my ass of a secretary put a very valuable stamp on it. I was keeping the stamp, which had a unique reversed border—only one of its kind—and I suppose the fella hooked it to save himself trouble. I couldn’t sack him—he was a Balliol man—but I made his life a perfect hell till he quit. And I swore I’d get that stamp back in this world or the next. Well, as you see, I didn’t get it in this world. And only now have I found out where the letter is. Give me my stamp.”
   “I haven’t got your beastly stamp,” said I, “and I think you are an impostor. Royalty never stamps letters. Everybody knows that.”
   “Do they, b’God!” said he. “I always stamped mine. I liked stamps. Why, I even designed a few stamps. Now, where’s my stamp?”
   “I suppose it has been thrown away,” said I; “nobody files letters in envelopes.”
   “That shows how much you know,” said the King, with what I thought quite unnecessary rudeness. But then I remembered that he had been a Navy man all his life, and forgave him. He went on: “You must have heard about filing: what you do is this—you cut open your letter with an ivory paperknife and when you have read it you replace it in its envelope, and make a concise précis of what the letter says on the envelope. Then you chuck it into your locker. That way you preserve the stamp. That’s what I always did. That’s what every sane man does. So my stamp must be in here.”
   “But as you see,” said I, “these letters are not filed in envelopes.”
   A look of suspicion came into the King’s blazing eyes, and he became as frantic as a man in the uniform of a full Admiral can possibly be. “Then he’s filed the envelopes separately,” he roared; “obviously because he was a collector! Where are the envelopes?”
   “I don’t know,” said I.
   “Then help me find them,” he shouted.
   “I cannot prevent you, as a monarch and a ghost, from doing as you please,” said I, “but you must not ask me to join in rummaging through our Visitor’s papers; it is contrary to my duty to Mr. Massey, to the College, to the Librarian—”
   The King made a very unsuitable proposal regarding the Librarian, which I do not think it proper to repeat. It was increasingly obvious that his character and vocabulary had been formed in the Navy.
   “Here’s a rum start!” he continued. “My time is short, and I need expert help. Who were Mr. Massey’s correspondents?”
   I was flummoxed by that one. “Oh, just about everybody,” I replied.
   “Any collectors?” he asked. “You know our rules, I suppose; I can’t call up anybody who isn’t represented somehow in this room. Supernatural Regulations 64 A. What about my son? He was a very fair collector; not in my class, of course, but good enough. Any letters from him in these boxes?”
   It seemed likely, and I nodded. The King began to shout in a quarter-deck voice. “Bertie!” he roared. “Bertie, come here at once; I need you. Bertie!”
   A voice spoke behind me—a voice I remembered well—the quiet, careful voice of a man who has overcome a distressing stammer.
   “Father,” it said; “I’ve been looking all over the Commonwealth for you. We are due to haunt the chartroom of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. Do hurry.”
   “Bertie, my boy,” shouted King George the Fifth. “We’ve got a good ten minutes. My three-penny with the reversed border is in here someplace, and we’ve got to find it. Hurry up, boy, hurry up!”
   Nothing in my experience is stranger than the scene that followed. There was George the Fifth, and with him George the Sixth, in full Naval kit, tearing open those carefully sealed filing-cabinets. They severed the rope bindings with their swords (I had never before believed that those swords would cut anything) and tore out double handfuls of papers, which they threw about the room until it was like a snowstorm. The monarchs were in the grip of collectors’ mania—than which there are few more terrible passions in the world. The short King and the tall King whisked about the room with extraordinary speed, searching, sifting, seeking, while I dodged hither and thither, expostulating and now and then hopping out of reach of their terrible swords.
   What time passed, I cannot tell; a few minutes, I suppose, though it seemed hours. Then George the Sixth, far too excited to speak, discovered in some obscure corner an envelope, upon which a few words had been written, and thrust it at his father. The senior monarch was overjoyed; as he seized it, the blue eyes filled with tears.
   “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.
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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 their 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 napkin, 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.
   You must not suppose that we ate in silence. I do not report our conversation because it is of slight interest. Just—”Another slice of turkey, my dear Doctor; allow me to give you the liver-wing.” And—”Sir John, let me press you to a little more of this excellent Timbale de Macaroni; and may I refill your glass. Oh, you’ve done it yourself.” You know the sort of thing; the polite exchanges of men who are busy with their food.
   But at last the table was empty, except for bones and wreckage. I sat back, satisfied yet in no way uncomfortable, and reached for a toothpick. It was a Victorian table, and so there were toothpicks of the finest sort—real quill toothpicks such as one rarely sees in these weakly fastidious days. I was ready to put into effect the plan I had been hatching.
   In the bad old days, before the academic life claimed me, I was, you must know, a journalist. And here I found myself in a situation of which no journalist would dare even to dream. Across the table from me sat one whose unique knowledge of our country’s past was incalculably enhanced by his extraordinary privilege of possessing access to our country’s future! Here was one who could tell me what would be the outcome of the present disquiet in Quebec. And then how I should be courted in Ottawa! Would I demand the Order of Canada—the Companionship, not the mere medal—before I deigned to reveal what I knew? And how I should lord it over Maurice Careless! But I at once put this unworthy thought from me. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. I wound myself up to put my leading question.
   But, poor creature of the twentieth century that I am, I was mistaken about the nature of our meal.
   “Ready for the second course, I think, eh Doctor?” said Sir John, and waved his hand. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye—the Biblical phrase popped into my mind—the table was completely re-set, and before us was spread a profusion of partridges, wild duck, lobster salad, galantines, plum pudding, jelly, pink blancmange, Charlotte Russe, Italian Cream, a Bavarian Cream, a Genoa Cream, plates of pastries of every variety—apple puffs, bouchées, cornucopias, croquenbouche, flans, strawberry tartlets, maids-of-honour, stuffed monkeys, prune flory, tortelli—it was bewildering. And there were ice creams in the Victorian manner—vast temples of frozen, coloured, flavoured cornstarch—and there were plum cakes and that now forgotten delicacy called Pyramids.
   And fruit! Great towers of fruit, mounting from foundations of apples, through oranges and nectarines to capitals of berries and currants, upon each of which was perched the elegantly explosive figure of a pineapple.
   You see, I had forgotten that a proper Victorian dinner had a second course of this nature, so that one might have some relaxation after the serious eating was over.
   But Sir John seemed disappointed. “What!” he cried; “no gooseberry fool? And I had been so much looking forward to it!” He proceeded to drown his sorrow in sherry.
   I had no fault to find. I began again, eating methodically of every dish, and accepting second helpings of Charlotte Russe and plum cake. During this course I drank champagne only. It was that wonderful Victorian champagne, somewhat sweeter than is now fashionable, and with a caressing, rather than an aggressive, carbonization. I hope I did not drink greedily, but in Sir John’s company it was not easy to tell.
   I do not mean to give you the impression that Sir John was the worse for his wine. He was completely self-possessed, but I could not help being aware that he had consumed nine bottles of sherry without any assistance from me, and that he showed no sign of stopping. I knew—once again I was in the debt of Professor Careless for this information—that it was sherry he had favoured for those Herculean bouts of solitary drinking that are part of his legend. I was concerned, and I suppose my concern showed. Before I could begin my interrogation, might not my companion lose the power of coherent speech? I sipped my champagne and nibbled abstractedly at a stuffed monkey wondering what to do. Suddenly Sir John turned to me.
   “Have a weed?” he said, I accepted an excellent cigar from the box he pushed toward me.
   “And a b. and s. to top off with?” he continued. Once again I murmured my acquiescence, and he prepared a brandy and soda for me at the sideboard. But for himself he kept right on with the sherry.
   “Now, Doctor,” said Sir John, “I can see that you have something on your mind. Out with it.”
   “It isn’t very easy to put into words,” said I. “Here am I, just as Canada’s centennial year is drawing to a close, sitting alone with the great architect of our Confederation. Naturally my mind is full of questions; the problem is, which should come first?”
   “Ah, the centennial year,” said Sir John. “Well, in my time, you know, we didn’t have this habit of chopping history up into century-lengths. It’s always the centennial of something.”
   “But not the centennial of Canada,” said I. “You cannot pretend to be indifferent to the growth of the country you yourself brought into being.”
   “Not indifferent at all,” said he. “I’ve put myself to no end of inconvenience during the past year, dodging all over the continent—a mari usque ad mare—to look at this, that and the other thing.”
   I could not control myself; the inevitable question burst from my lips. “Did you see Expo?” I cried.
   “I certainly did,” said he, laughing heartily, “and I took special trouble to be there at the end when they were adding up the bill. The deficit was roughly eight times the total budget of this Dominion for the year 1867. You call that a great exposition? Why, my dear Doctor, the only Great Exposition that made any sense at all was the Great Exposition of 1851. It was the only world’s fair in history that produced a profit. And why was that? Because it was dominated by that great financier and shrewd man of business Albert the Prince Consort. If you had had any sense you would have put your confounded Expo under the guidance of the Duke of Edinburgh; no prince would have dared to bilk and rook the country as your politicians did, for he would have known that it might cost him his head. Expo!—” And then Sir John used some genial indecencies which I shall not repeat.
   “But Sir John,” I protested, “this is a democratic age.”
   “Democracy, sir, has its limitations, like all political theories,” said he, and I remembered that I was talking, after all, to a great Conservative and a titled Canadian. But now, if ever, was the time to come to the point.
   “We have hopes that our mighty effort may reflect itself in the future development of our country,” said I. “Because you have been so kind as to make yourself palpable to me I am going to ask a very serious question. Sir John, may I enquire what you see in store for Canada, the land which you brought into being, the land which reveres your memory, the land in which your ashes lie and your mighty example is still an inspiration? May I ask what the second century of our Confederation will bring?”
   “You may ask, sir,” said Sir John; “but it won’t signify, you know. I see, Doctor, that I must give you a peep into the nature of the realm of which I am now a part. It is a world of peace, and every man’s idea of peace is his own. Consider the life I led: it was one long vexation. It was an obstacle race in which my rivals were people like that tendentious, obstructive ass Brown, that rancorous, dissident ruffian Cartier, even such muttonheaded fellows as Tupper and Mowat. It was a world in which I would be interrupted in the task of writing a flattering letter to an uncomprehending Queen in order to choke off some Member of Parliament who wanted one of his constituents appointed to the post of a lighthouse-keeper. It was a life in which my every generous motive was construed as political artfulness, and my frailties were inflated into examples to scare the children of the Grits. It was, doctor, the life of a yellow dog. Now—what would peace be to such a man as I was? Freedom, Doctor; freedom from such cares as those; freedom to observe the comedy and tragedy of life without having to take a hand in it. Freedom to do as I please without regard for consequences.”
   During this long speech Sir John had finished the final bottle of his dozen of sherry. Those which he had drunk before had all floated, each as it was emptied, to the sideboard, where they now stood in a cluster. He picked up the twelfth bottle, and whirled it round his head like an Indian club, closing one eye to take more careful aim.
   “You ask about the future of Canada, my dear sir?” he shouted. “Understandably you want to tell the world what I know it to be. But you can’t, my dear Doctor, because I haven’t taken the trouble to look. And the reason for that, my dear sir, is that I DO NOT GIVE A DAMN!”
   And as he uttered these fearful words the Father of My Country hurled that last sherry bottle at the eleven on the sideboard. There was a tremendous smash, the gaslight went out, and I lost consciousness.
   How much later it was I cannot tell, but when I was myself again I was walking around the quad, somewhat dazed but strangely elated. For, although I had been baulked in my wish to learn something of the future in this world, had I not been admitted to a precious, soothing, heartlifting secret about the next? To be a Canadian, yet not to have to give a damn—was it not glorious!
   And to have eaten the Charlottetown banquet in such company! A smile rose to my lips, and with it the ghost of a hiccup.
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When Satan Goes Home for Christmas

   One of the Fellows of this College—a distinguished scholar whose name is familiar to all of you—said to me a few weeks ago: “Well, I suppose we are going to have another of your ghost stories at the Gaudy.”
   My ear is sensitive, and it seemed to me that his remark contained less of eager enquiry than of resigned acceptance. I asked him at once what it was he disliked about my ghost stories.
   “The ghosts,” he said, bluntly. “We’ve heard about your meetings with the shades of Queen Victoria, and George V and George VI, and Sir John A. Macdonald; it is as if nobody was fit to haunt you who had not first gained a distinguished place in history. It’s ectoplasmic elitism of the most disgusting kind.”
   I could have told him that these ghosts were not inventions; I did not seek them—they sought me. But it is useless to argue with jealous people who, if they are haunted at all, are clearly haunted by ghosts drawn from the lower ranks of the Civil Service. But I determined that I would show him. I did not expect a real ghost this year; after all, five in a row is surely enough even for the most-haunted College in the University. I knew I should have to invent a ghost; it would be a simple matter to invent a ghost who would be acceptable to listeners with strong egalitarian views.
   I did so. It is an excellent story—what used to be called in an earlier day “a ripping yarn”—and quite original. It is about a Junior Fellow of this College called Frank Einstein, a brilliant young biologist who discovers the secret of life in an old alchemical manuscript, and manufactures a living creature out of scraps he steals from the dissection lab in the new Medical Building. He fits it together secretly in his bedroom. But because he cannot give his creation a soul, it is a Monster, and kills the Bursar and the Librarian and finally deflowers and then eats Frank’s girlfriend, a graduate student called Mary Shelley. It is a lively narrative, and I had looked forward to reading it—especially the soliloquies of the Monster—but last night—
   Last night we held our College Christmas Dance, and there was no sleep till morn, as is entirely proper when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing Hours with flying-feet. It was about one o’clock, and I had been to look at the dancing in the Round Room, where the flying Hours were being chased in a circle, which is after all what you would expect in a Round Room. I then went downstairs to the Chapel; it seemed unlikely that any couples would be sitting out there, and I would gain ten minutes of blessed quietness. But the Chapel was not empty.
   The man who was standing at the altar, gazing so intently at the reredos, was not odd in any way, and yet I felt at once that he was extraordinary in every way. He seemed to be middle-aged, and yet he was not an academic; you can always date an academic by the cut of his dress suit, which he buys before he is thirty and uses very sparingly for the next forty-five years. But this man’s tail-coat might have been made yesterday, though its cut was conservative. His hair was rather long, and curly, but it was most elegantly arranged. His bearing was distinguished. I am somewhat too old to describe a man’s face as beautiful without self-consciousness, yet he was undeniably beautiful—beautiful but of an icy hauteur. I recognized the type at once; obviously a visiting lecturer from some Mid-Western American University.
   “It is a handsome piece of work, isn’t it?” said I, referring to our reredos.
   He did not look at me. “Quite interesting, as these family portraits go,” he murmured. I concluded that he must be deaf.
   “It is Russian, seventeenth century, what is called a travelling iconostasis,” I said, raising my voice.
   “A pity there is no picture of Father here. Still, not bad of its kind,” said he, still ignoring me.
   “I take it you are a visitor to our Department of Fine Art,” I shouted.
   He turned then and looked at me. It was a look in which pity and contempt vied for supremacy. I was taken aback, for I have not been looked at in that way since my final oral examination, now some thirty years ago.
   “You do not know me?” said he.
   This nettled me. I am not very good at names, but I am first-rate at faces. I knew that I had never seen him before. And yet—there was something familiar about him.
   “Does this give you a clue?” said the stranger, and in an instant he was transformed. A scarlet, tight-fitting costume, and a voluminous red cloak appeared where the fashionable dress-suit had been, and the murmur of the discotheque upstairs seemed suddenly to be changed to some familiar bars of—who was it—yes, Gounod.
   “Of course I know you now,” I cried; “you are the new director of the Opera School. How good of you to come in fancy dress.”
   “No!” he shouted, impatiently, and once again he was transformed. This time he wore a rough, hairy costume, the feet of which were like hooves; great ram’s horns sprang from his brow, and at the back, where the seat of his trousers had been, there was now an ugly face from the mouth of which a long red tongue lolled obscenely.
   “Of course,” I shouted, and laughed foolishly, for I was becoming somewhat unnerved; “you must be one of the actors from the medieval play group, the Poculi Ludique Societas. What a good disguise!”
   “Disguise!” he roared, and his voice was like a lion’s. At the same moment the pendulous tongue of that nether face blew a loud raspberry—the very trumpet-call of derision. “Wretched child of an age of unbelief, what is to be done with you?” And suddenly, to my intense dismay, there was—right before me in the Chapel—a red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. The noises made by those seven heads were very hard on the nerves, and the delicate scent of the beautiful man’s cologne had given place to a stench of brimstone that made me gasp. I leapt backward, tumbled over a chair and crashed to the ground.
   “O the Devil!” I exclaimed, and suddenly the dragon was gone and the beautiful man stood before me. “Well, you’ve got it at last,” said he, and helped me to rise.
   I did not stay on my feet for an instant. I know when I am outclassed; I dropped immediately to my knees. “Great Lord,” I said, and as my voice did not seem to be trembling enough naturally I added a shade more tremolo to it by art, “Great Lord, what is your will?”
   “My will is that you stand up and forget all that medieval mummery,” said the Devil—for now it was as plain as could be who the visitor was. “You wretched mortals insist on treating me as if I had not moved forward since the sixteenth century; but living outside time as I do, I am always thoroughly up-to-date.”
   “All right,” said I, getting to my feet, “what can I do for you? An excellent supper is being served in the Upper Library, or if you would fancy a damned soul or two, I can easily give you a College list, with helpful markings in the margin.”
   “Oh dear, dear, dear,” said he; “what a cheap Devil you must think me. I don’t want any of your Junior Fellows, or any of your colleagues, either; I leave such journeyman’s work as they are to my staff.”
   A thought of really horrible dimension—of blasting vanity—swept through me. Trying to keep pride out of my voice, I whispered, “Then you have come for me?”
   The Devil laughed—it was a silvery snicker, if you can imagine such a thing—and poked me playfully in the ribs. “Get along with you, and stop fishing for compliments,” said he.
   It was that poke in the ribs that reassured me. I had always been told the Devil has a common streak in him, and now he had shown it I was not so afraid. “Well,” said I, “I am sure that you have not come here for nothing; if you don’t want souls—even so desirable a spiritual property as my own soul—what can I offer you?”
   “Nothing but a really good look at this handsome reredos,” he replied. “Doubtless you will find this strange, but at this time of year, when so much Christmas celebration is going on, I feel a little wistful. I hear so many people saying that they are going home for Christmas. Do you know, Master, I should very much like to go home for Christmas.”
   I was too tactful to offer any comment.
   “But of course I shan’t be asked,” he said, and a look of exquisite melancholy transformed the beautiful, proud face into the saddest sight that I have ever beheld.
   When I was a boy there was still a large public for a novel by Marie Corelli called The Sorrows of Satan, but even she never guessed that not being asked home for Christmas was one of them.
   I was in a quandary. Against overpowering and insensate Evil I could have thrown myself, and been consumed in defence of the College. But against sentimentalism I did not know what to do. This was a time for the uttermost in tact.
   “Do they have a pretty lively time at your old home, when Christmas rolls round?” I asked, thinking that this colloquial tone might disarm him.
   “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 suitable 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.
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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, lilies 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.
   “What’s your beef?” I said.
   It was the girl who shared the horse who replied. “He means that Pope Paul announced last ninth of May that all this lot weren’t really saints any more. Demoted them to legends, you see. A stinking trick, when you consider what they’ve been worth to the Papacy, over the centuries. But he wanted to make places for some Africans, and Americans, and other trendy riffraff. So since then we’ve been racketing all over Christendom trying to find someplace to stay. My name is Cleodolinda, by the way, and I’m not a saint. I just have to travel around with Georgie here because I’m a reminder of his greatest triumph. You remember, when he slew the dragon? I was the girl the dragon was—well, nowadays they call it molesting. Will you take us in? It’s All Saints, today; if we don’t get a home, and a place where we are respected, before midday, it’s Limbo for us, I’m afraid. And Limbo is the absolute end, you know.”
   I liked Cleodolinda. As I listened, her history came back to me. Daughter of the King of Lydia. I’ve always got on well with princesses. But as I looked at that streetful of sanctified hippies and flower-children, my heart misgave me.
   “Why Massey College?” I asked her. “With all the earth to choose from, why have you come here?”
   It was Saint George who answered. He never let Cleodolinda get a word in edgewise. The way he insisted on having all the good lines for himself, you might almost have thought they were married.
   “You need us,” he said, “to balance the extreme, stringent modernity of your thinking; nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity, you know; we’ll keep you in touch with the real world—the world outside time. And we need you, because we want handsome quarters and you have them. It is our intention to set up a Communion of Saints in Exile, and this is the very place to do it. We wouldn’t dream of going to the States, of course. But here in the colonies is just the spot.”
   Cleodolinda saw that I didn’t like Saint George’s tone; she leaned forward and whispered, “He’s begging, you know, really; please let them in.”
   Compassion overcame common sense, and I nodded. Immediately the crowd began to surge forward, and that tiresome girl Saint Catherine shouted “Adeste fideles!” again. I began to dislike her; she reminded me of a girl whose thesis I once supervised; she had the same quality of overwhelming feminine gall.
   “One moment,” I shouted. “It must be understood that if you enter here, I’m running the show. There’ll be no taking over, do you understand? The first rule is, you must keep out of sight. I presume you are all able to remain invisible?”
   “Oh, absolutely,” said Saint George; “but we really must resume physical form for a little while each day. You’ve no idea how cold invisibility is, and most of us are from the East; we have to warm up, every now and then.”
   “Five minutes a day,” I said, “and I don’t want you scampering all over the College. I’ll tell you where to go, and there you must stay. Oh, yes, you may run along to the Chapel daily, but don’t loiter. And no ostentatious miracles without written consent from the House Committee. We have participatory democracy here I’d like you to know, and that means you mayn’t do anything without getting permission from the students. Now, one at a time please, and no shoving.”
   Saint George helped me to check them in, and it was no trifling job. There were about two hundred of them, but the trouble was that they all insisted on bringing what they called their “attributes”—the symbols by which they have been recognized through the ages. Saint Ursula, for instance, brought her eleven thousand virgins with her, and insisted that they were simply personal staff, and only counted as one; they were a dowdy lot of girls, and I sent them to the kitchen, thinking the Chef would probably be able to put them to work. Saint Barbara I packed off to the Printing Room; I thought that brass cannon of hers wouldn’t be noticed among all the old presses down there. Because of his association with travel I sent Saint Christopher to the parking-lot; many College people have remarked that they have never had any trouble finding a space since that moment. Saint Valentine was tiresome; he insisted that he must be free to roam at large through the living quarters, or I would regret it. I mistrusted the look in his eye. Indeed, I quickly realized that all of these saints had a strong negative side to their characters, and could turn ugly at a moment’s notice. So I told Valentine to go where he liked, but that I would hold him responsible for any scandal.
   Saint Lucy seemed a nice little thing, but conversation was made difficult by her trick of carrying her eyes before her on a salver. Still, she was simplicity itself compared with Saint Agatha, who walked up to me, confidently carrying her two severed breasts on a platter; I was so disconcerted that, before I grasped the full implication of my deed, I sent her to the kitchen. I made the same mistake—so full of potentialities for College cannibalism—with Saint Prudentiana, who was carrying a sponge, soaked in some jam-like substance that she insisted was martyr’s blood. I can tell you that after these it was a relief to admit Saint Susanna, who carried nothing more disconcerting than a crown. As for Saint Martin, I recalled that he had once rent his cloak in two, in order to share it with a beggar, so I knew that he had experience in tearing up rags, and sent him down to our Paper-Making Room. Nor was Saint Thomasius a problem: I knew that his knack was for turning water into wine, and I thought he could make himself useful in the bar.
   In fairness I must say that I foresaw certain problems that did not arise. Saint Nicholas, for instance. I was sure he would miss children, but he assured me he did not care if he never saw a child again this side of the Last Judgement; he said he wanted to re-establish himself as what he originally was—a treasurer, an administrator, a dealer in money. I shipped him straight off to the Bursary, and I understand he has since made himself very comfortable in that grandfather’s clock.
   Many of the saints had animals, and these gave me a lot of trouble. Saint Hubert, for instance, had brought a large white stag, which was interesting enough because it bore a blazing cross between its horns; I told him to put it to work cropping the croquet lawn, but not to let it nibble the flowering shrubs. But then there was Saint Euphemia, who had brought a bear, and knowing how bears love to catch fish, I was worried about what Roger would think; we finally made a deal that if the bear would chase those squirrels that eat all our crocus bulbs, it could stay. But the problem presented by these animals is that their powers of invisibility are not under such control as those of their saintly owners, and I don’t want that bear to turn up unexpectedly in—well, for instance, in a quorum of university presidents. You may imagine I was glad to face such easy decisions as that of Saint Dorothy with her basket of fruit and flowers—very handy in the private dining-room. And when Saint Petronilla turned up with her dolphin, I simply gestured her toward the pool.
   Dragons were a perfect nuisance. An otherwise decent fellow named Saint Germanus of Auxerre wanted to bring in a dragon with seven heads. I asked him to wait. But then along came that detestable Saint Catherine of Alexandria, with a very nasty dragon which she insisted was not a dragon at all. “Is a pet, a symbol of all that is evil in my nature, which I have utterly subdued,” she said. But the dragon did not look as subdued as I should have liked, and we had high words. She wanted to have the Round Room all to herself and she wanted a priest always with her; she had some extraordinary plans for examinations: but I insisted that she scramble up the tower, and accommodate herself in our Saint Catharine bell, with her great spiky wheel, and her gigantic Sword of Truth, and her disgusting dragon.
   “But I am patroness of all scholars,” she protested.
   “You’ll see them to great advantage from up there,” I replied, and refused to budge. She went off in a sulk.
   It was with Saint George I had the worst trouble. Not only did he insist on bringing in his horse, but he also had a perfectly frightful dragon with him. I had to put my foot down.
   “But it isn’t a dragon,” he shouted; “it’s a dog. Watch, now. Sit, Rover!” he cried. But the dragon did not sit. It leapt up at me and snuffled me intimately and licked me, and tore the leg of my pyjamas, and uttered the most horrifying howls. Mind you, this was not wholly surprising. I have known scores of Englishmen who owned nasty, rough, smelly dragons that they insisted were really dogs. But this was too much.
   “That’s no dog,” said I, and gave the dragon a kick in the cloaca. “It’s blowing fire out of its nose. See—it’s scorched a great hole in my dressing-gown.”
   “Of course.” he said, haughtily; “it’s a fire-dog.”
   This was the last straw. “All dragons to the furnace-room immediately,” I shouted. “In the morning Professor Swinton will examine them, and if they are really prehistoric animals, he will take them to the Museum.” They saw I meant it, and the dragons slithered and puffed off down the stairs.
   At last the whole tribe of refugee saints was disposed of about the College somehow, and I was able, in a very slight degree, to recover my composure. But then I saw that Cleodolinda had been left behind. Saint George, a real Englishman, had been so concerned about his dog he had forgotten his girl.
   “Well, young woman, what are we going to do with you?” I said.
   “Oh, I suppose it’s Limbo for me,” she replied in a resigned but not a complaining tone. “I’m only an attribute, you see, not a saint, and as you’ve put Georgie on to help the Porter he won’t have time for me. After all, I can’t hang about the lodge undressed like this.”
   I looked at her. She repaid looking at, but I felt our Massey College men were not quite ready for so much feminine beauty, all at one gaze, so to speak.
   “I don’t like to think of you in Limbo,” said I, “but the College is crammed with your friends and their luggage and pets. So—for a while, anyhow—you may use my guest-room.”
   Never trust a woman. “Oh, you are kind,” she said, and hopped up and down with delight, producing a very agreeable effect. “And you won’t mind if I bring a friend, will you?”
   “It depends,” said I, “a beheaded virgin or something of that kind would be all right, but no young men. I’m expected to set an example.”
   “Well, it’s a man, but not a bit young,” said she. “It’s Saint Patrick, you see. The poor old sweet never thought he would be desanctified, and just when the Pope pronounced his sentence he was in one of the steam baths in Rome, and he hadn’t a minute to pick up a few things, so he hasn’t even an attribute to bless himself with, and—”
   You know how it is. Women always overdo explanations. As Cleodolinda spoke a forlorn figure hobbled forward out of the darkness beyond our gate; a shrivelled little old fellow, covered only by his flowing beard and a very small towel on which was embroidered, in red, Sauna Grande di Roma. He was talking long before Cleodolinda had finished.
   “Yez’ll have pity on me, I know,” he said, “seeing as how I’m a fella-Celt. Sure, amn’t I a Welshman meself? Isn’t it well-known I sailed from Wales to Ireland on a millstone, to convert them heathen? And wouldn’t I have brought the millstone itself if that dirthy ould double-crosser in Rome had give me a minute? But awww, no! It was ‘Out with Saint Path-rick’, and no two ways about it. You’ll notice that Saint Andrew is safe and snug, right where he was. Leave it to the Scotch to get it all their own way. And that roaring ould tough, Saint David is still in his place—aw but I forgot, he’s a Welshman like yourself—I mean like ourselves. Things haven’t been so bad with me since the last Englishman sat on the throne of Peter, and that’s damned near six centuries. You’ve got to let me in. I’m just a poor roont old fella like yourself—”
   Here I noticed Cleodolinda kick him on the shin, and he hastily changed his tactics.
   “I mean to say, a fine young lad, just in the flower of his splendour, like yourself, isn’t going to turn me away, and Limbo gaping before me. You wouldn’t have it on your soul. And you’ve a giant of a soul. I can tell by the kindly light in your eyes.”
   And so on. Much, much more. And the upshot was that I sent him off with Cleodolinda to my guest-room, with strict orders not to manifest themselves in the flesh except when they were safely locked in the bathroom.
   But you know how people are. Especially people who have been used to having their own way (not to speak of adoration and prayers addressed to them) for over a thousand years. It worked for a few days, and then those two were prancing around in there, quite naked, waving to Saint Catharine up in the tower, whistling at the stag, and stirring up the bear by shooting pins at it with an elastic. And the Fellows, as they sit at their breakfast, have been ogling.
   If it is Patrick they see, I presume they take him for a rather more than ordinarily demented visiting professor. But from the light in my young friend’s eye, I have a feeling it is Cleodolinda.
   And now they are in, how shall I ever get them out? Beware of compassion!
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Apple iPhone 6s
Dickens Digested

   In this, the centenary of his death, I should like to speak well of Charles Dickens; the literary world has united to do him honour as one of the half-dozen foremost geniuses of our great heritage of poetry, drama and the novel. That I should have to stand before you tonight and direct at that Immortal Memory a charge of—the word sticks in my throat, but it must be given voice—a charge of Vampirism, repels and disgusts me, but when Dickens has cast this hateful shadow across the quadrangle of Massey College, I have no other course.
   This is what happened.
   It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity—in short, it was the beginning of the autumn term, and the year was 1969. I met the incoming group of Junior Fellows, and among the thirty-five or so new men were some who immediately attracted my attention—but the subject of my story was not one of these. No, Tubfast Weatherwax III had nothing about him to draw or hold one’s interest; he was a bland young man, quite unremarkable in appearance. Of course, I was familiar with his dossier, which had been thoroughly examined by the Selections Committee of the College. He came to us from Harvard, and he was a young American of distinguished background—as the dynastic number attached to his name at once made clear. His mother, I know, had been a Boston Winesap. But young Weatherwax bore what one politely assumed to be—in republican terms—a noble heritage lightly, and indeed unobtrusively.
   He was a student of English Literature, and he sought a Ph.D. When I asked him casually what he was working at, he said that he thought perhaps he might do something with Dickens, if he could get hold of anything new. I considered his attitude rather languid, but this is by no means uncommon among students in the English graduate school; hoping to encourage him I said that I was certain that if once Dickens thoroughly took hold of him, he would become absorbed in his subject.
   Ah, fatal prophetic words! Would that I might recall them! But no—I, like poor Tubfast Weatherwax, was a pawn in one of those grim games, not of chance but of destiny, which Fate plays with us in order that we may not grow proud in our pretension to free will.
   I saw no more of him for a few weeks, until one day he came to see me, to enquire about Dickens as a dramatist. I am one of the few men in the University who has troubled to read the plays of Charles Dickens, and relate them to the rest of his work, so this was normal enough. He knew nothing about the nineteenth-century theatre, and I told him I thought Dickens’ drama unlikely to yield a satisfactory thesis to anyone but an enthusiastic specialist. “And you, Mr. Weatherwax,” I said, “did not seem very much caught up in Dickens when last we spoke.”
   His face changed, lightening unmistakably with enthusiasm. “Oh, that’s all in the past,” he said; “it’s just as you said it would be—I feel that Dickens is really taking hold of me!”
   I looked at him more attentively. He had altered since first I saw him. His dress, formerly that elegant disarray that marks the Harvard man—the carefully shabby corduroy trousers, the rumpled but not absolutely dirty shirt, the necktie worn very low and tight around the loins, in lieu of a belt—had been changed to extremely tight striped trousers, a tight-waisted jacket with flaring skirts, and around the throat what used to be called, a hundred and fifty years ago, a Belcher neckerchief. And—was I mistaken, or was that shadow upon his cheeks merely the unshavenness which is now so much the fashion, or might it be the first, faint dawning of a pair of sidewhiskers? But I made no comment, and after he had gone I thought no more about the matter.
   Not, that is, until the Christmas Dance.
   There are many here who remember our Christmas Dance in 1969. It was a delightful affair, and, as always the dress worn by the College men and their guests ran through the spectrum of modern university elegance. I myself always wear formal evening clothes on these occasions; it is expected of me; of what use is an Establishment figure if he does not look like an Establishment figure? But somewhat to my chagrin I found myself outdone in formality, and by none other than Tubfast Weatherwax III. And yet—was this the ultimate in modern fashion, or was it a kind of fancy dress? His bottle green tail coat, so tight-waisted, so spiky-tailed, so very high in the velvet collar and so sloping in the shoulders; his waistcoat of garnet velvet, hung all over with watch-chains and seals depending from fobs; his wondrously frilled shirt, and the very high starched neck-cloth that came up almost to his mouth; his skin-tight trousers, and—could it be? yes, it certainly was—his varnished evening shoes, were in the perfection of the mode of 1836, a date which—it just flashed through my mind—marked the first appearance of Pickwick Papers. And his hair—so richly curled, so heaped upon his head! And his side-whiskers, now exquisite parentheses enclosing the subordinate clause which was his innocent face. It was—yes, it was certainly clear that Tubfast Weatherwax III had got himself up to look like the famous portrait of the young Dickens by Daniel Maclise.
   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.
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