High Spirits Page 10

  I should explain that although the male members of our Choir are never wholly drawn from the members of the College, several Junior Fellows have, at one time and another, sung with them. Unquestionably the finest of these was one of our Russian exchange students, Igor Lvov. But Lvov disappeared from the College several years ago, on the fifteenth of December, and we never heard of him again. Russian exchange students are sometimes summoned home on short notice, for political reasons into which it would be tedious to penetrate now. So, when Igor vanished, we sighed, but accepted the situation with philosophy.

  It was on a Sunday night two weeks ago that I was walking with Gordon and Giles along one of the corridors on the lowest floor of this College, listening to their plaints for the lost Igor.

  “Igor could have boiled like a pot,” sighed Gordon.

  “And how he would have handled that pot of ointment,” said Giles, almost sobbing.

  “I can hear him now,” said Gordon, his face beautified by the light of happy recollection.

  It was merely a figure of speech, but it filled me with terror. No, not terror; what overwhelmed me was that sense of doom, of realization that once again the forces of unreason had invaded Massey College. Here we go again, I thought to myself; O, ye powers that protect colleges from all that threatens them, let it not be! This year, just for this year alone, let no uncanny thing drag its trail of loathsome slime across our chronicle! But even as I prayed, I knew that it was hopeless. For although Gordon thought he heard Igor’s voice only in memory, I was horribly aware that I had heard it in reality! It was just as we were passing a locked door marked Service 6.

  As quickly as I could, I hurried Gordon and Giles to the gate, and bade them good-night. They walked away, happily talking about music, as I had seen them do a hundred times, and I, with heavy, doomed steps, dragged myself back to the cellarage, to the door marked Service 6. With my master-key I unlocked it, and went in, shuddering but with the courage of resignation.

  “Igor, where are you?” I whispered. “Igor, speak to me.”

  “I am here, little father,” said a deep, velvety voice that seemed to come from the farthest depths of the room. For Service 6, because of the purpose for which it is used, extends far under the quadrangle. Guided by the sound of the voice, I felt my way into its cave-like recesses.

  I don’t know what I expected to find, but I knew Igor was there, for I never forget a voice. Names I forget, as a thousand humiliations every year make clear, but never voices. If I had heard Igor, Igor it must be.

  “Where?” I whispered, as I crept deeper and deeper into the cave.

  “Here,” said Igor’s voice, seemingly at the level of my knees.

  What had happened? What was Igor’s fate? Had he refused to return to Russia at command, and was he dragging out a fugitive’s life in this darkest, most neglected, almost forgotten portion of the College? Dreading whatever it was I might see, I lit a match.

  Oh, horror, horror, horror! There, in a dank tank, squatted a gigantic frog!

  “Igor!” I hissed.

  “I,” croaked the frog.

  “Lvov!” I gasped.

  “None other,” he gurgled.

  “What has brought you to this?” I quavered.

  “Pride!” said Frog-Igor (for from now on I shall call him that). “Pride in our great Soviet State. Pride in the glory of modern Russia! Pride in the sound of my own voice, which is the worst possible kind of pride for a citizen of a Communist state! Sit down, little father, and I shall tell you all.”

  I sat.

  “Since childhood I have loved to sing,” said Frog-Igor. “As a child on the collective, mine was the loudest voice, heard far above the sound of the machinery. As a youth in the university I was tempted to drop my studies in the crystallization of liquid manure in order to take up a career in opera. But Russia needs crystallized manure, and I stuck to it. But always I sang. Always I was in some choir. And when I came to Canada as a Soviet exchange student, I lost no time in finding a choir which badly needed me. It was a Toronto choir, named after the bourgeois-recidivist-Jew-beast Mendelssohn, and its leader was the mighty Gospodin Iseler.”

  “The Mendelssohn Choir,” said I; “a happy choice.”

  “Not so happy,” said Frog-Igor. “Very degenerate; very tainted music. Trained as I had been in the state-approved people’s music of Soviet Russia I found strong traces of ideological retrogression in this music. But—I must sing, or die, so I sang what the Mendelssohn Choir sang, all the time keeping my own reservations about the material.

  “At last came this time of year, the winter festival called Christmas, and the Mendelssohn Choir announced that it would offer a large composition unknown to me, called Messiah. You will understand, little father, that I was not pleased when I discovered, by going through the libretto with a dictionary, that this Messiah was a piece of overtly Christian propaganda. Yes! Shameless. But, I said to myself, these backward countries must take what music they can get. This music is degenerately modern to the Soviet ear, but there are a few good tunes and the whole score goes with a swing that is extraordinary when the source of its inspiration is considered. So—I shall consent to sing in it.

  “You see, the great Iseler was very kind to me. He created an entirely new group within the choir, for me alone. Third Bass, it was called. I admired Gospodin Iseler devotedly. A man of rich spirit and Byzantine beauty, little father, and even in Russia we meet few like him.

  “But still there was my problem. What was I to do about the nakedly religious nature of the text? And then I hit on a great idea. I would sing Messiah with mental reservations. Whenever the name of the false Hebrew God or his discredited Son occurred, I uttered an indeterminate sound, which, in the Mendelssohn Choir, nobody would notice. But in my mind I substituted the name of our mighty leader, Nikita Khrushchev. And thus, you see, I preserved my integrity.

  “Oh, little father, it worked at rehearsal, but when the first performance came, musical enthusiasm betrayed me. It was a great night. Massey Hall was filled to capacity with wealthy bourgeois. The smells of face-powder and mink recalled the worst days of the Czarist regime. I supposed it was because this was a new work we were launching, and I looked everywhere in the audience for the composer, but though many men had long hair, none looked like the picture of Handel on my music book.

  “All went well, and my system of mental reservation worked like a—what is it you say it works like—?”

  I have a fine academic command of cliché. “Like a charm?” I prompted.

  “Ah, good, good!” said Frog-Igor. “Like a charm. But then we approached one of my favourite passages. It is in a big chorus, where everybody sings, ‘For unto us a child is born,’ but mentally I was singing, ‘For unto us a people’s republic is born,’ and as we approached the climax, with the words—

  “And the government shall be upon his shoulder—I was thinking so powerfully of Comrade Khrushchev that his beautiful, benign face seemed to rise right in front of me and—”

  “Yes,” I said, “and—”

  “And I made a wrong entrance,” said Frog-Igor, hanging his huge, warty head in shame. “Before everybody else I sang, thunderously and triumphantly—

  “And the government shall be upon his shoulder—meaning Khrushchev, you see, and all at once I felt a most terrible blow, as if I had been struck with a bullet. I raised my eyes from my music, and found that the mighty Iseler was looking at me with such hatred, such loathing, such unutterable detestation, that I dropped my score, struggled past all the other basses who sat between me and the door, and ran into the street. Oh, the shame, the bitter shame.”

  “All that audience knows Messiah by heart,” said I. “Elmer wouldn’t care for a wrong entrance.”

  “Well you may say it,” said Frog-Igor. “As I hurried back to the College I felt worse and worse. You remember me as I was; a splendid figure of a Russian—two metres tall, two metres wide, two metres from front to back—but as I hurried throug
h the streets I felt myself shrinking, and my free stride was becoming more and more difficult. And hot! I was perishing with shame. At last, when I reached the College I pressed myself under the gate—I could not bear to come under the glance of the Cossack McCracken—and flung myself into the cooling pool. And there, sitting on a stone, with the chill water of December washing over me, I considered my fate.

  “It became clear at last. All my life, little father, and all my education, has been a rejection of superstition. Reason is all! So says the Soviet: so also says Massey College. But in Russia, there are still those among our old people who talk of very bad, almost forgotten things. And one of them is the Evil Eye. And I knew the worst: I had done wrong, in the sight of everybody; I had spoiled the first performance of this new work, this Messiah, and the great Iseler had cast the Evil Eye upon me. And—there I sat in the pool and I had to face it—I had been turned into a frog.

  “Since then, I have lived in the pool all summer, and when the coldest weather comes, the good Comrade Roger puts me in here, in this nice wet tank, and I sleep the winter away. But O, little father, how I long to sing again.”

  I put out my hand and patted Frog-Igor on the head. It was not a pleasurable sensation, but I have never allowed personal considerations to stand in the way of a noble action.

  “You shall sing, again, Igor,” I said; “but first of all we must do something about your personal appearance. Did the old people who spoke of the Evil Eye say anything about how to get rid of it?”

  “Yes,” said Frog-Igor; “it is very difficult. But you, little father, you are a good, simple man, a real member of the proletariat, and everybody pities you. Perhaps you could persuade him.”

  “Persuade who?” I asked.

  “The great Iseler,” said Frog-Igor. “I can only be restored to human form again by—his kiss.”

  In old-fashioned books one often reads about somebody being “nonplussed.” I had never before paid much attention to the word, but in that instant I understood its meaning fully. I was nonplussed. Frog-Igor was going on.

  “Go to him, little father. Fall at his feet; caress his knees. Let him see the tears running down your withered cheeks. Entreat for me. He will not be able to refuse you.”

  It was now clear to me that, as so often happens in these invasions of the College by the forces of unreason, I was cast for an ignominious, absurdly demanding role. I spoke crisply.

  “Useless,” I said. “I know Elmer Iseler quite well. If I crept up on him and pawed his knees I don’t know what he might think. You don’t understand life in the democracies. All that crawling and cringing and weeping is much too Dostoevskian for twentieth-century Canada.

  “Isn’t there anybody else who could kiss you with the same effect?”

  “There is Comrade Khrushchev,” said Frog-Igor hopefully. “He has what we call in Russia the Proletarian Touch; it is the sovietized version of what used to be called the Royal Touch.”

  I knew something that Frog-Igor, during the past seven years, had not heard. I suppose a very limited version of the world’s news gets into our pool. So I temporized.

  “Too far away,” I said. “But what about a beautiful girl? In these situations on this side of the Iron Curtain it is always a princess who kisses the frog and turns him back into a prince.”

  “I refuse to be turned into a prince,” said Frog-Igor. “It is against all my principles. A bass, da: a prince, nyet.”

  “Perhaps a soprano?” I suggested.

  Frog-Igor looked as doubtful as a frog can.

  “Or a very beautiful contralto,” I wheedled. “The most beautiful girl in our choir?”

  To make a long story short, I talked him into trying it. I put the situation squarely up to Gordon and Giles, and at the next choir rehearsal Gordon made a very graceful little speech, not harping on the Frog aspect of the problem. Only the most beautiful of the women’s section, he said, was expected to volunteer.

  I had feared this might create a difficult problem of discrimination, but the girls volunteered in a body. So I took Frog-Igor out of the little box in which I had brought him to the Choir Room, and put him in the middle of the table.

  The girls seemed to lose their zeal. Frog-Igor leered and did his best to make himself attractive, but I thought he looked worse than before. One of the sopranos suggested that perhaps a counter-tenor might kiss him, as the Frog wouldn’t know the difference. Frog-Igor spat up some unpleasant-looking black slime at that moment, and the choir realized that he understood English very well.

  There was one noble contralto, a doctor by profession, who said she had had to meet worse problems in the Emergency Admissions, and she would make a start. After all, she said, it was just like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. So she kissed him, and Frog-Igor perked up a little. The other girls were ashamed to back out after such an example of self-sacrifice, and, with a certain amount of gagging and wiping their mouths on bits of Kleenex, they all kissed Igor, and as they did so he swelled and swelled until at last he squatted before us, in the evening clothes he had worn when he was last a man, looking very much like a bass from the Mendelssohn Choir.

  Oh, the joy of Gordon and Giles! It was beautiful to behold. They told the girls that every ounce of their sacrifice had been justified, and set to work at once to rehearse the great, rediscovered Purcell anthem. I have never heard anything like it. Igor boiled like a pot, and he slithered richly like grease, and one might have thought that the great John Gostling had been restored to life.

  All too soon we realized that Igor’s cure was not permanent. Even during rehearsal he showed signs of shrinking again into a frog, but an occasional quick peck from any female singer who had a rest at the time would put him right again. But after rehearsal I had to take him back to Service 6, to the tank.

  “These girls, they are not strong,” he said; “not strong like our Russian girls. But even a Russian girl could not help me for long.”

  “Well, you can just put any ideas about a kiss from Elmer Iseler out of your head,” I said firmly.

  “Ah, no; but there is still Comrade Khrushchev,” he said, rolling his great eyes at me.

  I knew that Comrade Khrushchev had long since died in disgrace and obscurity, but I thought it better not to tell Igor.

  The Sunday came—well, it was last Sunday, not to make a mystery of it—when the great Purcell anthem was to be performed at the afternoon Chapel service. Gordon had made it clear that no excuses of illness or having a cold would be accepted from any of the women in the choir, and they all turned up, looking a little discomfited, but showing a good spirit on the whole. I brought Igor in from his tank, and after half an hour’s hard work they had him in condition to sing.

  For the first part of the anthem I experienced a delight I have never felt before in our Chapel. This, I thought, is the perfection of religious music. And in my dark heart I began to plot to keep Igor in the tank for many years, and let him out only for services, and recording-sessions which would bring the College the ample funds it so badly needs.

  Igor’s voice was superb. As he sang the deep did truly boil like a pot, and the sea was like a pot of ointment. But then came the later section of the anthem, very solemn, very noble, where the bass and tenor soloists together declare:

  Upon earth there is not his like,

  Who is made without fear.

  He beholdeth all high things:

  He is a king over all the children of pride.

  It is tricky work, that duet, and Robert Hurd as tenor, and Igor as bass, had to watch their step carefully. I became aware that while Robert was firm, Igor was rocky. There was an excitement in his voice that alarmed me. And then, suddenly, he made an obvious, a gross mis-timing; he came in too early, and an instant later there was a horrible croak, a sound as if gas were escaping from a large balloon, and the anthem sagged to a chaotic end.

  Luckily this happened near the end of the service, and as soon as the benediction had been pronounced, I sped to the
Choir Room.

  Poor Igor! He sat damply in the middle of the table, a frog again. A contralto—that good sport the doctor—was puckering her lips, but I knew that would do no good now. Gordon was standing in a corner, with his face to the wall, muttering incoherently. Giles, to my horror, was kicking the organ savagely. The members of the choir looked shocked and shaken, except for Malcolm Russell, who was chuckling.

  I knew what had to be done. There are times, happily few in number, when I have to exert authority in this College.

  “Mr. Wry, Mr. Bryant,” I rapped out. “I will have no exhibitions of the Evil Eye in this College. Kiss Igor at once, both of you!”

  “Won’t,” said Gordon.

  Giles is an Englishman. “Shan’t,” said he.

  I knew I was beaten. There is no arguing with musicians when somebody has foozled an entry. It was Robert Hurd who explained the situation to me.

  “During our last passage, about the power of God, it was pretty obvious Igor got to thinking about Nikita Khrushchev,” he said, “and when he came in wrong both Gordon and Giles rounded on him at once, and he was caught between their glares. Poor old Igor.”

  Poor Igor indeed. When I picked him up he was sobbing piteously for the Kiss of Khrushchev. So I put him in a little box, with some fresh lettuce leaves upon which I sprinkled a few grains of caviar, and I addressed it to Comrade Nikita Khrushchev, care of the Russian Embassy at Ottawa, and dropped it in the mail-box on the corner of Hoskin Avenue.

  A dirty trick? Perhaps. But you see, Igor would never have been of any further use to the College.

  The Cat That Went to Trinity

  Every autumn when I meet my new classes, I look them over to see if there are any pretty girls in them. This is not a custom peculiar to me: all professors do it: I also count the number of young men who are wearing Chairman Mao coats, or horseshoe moustaches. A pretty girl is something on which I can rest my eyes with pleasure while another student is reading a carefully-researched but uninspiring paper.