You’ve heard tell, I dare say, about Landlord Cummins and Billy Bosistow, and the great jealousy there was between them. No? Well, I see you going about Ardevora, and making a study of us; and I know you can read, because I’ve seen you doing it down to the Institute. But sometimes, when I ask you a simple little question like that, you force me to wonder what you’ve been doing with yourself all these years. Why, it got into the Law Courts!
I know all about it, being related to them both after a fashion, as you might say. Landlord Cummins — he that used to keep the Welcome Home — married an aunt of mine on my mother’s side, and that’s part of the story. The boys used to call him “Calves-infront,” because of his legs being put on in an unusual manner, which made him walk slow all his days, and that’s another part of the story. And Billy Bosistow, or Uncle Billy, was my father’s father’s’ stepson. You needn’t take any trouble to get that clear in your mind, because our family never owned him after he came home from the French war prisons and took up with his drinking habits; and that comes into the story, too.
As it happens, the occasion that took their quarrel into the Law Courts is one of the first things I can remember. It was in the year ‘twenty-five. Landlord Cummins, by dint of marrying a woman with means (that was my aunt), and walking the paths of repute for eleven years with his funny-shaped calves, got himself elected Mayor of the Borough. You may suppose it was a proud day for him. In those times the borough used to pay the mayor a hundred pounds a year to keep up appearances, and my mother had persuaded my father to hire a window for Election Day opposite the Town Hall, so that she might have the satisfaction of seeing so near a relative in his robes of dignity.
Well, there in the window we were gathered on that July forenoon (for the mayors in those back-a-long days weren’t chosen in November as they are now), and the sun — it was a bright day — slanting high down our side of the street, and my mother holding me tight as we leaned out, for I was just rising five, and extraordinary heavy in the head. And out upon the steps of the Town Hall stepped Landlord Cummins, Mayor, with the town crier and maces before him, and his robes hanging handsomely about his calves, and his beaver hat and all the rest of the paraphernalia, prepared to march to church.
While he stood there, bowing to a score of people, and looking as big as bull’s beef, who should step out from the pavement under us but Uncle Billy Bosistow! He was a ragged old scarecrow, turned a bit grey and lean with iniquitous living, but not more than half-drunk; and he stepped into the middle of the roadway and cut a low reverence to his worship, flinging out his leg like a dancing-master. And says he, in a high cackle, very solemn but mocking:
“I salute thee, O Mayor! Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before thy God.”
“Put that dam fool in the stocks!” cried his worship, very red in the gills, and speaking vicious. And Uncle Billy was collared and marched off between two constables, while the procession formed up to lead the new Mayor to church.
Well, that, as it happened, wasn’t a lucky start-off for Mr. Cummins’s year of office. For no sooner was Billy let out of the stocks than off he went to Lawyer Mennear, who was a young man then just set up in practice, and as keen for a job as a huer for pilchards; and between them they patched up an action for false imprisonment — damages claimed, one hundred pounds.
The case came on at Bodmin, and the Mayor was cast in damages, twenty-five pounds. He paid, of course, though with a very long face. But Billy’s revenge didn’t stop here. Instead of putting the money by, the old varmint laid it out in the best way he could to annoy his enemy. And the way he contrived it was this. Every free Saturday he’d put a sovereign in his pocket, and start the round of the public-houses — always beginning with Cummins’s own house, the Welcome Home. Cummins, you see, couldn’t refuse to serve him: the law wouldn’t allow it. So he’d pull out a brand new sovereign and slap it on the counter and eye it. “Ah!” he’d say, “it was a dear friend gave me that there coin. His heart’s in the right place, which is more’n can be said for his calves. Two-pennyworth of gin, please, your Worship.” The Mayor’s dignity wouldn’t let him serve it, so, the first day, he called his wife down. Mrs. Cummins began by trying argument. “William,” she said, “the Lord knows you wouldn’t have this money if there was justice in England. But got it you have, and now be a sensible man and put it by for a rainy day.” “Mrs. Mayor,” answers Billy, slow and vicious, “if there was any chance of presentin’ you with a silver cradle, I’d save it up and subscribe.” After that there was nothing more to say. It hurt the poor soul terrible, and she went upstairs again and cried as she went. Billy sat on and soaked, and the Mayor, across the counter, sat and watched his condition, quiet-like, till the time came for refusing any more liquor and turning him out. When that happened the old sinner would gather up his change and make off for another public. And the end was that he’d be up before the Mayor on Monday morning, charged with drunkenness. No use to fine him; he wouldn’t pay, but went to gaol instead. “Ten years was I in prison,” he’d say, addressing the bench, “along with his Worship there. I don’t know what ’twould appear to him who came back and got the Welcome Home; but I didn’t, and ten days don’t frighten me.”
Landlord Cummins would listen to this, looking as unnatural as a blue china cat in a thunderstorm. He fairly hated these appearances of Billy, and they spoiled his term of office, I do believe. But all the same he turned out a very passable Mayor. The townsfolk respected him so highly, I’ve heard my mother say, that they made him Ex–Mayor the year following.
Now you’ll be wanting to know what made these two men hate each other, for friends they had been, as two men ought to be who had been taken prisoners together and spent ten years in captivity to the French, and come home aboard the same ship like brothers. The bigger the love the bigger the hate, and no difficulty to guess there was a woman in the case. So there was; but the way she came between them was curious, for all that.
First of all, you must know, that up to the year ‘three Abe Cummins and Bill Bosistow hadn’t known what it is to quarrel or miss meeting each other every day. They went to school together, and then to the fishing, and afterwards they sailed together with the free-traders over to Mount’s Bay, and good seamen the both, though not a bit alike in looks and ways. Abe, the elder by a year, was a bit slow and heavy on his pins; given to reading, too, though he seemed to take it up for peace and quietness more than for any show he made of his learning. Bill was smarter altogether and better looking; a bit boastful, after the manner of young chaps. He could read too, but never did much at it, though I’ve heard that on Saturday nights he was fond of ranting verses — stuff about drink and such like — out of a book of Robert Burns’s poetry he’d borrowed off Abe.
You’d hardly have thought two young fellows so different in every way could have hit it off as they did. But these were like two figures in a puzzle-block; their very differences seemed to make them fit. There never was such a pair since David and Jonathan, and I believe ’twas partly this that kept them from running after girls. So far as I can see, the most of the lads begin at seventeen; but these two held off sweethearting right along until Christmas of the year ‘three when they came home from Porthleven to spend a fortnight at Ardevora, and they both fell in love with Selina Johns.
Selina Johns wasn’t but just husband-high; turned sixteen and her hair only put up a week before, she having begged her mother’s leave to twist it in plaits for the Christmas courants. And Abe and Billy each knew the other’s secret almost before he knew his own, for each, as you may say, kept his heart like a window and looked into his friend’s window first.
And what they did was to have it out like good fellows, and agree to wait a couple of years, unless any third party should interfere. In two years’ time, they agreed, Selina Johns would be wise enough to choose — and then let the best man win! No bad blood afterwards, and meanwhile no more talk than necessary — they shook hands upon that. That January, being tired of the free-trade, they shipped together on board a coaster for the Thames, and reshipped for the voyage homeward on board the brig Hand and Glove, of London.
The Hand and Glove, Uriah Wilcox, master, was bound for Devonport with a cargo of copper and flour for the dockyard there, and came to anchor in the Downs on March 24th to join convoy under the Spider gun-brig. On the 25th (a Sunday) it blew hard from north to west, and she let go sheet anchor. Next day the weather moderated a bit, and, heaving up her sheet anchor, she rode to her best bower. On the Tuesday, the wind having fallen light, the master took off a new longboat from Deal. There was some hitch in delivering her, and she was scarcely brought alongside by five the next morning when the Commodore signalled to get under weigh.
By reason of this delay, the Hand and Glove was taken unawares, and started well astern of the fleet, which numbered over twenty sail of merchantmen; and, being a sluggard in anything short of half a gale, she made up precious little way in the light E.N.E. breeze.
Soon after seven that evening, Beachy Head bearing N.W. by W. four miles and a half, Abe Cummins on the look-out forward spied a lugger coming towards shore upon a wind. She crossed well ahead of the Hand and Glove, and close — as it looked — under the stem of an East Indiaman which was then busy reefing topsails before night. For a while Abe lost sight of her under the dark of the land; but by-and-by the wheelman took a glance over his shoulder, and there she was, creeping up close astern. His call fetched up Captain Wilcox, who ran aft and hailed, but got no reply. And so she came on, until, sheering close up under the Hand and Glove’s port quarter, she was able to heave a grapnel on board and throw twenty well-armed Johnnies into the old brig. The Englishmen — seven in all, and taken unprepared — were soon driven below and shut down — four in the cabin, two in the steerage, and one in the forecastle, this last being Abe Cummins. After a while the sentry over the hatchway called for him to come up and show where the leading ropes were, which he did at the point of a cutlass. And precious soon the Johnnies had altered the brig’s course and stood away for the coast of France, the lugger keeping her company all night.
Early next morning the two vessels were close off Dieppe Harbour; and there, when the tide suited, they were taken inside, and the prisoners put ashore at nightfall and lodged for three days in a filthy round tower, swarming with vermin. On April 1 — Easter Sunday, I’ve heard it was — they were told to get ready for marching, and handed over, making twenty-five in all, with the crews of two other vessels, both brigs — the Lisbon Packet, bound from London to Falmouth with a general cargo, and the Margaret, letter of marque of London, bound from Zante, laden with currants — to a lieutenant and a guard of foot soldiers. Not a man of them knew where they were bound. They set out through a main pretty country, where the wheat stood nearabouts knee-high, but the roads were heavy after the spring rains. Each man had seven shillings in his pocket, given him at parting by the captain of his vessel — the three captains had been left behind at Dieppe — and on they trudged for just a fortnight on an allowance of 1 lb. of brown bread and twopence-halfpenny per man per day; the bread served out regular and the money, so to say, when they could get it. Mostly they came to a town for their night’s halt, and as often as not the townsfolk drummed them to jail with what we call the “Rogue’s March,” but in France I believe it’s “Honours of War,” or something that sounds politer than ’tis. But there were times when they had to put up at a farm house by the road, and then the poor chaps slept on straw for a treat.
Well, on the last day of the fortnight they reached their journey’s end — a great fortress on a rock standing right over the river, with a town lying around the foot of the rock, and a smaller town, reached by a bridge of boats, on the far side of the river. I can’t call to mind the name of the river, but the towns were called Jivvy — Great and Little Jivvy. 5 The prison stood at the very top of the rock, on the edge of a cliff that dropped a clean 300 feet to the river: not at all a pretty place to get clear of, and none so cheerful to live in on a day’s allowance of one pound of brown bread, half a pound of bullock’s offal, three-halfpence in money (paid weekly, and the most of it deducted for prison repairs, if you please!), and now and then a noggin of peas for a treat. They found half a dozen ships’ companies already there, and enjoying themselves on this diet; the crew of the Minerva frigate, run ashore off Cherbourg; the crew of the Hussar, wrecked outside Brest; and — so queerly things fall out in this world — among them a parcel of poor fellows from Ardevora, taken on board the privateer Recovery of this port.
To keep to my story, though — which is about Abe Cummins and Billy Bosistow. It was just in these unhappy conditions that the difference in the two men came out. Abe took his downfall very quiet from the first. He had managed to keep a book in his pocket — a book of voyages it was — and carry it with him all the way from Dieppe, and it really didn’t seem to matter to him that he was shut up, so long as he could sit in a corner and read about other folks travelling. In the second year of their captivity an English clergyman, a Mr. Wolfe, came to Jivvy, and got leave from the Commandant to fit up part of the prison granary for a place of worship and preach to the prisoners. It had a good effect on the men in general, and Abe in particular turned very religious. Mr. Wolfe took a fancy to him, and lent him an old book on “Navigation”— Hamilton Moore’s; and over that Abe would sit by the hour, with his room-mates drunk and fighting round him, and copy out tables and work out sums. All his money went in pen and ink instead of the liquor which the jailors smuggled in.
Billy Bosistow was a very different pair of shoes. Although no drinker by habit, he fretted and wore himself down at times to a lowness of spirits in which nothing seemed to serve him but drinking, and fierce drinking. On his better days he was everybody’s favourite; but when the mood fell on him he grew teasy as a bear with a sore head, and fit to set his right hand quarrelling with his left. Then came the drinking fit, and he’d wake out of that like a man dazed, sitting in a corner and brooding for days together. What he brooded on, of course, was means of escape. At first, like every other prisoner in Jivvy, he had kept himself cheerful with hopes of exchange, but it seemed the folks home in Ardevora had given up trying for a release, or else letters never reached them. And yet they must have known something of the case their poor kinsmen were in, for in the second year the Commandant sent for Abe and Billy, and informed them that, by the kindness of a young English lady, a Miss Selina Johns, their allowance was increased by two sols a day. He showed them no letter, but the increase was paid regularly for eight months; after which a new Commandant came, and it ceased. They could never find out if the supply ceased, or into whose pocket it went if it came.
From that time Bosistow had two things to brood upon — escape and Selina. But confinement is the ruination of some natures, and as year after year went by and his wits broke themselves on a stone wall, he grew into a very different man from the handy lad the Johnnies had taken prisoner. One thing he never gave up, and that was his pluck; and he had plenty of use for it when, after seven years, his chance came.
His first contrivance was to change names with an old American in the depot. It so happened that the captain of a French privateer had applied to the prison for a crew of foreigners to man his ship, then lying at Morlaix. The trick, by oiling the jailor’s palm, was managed easily enough, and away Bosistow was marched with twenty comrades of all nations. But at the first stage some recruiting officers stopped them, insisting that they were Irish and not Americans, and must be enlisted to serve with Bonaparty’s army in Spain. The prisoners to a man refused to hear of it, and the end was they were marched back to prison in disgrace, and, to cap everything, had their English allowance stopped on pretence that they had been in the French service. Yet this brought him a second chance, for being now declared an Irishman he managed to get himself locked up with the Irish, who had their quarters on the handier side of the prison; and that same night broke out of window with two other fellows, got over the prison wall, and hid in the woods beyond. But on the second day a party of wood-rangers attacked them with guns and captured them; and back they went, and were condemned to six years in irons.
This, as it turned out, didn’t amount to much; for, while they were waiting to be marched off to the galleys, their jailor came with news that a son was born to the Emperor, and they were pardoned in honour of it. But instead of putting them back in their old quarters, he fixed them up for a fortnight in a room by themselves, being fearful that such bad characters would contaminate the other prisoners. This room was an upstairs one in a building on the edge of the ramparts, and after a few nights they broke through the ceiling into an empty chamb............