"I Shall Most Likely Be Out on the Links": Golf As Metaphor in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2004 by Thompson, Terry W

Once unpacked at the venerable Globe Inn in Burnstow, the Professor spends "the greater part of the day following his arrival" out on the golf course "improving his game," but on his leisurely walk back from the links that afternoon, his precisely laid plans for a quiet and relaxing fortnight of reading, writing, and golfing take an unscheduled-and terrifying-detour (78). While strolling among some ancient ruins near the course, he discovers a bronze whistle, "about four inches long, and evidently of some considerable age," hidden deep in a hole among the decayed remains of what was once a sacred place to the extinct Knights Templar as well as to thousands of years' worth of Britain's earlier inhabitants, barbarians all to the Professor-untutored, quasi-literate people who did not know of modern science and rational inquiry and critical thought (79). Ever the fearless investigator, the sober empiricist, and the self-appointed debunker of puerile superstition, Parkins eschews all dire warnings from the locals and keeps and cleans the curious whistle. On one side of it, after some scraping, he discovers the ominous phrase "'Who is this who is coming?'" written in block Latin (81).

Although "it may not be quite prudent" to meddle in the supernatural realm lest some "formidable visitants" be aroused (James, "Stories I Have Tried to Write" 362), eventually Professor Parkins cannot resist the temptation. He blows the whistle and thereby summons forth a horrifying being, a spirit of something long dead, something dark and dreadful and untempered by reason, logic, science, modernism, or cutting-edge theory in any discipline. The thing that is animated by the careless blast on the whistle is neither man nor god, flesh nor blood, Victorian nor Edwardian. It is a ghastly and primal "figure in pale, fluttering draperies," some frightfully "ill-defined" being from the netherworld of dreams and nightmares, dark places where hard science has no purchase and modern theory is irrelevant ("Oh, Whistle" 83). All the rational thought in the material world will not deter this unwittingly evoked avatar of "some stubbornly unexpunged faith," will not return the sinister wraith to its clammy resting place amid the ancient Templar ruins (Leithauser 13). The headstrong Professor learns the hard way that "such creatures are easier summoned than eluded" (Sullivan 69).

When the horrid specter corners him in his room at midnight and all seems lost, Parkins is delivered at the last moment by a fellow guest at the lodge, a retired army officer named Colonel Wilson, a gruff man of the world who has seen the occult at work in the dusky places of the globe, has seen firsthand the dire powers that sometimes dwell in darkness. The non-cloistered, non-academic Colonel rescues the hapless pedagogue from his otherworldly tormenter and sends the dark specter back to its resting place; the Colonel-a man of action, not theory-then goes down to the beach and hurls the offending whistle "as far into the sea as a brawny arm could send it" (James, "Oh, Whistle" 90).