Troy on a Regatta Day differs astonishingly from Troy on any other day in the year, and yet until you have seen us on a Regatta Day you have not seen Troy.
Once every August, on a Monday afternoon, the frenzy descends upon us; and then for three days we dress our town in bunting and bang starting guns and finishing guns, and put on fancy dresses, and march in procession with Japanese lanterns, and dance, and stare at pyrotechnical displays. But the centre, the pivot, the axis of our revelry is always the merry-go-round on the Town Quay.
"The merry-go-round, the merry-go-round,
the merry-go-round at Troy,
They whirl around, they gallop around,
man, woman, and maid and boy!"
"The merry-go-round, the merry-go-round,
the merry-go-round at Troy,
They whirl around, they gallop around,
man, woman, and maid and boy!"
Yachtsmen, visitors, farmers and country wives, sober citizens and mothers of families, all meet centripetally and mount and are whirled to the mad strains of the barrel-organ under the flaming naphtha, around the revolving pillar where the mirrored images chase one another too quickly for thought to answer their reflections. We make no toil of our pleasure; yet, if you will mark the distinction, it keeps us hard at work, and reflection must wait until Thursday morning. Then we dismiss the yachts on their Channel race westward. We fire the last gun, pull down the blue Peter, and off they go. We draw a long breath, stow away our remaining blank cartridges, pocket the stopwatch, heap the recall numbers together, and, having redded up the jolly-boat, light our pipes and sit and gaze awhile after our retreating visitors. They go from us silent as great white moths; but, silent themselves, they take, as they brought, all the noise and racket with them. Our revel is over; behind us the harbour lies almost deserted, and we row back to our diurnal peace.
To be sure, in the days of which I write, there were no yachts to visit us. But three of His Majesty's training-brigs had arrived, bringing their gigs and long-boats, and sailing cutters, with the racing-shells in which the oarsmen of Dock were to do battle with our champions of Troy, and a couple of crews of the famous Saltash fishwomen who annually gave us an exhibition race for a purse of gold and in the evening danced quadrilles and country reels on the quarter-deck with His Majesty's officers.
The town, on its part, had made all due and zealous preparations; and at eight o'clock in the morning, when the Major stepped out of the hospital for a look at the weather (which was hazy but warm, with promise of a cloudless noon), already the streets breathed festival. Sir Felix's coppices had been thinned as usual for the occasion, and scores of small saplings, larch and beech and hazel, lined the narrow streets, their sharpened stems planted between the cobbles, their leafy tops braced back against the house-fronts and stayed with ropes which, leading through the upper windows, were made fast within to bars of grates, table-legs and bed-posts. Over them, from house to house, strings of flags waved in the light morning breeze, and over these again the air was jocund with the distant tunding of a drum and the voices of flute and clarionet calling men to mirth in the Town Square.
The Major gave a glance up and down the street and retired indoors to prepare his breakfast, for he was alone. Cai Tamblyn and the widow Snell had the day before departed—on their honeymoon.
To arrange that his honeymoon should take him from Troy on the day of all days to which every other soul in the town looked forward, was quite of a piece with Cai Tamblyn's sardonic humour. But he surely excelled himself when, the day before his marriage, he called on the Mayor and begged leave to appoint the patient in the hospital as his locum tenens for the week.
"The man's well enough to look after the place," he urged; "and you won't find him neglectin' it to go gaddin' round the shows. A wooden leg's a wonderful steadier at fair-times." And the Doctor assented.