Chapter IV: Part 4

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.

Ernest’s Directorship enabled him to keep back the next train due to leave for Calais, which being duly caught he sat back and let thoughts run through his brain valves with an open throttle. He reached Paris the next morning and called on his French colleagues, who were Directors of the lines to the Riviera. Haltingly but obstinately he explained how important it was that he should have certain flowers in London by the evening of the following day. It was believed that there was one horticulturist in the South of France who kept a camellia farm.

He had long held the repute of a mad Englishman among his French colleagues and his predilection for driving engines appeared only a vagary of sport. It was more conceivable to them that he should want a special train to fetch camellias from the Riviera, but even so whether it was, as he said, for a wedding or, as they suspected, _pour complimenter une dame_, it seemed an inconceivable luxury. They suggested telegraphing and arranging for the next train from the Riviera to bring a few blossoms on his behalf. He assented wildly and waited a day and a night in Paris. He was fond of describing how the Riviera Express reached Paris on the early morning of Wednesday leaving him one half-hour to transfer the expected bouquet of camellias to the first train leaving for London. What was his amazement when he found the officials of the train struggling under three huge baskets full!

There was just time to convey them from the _Paris, Lyon Méditerranée_ station to the train at the _Gare du Nord_. That evening he reached her apartment and sent a fresh bouquet to her while she was dressing. The answer was an invitation to her box that night. He had moved her at last! The compliment had shot home and it only remained for him to crown his deed by scattering the remainder of the flowers outside her doors as a surprise. He emptied three basketfuls. There were a hundred bunches at least in each and to his delight they carpeted the whole of the tiny space between her dressing-room and her sitting-room. Bunch by bunch he flowered the floor and went his way. The result could only be imagined. When Melissa Delme swept out of her room in an opera cloak of the colour of green agate with a silver lining she felt her feet treading on something soft. It was a minute before she realised that the carpet had changed its touch and texture during the time she had taken to change herself into evening clothes. Later in the evening she allowed Ernest to know that he had added a full minute’s delight to her simpler emotions. It was undiluted triumph!

News of Ernest’s _coup_ percolated the Clubs and led to more and more serious attempts to win the unwinnable. His contemporaries racked their brains and their bank accounts in the endeavour to surprise and please her, but she was difficult to surprise and impossible to please. For her generation she remained more than a little unattainable. She was the great unattained. In fantasy I can visualise her now. She had green-pupilled eyes like emeralds washed under spring water, and hair that was neither gold nor bronze. Her step was long famous on the boards. It was said by critics to be precisely composed of a Fairy’s falter, an Angel’s tread and a Dryad’s trip. The divinities entrusted with her composition had very deceptively fitted layers of Aphrodite and Adonis in the mould without vitiating the exquisiteness of her sex. Her boyishness made her girlishness even more feminine. Her femininity framed her boyishness to perfection. While she reigned on the stage, her dazzling purity, based on boredom and the unfortunate omission of one vital element in her celestial make-up, made the acting profession even more respectable than it really is. Clergymen’s daughters applied for places in the Chorus; an Archdeacon’s wife wrote a play called “Archidiaconal Functions,” which three Bishops incidentally denounced by Pastoral without having read, and several Dowagers wrote to Mr. Edwardes of the Gaiety Theatre giving permission for their unmarried daughters to play leading parts.

And all the while Ernest was devising new ways of surprising her, and his brother was trying to cap and supplant him. Ernest’s love became Platonic perforce. He took the habit of inquiring her holiday movements and taking the engine-driver’s place on the metals. It pleased him fiercely to think that her life unwittingly was in his hands; that he was even directing her path and her speed; that while she lay back in cushioned companionship he kept lone watch spying out her lightning track, as though it had been granted to him to carry her through space. The first time he had hopped off the cab at the end of the journey and revealed himself under his oily rags she was more than surprised. For the second time in his life he had pleased her. No admirer hitherto had adopted such an unexpected disguise of approach. The second time he appeared to her as an engine-driver she took no notice. In the end he was content to drive the trains in which she was travelling out of pure and unrewarded intellectual love.

Peter had no profession or accomplishments, so he could only waste ways and means to keep step with his brother’s courtship of Melissa. He once crossed the Continent to watch her change trains at York. She was staying in a country house, to which he had failed of an invitation, but he travelled two days and a night to be in time to meet her on the platform and to carry her wraps to the next. Then he waited bareheaded while her train drew out.

Soon after this romantic excursion Peter’s affairs passed from bad to worse financially, and finally a family conclave met to decide whether to cut his losses or cut him adrift. Peter was the only light-hearted person at this domestic trial and investigation. Though Melissa was never mentioned, it was found that his debts had been largely incurred in planning and conducting surprises, parties and compliments on her behalf. His family were grave but generous. Ernest, as head of the family, took a lenient view towards one whom he considered an ineffectual rival; the game was in his hands. He suggested that his brother should leave the country and promise his family not to return provided they guaranteed him a tolerable income out of their own inheritances. Peter’s future was thus settled. After the meeting Peter approached his brother and rather limply muttered that he was sorry to have caused all this trouble, but that if his brother would lend him sixty pounds down that day he would gladly sail to Australia and forgo the annuity his relations so kindly proposed for him. He promised they would never hear of him again unless he struck gold or won the Melbourne Cup. Ernest looked into his brother’s sheepy eyes and felt moved both to pity and economy. It was surely better to present him with sixty pounds then and there than to give him a banker’s order for an annual hundred. He drove him to the Bank and gave him the sum in crisp new notes, said good-bye handsomely and returned to his Club. He had reason to feel virtuous, generous and comfortable.

An hour later he was about to sit down to a good dinner when a messenger arrived from the Terminus station-master with an emergency summons to drive a Special to the South Coast that evening. He looked at his watch. He had twenty minutes to get to Victoria and look over his engine. It always did him good mentally and physically to drive a fast train to the sea, especially a small one made up of Saloon and Guard’s Van. He could imagine making a speed record with no stops. He was at Victoria in ten minutes. His overalls were ready and his favourite fireman was already wiping the clutches with an oil rag. It was a new powerful engine, the finest on the line, and he spent every minute before the start fingering and touching levers and parts. Steam had brought the boiler to the point of exasperation. At the sound of the whistle he loosed the engine with a sniff and a plunge across the Thames. It was exhilarating to gather speed and he had no thought of the occupants of the Saloon--semi-royalties or South American millionaires, no doubt. He gave them a rippling run over the steel threads through Surrey and Kent. The engine throbbed and danced to all the emotions that are procurable to steam and grease and steel, and Ernest made the dash of his life--one indeed that he was never to forget, though it was years before he dared tell, even in the secret recesses of his Club.

As he neared Folkestone he felt proud of his own driving. He had not lost a minute out of the fastest expected time. He was moving the engine across the points as slickly as a dancer moves his partner in and out of corners on a dancing floor. He slowed the train down to an exact standstill like a musician bringing to final poise and close some great piece upon the organ. He felt the great instrument of hissing pipes and pounding pistons and escaping winds sink under his powerful handling to a solemn standstill. But when all was over and the fireman was creeping round the front of the engine with the oiler, Ernest felt a certain curiosity to see what particular Pasha or Serene Highness or Great Mogul or plain New Yorker could have afforded the cost of such a trip. Slipping off the panting mass of metal he passed round the station into the waiting-room, through which the passengers were bound to pass. With a greater throb at heart than the engine had given in its fastest moments, Ernest reeled. He had recognised that the Serene Highness in this case was Melissa Delme. He could only pull the greasy cap off his head and stand to foolish attention. Whether she deigned to recognise him or not he never knew, for he devoted his eyesight to exchanging a long and meaning look with the Pasha. The Pasha was brother Peter! Ernest said he just stood and choked, as though he had swallowed a lump of train grease. When the couple had both disappeared in the direction of the Boulogne boat he began to feel that there was something magnificent in his brother’s performance. Ernest crawled home on a goods train and on arrival at Victoria inquired what the cost of the Special had been. He was told that it had cost just sixty pounds!

A STUDY IN SMOKE

All that winter of the war men laboured at furious speed to furnish the guns which the British Government had forgotten to make before the war. Guns were needed imperatively for the navy, and even more for the hapless army bogged in Flanders mud. So the factories and foundries of Woolhurst worked at full pressure. The factories screamed and glittered through day and night, and the foundries drew a muffled roar as an occasional red mist burst out of their chimneys and a gun or part of a gun was cast. It was slow but furious work--furious in the detail of fire and molten metal, slow in the aggregate of fitting and testing each mighty gun. Furious work for the sweltering workers, stokers, and moulders, but slow, infinitely slow, to the waiting officials, and slowest still for the officers and men waiting for gun equipment by land or sea.

To beget a gun on official paper is a different thing from its long generation and growth in the foundries. An order can order but not quicken a gun’s delivery. The most imperious official cannot make the molten metal more malleable to man’s dire need.

Thousands of workers wrought like cogs in a machine, surrendering their thought and strength to the metal. The pay was good and the toil overwhelming. There was no time or strength left to think of anything except the immediate toil. They were fascinated and caught like moths upon the outskirts of that chaotic bonfire for which they were binding iron faggots and filling steel squibs. Cranes, lorries, and trucks picked up their output and disappeared. There was no time to ask a question. The harder and fiercer they worked, the sooner the war would be over. Only madmen and Socialists asked why. The argument stood that the higher and brighter the bonfire was piled, the sooner it would be burnt out to a finish. No one in the Woolhurst factories queried the uselessness and meaninglessness of all their labour except Ben, the local Labour leader. Whatever he was known as to the officials, he was Ben to his fellows, and always had been, in strike and out of strike time. He worked with the rest but he did not think with them. The bitter humours, which a little reading and much agitating had left in his brain, were not dissipated in the burning fires of the foundry. He grew bitter as he grew wearier. He felt careless whether he gave his full power to the work of destroying the workmen of another country. It was only the war of one ant-hill against another. Patriotism had not caught him in the board-school, and less during his apprenticeship to work. His education was what he had given himself out of the _Labour Press_ and from second-hand copies of Marx and Carlyle. As he grew careless, he grew clumsier and earned the curses of the foreman, as far as curses availed against the hot blasts. He hated his work and all around him.... He hated the great gun which they were casting in molten form. He could see the white-hot metal pouring like milk out of the furnace. The sight did not exhilarate him in the way it seemed to inspire the others. His muscles relaxed and his eyes went languidly out of focus. The seething mass of blazing liquid drew his languor into itself. The foreman was still cursing. It needed only a touch to upset his balance. Without a splash or a ripple he passed into the fiery mass ... an accident!

There are times when a ship cannot be stopped for a paltry individual who has fallen overboard, and the foundry could not be held up for one man’s remains. A big gun is worth many human lives. Besides, he had disappeared. Cremation was complete and total.

By the time the glowing liquor had passed into the moulds and entered into the long process of cooling, the human moth was charred to the nothingness of carbon, and every bone and particle was digested by the steel. His tomb not only enclosed but absorbed him. He had become part and ingredient of his own sepulchre.... And there could be no inquest, for there was no relic for a coroner’s inspection. Long before the gun was adjusted with all its minute and meticulous parts, long before it was tested and sent to a naval dockyard, the unfortunate man it contained was forgotten, and had become as nameless and anonymous as the gun itself. Nameless was the six-inch gun that was sent to sea, and nameless let the cruiser remain on which it was hoisted.

* * * * *

For weary weeks _H.M.S. ----_ patrolled the northern mists, with a brighter interval in the Mediterranean. Undeviating drill and perpetual practice brought crews and armament to a stage of perfection bordering on staleness. The chaplain came into the captain’s room with a puzzled look.

“Sick?” queried the skipper.

“No,” said the chaplain, “I have been talking to the men.”

“Not done talking to them yet?” laughed the other, who took a good-natured but perfectly sceptical view about chaplains and their functions.

“Well, I should say,” suggested the chaplain, “that they have been talking to me lately.”

“What about?”

“About spirits!”

The captain shifted his foot and spun round: “I thought it was your business to talk to them about spirits, and what you didn’t know about the spiritual simply wasn’t spirits”--and he laughed outright.

“This is not my kind of spirit.”

“The men will want to be teaching me my job next!” exclaimed the captain.

“These are not the spirits of the Prayer Book so much as ...”

“What?”

“The spirits that are called ghosts.”

“Well, are there no ghosts in the Bible?”

“Yes, but not quite the same kind that the men have come to believe is on board this ship.”

Anything affecting the nerves of the men became a preoccupation of the skipper, and he grew grave.

“Go on.”

“Well, sir, it is very like a hallucination, but I thought you had better know what the men are thinking about, in case it is interfering with their work. They do not like handling one of the starboard six-inch guns.”

“What do you mean? It is brand-new and tested to the ounce.”

“The men think there is a spirit in that gun and that he appears every time they fire the gun.”

“Cannot they blow him out?”

“No, for it is in the smoke after firing that they discern the figure of a man, and they think that he will end by sinking the ship....”

There was a longish silence, for the captain was far too good a sailor not to know the part superstition plays in a sailor’s life. Devoid of religion himself, he was calculating the result of such a fear on the gun’s crew. For months the Grand Fleet had been chafing at anchor, with intervals spent bursting through the fogs or charging the mists. Mysterious performances known as P. Z. exercises, devised by admirals, carried out by captains, and rectified in practice by humble individuals in chart-rooms, occupied most of their seagoing. The exact strategists were learning that accuracy and certainty were more difficult to obtain on the water than on paper. The reckonings of ships varied, and the value of given fire against given armament did not always respond to theory. Even blindfold chess gave more certain results. This was blindfold boxing against an enemy who was as often below as above the waters. Months of phantom-chasing took its effect on men’s minds. Crews became used to being called to action preceding no action. Destroyers reported enemies that melted into mist, and imaginary submarines caused panic in the Firth and the Flow. The invisible enemy preyed more substantially on their minds than would have been the case had action materialised. The strain told, and the sarcastic elements seemed to mimic the thunder of guns whose smoke only curled into the mocking clouds.

The practice day following the conversation of chaplain and captain on _H.M.S. ----_ was fine and clear. The Dreadnoughts were slowly making line to the practice-ground, preceded by the cruisers in formation, while the destroyers ran in and out like bicycles twisting amongst huge motor-buses. The captain of _H.M.S. ----_ took his position on the bridge, and asked the chaplain to stand on the far end to note the firing, while he remained at the other.

“Watch the firing of the forecastle-guns, and especially of the starboard six-inch. I shall be glad to have your detailed report.”

At a signal from the flag-ship the fire-control of the cruisers was tested. They fired in turn at a slow-moving target. The turn came for _H.M.S. ----_. The port forecastle-gun emitted a cloud of smoke, a great rolling blanket of white vapour. Captain and chaplain pierced it with their glasses, and it had rolled away before the splash of the shell showed where the aim had fallen short. The cruiser swung slowly round, and the brand-new 9·2 fired for the tenth time in its existence. Captain and chaplain watched the smoke without raising their glasses. It slowly melted in the bright breeze, disintegrating and discolouring of itself. It was quite thin before a man’s figure could be discerned struggling in the dissolving smoke. It seemed obvious, matter-of-fact, and chemical, except that it was a figure of smoke. The figure was only comprehensible for a moment or two, for the wind elongated his writhings; and his limbs, as though on the rack, were torn apart with delirious speed. But the impression of human agony remained with every human being who watched the torment of the smoke. Only the officer controlling the fire watched the target and noted how near the shell fell this time. By the time the next shot was fired, not a wisp of the ghostly smoke remained.... And the fear of doom remained in every heart on board that night except with the captain and the chaplain. The chaplain had decided clearly that it was either a fantasy or a divine omen. In the latter case it was for the good, and in the first case it did not matter. As for the captain, he was both puzzled and unafraid.

The chaplain had noted the firing and its results very carefully as directed, and he handed his notes to the captain, who read them in his cabin. They were accurate and corresponded to the official account in the log.

“You make no mention of the smoke,” suggested the captain.

“No.”

“Well, I saw a very distinct outline of a man in the smoke, and I expected you would have recorded it.”

“No,” replied the other. “I particularly left the spook to you. It would have been no evidence for me to have seen and reported it, for I am officially supposed to believe in spirits.”

“Well,” said the captain, “I who do not believe in them have seen this.”

“Blessed rather are those who have not seen and yet have believed,” said the chaplain.

“That is hardly my case,” replied the captain, “for I have most distinctly seen and yet have not believed.”

Both turned then as sensible men to consider the effect of the hallucination, or whatever it was, on the crew of the gun, and incidentally on the whole ship. The men had come to regard it as a bad omen. To them it was worse than carrying round a corpse. They thought the gun was haunted and that, however deadly its firing to the enemy, it would in the end prove more fatal to the ship. They believed they were on a doomed vessel. It was no use changing the crew of the gun, as the whole ship seemed involved.

“Provided I can drop a hit on the enemy with that gun in action, I do not so much mind if the ship sinks under me,” was the captain’s final deliberation....

The long wait of months was broken for some by the instantaneous decision of mine or explosion, for others by change of latitude and ship; for some, indeed, it was never broken; but for a few it was crossed by the magic signal, “action!” On a joyous day for _H.M.S. ----_ issue was joined in the North Sea with a German raider supported in the dim distance by enemy light forces. The captain gathered all the threads of his life and training into his hand, and stood glued to the bridge. The chaplain went down to steady the men, who in the glad glow of coming action forgot all their troubles of body or mind. The moving smoke on the horizon was the sign of retreating enemy, and cruisers with torpedoes were dashing to cut them off. Every heart on board beat in steady throb of unison with the ship’s engines. Precious minutes passed, and the smokes on the horizon were no nearer. The largest smoke was separating from the others. Half an hour passed and a hull was outlined. It corresponded to the raider, one of those sweet prizes which had been dashing in and out of middies’ dreams for months. As the raider drew off from her escort, chancing a northern mist, _H.M.S. ----_ followed into the gathering vapour. Fire was being exchanged between the others, but he reserved the raider to his own. Careless whether she was dropping mines, he pushed into her direct wake. In ten minutes he would open fire. And he did.

The fore-guns flashed in turn and eager glasses picked up the splash of the first shell falling short. The captain groaned, but his groan was choked with relief as he watched the next shell drop with a red flash on the raider’s bridge. He telephoned his congratulations to the gun’s crew, who received them in British silence. The red glare of fire was rising from the raider under the British fire. She was blazing steadily, and the captain no longer kept check of his guns. They were being fired in irregular but enthusiastic salvoes. The German flag was visible, white against the yellow smoke, so good were the captain’s glasses. Another glance and the flag was gone. He immediately gave the signal to cease firing. A destroyer ran in and fired a torpedo, whereat the raider turned quietly over....

Leaving the rescuing to the destroyers, the captain of _H.M.S. ----_ cheerfully inquired if there had been any casualties. The chaplain joined him on the bridge with a list.

“I am afraid there have been a few.”

“I never knew we were hit.”

“No, we were not hit by the enemy, but unfortunately a six-inch gun starboard exploded after firing one shot, the second shot of the action, and the whole crew were killed or wounded.”

The captain buried his face in his hands, forgetful that this was the end of the perfecting day of his career, when years of preparation were tested in action. Action and victory had come and also unlooked-for disaster.

He could return home and report a brilliant and decisive action, but the nature of his casualties necessitated an inquiry. A great deal of evidence was taken as to the explosion of the six-inch breech, and as little as possible was allowed to reach the public. It was proved that the gun had been made with every possible care, being tested and regulated in every way. The metal itself was subjected to a close examination, and found to be of the best. The only flaw was traced to a slight superfluity of carbon, which remained inexplicable amid the alloy, and no blame was attached to the maker, or to the crew or captain who had had charge of her in action. This carbon had undoubtedly brought about a weak point in the gun, and under pressure she had exploded, though in practice she had been successfully fired. It was an explanatory but unsatisfying report....

A month later--“Carbon is a material cause at least,” remarked the captain to the chaplain, “and carbon could have come from a man.”

“That is a possible solution, if you think it likely that some man fell accidentally into the gun when it was cast,” replied the chaplain.

“I know it,” said the captain, “for it was my suspicion, and a private and careful inquiry has placed me in possession of the fact that this gun came from a foundry where a man had been actually lost in the molten metal.”

Both sat in stony silence, and then the captain rose to go.

“Whatever I saw and you saw and the ship’s crew saw, the cause was material and a man.”

“Yes, and as you have had reason to observe, a man is a spirit,” said the chaplain, returning to his duties....

THE MISSIONARY