THE LAND OF THE DRUM
Alan went with Wassaquam into the front library, after the Indian had
shown Spearman out.
"This was the man, Judah, who came for Mr. Corvet that night I was
hurt?"
"Yes, Alan," Wassaquam said.
"He was the man, then, who came here twice a year, at least, to see Mr.
Corvet."
"Yes."
"I was sure of it," Alan said. Wassaquam had made no demonstration of
any sort since he had snatched at Spearman's wrist to hold him back
when Alan had bent to the drawer. Alan could define no real change now
in the Indian's manner; but he knew that, since Wassaquam had found him
quarreling with Spearman, the Indian somehow had "placed" him more
satisfactorily. The reserve, bordering upon distrust, with which
Wassaquam had observed Alan, certainly was lessened. It was in
recognition of this that Alan now asked, "Can you tell me now why he
came here, Judah?"
"I have told you I do not know," Wassaquam replied. "Ben always saw
him; Ben gave him money. I do not know why."
Alan had been holding his hand over the papers which he had thrust into
his pocket; he went back into the smaller library and spread them under
the reading lamp to examine them. Sherrill had assumed that Corvet had
left in the house a record which would fully explain what had thwarted
his life, and would shed light upon what had happened to Corvet, and
why he had disappeared; Alan had accepted this assumption. The careful
and secret manner in which these pages had been kept, and the
importance which Wassaquam plainly had attached to them--and which must
have been a result of his knowing that Corvet regarded them of the
utmost importance--made Alan certain that he had found the record which
Sherrill had believed must be there. Spearman's manner, at the moment
of discovery, showed too that this had been what he had been searching
for in his secret visit to the house.
But, as Alan looked the pages over now, he felt a chill of
disappointment and chagrin. They did not contain any narrative
concerning Benjamin Corvet's life; they did not even relate to a single
event. They were no narrative at all. They were--in his first
examination of them, he could not tell what they were.
They consisted in all of some dozen sheets of irregular size, some of
which had been kept much longer than others, a few of which even
appeared fresh and new. The three pages which Alan thought, from their
yellowed and worn look, must be the oldest, and which must have been
kept for many years, contained only a list of names and addresses.
Having assured himself that there was nothing else on them, he laid
them aside. The remaining pages, which he counted as ten in number,
contained nearly a hundred brief clippings from newspapers; the
clippings had been very carefully cut out, they had been pasted with
painful regularity on the sheets, and each had been dated across its
face--dates made with many different pens and with many different inks,
but all in the same irregular handwriting as the letter which Alan had
received from Benjamin Corvet.
Alan, his fingers numb in his disappointment, turned and examined all
these pages; but they contained nothing else. He read one of the
clippings, which was dated "Feb. 1912."
The passing away of one of the oldest residents of Emmet county
occurred at the poor farm on Thursday of last week. Mr. Fred Westhouse
was one of four brothers brought by their parents into Emmet county in
1846. He established himself here as a farmer and was well known among
our people for many years. He was nearly the last of his family, which
was quite well off at one time, Mr. Westhouse's three brothers and his
father having perished in various disasters upon the lake. His wife
died two years ago. He is survived by a daughter, Mrs. Arthur Pearl,
of Flint.
He read another:
Hallford-Spens. On Tuesday last Miss Audrey Hallford, daughter of Mr.
and Mrs. Bert Hallford, of this place, was united in the bonds of holy
matrimony to Mr. Robert Spens, of Escanaba. Miss Audrey is one of our
most popular young ladies and was valedictorian of her class at the
high school graduation last year. All wish the young couple well.
He read another:
Born to Mr. and Mrs. Hal French, a daughter, Saturday afternoon last.
Miss Vera Arabella French, at her arrival weighed seven and one-half
pounds.
This clipping was dated, in Benjamin Corvet's hand, "Sturgeon Bay,
Wis., Aug. 1914." Alan put it aside in bewilderment and amaze and took
up again the sheets he first had looked at. The names and addresses on
these oldest, yellowed pages had been first written, it was plain, all
at the same time and with the same pen and ink, and each sheet in the
beginning had contained seven or eight names. Some of these original
names and even the addresses had been left unchanged, but most of them
had been scratched out and altered many times--other and quite
different names had been substituted; the pages had become finally
almost illegible, crowded scrawls, rewritten again and again in
Corvet's cramped hand. Alan strained forward, holding the first sheet
to the light.
[Illustration: list of names and addresses]
Alan seized the clippings he had looked at before and compared them
swiftly with the page he had just read; two of the names--Westhouse and
French--were the same as those upon this list. Suddenly he grasped the
other pages of the list and looked them through for his own name; but
it was not there. He dropped the sheets upon the table and got up and
began to stride about the room.
He felt that in this list and in these clippings there must be,
somehow, some one general meaning--they must relate in some way to one
thing; they must have deeply, intensely concerned Benjamin Corvet's
disappearance and his present fate, whatever that might be, and they
must concern Alan's fate as well. But in their disconnection, their
incoherence, he could discern no common thread. What conceivable bond
could there have been uniting Benjamin Corvet at once with an old man
dying upon a poor farm in Emmet County, wherever that might be, and
with a baby girl, now some two years old, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin?
He bent suddenly and swept the pages into the drawer of the table and
reclosed the drawer, as he heard the doorbell ring and Wassaquam went
to answer it. It was the police, Wassaquam came to tell him, who had
come for Luke's body.
Alan went out into the hall to meet them. The coroner's man either had
come with them or had arrived at the same time; he introduced himself
to Alan, and his inquiries made plain that the young doctor whom Alan
had called for Luke had fully carried out his offer to look after these
things, for the coroner was already supplied with an account of what
had taken place. A sailor formerly employed on the Corvet ships, the
coroner's office had been told, had come to the Corvet house, ill and
seeking aid; Mr. Corvet not being at home, the people of the house had
taken the man in and called the doctor; but the man had been already
beyond doctors' help and had died in a few hours of pneumonia and
alcoholism; in Mr. Corvet's absence it had been impossible to learn the
sailor's full name.
Alan left corroboration of this story mostly to Wassaquam, the
servant's position in the house being more easily explicable than his
own; but he found that his right there was not questioned, and that the
police accepted him as a member of the household. He suspected that
they did not think it necessary to push inquiry very actively in such a
home as this.
After the police had gone, he called Wassaquam into the library and
brought the lists and clippings out again.
"Do you know at all what these are, Judah?" he asked.
"No, Alan. I have seen Ben have them, and take them out and put them
back. That is all I know."
"My father never spoke to you about them?"
"Once he spoke to me; he said I was not to tell or speak of them to any
one, or even to him."
"Do you know any of these people?"
He gave the lists to Wassaquam, who studied them through attentively,
holding them to the lamp.
"No, Alan."
"Have you ever heard any of their names before?"
"That may be. I do not know. They are common names."
"Do you know the places?"
"Yes--the places. They are lake ports or little villages on the lakes.
I have been in most of them, Alan. Emmet County, Alan, I came from
there. Henry comes from there too."
"Henry Spearman?"
"Yes."
"Then that is where they hear the Drum."
"Yes, Alan."
"My father took newspapers from those places, did he not?"
Wassaquam looked over the addresses again. "Yes; from all. He took
them for the shipping news, he said. And sometimes he cut pieces out
of them--these pieces, I see now; and afterward I burned the papers; he
would not let me only throw them away."
"That's all you know about them, Judah?"
"Yes, Alan; that is all."
Alan dismissed the Indian, who, stolidly methodical in the midst of
these events, went down-stairs and commenced to prepare a dinner which
Alan knew he could not eat. Alan got up and moved about the rooms; he
went back and looked over the lists and clippings once more; then he
moved about again. How strange a picture of his father did these
things call up to him! When he had thought of Benjamin Corvet before,
it had been as Sherrill had described him, pursued by some thought he
could not conquer, seeking relief in study, in correspondence with
scientific societies, in anything which could engross him and shut out
memory. But now he must think of him, not merely as one trying to
forget; what had thwarted Corvet's life was not only in the past; it
was something still going on. It had amazed Sherrill to learn that
Corvet, for twenty years, had kept trace of Alan; but Corvet had kept
trace in the same way and with the same secrecy of many other
people--of about a score of people. When Alan thought of Corvet, alone
here in his silent house, he must think of him as solicitous about
these people; as seeking for their names in the newspapers which he
took for that purpose, and as recording the changes in their lives.
The deaths, the births, the marriages among these people had been of
the intensest interest to Corvet.
It was possible that none of these people knew about Corvet; Alan had
not known about him in Kansas, but had known only that some unknown
person had sent money for his support. But he appreciated that it did
not matter whether they knew about him or not; for at some point common
to all of them, the lives of these people must have touched Corvet's
life. When Alan knew what had been that point of contact, he would
know about Corvet; he would know about himself.
Alan had seen among Corvet's books a set of charts of the Great Lakes.
He went and got that now and an atlas. Opening them upon the table, he
looked up the addresses given on Corvet's list. They were most of
them, he found, towns about the northern end of the lake; a very few
were upon other lakes--Superior and Huron--but most were upon or very
close to Lake Michigan. These people lived by means of the lake; they
got their sustenance from it, as Corvet had lived, and as Corvet had
got his wealth. Alan was feeling like one who, bound, has been
suddenly unloosed. From the time when, coming to see Corvet, he had
found Corvet gone until now, he had felt the impossibility of
explaining from anything he knew or seemed likely to learn the mystery
which had surrounded himself and which had surrounded Corvet. But
these names and addresses! They indeed offered something to go upon,
though Luke now was forever still, and his pockets had told Alan
nothing.
He found Emmet County on the map and put his finger on it. Spearman,
Wassaquam had said came from there. "The Land of the Drum!" he said
aloud. Deep and sudden feeling stirred in him as he traced out this
land on the chart--the little towns and villages, the islands and
headlands, their lights and their uneven shores. A feeling of "home"
had come to him, a feeling he had not had on coming to Chicago. There
were Indian names and French up there about the meetings of the great
waters. Beaver Island! He thought of Michabou and the raft. The
sense that he was of these lakes, that surge of feeling which he had
felt first in conversation with Constance Sherrill was strengthened an
hundredfold; he found himself humming a tune. He did not know where he
had heard it; indeed, it was not the sort of tune which one knows from
having heard; it was the sort which one just knows. A rhyme fitted
itself to the hum,
"Seagull, seagull sit on the sand,
It's never fair weather when you're on the land."
He gazed down at the lists of names which Benjamin Corvet had kept so
carefully and so secretly; these were his father's people too; these
ragged shores and the islands studding the channels were the lands
where his father had spent the most active part of his life. There,
then--these lists now made it certain--that event had happened by which
that life had been blighted. Chicago and this house here had been for
his father only the abode of memory and retribution. North, there by
the meeting of the waters, was the region of the wrong which was done.
"That's where I must go!" he said aloud. "That's where I must go!"
Constance Sherrill, on the following afternoon, received a telephone
call from her father; he was coming home earlier than usual, he said;
if she had planned to go out, would she wait until after he got there?
She had, indeed, just come in and had been intending to go out again at
once; but she took off her wraps and waited for him. The afternoon's
mail was upon a stand in the hall. She turned it over, looking through
it--invitations, social notes. She picked from among them an envelope
addressed to herself in a firm, clear hand, which, unfamiliar to her,
still queerly startled her, and tore it open.
Dear Miss Sherrill, she read,
I am closing for the time being, the house which, for default of other
ownership, I must call mine. The possibility that what has occurred
here would cause you and your father anxiety about me in case I went
away without telling you of my intention is the reason for this note.
But it is not the only reason. I could not go away without telling you
how deeply I appreciate the generosity and delicacy you and your father
have shown to me in spite of my position here and of the fact that I
had no claim at all upon you. I shall not forget those even though
what happened here last night makes it impossible for me to try to see
you again or even to write to you.
ALAN CONRAD.
She heard her father's motor enter the drive and ran to him with the
letter in her hand.
"He's written to you then," he said, at sight of it.
"Yes."
"I had a note from him this afternoon at the office, asking me to hold
in abeyance for the time being the trust that Ben had left me and
returning the key of the house to me for safekeeping."
"Has he already gone?"
"I suppose so; I don't know."
"We must find out." She caught up her wraps and began to put them on.
Sherrill hesitated, then assented; and they went round the block
together to the Corvet house. The shades, Constance saw as they
approached, were drawn; their rings at the doorbell brought no
response. Sherrill, after a few instants' hesitation, took the key
from his pocket and unlocked the door and they went in. The rooms, she
saw, were all in perfect order; summer covers had been put upon the
furniture; protecting cloths had been spread over the beds up-stairs.
Her father tried the water and the gas, and found they had been turned
off. After their inspection, they came out again at the front door,
and her father closed it with a snapping of the spring lock.
Constance, as they walked away, turned and looked back at the old
house, gloomy and dark among its newer, fresher-looking neighbors; and
suddenly she choked, and her eyes grew wet. That feeling was not for
Uncle Benny; the drain of days past had exhausted such a surge of
feeling for him. That which she could not wink away was for the boy
who had come to that house a few weeks ago and for the man who just now
had gone.