THE DRUMMER OF GORDONMUIR

Two years before the war broke out, I became trustee to Allan Gordon, of Gordonmuir, in the county of Argyle and kingdom of Scotland. He was not more than a fledged schoolboy when he inherited his uncle’s property and the nominal chieftainship of the clan. My connection was distant, but I was persuaded by his aunt to supervise his affairs. A week later, I found myself sitting in the “Flying Scotchman” with an old lawyer for colleague, who confided to me that he did not expect the estate to bear our travelling expenses.

Late that night, after a ten miles’ drive from the station in the drenching embrace of a Scotch mist, we reached Gordonmuir. I was chilled to the heart when I first viewed the mixture of Indian bungalow and mediæval dungeon that made up Allan’s mansion. In the centre was a stone keep, ivy-clad, crumbling, and crenellated. On either wing in the inclosure, where they used to herd the stolen cattle, was a modern shooting box attached with the minimum of architectural art. My companion shivered in the gaunt doorway like one of his old parchments crackling in a draught. But Allan ran out, as cheery and cock-a-hoop as the chieftain’s feather in his bonnet. He seemed the one representative of joy and life within that grisly precinct.

We passed the whole of the next day discussing wills and mortgages in the dead jargon of Scots law. My colleague wished to pay off the mortgages and the annuity due to Allan’s aunt, but there was equally the question of Allan’s allowance at the university to be considered, and I plumped for as much as the rickety estate would allow. I felt that college life comes but once, and not to everybody, and that three hundred pounds was necessary to uphold the dignity of a young laird thrown among Jews and Saxons.

The lawyer insisted on cutting it down to fifty, to preserve what he called a “feenancial aspeect.” But Allan was satisfied; and so was I, when I found that his gratitude took the form of free trout-fishing for life. Trustees are not generally rewarded; in fact, as my gloomy colleague reiterated, they are oftener liable to terms of imprisonment for inadvertently touching trust money with other than the legal end of the poker. So I left the rest of the business to his care and started out to test Allan’s trout—in my opinion the most valuable stock he possessed.

The old lawyer remained perfectly content wheezing snuff to blow away the damp that rose out of the old parchments, while Allan and I were whipping the neighbouring lakes with iron-bodied flies twisting at the end of silver gut. After a week’s work, the lawyer left us to ourselves for good.

“There are grand sheepskins in your chest,” he told Allan, on departing, “and specimens of Scotch law in all its manifold application. And there’s much of interest concerning your family, much of good report and some of ill—and one tale among the papers that I reserve for your ears alone, though your gillie, Murdoch, whom I have been questioning, can serve you the popular version.”

When the lawyer had gone, I never cared to ask Allan what this might be; and reticence is to be encouraged in youth. It was not for two years that I was to learn.

Meantime, I had taken vacations regularly at Gordonmuir. Every autumn I travelled north with a skein of trout lines and feather flies in my lap. It is the one perfect occupation in a train. It plies the heart with reminiscence and expectation by turns. It soothes away more hours of motion than reading or talking, and it leaves the mind active and the fingers nimble at the end of the journey. Often have I thought of patenting it as a railway amusement, but then the true and complete anglers whom it would occupy are diminished to few in the land.

I used to arrive at Gordonmuir with my cap and pockets bristling with silk flies and lengths of gut every autumn. And Gordonmuir in autumn!—when the skies have settled into their summer sheen and the red heath is running to dull purple; when the long, billowy hills lie reflected on the waters that float above their foundations in the Hebridean sea, hills that change their marine flora a few yards above the rocky tide belt for all the sweeter weeds of earth—sea pinks for mountain heather and the long yellow tide ribbons for the crisp bracken and harts-tongue ferns. Hills of transformation and wonder! At their feet the heavy, opaque water of the sea lounges over rocks studded with green limpets and suckstones, while in their hollows, under the clouds above, the bubbling springs run into fresh streams and lakes. But the best contrast of all is furnished by the coarse, lubberly fish that basks under the shadow of the rocks, fit only for the seine net and the spear of the poacher; a fish without a soul. But a good Providence replaces him in the higher, dew-fed waters with the merry brook trout—as gamy a jester, in his motley of red spot and yellow, as ever tumbled at one end of a fifty-foot line.

It was this perennial sport that drove away the gloom and discomfort 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.