As I swooned the scarlet lips of the Dickens bust parted in a terrible smile, and its beard stirred in a hiccup of repletion.

It was a few days later—last Friday, indeed—when a young colleague in the Department of English—a very promising Joyce man—said to me, “It is astounding how Dickens studies are picking up; quite a few theses have been registered in the past three months.” I knew he despised Dickens and all the Victorians, so I was not surprised when he added, “Wonderful how the old wizard keeps life in him! Upon what meat doth this our Charlie feed, that he is grown so great?”

He smiled, pleased at his little literary joke. But I did not smile, because I knew.

Yes, I knew.

Any invasion of this College by uncanny and irrational elements is a source of distress to me. We have here an institution devoted to scholarship; we toil in Massey College to raise what I like to think of as a Temple of Reason. But, alas, from time to time I am forced to recognize that nowhere, not even here, is Apollo the sole shaper of human existence. Dionysian forces are also at work. But there is one element in our college community which, I consoled myself until recently, had never suffered painful invasions from the realm of unreason; that was our College Choir.

They have been with us from the beginning. A merry, highhearted group, they have for eight years welcomed our summers with their song, lent a sombre splendour to our Chapel services, and, on such occasions as this, they have marked the season with the widest variety of Christmas music. Nor have they stood apart from the ideal of scholarship which is the chief purpose of the College. They recover, from manuscripts or rare publications, choral music which has been unjustly neglected; they dust it off, and bring it into the world again. And that is just how this whole grotesque incident began.

Many of you, I know, find delight in the music of Henry Purcell, who is still regarded as the greatest of English composers. He wrote superbly for the human voice, because he was himself a singer, and in his time, as Organist of the Chapel Royal, he drew great singers around him. One of these was a remarkable bass called John Gostling; not only was his voice of dark beauty, but it was of extraordinary compass. His lowest note was an F—not the F below the bass clef, which any bass can sing, but the F an octave below that—which only a very few exceptional basses can sing. Now, our organist, Giles Bryant, discovered an anthem of Purcell’s in MS in the British Museum; it had quite passed out of the choral repertory because of its exceptional difficulty. It is a setting of the passage from the Book of Job which contains the words, “He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: He maketh the sea like a pot of ointment.” Obviously Purcell had written this for his favourite John Gostling, because when the sea boils like a pot the bass soloist is called upon to perform an exceedingly long trill on that low F, and when the sea becomes like a pot of ointment an excruciatingly difficult legato passage in the deepest registers of the bass voice is called for, to produce an effect of heaving greasiness which would, properly performed, arouse nausea in every musically sensitive hearer.

Giles Bryant found it last summer, and he and Gordon Wry longed with all their musical souls to revive it in our Chapel. But where were they to find the necessary bass?

We have some good basses, but there have been few Gostlings. Our choir directors were in an anguish of frustrated desire, and the refrain of their conversation was: “If only Igor were here now!”

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 15th 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 makes 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.”