Quiller-Couch Fort Amity

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5080-8262-0
Verlag: Dead Dodo Presents Quiller-Couch
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 284 Seiten

Reihe: Arthur Quiller-Couch Collection

Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Arthur Quiller-Couch 'Fort Amity.


Fort Amity was published in 1904.


Quiller-Couch was a noted literary critic, publishing editions of some of Shakespeare's plays (in the New Shakespeare, published by Cambridge University Press, with Dover Wilson) and several critical works, including Studies in Literature (1918) and On the Art of Reading (1920). He edited a successor to his verse anthology: Oxford Book of English Prose, which was published in 1923. He left his autobiography, Memories and Opinions, unfinished; it was nevertheless published in 1945.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Quiller-Couch, Arthur

Leseproben

CHAPTER I. MALBROUCK S’EN VA-T’EN GUERRE
.................. “SO ADIEU, JACK, UNTIL WE meet in Quebec! You have the start of us, report says, and this may even find you drinking his Majesty’s health in Fort Carillon. Why not? You carry Howe, and who carries Howe carries the eagles on his standards; or so you announce in your last. Well, but have we, on our part, no vexillum? Brother Romulus presents his compliments to Brother Remus, and begs leave to answer ‘Wolfe!’ ‘Tis scarce forty-eight hours since Wry-necked Dick brought his ships into harbour with the Brigadier on board, and already I have seen him and—what is more—fallen in love. ‘What like is he?’ says you. ‘Just a sandy-haired slip of a man,’ says I, ‘with a cock nose’: but I love him, Jack, for he knows his business. We’ve a professional at last. No more Pall Mall promenaders—no more Braddocks. Loudons, Webbs! We live in the consulship of Pitt, my lad—deprome Caecubum—we’ll tap a cask to it in Quebec. And if Abercromby’s your Cæsar—” Here a bugle sounded, and Ensign John à Cleeve of the 46th Regiment of Foot (Murray’s) crushed his friend’s letter into his pocket and sprang off the woodpile where he had seated himself with the regimental colours across his knees. He unfolded them from their staff, assured himself that they hung becomingly—gilt tassels and yellow silken folds—and stepped down to the lake-side where the bateaux waited. The scene is known to-day for one of the fairest in the world. Populous cities lie near it and pour their holiday-makers upon it through the summer season. Trains whistle along the shore under its forests; pleasure-steamers, with music on their decks, shoot across bays churned of old by the paddles of war-canoes; from wildernesses where Indians lurked in ambush smile neat hotels, white-walled, with green shutters and deep verandas; and lovers, wandering among the hemlocks, happen on a clearing with a few turfed mounds, and seat themselves on these last ruins of an ancient fort, nor care to remember even its name. Behind them—behind the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains—and pushed but a little way back in these hundred and fifty years, lies the primeval forest, trodden no longer now by the wasting redman, but untamed yet, almost unhandselled. And still, as the holidaymakers leave it, winter closes down on the lake-side and wraps it in silence, broken by the loon’s cry or the crash of a snow-laden tree deep in the forest—the same sounds, the same aching silence, endured by French and English garrisons watching each other and the winter through in Fort Carillon or Fort William Henry. “The world’s great age begins anew."… It begins anew, and hourly, wherever hearts are high and youth sets out with bright eyes to meet his fate. It began anew for Ensign John à Cleeve on this morning of July 5, 1758; it was sounded up by bugles, shattering the forest silence; it breathed in the wind of the boat’s speed shaking the silken flag above him. His was one of twelve hundred boats spreading like brilliant water-fowl across the lake which stretched for thirty miles ahead, gay with British uniforms, scarlet and gold, with Highland tartans, with the blue jackets of the Provincials; flash of oars, innumerable glints of steel, of epaulettes, of belt, cross-belt and badge; gilt knops and tassels and sheen of flags. Yonder went Blakeney’s 27th Regiment, and yonder the Highlanders of the Black Watch; Abercromby’s 44th, Howe’s 55th with their idolised young commander, the 60th or Royal Americans in two battalions; Gage’s Light Infantry, Bradstreet’s axemen and bateau-men, Starke’s rangers; a few friendly Indians—but the great Johnson was hurrying up with more, maybe with five hundred; in all fifteen thousand men and over. Never had America seen such an armament; and it went to take a fort from three thousand Frenchmen. No need to cover so triumphant an advance in silence! Why should not the regimental bands strike up? For what else had we dragged them up the Hudson from Albany and across the fourteen-mile portage to the lake? Weary work with a big drum in so much brushwood! And play they did, as the flotilla pushed forth and spread and left the stockades far behind; stockades planted on the scene of last year’s massacre. Though for weeks before our arrival Bradstreet and his men had been clearing and building, sights remained to nerve our arms and set our blood boiling to the cry “Remember Fort William Henry!” Its shores fade, and somewhere at the foot of the lake three thousand Frenchmen are waiting for us (if indeed they dare to wait). Let the bands play “Britons strike home!” Play they did: drums tunding and bagpipes skirling as though Fort Carillon (or Ticonderoga, as the Indians called it) would succumb like another Jericho to their clamour. The Green Mountains tossed its echoes to the Adirondacks, and the Adirondacks flung it back; and under it, down the blue waterway toward the Narrows, went Ensign John à Cleeve, canopied by the golden flag of the 46th. The lake smiled at all his expectations and surpassed them. He had imagined it a sepulchral sheet of water, sunk between cavernous woods. And lo! it lay high in the light of day, broad-rimmed, with the forests diminishing as they shelved down to its waters. The mountains rimmed it, amethystine, remote, delicate as carving, as vapours almost transparent; and within the rim it twinkled like a great cup of champagne held high in a god’s hand—so high that John à Cleeve, who had been climbing ever since his regiment left Albany, seemed lifted with all these flashing boats and uniforms upon a platform where men were heroes, and all great deeds possible, and the mere air laughed in the veins like wine. Two heavy flat-boats ploughed alongside of his; deep in the bows and yawing their sterns ludicrously. They carried a gun apiece, and the artillerymen had laded them too far forward. To the 46th they were a sufficiently good joke to last for miles. “Look at them up-tailed ducks a-searching for worms! Guns? Who wants guns on this trip? Take ‘em home before they sink and the General loses his temper.” The crews grinned back and sweated and tugged, at every third drive drenching the bowmen with spray, although not a breath of wind rippled the lake’s surface. The boat ahead of John’s carried Elliott the Senior Ensign of the 46th, with the King’s colours—the flag of Union, drooping in stripes of scarlet, white, and blue. On his right strained a boat’s crew of the New York regiment, with the great patroon, Philip Schuyler himself, erect in the stern sheets and steering, in blue uniform and three-cornered hat; too grand a gentleman to recognise our Ensign, although John had danced the night through in the Schuylers’ famous white ball-room on the eve of marching from Albany, and had flung packets of sweetmeats into the nursery windows at dawn and awakened three night-gowned little girls to blow kisses after him as he took his way down the hill from the Schuyler mansion. That was a month ago. To John it seemed years since he had left Albany and its straight sidewalks dappled with maple shade: but the patroon’s face was the same, sedately cheerful now as then when he had moved among his guests with a gracious word for each and a brow unclouded by the morrow. Men like Philip Schuyler do not suffer to-morrows to perturb them, since to them every morrow dawns big with duties, responsibilities, risks. John caught himself wondering to what that calm face looked forward, at the lake-end, where the forests slept upon their shadows and the mountains descended and closed like fairy gates! For John himself Fame waited beyond those gates. Although in the last three or four weeks he had endured more actual hardships than in all his life before, he had enjoyed them thoroughly and felt that they were hardening him into a man. He understood now why the tales he had read at school in his Homer and Ovid—tales of Ulysses, of Hercules and Perseus—were never sorrowful, however severe the heroes’ labours. For were they not undergone in just such a shining atmosphere as this? His mind ran on these ancient tales, and so, memory reverting to Douai and the seminary class-room in which he had first construed them, he began unconsciously to set the lines of an old repetition-lesson to the stroke of the oars. Angustam amice pauperiem pati robustus acri militia puer condiscat et Parthos feroces vexet eques metuendus hasta: Vitamque sub divo et trepidis agat in rebus… —And so on, with halts and breaks where memory failed him. Parthos—these would be the Indians—Abenakis, Algonquins, Hurons, whomsoever Montcalm might have gathered yonder in the woods with him. Dulce et decorum est—yes, to be sure; in a little while he would be facing death for his country; but he did not feel in the least like dying. A sight of Philip Schuyler’s face sent him sliding into the next ode—Justum et tenacem… non voltus instantis tyranni.… John à Cleeve would have started had the future opened for an instant and revealed the face of the tyrant Philip Schuyler was soon to defy: and Schuyler would have started too. Then John remembered his cousin’s...