The Night of the Three Kings

A fortnight ago I prepared a Ghost Story to read to you on this occasion. It was a lame affair, because I had to manufacture the whole thing. For three years at this time I have told you of things that really happened—of supernatural visitations to the College which I deeply regretted (because being haunted is considered unseemly in an institution dedicated to truth and scholarship) but which nevertheless provided me with a story to tell. This year I waited, half hopeful that another ghost would turn up, half fearful that our corporate image might receive yet another brutal blow from the unseen world. As nothing happened, I wrote a story, as I said, to pass a few minutes this evening; perhaps I had better be quite frank and admit that I stole a story out of an old volume of Chums, and adapted it clumsily to a College setting. I was sorry for the plagiarism, but there seemed no other way out. And then—

But it would not do to raise your expectation too high. It is not of a haunting that I shall tell you tonight. Rather, I must inform you of a haunting that is yet to come. I was there when it was planned. Indeed I—but let me not anticipate.

It happened last night, which as those of you who live in the College know, was one of our High Table nights. There had been guests at dinner, and a great deal of general conversation, and finally an adjournment to the rooms of one of our Senior Fellows for one of those convivial gatherings which are such an enlarging aspect of College life. When the guests had gone, I walked about the College, as I often do on such occasions, expecting to finish with a stroll in the quadrangle. A little fresh air helps one to organize one’s recollection of the brilliant and pithy observations on life with which High Table conversation invariably teems. I began with a tour of the lower floor—the sous sol as Professor Finch so elegantly calls it; we deplore the word “basement”. And as I was walking through the corridor on the north side of the building, I smelled, unmistakably, the aroma of a cigar.

Nothing in that, you will say. That is what I said. Indeed, I had been smoking a cigar myself not long before, and traces of it may yet have hung about me. So I went on, humming the Antiphon for the Day, which as you will recall, is the one that begins O Sapientia. But as I was peeping into the Chapel, an uneasiness began to assert itself. A cigar—but not any cigar that I had smoked. A cigar, rather, that raised a question in the mind’s nose. What was that scent? I sat down in the Chapel and mused. Then it came to me; it was the fragrance of a Hoyo de Monterey, and it was quite fresh. Well!

I see that you share my astonishment. Still, in case there are a few of the ladies present who have led very sheltered lives, or who perhaps have never known any really first-rate men, I shall explain. The Hoyo de Monterey was certainly one of the finest cigars ever manufactured, but it was exported only to England and none has been made since 1939!

I retraced my steps. I paced up and down the north corridor sniffing like a great hound. Who had a Hoyo de Monterey? Who, having such a treasure, was smoking it after midnight in our sous sol? I sniffed… and sniffed… and my sniffs brought me to a locked door.

You know the door; it is to what will be called the Muniment Room when it is completed. It is the room which will contain the personal papers of our Visitor. Great quantities of those papers are in there now, in roped and sealed filing cabinets, waiting to be catalogued. Who was smoking a Hoyo de Monterey in there, among those inflammable papers? The Visitor himself? Doesn’t smoke cigars. The Librarian? Smokes a pipe, of what had better be called a characteristic odour. It was my duty to unravel this mystery. I have a master-key. I unlocked the door.

There he was, the scoundrel, crouched behind a row of filing cabinets. These cabinets are sealed, but he appeared to have broken a seal and was rooting in a drawer. The Hoyo de Monterey, in all its tawny magnificence, was nestling between the silkiest moustache and the most elegantly spiked Navy beard you ever saw; he was wearing the full dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, and on top of the filing cabinet rested a gold-laced admiral’s fore-and-aft hat. He spotted me. I insist upon the term; he did not see, or observe, or take notice; he spotted me.

“You, there,” he called, much more loudly than was necessary in a small room; “do you work here?”

Of course I do work here. I work like a dog—nay, like a Trojan. But one of the necessary fictions of Massey College—what Ibsen would have called the Life-Giving Lie—is that I am a person of limitless scholarly leisure. I replied sternly.

“I am the Master of this College,” said I. “What do you think you are doing?”

“I don’t think anything about it, my good man,” said he. “I’m looking for a valuable stamp.”

I do not like being called “my good man”; in the particular minority of which I am a member, it is a discriminatory and offensive term.

“Who are you?” said I. But I knew. Already I knew.

My question made him hesitate for a moment. “Oh—I’m Baron Killarney,” he replied, trying to make it sound like John Smith.

“So you are,” said I, courteously, I hope, “and you are also the late George the Fifth, King of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, and Emperor of India. Now sir, what are you doing snooping in Mr. Massey’s papers?”

He looked at me closely for the first time. Never have I looked into eyes of so bright a blue.

“You’re not as big a fool as you look,” said he. I acknowledged the compliment with a half-bow; I didn’t think it called for a whole bow. “Well, I wrote a letter to Vincent Massey in 1934 and my ass of a secretary put a very valuable stamp on it. I was keeping the stamp, which had a unique reversed border—only one of its kind—and I suppose the fella hooked it to save himself trouble. I couldn’t sack him—he was a Balliol man—but I made his life a perfect hell till he quit. And I swore I’d get that stamp back in this world or the next. Well, as you see, I didn’t get it in this world. And only now have I found out where the letter is. Give me my stamp.”

“I haven’t got your beastly stamp,” said I, “and I think you are an impostor. Royalty never stamps letters. Everybody knows that.”

“Do they, b’God!” said he. “I always stamped mine. I liked stamps. Why, I even designed a few stamps. Now, where’s my stamp?”

“I suppose it has been thrown away,” said I; “nobody files letters in envelopes.”

“That shows how much you know,” said the King, with what I thought quite unnecessary rudeness. But then I remembered that he had been a Navy man all his life, and forgave him. He went on: “You must have heard about filing: what you do is this—you cut open your letter with an ivory paperknife and when you have read it you replace it in its envelope, and make a concise précis of what the letter says on the envelope. Then you chuck it into your locker. That way you preserve the stamp. That’s what I always did. That’s what every sane man does. So my stamp must be in here.”

“But as you see,” said I, “these letters are not filed in envelopes.”

A look of suspicion came into the King’s blazing eyes, and he became as frantic as a man in the uniform of a full Admiral can possibly be. “Then he’s filed the envelopes separately,” he roared; “obviously because he was a collector! Where are the envelopes?”

“I don’t know,” said I.

“Then help me find them,” he shouted.

“I cannot prevent you, as a monarch and a ghost, from doing as you please,” said I, “but you must not ask me to join in rummaging through our Visitor’s papers; it is contrary to my duty to Mr. Massey, to the College, to the Librarian—”