attached to Allan’s residence. He kept no servant but Murdoch, who
was better at twisting flies than making beds, and could stalk game
more easily that he could cook it. The house itself remained dreary
even when flooded by the five thousand acres of sunshine included in
the property. It looked what it was--the half-dismantled mansion of a
line of fighters and spendthrifts. Even at night, Allan’s red family
claret and silver-sconce lights--sole heirlooms besides a lock of the
Pretender’s hair--were as insufficient to clear the gauntness of the
atmosphere as the burning sunset and white starlight to drive the
evening mists from the hills.
But our days were largely spent in the open air, and evening found
us too tired to care whether our shelter was uncanny or not. Matters
ghostly were drowned in the steam of smoking cakes and trout baked
so fresh that their red spots showed like red wax under the melting
butter. And now that the old days have passed away and that the iron
has swept over our home life, it is good to look back and enjoy their
memory.
By the summer of last year, Allan had completed his second year at
Oxford, and I was enjoying my third successive holiday for his and
his estate’s benefit. We had fished together through a sun-smitten
June, and filled a rush basket daily with peacock-coloured troutlings.
About the middle of July, a strange thing broke the lazy monotony of
life--the first, and I hope the last, of its kind to come to me.
We had finished our supper one night, and I was sitting alone at the
open casement of the dining-room, watching the wonderful twilight night
that doubles summertime for those who live in northern latitude. It was
so light that the birds were stirring and calling on the moors around.
So full was the air of the elusive, haunting sounds of the Highlands
that I found myself listening to a steady drumming beyond the chestnuts
in the avenue without remembering exactly how or when it started. It
was a distinct tap-tap-tap, followed by a sequence of rub-a-dubbing,
and then a full drum symphony; a simple old tune, but, coming in the
white night, it sounded eerie beyond words.
For the moment I could only imagine it was some kind of monstrous
woodpecker, and I went upstairs to ask Allan if there were such a
species. He laughed loud at my ornithology, and in a burst of rank
college wit mixed a long name out of the Latin for owl and my own
patronymic for the new midnight bird, discovered by a south Briton
travelling in high latitude.
But his mirth quieted when I insisted that it sounded like a drum. He
seemed startled, and jerked down the creaky stairway. A minute later he
rang for Murdoch, and I heard him talking in a calm undertone, which I
confess did not prepare me for the quaking tones of his gillie’s reply.
It did not sound like the brawny mountaineer I had known for weeks
without suspecting a chink in his heart. But there could be no doubt,
judging from his voice, that Murdoch was exceedingly afraid. And fear
in the unsubtle is not as the fear of the educated--it is something
far more primitive. A college man can temper his fears with scepticism,
but an honest, superstitious gillie is without help. Murdoch was as
changed as the hills in winter. He trembled, and the sweat ran off his
face.
“Oh, Master Allan, Master Allan, I know well that drumming! It can only
be the Drummer of Gordonmuir that I was telling to you.”
“Holy God!” said Allan. “Not so soon again! Who can he come for now?
I’m not nearly old enough.”
“Heaven will need to watch over you day and night, my poor Master
Allan,” moaned Murdoch.
This sounded strange to me. I had never heard Allan invoke his Creator
before, for he had streaks of Scotch righteousness remaining in his
otherwise untheological nature. He turned around as I descended the
stairs.
“Come in here and listen!” he said.
The drumming had ceased.
“I don’t hear a sound of it. Perhaps it was imagination,” I said,
listening carefully.
“No, I mean listen to the story,” he answered quickly. “But first tell
me honestly what you made of it.”
“Well, Allan,” I could only reply, “I’ve already told you that since
there is no species of woodpecker that drills into Scotch timber
at midnight with a sound you can hear a mile off, it struck me as
remarkably like a drum.”
Allan stood at the open window for a moment before shoving the casement
down with a jerk.
“That’s what it is exactly, and probably my aunt is dead now.” And he
left me in the room with this enigma, in order to comfort Murdoch, who
was on his knees outside, muttering what sounded uncommonly like spells
against witchcraft.
He sent Murdoch to bed, and then poured out some brandy.
“I suppose you have some inkling of what that drum means,” he said,
handing me a glass. “I’d better tell you the story now, at least what
our friend, the lawyer, put together from letters in the muniment-room.
You know, of course, that we have a fetch, like all well-regulated
families in the Highlands. The whole county believes in the Drummer
of Gordonmuir, who plays the unholy part of death-watch to our little
establishment. The lawyer found a paper that described the movements of
the clan when we turned out for Prince Charlie in 1745. Apparently they
shared in his first successes, for they sent back an English drummer
prisoner. Two of them were left to guard him, and, because he wouldn’t
play some rebel air, they lowered him down the wellhead up to his shins
in water. But, barbarous as they were in those times, I don’t think
they intended his death.
“After the Battle of Culloden, there was some alarm of the English
coming, and they scattered to the hills, forgetting their prisoner, I
suppose; at least they left him to his friends, if they believed they
were coming. But the English never came, and the poor drummer was left
drumming vainly in that wellhead to attract attention. It must have
been a weary death.
“Weeks afterward, the clansmen crept home, and my ancestor had to
invent excuses and alibis to save his property from confiscation. They
found the prisoner lying in the well with his sheepskin drummed right
through and the drumsticks chewed in his teeth. It was an ugly thing to
find under the place where our rearing and living and dying were due to
go on till doomsday. If ever a spirit had the leisure, and, I am sorry
to say, just cause to possess itself of a family mansion, it was surely
that drummer.
“At first there was talk about building on a fresh site, but lack of
funds drove them to the alternative of burying the drummer, with an
iron stake to pin his body to the bottom of the sea in a place where
two tides meet. I suppose they got the recipe from some old witch who
had escaped the faggots in the previous century. They burned the drum
on a fire of dead men’s bones, and filled up the wellhead with all
manner of heathenish rites.
“But it was not the least good. The drummer rose out of the sea, and
he has drummed every Gordon of Gordonmuir, male or female, cradled or
crutched, into the kirkyard when their day came. He drums up yonder
whenever one of our family is going to die. He generally gives us a
week or a month’s warning, as he feels inclined. Murdoch will tell
you how he drummed my poor uncle frantic before he died, four years
ago. That’s why he is scared for me. Personally, I feel too hale to be
anxious, and, besides, I have come to the comfortable conclusion that
my aunt is dying and her annuity with her.” And he tried to laugh.
Neither of us could strip or sleep that night, sitting bolt upright
over our brandy till the morning. We listened and listened, and whether
it was only the wild echo of my imagination or that Allan’s aunt was
very hard of dying, I am persuaded that we heard the drumming come and
go, go and come, the whole night.
It was several days before we warmed to the fishing again, and even
then Murdoch’s gloom turned us into mutes. Allan cheered up, however,
became hilarious even, when a judicious inquiry as to his aunt’s health
brought a favourable reply. My last traces of uneasiness were dissolved
a day later in the death struggles of a tremendous six-pound trout with
a back of Tyrian purple and a hooked under jaw like Punch.
In such wise we fished away our last days together on earth, and I
would not change their manner even if I had them back again.
The gradual approach of autumn made the passage of July more beautiful
than ever. The stone pines stood waiting for winter in their burnished
green, while the chestnuts below flushed to crimson as if with
modesty at the coming nudity of their boughs. Under them all, the
wood bracken sobered to yellow and then to burnt madder, until it
became indistinguishable from the earth tint. Farther below, the
summer-coloured sea heaved through masses of orange weed the sunlight
seemed to have charmed out of her submerged gardens. And with the dying
splendour of summer passed away the last days of peace.
August brought war.
It makes a short story to tell what occurred in the weeks following.
Allan left Gordonmuir immediately to rejoin his university’s training
corps, of which he was a member. His family name and county standing
procured him a probationary commission in a Scotch regiment already
serving in France. He left for the war, with Murdoch as his soldier
servant, and I saw him no more. He did not reach the actual front
until after the retreat of the British army from Mons, but he was in
time to share in the astounding battle of Ypres, and, alas! to perish
in its final stages. The brief War Office telegram announcing his
death, with Lord Kitchener’s regrets, was sent to his trustees.
Allan was the last of the Gordons of Gordonmuir. As his sole relative,
his aunt, declined to live there in his stead, the house has been
abandoned, and it may be said that the curse of the Gordons has come
home to roost in its decaying timbers for ever.
Yet that is not all.
Six weeks later, I found myself a few miles behind the battle front
where Allan had been killed. I had volunteered my services as an
interpreter, and was posted to the unwarlike business of searching the
German prisoners for documents and diaries, which I translated for
the intelligence of the general staff as well as my limited German
permitted.
One day I was crossing the street in the little French town where we
were quartered when some of our wounded were brought in. One of them
called out to me by name in a piteous tone, but I did not recognise who
lay under the red linen bandages till the voice went on:
“Eh, man, do ye not remember that famous trout we were catching
together?”
It was Murdoch. He had been hit in the head, and was raving, but he
knew me and continued to call for me and Allan, while they lifted him
into the temporary hospital. I visited him regularly, and when he was
better, he was able to tell me the circumstances of Allan’s death:
“It was terrible, just terrible, from the start to the finish. We were
marched one way and another and posted at last about the city they call
‘Wipers.’ Master Allan was given a ditch to hold, which is no proper
covering for a Highland gentleman. To the right was a wood lined by
an English regiment, and on the other side of us was the colonel and
the rest of our men. The shells never stopped falling out of the air
like invisible rocks that blew to dust before you could mark them.
Soon the Germans began to come across the fields as packed as a shoal
of fish, and squalling like the gulls that follow the fish in the
bay--stout-looking men with spikes on their heads like the first show
of a stag’s antler.
“We all fired away, making easy shooting. Master Allan took my rifle,
and I sat loading for him until it was too hot to touch. When all
the men next to us were killed, we picked up their rifles and stood
together committing manslaughter without thought of judge or jury. But
the Germans never ceased coming, and the men in our ditch grew fewer
and fewer with the shell fire. Every now and again there came a burst
among us like a quarry blast, save that it was limbs and pieces of men
that fell out of the air afterward instead of bits of rock. And blood
enough there was running out of that ditch to taint the Solway Firth.
“At last, after the wounded were taken to the rear, there was only
Master Allan and myself left. A little farther on, we could see the
colonel and a single private loading his rifle for him. The colonel
sent him for reinforcements, but he never came back. Then the colonel
signalled to me to join him. I crawled down the ditch to his side, and
he told me to take word to his commander that his bit of the line was
worn away, and to ask should he rely on angels or fresh troops to hold
it.
“I left them there, Master Allan and the colonel, firing their
shoulderful of rifles in unison, so as to give the Germans the
impression that they were still in good force. I started crawling and
running in turns till I came across an outpost, who took me to the
general’s head-quarters--just a table behind a blackened hayrick, but
it was good protection.
“The general gave a grim laugh when I delivered the message, and told
me that he had just sent the last cooks and camp followers up to the
line with rifles.
“‘And tell your colonel,’ he added, with a look that might have been
either despair or mockery, ‘that he had better rely on angels for lack
of more material reinforcement, but you can also add that we do not
expect the Germans to come on again. They seem to have had enough of it
for to-day.’
“I set out to make my way back, and had crossed half-way over the
sticky fields when I heard a sound that set my heart beating harder
than the German cannonading could make it. You would hardly believe it,
but I heard the rolling of a drum up in the clouds. At first I couldn’t
distinguish it above the booming of the guns and the crackling of the
rifle fire. But there came a lull, and the drum began rapping out like
the crying of the moor fowl between the discharges of a thunderstorm,
and it brought the tears to my eyes and the fear of God to my heart,
for I know the Summoner of Gordonmuir by now, and, oh, to think that
he should have crossed the seas to play the last of the Gordons of
Gordonmuir home! It was a grand and wonderful sound to hear the noise
of battle dying away to our right and the artillery bursting out on our
left, and all the while, above German and Scotch and English, our bonny
Drummer playing the devil’s own march out of God’s sky!
“But before I found the ditch again, I lost my way and the darkness
came over me. I was hit by a bullet in the leg, and the loss of blood
took the heart and the feeling out of me, and I just lay down within
sound of the Drummer and waited to die. In the morning, they picked me
up unconscious, but not too badly hurt, for I was back in the line a
fortnight later.
“But Master Allan and his colonel, they found them lying where I had
left them, in the midst of a pile of empty rifles. The Germans never
dared come up to the pair of them, though they could have marched
straight forward and none to hinder them. Maybe they were afeared and
maybe their bones were too heavy, and maybe the Drummer of Gordonmuir
had drummed holy terror into their souls. I am thinking that the
Germans must be an unholy people and displeasing to Almighty God, that
He should allow the heathen spirits and kelpies out of the woods to
come all the way from Scotland to discourage them!”
Poor Murdoch! He was hard hit this time, and he began to rave again.
It was the same story he told again and again until the night he died,
holding my hand and calling out to Allan. I have no doubt that he is
acting gillie to him somewhere in the next world, beyond space and the
other side of time. He would not have wished to live after his chief.
* * * * *
A month later, a postscript to this story reached me as strangely
as such things can occur. I was sitting up one night in my billet,
translating a batch of German papers and sorting what useful
intelligence I could glean from the epistolary rigmarole, when a
written date stabbed me like a knife.
It was the date of the day on which Allan had been killed, and it
headed what purported to be a private soldier’s account of the fighting
from the side of the attack. I read it through very carefully and then
made a translation, not for the use of the general staff, but for the
trustees of Gordonmuir. The last page ran as follows:
_Before Ypres, October 31, 1914._
In spite of the fierce attacks which we delivered during the day,
the English line was not perceptibly thinned in any direction where
we could push our final thrust. At one point of attack we could
distinctly hear the drums of the enemy playing all the time to the
rear, which showed that they had available men in that direction.
This, together with a slackening of fire, gave us to understand that
it was a ruse. We shifted our attack accordingly down the line, but
up to this moment we have not yet broken through.
THE SUPREME COMPLIMENT
She was very beautiful, far and away the most beautiful feminine
divinity of our generation. It was a puzzle how the Manufacturer of
Gods and Goddesses achieved her manufacture with the human elements at
His disposal, for even the most exquisite skeleton of whittled ivory
as a background and the finest modelling of the refined and rosy clay
of girlhood, all tightly and attractively enclosed in the thinnest
and most transparent chicken-skin, could not account for the charm of
Melissa Delme. Minute were the saphenous veins underlying her satined
skin. Her eyes were glaucous as those of the grey-eyed Athena. Her hair
was as barley-sugar finely spun. Her lips tied a tiny tulip. Her feet
were quicksilver. No reference to her stage success is needed. From the
moment that she first appeared at the Hounslow Hippodrome to the series
of rapturous farewells for ever associating her name with Worthing
Pier, her professional path was a rose alley and her private life a
continual and seraphic serenade.
Perhaps that was why it was so dull. It was all Up without Down. Her
whole life worked like a little piece of divine clockwork. Delicate as
was her art, her success was machinelike. It was too perfect to admit
of any criticism or even of much discussion. It is true there was some
division in the Clubs as to whether she sang better than she acted or
whether she played the violin better than either. At White’s a vote
was actually taken and her power of song exalted above her expression
in music. The Travellers’, on the other hand, decided that she danced
even better than she sang. At the Bachelors’, however, these matters
remained too painful for discussion.
So her life remained unutterably dull. Every man who met her fell in
love punctually at the third minute, and remained doing and saying
and presumably thinking the same things at scheduled intervals. The
London male seemed to be furbished and furnished from the same gigantic
slot-machine. She had only to drop a pennyworth of smile and press
with her hand, for the same wearisome sequel to follow, the same inane
amatory collapse, the same letters, the same flowers to match the cut
and dry compliments, the same proposals. For a fortnight she once fled
to America in wild hope of variety and adventure, but returned sadly
after enduring the same accents and the same accidents from New York to
Chicago, and back.
Melissa Delme remained on the stage for two years of crowded life
and crowded audiences. But the greater the crowds that flocked to
see and hear her, the more lonely she became. She was too bright a
constellation to become companionable. Had she been less a paragon she
might have found a paramour. But she remained as intact and virtuous as
a marble statue in the midst of a shopful of brittle and vulgar Chelsea
china. She was really a little too beautiful and it had made her
capricious and careless. Some women try to resemble posters, but it was
the posters that tried to look like Melissa Delme. She had long ceased
to care whether she was admired or not. She only cared whether she
admired herself. All other admiration was commonplace, but the flashing
compliments of her mirror were Narcissan and acceptable. Externally she
became exquisitely unique. Within she remained unabatingly bored. She
never expected to fall in love. The God, Who made her, had exhausted
Himself, and in finishing His masterpiece forgot or withheld one thing,
the capability of receiving or feeling love. So she remained the
divine masterpiece and mistress of no man. Then the time came when she
was understood to be considering proposals and they multiplied, but
without disclosing more originality than so many tenders from British
tradesmen. The first note of variety occurred in the letter of a
Cabinet Minister in Holland. She read it and took it as a joke, but in
the end she married him and took a Dutch treat. Tell it not in White’s
and whisper it not at the Bachelors’ Club! It appeared that he held a
very responsible position in his own country as Minister of Cheeses. So
she settled down in the romantic Hague and gave birth to a succession
of little Dutch dolls. There is no foundation to the rumour that she
was the only woman to cause jealousy to the Queen of Holland. She was
never anything but virtuous, beautiful and bored. In the end her beauty
bored herself. She was too beautiful; that was all. There was no flaw
in her morals or in her looks. She was only discovered to be not quite
human, which was not surprising as she had been created a Goddess.
But it is historical to relate that supreme efforts were made during
her sparkling career on the stage to deviate her virtue and to keep
her for England.
When all ordinary compliments had failed, the more ingenious of
her admirers set themselves on the path of invention. One of them
sent her a beautiful leather toilet bag with every article made in
chocolate--chocolate hair-brushes, chocolate flasks and bottles,
chocolate scissors and manicure with enough silver-paper to give
the illusion of reality. She played with it for half an hour before
she sent it to the Children’s Hospital. I mention this comparative
success, for the idea was originally mine and was carried out by my
dear friend Ernest Beaugent, who spent the best years of his life
and genius courting Melissa Delme. His hot rival during those years
was his brother Peter, who on hearing of the success of my chocolate
immediately and recklessly capped the gift the next day by sending
her a whole portmanteau stuffed with sweets. That was possibly
why confectionery figured so considerably in his later bankruptcy
proceedings. Then Melissa took to skating, and all her admirers
ransacked the dealers for skates--iron skates, steel skates, American
skates, Swiss skates, Norwegian skates. However, Peter triumphed for a
winter by having a pair of skates made of gold with steel blades. Gold
skates could not be trumped, and it was not till the spring that Ernest
found occasion to cap the compliment.
It was over camellias. In those days flowers were often unprocurable
in England. There was no flower express from the Riviera. The flower
industry in the Channel Isles had not been developed. To ask for a
bunch of camellias in January was like asking for plovers’ eggs at
Christmas. Yet that was exactly what Melissa asked of Ernest one
Monday morning, presumably to be quit of his attentions for the week.
She was going to the Opera on the Wednesday and said she would much
like to carry a bouquet of camellias. Instead of offering her the
moon on a silver salver or a slice of the sun, would he be practical
enough to procure so simple a nosegay? Ernest went out thinking. That
night he crossed to Paris. Melissa must have thought no more of him,
for he afterwards learnt that she had ordered herself a large spray of
artificial blossoms. He crossed to Paris because he did not believe
that the camellias were really impossible to obtain. He happened to
be a railway director by trade, and one of an inventive turn of mind.
Though born a gentleman and bred a graduate, he had surprised Victorian
society by becoming a competent engine-driver. He had qualified in all
the tests, and every Saturday instead of a ride in the Park or joining
a shooting-party he used to drive an Express to some watering-place
on the South Coast. He was on the Company’s reserve list of drivers
in case of invasion or railway strike. And in emergency he was always
liable to be summoned. Several times he had driven Royalty without
mention of his name being made in the Court Circular. It remains, by
the way, for a Labour Government to insert among the names of guests or
preachers who have the honour of boring their Majesties the names of
the honest engineers and stokers who have the honour of driving them.