Читать книгу England, Their England - A. G. Macdonell - Страница 5

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One of the routes by which shell-shocked officers progressed from the base hospitals back to health was via a temporary row of huts in Palace Green, two enchanting private houses on the top of Campden Hill, and finally one or other of the monster hydropathics in Derbyshire or Scotland. Donald Cameron travelled this route, and ended in a monster hydropathic in Scotland, where the chief, indeed, the only, qualification of the Commandant for solving the three hundred separate psychological problems entrusted to him by the War Office was an unrivalled knowledge of the drainage system of the insalubrious port of Leith. But even this expert was unable to do much for Donald beyond applying his universal remedy for all shell-shock cases. This remedy was simple. It consisted of finding out the main likes and dislikes of each patient, and then ordering them to abstain from the former and apply themselves diligently to the latter. For example, those of the so-called patients—for the Commandant privately disbelieved in the existence of shell-shock, never having experienced himself any more alarming manifestation of the power of modern artillery than the vibrations of target-practice by invisible battleships—who disliked noise were allotted rooms on the main road. Those who had been, in happier times, parsons, schoolmasters, journalists, and poets, were forbidden the use of the library and driven off in batches to physical drill, lawn tennis, golf, and badminton. Those who wished to be alone were paired with horse-racing, girl-hunting subalterns. Those who were terrified of solitude had special rooms by themselves behind green-baize doors at the ends of remote corridors. By means of this admirable system, the three hundred separate psychological problems were soon reduced to the uniform level of the Leith drainage and sewerage, and by the time that a visiting commission of busybodies, arriving unexpectedly and armed with an absurd technical knowledge and jargon, insisted upon the immediate sack of the Commandant and his replacement by a civilian professor of psychology, it was estimated that the mental condition of as many as two per cent of the patients had definitely improved for the better since admission to the hospital.

Donald was not among the fortunate two per cent. His natural shyness had been increased by the concussion of the high-explosive shell on the Passchendaele Ridge, and the Commandant's system, which had made Donald president of the Debating Society and compulsory speaker at all debates, had had the unfortunate effect of assisting rather than countering the efficient work of the German militarists and munition-makers. Indeed the professor of psychology, a man who not only believed in the existence of the subject which he professed, but also read books about it written by foreigners, and Germans at that, allowed more than a year and a half to elapse before he felt that it would be safe to send Donald out into the world of civil life from which he had been so suddenly and so strangely excluded for six years. It was not until 1920, therefore, that Donald was furnished with a document which said that he would only be forty-hundredths of a normal man for the next seven years; that his physical rating for the rest of his life as a potential soldier in any future war that might elude the influence of the Great War to end War was C2; but that on the expiration of the seven years he would, unaccountably, become once again a hundred per cent citizen with no further claim upon the finances of the country. Such was the mathematical exactitude of prophecy with which the Ministry of Pensions was endowed in those years that immediately followed the War, and it is believed to be the first successful poach by Aesculapius upon the preserves of the Delphian Apollo. To this document was attached a statement that the missing sixty-hundredths of Lieutenant Donald Cameron were worth £85 a year—a mortifying comparison with the value put upon his services at that desperate crisis in world affairs when General von Kluck, the subject of so many admirable rhymes, was advancing nimbly upon Paris, and Colonel Repington was beginning his diary.

The £85 per annum was to be paid in half-yearly instalments and was subject to income-tax. Income-tax was to be deducted at the source.

Donald packed his valise for the last time, saluted a major for the last time, shook hands affectionately with the professor who had so unpatriotically called in Herr Freud to redress the balance of Frau Krupp, and departed in a first-class carriage, for the last time for many years, to Aberdeen, and from Aberdeen by slow train to the country district of Aberdeenshire which is called Buchan. His father, Ewan Cameron, was the proprietor of a farm in Buchan called the Mains of Balspindie, and Ewan was known as the best singer, the best violinist, the champion whisky-drinker, the story-teller par excellence, the scholar who could out-talk the minister, the quickest-tempered, the kindest-hearted, the handsomest old man, and the worst farmer, from the Mormond Hill to the foot of the Lecht. Ewan Cameron had not always been a farmer. He had once owned a small distillery near Edzell in Angus, but the distillery had failed because of the owner's sentimental attachment to his own wares. He could not bear the thought of other people drinking the precious fluid. At another period of his life, Ewan Cameron had kept a general store in the village of Forres, but this too had failed. For Ewan contracted a habit of putting up the shutters earlier and earlier every week in order to indulge his passion for fishing, an art in which he was a complete master, as even the pundits of Deveronside and Spey admitted. The result, of course, was that as the creel filled the till emptied, and Ewan Cameron packed his belongings, filled his silver snuff-mull—it had a huge cairngorm on the top—and moved on. Tomintoul, highest village of Britain, saw him for a month or two. In Charlestown-of-Aberlour he stayed two years, nominally as factor to a small laird, but actually spending all his days and a long part of his nights in making violins, which he offered for sale to those who could not play the violin and gave as presents to those who could. In Fochabers he taught Latin in the school for a while, but neglected his school hours in order to argue with the parish priest about the Infallibility of the Pope, a subject in which he was greatly interested at the time; and in Knockando for six months he drove the straightest furrow that had been seen in those parts for many a long day. His hair gradually silvered, his face grew wrinkled and old, but no amount of whisky and no length of nocturnal discussion and no fall from comfort to poverty could dim the brightness of his eye or roughen the clearness of his tenor voice, or shake the nimbleness of his fingers upon the violin-strings or the chanter. Only on two subjects he would never talk, and those were his father and his father's father. All that Donald knew about his great-grandfather was that he had "come over the hills" in about 1790 and that he was a very silent man; and all that he knew about his grandfather was that he was the most skilful poacher, although an amateur, from Donside to Fort George, and that he too was a very silent man.

In 1921 the farm in Buchan was gradually going the same way as the distillery and the shop and the schoolmastering and the rest of them had gone. Ewan Cameron did not care. His wife had been dead many years; his only son had been supported by the Government since 1914, and he had just discovered Dante. He had no cares in the world. A weird machine which the English call a char-à-banc, and the French an autobus, had begun to ply between the district of Balspindie and Aberdeen, and twice a week the old man went to plague the life of the librarian of King's College in the Old Town by demanding obscure Continental books of which the librarian had never heard, and to chase the lecturer in Italian of Marischal College in the New Town. His conversation with lecturer and librarian was as learned and dignified as his repartee in the char-à-bancs was lewd and swift. "Auld Balspindie" or "the auld deevil" was respected and feared and admired in that country-side of lewdness and learning.

When Donald went home in the spring of 1921 with his £85 per annum, the old man was surprised.

"This is no place for a young man," he said, looking sternly at his son from under his white eyebrows and pouring out two whiskies. "I won't say I'm not glad to see you for my sake, because I am. But not for your sake. Balspindie is for old men."

"And what for young ones, Father?" asked Donald.

"The world," replied the old man sharply, draining his glass and refilling it.

"But I've seen quite enough of the world for the time being," protested Donald.

"Ay," Ewan Cameron nodded, "I thought you might be thinking that. It's the child's instinct. You've been hurt and you run home to your mother. Your mother's dead and Balspindie has to do in her place. Well, you're welcome here. And you can stay till you're well again. But after that, it's the road for you, my boy. Come back here to die, if you like. But go out there," he flung his arms wide as if he was King of All the Spains and Emperor of All the Indies, "go out there to live."

"I don't know that I want to," replied Donald timidly. He was feeling that he never wanted to stir five miles from Balspindie again for the rest of his life. By some amazing series of flukes he had escaped the Germans, the Staff, disease, and even the sewage-expert from Leith, and his instinct was to settle down and live a quiet life. He had no desire whatever for further adventures and experiences, and he said so, diffidently.

His father did not argue. He nodded repeatedly and said finally:

"You're not cured yet. When you are cured you'll leave me. Not because I tell you to, but because you'll want to. Meanwhile, there's plenty to do here."

There was plenty to do, and Donald did it. He got up early and went to bed early. He worked in the fields, and in time he ploughed a furrow that was quite creditable.

"I might have ploughed that one myself," said his father admiringly on one occasion, "If I'd been blindfolded and short of one arm and with a team of horses that rocketed about like steeplechasers."

For several years father and son continued their queer, incongruous partnership until the senior partner dissolved it by dying. Ewan Cameron made as little fuss about dying as he had made about living. He went to bed at about six o'clock one evening in late summer, windless and warm and scented with the scent of corn-stooks, and told the dairymaid to go out into the fields for Donald. When Donald came in, breathless from running across stubble, he found the old man lying on his side in a doze. He knelt down on the stone floor beside him, and Ewan Cameron opened his great black eyes and smiled a smile that Franz Hals might have painted.

"I'm for off, boy," he said, in the only Buchan phrase that Donald had ever heard him use. And then: "Lochaber no more. Go to the Gordon barracks in Aberdeen to-morrow and bring a piper who can play a Cameron lament." He stopped and shook his great head a little and then went on. "I was a Catholic once. Go away from Buchan. It's not our country. Don't be afraid, I won't babble of green fields. If ever you meet Lochiel, give him a peat. The snuff-mull was carried at Culloden." Then he sighed and said, "I'll not see Achnacarry again," and then he shut his eyes and died.

Donald Cameron fetched a piper from Castlehill barracks, and all Buchan came to the funeral and listened to the Cameron lament, and there were no dry eyes for "Auld Balspindie."

On the day after the funeral, an advocate from a firm of advocates in Golden Square, Aberdeen, came out in a motor-car with the news that Ewan Cameron had left just over seven thousand pounds to his son Donald, on condition that he spent no more than one month in the year north of the Tweed until he was fifty years of age. Where the old man got the money no one ever discovered, but it must have been a long time before, the advocate said, for the original sum had been about thirty-five hundred pounds and had been lying in Aberdeen at compound interest for over twenty years.

At first the advocate frightened Donald a good deal, for he had not spoken to a man of the world since leaving the military hospital, until it came out in the course of conversation that the man of feus and fees had himself commanded a battalion of Highland infantry in the War and that they had many battlefield friends, and had once had many more, in common. To this small, dry man, once a leader of desperate attacks and commander of a thousand incomparable soldiers, Donald entrusted the fortunes of the Mains of Balspindie, and a week or two later, having packed his military valise with his civilian clothes and procured two or three introductions from the librarian of the University Library and the lecturer in Italian to friends in the southern part of Britain, he set off once again for London, for the first time in his life making the twelve-hour journey in a third-class carriage. It was very uncomfortable.