High Spirits

by Robertson Davies

  “You do not trust me,” he wheezed. “You think I am a magician. And so I am. But not a false magician. I am a scientist, which is a modern magician. Long ago, when our University first began, in 1572, they called me a black magician, and there are still some who make the sign against the Evil Eye when I pass them. But I wish you would trust me and let me be your friend, because I can help you greatly. Let us be friends in your Canadian manner. Call me Jesus.”

  There is a Puritan buried within me. I secretly determined not to call him Jesus if I could possibly avoid it. I took refuge in cunning.

  “I’ll do better than that,” I said; “I’ll call you Josh. Jesus is the same as Joshua, and the short name for Joshua is Josh. You see?”

  “Oh yes, I see,” said he; and I knew that he saw right through me and was laughing at my Protestant distaste. “Now, what shall we interpret? This College, don’t you think? What is its essence? What is at the root of it that will shape its destiny for centuries to come? Now wait—I must make myself ready.”

  He sat very upright on my leather chair, his feet tucked under him, his eyes shut, and both his hands raised with the fingers extended. “Now,” he said, “tell me the full name of this place, not too fast, so that I can reduce it to numbers.”

  “Massey College in the University of Toronto,” said I, and as I spoke his fingers began to flicker rapidly, as if he were tapping the keys of some invisible calculator. And indeed that is just what he was doing. I realized that I was looking at calculation as it had been during the Middle Ages, before the coming of cheap pencils and paper pads, and adding machines and computers. He had turned his ten fingers into an abacus. Nor did he hesitate for an instant before he spoke.

  “Seventeen and twenty-four, and twenty, and thirty-four, and fifty-one comes to one hundred and forty-six,” said he. “Add up the integers of one, four, six and it comes to—eleven! Oh! Oh! Eleven!”

  “Good, or bad?” said I, far more anxious than I wanted to reveal.

  “Magnifico! The number of revelation. The number of great teachers and visionaries in religion, science, politics and the arts. It is the number of those who live by the inner vision. Dangerous, mind you, for sometimes eleven loves ideas better than humanity, so that must be remembered and avoided. But what a Golden Number for a college! Oh, you need have no fears for this place.”

  “Thank you, Josh,” I said. “You give me great hope. I am only sorry that I shall not be here to see its fulfilment.”

  “How long have you been here?” said Professor Murphy.

  “It will be eighteen years next June,” said I, “but I began work on this place twenty years ago, on the first of January, 1960.”

  “Aha, well—that date and the year and date of your birth—add the integers and it comes to thirty—a three. That is very good, because three is your Golden Number also—”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I took trouble to find out before I came to-night, and I knew you for a Three the minute I set eyes on you. So that is a happy—”

  “Coincidence?” said I.

  “There is no such thing as a coincidence,” said Josh; “not in Gematria. It is all part of the numerical pattern that governs the world. Yes, you were a good man to begin this place, but not to continue it.”

  “Why?” I dreaded what he might say, but I had to know.

  “Too flighty,” said Josh. “Lots of imagination, lots of invention, but there is a limit to what those things can do in a place like this—a place with the Great Eleven as its Golden Number. You are not always and in all things wholly serious. You have what we biologists call Jokey Genes. High time you went. Who is to come next?”

  “Professor Hume,” said I. “You sat beside him upstairs.”

  “Yes, and I felt very strange things coming from him. That is why I had to have vinegar; he was heating me up, and I needed to reduce my body temperature. Tell me his full name.” And once again Josh took his calculating posture.

  “James Nairn Patterson Hume,” said I.

  Josh made his rapid, flickering calculation, then, to my horror, gave a pathetic little squeak and collapsed sideways. Had Pat Hume killed him? But I saw one of the tiny hands gesturing toward the vinegar bottle which sat on the floor at his side. In an instant I put it to his lips and he drank—drank—drank until there was not a drop left. His eyes opened slowly, but one was looking aloft while the other looked down, and from his tiny body mounted an overpowering reek of vinegar. If he had been drinking anything else I would have sworn he was drunk, but—vinegar? I must know.

  “Jesus,” I whispered, shaking him gently. “Jesus, are you pickled?”

  He did not answer at once, but shook his head again and again, as if in wonderment. At last he spoke.

  “This place must have a very special destiny,” he said. “Its Golden Number is the Great Eleven, and that is splendour sufficient, but this Hume—this James Nairn Patterson Hume—his Golden Number is also—despampanante!—the Great Eleven. Work it out for yourself: fourteen, plus six, plus forty-one, plus twenty—and what have you?”

  “How should I know?” I said; “I’m just one of your frivolous Threes; I can’t be expected to add in my head. What have you?”

  “Badulaque! Analphabet! You have ninety-two and even you should see that when you add the integers—nine and two, dog of a Three—you get eleven. So this College, already shaped by Eleven, is now to have a Master who is also an Eleven, and what will happen then—Oh, rumboso, rumboso!” His eyes seemed fixed upon some rosy vision.

  “What will happen? Tell me,” I said, shaking him.

  “Oh, do not ask me to tell,” said Professor Murphy. “Instead, why don’t you join me in the Great Silent Chamber of the Immortals in the University at Bogotá, and from time to time we shall come back here and behold with our own eyes the wonders that are sure to be brought forth.”

  I was mystified. “Great Silent Chamber of Immortals?” I said.

  “You know of my work,” said he. “Am I not the Praefectus of the Instituto Cryonico of Bogotá?”

  “I suppose so,” said I, not very tactfully; “but what’s Cryonics?”

  “Oh, you Threes, you have the minds of ballet-dancers! Cryonics, numbskull, is the science that will save mankind by preserving indefinitely the lives and abilities of people chosen for that purpose. It is achieved by a carefully calculated arrest of the cellular death which eventually brings ordinary mortals to the point of physical and spiritual death; that arrest is managed by draining the body of most of its blood, and substituting a formula for which ordinary vinegar may serve as a temporary substitute; then the body is placed in a very cold chamber, and all its activities, but not its cellular life, are kept on ice, so to speak, until they are needed. Then, a gradual melting-out, and there’s your man, practically as good as new and in my case, more than four hundred years old. Think what an accumulation of wisdom and experience that means! What we alchemists began so long ago as a search for the Philosopher’s Stone was achieved in our Andean heights when we discovered—Oh, to hell with modesty!—when I discovered, that all that was needed was a sufficiently low temperature and plenty of vinegar. Now—here is your chance, and you must be quick, for this evening has been an exhausting one for me. Will you fly back with me to Bogotá? I promise you that in a week you will be emptied of your disgusting thick blood, and you will find yourself in a flask, reduced to the temperature of liquid nitrogen. All you have to do is leave a call at the desk—just like a motel—and in a hundred years you will be shipped back here to see what this great College has achieved.”

  I was tempted. I confess I was tempted. But I thought I should first talk the matter over with my wife. Later, when I had Professor Murphy’s calculations checked by a Jewish scholar at one of the synagogues on Bathurst Street, I discovered that my wife is also a Three, just as I am myself, and it is unwise to neglect her opinion.

  “May I have till tomorrow to make up my mind?” said I, and the Professor’
s nod was so feeble that I became greatly alarmed about him.

  But we Threes have substantial powers of improvisation. It was clear that the Professor was so overcome by what he had found out about Massey College that he needed first aid, and of a special kind. So I did my unscientific best. Taking him in my arms, I carried him up the back stairs to the College kitchen; it was like carrying a wineskin, for the vinegar within him kept sloshing around most unaccountably. But I got him on one of the kitchen tables without having been seen during our wobbly progress through the College, and I undressed him, right down to his skin. Former priest that he was, I was not surprised to find that he was wearing a tiny hair shirt, which is still in my possession, more or less, for Miss Whalon uses it as a tea-cosy. I managed to rouse him sufficiently to drink a couple of large beakers of vinegar, then I brought jugs of ice-water, doused him thoroughly, and tucked him up for the night on a shelf in our large, walk-in refrigerator. In that embracing chill he fell instantly into a child-like sleep, and so I left him.

  I went immediately to my wife, and put the great question up to her: was I to go to Bogotá and a chilly life eternal, in order that, from time to time, I might return to Massey College and spy on what my successors were doing? She thought for a while, and then said: “I wouldn’t, if I were you. Don’t be a Massey College ghost; it would be most unbecoming. Don’t you remember the line from our theatre days—‘Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage’? When you have made your exit, take off your costume, clean the assumed character off your face, and leave the theatre.”

  These were wise words, as I had expected them to be. So I went to bed; went to sleep; and forgot the whole matter.

  I was sharply reminded of it only last week, when we had our annual Christmas Dance. A great feature of that affair is the buffet, which is a splendidly theatrical creation at which all the guests survey, before they eat, the miracles of cuisine that our chefs have prepared. Elegantly displayed turkeys, splendidly ornamented fish, jellies and potted meats pressed into fantastic and festive shapes, cream puffs filled with cream, so that their whiteness takes on the likeness of swans, wonderful little tartlets like jewels of topaz, and ruby and emerald. Cakes decorated in High Baroque style that are themselves the epitome of Christmas, and happy youth and good cheer. As always, I looked at it with pride; this was just the sort of show to appeal to a man whose Golden Number is Three. And then—

  I don’t want to continue. I’d much rather not. But there are imperatives of historical truth which even a Three dare not brush aside. There, at the centre of the main table, was—No, no. No, I say!

  Well, it was a roast suckling pig. At any rate, that was the way it was garnished. Certainly it had an apple in its mouth, and around the little eyes were outlines of white icing. Tips of pink icing extended its ears, which were not wholly pig-like. I looked hopefully between the markedly un-piglike buttocks for a curly tail, but there was none.

  Turning to our Bursar, Colin Friesen, I said, controlling my voice as best I could: “That’s unusual, isn’t it? Where did you get it?”

  “It must have come in a big order,” said he. “Nobody seems to know anything about it. It is a novelty. Delicious! Vinegar-cured, I should say. Try a bit of the crackling.”

  But I declined. A flighty Three I may perhaps be, but I can boast, as I hope all my successors will be able to boast, that I have never, knowingly, eaten a guest of this College.