The Complete McAuslan. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ Brand, Hutcheson—”

      “Hutcheson got the jail,” said Cuddy. “He played the fiddle for his recreation, and went poaching with snares made from violin strings. An awfy man.”

      They chattered on, or at least the pipey chattered, and I made polite murmurs, and at last they ran my great-uncle to earth, reclining at the end of a front row and showing his noble profile in the Victorian manner. Showing as much of it, anyway, as was visible through his mountainous beard: he gave the impression of one peering through a quickset hedge.

      “Fine, fine whiskers they had,” cried the pipe-sergeant admiringly. “You don’t get that today. Devil the razor there must have been among them, the wee nappy-wallahs of India must have done a poor, poor trade at the shaving, I’m thinking. He’s a fine figure, your respected great-uncle, Mr MacNeill, a fine figure. Ye have the same look, the same keek under the brows, has he not, Cuddy? See there,” and he pointed to the minute portion of my ancestor that showed through the hair, “isn’t that the very spit? Did ye know him, sir?”

      “No,” I said. “I didn’t. He died in South Africa, of fever, I think.”

      “Tut, tut,” said the pipe-sergeant. “Isn’t that just damnable? No proper medical provisions then, eh, Cuddy?”

      I was studying the picture—“Peshawar, 1897”, it was labelled—and thinking how complete a stranger one’s closest relative can be, when a voice at my elbow said formally:

      “Good evening, sir,” and I turned to find the impressive figure of the R.S.M. beside me. He nodded in his patriarchal style—even without his bonnet and pace-stick he was still a tremendous presence—and even deigned to examine great-uncle’s likeness.

      “If he had lived I would have known him,” he said. “I knew many of the others, during my boy service. You have a glass there, Mr MacNeill? Capital. Your good health.”

      The mess was beginning to fill up now, and as we chatted under the pictures one or two others joined us—old Blind Sixty, my company quarter-master, and young Sergeant McGaw, who had been organiser of a Clydeside Communist Party in civilian life. “How’s Joe Stalin these days?” demanded the pipe-sergeant, and McGaw’s sallow face twitched into a grin and he winked at me as he said, “No’ ready tae enrol you, onyway, ye capitalist lackey.”

      They gagged with each other, and presently I finished my drink and straightened my sporran and said I should be getting along …

      “Have you shown Mr MacNeill his forebear’s other portrait?” demanded the R.S.M., and the pipey, at a loss for once, said he didn’t know there was one. At which the R.S.M. moved majestically over to the other wall, and tapped a fading print with a finger like a banana. “Same date, you see,” he said, “’97. This is the battalion band. Now, then … there, Pipe-Sergeant MacNeill.” And there, sure enough, was the ancestor, with his pipes under his arm, covered in hair and dignity.

      The pipe-sergeant squeaked with delight. “Isn’t that the glory! He wass a pipe-sergeant, the pipe-sergeant, like myself! And hasn’t he the presence for it? You can see he is just bursting with the good music! My, Mr MacNeill, what pride for you, to have a great-uncle that wass a pipe-sergeant. You have no music yourself, though? Ach, well. You’ll have a suggestion more of the Antiquary before ye go? Ye will. And yourself, Major? Cuddy? McGaw?”

      While they were stoking them up, the R.S.M. drew my attention to the band picture again, to another figure in the ranks behind my great-uncle. It was of a slim, dark young piper with a black moustache but no beard. Then he traced down to the names underneath and stopped at one. “That’s him,” he said. “Just a few months, I would say, before his name went round the world.” And I read, “Piper Findlater, G.”

      “Is that the Findlater?” I asked.

      “The very same,” said the R.S.M.

      I knew the name from childhood, of course, and I suppose there was a time when, as the R.S.M. said, it went round the world. There was the little jingle that went to our regimental march, which the children used to sing at play:

      Piper Findlater, Piper Findlater,

      Piped “The Cock o’ the North”,

      He piped it so loud

      That he gathered a crowd

      And he won the Victoria Cross.

      There are, as Sapper pointed out, “good V.C.s” and ordinary V.C.s—so far as winning the V.C. can ever be called ordinary. Among the “good V.C.s” were people like little Jack Cornwell, who stayed with his gun at Jutland, and Lance-Corporal Michael O’Leary, who took on crowds of Germans singlehanded. But I imagine if it were possible to take a poll of the most famous V.C.s over the past century Piper George Findlater would be challenging for the top spot. I don’t say that because he was from a Highland regiment, but simply because what he did on an Afghan hillside one afternoon caught the public imagination, as it deserved to, more than such things commonly do.

      “Well,” I said. “My great-uncle was in distinguished company.”

      “Who’s that?” said the pipey, returning with the glasses. “Oh, Findlater, is it? A fair piper, they tell me—quite apart from being heroical, you understand. I mind him fine—not during his service, of course, but in retirement.”

      “I kent him weel,” said Old Sixty. “He was a guid piper, for a’ I could tell.”

      “A modest man,” said the R.S.M.

      “He had a’ the guts he needed, at that,” said McGaw.

      “I remember the picture of him, in a book at home,” I said. “You know, at Dargai, when he won the V.C. And then it came out in a series that was given away with a comic-paper.”

      “Aye,” said the pipe-sergeant, on a triumphant note, and everyone looked at him. “Everybody kens the story, right enough. But ye don’t ken it all, no indeed, let me tell you. There wass more of importance to Findlater’s winning the cross than just the superfeecial facts. Oh, aye.”

      “He’s at it again,” said Old Sixty. “If you were as good at your trade as ye are at bletherin’, ye’d have been King’s Piper lang syne.”

      “I’d be most interested to hear any unrelated facts about Piper Findlater, Pipe-sergeant,” said the R.S.M., fixing him with his eye. “I thought I was fully conversant wi’ the story.”

      “Oh, yes, yes,” said the pipey. “But there is a matter closely concerned with regimental tradition which I had from Findlater himself, and it’s not generally known. Oh, aye. I could tell ye.” And he wagged his head wisely.

      “C’mon then,” said McGaw. “Let’s hear your lies.”

      “It’s no lie, let me tell you, you poor ignorant Russian lapdog,” said the pipey. “Just you stick to your balalaikeys, and leave music to them that understands it.” He perched himself on the arm of a chair, glass in hand, and held forth.

      “You know how the Ghurkas wass pushed back by the Afghans from the Dargai Heights? And how our regiment wass sent in and came under torrents of fire from the wogs, who were snug as foxes in their positions on the crest? Well, and then the pipers wass out in front—as usual—and Findlater was shot through first one СКАЧАТЬ