“I saved a life for the King’s service,” went on Keene, when the spluttering died away. “A young life. No one has suffered any harm. On the other hand, both you and Simpson have had your courage amply proved. You both know you can stand fire now, and so does every one else.”
“You have touched my personal honour, sir,” said Hornblower, bringing out one of his rehearsed speeches, “for that there can only be one remedy.”
“Restrain yourself, please, Mr. Hornblower.” Keene shifted himself in his chair with a wince of pain as he prepared to make a speech. “I must remind you of one salutary regulation of the Navy, to the effect that no junior officer can challenge his superior to a duel. The reasons for it are obvious—otherwise promotion would be too easy. The mere issuing of a challenge by a junior to a senior is a court-martial offence, Mr. Hornblower.”
“Oh!” said Hornblower feebly.
“Now here is some gratuitous advice,” went on Keene. “You have fought one duel and emerged with honour. That is good. Never fight another—that is better. Some people, oddly enough, acquire a taste for duelling, as a tiger acquires a taste for blood. They are never good officers, and never popular ones either.”
It was then that Hornblower realized that a great part of the keen excitement with which he had entered the captain’s cabin was due to anticipation of the giving of the challenge. There could be a morbid desire for danger—and a morbid desire to occupy momentarily the centre of the stage. Keene was waiting for him to speak, and it was hard to say anything.
“I understand, sir,” he said at last.
Keene shifted in his chair again.
“There is another matter I wanted to take up with you, Mr. Hornblower. Captain Pellew of the Indefatigable has room for another midshipman. Captain Pellew is partial to a game of whist, and has no good fourth on board. He and I have agreed to consider favourably your application for a transfer should you care to make one. I don’t have to point out that any ambitious young officer would jump at the chance of serving in a frigate.”
“A frigate!” said Hornblower.
Everybody knew of Pellew’s reputation and success. Distinction, promotion, prize money—an officer under Pellew’s command could hope for all these. Competition for nomination to the Indefatigable must be intense, and this was the chance of a lifetime. Hornblower was on the point of making a glad acceptance, when further considerations restrained him.
“That is very good of you, sir,” he said. “I do not know how to thank you. But you accepted me as a midshipman here, and of course I must stay with you.”
The drawn, apprehensive face relaxed into a smile.
“Not many men would have said that,” said Keene. “But I am going to insist on your accepting the offer. I shall not live very much longer to appreciate your loyalty. And this ship is not the place for you—this ship with her useless captain—don’t interrupt me—and her worn-out first lieutenant and her old midshipmen. You should be where there may be speedy opportunities of advancement. I have the good of the service in mind, Mr. Hornblower, when I suggest you accept Captain Pellew’s invitation—and it might be less disturbing for me if you did.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said Hornblower.
THE CARGO OF RICE
The wolf was in among the sheep. The tossing grey water of the Bay of Biscay was dotted with white sails as far as the eye could see, and although a strong breeze was blowing every vessel was under perilously heavy canvas. Every ship but one was trying to escape; the exception was His Majesty’s frigate Indefatigable, Captain Sir Edward Pellew. Farther out in the Atlantic, hundreds of miles away, a great battle was being fought, where the ships of the line were thrashing out the question as to whether England or France should wield the weapon of sea power; here in the Bay the convoy which the French ships were intended to escort was exposed to the attack of a ship of prey at liberty to capture any ship she could overhaul. She had come surging up from leeward, cutting off all chance of escape in that direction, and the clumsy merchant ships were forced to beat to windward; they were all filled with the food which revolutionary France (her economy disordered by the convulsion through which she was passing) was awaiting so anxiously, and their crews were all anxious to escape confinement in an English prison. Ship after ship was overhauled; a shot or two, and the newfangled tricolour came fluttering down from the gaff, and a prize-crew was hurriedly sent on board to conduct the captive to an English port while the frigate dashed after fresh prey.
On the quarterdeck of the Indefatigable Pellew fumed over each necessary delay. The convoy, each ship as close to the wind as she would lie, and under all the sail she could carry, was slowly scattering, spreading farther and farther with the passing minutes, and some of these would find safety in mere dispersion if any time was wasted. Pellew did not wait to pick up his boat; at each surrender he merely ordered away an officer and an armed guard, and the moment the prize-crew was on its way he filled his main-topsail again and hurried off after the next victim. The brig they were pursuing at the moment was slow to surrender. The long nine-pounders in the Indefatigable’s bows bellowed out more than once; on that heaving sea it was not so easy to aim accurately and the brig continued on her course hoping for some miracle to save her.
“Very well,” snapped Pellew. “He has asked for it. Let him have it.”
The gunlayers at the bow chasers changed their point of aim, firing at the ship instead of across her bows.
“Not into the hull, damn it,” shouted Pellew—one shot had struck the brig perilously close to her waterline. “Cripple her.”
The next shot by luck or by judgment was given better elevation. The slings of the foretopsail yard were shot away, the reefed sail came down, the yard hanging lopsidedly, and the brig came up into the wind for the Indefatigable to heave to close beside her, her broadside ready to fire into her. Under that threat her flag came down.
“What brig’s that?” shouted Pellew through his megaphone.
“Marie Galante of Bordeaux,” translated the officer beside Pellew as the French captain made reply. “Twenty-four days out from New Orleans with rice.”
“Rice!” said Pellew. “That’ll sell for a pretty penny when we get her home. Two hundred tons, I should say. Twelve of a crew at most. She’ll need a prize-crew of four, a midshipman’s command.”
He looked round him as though for inspiration before giving his next order.
“Mr. Hornblower!”
“Sir!”
“Take four men of the cutter’s crew and board that brig. Mr. Soames will give you our position. Take her into any English port you can make, and report there for orders.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Hornblower was at his station at the starboard quarter-deck carronades—which was perhaps how he had caught Pellew’s eye—his dirk at his side and a pistol in his belt. It was a moment for fast thinking, for anyone could see Pellew’s impatience. With the Indefatigable cleared for action, his sea chest would be part of the surgeon’s operating table down below, so that there was no chance of getting anything out of it. He would have to leave just as he was. The cutter was even now clawing up to a position on the Indefatigable’s quarter, so he ran to the ship’s side and hailed her, trying to make his voice sound as big and as manly as he could, and at the word of the lieutenant in command she turned her bows in towards the frigate.
“Here’s our latitude and longitude, Mr. Hornblower,” said Soames, the master, handing a scrap of paper to him.
“Thank you,” said Hornblower, shoving it into his pocket.
He scrambled awkwardly into the mizzen-chains and looked down into the cutter. Ship and boat were pitching together, almost bows on to the sea, and the distance between them looked appallingly great; the bearded seaman standing in the bows could only just reach up to the chains with his long boat-hook. Hornblower hesitated for a long second; he knew he was ungainly and awkward—book learning was of no use when it came to jumping into a boat—but he had to make
the leap, for Pellew was fuming behind him and the eyes of the boat’s crew and of the whole ship’s company were on him. Better to jump and hurt himself, better to jump and make an exhibition of himself, than to delay the ship. Waiting was certain failure, while he still had a choice if he jumped. Perhaps at a word from Pellew the Indefatigable’s helmsman allowed the ship’s head to fall off from the sea a little. A somewhat diagonal wave lifted the Indefatigable’s stern and then passed on, so that the cutter’s bows rose as the ship’s stern sank a trifle. Hornblower braced himself and leaped. His feet reached the gunwale and he tottered there for one indescribable second. A seaman grabbed the breast of his jacket and he fell forward rather than backward. Not even the stout arm of the seaman, fully extended, could hold him up, and he pitched headforemost, legs in the air, upon the hands on the second thwart. He cannoned onto their bodies, knocking the breath out of his own against their muscular shoulders, and finally struggled into an upright position.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped to the men who had broken his fall.
“Never you mind, sir,” said the nearest one, a real tarry sailor, tattooed and pigtailed. “You’re only a featherweight.”
The lieutenant in command was looking at him from the sternsheets.
“Would you go to the brig, please, sir?” he asked, and the lieutenant bawled an order and the cutter swung round as Hornblower made his way aft.
It was a pleasant surprise not to be received with the broad grins of tolerantly concealed amusement. Boarding a small boat from a big frigate in even a moderate sea was no easy matter; probably every man on board had arrived headfirst at some time or other, and it was not in the tradition of the service, as understood in the Indefatigable, to laugh at a man who did his best without shirking.
“Are you taking charge of the brig?” asked the lieutenant.
“Yes, sir. The captain told me to take four of your men.”
“They had better be topmen, then,” said the lieutenant, casting his eyes aloft at the rigging of the brig. The foretopsail yard was hanging precariously, and the jib halliard had slacked off so that the sail was flapping thunderously in the wind. “Do you know these men, or shall I pick ’em for you?”
“I’d be obliged if you would, sir.”
The lieutenant shouted four names, and four men replied.
“Keep ’em away from drink and they’ll be all right,” said the lieutenant. “Watch the French crew. They’ll recapture the ship and have you in a French gaol before you can say ‘Jack Robinson’ if you don’t.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said Hornblower.
The cutter surged alongside the brig, white water creaming between the two vessels. The tattooed sailor hastily concluded a bargain with another man on his thwart and pocketed a lump of tobacco—the men were leaving their possessions behind just like Hornblower—and sprang for the mainchains. Another man followed him, and they stood and waited while Hornblower with difficulty made his way forward along the plunging boat. He stood, balancing precariously, on the forward thwart. The mainchains of the brig were far lower than the mizzen-chains of the Indefatigable, but this time he had to jump upwards. One of the seamen steadied him with an arm on his shoulder.
“Wait for it, sir,” he said. “Get ready. Now jump, sir.”
Hornblower hurled himself, all arms and legs, like a leaping frog, at the mainchains. His hands reached the shrouds, but his knee slipped off, and the brig, rolling, lowered him thigh deep into the sea as the shrouds slipped through his hands. But the waiting seamen grabbed his wrists and hauled him on board, and two more seamen followed him. He led the way onto the deck.
The first sight to meet his eyes was a man seated on the hatch cover, his head thrown back, holding to his mouth a bottle, the bottom pointing straight up to the sky. He was one of a large group all sitting round the hatch cover; there were more bottles in evidence; one was passed by one man to another as he looked, and as he approached a roll of the ship brought an empty bottle rolling past his toes to clatter into the scuppers. Another of the group, with white hair blowing in the wind, rose to welcome him, and stood for a moment with waving arms and rolling eyes, bracing himself as though to say something of immense importance and seeking earnestly for the right words to use.
“Goddam English,” was what he finally said, and, having said it, he sat down with a bump on the hatch cover and from a seated position proceeded to lie down and compose himself to sleep with his head on his arms.
“They’ve made the best of their time, sir, by the Holy,” said the seaman at Hornblower’s elbow.
“Wish we were as happy,” said another.
A case still a quarter full of bottles, each elaborately sealed, stood on the deck beside the hatch cover, and the seaman picked out a bottle to look at it curiously. Hornblower did not need to remember the lieutenant’s warning; on his shore excursions with press gangs he had already had experience of the British seaman’s tendency to drink. His boarding party would be as drunk as the Frenchmen in half an hour if he allowed it. A frightful mental picture of himself drifting into the Bay of Biscay with a disabled ship and a drunken crew rose in his mind and filled him with anxiety.
“Put that down,” he ordered.
The urgency of the situation made his seventeen-year-old voice crack like a fourteen-year-old’s, and the seaman hesitated, holding the bottle in his hand.
“Put it down, d’ye hear?” said Hornblower, desperate with worry. This was his first independent command; conditions were absolutely novel, and excitement brought out all the passion of his mercurial temperament, while at the same time the more calculating part of his mind told him that if he were not obeyed now he never would be. His pistol was in his belt, and he put his hand on the butt, and it is conceivable that he would have drawn it and used it (if the priming had not got wet, he said to himself bitterly when he thought about the incident later on), but the seaman with one more glance at him put the bottle back into the case. The incident was closed, and it was time for the next step.
“Take these men forrard,” he said, giving the obvious order. “Throw ’em into the forecastle.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Most of the Frenchmen could still walk, but three were dragged by their collars, while the British herded the others before them.
“Come alongee,” said one of the seamen. “Thisa waya.”
He evidently believed a Frenchman would understand him better if he spoke like that. The Frenchman who had greeted their arrival now awakened, and, suddenly realizing he was being dragged forward, broke away and turned back to Hornblower.
“I officer,” he said, pointing to himself. “I not go wit’ zem.”
“Take him away!” said Hornblower. In his tense condition he could not stop to debate trifles.
He dragged the case of bottles down to the ship’s side and pitched them overboard two at a time—obviously it was wine of some special vintage which the Frenchmen had decided to drink before the English could get their hands on it, but that weighed not at all with Hornblower, for a British seaman could get drunk on vintage claret as easily as upon service rum. The task was finished before the last of the Frenchmen disappeared into the forecastle, and Hornblower had time to look about him. The strong breeze blew confusingly round his ears, and the ceaseless thunder of the flapping jib made it hard to think as he looked at the ruin aloft. Every sail was flat aback, the brig was moving jerkily, gathering sternway for a space before her untended rudder threw her round to spill the wind and bring her up again like a jibbing horse. His mathematical mind had already had plenty of experience with a well-handled ship, with the delicate adjustment between after sails and headsails. Here the balance had been disturbed, and Hornblower was at work on the problem of forces acting on plane surfaces when his men came trooping back to him. One thing at least was certain, and that was that the precariously hanging foretopsail yard would tear itself free to do all sorts of unforeseeable damage if it were tossed about much more. The ship must be
properly hove to, and Hornblower could guess how to set about it, and he formulated the order in his mind just in time to avoid any appearance of hesitation.
“Brace the after yards to larboard,” he said. “Man the braces, men.”
They obeyed him, while he himself went gingerly to the wheel; he had served a few tricks as helmsman, learning his professional duties under Pellew’s orders, but he did not feel happy about it. The spokes felt foreign to his fingers as he took hold; he spun the wheel experimentally but timidly. But it was easy. With the after yards braced round the brig rode more comfortably at once, and the spokes told their own story to his sensitive fingers as the ship became a thing of logical construction again. Hornblower’s mind completed the solution of the problem of the effect of the rudder at the same time as his senses solved it empirically. The wheel could be safely lashed, he knew, in these conditions, and he slipped the becket over the spoke and stepped away from the wheel, with the Marie Galante riding comfortably and taking the seas on her starboard bow.
The seamen took his competence gratifyingly for granted, but Hornblower, looking at the tangle on the foremast, had not the remotest idea of how to deal with the next problem. He was not even sure about what was wrong. But the hands under his orders were seamen of vast experience, who must have dealt with similar emergencies a score of times.
The first—indeed the only—thing to do was to delegate his responsibility.
“Who’s the oldest seaman among you?” he demanded—his determination not to quaver made him curt.
“Matthews, sir,” said someone at length, indicating with his thumb the pigtailed and tattooed seaman upon whom he had fallen in the cutter.
“Very well, then. I’ll rate you petty officer, Matthews. Get to work at once and clear that raffle away forrard. I’ll be busy here aft.”
It was a nervous moment for Hornblower, but Matthews put his knuckles to his forehead.
The Young Hornblower Omnibus Page 4