High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories

by Robertson Davies

  “Cabinet?” I said. “Tory overthrow? Do you mean that you are in power in—in—?” I did not know how to finish the question.

  “The greatest victory of my career,” came the reply. “I have reduced the Tories to a miserable, seedy rump, and their Leader is trying to prevent a final break.”

  “What Leader?” said I, breathless with curiosity.

  “Who has always been the leader of the Conservative Party, whatever puppet may have appeared to mortal eyes to hold that office?” said Mr. King.

  I knew, of course. That is to say, I knew who had always appeared to Mr. King to be the Tory Leader. My mind trembled on the verge of total disorder. “Mr. King,” I whispered, “are you telling me that you have brought about Separatism in—” But I did not like to speak the word. To a Presbyterian it might seem offensive. I changed the form of the question. “Mr. King,” said I; “where are you?”

  At that instant, it seemed to me that the Little Table became extremely hot. But it tapped merrily. And what it tapped amazed me greatly. Mr. King was not a slangy man, but I suppose that when he was a youth, an undergraduate in this University, he had acquired a few of the slang expressions of his contemporaries. Anyhow, what the Little Table rapped, almost giggling as it did so, was: “None of your beeswax!”

  “But Mr. King!” I persisted. “Don’t leave me just yet. You must know that your successor on earth has recently been described in an extremely influential American newspaper as ‘perhaps the world’s most gifted leader’. Tell me something helpful that I may pass on to Pierre Elliot Trudeau.”

  The table stopped its giggling in an instant. It became, not hot, but icy cold. “You tell Trudeau this from me!” it banged—yes, it banged on the floor. And then it began to tap so fast that it took all my concentration to make out the letters of its clumsy, rattling language. They seemed to mean little, until I understood that the tapping was now in French. But what French! It was politician’s French, which is a language in itself, understood by few. I could not make out, with clarity, what Mr. King wanted me to tell Mr. Trudeau, except that he seemed to be summoning him to join himself, wherever he was, with the utmost speed. Mr. King seemed to have a place for Mr. Trudeau in his new dominion, but I gathered that it was not in the Cabinet. I thought I caught something about “the hot-seat.”

  The Little Table was not made to withstand such vehemence. At the height of the tirade, one of the little feet broke off, and suddenly there was silence.

  I had the Little Table mended, the next day, by Norbert. He said he had a suitable piece of wood, which he had taken out of one of the fixtures of the College Chapel, that would do the job almost invisibly.

  But the Little Table never spoke again. I suppose there are things, such as pieces of wood from our Chapel, that are intolerable to Presbyterian ghosts, and especially those who have achieved Separatism by what used to be called the Harrowing of Hell.

  The King Enjoys His Own Again

  A hundred and fifty years is a long time, you will all agree, for a man to suffer misunderstanding and wrong. My task tonight is to attempt to put right such a misunderstanding. The length of time I have mentioned makes it clear at once that I am speaking on behalf of a ghost. Oh, if it were only one ghost! Because there are two; and I can feel them very near me as I address you now. Both are determined that I should support the version of the history of this University that they think the right one. Much hangs on which side I take.

  A week ago tonight we held our College Christmas Dance. My wife and I left at about one o’clock, and went to bed, but I was unable to sleep. I had an uneasy sense that someone had been there whom I had failed to greet, because I try to speak, or at least leer hospitably, at everybody. I rose: I prowled. I went to a window and, looking down, I was surprised to see someone in the quadrangle walking alone in a posture of dejection—someone in an academic gown.

  Gowns are often seen in the quad, but—at two in the morning? And was there not about the figure a singularity, a distinction greater than is common among academics? I went out into the night for a nearer look.

  Whoever it was paced up and down the stone paths, and as I came nearer, I heard what was unquestionably the sound of deep sobs. The figure was weeping! Some unhappy youth who had been, as they say, given the mitt by his partner at the dance? I hid behind a tree, to hear better. The broken utterance became audible: “O, the black ingratitude of it,” said the rich, fruity voice; “All this fuss, and not a word—not one solitary word—about me. It’s cruel, cruel!” I am not a man to withhold sympathy from any suffering soul, and I popped out from behind my tree.

  “Excuse me,” said I; “may I be of any assistance—” At that moment the figure moved into a gleam of moonlight, and you may judge of my dismay when I saw that the moonlight passed right through it! A cold greater than that of December seized upon me and my heart sank. For I knew that this much-haunted establishment was once again being visited by a ghost. But whose ghost this time?

  Then I knew. It could be none other. What I had mistaken for a gown was in fact a voluminous cloak, and when the figure turned to me the elegance of the clothes beneath the ghostly yet blinding blaze of stars and orders and diamonds in the moonlight, and more than anything else that great head, that florid, fleshy face, that beaky nose, those drooping eyelids, and the splendidly curled chestnut hair could belong to but one person. It was King George the Fourth. I bowed. It is not easy to bow elegantly in pyjamas, but old theatrical training came to my aid and I think it was not a bad bow. “Your Majesty,” said I.

  “So you know me,” said the figure. “I had concluded that I was utterly forgotten here.”

  I muttered something about the University Department of History.

  “Pah,” said the King. “Deluded toadies to a totally wrong principle. I should know. I am History, suppressed and distorted History. O Ingratitude! How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have founded a thankless University.” I mumbled some disclaimer, but the King spoke on. “It is now 1977 and this graceless institution is celebrating what it is pleased to call its Sesquicentennial. But has a word been said about the Monarch who, by a stroke of the pen, brought it into being? Don’t think I’m angry. No, no. But I am hurt. Deeply, terribly hurt. So what have you to say?”

  Me? It is not my job to deal with such things. Let the Public Relations people explain. Let the President explain. Let the Lieutenant-Governor, who acted as Chairman of the Sesquicentennial Committee, explain. But none of them were there. No, no; they were snug in their beds, and I was face to face with a sobbing, ignored Founder.

  “I can only appeal to your magnanimity, Sire,” I said. “You know what academics are. Simple folk whose minds rarely stray beyond the present. And really, I—what can I do?”

  “I’ll tell you in good time,” said the King. “But first a matter of curiosity; something led me here; something led me to this place; some notion that in this College, at least, I might find understanding. What do you think it can have been?”

  What was I to say? “Humble as I am,” I ventured, “I apologize on behalf of us all. I am sure no affront was intended.”

  He was not mollified. A look of bitterness succeeded to grief in his countenance. “Pshaw,” he said. “I notice none of you forgot John Strachan. Tell me, what does this University find that is so special about John Strachan?”

  I spoke without thinking. “As our Founder—” said I, causing the King to interrupt in a temper.

  “Oh Founder, Founder, Founder! Strachan was forever founding something! McGill University, your great rival—he had a finger in that pie. And Trinity, your neighbour—they toady to him there as a Founder. But in this University he wasn’t a Founder, he was merely an organizer! Did he ever open his sporran and lay down a penny-piece? Because I did! This University would have been nowhere without my money.”

  The word “money” as we all know, has strong magical overtones. Silently, but impressively, we were joined by another figure, and to my
experienced eye that figure was a phantom. It was John Strachan, without a doubt, in the full day-dress of an Anglican Bishop—gaiters, apron, squarecut long coat, and above all that peculiar hat like a stovepipe with a wireless aerial on either side, which gives a Bishop the appearance of one who is in perpetual receipt of messages from outer space. His square, granite face was marked with the look of intense disapproval so often seen in the Scot who has risen high in the world. John Strachan, without a doubt. The word “money” had brought him back from the grave.

  “Did I hear a suggestion,” he said in a withering tone, “That I contributed nothing to the founding of this institution?”

  “No money, at any rate,” said the King, who had no fear of this apparition. “I laid down a sturdy thousand pounds a year, which in terms of today’s money was very handsome. Indeed, I can’t understand, with what must be a hundred and fifty thousand pounds of my money, why this place is in need of money now.”

  “As I recall, that money was provided from public funds,” said the Bishop.

  But the King did not bat an eye. “I suppose it was,” said he; “I could hardly be expected to fuss about where it came from. The important fact is that I granted it and you got it, so I suppose we may say you had it from me.”

  “Your Majesty might say that,” said the Bishop, “but other donors have given from their own pockets.”

  “Meaning yourself, I suppose?” said the King.

  “A Bishop does not make known his contributions to worthy causes,” said John Strachan.

  “That’s gammon,” said the King. “Come along, Strachan, how much real money did you stump up?”

  “I must respectfully request your Majesty not to press a question that offends against Christian principle,” said the Bishop, and I thought he seemed uncomfortable.

  “Aha! Got you,” said the King; “I’ll wager fifty guineas you gave nothing at all,” and he laughed like a schoolboy.

  “Sir, you are disrespectful of my cloth,” shouted Strachan, fire darting from his eyes.

  “Pish for your cloth,” said the King. “Your cloth may be well enough, but the cut and fit are abominable. If you mean I don’t respect you as a Bishop, you’re wrong. It is well-known that I was vastly respectful of Bishops, when I chose my own. But you were one of my niece Victoria’s creations, and she had a sentimental taste for Scotchmen.”

  Now it was the Bishop’s turn to show hurt feelings. Tears dimmed those stony eyes. “This is a man’s reward for a life of the most stringent devotion to God, to duty and the cause of education,” said he; “how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to meet a thankless Monarch!”

  “Fiddle-faddle,” said the King. “What do you need of gratitude from your Monarch. Your name has been whooped and hallooed about this University for the past year, and more. You’ve had more gratitude than you deserve, because much of it was filched from me!”

  The Bishop stopped weeping, and roared. “You! Who slaved and contrived to set this University firmly on its feet? Who endured the reproach and ignominy of an ungrateful government and an indifferent populace? Whose hair turned gray under the strain of that shocking and discriminatory Charter you signed—without reading it, I am sure—until I was able to enlarge its scope and make a University that was truly for the people of this great land?”

  “A University which you subsequently described as ‘a godless imitation of Babel,’ “ said the King; “and after you had given it that nasty dig you skipped away and founded Trinity, which was much more to your liking. Oh, you were a mighty Founder, and such a tyrant as no King would dare to emulate. Don’t lecture me as if I didn’t know this University’s history. Don’t I remember (after my time on earth, of course) when the greedy Government took it over as an addition to their lunatic asylum, and didn’t they have the ugliness to call it the University Lunatic Asylum? Not such a bad name, when you think of it. And don’t twaddle about your hair going gray. No man needs to endure such things if he has a good valet.” And here King George IV touched his head with conscious pride, and indeed his splendidly curled wig was a work of art.

  “Huuut!” said the Bishop. It was his version of a laugh. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

  “That’s one of the truest things in the Bible,” said the King, quite affably. “If it weren’t for vanity we should still be running about in our skins, painted a horrid blue. Vanity is one of the mainsprings of human progress.”

  The King seemed to be getting the better of the argument. I remembered that John Strachan’s motto had been Prudent But Fearless. Now he showed a sudden change of mood toward what, in a character less granitic than his, might be described as soapy.

  “As a Bishop,” he said, “it would ill beseem me to show a want of charity toward any of God’s creatures—even toward one whose earthly life was verra far from being a suitable pattern for a Christian King. I am truly sorry that you suppose yourself to have been overlooked by a University in whose founding you played a trifling, purely ceremonial part—”

  The King broke in. “How could I have done more than I did? The University of London was being founded that same year, and of course I had a great deal to do with that. The older universities were offended, so I had to found those readerships in mineralogy and geology at Oxford to appease them. And you know how much I was involved in the Literary Fund, granting them a Charter, and as much money as I could scrape up at the time. I was always short. Generosity—it’s a costly indulgence, Bishop. Literature was my real love. Byron—how I admired him; and do you know, for a time at least, he admired me. And noble, generous Walter Scott—a dear friend. I always meant to do something in the way of a Civil List recognition for Jane Austen—dear, ironical Jane, her pretty novels taught me so much about people—even though she was somewhat hard on the clergy. And in all that, I couldn’t do much more than I did for little Toronto, now could I? Was it to be expected? Such a busy life, you see.”

  The Bishop looked sour, like a man who has been outbid at an auction. “Busy,” said he; “aye, busy in the pursuit of pleasure.”

  “True, true,” said the King, not in the least daunted. “I’ve been called that, you know—the Prince of Pleasure.”

  “And where has it brought you?” said the Bishop. “Think, think man, upon your present unhappy state.”

  “What unhappy state?” said the King, much surprised. “I’m as happy as—well, as happy as a King. I mingle in admirable society, and I don’t have to be tedious any more about rank. I can see as much as I please of the literary company I always longed for. Instead—of course it’s not proper for ordinary people to kiss and tell, but I am a King—dear Jane Austen has been one of my mistresses for the past—oh, well over a century. No great sensation in bed, I assure you, but a wonderful talker; so I talk to Jane and sleep with other ladies whose talent lies that way.”

  The Bishop was furious. “Reprobate!” he roared, quite forgetting what is due from a Bishop to the Defender of his Faith; “dare you tell me that you pursue your dissolute courses unrebuked in Hell?”

  “Who said anything about Hell?” said the King, much surprised. “You don’t suppose I’m in Hell, do you?”

  “If not Hell, where?”

  “In Elysium, of course. Where are you?”

  “I am in Paradise,” said the Bishop, like a man transformed. “In Jerusalem, the golden, with milk and honey blessed. Can you believe it, when I arrived, there was not a University, or a good private school, or an Association for the Improvement of Deserving Artisans, or an almshouse for the widows of indigent clergy, or a Society for the Relief of Decayed Gentlewomen, or a Society for distributing trusses to the ruptured poor, or a single evidence of practical benevolence in the whole of Paradise? And it has been my glorious care to found them all. And to found many, many more. And there are persons of wealth, to be cajoled and bullied and shamed into giving me the money to do it. Oh, what glorious tussles I’ve had with some of them! Man, it’s Heaven. Work, work, work, and fou
nd, found, found, and beg, beg, beg without cease. I have turned the new Jerusalem into a splendid likeness of modern Toronto. Oh, the goodness of our bountiful Creator! He has even provided Sin—Sin in unlimited quantity and horrendous quality, for his Blessed Ones like myself to struggle with and combat and overcome. At this present moment I am busy with an area of the New Jerusalem where shameless men resort to have their bodies rubbed by unclothed women. Aye, and there is an abomination quite new since my time, a group called The Gays, and it is my resolve to assail their New Sodom. How can a poor lost soul like yourself judge of the holy ecstasy that Paradise is to a man like me?”

  “I’ll keep to Elysium,” said the King.

  “But you ought to be in Hell,” shouted the Bishop.

  “Oh it would be Hell to you, just as your Paradise would be Hell to me,” said the King. “You’d find Elysium way over your head. The daylight hours are spent in a sort of perpetual banquet, interspersed with expeditions on the water, and there’s an opera every evening. And after lights out—no, no, Bishop, not for you. Of course I build a lot of new palaces, and you should see the gardens I’m planning. And furniture! Had it never struck you that a really satisfactory hereafter would involve perpetual delicious anxieties about new furniture? And—this is God’s charity at its most thoughtful—nobody ever sends in a bill!’

  The Bishop’s face was an arena in which Pity wrestled with Outraged Virtue. “Man, man,” he said, “do ye never tire of pleasure?”

  “Tire—of pleasure? What an extraordinary idea. Do you ever tire of good works?”

  “Never! But good works, inspired by faith—”

  “What kind of faith? Do you make nothing of my lifelong faith in art and beauty? I wasn’t an artist myself—except perhaps in my personal appearance—but I was a great patron, a great appreciator and inspirer, a commissioner of fine things, and a notable collector. Do you call that nothing?”