Captain Hornblower R. N.

by C. S. Forester

  ‘You can pipe down now, Mr Bush,’ said Hornblower. ‘And when the hands have had their breakfasts you can exercise them aloft’

  In the reaction following his excitement he was yearning to get away to the solitude of the stern gallery again. But here came Walsh the surgeon, trotting up the quarterdeck and touching his hat.

  ‘Surgeon’s report, sir,’ he said. ‘One warrant officer killed. No officers and no seamen wounded.’

  ‘Killed?’ said Hornblower, his jaw dropping. ‘Who’s killed?’

  ‘John Hart, midshipman,’ answered Walsh.

  Hart had been a promising seaman in the Lydia, and it was Hornblower himself who had promoted him to the quarterdeck and obtained his warrant for him.

  ‘Killed?’ said Hornblower again.

  ‘I can mark his “mortally wounded”, sir, if you prefer it,’ said Walsh. ‘He lost a leg when a nine-pounder ball came in through No. 11 gun port on the lower deck. He was alive when they got him down to the cockpit, but he died the next minute. Popliteal artery.’

  Walsh was a new appointment, who had not served under Hornblower before. Otherwise he might have known better than to indulge in details of this sort with so much professional relish.

  ‘Get out of my road, blast you,’ snarled Hornblower.

  His prospect of solitude was spoiled now. There would have to be a burial later in the day, with flag half mast and yards a-cockbill. That in itself was irksome. And it was Hart who was dead – a big gangling young man with a wide, pleasant smile. The thought of it robbed him of all pleasure in his achievements this morning. Bush was there on the quarterdeck, smiling happily both at the thought of what had been done today and at the thought of four solid hours’ exercise aloft for the hands. He would have liked to talk, and Gerard was there, eager to discuss the working of his beloved guns. Hornblower glared at them, daring them to address one single word to him; but they had served with him for years, and knew better.

  He turned and went below; the ships of the convoy were sending up flags – the sort of silly signals of congratulation one might expect of Indiamen, probably half of them mis-spelled. He could rely on Bush to hoist ‘Not understood’ until the silly fools got it right, and then to make a mere acknowledgment. He wanted nothing to do with them, or with anybody else. The one shred of comfort in a world which he hated was that, with a following wind and the convoy to leeward, he would be private in his stern gallery, concealed even from inquisitive telescopes in the other ships.

  VII

  Hornblower took a last pull at his cigar when he heard the drum beating to divisions. He exhaled a lungful of smoke, his head thrown back, looking out from under the cover of the stern gallery up at the blissful blue sky, and then down at the blue water beneath, with the dazzling white foam surging from under the Sutherland’s counter into her wake. Overhead he heard the measured tramp of the marines as they formed up across the poop deck, and then a brief shuffle of heavy boots as they dressed their line in obedience to the captain’s order. The patter of hundreds of pairs of feet acted as a subdued accompaniment as the crew formed up round the decks. When everything had fallen still again Hornblower pitched his cigar overboard, hitched his full dress coat into position, settled his cocked hat on his head, and walked with dignity, his left hand on his swordhilt, forward to the halfdeck and up the companion ladder to the quarterdeck. Bush was there, and Crystal, and the midshipman of the watch. They saluted him, and from farther aft came the snick-snack-snick of the marines presenting arms.

  Hornblower stood and looked round him in leisurely fashion; on this Sunday morning it was his duty to inspect the ship, and he could take advantage of the fact to drink in all the beauty and the artistry of the scene. Overhead the pyramids of white canvas described slow cones against the blue sky with the gentle roll of the ship. The decks were snowy white – Bush had succeeded in that in ten days’ labour – and the intense orderliness of a ship of war was still more intense on this morning of Sunday inspection. Hornblower shot a searching glance from under lowered eyelids at the crew ranged in long single lines along the gangways and on the maindeck. They were standing still, smart enough in their duck frocks and trousers. It was their bearing that he wished to study, and that could be done more effectively in a sweeping glance from the quarterdeck than at the close range of the inspection. There could be a certain hint of insolence in the way a restive crew stood to attention, and one could perceive lassitude in a dispirited crew. He could see neither now, for which he was thankful.

  Ten days of hard work, of constant drill, of unsleeping supervision, of justice tempered by good humour, had done much to settle the hands to their duty. He had had to order five floggings three days ago, forcing himself to stand apparently unmoved while the whistle and crack of the cat o’ nine tails sickened his stomach. One of those floggings might do a little good to the recipient – an old hand who had apparently forgotten what he had learned and needed a sharp reminder of it. The other four would do none to the men whose backs had been lacerated; they would never make good sailors and were mere brutes whom brutal treatment could at least make no worse. He had sacrificed them to show the wilder spirits what might happen as a result of inattention to orders – it was only by an actual demonstration that one could work on the minds of uneducated men. The dose had to be prescribed with the utmost accuracy, neither too great nor too small. He seemed, so his sweeping glance told him, to have hit it off exactly.

  Once more he looked round to enjoy the beauty of it all – the orderly ship, the white sails, the blue sky; the scarlet and pipeclay of the marines, the blue and gold of the officers; and there was consummate artistry in the subtle indications that despite the inspection the real pulsating life of the ship was going on beneath it. Where four hundred and more men stood at attention awaiting his lightest word the quartermaster at the wheel kept his mind on the binnacle and the leach of the main course, the lookouts at the masthead and the officer of the watch with his telescope were living demonstrations of the fact that the ship must still be sailed and the King’s service carried on.

  Hornblower turned aside to begin his inspection. He walked up and down the quadruple ranks of the marines, but although he ran his eye mechanically over the men he took notice of nothing. Captain Morris and his sergeants could be relied upon to attend to details like the pipeclaying of belts and the polishing of buttons. Marines could be drilled and disciplined into machines in a way sailors could not be; he could take the marines for granted and he was not interested in them. Even now, after ten days, he hardly knew the faces and names of six out of the ninety marines on board.

  He passed on to the lines of seamen, the officers of each division standing rigidly in front. This was more interesting. The men were trim and smart in their whites – Hornblower wondered how many of them ever realised that the cost of their clothing was deducted from the meagre pay they received when they were paid off. Some of the new hands were horribly sunburned, as a result of unwise exposure to the sudden blazing sun of yesterday. A blond burly figure here had lost the skin from his forearms as well as from his neck and forehead. Hornblower recognised him as Waites, condemned for sheepstealing at Exeter assizes – that explained the sunburn, for Waites had been blanched by months of imprisonment awaiting trial. The raw areas looked abominably painful.

  ‘See that this man Waites,’ said Hornblower to the petty officer of the division, ‘attends the surgeon this afternoon. He is to have goose grease for those burns, and whatever lotions the surgeon prescribes.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said the petty officer.

  Hornblower passed on down the line, scanning each man closely. Faces well remembered, faces it was still an effort to put a name to. Faces that he had studied two years back in the far Pacific on board the Lydia, faces he had first seen when Gerard brought back his boat load of bewildered captures from St Ives. Swarthy faces and pale, boys and elderly men, blue eyes, brown eyes, grey eyes. A host of tiny impressions were collecting in Hornb
lower’s mind; they would be digested together later during his solitary walks in the stern gallery, to form the raw material for the plans he would make to further the efficiency of his crew.

  ‘That man Simms ought to be rated captain of the mizzen-top. He’s old enough now. What’s this man’s name? Dawson? No, Dawkins. He’s looking sulky. One of Goddard’s gang – it looks as if he’s still resenting Goddard’s flogging. I must remember that.’

  The sun blazed down upon them, while the ship lifted and swooped over the gentle sea. From the crew he turned his attention to the ship – the breechings of the guns, the way the falls were flemished down, the cleanliness of the decks, the galley and the forecastle. At all this he need only pretend to look – the skies would fall before Bush neglected his duty. But he had to go through with it, with a show of solemnity. Men were oddly influenced – the poor fools would work better for Bush if they thought Hornblower was keeping an eye on him, and they would work better for Hornblower if they thought he inspected the ship thoroughly. This wretched business of capturing men’s devotion set Hornblower smiling cynically when he was unobserved.

  ‘A good inspection, Mr Bush,’ said Hornblower, returning to the quarterdeck. ‘The ship is in better order than I hoped for. I shall expect the improvement to continue. You may rig the church now.’

  It was a Godfearing Admiralty who ordered church service every Sunday morning, otherwise Hornblower would have dispensed with it, as befitted a profound student of Gibbon. As it was, he had managed to evade having a chaplain on board – Hornblower hated parsons. He watched the men dragging up mess stools for themselves, and chairs for the officers. They were working diligently and cheerfully, although not with quite that disciplined purposefulness which characterised a fully trained crew. His coxswain Brown covered the compass box on the quarterdeck with a cloth, and laid on it, with due solemnity, Hornblower’s Bible and prayer book. Hornblower disliked these services; there was always the chance that some devout member of his compulsory congregation might raise objections to having to attend – Catholic or Nonconformist. Religion was the only power which could ever pit itself against the bonds of discipline; Hornblower remembered a theologically minded master’s mate who had once protested against his reading the Benediction, as though he, the King’s representative at sea – God’s representative, when all was said and done – could not read a Benediction if he chose!

  He glowered at the men as they settled down, and began to read. As the thing had to be done, it might as well be done well, and, as ever, while he read he was struck once more by the beauty of Cranmer’s prose and the deftness of his adaptation. Cranmer had been burned alive two hundred and fifty years before – did it benefit him at all to have his prayer book read now?

  Bush read the lessons in a tuneless bellow as if he were hailing the foretop. Then Hornblower read the opening lines of the hymn, and Sullivan the fiddler played the first bars of the tune. Bush gave the signal for the singing to start – Hornblower could never bring himself to do that; he told himself he was neither a mountebank nor an Italian opera conductor – and the crew opened their throats and roared it out.

  But even hymn singing had its advantages. A captain could often discover a good deal about the spirits of his crew by the way they sang their hymns. This morning either the hymn chosen was specially popular or the crew were happy in the new sunshine, for they were singing lustily, with Sullivan sawing away at an ecstatic obbligato on his fiddle. The Cornishmen among the crew apparently knew the hymn well, and fell upon it with a will, singing in parts to add a leavening of harmony to the tuneless bellowings of the others. It all meant nothing to Hornblower – one tune was the same as another to his tone-deaf ear, and the most beautiful music was to him no more than comparable with the noise of a cart along a gravel road. As he listened to the unmeaning din, and gazed at the hundreds of gaping mouths, he found himself wondering as usual whether or not there was any basis of fact in this legend of music – whether other people actually heard something more than mere noise, or whether he was the only person on board not guilty of wilful self-deception.

  Then he saw a ship’s boy in the front row. The hymn meant something to him, at least. He was weeping broken-heartedly, even while he tried to keep his back straight and to conceal his emotions, with the big tears running down his cheeks and his nose all be slobbered. The poor little devil had been touched in one way or another – some chord of memory had been struck. Perhaps the last time he had heard that hymn was in the little church at home, beside his mother and brothers. He was homesick and heartbroken now. Hornblower was glad for his sake as well as for his own when the hymn came to an end; the next ceremony would steady the boy again.

  He took up the Articles of War and began to read them as the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty had ordained should be done each Sunday in every one of His Britannic Majesty’s Ships. He knew the solemn sentences by heart at this, his five hundredth reading, every cadence, every turn of phrase, and he read them well. This was better than any vague religious service or Thirty Nine Articles. Here was a code in black and white, a stern, unemotional call to duty pure and simple. Some Admiralty clerk or pettifogging lawyer had had a gift of phrasing just as felicitous as Cranmer’s. There was no trumpet-call about it, no clap-trap appeal to sentiment; there was merely the cold logic of the code which kept the British Navy at sea, and which had guarded England during seventeen years of a struggle for life. He could tell by the death-like stillness of his audience as he read that their attention had been caught and held, and when he folded the paper away and looked up he could see solemn, set faces. The ship’s boy in the front row had forgotten his tears. There was a far away look in his eyes; obviously he was making good resolutions to attend more strictly to his duty in future. Or perhaps he was dreaming wild dreams of the time to come when he would be a captain in a gold-laced coat commanding a seventy-four, or of brave deeds which he would do.

  In a sudden revulsion of feeling Hornblower wondered if lofty sentiment would armour the boy against cannon shot – he remembered another ship’s boy who had been smashed into a red jam before his eyes by a shot from the Natividad.

  VIII

  In the afternoon Hornblower was walking his quarterdeck; the problem before him was so difficult that he had quitted his stern gallery – he could not walk fast enough there, owing to his having to bend his head, to set his thoughts going. The people on the quarterdeck saw his mood, and kept warily over to the lee side, leaving the whole weather side, nearly thirty yards of quarterdeck and gangway, to him. Up and down, he walked, up and down, trying to nerve himself to make the decision he hankered after. The Sutherland was slipping slowly through the water with a westerly breeze abeam; the convoy was clustered together only a few cables’ lengths to leeward.

  Gerard shut his telescope with a snap.

  ‘Boat pulling toward us from Lord Mornington, sir,’ he said. He wanted to warn his captain of the approach of visitors, so that if he thought fit he could make himself unapproachable in his cabin; but he knew, as well as Hornblower did, that it might be unwise for a captain to act in too cavalier a fashion towards the notabilities on board the East India convoy.

  Hornblower looked across at the boat creeping beetle-like towards him. Ten days of a strong north-easterly wind had not merely hurried the convoy to the latitude of North Africa where he was to leave them to their own devices, but had prevented all intercourse and visiting between ships, until yesterday. Yesterday there had been a good deal of coming and going between the ships of the convoy; it was only natural that today he should receive formal calls, which he could not well refuse. In another two hours they would be parting company – it could not be a prolonged ordeal.

  The boat ran alongside, and Hornblower walked forward to receive his own guests – Captain Osborn of the Lord Mornington, in his formal frock coat, and someone else, tall and bony, resplendent in civilian full dress with ribbon and star.

  ‘Good afternoon, Captain,’
said Osborn. ‘I wish to present you to Lord Eastlake, Governor-designate of Bombay.’

  Hornblower bowed; so did Lord Eastlake.

  ‘I have come,’ said Lord Eastlake, clearing his throat, ‘to beg of you, Captain Hornblower, to receive on behalf of your ship’s company this purse of four hundred guineas. It has been subscribed by the passengers of the East India convoy in recognition of the skill and courage displayed by the Sutherland in the action with the two French privateers off Ushant.’

  ‘In the name of my ship’s company I thank your Lordship,’ said Hornblower.

  It was a very handsome gesture, and as he took the purse he felt like Judas, knowing what designs he was cherishing against the East India convoy.

  ‘And I,’ said Osborn, ‘am the bearer of a most cordial invitation to you and to your first lieutenant to join us at dinner in the Lord Mornington.’

  At that Hornblower shook his head with apparent regret.

  ‘We part company in two hours,’ he said. ‘I was about to hang out a signal to that effect. I am deeply hurt by the necessity of having to refuse.’

  ‘We shall all be sorry on board the Lord Mornington,’ said Lord Eastlake. ‘Ten days of bad weather have deprived us of the pleasure of the company of any of the officers of the navy. Cannot you be persuaded to alter your decision?’