The Drums of Glen Tub

by LORD INVERCHAPEL

LORD JAMES was in one of his rare good moods. This was immediately apparent to his guests as, in deference to his habits of implacable punctuality, they gathered under the Gainsboroughs and Raeburns in the great hall a few minutes before eight o’clock. Tonight they seized upon this fugitive manifestation of geniality. I often wondered why they submitted to his normally sustained tetchiness, but those were the days when fashion laid it down that a substantial part of the autumn should be spent in Scotland, and, as fashion had to be observed and his grouse were good to kill, people tended to put in some days at the castle between perhaps more congenial visits, and to brave the often embarrassing spleen of their host.

I watched him as he stood with his back to the big fire and chatted with uncommon briskness to his somewhat obsequious guests, and I noted that he wore the kilt too short, showed too much of his rather bobbly knees, and displayed too many ornaments. It was the way of all his family from his brother, the duke, downwards, to disfigure with bejeweled fripperies an otherwise distinguished garb.

As the clock struck eight Kemble, the English butler, appeared. He was always to be counted upon to break the customary tension by announcing dinner. Tonight there was no tension, Tonight something had obviously ruffled him, for his normal calm and dignity were departed. “Mr. and Mrs. Starr to see your lordship urgently,” he said; “something seems to have happened.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Starr? Oh yes, that nice English couple at the lodge at Glen Tub. But why at this time of night? Lay some extra places at the table, Kemble, in case they stay to dinner. Ian,” addressing his son, “go and see what they want and bring them in. And you too, Archie, if you are as inquisitive as you look. Meanwhile, let us begin.”

Lord James, although himself the tenant of his brother at the castle, ignored his grace’s other tenants — mainly from England — who paid a handsome rent for six short weeks of sport. But Lord James had seen the Starrs in the village shop and had liked the look of them, more particularly of Mrs. Starr, who was youngish and handsome. “A damn fine woman. Well set up and shapely.” Ian, his son, put these words into Italian for him: “Un bel pezzo di donna, you mean, father.” “Yes, that’s it, a very fine piece of a woman,” glancing at me. In the village shop he had seen me disentangling from a sample of material one of the fishing flies with which her tweed costume bristled and at which her young brother had been fumbling ineffectively for some minutes, and he had twitted me about the length of time I had taken, “groping over her shapeliness,” as he put it. I fancied that there was in him a slight twinge of jealousy.

Lord James and his guests went towards the dining room, and Ian and I to the front door. There we found three frightened people with a breathless story to tell, which they told all three at the same time. They were the tenants at the lodge of Glen Tub, some seven miles away, where the Tub Water spilled itself into the sea loch. The Tub Water, as Ian and I well knew, was an ample, goodly if capricious river, that drew its amplitude from Ben Sligrachan, Tom Soiller, and the tumble of two or three other hills that topped its glen, its goodliness from the sea, and its caprices from the skies. At that time of the year it was full of fresh-run salmon and sea trout.

2

THERE were three beats on the Tub Water, each about two miles long. This meant that the three Starrs could all fish the river at the same time. That evening they had been at work. Mr. Starr had drawn the top beat, Mrs. Starr’s brother was in the middle, and Mrs. Starr at the bottom near the lodge, where the glen splayed out from its narrows into an expanse of good meadowland. The plan was to fish downstream. The river had scooped its way deeply through the belly of the glen. It was quite a business to get down to it through the birches and the whins from the rough road that General Wade had cut out of the hillside nearly two hundred years ago, when he had begun his work of disarming the Highlands and destroying the clan system. It was still more of a business to climb up to it again from the Tub Water.

Mr. Starr had five sizable trout in his creel and was bent upon making it six. Intent upon his purpose, he was slow to lend an ear to what seemed to him to be the sound of faraway drums, of drums moving down the glen towards him. Yes, it was surely the sound of drums, louder and more insistent. At last his curiosity was stirred. As he heaved himself up through the birch trees he wondered why he was bothering to investigate what could be but the clatter of a troop of homing boy scouts. But something strong inside him impelled him to get up to the road to see what was afoot. It was a stiff climb and it left him breathless. As he reached the low stone dike that edged the road, the rattle of drums was there, there, right in front of him, beating loudly on his ears. The air was trembling and pulsing with their rhythm.

He sat on the wall and tried to recapture his breath, staring at the empty rain-washed road. The measured din had passed him now, but although there was nothing to be seen, he was conscious, as he put it, of a disturbance of the atmosphere as if caused by the passage of a large number of men. He fancied indeed that he could even smell them. He sat for a little time in startled wonderment, trying to dismiss it all as too unreal to have happened. But that was no good, for, while the air about him was now still again, the noise of the drums, although diminishing, was still thudding in his ears from farther down the glen. Now, as fear dwindled, a new thought came to him. He slowly persuaded himself that the drums must mean something to him personally, must hold some portent for him; and he wondered why it seemed natural to say to himself “the drums,” as if they had indeed some special significance for him. As he told his story he was at pains to make this clear to Ian and myself, as if expecting from us some kind of elucidation.

When calm had come back to him he had remembered that he had left on the riverbank the expensive split cane rod which he had just bought from Mr. Ogden of St. James’s Street. He could not leave it and creel of five fish there. He slithered down the slope again, and once on the riverbank he decided not to try the exhausting climb back to the road but to follow the course of the river down to the middle beat. That was no easy journey either, amongst the rocks and brambles, and it was some time before he was able to hail his brother-in-law, who in his turn was to be seen packing up his rod on the fringe of the Still Pool. Mr. Starr began to shout, “The drums! The drums! Did you hear them?”

“Yes, our drums, our drums!”

The experience of Mrs. Starr’s brother had been the same as that of her husband. He too had heard the sound of passing drums and he too had felt irresistibly drawn towards the road and had found it empty.

A few minutes later the two men, speculating excitedly, were making their way down the road towards the foot of the glen, the now distant throbbing of the drums still ahead of them. Suddenly the drumming stopped. It was followed by a confused noise as of shouting, which slowly died away until its eternal quiet fell upon Glen Tub again. The two men looked at each other in fresh fear and puzzlement; then they hurried on and there, stretched on the heather by the road, they came upon Mrs. Starr. She was unconscious. Colin, the young Highland gillie, was on his knees beside her. He was hardly articulate. He could not explain the extraordinary behavior of Mrs. Starr, who on a sudden had thrust her rod upon him crying out in her strange southern idiom something about “drums,” and scrambling up the hillside to the road. Colin had heard no sound of drums. He had clearly thought that Mrs. Starr was daft. He had watched her climb over the stone dike and reach the road in safety. He had stayed on the river for a time to pack up her rod, and had then gone after her and had found her lying by the road in a faint. And now the other foreigners from London were clearly daft too, for they kept muttaring as they bent OVER her, “The drums! The drums!”

It was some time before Mrs. Starr came to and could be taken to the lodge. She had seemed reluctant to believe that she had fainted, and had insisted upon coming to the castle with her men to tell the strange story and to ask its meaning of us, undoubted natives, who would be bound to know. Ian and I listened incredulously to the halting and disjointed story, and our curiosity was particularly aroused by the air of possessiveness with which the Starrs seemed to talk of the drums. Mrs. Starr’s brother had even called them “our drums.” But there was nothing that we Scots could tell them. No, thanks very much, they would not burst in on Lord James’s dinner. They had better go back to Glen Tub. It was getting late and Mrs. Starr was rather upset.

All that we could do therefore was to put them into their car and promise to bring some light upon the mystery in the morning.

When Ian and L got back to the dining room, to a half-finished dinner, our version of t story was probably as confused as the Starrs’. Lord James listened with keen interest and asked many questions. He was now obviously sorry that he had not seen the Starrs himself, and said that he would call at Glen Tub tomorrow. I wondered whether his interest lay more in the attraction of Mrs. Starr than in the sound of the drums. “I was born here and I have known Glen Tub since I was a boy — over fifty years. I’ve never heard anything that could explain this story. You boys had better go and see John Mackintosh in the morning.”

3

EARLY next day we were in John Mackintosh’s shop amongst the barrel-shaped rolls of homespun, woven on hand looms by the local crofters — John Mackintosh had a fine eye for what would catch the fancy of the English tourist — and slimmer bolts of multicolored tartans. He was the village tailor and claimed with some justice that he could cut a better kilt than any of those smart fellows in George Street, Edinburgh. He was also the village historian and he knew the legend of every ghost in Lorne, Knapdaile, and Cowal, but he knew nothing about Glen Tub. He would see what he could do.

It was not until weeks later that John Mackintosh’s research brought him something like a clue. In 1745, he told us, the ancestors of Lord James, unlike most Highland families, had found it expedient to take sides against the Stuarts and to become the allies of the House of Hanover. Harried by their neighbors, who were all Jacobites, they had asked for and had been given the support of an English battalion which had occupied the little town of Invertullich throughout the wars. In the autumn of 1745 two companies of this battalion had marched out to raid ihe Macalastair country, for that clan had been giving much trouble. They had found the Macalastair clachans deserted by all except the old men and the very young. Not a fighting man was to be seen. The English did some burning and plundering, but respected the Lady Macalastair in her tower. They had been drumming themselves back to their base in Invertullich when they had fallen into an ambush set by the fighting Macalastairs at the foot of Glen Tub and had been massacred almost to a man.

It was in the library of the castle itself that John Mackintosh had happened upon a contemporary manuscript record of the incident. He thought this enough to account for the sounds of the drums and the shouting, but he could not explain how it had come about that the revelation should have been made to the three foreigners from the south when no native of the glen had ever heard a murmur of drums. At this stage John Mackintosh felt that his work had been done, and his interest in the affair came to an end. But not so Lord James’s. Memories perhaps of the shapeliness of Mrs. Starr had drawn him to London earlier in the year than had been his custom. From his romantic mind had sprung the happy thought that something might be gained by exploring the ancestry of the Starrs and they had taken up the idea with eagerness. Mr. Starr sought the services of a genealogist who, after prolonged search at Somerset House, made an interesting discovery. The great-grandfather of Mr. Starr had lost his life in 1745 as a drummer in the London battalion quartered at Invertullich. But, more remarkable, Mrs, Starr’s great-greatgrandfather had also been amongst those slaughtered in the tragic little massacre in Glen Tub.

Lord James was triumphant and the feeling of importance in the bosoms of the Starrs markedly swelled. When I passed through London shortly after on my way to Italy I dined with them. Lord James was there. He only had to walk across Cavendish Square to find himself in Mrs. Starr’s drawing room. It was natural that we should talk of the adventure in the Highlands, and Mr. Starr reminded us that, after the first spasm of fear had passed, he had felt that in some way or other the drums belonged to him, and had been, as it were, the filling of some gap left bare long ago, something now reaching out into the present for the fulfillment of something that had happened in the past.

Lord James had an explanation of the mystery which was readily accepted by all of us. The chance juxtaposition, on that autumn evening, on what must have been an anniversary of the massacre, of the descendants of two of the drummers had made of the negative deeply impressed upon the melancholy glen a clamorous positive. A positive for the ears of the Starrs alone.

John Mackintosh was upset when Ian and I had to confess that no major tragedy had befallen the Starr family in accordance with everyday Highland tradition. We too had been disposed to foretell something of the kind. But the Starrs went their way in peace, so far as I know. I lost sight of them. But I did hear that Mr. Starr had given away his Ogden rod and declared that he would never fish again. That was in 1910. Despite all the blandishments of Lord James the Starrs could not be persuaded to come back to the Highlands, and for forty years no sound of drums has troubled the stillness of Glen Tub.