Captain Hornblower R. N.

by C. S. Forester

  He felt oddly disturbed and ill at ease and not merely because of the upsetting of all his habits. It was annoying that his own private water closet was barred to him now so that he had to use the wardroom one, but it was not just because of this. Not even was it merely because he was on his way to fight the Natividad again in the certain knowledge that with Vice-Admiral Cristobal de Crespo in command it would be a hard battle. That was part of what was troubling him – and then he realised with a shock that his disquiet was due to the added responsibility of Lady Barbara’s presence on board.

  He knew quite well what would be the fate of himself and his crew if the Lydia were beaten by the Natividad. They would be hanged or drowned or tortured to death – el Supremo would show no mercy to the Englishman who had turned against him. That possibility left him unmoved at present, because it was so entirely inevitable that he should fight the Natividad. But it was far different in Lady Barbara’s case. He would have to see that she did not fall alive into Crespo’s hands.

  This brief wording of his difficulty brought him a sudden spasm of irritation. He cursed the yellow fever which had driven her on board; he cursed his own slavish obedience to orders which had resulted in the Natividad’s fighting on the rebels’ side. He found himself clenching his hands and gritting his teeth with rage. If he won his fight public opinion would censure him (with all public opinion’s usual ignorance of circumstances) for risking the life of a lady – of a Wellesley. If he lost it – but he could not bear to think about that. He cursed his own weakness for allowing her to come on board; for a moment he even dallied with the notion of putting back to Panama and setting her on shore. But he put that notion aside. The Natividad might take the Manila galleon. His crew, already discomposed by all the recent changes of plan, would fret still more if he went back and then went to sea again. And Lady Barbara might refuse – and with yellow fever raging in Panama she would be justified in refusing. He could not exercise his authority so brutally as to force a woman to land in a fever-stricken town. He swore to himself again, senselessly, making use of all the filthy oaths and frantic blasphemies acquired during his sea experience.

  From the deck came a shrilling of pipes and a shouting of orders and a clatter of feet; apparently the wind had backed round now with the fall of night. As the sound died away the feeling of oppression in the tiny cabin overcame him. It was hot and stuffy; the oil lamp swinging over his head stank horribly. He plunged up on deck again. Aft from the taffrail he heard a merry laugh from Lady Barbara, instantly followed by a chorus of guffaws. The dark mass there must be at least half a dozen officers, all grouped round Lady Barbara’s chair. It was only to be expected that after seven months – eight, nearly, now – without seeing an English woman they would cluster round her like bees round a hive.

  His first instinct was to drive them away, but he checked himself. He could not dictate to his officers how they spent their watch below, and they would attribute his action to his desire to monopolise her society to himself – and that was not in the least the case. He went down again, unobserved by the group, to a stuffy cabin and the stinking lamp. It was the beginning of a sleepless and restless night.

  XII

  Morning found the Lydia heaving and swooping lightly over a quartering sea. On the starboard beam, just jutting over the horizon, were the greyish-pink summits of the volcanoes of that tormented country; by ranging along just in sight of the coast the Lydia stood her best chance of discovering the Natividad. The captain was already afoot – indeed, his coxswain Brown had had apologetically to sand the captain’s portion of the quarterdeck while he paced up and down it.

  Far away on the port side the black shape of a whale broke the surface in a flurry of foam – dazzling white against the blue sea – and a thin plume of white smoke was visible as the whale emptied its lungs. Hornblower liked whales for some reason or other; the sight of this one, in fact, led him on his first step back towards good temper. With the imminent prospect of his cold shower bath before him the prickle of sweat under his shirt was gratifying now instead of irritating. Two hours ago he had been telling himself that he loathed this Pacific coast, its blue sea and its hideous volcanoes – even its freedom from navigational difficulties. He had felt himself homesick for the rocks and shoals and fogs and tides of the Channel, but now, bathed in sunshine, his opinion changed once more. There was something to be said in favour of the Pacific after all. Perhaps this new alliance between Spain and England would induce the Dons to relax some of their selfish laws prohibiting trade with America; they might even go so far as to try to exploit the possibility of that canal across Nicaragua which the British Admiralty had in mind, and in that case this blue Pacific could come into its own. El Supremo would have to be suppressed first, of course, but on this pleasant morning Hornblower foresaw less difficulty in that.

  Gray the master’s mate had come aft to heave the log. Hornblower checked in his walk to watch the operation. Gray tossed the little triangle of wood over the stern, and, log line in hand, he gazed fixedly with his boyish blue eyes at the dancing bit of wood.

  ‘Turn!’ he cried sharply to the hand with the sand glass, while the line ran out freely over the rail.

  ‘Stop!’ called the man with the glass.

  Gray nipped the line with his fingers and checked it progress, and then read off the length run out. A sharp jerk at the thin cord which had run out with the line freed the peg so that the log now floated with its edge towards the ship, enabling Gray to pull the log in hand over hand.

  ‘How much?’ called Hornblower to Gray.

  ‘Seven an’ nigh on a half, sir.’

  The Lydia was a good ship to reel off seven and a half knots in that breeze, even though her best point of sailing was with the wind on her quarter. It would not take long if the wind held to reach waters where the Natividad might be expected to be found. The Natividad was a slow sailer, as nearly all those two-decker fifty-gun ships were, and as Hornblower had noticed when he had sailed in her company ten days back – it might as well be ten years, so long did it seem – from the Gulf of Fonseca to La Libertad.

  If he met her in the open sea he could trust to the handiness of his ship and the experience of his crew to out-manoeuvre her and discount her superior weight of metal. If the ships once closed and the rebels boarded their superior numbers would overwhelm his crew. He must keep clear, slip across her stern and rake her half a dozen times. Hornblower’s busy mind, as he paced up and down the deck, began to visualise the battle, and to make plans for the possible eventualities – whether or not he might hold the weather gauge, whether or not there might be a high sea running, whether or not the battle began close inshore.

  The little negress Hebe came picking her way across the deck, her red handkerchief brilliant in the sunshine, and before the scandalised crew could prevent her she had interrupted the captain in his sacred morning walk.

  ‘Milady says would the captain breakfast with her,’ she lisped.

  ‘Eh – what’s that?’ asked Hornblower, taken by surprise and coming out of his day dream with a jerk, and then, as he realised the triviality for which he had been interrupted ‘No no no! Tell her ladyship I will not breakfast with her. Tell her that I will never breakfast with her. Tell her that on no account am I to be sent messages during the morning. Tell her you are not allowed and neither is she on this deck before eight bells. Get below!’

  Even then the little negress did not seem to realise how enormous had been her offence. She nodded and smiled as she backed away without a sign of contrition. Apparently she was used to white gentlemen who were irascible before breakfast and attributed little importance to the symptoms. The open skylight of the after cabin was close beside him as he walked, and through it he could hear, now that his reverie had been broken into, the clatter of crockery, and then first Hebe’s and then Lady Barbara’s voice.

  The sound of the men scrubbing the decks, the harping of the rigging and the creaking of the timbers were noises t
o which he was used. From forward came the thunderous beat of a sledgehammer as the armourer and his mate worked upon the fluke of the anchor which had been bent in yesterday’s misadventure. He could tolerate all the ship’s noises, but this clack-clack-clack of women’s tongues through the open skylight would drive him mad. He stamped off the deck in a rage again. He did not enjoy his bath after all, and he cursed Polwheal for clumsiness in handing him his dressing gown, and he tore the threadbare suit which Polwheal had put out for him and cursed again. It was intolerable that he should be driven in this fashion off his own deck. Even the excellent coffee, sweetened (as he liked it) to a syrup with sugar, did not relieve his fresh ill-temper. Nor, most assuredly, did the necessity of having to explain to Bush that the Lydia was now sailing to seek out and to capture the Natividad, having already been to enormous pains to capture her and hand her over to the rebels who were now their foes.

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Bush gravely, having heard the new development. He was being so obviously tactful, and he so pointedly refrained from comment, that Hornblower swore at him.

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Bush again, knowing perfectly well why he was being sworn at, and also knowing that he would be sworn at far worse if he said anything beyond ‘aye aye, sir.’ Really what he wanted to say was some expression of sympathy for Hornblower in his present situation, but he knew he dared not sympathise with his queer-tempered captain.

  As the day wore on Hornblower came to repent of his ill-humour. The saw-edged volcanic coast was slipping past them steadily, and ahead of them somewhere lay the Natividad. There was a desperate battle awaiting them, and before they should fight it it would be tactful for him to entertain his officers to dinner. And he knew that any captain with an eye to his professional advancement would be careful not to treat a Wellesley in the cavalier fashion he had employed up to the present. And ordinary politeness dictated that he should at this, the earliest opportunity, arrange that his guest should meet his officers formally at dinner, even though he knew full well that she had already, in her emancipated manner, conversed with half of them in the darkness of the quarterdeck.

  He sent Polwheal across to Lady Barbara with a politely worded request that Lady Barbara would be so kind as to allow Captain Hornblower and his officers to dine with her in the after cabin and Polwheal returned with a politely worded message to the effect that Lady Barbara would be delighted. Six was the maximum number that could sit round the after cabin table; and superstitiously Hornblower remembered that on the eve of his last encounter with the Natividad Galbraith, Clay, and Savage had been his guests. He would never have admitted to himself that it was for this reason that he invited them again in the hope of encountering similar good fortune, but it was the case nevertheless. He invited Bush as the sixth – the other possible choice was Gerard, and Gerard was so handsome and had acquired somehow such a knowledge of the world that Hornblower did not want to bring him into too frequent contact with Lady Barbara – solely, he hastened to assure himself, for the sake of peace and quiet in his ship. And when that was all settled he could go on deck again to take his noon sights and pace his quarterdeck in his consuming restlessness, feeling that he could (after this exchange of polite messages) meet Lady Barbara’s eyes without the embarrassment that would previously have prevented him, unreasoningly.

  The dinner at three o’clock was a success. Clay and Savage passed through the stages of behaviour that might have been expected of boys their age. At first they were brusque and shy in Lady Barbara’s presence, and then, when the novelty had worn off and they had a glass of wine inside them they moved towards the other extreme of over-familiarity. Even the hard-bitten Bush, surprisingly, showed the same symptoms in the same order, while poor Galbraith was of course shy all the time.

  But Hornblower was astonished at the ease with which Lady Barbara handled them. His own Maria would have been too gauche ever to have pulled that party together, and in a world where he knew few women Hornblower was prone to measure the ones he met by Maria’s standard. Lady Barbara laughed away Clay’s bumptiousness, listened appreciatively to Bush’s account of Trafalgar (when he had been a junior lieutenant in the Téméraire) and then won Galbraith’s heart completely by displaying a close knowledge of a remarkable poem called ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ by an Edinburgh lawyer – every line of which Galbraith knew by heart, and which Galbraith thought was the greatest poem in the English language. His cheeks glowed with pleasure as they discussed it.

  Hornblower kept his opinion of the work to himself. His model author was Gibbon, whose ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ was to be found in the very locker on which he sat, and he was surprised that a woman who could quote Juvenal with ease should be so interested in a barbaric romantic poem with no polish about it whatever. He contented himself with sitting back and watching the faces round the table – Galbraith tense and pleased, Clay and Savage and Bush a little out of their depth but interested in spite of themselves, and Lady Barbara completely at ease, conversing with a fearless self-confidence which nevertheless (as Hornblower grudgingly admitted to himself) seemed to owe nothing to her great position.

  She made no use of her sex, either, Hornblower realised, and yet she was, marvellously, neither cold nor masculine. She might have been Savage’s aunt, or Galbraith’s sister. She could talk to men as an equal, and yet could keep from her manner both invitation and hostility. She was very different from Maria. And when dinner was over and the officers rose to drink the health of the King, stooping under the deck beams (not until twenty-five more years had passed would a King who had been a sailor himself give permission to the Navy to drink his health sitting) she echoed ‘God bless him!’ and finished her single glass of wine with exactly the right touch of light-hearted solemnity which befitted the occasion. Hornblower suddenly realised that he was passionately anxious for the evening not to end.

  ‘Do you play whist, Lady Barbara?’ he asked.

  ‘Why, yes,’ she said, ‘are there whist players on board this ship?’

  ‘There are some who are not too enthusiastic,’ replied Hornblower, grinning at his juniors.

  But nobody had nearly as much objection to playing in a four with Lady Barbara, the more so as her presence might moderate the captain’s dry strictness. The cut allotted Lady Barbara as the captain’s partner against Clay and Galbraith. Clay dealt and turned up a heart as trump; it was Lady Barbara’s lead. She led the king of hearts, and Hornblower writhed uneasily in his seat. This might well be the play of a mere tyro, and somehow it hurt him to think that Lady Barbara was a bad whist player. But the king of hearts was followed by the king of diamonds, which also took the trick, and that by the ace of hearts, followed by the seven. Hornblower took the trick with the queen – his last heart, making a total of eleven played, and returned a diamond. Down came Lady Barbara’s queen. Next came the ace of diamonds, and then two small ones to follow. At his first discard Hornblower dropped the seven from his suit of four clubs headed by king and knave. His opponents each discarded small spades on that remorseless string of diamonds. From doubt Hornblower changed instantly to complete confidence in his partner, which was entirely justified. She led the ace of clubs followed by the three, Hornblower finessed his knave, played his king, on which his partner discarded her singleton spade and then claimed the last two tricks with her remaining trumps. They had made a slam even though their opponents held every trick in spades.

  Lady Barbara had shown that she could play a good hand well; later she proved that she could fight out a losing hand with equal brilliance. She watched every discard, noted every signal, finessed boldly when there was a chance of profit, returned her partner’s leads and yet resolutely ignored them if her hand justified the risk; she played low from a sequence and led high. Not since the Lydia left England had Hornblower had such a good partner. In his pleasure at this discovery Hornblower quite forgot to have any qualms at the fact that here was a woman who could do something well.

  A
nd the next evening she displayed another accomplishment, when she brought out a guitar on to the quarterdeck and accompanied herself in the songs which she sang in a sweet soprano – so sweet that the crew came creeping aft and crouched to listen under the gangways and coughed and fidgeted sentimentally at the close of each song. Galbraith was her slave, and she could play on his musical heartstrings as on her guitar. The midshipmen loved her. Even the barnacle-encrusted officers like Bush and Crystal softened towards her, and Gerard flashed his brilliant smile at her and made play with his good looks and told her stories of his privateering days and of his slaving adventures up the African rivers. Hornblower watched Gerard anxiously during that voyage up the Nicaraguan coast, and cursed his own tone deafness which made Lady Barbara’s singing not merely indifferent to him but almost painful.

  XIII

  The long volcanic coast line slid past them day after day. Every day brought its eternal panorama of blue sea and blue sky, of slaty-pink volcanic peaks and a fringing coast line of vivid green. With decks cleared for action and every man at his post they ran once more into the Gulf of Fonseca and sailed round the island of Manguera in search of the Natividad, but they did not find her. They saw no sign of life on the shores of the bay, either. Someone fired a musket at the ship from the cliffs of Manguera – the spent bullet thudded into the mainchains – but they did not see the man who fired it. Bush steered the Lydia out of the gulf again and north eastward in his search for the Natividad.

  The Natividad was not to be found in the roadstead of La Libertad, nor in any of the little ports farther along. There was much smoke to be seen at Champerico, and Hornblower, training his glass upon it, could see that for once it was not volcanic. Champerico was in flames, so that presumably el Supremo’s men had come there spreading enlightenment, but there was no sign of the Natividad.