High Spirits

by Robertson Davies

  “Very well,” said the Bull. “Allow me to remind everyone present that only a month ago a Princess of the Realm, surely an example to all young women, took a public vow to OBEY the man who became her husband. And several young men in this College got up at five o’clock in the morning to hear her do it.”

  This time it was Scrap who laughed, and it was immediately clear that laughter was something the Bull had not expected. He glared angrily, but he was confused, and Scrap took shrewd advantage of his confusion.

  “Are you so besotted with male vanity you don’t know what the Princess had in mind?” said she. “Must I show you what feminine obedience means?”

  From the mass of paper of which she was composed, Scrap produced a sheet printed entirely in red, and she began to trail it slowly and provocatively in front of the Bull. I could hardly believe what followed. As if hypnotised, its great head began to roll to left and right, as it followed this transfixing red cloak, which gave out the characteristic feminine rustle that I had noticed before.

  “Let’s see who does the obeying now,” whispered Scrap.

  O for the pen of an Ernest Hemingway, that I might adequately describe for you the spectacle of art and brutality that followed! Scrap was all femininity as she glided, not rapidly but with splendid grace, around the ring of our Round Room. As she moved she murmured in a low, compelling, unbearably taunting voice, “Ah, toro, toro! Here—here to me, toro! Aha! Toro! Toro!” And the Bull, unable to help himself, responded to every word and gesture.

  Do you know our Round Room? There are twenty-two tall black chairs in it, and on the back of every chair is stamped, in gold, the head of a bull. As Scrap led her victim in his fated dance, I saw that the forty-four eyes of those bulls followed every move: their forty-four nostrils stirred with growing apprehension, and I thought I saw the frothy spittle of fear dripping from their twenty-two tongues.

  What was I to do? Where did my sympathies lie? I was, if you will pardon the bluntness of my speech, a quivering ganglion of irreconcilable emotions. I ought to stop the fight. I ought to help the Bull, who was as surely doomed as any bull I have ever seen in a ring. But the skill shown by Scrap thrilled me. Without knowing how it happened, I found myself standing on my desk cheering. I even snatched the rose from my buttonhole and threw it into the ring.

  The fight did not last long, but it was splendid while it lasted. More and more furiously the Bull responded to the taunts of Scrap, whose elegance as a matador was beautiful to behold. Her veronicas, her amontillados, her tournedos bonne femme were as fine as anything I have ever seen, in the great corridas of Madrid. But all the time I wondered: How is she going to finish him off? She has no weapon, except that which she had pretended to hold in contempt—her feminine fascination, her charm.

  As I have said, the light was ghost-light, and I have but mortal eyes. Suddenly there was a crash and the Bull was down; he had stepped on the rose I had thrown, slipped, and cracked his great head on the corner of one of our curved tables. I was cheering wildly.

  But to my astonishment, Scrap was weeping. She stumbled blindly about the Round Room, looking for a corner in which to hide her head; on the floor lay the Bull, apparently dead. I thought he looked rather noble in death—until he winked at me. I had no time for reflection, because Scrap was pulling at my sleeve.

  “Call me a trash-bin,” she sobbed, “and let me get away from here.”

  “But you’ve won,” said I. “I presume you mean to take over the College. Isn’t that what all this was about?”

  “I didn’t mean to kill him,” sobbed Scrap. “I only meant to teach him a lesson. What shall I do without him?”

  There are certain advantages in being no longer young. One sees a little more clearly, even without one’s glasses. “Leave everything to me,” said I. “And you really mustn’t go away. I think you’ll like it here. And I think we’re going to like you. Now let me put you in a nice restful place to think it all over until next September.”

  And, with gallantry which Scrap did not now refuse, I gave her my arm and led her through the labyrinths of the lower part of the College, and there I put her in a very comfortable part of the Library to rest. I took care that she did not see what was printed on the door behind which I locked her, but I don’t mind telling you. It said Printed Ephemera.

  Then I hastened back to the Round Room to render first aid to the Bull. I knew that he had simply knocked his head against a reality but I thought his self-esteem might need some delicate attention.

  He had gone. The Ugly Spectre of Sexism was lurking at Massey College no longer. And as I walked out into the quad I saw that he was back in his accustomed place over the gate, and I noticed, as you may notice if you choose, that, noble as he looks, and invincible as he looks, he has an undoubted black eye. But with his right eye he winked again. And I observed that he was wearing his huge single earring with a new jauntiness as though he had discovered, in his brief encounter with Scrap, the truth that in the most redoubtably masculine creature there lurks some strain of the feminine.

  All seemed peace in the College as I walked again in the quad. Even the music from the dance was peaceful, for the band was playing a Golden Oldie, You’re the Cream in my Coffee

  You will always be

  My necessity

  Can’t get along without you—

  I hummed, and winked back at the Bull.

  The great clock of Hart House struck a single resonant note. Everybody in the University knows what that sound means. “Great Heaven,” I cried, “it must be two o’clock.” And I hurried back to the dance.

  The Pit Whence Ye Are Digged

  On alternate Fridays during the university term, the Senior Fellows of this College entertain guests at dinner; some of our guests are Junior Fellows of the College, some are people who do interesting things in the world outside, some are visiting academics to whom we offer the hospitality of the College during their stay in the university. At our last dinner for the present year—that is to say, about a fortnight ago—we had two visitors of this latter class. One, an eminent Arabic scholar, was Dr. Abu Ben Adhem, from the University of Alexandria; the other was a Swiss, a Dr. Theophrastus von Hohenheim from, I think he said, the University of Basel. He seemed rather a queer customer; there is always a good deal of laughter at our High Table, but he never laughed; instead he smiled in a disquieting way, as if he saw a joke hidden from the rest of us. Also, he kept looking at his watch, and it was a watch that caught the eye.

  “That’s a handsome watch you have,” I said to him, because one must make conversation and his special subject, which I believe was some sort of physics, was unknown country to me.

  “Handsome indeed,” said he. “Very old; very precious.” He held it up for me to see. It was much larger than a modern pocket-watch, and beautifully cased in engraved gold; on the enamelled face were many dials; the figures on some of the dials were Greek letters, and others were signs which I knew—because I dabble a little in such things—to be cabbalistic. As he held it toward me he touched a spring, and the watch chimed prettily. Chiming watches are great rarities, and I have never heard one finer than his; I put out my hand to examine it, but he drew it back to himself. “Not to play with,” he said, smiling disagreeably. I felt a little snubbed, and turned to talk to another guest.

  After we have dined in Hall, the High Table group goes to the Upper Library, where we sit around a big table and divert ourselves with port and Madeira and general conversation. Abu Ben Adhem and von Hohenheim sat across the table from me, on either side of our Visitor; he is used to queer customers—they are his stock-in-trade—and I knew he would give them a good time.

  Sitting on my right was one of the young women who are now included among our Junior Fellows. I know it is considered inexcusably sexist in our time to say that any girl is charming, but it is hard to break the habit of a lifetime: she was charming. She was a lively talker, and I like a girl who has lots to say for herself; quiet girls, whom
some men admire so much, always make me think of clocks that have run down. She was well wound up; she seemed to regard the College port as a pleasing light thirst-quencher, instead of the mover of mountains that it is, and after a glass or two she was almost over-wound.

  The talk on these occasions is often general. We fling remarks and sometimes whole paragraphs up and down the board in good, well-rounded voices. The people who say we shout don’t understand academic courtesy; we are simply considerate of those who may be a little hard of hearing.

  The loudest outcry on this particular night came from Professor Swinton and Professor Wilson. “What are you two roaring about?” cried our Visitor, who has himself a voice that dominates courtrooms and makes the boldest felons tremble. “About Scotland and the year 1974,” shouted Professor Wilson; “1974, the year that has seen the Scottish Nationalists on the march. And what better year for that? Is it not seven hundred years precisely since the birth of Scotland’s mighty king and liberator, Robert the Bruce?”

  “Ye’re daft,” cried Professor Swinton; “Robert the Bruce was well enough in his small way, but this year is a far greater anniversary in the history of Scots culture and imperialism, for was it not in 1774 that the great Henry Duncan was born.”

  “And who might Henry Duncan be?” asked our Visitor.

  Professor Swinton looked aghast. “Man, I despair of ye,” said he; “was not Henry Duncan the founder and deviser of the savings bank? And has not Scotland ever since dominated the earth through the gentle, ameliorating, civilizing influence of the savings bank?”

  “Hoot, awa!” shouted our Librarian, from down the table. “Scotland’s poets are her glory, and let me remind you that Gavin Douglas was born five centuries ago, to the year.”

  When Scotsmen are in full cry, they must be resisted. Professor LePan threw himself into the breach. “I’m not ashamed to say I’ve never heard of Gavin Douglas,” said he, “but I remind you that a very respectable, if not positively a great, poet was born in 1774, and that was Robert Southey.”

  “Southey!” shouted the Librarian, with Caledonian—nay, Nova Scotian—contempt; “Southey! Can ye not do better than Southey?”

  “Yes,” said Professor LePan; “Oliver Goldsmith died in 1774; he popped out just as Southey popped in. And Robert Herrick died in 1674. So there!”

  The Librarian uttered a wordless jeer; it was a Scottish sound rather like a power-saw striking a knot. “You’ve had to take refuge in deaths,” he triumphed; “deaths will avail you nothing.”

  The rest of us rallied as well as we could to LePan’s defence. Our expert on Canadian literature is Dr. Claude Bissell. “What about Robert William Service, the bard of the Canadian north, born in 1874,” he cried, and launched at once into—

  “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up

  In the Malemute Saloon;

  The kid who tickles the ivories

  Was hitting a jagtime tune—”

  But he was overcrowed by a roar from Professor Stacey. “If you talk of Canada, tie this, if you can; who was born on the seventeenth of December, 1874? You don’t know? Of course you don’t know. But I know. It was William Lyon Mackenzie King; that’s who was born on December 17, 1874.”

  “Mackenzie King didn’t write any poetry,” said Dr. Bissell, who wanted to get on with The Shooting of Dan McGrew.

  “Oh, yes he did,” shouted Professor Stacey. “It’s not widely known, but I know it. And I’m bringing out a fully annotated edition of the Collected Poems of William Lyon Mackenzie King—including his five-act blank verse drama The Happy Conscript—within the next twenty years, so all the rest of you keep your paws off it.”

  “You’re welcome to your Mackenzie King,” shouted Professor Careless, who was late to get into the scrap, but the more valiant because of it. “King wasn’t the only Canadian poet to be born in 1874. In twenty years I’m bringing out the Collected Poems of Arthur Meighen, including his mighty Ode to Coalition Government; then we’ll see who was the better man.”

  It was a moment for the voice of reason, of taste, of moderation and civilization, and of course it came from Professor Finch. “Allow me to remind you,” said he, “that apart from the lesser figures you mention, this year marks the fourth centenary of the birth of Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, an ornament of a great civilization.”

  The Librarian began a mocking chant: “Dirty books, dirty books, Finch only thinks about dirty books!”

  “Pardon me,” said Professor Finch, with that perfection of high-bred scorn and unruffled temper which is peculiarly his own; “I presume you, Mr. Librarian, are thinking of the son, Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, whose witty novel Le Sopha, might seem risqué to a Calvinist mind, coarsened by the lewd rhymes of the exciseman Burns. But that was Crébillon fils; I was speaking of the dramatist, Crébillon père.”

  It seemed to me that the conversation was growing rather too warm. I sought to cool it. Now, one of my disabilities as Master of this College is that I really don’t know much about anything. But I am paid part of my salary because of a pretence that I know a little about the theatre. I fished in the dank tarn of my memory for a cooling fact, and came up with a beauty. “If you don’t mind another pair of deaths,” I said, “the world of popular entertainment lost two of its brightest luminaries just a hundred years ago.”

  But I was not to have things all my own way. I never am. “Of course one of them was William Henry Betty, the Young Roscius, who died on August 24, 1874,” said Professor Jacques Berger, with an unconvincing affectation of carelessness. I was directing a look of scholarly rigour toward him when Professor Hume struck in: “I don’t know why you worry about theatrical deaths when 1874 was the birth-year of both Harry Houdini and Lilian Baylis,” said he. I was furious, but I smiled as sweetly as any Finch. “I only wished to draw attention to the death, in 1874, of the original Siamese Twins, Eng and Chang. I supposed its biological interest might appeal to you.” But irony is lost on scientists who have just speared a humanist and beaten him at his own game.

  While this was going on my young companion on my right had been getting rather heavily into the port, and the academic world was undulating before her in its brightest colours.

  “It’s all so romantic,” she cried; “I just love Olden Times. Oh, how I wish I could make a journey backward in time; I know I’d be somebody fascinating. I’ve sometimes thought that I’m a reincarnation of one of those marvellous women of an earlier day—one of those mistresses, they called them then.”

  We all turned to her with looks in which pity and dismay were mingled. She was a clever girl; I won’t tell you what she was studying, but it was one of the really clever subjects. She had a blazing array of marks and prizes, but it is precisely these clever people who reveal a very soft core when the port engulfs them.

  It was Dr. von Hohenheim who pounced. “You really wish to journey back into Time?” said he.

  “Oh, yes I do. You see I have this very, very, very strong conviction that I’m a reincarnation,” said our young guest.

  Dr. Abu Ben Adhem struck in. “Do be very careful, I entreat you,” said he. “We are all reincarnations, but of course we are simply reincarnations of our own forbears. Travel backward in time and you will only find yourself your own great-great-great-grandmother, or somebody of that order.”

  “Oh, but I’m sure she must have been somebody wonderful,” shouted the girl; “Marie Antoinette or somebody like that. I’ve always understood there was French blood in the family.”

  “That might very well be,” said Dr. Swinton, unexpectedly. “Though as our friend here says, it’s a wise child that knows its own father. How wise does a child have to be to know its own great-great-grandfather?”

  “I’d love to know,” cried the girl, who was now in a high state of excitement. “I’d love to go back—back to 1774, for instance—and see who I was.” She saw the doubt on my face, and shook me by the arm. “Think how it would be—all that graciousness and politesse and
lovely clothes and lots of servants and things.”

  I was about to suggest that one of the other ladies present take her out for a brisk walk around the quad in the cold air. But to my dismay Dr. Theophrastus von Hohenheim rose to his feet, dominating the table.

  “It can be managed,” said he calmly, and took out his beautiful watch, which he held aloft. “Be as thou wast wont to be; See as thou wast wont to see,” he intoned, solemnly. Then he pressed the spring and the watch chimed so sweetly, so melodiously that I—I have always been sensitive to music—thought I lost consciouseness for a moment, and when I opened my eyes, what a scene confronted me!

  Oh for the pen of my great master, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman, to describe what I saw! It was our Upper Library still, and our table was the same. Our company was the same too, but we were all in the dress of 1774, and we were all—I knew it with sickening conviction—our great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers or grandmothers of that time, though which of the one hundred and twenty-eight possibilities I could not, of course, tell. “That is where chance comes in,” I thought to myself. And what a crew we were!

  It was pleasant enough for some. There, at one end of the table, Professors Swinton and Wilson were still disputing, but now they were the great Swinton of Swinton, arrayed in the height of Edinburgh elegance, and, in the splendid panoply of a Highland chieftan, Wilson of Gunn. (I had occasionally heard Jock Wilson spoken of by his envious colleagues as a son-of-a-gun, but I never felt the truth of it till that moment.) They were still deep in a haggle about Scottish Nationalism, for time had made little difference to them. They looked like portraits by Raeburn, and gave a lustre to the room far warmer even than the candle-light. The Librarian, too, was still obviously a librarian, though he had no beard, and wore a wig that had seen better days; on his left arm was a black band, and I heard him explaining to his neighbour that it was mourning for the Scots poet Robert Fergusson, who had died a few weeks ago, on the 16th of October, 1774. “The name of Fergusson will never die,” he declared, and Dr. von Hohenheim, who was in an ominous suit of unrelieved black, murmured, “No, never so long as it is linked with the name of Massey.”