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“COPENHAGEN”: A CHARACTER

WHEN I go home on summer visitations, old friends, with the most generous desire to aid one in an eccentric and indeed half-daft and wholly disreputable way of living, come to me covertly in reckless moments “for auld lang syne,” and remind me of native characters ancient or modern. They themselves are (if they only knew it) characters the most superb for any of my purposes, but, wholly unsuspecting, they narrate the whims and oddities, the follies and conceits of others, lamenting always that the race of characters is rapidly running done. “When Jiah, and Jocka, and Old Split-a-dale are gone,” say they, “we’ll can take to reading your own bits of stories, for there’ll be nothing better left to do, and not a ploy from Martinmas to Whitsunday and back again.”

I know better, of course. I know that unconventional characters – fantastic, whimsical, bombastic, awkward, crazed – will come to the surface there and elsewhere as constant as the bracken comes upon the braes in spring.

But age, undoubtedly, whether it matures an oddity or not, endears him to you if yours be the proper sympathetic soul for such caprices of the stars. What in a droll “going-about body” of thirty seems a rogue’s impertinence will appear to some one else, thirty years after this, or even to yourself perhaps, a quaint wit, and his sayings and doings will be the cause of merriment over all the countryside. So it is that even I am sometimes constrained to think the old characters dead and gone will never have such brilliant successors.

I had that thought yesterday as I walked past Copenhagen’s school. Alas! not Copenhagen’s school, for Copenhagen wields no earthly ferrule, and lies with many of his pupils under grass in Kilmailie, and the little thatched academy, where we drowsed in summer, and choked in winter in the smoke of our own individual peats, is but a huddle of stones, hidden by nettles, humbled in the shade of the birch-tree from which old Copenhagen culled the pliant and sibilant switch for our more noisy than unpleasant castigation. But there, persistent as are the roads old hunters made upon the hills of long ago, as are the ways our fathers went to market through glens for years untenanted, was the path we youngsters made between the highway and old Copenhagen’s school!

Is it conceivable, I ask my old companions of that hillside seminary, that Copenhagen should be dead? That a time should come when his thin, long, bent figure, carried on one of his own legs and one (as went our tradition) cut from an ash in the wood of Achnatra, should dart about the little school no more, and his tales of Nelson and the sea be all concluded?

He had been twenty years in the Navy, and had seen but a single engagement – the one that gave him his byname, and cost him his leg. He came home with a pension, and settled in his native parish. He was elderly; he was – as we should think it now – ill-educated; he was without wife or child of his own; he had at times the habit of ran-dan, as we call a convivial rollicking. Heaven plainly meant him for a Highland school, and so he opened one – this same, so lowly to-day among the nettles. Of the various things he taught, the most I can remember (besides reading, which came, I fear, more by nature than by Copenhagen’s teaching) was the geography of the Baltic, the graphic fact that Horatio Nelson nearly always wore a grey surtout, three ways of tying knots, and a song of epic character called “The Plains of Waterloo.” What would perhaps be called a “special subject” nowadays was the art he taught us of keeping birds from cherry-trees. The cherry-trees grew up the front of Copenhagen’s bachelor dwelling-house, half a mile from the school. When the fruit reddened, every scholar in the school (we numbered twelve or fourteen) rose at dawn for days and sat below the cherry-trees chanting a Gaelic incantation that never failed to keep away the predatory thrush. The odd thing was that Copenhagen, in spite of these precautions, never got a single cherry, and did not seem to care. We ate the cherries as they ripened, relieving each other alternately of the incantation; he came out to praise us for our industry, and never cast a glance aloft.

The fees for Copenhagen’s college were uncertain – not only in payment, but in amount. When our parents asked him what was to pay for Bob or Sandy, the antique pensioner blew his nose with noisy demonstration, and invariably answered, “We don’t know what we’ll need till we see what we’ll require.” His requirements were manifestly few, for three-fourths of the pupils contributed nothing to the upkeep of the school but a diurnal peat in winter, and the others had their fees wholly expended on pens and paper for themselves when the flying stationer came round twice a year.

We grew to like and to respect old Copenhagen, knowing nothing of his ran-dans, that were confined to the town six miles away, and never were allowed to interfere with his duty to his pupils. He made no brilliant scholars, but he gave us a thousand pleasant, droll, and kindly memories that go far as a substitute for a superficial knowledge of Greek. I would myself have learned the cutlass from him, being the oldest of the pupils and the likeliest to make a good practitioner of that noble marine weapon; but, unhappily, I left the school and started my career in town the very day he had unearthed the sword and brought it forth for my first lesson.

It was there I learned that Copenhagen was the church precentor, and had his little vices, whereof our folks at home, with wisdom and delicacy, had never given us a hint. He used to come down to town each Sunday in a pair of tightly-strapped breeches, a black surtout, and what we called a three-storey hat. The preacher chose the psalm, but it was Copenhagen chose the tune. He had but half a dozen airs in all his repertory – Selma, Dundee, Martyrdom, Coleshill, and Dunfermline, and what he called “yon one of my own.” I have sometimes been to the opera since; I fear, from knowledge gained by that experience, that the old man was not highly gifted for vocalism. Invariably he started on too high a key, and found that he had done so only when a bar or two was finished. With imperturbability unfailing, he just stopped short, and, leaning over his desk, said to the congregation, “We’ll have another try at it, lads!” The service was an English one, but this touching confidence was in Gaelic, and addressed particularly to the men who, married or single, sat apart from the women.

While Copenhagen still led the praise to Coleshill and “yon one of his own,” a pestilent innovator came to the place who knew music, and, unhappily, introduced a band of enterprising youths to the mysteries of harmony. He taught them bass and alto, and showed them how the melody of Dundee and Coleshill could be embellished and improved by those. The first Sunday these vocalists started to display their new art in the church, Copenhagen stopped in the middle of a verse to make a protest.

“I’ll have none of your boom-boom singing here to put me all reel-rall,” said he, “nor praising of the Lord with such theatricals,” then baffled them by changing the air to “yon one of his own.”

A bachelor by prejudice and conviction, he liked to hear of marriages, and when the “cries” were read he had for long – until a new incumbent made a protest – a cheerful, harmless habit of crying at the end of the announcement, “I have no objections to’t whatever.”

The new incumbent was less tolerant than his predecessor; to him was due the old man’s retirement from the office of conductor of the psalmody. He would not countenance the ran-dans, nor consent to the perpetuation of Copenhagen’s ancient manners in the precentor’s desk. First of all he claimed the right of intimating the tunes as well as the psalms to be sung to them, and sought thereby to put an end to the unseemly “yon one of my own”; but Copenhagen started what air he pleased, no matter what was intimated, and more often than before it was his own creation. Then were thrust upon the old man wooden boards with the names of half a dozen psalm tunes printed on them. They were to be displayed in front of the desk as required, and thus save all necessity for any verbal intimation. But Copenhagen generally showed them upside down, and still maintained his vested rights to start what airs he chose. “I think we agreed on Martyrdom in the vestry,” said the minister once, exasperated into a protest in front of the congregation when Copenhagen started “yon one.” “So we did, so we did – I mind fine; but I shifted my mind,” said Copenhagen, looking up, and cleared his throat to start again. “Upon my word,” said he to sympathisers in the afternoon, “upon my word the man’s a fair torment!”

Old Copenhagen’s most notable ran-dans were after he had demitted office as musician, out of patience at last with the “torment.” They were such guileless, easily induced excesses, so marked by an incongruous propriety, that I hesitate to speak of them as more than innocent exhilarations. ’Twas then his surtout was most spick and span, his manner most urbane and engaging. The poorest gangrel who addressed him on the highway then was “sir” to Copenhagen, and a boy had but to look at him to be assured of a halfpenny. His timber leg went tapping over the causeways then with an illusive haste, for it was Copenhagen’s wish to be thought a man immersed profoundly in affairs. He spoke in his finest English (reserved for moments of importance) of the Admiralty, and he never entered the inn without having in his hand a large packet of blue envelopes tied with a boot-lace, to suggest important and delicate negotiations with some messenger from the First Lord. Once, I remember, he came out of the inn with a suspicious-looking bulge in the tail-pocket of his surtout. As he passed the Beenickie and Jock Scott and me standing at the factor’s corner, and punctiliously returned the naval salute he always looked for from his own old pupils, a “Glenorchy pint” (as it was called) fell out of his pocket in the street, without suffering any damage. He never paused a moment or looked round, and the Beenickie cried after him, “You have dropped something, Mr Bain.” “It is just a trifle, lads,” he answered without looking back; “I will get it when I return,” and pursued his way to his house, six miles away. He was ashamed, I suppose, of the exposure.

Another time – on the night of St John’s, when the local Freemasons had their flambeau march, and every boy who carried a torch got threepence on production of its stump the following day (which induced some to cut their stumps in two, and so get sixpence) – I saw old Copenhagen falling down an outside stair. I hastened to his assistance, suffering sincere alarm and pity for my ancient dominie. He was, luckily, little the worse. “I was coming down in any case, John,” said he benignly. “Man! I am always vexed I never learned you the fencing with the cutlass, for you were a promising lad.” “I am sorry too, Mr Bain,” said I, though indeed I could not see that a clerk in a law office would find the accomplishment in question of much use to him. “I knew your Uncle Jamie,” he added. “Him and me was pretty chief. You will say nothing about my bit of a glide, John: I was coming down at any rate, I assure you.”

I should like my last reminiscence of old Copenhagen to be more reputable, for his own last words in gossiping of any one, no matter how foolish or vile, were always generous. And I recall a day when he came from his distant seminary through deep drifts of snow to the town to post a letter that he wished me to revise first. The ‘Courier’ of the week was full of tales of misery among our troops in the Crimean trenches, and Copenhagen’s sympathies were fired. His letter was a suggestion to the Admiralty that in these times of stress it might help my Lords a little if they were relieved of the payment of the pension of Archibald Bain, late of H.M.S. Elephant. He was very old, and frail, and tremulous in these days; his hand of write would have sorely puzzled any one but me, who knew so well its eccentricities. His folly touched me to the core; I knew his object, but for the life of me I could not read his letter.

“I think it would be a mistake to send it, Mr Bain,” I said, when he explained.

“Havers!” said he. “What I want you to tell me is if it is shipshape and Bristol fashion, eh? and not likely to give offence. Read it, man, read it!”

“Read it out to me yourself, Mr Bain,” I stammered, “the thing’s beyond me.”

He put on his spectacles and looked closely at his own scrawl. “I declare to you,” he said in a little, laughingly, “I declare to you I cannot read a word of her myself. But no matter, John, we’ll just let her go as she stands; they’re better scholars in London than what we are.”

The letter went, but I never heard that the British Admiralty availed itself of an offer so unusual and kind.

I thought of these things yesterday as I passed the ruins of Copenhagen’s school. How far, since then, have travelled the feet that trod there; how far, how weary, how humbled, how elate, how prosperous, how shamefully down at heel? Dear lads, dear girls, wherever you be, my old companions, were we not here in this poor place, among the hazel and the fern, most fortunate and happy? Has the wide world we travel through for fame or fortune – or, better still, content – added aught to us of joy we did not have (at least in memory) in those irrecoverable, enduring, summer days? Now it is mist for ever on the hill, and the rain-rot in the wood, and clouds and cares chasing each other across our heavens, and flowers that flame from bud to blossom and smoulder into dust almost before we have caught their perfume; then, old friends, we pricked our days out leisurely upon a golden calendar: the scent of the morning hay-fields seemed eternal.

THE SILVER DRUM

FIFTY yards to the rear of the dwelling-house the studio half hid itself amongst young elms and laurel bushes, at its outside rather like a granary, internally like a chapel, the timbers of the roof exposed and umber-stained, with a sort of clerestory for the top light, a few casts of life-size statues in the corners, and two or three large bas-reliefs of Madonnas and the like by Donatello helping out the ecclesiastical illusion. It was the last place to associate with the sound of drums, and yet I sat for twenty minutes sometimes stunned, sometimes fascinated, by the uproar of asses’ skin. The sculptor who played might, by one less unconventional, be looked upon as seriously sacrificing his dignity in a performance so incongruous with his age and situation. But I have always loved the whimsical; I am myself considered somewhat eccentric, and there is a rapport between artistic souls that permits – indeed, induces – some display of fantasy or folly when they get into each other’s society apart from the intolerant folks who would think it lunacy for a man of over middle age to indulge in the contre-dance of “Petronella” at a harvest-home, or display any accomplishment with the jew’s-harp.

Urquhart, at the time when I sat to him, was a man of sixty years or thereabout; yet he marched up and down the floor of his workshop with the step of a hill-bred lad, his whole body sharing the rhythm of his beating, his clean-shaven face with the flush of a winter apple, the more noticeable in contrast with the linen smock he used as an overall while at work among his clay. The deep old-fashioned side-drum swinging at his groin seemed to have none of a drum’s monotony. It expressed (at all events to me that have some fancy) innumerable ecstasies and emotions – alarms, entreaties, defiances, gaieties, and regrets, the dreadful sentiment of forlorn hopes, the murmur of dubious battalions in countries of ambush. The sound of the drum is, unhappily, beyond typographical expression, though long custom makes us complacently accept “rat-a-tat-tat” or “rub-a-dub-dub” as quite explanatory of its every phrase and accent; but I declare the sculptor brought from it the very pang of love. Alternated with the martial uproar of rouses, retreats, chamades, and marches that made the studio shake, it rose into the clerestory and lingered in the shades of the umber roof, this gentle combination of taps and roulades, like the appeal of one melodiously seeking admission at his mistress’s door.

“You had no idea that I handled sticks so terrifically?” said he, relinquishing the instrument at last, and returning to his proper task of recording my lineaments in the preparatory clay.

“You play marvellously, Mr Urquhart,” I said, astonished. “I had no idea you added the drum to your – to your accomplishments.”

“Well, there you have me revealed – something of a compliment to you, I assure you, for I do not beat my drum for everybody. If I play well it is, after all, no wonder, for with a side-drum and a pair of sticks I earned a living for seven years and travelled among the most notable scenes of Europe.”

“So?” I said, and waited. He pinched the clay carefully to make the presentment of the lobe of my ear, and stood back from his work a moment to study the effect.

“Yes,” he said, “few people know of it; and perhaps it is as well, for it might not be counted wholly to the credit of an R.S.A. if it were known; but for seven years I played the side-drum in the ranks of the 71st. I played from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, at Vimiera, Corunna, Talavera, Busaco, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos, Quatre Bras, and Waterloo. Lord! the very names go dirling through my heart. They were happy days, I assure you, when I – when I – ”

“Thumped the skin,” I ventured foolishly, as he paused to make a line of some importance on my effigy.

He corrected me with a vexed air.

“Thumped, my dear sir, is scarcely the word I should use under the circumstances. That hackneyed verb of every dolt who has neither ear nor imagination should not be chosen by a fellow-artist, a man of letters, to describe the roll of the drum. My happiest days, as I was about to say, were when I carried Kildalton’s silver drum, for which this one is but an indifferent substitute.”

“Well, at least,” said I lamely, “the drummer of the 71st has gone pretty far in another art than music.”

“It is very good of you to say so,” remarked Urquhart, with quiet dignity and an old-fashioned bow. “I trust, by-and-by, with assiduity to become as good a sculptor as I was a drummer.”

“How did you happen to join the Army?” I asked, anxious to have him follow up so promising an introduction.

“Because I was a fool. Mind, I do not regret it, for I had at the same time, in my folly, such memorable and happy experiences as quite improperly (as you might think) never come to the doorstep of the very wise. Still, I joined the Army in a fool’s escapade, resenting what seemed to me the insufferable restrictions of a Scottish manse. My father was incumbent of a parish, half Highland, half Lowland. At sixteen I came home from Edinburgh and my first session of the University there; at sixteen and a half I mutinied against sixpence a week of pocket-money and the prospect of the Divinity Hall for one (as I felt) designed by Heaven for Art, and with a borrowed name and an excellently devised tale of orphanhood, took a bounty in the territorial regiment. They put me to the drums. They professed to find me so well suited there that they kept me at them all the time I was a King’s man, in spite of all my protests, and there, if you are in the mood for a story, I had an experience.

“The corps had two drums of silver, one of which was entrusted to me. They were called ‘Kildalton’s drums,’ in compliment to their donor, from whose lands no fewer than four companies of the 71st had been embodied. They were handsome instruments, used only for stately occasions, and mine, at least, so much engaged my fancy that I liked to keep it shining like a mirror; and the cords and tassels of silk – pleated, as we were told, by Kildalton’s daughter – appealed so much to the dandiacal in me, I fretted to have them wet on a parade. You can fancy, therefore, my distress when my darling was subjected to the rough work and hazards of the sack of Ciudad Rodrigo.

“Our corps on that occasion was in the Light Division. While Picton’s men, away to our left and nearer the river, were to attack the great breach made in the ramparts by our guns on the Tessons, we were to rush into a lesser breach farther east. The night was black and cold to that degree I could not see the fortress at a hundred yards, and could scarcely close my fingers on the drum-sticks as I beat for the advance of Napier’s storming party. The walls we threatened burst in tongues of flame and peals of thunder. Grape-shot tore through our three hundred as we crossed the ditch; but in a moment we were in the gap, the bayonets busy as it were among wine-skins, the footing slimy with blood, and a single drum (my comrade fell mortally wounded in the ditch) beat inside the walls for the column outside to follow us.”

“Yes, yes,” I said, impatient, for Urquhart drew back abstracted, checking his tale to survey the effect of his last touch upon my eyebrows.

He smiled.

“Why,” said he, “I hardly thought it would interest you,” and then went on deliberately.

“I need not tell you,” he said, “how quick was our conquering of the French, once we had got through the walls. My drum was not done echoing back from Sierra de Francisca (as I think the name was), when the place was ours. And then – and then – there came the sack! Our men went mad. These were days when rapine and outrage were to be expected from all victorious troops; there might be some excuse for hatred of the Spaniard on the part of our men, whose comrades, wounded, had been left to starve at Talavera – but surely not for this. They gorged with wine, they swarmed in lawless squads through every street and alley; swept through every dwelling, robbing and burning; the night in a while was white with fires, and the town was horrible with shrieks and random musket-shots and drunken songs.

“Some time in the small hours of the morning, trying to find my own regiment, I came with my drum to the head of what was doubtless the most dreadful street that night in Europe. It was a lane rather than a street, unusually narrow, with dwellings on either side so high that it had some semblance to a mountain pass. At that hour, if you will credit me, it seemed the very gullet of the Pit: the far end of it in flames, the middle of it held by pillagers who fought each other for the plunder from the houses, while from it came the most astounding noises – oaths in English and Portuguese, threats, entreaties, and commands, the shrieks of women, the crackling of burning timber, occasionally the firing of weapons, and through it all, constant, sad beyond expression, a deep low murmur, intensely melancholy, made up of the wail of the sacked city.

“As I stood listening some one called out, ‘Drummer!’

“I turned, to find there had just come up a general officer and his staff, with a picket of ten men. The General himself stepped forward at my salute and put his hand on my drum, that shone brightly in the light of the conflagrations.

“‘What the deuce do you mean, sir,’ said he with heat, ‘by coming into action with my brother’s drum? You know very well it is not for these occasions.’

“‘The ordinary drums of the regiment were lost on Monday last, sir,’ I said, ‘when we were fording the Agueda through the broken ice.’ And then, with a happy thought, I added, ‘Kildalton’s drums are none the worse for taking part in the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo. This was the first drum through the walls.’

“He looked shrewdly at me and gave a little smile. ‘H’m,’ he muttered, ‘perhaps not, perhaps not, after all. My brother would have been pleased, if he had been alive, to know his drums were here this night. Where is the other one?’

“‘The last I saw of it, sir,’ I answered, ‘was in the ditch, and Colin Archibald, corporal, lying on his stomach over it.’

“‘Dead?’

“‘Dead, I think, sir.’

“‘H’m!’ said the General. ‘I hope my brother’s drum’s all right, at any rate.’ He turned and cried up the picket. ‘I want you, drummer,’ he said, ‘to go up that lane with this picket, playing the assembly. You understand? These devils fighting and firing there have already shot at three of my officers, and are seemingly out of their wits. We will give them a last chance. I don’t deny there is danger in what I ask you to do, but it has to be done. The men in there are mostly of Pack’s Portuguese and the dregs of our own corps. If they do not come out with you I shall send in a whole regiment to them and batter their brains out against the other end, if the place is, as I fancy, a cul-de-sac. March!’

“I went before the picket with my drum rattling and my heart in my mouth. The pillagers came round us jeering, others assailed us more seriously by throwing from upper windows anything they could conveniently lay hand on (assuming it was too large or too valueless to pocket), but we were little the worse till in a lamentable moment of passion one of the picket fired his musket at a window. A score of pieces flashed back in response, and five of our company fell, while we went at a double for the end of the lane.

“‘By Heaven!’ cried the sergeant when we reached it, ‘here’s a fine thing!’ The General had been right – it was a cul-de-sac! There was nothing for us then but to return.

“You have never been in action; you cannot imagine,” Urquhart went on, “the exasperating influence of one coward in a squad that is facing great danger. There were now, you must know, but six of us, hot and reckless with anger, and prepared for anything – all but one, and he was in the fear of death. As I went before the picket drumming the assembly and the sergeant now beside me, this fellow continually kicked my heels, he kept so close behind. I turned my head, and found that he marched crouching, obviously eager to have a better man than himself sheltering him from any approaching bullet.

“‘You cowardly dog!’ I cried, stepping aside, ‘come out from behind me and die like a man!’ I could take my oath the wretch was sobbing! It made me sick to hear him, but I was saved more thought of it by the rush of some women across the lane, shrieking as they ran, with half a company at least of Portuguese at their heels. With a shout we were after Pack’s scoundrels, up a wide pend close (as we say in Scotland) that led into a courtyard, where we found the valorosas prepared to defend the position with pistol and sword. A whole battalion would have hesitated to attack such odds, and I will confess we swithered for a moment. A shot came from the dark end of the entry and tore through both ends of my drum.

“‘We’re wretched fools to be here at all,’ said lily-liver, plainly whimpering, and at that I threw down my outraged instrument, snatched his musket from him, and charged up the close with the other four. The Portuguese ran like rabbits; for the time, at least, the women were safe, and I had a remorse for my beloved drum.

“I left the others to follow, hurried into the lane, and found the poltroon was gone, my drum apparently with him. Ciudad Rodrigo was darker now, for the fires were burning low. It was less noisy, too; and I heard half-way up the lane the sound of a single musket-shot. I ran between the tall tenements; the glint of bright metal filled me with hope and apprehension. A man lay in the gutter beside my drum, and a Portuguese marauder, who fled at my approach, stood over him with a knife.

“The man in the gutter was the General, with his brother’s drum slung to him, and the sticks in his hands, as if he had been playing. He was unconscious, with a bullet through his shoulder.”