FIFTY yards to the rear of the dwelling-house the studio half hid itself
amongst young elms and laurel bushes, at its outside rather like a
granary, internally like a chapel, the timbers of the roof exposed and
umber-stained, with a sort of clerestory for the top light, a few casts
of life-size statues in the corners, and two or three large bas-reliefs
of Madonnas and the like by Donatello helping out the ecclesiastical
illusion. It was the last place to associate with the sound of drums,
and yet I sat for twenty minutes sometimes stunned, sometimes fascinated,
by the uproar of asses’ skin. The sculptor who played might, by one less
unconventional, be looked upon as seriously sacrificing his dignity in a
performance so incongruous with his age and situation. But I have always
loved the whimsical; I am myself considered somewhat eccentric, and there
is a _rapport_ between artistic souls that permits—indeed, induces—some
display of fantasy or folly when they get into each other’s society apart
from the intolerant folks who would think it lunacy for a man of over
middle age to indulge in the contre-dance of “Petronella” at a
harvest-home, or display any accomplishment with the jew’s-harp.
Urquhart, at the time when I sat to him, was a man of sixty years or
thereabout; yet he marched up and down the floor of his workshop with the
step of a hill-bred lad, his whole body sharing the rhythm of his
beating, his clean-shaven face with the flush of a winter apple, the more
noticeable in contrast with the linen smock he used as an overall while
at work among his clay. The deep old-fashioned side-drum swinging at his
groin seemed to have none of a drum’s monotony. It expressed (at all
events to me that have some fancy) innumerable ecstasies and
emotions—alarms, entreaties, defiances, gaieties, and regrets, the
dreadful sentiment of forlorn hopes, the murmur of dubious battalions in
countries of ambush. The sound of the drum is, unhappily, beyond
typographical expression, though long custom makes us complacently accept
“rat-a-tat-tat” or “rub-a-dub-dub” as quite explanatory of its every
phrase and accent; but I declare the sculptor brought from it the very
pang of love. Alternated with the martial uproar of rouses, retreats,
chamades, and marches that made the studio shake, it rose into the
clerestory and lingered in the shades of the umber roof, this gentle
combination of taps and _roulades_, like the appeal of one melodiously
seeking admission at his mistress’s door.
“You had no idea that I handled sticks so terrifically?” said he,
relinquishing the instrument at last, and returning to his proper task of
recording my lineaments in the preparatory clay.
“You play marvellously, Mr Urquhart,” I said, astonished. “I had no idea
you added the drum to your—to your accomplishments.”
“Well, there you have me revealed—something of a compliment to you, I
assure you, for I do not beat my drum for everybody. If I play well it
is, after all, no wonder, for with a side-drum and a pair of sticks I
earned a living for seven years and travelled among the most notable
scenes of Europe.”
“So?” I said, and waited. He pinched the clay carefully to make the
presentment of the lobe of my ear, and stood back from his work a moment
to study the effect.
“Yes,” he said, “few people know of it; and perhaps it is as well, for it
might not be counted wholly to the credit of an R.S.A. if it were known;
but for seven years I played the side-drum in the ranks of the 71st. I
played from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, at Vimiera, Corunna, Talavera,
Busaco, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos, Quatre Bras, and Waterloo. Lord! the
very names go dirling through my heart. They were happy days, I assure
you, when I—when I—”
“Thumped the skin,” I ventured foolishly, as he paused to make a line of
some importance on my effigy.
He corrected me with a vexed air.
“Thumped, my dear sir, is scarcely the word I should use under the
circumstances. That hackneyed verb of every dolt who has neither ear nor
imagination should not be chosen by a fellow-artist, a man of letters, to
describe the roll of the drum. My happiest days, as I was about to say,
were when I carried Kildalton’s silver drum, for which this one is but an
indifferent substitute.”
“Well, at least,” said I lamely, “the drummer of the 71st has gone pretty
far in another art than music.”
“It is very good of you to say so,” remarked Urquhart, with quiet dignity
and an old-fashioned bow. “I trust, by-and-by, with assiduity to become
as good a sculptor as I was a drummer.”
“How did you happen to join the Army?” I asked, anxious to have him
follow up so promising an introduction.
“Because I was a fool. Mind, I do not regret it, for I had at the same
time, in my folly, such memorable and happy experiences as quite
improperly (as you might think) never come to the doorstep of the very
wise. Still, I joined the Army in a fool’s escapade, resenting what
seemed to me the insufferable restrictions of a Scottish manse. My
father was incumbent of a parish, half Highland, half Lowland. At
sixteen I came home from Edinburgh and my first session of the University
there; at sixteen and a half I mutinied against sixpence a week of
pocket-money and the prospect of the Divinity Hall for one (as I felt)
designed by Heaven for Art, and with a borrowed name and an excellently
devised tale of orphanhood, took a bounty in the territorial regiment.
They put me to the drums. They professed to find me so well suited there
that they kept me at them all the time I was a King’s man, in spite of
all my protests, and there, if you are in the mood for a story, I had an
experience.
“The corps had two drums of silver, one of which was entrusted to me.
They were called ‘Kildalton’s drums,’ in compliment to their donor, from
whose lands no fewer than four companies of the 71st had been embodied.
They were handsome instruments, used only for stately occasions, and
mine, at least, so much engaged my fancy that I liked to keep it shining
like a mirror; and the cords and tassels of silk—pleated, as we were
told, by Kildalton’s daughter—appealed so much to the dandiacal in me, I
fretted to have them wet on a parade. You can fancy, therefore, my
distress when my darling was subjected to the rough work and hazards of
the sack of Ciudad Rodrigo.
“Our corps on that occasion was in the Light Division. While Picton’s
men, away to our left and nearer the river, were to attack the great
breach made in the ramparts by our guns on the Tessons, we were to rush
into a lesser breach farther east. The night was black and cold to that
degree I could not see the fortress at a hundred yards, and could
scarcely close my fingers on the drum-sticks as I beat for the advance of
Napier’s storming party. The walls we threatened burst in tongues of
flame and peals of thunder. Grape-shot tore through our three hundred as
we crossed the ditch; but in a moment we were in the gap, the bayonets
busy as it were among wine-skins, the footing slimy with blood, and a
single drum (my comrade fell mortally wounded in the ditch) beat inside
the walls for the column outside to follow us.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, impatient, for Urquhart drew back abstracted,
checking his tale to survey the effect of his last touch upon my
eyebrows.
He smiled.
“Why,” said he, “I hardly thought it would interest you,” and then went
on deliberately.
“I need not tell you,” he said, “how quick was our conquering of the
French, once we had got through the walls. My drum was not done echoing
back from Sierra de Francisca (as I think the name was), when the place
was ours. And then—and then—there came the sack! Our men went mad.
These were days when rapine and outrage were to be expected from all
victorious troops; there might be some excuse for hatred of the Spaniard
on the part of our men, whose comrades, wounded, had been left to starve
at Talavera—but surely not for this. They gorged with wine, they swarmed
in lawless squads through every street and alley; swept through every
dwelling, robbing and burning; the night in a while was white with fires,
and the town was horrible with shrieks and random musket-shots and
drunken songs.
“Some time in the small hours of the morning, trying to find my own
regiment, I came with my drum to the head of what was doubtless the most
dreadful street that night in Europe. It was a lane rather than a
street, unusually narrow, with dwellings on either side so high that it
had some semblance to a mountain pass. At that hour, if you will credit
me, it seemed the very gullet of the Pit: the far end of it in flames,
the middle of it held by pillagers who fought each other for the plunder
from the houses, while from it came the most astounding noises—oaths in
English and Portuguese, threats, entreaties, and commands, the shrieks of
women, the crackling of burning timber, occasionally the firing of
weapons, and through it all, constant, sad beyond expression, a deep low
murmur, intensely melancholy, made up of the wail of the sacked city.
“As I stood listening some one called out, ‘Drummer!’
“I turned, to find there had just come up a general officer and his
staff, with a picket of ten men. The General himself stepped forward at
my salute and put his hand on my drum, that shone brightly in the light
of the conflagrations.
“‘What the deuce do you mean, sir,’ said he with heat, ‘by coming into
action with my brother’s drum? You know very well it is not for these
occasions.’
“‘The ordinary drums of the regiment were lost on Monday last, sir,’ I
said, ‘when we were fording the Agueda through the broken ice.’ And
then, with a happy thought, I added, ‘Kildalton’s drums are none the
worse for taking part in the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo. This was the first
drum through the walls.’
“He looked shrewdly at me and gave a little smile. ‘H’m,’ he muttered,
‘perhaps not, perhaps not, after all. My brother would have been
pleased, if he had been alive, to know his drums were here this night.
Where is the other one?’
“‘The last I saw of it, sir,’ I answered, ‘was in the ditch, and Colin
Archibald, corporal, lying on his stomach over it.’
“‘Dead?’
“‘Dead, I think, sir.’
“‘H’m!’ said the General. ‘I hope my brother’s drum’s all right, at any
rate.’ He turned and cried up the picket. ‘I want you, drummer,’ he
said, ‘to go up that lane with this picket, playing the assembly. You
understand? These devils fighting and firing there have already shot at
three of my officers, and are seemingly out of their wits. We will give
them a last chance. I don’t deny there is danger in what I ask you to
do, but it has to be done. The men in there are mostly of Pack’s
Portuguese and the dregs of our own corps. If they do not come out with
you I shall send in a whole regiment to them and batter their brains out
against the other end, if the place is, as I fancy, a _cul-de-sac_.
March!’
“I went before the picket with my drum rattling and my heart in my mouth.
The pillagers came round us jeering, others assailed us more seriously by
throwing from upper windows anything they could conveniently lay hand on
(assuming it was too large or too valueless to pocket), but we were
little the worse till in a lamentable moment of passion one of the picket
fired his musket at a window. A score of pieces flashed back in
response, and five of our company fell, while we went at a double for the
end of the lane.
“‘By Heaven!’ cried the sergeant when we reached it, ‘here’s a fine
thing!’ The General had been right—it was a _cul-de-sac_! There was
nothing for us then but to return.
“You have never been in action; you cannot imagine,” Urquhart went on,
“the exasperating influence of one coward in a squad that is facing great
danger. There were now, you must know, but six of us, hot and reckless
with anger, and prepared for anything—all but one, and he was in the fear
of death. As I went before the picket drumming the assembly and the
sergeant now beside me, this fellow continually kicked my heels, he kept
so close behind. I turned my head, and found that he marched crouching,
obviously eager to have a better man than himself sheltering him from any
approaching bullet.
“‘You cowardly dog!’ I cried, stepping aside, ‘come out from behind me
and die like a man!’ I could take my oath the wretch was sobbing! It
made me sick to hear him, but I was saved more thought of it by the rush
of some women across the lane, shrieking as they ran, with half a company
at least of Portuguese at their heels. With a shout we were after Pack’s
scoundrels, up a wide pend close (as we say in Scotland) that led into a
courtyard, where we found the valorosas prepared to defend the position
with pistol and sword. A whole battalion would have hesitated to attack
such odds, and I will confess we swithered for a moment. A shot came
from the dark end of the entry and tore through both ends of my drum.
“‘We’re wretched fools to be here at all,’ said lily-liver, plainly
whimpering, and at that I threw down my outraged instrument, snatched his
musket from him, and charged up the close with the other four. The
Portuguese ran like rabbits; for the time, at least, the women were safe,
and I had a remorse for my beloved drum.
“I left the others to follow, hurried into the lane, and found the
poltroon was gone, my drum apparently with him. Ciudad Rodrigo was
darker now, for the fires were burning low. It was less noisy, too; and
I heard half-way up the lane the sound of a single musket-shot. I ran
between the tall tenements; the glint of bright metal filled me with hope
and apprehension. A man lay in the gutter beside my drum, and a
Portuguese marauder, who fled at my approach, stood over him with a
knife.
“The man in the gutter was the General, with his brother’s drum slung to
him, and the sticks in his hands, as if he had been playing. He was
unconscious, with a bullet through his shoulder.”