High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories Read online

  “Stop! Stop!” he cried; “for God’s sake don’t fade and reappear like that. You make me giddy.” And to my astonishment he fell back into my chair and closed his eyes, as white as—well, as white as a ghost. I forgot all about the Porter, and hurried to his side. I put out my hand to feel his brow, just as he opened his eyes. I was amazed to see unmistakable fear in his face, and he shrank from my touch.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said, “I only want to help you.” His voice was faint, and came from a dry mouth. “Who did you say you were?” he asked.

  “I am the first Master,” said I. Presumably I was distressed more than I realized, for though I was trying to reassure him my voice sounded sad and eerie, even to myself.

  “Then you are—Finch?” he said.

  Again the inexplicable malaise overcame me, and I could tell by the fear in his eyes that, to his vision, I must be fading and reappearing again. My sensations were mingled; to be mistaken for Robert Finch—painter, poet, musician, scholar, wit and distinguished diner-out—presented me with an extreme of temptation. Should I risk all, and bask for a moment in another’s glory? But decency prevailed. I denied, reluctantly, that I was Finch.

  “Good God! Then—you must be the other fellow who was here, briefly, even before Finch,” said he.

  Condemn me, if you will, as an egotist, but in such a situation which of you could have contained his curiosity? “What became of him—that other fellow who was here, briefly, before Finch?’ I asked. And again I heard in my own voice that hollow, eerie note.

  He shook his head. “I don’t really know,” he said; “it was whispered that something happened that occasionally happened to professors in those days; something called ‘making a composition with his creditors’, or some quaint phrase of the kind, and he went.”

  “Where did he go?” I persisted. The man looked as if he needed fresh air, but the subject was of such importance to me that I put my own interest first.

  “I don’t think anybody knew,” he said. “The story that has come down to us is that there was a full-dress enquiry in the Round Room, and it is presumed that the Visitor broke the Master, for when it was over he stumbled out into the quad, and it was seen that the russet rosette had been torn from his gown. After that—well, some said it was the pool, and some said he leapt from the tower, and some said”—here his voice thickened with repugnance—”that he went off and got a job at York. The College behaved very well toward the wife and girls; they kept going by taking in washing for some of the Junior Fellows who couldn’t afford the Coin Wash. Finch was a man of very delicate feeling, by all accounts, and he saw to it. But it was all so long ago…”

  My concern for his suffering had considerably abated. Madman he might be, but… “How long ago?” I asked.

  “A century, at least,” said he. “Let’s see—this is Christmas, 2063—oh, yes; a full century.”

  “A century, and nine Masters?” said I. And again that dreadful sensation, like going down too rapidly in an elevator.

  “A distinguished group,” said he, with complacency, “Let’s see—before me—I’m in my fourth year now—there was Kasabowszki for twenty-one years, poor Sawyers who died after three, Taschereau who made it for ten, Gamble for twelve, Meyer for seven, Duruset for fifteen, poor Polanyi—worn out with waiting, really,—for three, and of course Finch’s glorious first mastership of twenty-five long, sunny years. Yes, nine Masters from the beginning.”

  I knew I was dealing with a madman. I knew that I was behaving foolishly, but I couldn’t help myself. “Nine, you idiot!” I shouted. “Ten, ten, ten! I was first Master—” I stopped, shocked at what I had said, and hurried to change the dreadful word. “I am first Master,” I screamed.

  I suppose I must have looked dreadful, waving my arms and shouting, for he shrank back into my chair, and covered his face with his hands. But I could hear him muttering.

  “It isn’t true,” he was whispering to himself. “Reason and science—everything I have lived by—are against it. I’m not seeing a ghost. I utterly deny that I am seeing a ghost.”

  These words affected me dreadfully. I felt as though every fibre and bone of my body were melting into something insubstantial, and my control of myself deserted me utterly. “Ghost!” I screamed; “ghost yourself! Ghost yourself!” But even as I protested a fearful sickness of doubt was mounting to my heart. I needed help, not for the madman in my chair but for myself. I pushed the bell for the Porter; that way lay sanity; an old army man would know what to do.

  The Porter came faster than I could have hoped—but what a Porter! Six feet four of ex-naval man, a bo’sun if ever I saw one. He went at once to the figure in my chair.

  “I heard you shouting, sir,” said he; “anything I can do?”

  “Get rid of that thing there by the fireplace,” said the impostor, pointing toward me, but keeping his eyes closed.

  “Nothing there, sir,” said the Porter. “Better let me help you out into the air, sir. Terrible smoky fire you have today.”

  Nothing there! The words struck me like a heavy blow, and I swooned.

  How long it was I do not know, but some time later I was aroused to find Mr. McCracken helping me to my feet.

  “Better let me help you out into the air, sir,” he said. “Terrible smoky fire you have today.”

  “Yes,” I said; “we must ask the Bursar for some seasoned wood.”

  The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees

  Some of you may have wondered what became of our College Ghost. Because we had a ghost, and there are people in this room who saw him. He appeared briefly last year at the College Dance on the stairs up to this Hall, and at the Gaudy he was seen to come and go through that door, while I was reading an account of another strange experience of mine. I did not see him then, but several people did so. What became of him?

  I know. I am responsible for his disappearance. I think I may say without unwarrantable spiritual pride that I laid him. And, as is always the case in these psychic experiences, it was not without great cost to myself.

  When first the ghost was reported to me, I assumed that we had a practical joker within the College. Yet the nature of the joke was against any such conclusion. We had had plenty of jokes—socks in the pool, fish in the pool, funny notices beside the pool, pumpkins on the roofs, ringing the bell at strange hours—all the wild exuberance, the bubbling, ungovernable high spirits and gossamer fantasy one associates with the Graduate School of the University of Toronto. The wit of a graduate student is like champagne—Canadian champagne—but this joke had a different flavour, a dash of wormwood, in its nature.

  You see, the ghost was so unlike a joker. He did not appear in a white sheet and shout “Boo!” He spoke to no one, though a Junior Fellow—the one who met him on the stairs—told me that the Ghost passed him, softly laying a finger on its lips to caution him to silence. On its lips, did I say? Now this is of first importance: it laid its finger where its lips doubtless were, but its lips could not be seen, nor any of its features. Everybody who saw it said that the Ghost had a head, and a place where its face ought to be—but no face that anybody could see or recognize or remember. Of course there are scores of people like that around the university, but they are not silent; they are clamouring to establish some sort of identity; the Ghost cherished his anonymity, his facelessness. So, perversely I determined to find out who he was.

  The first time I spotted him was in the Common Room. I went in from my Study after midnight to turn out the lights, and he was just to be seen going along the short passage to the Upper Library. I gave chase, but when I reached the Upper Library he had gone, and when I ran into the entry, he was not to be seen. But at last I was on his trail, and I kept my eyes open from that time.

  All of this took place, you should know, last Christmas, between the Gaudy and New Year. Our Gaudy last year was on December the seventeenth; I first saw the Ghost, and lost him, on the twenty-first. He came again on the twenty-third. I woke in the night wi
th an odd sensation that someone was watching me, and as this was in my own bedroom I was very angry; if indeed it were a joker he lacked all discretion. I heard a stirring and—I know this sounds like the shabbiest kind of nineteenth century romance, but I swear it is true—I heard a sigh, and then on the landing outside my door, a soft explosion, and a thud, as though something had fallen. I ran out of my room, but there was nothing to be seen. Over Christmas Day and Boxing Day I had no news of the Ghost, but on the twenty-eighth of December matters came to a head.

  December the twenty-eighth, as some of you may know, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, traditionally the day on which King Herod slaughtered the children of Bethlehem. In the Italian shops in this city you can buy very pretty little babies, made of sugar, and eat them, in grisly commemoration of Herod’s whimsical act.

  I was sitting in my study at about eleven o’clock that night, reflectively nibbling at the head of a sugarbaby and thinking about money, when I noticed that the lights were on in the Round Room. It troubles me to see electric current wasted, so I set out for the Round Room in a bad humour. As I walked across the quad, it seemed that the glow from the skylight in the Round Room was more blue and cold than it should be, and seemed to waver. I thought it must be a trick of the snow, which was falling softly, and the moonlight which played so prettily upon it.

  I unlocked the doors, walked into the Round Room, and there he was, standing under the middle of the skylight.

  He bowed courteously. “So you have come at last,” said he.

  “I have come to turn out the lights,” said I, and realized at once that the lights were not on. The room glowed with a fitful bluish light, not disagreeable but inexpressibly sad. And the stranger spoke in a voice which was sad, yet beautiful.

  It was his voice which first told me who he was. It had a compelling, ‘cello-like note which was unlike anything I was accustomed to hear inside the College, though our range is from the dispirited quack of Ontario to the reverberant splendours of Nigeria. The magnificent voice came from the part of his head where a face should be—but there was no face there, only a shadow, which seemed to change a little in density as I looked at it. It was unquestionably the Ghost!

  This was no joker, no disguised Junior Fellow. He was our Ghost, and like every proper ghost he was transporting and other-worldly, rather than merely alarming. I felt no fear as I looked at him, but I was deeply uneasy.

  “You have come at last,” said the Ghost. “I have waited for you long—but of course you are busy. Every professor in this university is busy. He is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth. But none has time for an act of mercy.”

  It pleased me to hear the Ghost quote Scripture; if we must have apparitions, by all means let them be literate.

  “You have come here for mercy?” said I.

  “I have come for the ordeal, which is also the ultimate mercy,” he replied.

  “But we don’t go in for ordeals,” said I. “Perhaps you can tell me a little more plainly what it is you want?”

  “Is this not the Graduate School?” said he.

  “No indeed,” said I; “this is a graduate college, but the offices of the Graduate School are elsewhere.”

  “Don’t trifle with me,” said the Ghost sternly. “Many things are growing very dim to me, but I have not wholly lost my sense of place; this is the Graduate School; this is the Examination Room. And yet”—the voice faltered – “it seemed to me that it used to be much higher in the air, much less handsome than this. I remember stairs—very many stairs…”

  “You had been climbing stairs when you came to me in my bedroom,” said I.

  “Yes,” he said eagerly. “I climbed the stairs—right to the top—and went into the Examination Room—and there you lay in bed, and I knew I had missed it again. And so there was nothing for it but to kill myself again.”

  That settled it. Now I knew who he was, and I had a pretty shrewd idea where, so far as he was concerned, we both were.

  Every university has its secrets—things which are nobody’s fault, but which are open to serious misunderstanding. Thirty or more years ago a graduate student was ploughed on his Ph.D. oral; he must have expected something of the kind because when he had been called before his examiners and given the bad news he stepped out on the landing and shot himself through the head. It is said, whether truly or not I cannot tell, that since that time nobody is allowed to proceed to the presentation and defence of his thesis unless there is a probability amounting to a certainty that he will get his degree.

  Here, obviously, was that unfortunate young man, standing with me in the Round Room. Why here? Because, before Massey College was built, the Graduate School was housed in an old dwelling on this land, and the Examination Room was at the top of the house, as nearly as possible where my bedroom is now. Before that time the place had been the home of one of the Greek-letter fraternities—the Mu Kau Mu, I believe it was called.

  “The Examination Room you knew has gone,” said I. “If you are looking for it, I fear you must go to Teperman’s wrecking yard, for whatever remains of it is there.”

  “But is this not an Examination Room?” said the Ghost. I nodded. “Then I beg you, by all that is merciful, to examine me,” he cried, and to my embarrassed astonishment, threw himself at my feet.

  “Examine you for what?” I said.

  “For my Ph.D.”, wailed the Ghost, and the eerie, agonized tone in which it uttered those commonplace letters made me, for the first time, afraid. “I must have it. I knew no rest when I was in the world of men, because I was seeking it; I know no rest now, as I linger on the threshold of another life, because I lack it. I shall never be at peace without it.”

  I have often heard it said that the Ph.D. is a vastly overvalued degree, but I had not previously thought that it might stand between a man and his eternal rest. I was becoming as agitated as the Ghost.

  “My good creature,” said I, rather emotionally, “if I can be of any assistance—”

  “You can,” cried the Ghost, clawing at the knees of my trousers with its transparent hands; “examine me, I beg of you. Examine me now and set me free. I’m quite ready.”

  “But, just a moment,” said I; “the papers—the copies of your thesis—”

  “All ready,” said the Ghost, in triumph. And, though I swear that they were not there before, I now saw that all the circle of tables in the Round Room was piled high with those dismal, unappetizing volumes—great wads of typewritten octavo paper—which are Ph.D. theses.

  “Be reasonable,” said I. “I don’t suppose for a minute I can examine you. What is your field?”

  “What’s yours?” said the Ghost, and if a Ghost can speak cunningly, that is exactly what this one did now.

  “English literature,” I said; “more precisely, the drama of the nineteenth century, with special emphasis on the popular drama of the transpontine London theatres between 1800 and 1850.”

  Most people find that discouraging, and change the subject. But the Ghost positively frisked to one of the heaps, drew out an especially thick thesis, and handed it to me.

  “Shall I sit here?” he asked, pointing to the red chair, which, as you know, has a place of special prominence in that room.

  “By no means,” said I, shocked by such an idea.

  “Oh, I had so hoped I might,” said the Ghost.

  “My dear fellow, you have been listening to University gossip,” said I. “There are people who pretend that we put the examinee in that chair and sit around the room in a ring, baiting him till he bursts into tears. It is the sort of legend in which scientists and other mythomaniacs take delight. No, no; if you will go away for a few hours—say until tomorrow at ten o’clock—I shall have the room set up for an examination. You shall have a soft chair, cheek by jowl with your examiners, with lots of cigarettes, unlimited water to drink, a fan, and a trained nurse in attendance to take you to the Examinees’ W.C. and bring you back a
gain, should the need occur. We are very well aware here that Ph.D. candidates are delicate creatures, subject to unaccountable metaphysical ills—”

  The Ghost broke in, impatiently. “Rubbish,” he said; “I’m quite ready. Let’s get to work. You sit in the red chair. I’m perfectly happy to stand. I think I’m pretty well prepared”—and as he said this I swear that something like a leer passed over the shadow that should have been a face—”and I’m ready as soon as you are.”

  There was nothing for it. The Ghost had taken command. I sat down in the red chair—my chair—and opened the thesis. Prolegomena to the Study of the Christ Symbol in the Plays of Thomas Egerton Wilks, I read, and my heart, which had been sinking for the last few moments now plunged so suddenly that I almost lost consciousness. I have heard of Wilks—it is my job to have heard of him—but of his fifty-odd melodramas, farces and burlesque extravaganzas I have not read a line. However, I have my modest store of professor-craft. I opened the thesis, riffled through the pages, hummed and hawed a little, made a small mark in the margin of one page, and said—”Well, suppose for a beginning, you give me a general outline of your argument.”

  He did.

  Forty-five minutes later, when I could get a word in, I asked him just where he thought the Christ symbol made its first appearance in My Wife’s Dentist, or The Balcony Beau which is one of Wilks’ dreary farces.

  He told me.

  Before he had finished he had also given me more knowledge than I really wanted about the Christ symbol in Woman’s Love or Kate Wynsley the Cottage Girl, Raffaelle the Reprobate, or the Secret Mission and the Signet Ring, The Ruby Ring, or The Murder at Sadlers Wells, and another farce named, more simply, Bamboozling.

  By this time I felt that I had been sufficiently bamboozled myself, so I asked him to retire, while the examination board—me, me, and only me, as the old song puts it—considered his case. When I was alone I sought to calm myself with a drink of water, and after a decent interval I called him back.