Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

nothing better was open to Chauncey, unless fortune should favor him.

At half-past ten the British again wore, now standing northwest after the American squadron, the rear vessels of which opened fire at eleven. At quarter-past eleven the cannonade became general between the enemy and the weather line. Fifteen minutes later, the four rear schooners of the latter, which were overmatched when once within carronade range, bore up and ran to leeward; two taking position on the other side of the main division, and two astern of it. So far all went according to plan; but unhappily the leading two American schooners, instead of keeping away inobedience to orders, tacked-went about towards the enemy-keeping to windward. Chauncey, seeing the risk involved for them, but prepossessed with the idea of luring Yeo down by the appearance of flight set by the schooners, made what can scarcely be considered other than the mistake of keeping away himself, with the heavy ships; "filled the maintop-sail, and edged away two points, to lead the enemy down, not only to engage him to more advantage, but to lead him away from the Growler and Julia." Yeo, equally dominated by a preconceived purpose of not bringing his ships under the guns of the Pike, acted much as a squirrel would do with two nuts in sight; he went for the one safely distant from the danger he suspected. "He kept his wind," reported Chauncey, "until he had completely separated those two vessels from the rest of the squadron, exchanged a few shot with the Pike as he passed, withcut injury to us, and made sail after the two schooners." These surrendered some time after midnight to odds plainly irresistible.

. The tacking of the two schooners was an act as ill-judged as it was insubordinate, for which Chauncey was in no wise responsible. His bearing up was certainly an error, which unfortunately lent itself to the statement, contemporaneously made by an American paper, that he retreated, leaving the two vessels to their fate. It was possible, therefore, for Sir James to word the transaction as he airily did: "At eleven, we came within gunshot of their line of schooners, which opened a heavy fire, their ships keeping off the wind to prevent our closing. At half-past twelve, this ship

came within gunshot of the Pike and Madison, when they immediately bore up; fired their stern chase-guns, and made sail for Niagara, leaving two of their schooners astern, which we captured." This gives a more victorious and dashing air to the success than it quite deserves. As it stood, it was real enough, though trivial. To take two vessels from a superior fleet, within range of its commander-in-chief, is a handsome business, which should not need to be embellished by the implication that a greatly desired fight could not be had. To quote Marryatt, "It is very hard to come at the real truth of these sort of things, as I found out during the time that I was in His Majesty's service." Chauncey's version is perfectly probable. Seeing that the enemy would not follow, "tacked and stood after him. At twelve (midnight), finding that I must either separate from the rest of the squadron, or relinquish the hope of saving the two which had separated, I reluctantly gave up the pursuit." His reading of Yeo's conduct is plausible. "From what I have been able to discover of the movements of the enemy, he has no intention of engaging us, except he can get decidedly the advantage of wind and weather; and as his vessels in squadron sail better than our squadron, he can always avoid an action. He thinks to cut off our small dull sailing schooners in detail." Here and always Chauncey's conduct reflects the caution prescribed in his instructions to Perry, rather than the resolute determination the latter showed to bring matters to an issue. On the other hand, it is to be remembered that, owing to the nearly equal facilities for ship-building for replacing ships lost-possessed by Kingston and Sackett's, a decisive naval victory would not have the finality of result to be expected on Lake Erie. Contrary to the usual conditions of naval war, the two ports, not the fleets dependent on them, were the decisive elements of the Ontario campaign; and the ignoring of that truth was the fundamental, irremediable, American error.

[ocr errors]

Chauncey returned to Sackett's on August 13th, provisioned the squadron for five weeks, and sailed the same evening. On the 16th he was back off Niagara, and there again sighted the enemy; but a heavy westerly gale drove both squadrons to the lower end of the lake, where each entered its

own harbor on the 19th. On the 29th the American put out again, having an additional newly built schooner, named the Sylph, large and fast, carrying three or four long 32-pounders. Chauncey reported that he had now nine vessels with ninety-one guns, but that the enemy was still superior. In number of guns, possibly; but it is difficult to accept the statement otherwise, except in the one very important particular of squadron-manoeuvring power. This enabled Yeo to avoid action, except when it suited him to fight; or unless Chauncey was willing to engage first with part only of his squadron, following it with the rest. This advantage in manoeuvring greatly increases the ability of the inferior to serve his own cause, but it does not constitute superiority. The delusion of measuring force by guns, irrespective of the ships that carry them, has been explained.

Yeo's intermediate movements do not appear, but on September 7th the antagonists again met off the Niagara River. From that day till the 12th the American fleet endeavored to force a general action, which the other steadily, and properly, refused. The persistent efforts of the one to close and of the other to avoid, led to a movement round the lake, ending by the British enter

ing Amherst Bay, five miles west of Kingston. On one occasion, off the Genesee on September 11th, a westerly breeze carried the United States squadron within threequarters of a mile of the enemy, before the latter felt it. A cannonade and pursuit of some hours followed, but without decisive result. There seems traceable throughout Chauncey's account a distinct indisposition to what is called technically "a general chase;"to press on with part of the squadron, trusting to the slower vessels coming up in time to complete the work of the faster. He was unwilling thus to let his fleet loose. "This ship," (the General Pike),“ the Madison, and the Sylph, have each a schooner constantly in tow, yet the others cannot sail as fast as the enemy's squadron, which gives him decidedly the advantage, and puts it in his power to engage me when and how he chooses." In such a situation success can be had only by throwing the more rapid upon the enemy, as an advance guard engaging as they get within range, relying upon their effecting such detention that the others can arrive in time to their support. To this recourse, though in halting fashion, Chauncey finally came on what proved to be his last collision with Yeo, September 28th.

[blocks in formation]

CHILD, I beheld thee, one night, swept in by the Tide on this known shore of Being; Naked thou wert, and unfain to be here, and thine eyes were averse to all seeing; Bitter and small was thy first-uttered cry, and filled with unnamed desolation— Thou, so encompassed by Love and by Joy in their marvelling proud salutation! Child, in thy turn, thou shalt see me, rapt by the refluent Tide swiftly flowing; All sound shall be stopped from these lips save only the last sigh of breath in outgoing; The face thou shalt watch will grow strange, the word thou wouldst hear-it shall not

be spoken!

Then shalt thou sweep the dim seas for a beacon, and storm the locked heavens for token!

O child, in that hour of the Ebb, left alone on the ignorant shore, crying, "Whither?"
I charge thee, Remember, naught didst thou know of the Tide that once brought
thee hither,

Loath to thine heritage-thou, the darling of Life, whom the banquet invited;
So much, and no more dost thou know, what awaiteth the outbound pilgrim benighted,
What sovereignty royal-what dream beatific fulfilled in Youth's restoration—
What galaxy crowding in welcome-what guest-rites-what marvelling proud salutation!

S

I

"DIVIDED"

THE STORY OF A POEM

By Clara E. Laughlin

HE was a lonely little girl in a bleak farmhouse. Years ago her mother had come hither, flushed with romantic sacrifice, from the teaching of literature in a semirural academy to the practical facts of "helpmeeting" on a farm. From the eminence of being appealed to from three counties to say who wrote "Beautiful Snow," and who was the greatest American poet," and why," the little girl's mother had come to take up the love-life her poets told about, in a home whose treadmill demands broke her feeble spirit long, even, before they wore out her frail body. Love had not failed her, but it had failed to satisfy her. The poor little spirit that had fattened on the husks of neighborhood eminence and a hectic love of sentiment, starved on the ripe grain of motherhood and an honest love, and when the little girl was eight years old she found herself vaguely mourning her motherlessness. She missed her mother rather more sentimentally than actually, however, for the brokenspirited woman had given no companionship and little even of supervision to her child. But the child hadán inherited sentimentality; she knew it was a pathetic thing to be motherless-everyone said so, the poetry books, the neighbors, even her big, kind, quiet father, who indulged her more than ever because she had "no mother now."

And so the little girl, whom her mother had named Aurora, for love of Aurora Leigh, went her lonely way across the fields to school when the weather permitted (a question which she alone decided), and when it didn't, sat curled up for long hours in some quiet corner absorbed with her dead mother's "Family Editions" of Longfellow and Whittier and Burns, and her well-worn copies of Felicia Hemans, Owen Meredith, and Jean Ingelow, whereVOL. XXXVI.-13

out of her untrained fancy read marvels of literalness and constructions that might well have wrought consternation in the authors.

Many of the poems mystified her unpleasantly, many of them she liked not at all, but of her many favorites one gave her, above all, the supreme satisfaction of continually piquing her interest. It answered all the purposes of the Sphinx to the lonely child, who was forever questioning it and never getting any answer.

It was the opening poem in a red-bound book by Jean Ingelow, and it was called "Divided." Perhaps its illustrations were its chief charm; the first of them represented a boy and girl of about Aurora's age playing in a meadow, for all the world like the south meadow of Aurora's father. The boy chased butterflies and the girl gathered posies. In the next picture they knelt, jubilant, beside a tiny silver thread of water trickling through the grass. Parting the grasses to determine its course, the laughing children, in picture three, "took hold of hands" across the baby brook, and started to run with it. In picture four the brooklet had become a brook, and the children, following their new treasure toward its mouth, had to loose their mutual clasp as they ran, one on either bank. In the picture following, the brook had widened still more and the boy and girl, now larger grown, waved gaily at each other from their opposite sides. By and by it became a river, and the flowering fields led the way to a town of masts and spires; they could no longer call across, but only signal, yet they kept on and on and on. At last the river, passing the town, widened to a great estuary, and on a shore whose opposite was not even dimly discernible, the girl, a woman grown, and weary, stood and waved a signal to the companion she could not see, and from whom no answering signal came to her.

Aurora agonized over the story. What did it all mean? Why did they "let go hands"? Or why, if after letting go they

113

found the stream separating them, did they not go back a little space and either abandon the trail or follow it together? The joys of their companionship looked so beatific to the lonely child she marvelled herself heart-sick over their separation. There was a brook in her father's south meadow, a full-grown, trout - yielding brook, to be sure, and not an incipient trickle playing hide and seek among the grasses, and Aurora looked to that meadow to yield her, some day, a boy companion. And most determined was Aurora if that boy were ever found, never to adventure with him where they could not hold hands across, never to lose him for lack of going over, as a woman should, to his side.

One day-such is, sometimes, the power of faith-one warm, bright June day in the summer when Aurora was ten, she wandered lonesomely down into the south meadow to think about the boy and all that he typified of companionship, and lo! there he was, fishing in her father's brook. The very white bare feet that he dangled in the clear water were all that was needed to denote a being from remote parts-in other words, The Boy! Wrapped in delicious reflections of her own, Aurora stood so long silently contemplating the boy that he grew restive.

"Well," he snapped finally, with a suddenness and a testiness that nearly precipitated Aurora into the brook," what you gawking at?"

Aurora evaded the question.

"You can't catch trout that way," she volunteered after an awkward silence. It was an ill beginning.

"What way?" demanded the boy, haughtily.

"The way you're doin'," rejoined Aurora, losing her first awe and waxing bold with the consciousness of superior knowledge.

"You dassent to put your feet in the water when you're fishin' fer trout! Why, you dassent even to leave your shadow be on the water, they're that timid and smart. You got to git out o' sight and not leave 'em see your line, even, and bait with a grasshopper, and be awful quiet.'

[ocr errors]

It cost the boy a struggle to know how to receive this gratuitous advice, but two hours of patient dangling and flicking the water with his gaudy patent fly had prepared him

to hearken to Aurora's wisdom with inner, but not outer, meekness. That she was right he more than mistrusted, but how to avoid saying so that was the question.

The white feet, therefore, remained defiantly in the water, and the gaudy fly continued to keep wary trout at a distance, while between the two on opposite banks of the wee brook an ominous silence rested.

"Where do you live?" asked the boy at length, with as superior an air as he could manage.

Aurora indicated, with a backward jerk of her thumb.

"I live in New York," said the boy, without waiting to be asked. Aurora gasped, so audibly that the boy almost forgave her for her advice about the trout.

"Ever been there?" he asked, and the meekness of her faltering "No, oh, no!” put the boy again in good favor with himself, and in a proper masculine position of superiority.

He was Garrett Levering, he informed her, visiting his uncle, Amos Levering, for the school holidays, and went on to explain that he lived in a "brown-stone front" four stories high; and seeing that four stories conveyed little meaning to Aurora, who had never seen a house of more than one story and a half, he elucidated by saying that it was as high as the giant elm against whose lofty bole Aurora's little home-cot leaned, small as a toddling child against a great man's knees. This comparison was just a bit of an exaggeration, but the boy knew it no more than the girl-so really sky-high did his home loom in his proud memory alongside the low-roofed cottages of the country. The first impression of that great stone house reaching far into the sky, stayed with Aurora for many years and lent its majesty to the boy who emanated therefrom for her companionship.

That summer Aurora read no more poetry books; she had never divulged to Garrett her former interest in them, being a little sentimentally shy about THE poem which he was in part realizing for her, and, for the rest, feeling that A Psalm of Life, Snowbound, Miles Standish, even Bingen on the Rhine, were ill worth mentioning after the tales Garrett told her about Richard and Saladin, the Scottish Chiefs, and Robinson Crusoe.

When, however, the first of September was at hand, and Garrett was about to go, with only a possibility of return the following June, the pall of separation, the shadow of dread of her former loneliness, lay heavy on the spirit of Aurora.

He left on a Sunday afternoon, and after the early dinner at his. uncle's Garrett obtained permission to trudge, in his Sunday suit of black and his shining black shoes, the two miles of hot, dusty road to Aurora's house, to say good-by. Bantered by his uncle's family he set off, and received by Aurora's father with a goodnatured but insinuating grin, he was bidden to "set out in the yard where it's cooler," and to take off his coat for comfort. This latter Garrett, with chilling dignity, declined to do, and Aurora's father was reminded how averse her mother had been to the practice, which sent him ruminating into the house, where, in the shelter of the kitchen porch, he weighed the chances of Aurora's getting "mixed up with a city feller," and suffering the rebuffs for her country rudeness that he had suffered for his in days gone by.

Left to themselves the children were a little constrained at first. Garrett was not specially depressed by the impending separation; he had the world-old masculine advantage of new activities ahead to anticipate, minimizing the reluctance he might have felt at leaving a pleasant summer behind. Aurora, however, woman-like, enjoyed no such advantage; change for her meant simply a staying behind in scenes long irksome through familiarity and now to be more bare of charm than ever by reason of the passing of companionship.

The shadow of the sky-high house waiting to receive him added to the tragedy of his leaving, made the conversational channels of other days seem quite inadequate to Aurora, and she strove, with real woman bravery, to turn the talk in the direction of his future interests and to keep it off the subject of her own distress.

voiced nothing of her bitter disbelief that she should ever go to New York.

When Garrett was actually gone, out of sight down the dusty road, Aurora went up to her little room in the half-story of her paintless home, and threw herself on her bed, and cried, and cried.

"Gosh!" said her father, who tip-toed to her door, and tip-toed away again.

When she got up it was six o'clock, the time Garrett was to take his train. And going to the little hanging shelf where she kept her neglected "poetry books," she took down her favorite, and for the first time in her starved little life, full of harsh practicalities, a symbolism flashed upon her inner sight. The literalness of her former renderings became foolishness to her in the twinkling of a tear-wet eye, and "I know," she said, shutting the book with a sob, "it wasn't a brook; he had to go away."

II

he

GARRETT did not come next summer; went to Europe, whence he wrote Aurora once or twice, boyish letters filled with statistics of things seen. Nor did he come the next summer, nor the next, nor the next; his father had bought a place at the seashore, and Garrett preferred going there each year, and renewing acquaintance with the companionable young people of the other cottages.

After five summers, however, the place rather palled on Garrett, just beginning to know the ennui of eighteen. In June of that year, therefore, when he was preparing to take his examinations for college, his father proposed to him that he go up to his uncle's and put in a long, quiet summer of hard work and simple living. Garrett agreed, and one afternoon was set down on the blistering board platform of the station at Overbrook, with a bicycle, a tennis set, an up-to-date fishing outfit, a guitar, a collie dog, a camera, a trunk of large dimensions, and a very nobby valise.

Not until the moment came to say the actual good-by did Aurora summon courage enough to ask him if he thought he would come again next summer. He to didn't know; maybe so, maybe not. But But if she came to New York she must come and see him. Aurora thanked him, and

The next morning, after an hour of Horace, Garrett felt more attuned in spirit "green fields and running brooks" than to "rendering to "rendering" and syntax, so, putting away his books, he got up, thinking to hunt a favorable place to lay out his tennis

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »