E-text prepared by Lionel Sear
THE MAYOR OF TROY.
by
Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch.
1906
This e-text prepared from a reprint of a version published in 1906.
TO MY FRIEND
KENNETH GRAHAM
AND
THE REST OF THE CREW
OF THE
"RICHARD AND EMILY"
AND WITH APOLOGIES TO
THE MAYOR OF
LOSTWITHIEL
A BOROUGH
FOR WHICH I HAVE (WITH CAUSE)
MUCH AFFECTION AND
A VERY HIGH ESTEEM.
CONTENTS.
Chapter.
PROLOGUE.
I. OUR MAJOR.
II. OUR MAYOR.
III. THE MILLENNIUM.
IV. HOW THE TROY GALLANTS CHALLENGED THE LOOE DIEHARDS.
V. INTERFERENCE OF A GUERNSEY MERCHANT.
VI. MALBROUCK S'EN VA.
VII. THE BATTLE OF TALLAND COVE.
VIII. "COME, MY CORINNA, COME!"
IX. BY LERRYN WATER.
X. GUNNER SOBEY TURNS LOOSE THE MILLENNIUM.
XI. THE MAJOR LEAVES US.
XII. A COLD DOUCHE ON A HOT FIT.
XIII. A VERY HOT PRESS.
XIV. THE "VESUVIUS" BOMB.
XV. UP-CHANNEL.
XVI. FAREWELL TO ALBION!
XVII. MISSING!
XVIII. APOTHEOSIS.
XIX. THE RETURN.
XX. IN WHICH THE MAJOR LEARNS THAT NO MAN IS NECESSARY.
XXI. FACES IN WATER.
XXII. WINDS UP WITH A MERRY-GO-ROUND.
THE MAYOR OF TROY.
PROLOGUE.
Good wine needs no bush; but this story has to begin with an apology.
Years ago I promised myself to write a treatise on the lost Mayors of
Cornwall--dignitaries whose pleasant fame is now night, recalled only
by some neat byword or proverb current in the Delectable (or as a
public speaker pronounced it the other day, the Dialectable) Duchy.
Thus you may hear of "the Mayor of Falmouth, who thanked God when the
town jail was enlarged"; "the Mayor of Market Jew, sitting in his own
light"; "the Mayor of Tregoney, who could read print upside-down, but
wasn't above being spoken to"; "the Mayor of Calenick, who walked
two miles to ride one"; "the Mayor of East Looe, who called the King
of England 'Brother.'" Everyone remembers the stately prose in which
Gibbon records when and how he determined on his great masterpiece,
when and how he completed it. "It was at Rome: on the 15th of
October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while
the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter,
that the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the City first
started in my mind." So I could tell with circumstance when, where
and how I first proposed my treatise; and shall, perhaps, when I have
concluded it. But life is short; and for the while my readers may be
amused with an instalment.
Now of all the Mayors of Cornwall the one who most engaged my
speculation, yet for a long while baffled all research, was "the
Mayor of Troy, so popular that the town made him Ex-Mayor the year
following."
Of course, if you don't know Troy, you will miss half the reason of
my eagerness. Simple, egregious, adorable town! Shall I go on here
to sing its praises? No; not yet.
The reason why I could learn nothing concerning him is that, soon
after 1832, when the Reform Bill did away with Troy's Mayor and
Corporation, as well as with its two Members of Parliament, someone
made a bonfire of all the Borough records. O Alexandria! And the
man said at the time that he did it for fun!
This brings me to yet another Mayor--the Mayor of Lestiddle, who is a
jolly good fellow.
Nothing could be handsomer than my calling the Mayor of Lestiddle a
jolly good fellow; for in fact we live at daggers drawn. You must
know that Troy, a town of small population (two thousand or so) but
of great character and importance, stands at the mouth of a river
where it widens into a harbour singularly beautiful and frequented by
ships of all nations; and that seven miles up this river, by a bridge
where the salt tides cease, stands Lestiddle, a town of fewer
inhabitants and of no character or importance at all. Now why the
Reform Bill, which sheared Troy of its ancient dignities, should have
left Lestiddle's untouched, is a question no man can answer me; but
this I know, that its Mayor goes flourishing about with a silver mace
shaped like an oar, as a symbol of jurisdiction over our river from
its mouth (forsooth) so far inland as a pair of oxen yoked together
can be driven in its bed.
He has, in fact, no such jurisdiction. Above bridge he may, an it
please him, drive his oxen up the riverbed, and welcome. I leave him
to the anglers he will discommodate by it. But his jurisdiction
below bridge was very properly taken from him by order of our late
Queen (whose memory be blessed!) in Council, and vested in the Troy
Harbour Commission. Now _I_ am Chairman of that Commission, and yet
the fellow declines to yield up his silver oar! We in Troy feel
strongly about it. It is not for nothing (we hold) that when he or
his burgesses come down the river for a day's fishing the weather
invariably turns dirty. We mislike them even worse than a German
band--which brings us no worse, as a rule, than a spell of east wind.
Nevertheless, the Mayor of Lestiddle is a jolly good fellow, and I am
glad that his townsmen (such as they are) have re-elected him.
One day this last summer he came down to fish for mackerel at the
harbour's mouth, which can be done at anchor since our sardine
factory has taken to infringing the by-laws and discharging its offal
on the wrong side of the prescribed limit. (We Harbour Commissioners
have set our faces against this practice, but meanwhile it attracts
the fish.) It was raining, of course. Rowing close up to me, the
Mayor of Lestiddle asked--for we observe the ordinary courtesies--
what bait I was using. I answered, fresh pilchard bait; and offered
him some, delicately forbearing to return the question, since it is
an article of faith with us that the burgesses of Lestiddle bait with
earthworms which they dig out of their back gardens. Well, he
accepted my pilchard bait, and pulled up two score of mackerel within
as many minutes, which doubtless gave him something to boast about on
his return.
He was not ungrateful. Next week I received from him a parcel of MS.
with a letter saying that he had come across it, "a fly in amber," in
turning over a pile of old Stannary records. How it had found its
way among them he could not guess.
A fly in amber, quotha! A jewel in a midden, rather! How it came
among his trumpery archives I know as little as he, but can guess.
Some Lestiddle man must have stolen it, and chosen them as a safe
hiding-place.
It gave me the clue, and more than the clue. I know now the history
of that Mayor of Troy who was so popular that the town made him
Ex-Mayor the year following.
Listen! Stretch out both hands; open your mouth and shut your eyes!
It is a draught of Troy's own vintage that I offer you; racy,
fragrant of the soil, from a cask these hundred years sunk, so that
it carries a smack, too, of the submerging brine. You know the old
recipe for Wine of Cos, that full-bodied, seignorial, superlative,
translunary wine.
Yet I know not how to begin.
"Fortunam Priami cantabo et nobile bellum."
"I will sing you Troy and its Mayor and a war of high renown," that
is how I want to begin; but Horace in his _Ars Poetica_--confound
him!--has chosen this very example as a model to avoid, and the
critics would be down on me in a pack.
Very well, then, let us try a more reputable way.
CHAPTER I.
OUR MAJOR.
Arms and the Man I sing!
When, on the 16th of May, 1803, King George III. told his faithful
subjects that the Treaty of Amiens was no better than waste paper,
Troy neither felt nor affected to feel surprise. King, Consul,
Emperor--it knew these French rulers of old, under whatever title
they might disguise themselves. More than four centuries ago an
English King had sent his pursuivants down to us with a message that
"the Gallants of Troy must abstain from attacking, plundering, and
sinking the ships of our brother of France, because we, Edward of
England, are at peace with our brother of France": and the Gallants
of Troy had returned an answer at once humble and firm: "Your Majesty
best knows your Majesty's business, but _we_ are at war with your
brother of France." Yes, we knew these Frenchmen. Once before, in
1456, they had thought to surprise us, choosing a night when our
Squire was away at market, and landing a force to burn and sack us:
and our Squire's wife had met them with boiling lead. His Majesty's
Ministers might be taken at unawares, not we. We slept Bristol
fashion, with one eye open.
But when, as summer drew on, news came that the infamous usurper was
collecting troops at Boulogne, and flat-bottomed boats, to invade us;
when the spirit of the British people armed for the support of their
ancient glory and independence against the unprincipled ambition of
the French Government; when, in the Duchy alone, no less than 8511
men and boys enrolled themselves in twenty-nine companies of foot,
horse and artillery, as well out of enthusiasm as to escape the
general levy threatened by Government (so mixed are all human
motives); then, you may be sure, Troy did not lag behind.
Ah! but we had some brave corps among the Duchy Volunteers!
There was the St. Germans Subscription Troop, for instance, which
consisted of forty men and eleven uniforms, and hunted the fox thrice
a week during the winter months under Lord Eliot, Captain and M.F.H.
There was the Royal Redruth Infantry, the famous "Royal Reds," of 103
men and five uniforms. These had heard, at second hand, of
Bonaparte's vow to give them no quarter, and wore a conspicuous patch
of red in the seat of their pantaloons that he might have no excuse
for mistaking them. There was the even more famous Mevagissey
Battery, of no men and 121 uniforms. In Mevagissey, as you may be
aware, the bees fly tail-foremost; and therefore, to prevent
bickerings, it was wisely resolved at the first drill to make every
unit of this corps an officer.
But the most famous of all (and sworn rivals) were two companies of
coast artillery--the Looe Diehards and the Troy Gallants.
The Looe Diehards (seventy men and two uniforms) wore dark blue coats
and pantaloons, with red facings, yellow wings and tassels, and white
waistcoats. Would you know by what feat they earned their name?
Listen. I quote the very words of their commander, Captain Bond, who
survived to write a _History of Looe_--and a sound book it is.
"The East and West Looe Volunteer Artillery was established in 1803,
and kept in pay from Government for six years. Not a single man of
the company died during the six years, which is certainly very
remarkable."
But, when you come to think of it, what an even more remarkable boast
for a body of warriors!
We of Troy (180 men and two uniforms) laughed at this claim.
Say what you will, there is no dash about longevity, or very little.
For uniform we wore dark-blue coats and pantaloons, with white wings
and facings, edged and tasselled with gilt, and scarlet waistcoats,
also braided with gilt. We wanted no new name, we! Ours was an
inherited one, derived from days when, under Warwick the King-maker,
Lord High Admiral of England, we had swept the Channel, summoned the
men of Rye and Winchelsea to vail their bonnets--to take in sail,
mark you: no trumpery dipping of a flag would satisfy us--and when
they stiff-neckedly refused, had silenced the one town and carried
off the other's chain to hang across our harbour from blockhouse to
blockhouse. Also, was it not a gallant of Troy that assailed and
carried the great French pirate, Jean Doree, and clapped him under
his own hatches?
"The roaring cannons then were plied,
And dub-a-dub went the drum-a;
The braying trumpets loud they cried
To courage both all and some-a."
"The grappling-hooks were brought at length,
The brown bill and the sword-a;
John Dory at length, for all his strength,
Was clapt fast under board-a."
That was why we wore our uniforms embroidered with gold (_dores_).
The Frenchmen, if they came, would understand the taunt.
But most of all we were proud of Solomon Hymen, our Major and our
Mayor of Troy.
I can see him now as he addressed us on the evening of our first
drill, standing beside the two long nineteen-pounders on the Old
Fort; erect, with a hand upon his ivory sword-hilt, his knops and
epaulettes flashing against the level sun. I can see his very
gesture as he enjoined silence on the band; for we had a band, and it
was playing "Come, Cheer Up, My Lads!" As though we weren't cheerful
enough already!
[But "Come, come!" the reader will object. "All this happened a
hundred years ago. Yet here are you talking as if you had been
present." Very true: it is a way we have in Troy. Call it a
foible--but forgive it! The other day, for instance, happening on
the Town Quay, I found our gasman, Mr. Rabling, an earnest Methodist,
discussing to a small crowd on the subject of the Golden Calf, and in
this fashion: "Well, friends, in the midst of all this pillaloo,
hands-across and down-the-middle, with old Aaron as bad as any and
flinging his legs about more boldacious with every caper, I happens
to glance up the hill, and with that I gives a whistle; for what do I
see but a man aloft there picking his way down on his heels with a
parcel under his arm! Every now and then he pulls up, shading his
eyes, so, like as if he'd a lost his bearin's. I glances across to
Aaron, and thinks I, 'Look out for squalls! Here's big brother
coming, and a nice credit _this'll_ be to the family!' . . ."
The historic present, as my Latin grammar used to call it, is our
favourite tense: and if you insist that, not being a hundred years
old, I cannot speak as an eye-witness of this historic scene, my
answer must be Browning's,--"All I can say is--I saw it!"]
"Gentlemen!" began the Major.
We might not all be officers, like the Mevagissey Artillery, but in
the Troy Gallants we were all gentlemen.
"Gentlemen!"--the Major waved an arm seaward--"yonder lies your
enemy. Behind you"--he pointed up the harbour to the town--
"England relies on your protection. Shall the Corsican tyrant lay
his lascivious hands upon her ancient liberties, her reformed and
Protestant religion, her respectable Sovereign and his Consort, her
mansions, her humble cottages, and those members of the opposite sex
whose charms reward, and, in rewarding, refine us? Or shall we meet
his flat-bottomed boats with a united front, a stern 'Thus far and no
farther,' and send them home with their tails between their legs?
That, gentlemen, is the alternative. Which will you choose?"
Here the Major paused, and finding that he expected an answer, we
turned our eyes with one consent upon Gunner Sobey, the readiest man
in the company.
"The latter!" said Gunner Sobey, with precision; whereat we gave
three cheers. We dined, that afternoon, in the Long Room of the
"Ship" Inn, and afterwards danced the night through in the Town Hall.
The Major danced famously. Above all things, he prided himself on
being a ladies' man, and the fair sex (as he always called them)
admired him without disguise. His manner towards them was gallant
yet deferential, tender yet manly. He conceded everything to their
weakness; yet no man in Troy could treat a woman with greater
plainness of speech. The confirmed spinsters (high and low, rich and
poor, we counted seventy-three of them in Troy) seemed to like him
none the less because he lost no occasion, public or private, of
commending wedlock. For the doctrine of Mr. Malthus (recently
promoted to a Professorship at the East India College) he had a
robust contempt. He openly regretted that, owing to the negligence
of our forefathers, the outbreak of war found Great Britain with but
fifteen million inhabitants to match against twenty-five million
Frenchmen. _They_ threatened to invade _us_, whereas _we_ should
rather have been in a position to march on Paris! He asked nothing
better. He quoted with sardonic emphasis the remark of a politician
that "'twas hardly worth while to go to war merely to prove that we
could put ourselves in a good posture for defence."
"If I had my way," announced Major Hymen, "every woman in England
should have a dozen children at least."
"What a man!" said Miss Pescod afterwards to Miss Sally Tregentil,
who had dropped in for a cup of tea.
And yet the Major was a bachelor. They could not help wondering a
little.
"With two such names, too!" mused Miss Sally. "'Solomon' and
'Hymen'; they certainly suggest--they would almost seem to give
promise of, at least, a _dual_ destiny."
"You mark my words," said Miss Pescod. "That man has been crossed in
love."
"But _who_?" asked Miss Sally, her eyes widening in speculation.
"_Who_ could have done such a thing?"
"My dear, I understand there are women in London capable of
anything."
The Major, you must know, had spent the greater part of his life in
the capital as a silk-mercer and linen-draper--I believe, in the
Old Jewry; at any rate, not far from Cheapside. He had left us at
the age of sixteen to repair the fortunes of his family, once
opulent and respected, but brought low by his great-grandfather's
rash operations in South Sea stock. In London, thanks to an
ingratiating manner with the sex on which a linen-draper relies for
patronage, he had prospered, had amassed a competence, and had sold
his business to retire to his native town, as Shakespeare retired to
Stratford-on-Avon, and at about the same period of life.
Had the Major in London been crossed in love? No; I incline to
believe that Miss Pescod was mistaken. That hearts, up there,
fluttered for a man of his presence is probable, nay certain.
In port and even in features he bore a singular likeness to the
Prince Regent. He himself could not but be aware of this, having
heard it so often remarked upon by persons acquainted with his Royal
Highness as well as by others who had never set eyes on him. In
short, our excellent Major may have dallied in his time with the
darts of love; there is no evidence that he ever took a wound.
Within a year after his return he bought back the ancestral home of
the Hymens, a fine house dating from the reign of Queen Anne.
(His great-grandfather had built it on the site of a humbler abode,
on the eve of the South Sea collapse.) It stood at the foot of
Custom House Hill and looked down the length of Fore Street--a
perspective view of which the Major never wearied--no, not even on
hot afternoons when the population took its siesta within doors and,
in the words of Cai Tamblyn, "you might shot a cannon down the
streets of Troy, and no person would be shoot." This Cai (or Caius)
Tamblyn, an eccentric little man of uncertain age, with a black
servant Scipio, who wore a livery of green and scarlet and slept
under the stairs, made up the Major's male retinue. Between them
they carried his sedan chair; and because Cai (who walked in front)
measured but an inch above five feet, whereas Scipio stood six feet
three in his socks, the Major had a seat contrived with a sharp
backward slope, and two wooden buffers against which he thrust his
feet when going down-hill. Besides these, whom he was wont to call,
somewhat illogically, his two factotums, his household comprised Miss
Marty and a girl Lavinia who, as Miss Marty put it, did odds and
ends. Miss Marty was a poor relation, a third or fourth cousin on
the maternal side, whom the Major had discovered somewhere on the
other side of the Duchy, and promoted. Socially she did not count.
She asked no more than to be allowed to feed and array the Major, and
gaze after him as he walked down the street.
And what a progress it was!
Again I can see him as he made ready for it, standing in his doorway
at the head of a flight of steps, which led down from it to the small
wrought-iron gate opening on the street. The house has since been
converted into bank premises and its threshold lowered for the
convenience of customers. Gone are the plants--the myrtle on the
right of the porch, the jasmine on the left--with the balusters over
which they rambled, and the steps which the balusters protected--ah,
how eloquently the Major's sword clanked upon these as he descended!
But the high-pitched roof remains, with its three dormer windows
still leaning awry, and the plaster porch where a grotesque,
half-human face grins at you from the middle of a fluted sea-shell.
Standing before it with half-closed eyes, I behold the steps again,
and our great man at the head of them receiving his hat from the
obsequious Scipio, drawing on his gloves, looping his malacca cane to
his wrist by its tasselled cord of silk. The descent might be
military or might be civil: he was always Olympian.
"The handsome he is!" Miss Marty would sigh, gazing after him.
"A fine figure of a man, our Major!" commented Butcher Oke, following
him from the shop-door with a long stare, after the day's joint had
been discussed and chosen.
The children, to whom he was ever affable, stopped their play to take
and return his smile. Some even grinned and saluted. They reserved
their awe for Scipio. Indeed, there is a legend that when Scipio
made his first appearance in Fore Street--he being so tall and the
roadway so narrow--he left in his wake two rows of supine children
who, parting before him, had gradually tilted back as their gaze
climbed up his magnificent and liveried person until the sight of his
ebon face toppled them over, flat.
Miss Jex, the postmistress, would hand him his letters or his copy of
the _Sherborne Mercury_ with a troubled blush. No exception surely
could be taken if she, a Government official, chose to hang a
coloured engraving of the Prince Regent on the wall behind her
counter. And yet--the resemblance! She had heard of irregular
alliances, Court scandals; she had even looked out "Morganatic" in
the dictionary, blushing for the deed while pretending to herself
(fie, Miss Jex!) that "Moravian" was the word she sought.
In Admirals' Row--its real name was Admiral's Row, and had been given
to it in 1758, after the capture of Louisbourg and in honour of
Admiral Boscawen; but we in Troy preferred to write the apostrophe
after the 's'--Miss Sally Tregentil would overpeer her blind and draw
back in a flutter lest the Major had observed her.
"Georgiana Pescod is positive that he was wild in his youth.
But how," Miss Sally asked herself, "can Georgiana possibly know?
And if he were--"
I leave you, my reader, as you know the female heart, to continue
Miss Sally's broken musings.