Murther and Walking Spirits Read online

  Murther & Walking Spirits

  ROBERTSON DAVIES (1913–1995) was born and raised in Ontario, and was educated at a variety of schools, including Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and Balliol College, Oxford. He had three successive careers: as an actor with the Old Vic Company in England; as publisher of the Peterborough Examiner; and as university professor and first Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, from which he retired in 1981 with the title of Master Emeritus.

  He was one of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters, with several volumes of plays and collections of essays, speeches, and belles lettres to his credit. As a novelist he gained worldwide fame for his three trilogies: The Salterton Trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy, and The Cornish Trilogy, and for later novels Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man.

  His career was marked by many honours: He was the first Canadian to be made an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was a Companion of the Order of Canada, and he received honorary degrees from twenty-six American, Canadian, and British universities.

  By Robertson Davies

  NOVELS

  THE SALTERTON TRILOGY

  Tempest-Tost

  Leaven of Malice

  A Mixture of Frailties

  THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY

  Fifth Business

  The Manticore

  World of Wonders

  THE CORNISH TRILOGY

  The Rebel Angels

  What’s Bred in the Bone

  The Lyre of Orpheus

  Murther & Walking Spirits

  The Cunning Man

  SHORT FICTION

  High Spirits

  FICTIONAL ESSAYS

  The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

  The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks

  Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack

  The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks

  ESSAYS

  One Half of Robertson Davies

  The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies

  The Merry Heart

  Happy Alchemy

  Selected Works on the Art of Writing

  Selected Works on the Pleasures of Reading

  CRITICISM

  A Voice from the Attic

  PLAYS

  Selected Plays

  MURTHER & WALKING SPIRITS

  Robertson Davies

  Murther & Walking Spirits

  New Canadian Library electronic edition, 2015

  Copyright © 1991 Robertson Davies

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  First published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1991

  First published in the U.S. by Viking Penguin in 1991

  First published in Great Britain by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1991

  All rights reserved.

  e-ISBN: 978-0-7710-2784-0

  Cover Design by Lisa Jager

  Detail of original cover artwork by Bascove

  Electronic edition published in Canada by New Canadian Library, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company, Toronto, in 2015.

  McClelland & Stewart with colophon is a registered trademark.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication available upon request.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Brenda

  Printers finde by experience that one Murther is worth two Monsters, and at least three Walking Spirits. For the consequence of Murther is hanging, with which the Rabble is wonderfully delighted. But where Murthers and Walking Spirits meet, there is no other Narrative can come near it.

  (Samuel Butler: 1612–80)

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I Roughly Translated

  II Cain Raised

  III Of Water and the Holy Spirit

  IV The Master Builder

  V Scenes from a Marriage

  VI The Land of Lost Content

  VII … To the Wind’s Twelve Quarters I Take My Endless Way

  I

  Roughly Translated

  I WAS NEVER so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.

  How did I know that I was dead? As it seemed to me, I recovered consciousness in an instant after the blow, and heard the Sniffer saying, in a quavering voice: “He’s dead! My God, I’ve killed him!” My wife was kneeling by my side, feeling my pulse, her ear to my heart; she said, with what I thought was remarkable self-possession in the circumstances, “Yes, you’ve killed him.”

  (2)

  WHERE WAS I? I was surveying the scene at close range but I was not in the body that lay on the floor. My body, looking as I had never seen it in my life. Had I really been such a big man? Not a huge man, not a giant, but six feet and rather heavy? So it seemed, for there I lay, in my not-very-well-pressed summer suit, a contrast to my wife and the Sniffer, who were both naked, as they had leapt from the bed – my bed – in which I had surprised them.

  A cliché of human experience, but a novelty for me: husband finds wife in bed with lover, lover leaps up, discloses concealed weapon and strikes husband a severe blow – much too severe, it now appears – on the temple, and husband falls dead at his feet. My astonishment, as I have said, was greater than anything I had ever experienced before, and I had no room for indignation. Why on earth had he done it? And was it true that he could not undo it, as both he and I devoutly wished?

  The Sniffer was losing his nerve, had shrunk back toward the bed and was sitting on it, weeping hysterically.

  “Oh shut up,” said my wife, fiercely. “We’ve no time for that. Be quiet and let me think.”

  “Oh my God!” the Sniffer wailed. “Poor old Gil! I never meant it. I didn’t! I couldn’t! What’s going to happen? What will they do to me?”

  “If they catch you, they’ll probably hang you,” said my wife, “so stop that noise and do exactly what I say. First of all, get some clothes on. No – wait! First wipe that damned thing on a tissue and then put it back in its case. There’s blood on it. Then get dressed, and go home, and take care nobody sees you. You have five minutes, and then I’m going to phone the police. Hurry up!”

  “The police!” His fright was so farcical that I laughed, and realized that they could not hear me. The Sniffer was wholly unmanned.

  No so my wife. She was manly and decisive and I admired her self-command. “Of course the police,” she said. “A man has been murdered. Right? It must be reported immediately. Right? Have you worked on a newspaper and you don’t know that? Do what I say, and be quick about it.”

  Had these two been lovers? What tenderness was to be felt now? The only sign my wife gave that her nerves were shaken was that she had returned to her old trick of interposing that interrogative clincher “Right?” into her conversation. I thought I had broken her of that, but in this moment of crisis she reverted to type. She had never been what I call a good writer. No serious regard for language.

  Moaning and snuffling, the Sniffer began to pull on his clothes; his foolishly elegant clothes, of which his newspaper colleagues made such unceasing fun. But he did as he was told. His first act was to use a tissue to wipe the ugly metal cosh that had sprung from inside his beauti
ful walking-stick. The handle of the stick, when it was unscrewed, was also the handle of the cosh, and now he screwed it back into its hiding-place. How proud he had been of that nasty weapon, against which I had warned him countless times. People who carry weapons are certain at some time to use them, I had said. But he thought the thing dashing, and a sign of his dangerous masculinity, his macho ostentation. He had paid a lot of money for it in a famous London shop. Better than a sword-stick, he said. But why did he want either a sword-stick or a bludgeon? Now he knew the good sense of what I had told him. Miserable little wretch! A murderer. My murderer.

  I was angry still but I could not help laughing. Why had he struck me? I suppose it was because when I found the two in flagrante I spoke jocosely, angry though I was.

  “My God, Esme, not the Sniffer?” I said.

  And in his fury, fed, I suppose, by sexual excitement, he fetched out his weapon and clouted me.

  He dressed, but did not look fully his accustomed smart self. He crept around my body, that almost blocked the door, and went into the living-room of our apartment, heading straight for the drinks cupboard. He took out a bottle of cognac.

  “No,” said my wife, who had followed him. “Remember? ‘Never touches a drop till after the show.’ ” She laughed but he did not. The old joke, which he had used so often about so many actors who were given to the bottle, could not raise a smile when it was turned on himself. He put the bottle back. “Wipe the neck where you’ve touched it,” said my wife. “The police will be looking for dabs.”

  Dabs! Fingerprints. What a command she had of detective-story lingo. I was full of admiration for her coolness. He turned at the door, plainly asking for a kiss. But she was not now in the kissing vein. “Hurry up,” she said, “and take care not to be seen.”

  He went, as smart a murderer as you could hope to meet in a day’s march, though his face was tense with pain. But then, who notices when they meet a theatre critic whose face is tense with pain? It is one of the marks of the profession.

  (3)

  THE MOMENT HE was gone my wife, still as naked as the breeze, set about tidying up the bed. She put it to rights, then she hopped into it and made an impression of single occupancy. Next, some tidying in the bedroom and two glasses rinsed and dried in the bathroom. Then a quick but careful examination of the floor; she fetched a carpet-sweeper and swept the rug. She dampened a facecloth very slightly and wiped all the surfaces that the Sniffer might have touched. Oh, but she was a methodical woman!

  I watched her with admiration and a strong charge of erotic feeling. A naked woman may be enticing when she lies on the bed, ready for love, but how much more beautiful she is when she is at work. The muscles of her back and legs moved so elegantly as she plied the sweeper! The fine curve of her neck as she searched for dabs! What made her so lovely at this moment? Excitement? Danger? Crime? For she had been witness to a murder, and might well be thought an accessory.

  Now, the telephone. “Police?” she said; “a man has been murdered. My husband. Please come at once,” and she gave our address. Not a bad actress. For the first time her voice betrayed emotion. But there was no emotion when she had been assured that the police would come. Quicker than I would have thought possible she wiped off her make-up, which had been somewhat smudged in her raptures with the Sniffer, put on a nightgown and a dressing-gown, combed her hair – and then mussed it in what I suppose she thought was an appropriate disarray. Then she sat down at her desk – her desk, for she was going to prepare a story – to wait for the police to ring at the door of the apartment building.

  She did not have to wait long.

  (4)

  OF COURSE YOU want details. Who are these people?

  The Sniffer, to begin with. His name is Randal Allard Going, and he insists that you get it right – Allard Going – because it is a distinguished name, as names go in Canada. One of his great-great-great-grandfathers – Sir Alured Going – had been a Governor in our part of the world in the colonial days, and there is a memorial tablet to him in the old church at Niagara-on-the-Lake which proclaims his virtues in the regretful prose of his time: “His Character was too Great to be described, and yet too Good to be concealed … truly Humble without Affectation, Grave without Moroseness, Cheerfull without Levity …” and much more in the same encomiastic style. But the history books have little to say about Sir Alured, and the likelihood is that he was simply one of those nonentities who were sent by the Motherland to her colonies because he needed a job and was not influential enough to be given one at home. But in the Canada of his day he was a big toad in an obscure puddle and was well able to hold his own in that group of early settlers of good family whom the Sniffer likes to refer to as “the squirearchy,” and whose passing he regrets and wishes to perpetuate in himself.

  He assumes what he believes to be a distinguished air, his manners are a little too elaborate for his place in the modern world, and he dresses formally and indeed ostentatiously, for although he is a young man – thirty-two, I believe – he always carries a walking-stick. In keeping with his pretension, he feels that he needs a weapon always about him, and the stick, which conceals in its length the cosh with which he struck me down, is his constant companion. He is not physically a large man – rather a squirt, indeed – but he thinks of himself as a d’Artagnan. He would have preferred a sword-stick but, as he explains to the very few people to whom he confides his secret, the cosh is more appropriate to our time where mugging is not unknown, even in godly Toronto.

  One cannot dismiss Allard Going as a fop or a fool, because, in spite of his eccentricities, he is quite a capable journalist and does his work as a theatre critic pretty well, though not as well as I, his editor, would like. I did not appoint him to his position on The Colonial Advocate, the newspaper (the very good newspaper) on which I serve as Entertainment Editor; I inherited him from my predecessor. I have not myself been more than three years in my job – or what was my job before the Sniffer retired me permanently.

  The Sniffer’s nickname, which he hates, is a newspaper joke. He writes criticism of modern plays in which it is his delight to detect “influences,” and his way of introducing such influences as put-downs for new writers is to say – too often, but I have not been able to break him of the trick – “Do we sniff an influence from Pinter (or Ayckbourn, or Ionesco, or even Chekov) in this latest work of Mr. Whoever-it-is?” Whoever, that’s to say, the Sniffer wants to reduce to his lowest common denominator. The Sniffer is certain that nobody who writes a play, especially a first play, in Canada can be original in any important sense; he must be leaning upon, and dipping into, the work of some playwright of established fame, most often an Englishman. The Sniffer is one of the vanishing breed of Canadians for whom England is still The Great Good Place.

  Of course his colleagues on the Advocate, who are a facetious lot, as journalists tend to be, call him the Sniffer, and the boys in the Sports department have gone farther, and hint darkly that he really is a sniffer, and gets his sexual fulfilment by sniffing the bicycle saddles of teen-age girls. This is especially galling to the Sniffer, who fancies himself as a Byronic ladies’ man, and indeed is one, as his success with my wife makes clear.

  He is not popular, although because of his ability he must be tolerated. Twice the wags at the Press Club have nominated him for their annual award as Asshole of the Year, but in the final election he has always been nosed out by some superior claimant, from the world of politics. He is not popular, I shall say, among men. With women it is another matter.

  My wife, the latest conquest of the Sniffer, is far too good for him, and until I came upon them in bed I refused to believe the rumours which kind friends were careful should reach my ears.

  My wife is also employed by the Advocate, though not in my department; she is in Features, and is high among our most popular columnists. She writes about women’s affairs, in the broadest sense, and does so with discretion and conviction. She is not a snorting feminist, though sh
e is firm in her determination to get for women anything to which they have a right, or even a less certain claim. She urges greater political action upon her sisters, she champions the right to abortion, she is particularly good in the realm of compassion, that powerful journalistic emollient, and is strong in her defence of beaten wives, incestuously tormented children, and bag ladies in their bewildering variety. In all of these things I support her and admire her zeal, though her prose gets on my nerves.

  Her name is Esme Baron. She was christened Edna, a name of some biblical resonance, but as a schoolgirl she took against it, and told her parents firmly that she was going to be Esme; she knew that it was originally a man’s name, but possibly in an early manifestation of her enthusiasm for the female cause she claimed it for herself; if anyone wanted to think she was a man, they were free to do so. She advanced rapidly as a journalist, and at the time of my murder she was making some progress as a broadcaster. If not precisely a beautiful woman – but who can be precise about beauty – she undoubtedly had a beautiful figure, and an attractive, serious face. She had in a high degree the power to make you think, when she was talking to you, that she considered you the most significant person in the world, and she was able to project this invaluable trait into her broadcasting; hundreds of thousands of listeners were convinced that she was talking to them, and them alone. With this rare gift, was it strange that she should be thinking about a career chiefly in broadcasting, and was drawn to the Sniffer, who seemed to have influence in that sphere? Even so she had been drawn to me, when it looked as though I could further her career as a journalist. If that sounds unkind, I do not mean it. I loved Esme very much, and if she did not love me quite as much, or without some measure of calculation, I am certainly not the first man to find himself in that position.

  I do not propose, however, to excuse her for her betrayal of me. She could have told me she was tired of our marriage, and I suppose something might have been done about that. She might even have told me that she preferred Allard Going, and after I had recovered from laughter and incredulity, I suppose we might even have done something about that, as well. If she had wanted a fling with the Sniffer, I suppose I could have put up with it, for a while. Perhaps she was not perfectly sure that the Sniffer could deliver the goods she wanted, and would have brought up the matter with me at a later time, when his influence was made clear, and his price made clear, as well. I don’t think for a moment that he wanted to marry her; his image of himself demanded a succession of conquests, not anything permanent. An artist (and he included himself in that category, for if criticism is not an art, what is it?) must be free.