The Young Hornblower Omnibus

by C. S. Forester

  ‘I’ll entertain the captain in my cabin,’ said Hornblower. ‘Mr Bush, see that the other man is taken forward and well looked after. See he has a drink.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  A line over the side brought up two big buckets of fish, and these were followed by two blue-jerseyed men who scrambled up easily enough despite their sea-boots.

  ‘A great pleasure, captain,’ said Hornblower in the waist to greet him. ‘Please come with me.’

  The captain looked curiously about him as he was led up to the quarter-deck and aft to the cabin. He sat down cautiously in the only chair while Hornblower perched on the cot. The blue jersey and trousers were spangled with fish scales – the cabin would smell of fish for a week. Hewitt brought rum and water, and Hornblower poured two generous glasses; the captain sipped appreciatively.

  ‘Has your fishing been successful?’ asked Hornblower, politely.

  He listened while the captain told him, in his almost unintelligible Breton French, about the smallness of the profits to be earned in the pilchard fishery. The conversation drifted on. It was an easy transition from the pleasures of peace to the possibilities of war – two seamen could hardly meet without that prospect being discussed.

  ‘I suppose they make great efforts to man the ships of war?’

  The captain shrugged.

  ‘Certainly.’

  The shrug told much more than the word.

  ‘It marches very slowly, I imagine,’ said Hornblower, and the captain nodded.

  ‘But of course the ships are ready to take the sea?’

  Hornblower had no idea of how to say ‘laid-up in ordinary’ in French, and so he had to ask the question in the opposite sense.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the captain. He went on to express his contempt for the French naval authorities. There was not a single ship of the line ready for service. Of course not.

  ‘Let me refill your glass, captain,’ said Hornblower. ‘I suppose the frigates receive the first supplies of men?’

  Such supplies as there were, perhaps. The Breton captain was not sure. Of course there was – Hornblower had more than a moment’s difficulty at this point. Then he understood. The frigate Loire had been made ready for sea last week (it was the Breton pronunciation of that name which had most puzzled Hornblower) for service in Far Eastern waters, but with the usual idiocy of the naval command had now been stripped of most of her trained men to provide nuclei for the other ships. The Breton captain, whose capacity for rum was quite startling, did nothing to conceal either the smouldering Breton resentment against the atheist régime now ruling France or the contempt of a professional user of the sea for the blundering policies of the Republican Navy. Hornblower had only to nurse his glass and listen, his faculties at full stretch to catch all the implications of a conversation in a foreign language. When at last the captain rose to say good-bye there was a good deal of truth in what Hornblower said, haltingly, about his regrets at the termination of the visit.

  ‘Yet perhaps even if war should come, captain, we may still meet again. As I expect you know, the Royal Navy of Great Britain does not make war on fishing vessels. I shall always be glad to buy some of your catch.’

  The Frenchman was looking at him keenly now, perhaps because the subject of payment was arising. This was a most important moment, calling for accurate judgement. How much? What to say?

  ‘Of course I must pay for today’s supply,’ said Hornblower, his hand in his pocket. He took out two ten-franc pieces and dropped them into the horny palm, and the captain could not restrain an expression of astonishment from appearing in his weather-beaten face. Astonishment, followed instantly by avarice, and then by suspicion, calculation, and finally by decision as the hand clenched and hurried the money into a trouser-pocket. Those emotions had played over the captain’s face like the colours of a dying dolphin. Twenty francs in gold, for a couple of buckets of pilchards; most likely the captain supported himself, his wife and children for a week on twenty francs. Ten francs would be a week’s wage for his hands. This was important money; either the British captain did not know the value of gold or—. At least there was the indubitable fact that the French captain was twenty francs richer, and there was at least the possibility of more gold where this came from.

  ‘I hope we shall meet again, captain,’ said Hornblower. ‘As of course you understand, out here at sea we are always glad to have news of what is happening on land.’

  The two Bretons went over the side with their two empty buckets, leaving Bush ruefully contemplating the mess left on the deck.

  ‘That can be swabbed up, Mr Bush,’ said Hornblower. ‘It will be a good ending to a good day.’

  V

  The cabin was quite dark when Hornblower awoke; there was not even the glimmering of light through the two stern windows. He lay curled on his side only half conscious, and then a single sharp note from the ship’s bell recalled him to the world, and he turned over on his back and stretched himself, half fretfully and half luxuriously trying to put his thoughts into order. That must be one bell in the morning watch, because one bell in the middle watch had sounded as he was getting back into bed after being roused when the ship was put about at midnight. He had had six hours of sleep, even after making allowance for that break; there were great advantages about being in command of a ship; the watch which had retired to bed at that time had been up on deck again for half an hour already.

  The cot on which he lay was swaying easily and slowly. Hotspur must be under very easy sail indeed, and, as far as he could judge, with a moderate wind on the starboard beam. That was as it should be. He would soon have to get up – he turned on to his other side and went to sleep again.

  ‘Two bells, sir,’ said Grimes, entering the cabin with a lighted lamp. ‘Two bells, sir. Bit of haze, and Mr Prowse says he’d like to go about on the other tack.’ Grimes was a weedy young seaman who affirmed that he had acted as captain’s steward in a West India packet.

  ‘Get me my coat,’ said Hornblower.

  It was cold in the misty dawn, with only a greatcoat on over his nightshirt. Hornblower found Maria’s gloves in a pocket and pulled them on gratefully.

  ‘Twelve fathoms, sir,’ reported Prowse as the ship steadied on her new course with the lead going in the forechains.

  ‘Very well.’

  There was time to dress, there was time to have breakfast. There was time for – Hornblower felt a wave of temptation breaking round him. He wanted a cup of coffee. He wanted two or three cups of coffee, strong and scalding hot. Yet he had on board no more than two pounds of coffee. At seventeen shillings a pound that was all he had been able to afford to buy. The miraculous forty-five pounds had melted away which he had won at whist the night before the appearance of the King’s message regarding the fleet. There had been his sea-going clothing and his sword to get out of pawn, his cabin furniture to buy, and he had had to leave seventeen pounds with Maria for her support until she could draw his allotment of pay. So there had been little enough left over for ‘captain’s stores’. He had not bought a sheep or a pig; not a single chicken. Mrs Mason had bought six dozen eggs for him – they were packed in shavings in a tub lashed to the deck in the chart room – and six pounds of heavily salted butter. There was a loaf of sugar and some pots of jam, and then the money had run out. He had no bacon, no potted meat. He had dined yesterday on pilchards – the fact that they had been bought with secret service money was some kind of sauce for them, but pilchards were unattractive fish. And of course there was the absurd prejudice of seamen regarding fish, creatures from their own element. They hated having their eternal round of salt beef and pork interrupted by a meal of fish – allowance must be made, of course, for the fact that the cooking of fish left behind a lingering scent, hard to eradicate from utensils sketchily washed in seawater. At this very moment, in the growing dawn, one of the lambs netted down in the boat chocked in the waist emitted a lingering baa-aaa as it woke. The wardroom officers had invested
in four of the creatures while the Hotspur was commissioning, and any day now they would be dining on roast lamb – Hornblower determined to get himself invited to dinner in the ward-room that day. The thought reminded him that he was hungry; but that was quite minor compared with his yearning for coffee.

  ‘Where’s my servant?’ he suddenly roared. ‘Grimes! Grimes!’

  ‘Sir?’

  Grimes put his head round the chart-room door.

  ‘I’m going to dress, and I’ll want my breakfast. I’ll have coffee.’

  ‘Coffee, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hornblower bit off the ‘damn you’ he nearly added. To swear at a man who could not swear back and whose only offence lay in being unoffending was not to his taste, just as some men could not shoot foxes. ‘You don’t know anything about coffee?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Get the oak box and bring it in to me.’

  Hornblower explained about coffee to Grimes while working up a lather with a quarter of a pint of fresh-water.

  ‘Count out twenty of those beans. Put them in an open jar – get that from the cook. Then you toast ’em over the galley fire. And be careful with ’em. Keep shaking ’em. They’ve got to be brown, not black. Toasted, not burnt. Understand?’

  ‘Well, yes, sir.’

  ‘Then you take ’em to the surgeon, with my compliments.’

  ‘The surgeon? Yes, sir.’ Grimes, seeing Hornblower’s brows come together like thunderclouds, had the sense to suppress in the nick of time his astonishment at the entry of the surgeon’s name into this conversation.

  ‘He has a pestle and mortar to pound his jalap with. You pound those beans in that mortar. You break ’em up small. Small, mark you, but you don’t make dust of ’em. Like large grain gunpowder, not mealed gunpowder. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I suppose so, sir.’

  ‘Next you – oh go and get that done and then report to me again.’

  Grimes was clearly not a man to do things quickly. Hornblower had shaved and dressed and was pacing the quarter-deck, raging for his breakfast, before Grimes appeared again with a panful of dubious powder. Hornblower gave him brief instructions on how to make coffee with it, and Grimes listened doubtfully.

  ‘Go and get it done. Oh, and Grimes!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I’ll have two eggs. Fried. Can you fry eggs?’

  ‘Er – yes, sir.’

  ‘Fry ’em so the yolk’s nearly hard but not quite. And get out a crock of butter and a crock of jam.’

  Hornblower was throwing discretion to the winds; he was determined on a good breakfast. And those winds to which he had thrown discretion suddenly asserted themselves. With hardly a warning puff there was a sudden gust which almost took Hotspur aback, and with it, while Hotspur paid off and recovered herself, there came driving rain, an April shower, icy cold. Hornblower shook off Grimes the first time he appeared to report that breakfast was ready, and only went off with him on his second appearance, after Hotspur was steady on her course again. With the weather clearing and daylight growing there was little time he could spare.

  ‘I’ll be on deck again in ten minutes, Mr Young,’ he said.

  The chart-room was a minute compartment beside his cabin – cabin, chart-room, and the captain’s pantry and head occupied the whole space of the Hotspur’s tiny poop. Hornblower squeezed himself into the chair at the little table.

  ‘Sir,’ said Grimes. ‘You didn’t come when breakfast was ready.’

  Here were the eggs. The rim of the whites was black; the yolks were obviously hard.

  ‘Very well,’ growled Hornblower. He could not blame Grimes for that.

  ‘Coffee, sir?’ said Grimes. With the chart-room door shut he was wedged against it hardly able to move. He poured from a jug into a cup, and Hornblower sipped. It was only just hot enough to drink, which meant that it was not hot enough, and it was muddy.

  ‘See that it’s hotter than this another time,’ said Hornblower. ‘And you’ll have to strain it better than this.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Grimes voice seemed to come from a great distance. The man could hardly whisper. ‘Sir—’

  Hornblower looked up at him; Grimes was cold with fright.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I kept these to show you, sir.’ Grimes produced a pan containing a bloody and stinking mess. ‘The first two eggs was bad, sir. I didn’t want you to think—’

  ‘Very well.’ Grimes was afraid in case he should be accused of stealing them. ‘Take the damned things away.’

  Now was it not exactly like Mrs Mason to buy eggs for him of which half were bad? Hornblower ate his unpleasant eggs – even these two, although not exactly bad, were flavoured – while reconciling himself with the prospect of making up for it all with the jam. He spread a biscuit with the precious butter, and here was the jam. Blackcurrant! Of all the misguided purchases! Grimes, squeezing back into the chart-room, positively jumped as Hornblower let out the oath that had been seeking an outlet for several minutes.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I’m not speaking to you, damn you,’ said Hornblower, his restraint at an end.

  Hornblower was fond of jam, but of all the possible varieties he liked blackcurrant least. It was a poor last best. Well, it would have to do; he bit at the iron-hard biscuit.

  ‘Don’t knock at the door when you’re serving a meal,’ he said to Grimes.

  ‘No, sir. I won’t sir. Not any more, sir.’

  Grimes’s hand holding the coffeepot was shaking, and when Hornblower looked up he could see that his lips were trembling too. He was about to ask sharply what was the matter, but he suppressed the question as the answer became apparent to him. It was physical fear that was affecting Grimes. A word from Hornblower could have Grimes bound to a grating at the gangway, there to have the flesh flogged from the bones of his writhing body. There were captains in the navy who would give just that order when served with such a breakfast. There would never be a time when more things went wrong than this.

  There was a knocking at the door.

  ‘Come in!’

  Grimes shrank against the bulkhead to avoid falling out through the door as it opened.

  ‘Message from Mr Young, sir,’ said Orrock. ‘Wind’s veering again.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ said Hornblower.

  Grimes cowered against the bulkhead as he pushed his way out; Hornblower emerged on to the quarter-deck. Six dozen eggs, and half of them bad. Two pounds of coffee – far less than a month’s supply if he drank coffee every day. Blackcurrant jam, and not much even of that. Those were the thoughts coursing through his mind as he walked past the sentry, and then they were expunged by the blessed air from the sea, and the instant approach of professional problems.

  Prowse was peering out to port through his telescope; it was almost full daylight, and the haze had dissipated with the rain.

  ‘Black Stones broad on the port-beam, sir,’ reported Prowse. ‘You can see the breakers sometimes.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Hornblower. At least his breakfast troubles had kept him from fretting during these final minutes before entering on to a decisive day. In fact he had actually to pause for several seconds to collect his thoughts before issuing the orders that would develop the plans already matured in his fevered mind.

  ‘Do you have good eyesight, Mr Orrock?’

  ‘Well, sir—’

  ‘Have you or haven’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes, sir.’

  ‘Then take a glass and get aloft. See what you can see of the shipping as we pass the entrance to the roadstead. Consult with the lookout.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Bush. Call the hands.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  Not for the first time Hornblower was reminded of the centurion in the New Testament who illustrated his authority by saying: ‘I say to one, come, and he cometh, and to another, go, and he goeth.’ The Royal Navy and the Roman Army were identical in discipli
ne.

  ‘Now, Mr Prowse. How far is the horizon now?’

  ‘Two miles, sir. Perhaps three miles,’ answered Prowse, looking round and collecting his thoughts after being taken by surprise by the question.

  ‘Four miles, I should think,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘Maybe, sir,’ admitted Prowse.

  ‘Sun’s rising. Air’s clearing. It’ll be ten miles soon. Wind’s north of west. We’ll go down to the Parquette.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  ‘Mr Bush, get the topgallants in, if you please. And the courses. Tops’ls and jib’s all we need.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  That way they would attract less notice; also they would, by moving more slowly, have longer for observation as they crossed the passage that led into Brest.

  ‘Sunset on a clear day,’ said Hornblower to Prowse. ‘Would be a better moment. Then we could look in with the sun behind us.’

  ‘Yes, sir. You’re right, sir,’ answered Prowse. There was a gleam of appreciation in his melancholy face as he said this; he knew, of course, that the Goulet lay almost east and west, but he had not made any deductions or plans on that basis.

  ‘But we’re here. We have this chance. Wind and weather serve us now. It may be days before we have another opportunity.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Prowse.

  ‘Course east by south, Mr Prowse.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  Hotspur crept along. The day was cloudy but clear, and the horizon was extending every minute. There was the mainland of France, Pointe St Mathieu – Point Matthew – in plain view. From there the land trended away out of sight again.

  ‘Land on the lee bow!’ yelled Orrock from the foretopmast-head.

  ‘That’ll be the other headland, sir,’ said Prowse.

  ‘Toulinguet,’ agreed Hornblower and then he corrected his pronunciation of ‘Toolingwette.’ For months or years to come he might be beating about this coast, and he wanted no chance of misunderstanding with any of his officers when he gave orders.