Читать книгу Rabble in Arms: A Chronicle of Arundel and the Burgoyne Invasion - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 14

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St. John’s had been bad enough; but when we had stumbled from dawn to noon across the flat plains of Canada on roads made mostly of logs, crossed the broad St. Lawrence at Longueuil and tramped up and down the muddy streets of Montreal until we came to the iron gates of the Château Ramezay, we knew that St. John’s had been nothing.

It was not so much the look of Montreal that made us hate the place, as it was the feel of it, and the gloom of the Americans we met wherever we turned. The city was a rich one, with fine residences and a wealth of warehouses; but the people we passed on the street had sour faces that grew sourer when they looked at us. Some spat as they passed. Others grinned contemptuously, and their mutterings were venomous, so that Cap Huff stewed and bubbled profanity beneath his breath, as if there had been a fire under him, and he a kettle filled with thick and simmering soup.

On every street were American soldiers, recognisable as soldiers because they had bayonets in scabbards, most of them, or dented kettles banging against their hips, or the tattered remnants of blankets made fast to their shoulders—though I would have taken them for beggars if Nason had not stopped a few for questioning.

They were the raggedest men I had ever seen anywhere, and I have seen plenty of ragged ones, especially in Spanish ports, where the beggars wear clothes that must have been old when Columbus was a boy.

These Americans were shoeless and stockingless, many of them, with breeches seemingly made of dirty rags and ribbons, and coats good for nothing except to cover a few of the gaping holes in their shirts, or, in the case of those without shirts, to conceal a small part of their nakedness. They were emaciated, too, with sores on their faces and legs; and their dull eyes held little except dejection. They jumped at small sounds, staring furtively over their shoulders, so that a person who looked at them too long became depressed himself.

They were searching for food, they nearly always told Nason; and when he asked them where their companies were, they sometimes said they were hunting them; or that their enlistments had expired and they were trying to get home—though most of them, I think, were lying. When we went on, they slunk away, peering into alleys and up at windows like hungry cats.

When at last we came to the Château Ramezay, a low, solid, steep-roofed building behind a tall iron fence and iron gates, we found more of these scarecrow soldiers. They sprawled in the open field across from headquarters like flattened bundles of rags, as dead men lie after a battle, or sat on the curbstone of the sidewalk, staring at nothing with lacklustre eyes. Some held up kettles to passers-by, begging for food.

At the gates of the Château were two real soldiers, sentries in blue uniforms faced with red; and on either side of the heavy double doors were two more. They looked out of place, somehow, like bright patches on an ancient mainsail.

“Stack your arms,” Nason told us, “and keep tight hold of what flour you’ve got left. Cap and I, we’ll go in and report. You’re not to move till we come out.” He tapped me on the arm. “You’d better come in with us. If the general’s there, I guess he’ll want to hear what you’ve got to say.”

We went in past the sentries, and found ourselves in a long stone hallway hung with Indian robes: some made of pieced-together wolfskins, and some of racoon, with a few beaver and two or three squirrel robes, one black, the most valuable that Indians make.

On one side of the hallway was a large room in which sat half a dozen men, business men seemingly, and evidently waiting for some one. They stared at us as we came in; then went back to glowering at the floor or fondling their chins. In the room across the corridor was a young man in a plain blue uniform, as serious and busy as a dog burying a bone. He may have been nineteen years old, but he had the ponderous gravity of an English butler contemplating the insignificance of all mankind. He came out to us, carrying papers in his hand, and walking very slow and cool, the picture of importance.

“You’ll have to wait outside,” he said, speaking with a southern accent. “The general’s given orders that if there’s food for distribution to unattached soldiers, the word’ll be announced at sundown.” He dropped his head a little forward and peered at us, and there was a movement of the muscles over his jaws, which gave him a determined air.

Cap Huff cleared his throat with the sound of a studding-sail ripping from its booms. To Nason he whispered hoarsely, “Tell the major we ain’t hungry.”

The young man looked doubtfully from Huff to Nason. “Not major,” he said. “Captain. Captain Wilkinson: aide to General Arnold.”

Nason nodded. “If the General can spare a minute,” he said, “we’d like to see him, Captain. Nason’s my name. I’ve got some scouts for him—and some information. I guess he’d better have the information right away. I guess I’d say something to him about it, if I was you.”

Captain Wilkinson stared at us, his jawbones moving angrily. As he stared, a closed doorway at the end of the hallway burst open with a bang. “I can’t promise, Doctor,” a voice said. It was not a loud voice, but there was a quality to it that gave me a shivery feeling between my shoulder-blades. It was high-pitched, so that it carried far, and there was a sort of suppressed shrillness to it as though it would cut like a knife, if unleashed, through the stone walls that surrounded us.

An officer popped from the open doorway and wheeled to look back into the room, as if impatient at the slowness of the man for whom he waited. Even before Nason told me who he was, I knew that this was General Arnold.

“I can’t promise,” Arnold said again in his high-pitched, suppressed voice, “but if you say they’ll die unless they have medicines, we’ll get medicines somehow! They’re our men and I’ll look out for ’em!”

He was stocky, and had tremendous broad shoulders. At first sight he seemed to be short, but he had a way of standing, poised a little forward, with his head thrown back and his chest rounded out, that made him seem to tower head and shoulders above the man who followed him out of the door—a slender, worried-looking man who must have been at least as tall as Arnold.

The general took the slender man by the arm and turned him toward us. “You understand the situation,” he said in that strange penetrating voice that seemed to send ripples across the fur robes that hung along the walls. “We’re destitute: we’re paupers; but if there’s medicine to be had, I’ll get it for you. You’ll hear from me before noon to-morrow. I’ll come to the hospital myself!”

He flung a quick nod at Wilkinson. “I’m to see Doctor Senter to-morrow. Hospital. Eleven o’clock.”

He clapped the slight young man on the shoulder, urging him toward the door, but stopped to look in at the room where the half-dozen business men sat. “What’s all this?” he demanded, as if exasperated. “Captain Wilkinson, couldn’t these gentlemen have been attended to? You know I promised to inspect the waterfront before dark—promised the Commissioners.”

Captain Wilkinson stepped close to him and whispered with an air of enormous secrecy and importance. Arnold whirled to look at us; then nodded abruptly and turned back to the roomful of men. “Gentlemen,” he said, “tell your business to my aide, Captain Wilkinson! I can’t spare a moment from my duties until two o’clock to-morrow morning.” Then, to Nason, he added: “Come back here!” As he hurried down the hallway, I saw he limped a little.

We followed him into a low-ceilinged room and stood in a row before his desk, like schoolboys. I had the impression that we were surrounded by a sea of documents. On the desk were piles of letters and papers, each batch held down by a horseshoe. On other tables around the room, and in corners, there were more stacks of them weighted with horseshoes. Fastened to each horseshoe was a label to tell what was beneath it, all neat as pie. The walls were bare, except for a rude map.

For a moment Arnold, standing beside the desk, seemed to have forgotten us; for he lifted one of the horseshoes, picked up a letter and examined it with a look of distaste. He replaced it carefully, dropped the horseshoe on it and threw back his head to stare at Nason out of cold blue eyes.

“Well,” he said harshly, “you’ve been long enough! I trust the results have justified your little vacation!” He came to stand immediately before Cap Huff, who breathed noisily, disturbed by the scrutiny. In spite of Cap’s great bulk, Arnold’s eyes seemed to peer into his from the same level; and that was a strange thing about Arnold: the oftener I saw him, the larger he appeared; whereas most men shrink a little on close acquaintance. “It’s Saved From Captivity!” Arnold said politely. “I can see you’ve not been starved on your trip, Saved From Captivity.”

Cap Huff said nothing: merely shuffled his feet uneasily; and it was plain to be seen that his admiration for this handsome, swarthy general was such that he was weak and speechless before him. It was evident, too, that Arnold took pleasure in Cap’s embarrassment; for he pursed his lips somewhat, as if to conceal a smile; and in the pursing his face seemed to lift and lengthen—to become narrower and less swarthy.

He turned to me and looked me up and down; and I thought to myself that if he was trying to discomfit me, he would have a hard time doing it because of my London practice in seeming unconscious of the supercilious stares of Englishmen. “Don’t tell me,” he said to Nason, “don’t tell me this is the sole result of two months’ holiday!”

Nason shook his head. “No sir; but if it was we might have done worse. This here’s Cap’n Peter Merrill of Arundel. He sailed from England the last of March, and he’s got information. Anyway it was information to us.”

“Captain? Captain of what?”

“Brig Orestes,” I said. “Of Arundel. One hundred and eighty-eight tons.”

“What were you doing in England?”

“The war overtook us. My father sent orders to sell the vessel.”

Arnold glanced from me to Nason. I saw Nason nod. “All right,” Arnold said quickly. “That’s all right! You enlisted with Nason, did you?”

“Three years,” Nason said.

“Why, that’s all right!” Arnold repeated. “I can use you. What kind of a rig on your brig?”

“Jackass,” I told him.

“That’s what I sailed. I find they handle better than a full rig. What’s your information?”

I told him, as clearly and briefly as I could, what I had heard in London about Burgoyne’s army; about the Hessians and Indians.

While I talked, Arnold watched me with pale eyes that had the look of expanding and contracting, almost like those of a cat watching a bird.

“Let’s see about this,” he said, when I had finished. “General Thomas thought his troops were stampeded by only two regiments from Halifax, but they may have come from England. They may have been the first of Burgoyne’s army! Yes, sir: what you say may be possible, in spite of the part about the Indians. That part’s not true. There aren’t five thousand Indians to be had for fighting, not by any one, anywhere. But the rest of it might be possible.”

“There’s no doubt about it,” I said. “I heard Germain tell a lady she could join Burgoyne in Canada.”

“What lady was that?” Arnold asked quickly.

“I don’t know, sir. A lady they called Peg—a friend of Burgoyne’s. A lady who’d heard you could row from Quebec to New York as easy as attending a regatta on the Thames.”

Arnold nodded. “That’s right! That’s the way they talk! It’s what they’d do, too: send Burgoyne to command a Canadian army. He’s a cavalryman. Put him in these forests and he’d be like a hen in the middle of the St. Lawrence. That’s the British of it: they always do the wrong thing first.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, happy to find his opinion coinciding with my own.

The general stared at us. His mind, I could see, was miles away. Then he darted his head forward, his lips compressed so that his face looked round and puffy. “How’d you come?” he demanded. “When were you in St. John’s?”

“This morning,” Nason said. “We got there last night and came on this morning.”

“Who was there?” Arnold asked. “Had General Sullivan come through? Did you see the new regiments? Wayne’s and Irvine’s regiments?”

“They hadn’t got there,” Nason said. “A man on a provision-boat said they’d just left Albany. There wasn’t anybody in St. John’s but two lieutenants and nearly three hundred cases of smallpox.”

Arnold’s face darkened. He laughed an abrupt, scornful laugh. “A smallpox garrison! I might have known it! If we could fill our haversacks and cartridge boxes with smallpox, we could whip the world!”

“There was a vessel on the stocks in St. John’s,” I said. “A third finished. Maybe seventy tons.”

Arnold nodded absently. Behind his pale eyes I could almost see his mind leaping about, examining from every side the information we had brought. Meanwhile we stood before him, waiting; stood so long that Cap Huff, overcome by the stillness, gasped twice and then sneezed explosively. At this Arnold became conscious of us once more.

“That’s good!” he said. “You’ve done well! Nason, you’ve done well! How many men have you brought?”

“Seventeen,” Nason said. In a low voice he added, “They’ve all had the smallpox.”

Arnold seemed not to hear. He scratched a few lines on a sheet of paper. “Here’s your billeting order. I’ve got to go! I’ve got things to do—inspection—meet the Commissioners—write reports—write General Schuyler—write General Washington—write Congress—make lists. I’ll tell you what you do: come back here at midnight. No: at one o’clock in the morning. Bring three or four of your best men. I’ll put ’em to work. Have you got anything to eat?”

Nason’s reply was dubious. “Enough for supper, I guess.”

“Good!” Arnold said. “There’s nothing but dried peas to be had around here. When you run out of food, I can get you some dried peas. They’re not so bad when you make rubbaboo out of ’em. I’ll give you the order to-night.” He herded us to the door. “If I’m a little abrupt,” he said, “you’ll have to overlook it. A million things to do, and no time for doing them. Everything that’s done, I have to do myself. There’s nobody to obey orders.”

He paused, and added, “Burgoyne, eh? Hessians and Indians, eh? Well, we’ll see about that!”

Then he left us, hurrying down the hall and shouting for Wilkinson. A moment later he tore open the front door and leaped down the steps; and behind him, to my way of thinking, there was the restless quiet that follows when a squall has passed over a vessel, leaving it safe but shaken.