Lieutenant Hornblower h-2

by Cecil Scott Forester

  He was making a suggestion, unasked, to his superior officer, and so courting a snub. But his manner indicated the deepest respect, and nothing besides but eagerness to save his superior all possible trouble.

  “Thank you,” said Buckland.

  Anyone could read in his face the struggle that was going on within him; he was still shrinking from committing himself too deeply—as if he was not already committed!—and he was shrinking from the prospect of making a speech to the assembled hands, even while he realised the necessity of doing so. And the necessity grew greater the more he thought about it—rumours must be flying about the lower deck, where the crew, already unsettled by the captain’s behaviour, must be growing more restive still in the prevailing uncertainty. A hard, definite statement must be made to them; it was vitally necessary. Yet the greater the necessity the greater the responsibility that Buckland bore, and he wavered obviously between these two frightening forces.

  “All hands, sir?” prompted Hornblower, very softly.

  “Yes,” said Buckland, desperately taking the plunge.

  “Very well, Mr. Wellard,” said Hornblower.

  Bush caught the look that Hornblower threw to Wellard with the words. There was a significance in it which might be interpreted as of a nature only to be expected when one junior officer was telling another to do something quickly before a senior could change his mind—that was how an uninitiated person would naturally interpret it—but to Bush, clairvoyant with fatigue and worry, there was some other significance in that glance. Wellard was pale and weak with fatigue and worry too; he was being reassured. Possibly he was being told that a secret was still safe.

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Wellard, and departed.

  The pipes twittered through the ship.

  “All hands! All hands!” roared the bosun’s mates. “All hands fall in abaft the mainmast! All hands!”

  Buckland went nervously up on deck, but he acquitted himself well enough at the moment of trial. In a harsh, expressionless voice he told the assembled hands that the accident to the captain, which they all must have heard about, had rendered him incapable at present of continuing in command.

  “But we’ll all go on doing our duty,” said Buckland, staring down at the level plain of upturned faces.

  Bush, looking with him, picked out the grey head and paunchy figure of Hobbs, the actinggunner, the captain’s toady and informer. Things would be different for Mr. Hobbs in future—at least as long as the captain’s disability endured. That was the point: as long as the captain’s disability endured. Bush looked down at Hobbs and wondered how much he knew, how much he guessed—how much he would swear to at a courtmartial. He tried to read the future in the fat old man’s face, but his clairvoyance failed him. He could guess nothing.

  When the hands were dismissed there was a moment of bustle and confusion, as the watches resumed their duties and the idlers streamed off below. It was there, in the noise and confusion of a crowd, that momentary privacy and freedom from observation could best be found. Bush intercepted Hornblower by the mizzenmast bitts and could ask the question that he had been wanting to ask for hours; the question on which so much depended.

  “How did it happen?” asked Bush.

  The bosun’s mates were bellowing orders; the hands were scurrying hither and thither; all round the two of them was orderly confusion, a mass of people intent on their own business, while they stood face to face, isolated, with the beneficent sunshine streaming down on them, lighting up the set face which Hornblower turned towards his questioner.

  “How did what happen, Mr. Bush?” said Hornblower.

  “How did the captain fall down the hatchway?”

  As soon as he had said the words Bush glanced back over his shoulder in sudden fright lest he should have been overheard. These might be hanging words. When he looked back Hornblower’s face was quite expressionless.

  “I think he must have overbalanced,” he said, evenly, looking straight into Bush’s eyes; and then he went on, “If you will excuse me, sir, I have some duties to attend to.”

  Later in the day every wardroom officer was introduced in turn to the captain’s cabin to see with his own eyes what sort of wreck lay there. Bush saw only a feeble invalid, lying in the halflight of the cabin, his face almost covered with bandages, the fingers of one hand moving minutely, the other hand concealed in a sling.

  “He’s under an opiate,” explained Clive in the wardroom. “I had to administer a heavy dose to enable me to try and set the fractured nose.”

  “I expect it was spread all over his face,” said Lomax brutally. “It was big enough.”

  “The fracture was very extensive and comminuted,” agreed Clive.

  There were screams the next morning from the captain’s cabin, screams of terror as well as of pain, and Clive and his mates emerged eventually sweating and worried. Clive went instantly to report confidentially to Buckland, but everyone in the ship had heard those screams or had been told about them by men who had; the surgeon’s mates, questioned eagerly in the gunroom by the other warrant officers, could not maintain the monumental discretion that Clive aimed at in the wardroom. The wretched invalid was undoubtedly insane; he had fallen into a paroxysm of terror when they had attempted to examine the fractured nose, flinging himself about with a madman’s strength so that, fearing damage to the other broken bones, they had had to swathe him in canvas as in a straitjacket, leaving only his left arm out. Laudanum and an extensive bleeding had reduced him to insensibility in the end, but later in the day when Bush saw him he was conscious again, a weeping, pitiful object, shrinking in fear from every face that he saw, persecuted by shadows, sobbing—it was a dreadful thing to see that burly man sobbing like a child—over his troubles, and trying to hide his face from a world which to his tortured mind held no friendship at all and only grim enmity.

  “It frequently happens,” said Clive pontifically—the longer the captain’s illness lasted the more freely he would discuss it—“that an injury, a fall, or a burn, or a fracture, will completely unbalance a mind that previously was a little unstable.”

  “A little unstable!” said Lomax. “Did he turn out the marines in the middle watch to hunt for mutineers in the hold? Ask Mr. Hornblower here, ask Mr. Bush, if they thought he was a little unstable. He had Hornblower doing watch and watch, and Bush and Roberts and Buckland himself out of bed every hour day and night. He was as mad as a hatter even then.”

  It was extraordinary how freely tongues wagged now in the ship, now that there was no fear of reports being made to the captain.

  “At least we can make seamen out of the crew now,” said Carberry, the master, with a satisfaction in his voice that was echoed round the wardroom. Sail drill and gun drill, tautened discipline and hard work, were pulling together a crew that had fast been disintegrating. It was what Buckland obviously delighted in, what he had been itching to do from the moment they had left the Eddystone behind, and exercising the crew helped to lift his mind out of the other troubles that beset it.

  For now there was a new responsibility, that all the wardroom discussed freely in Buckland’s absence—Buckland was already fenced in by the solitude that surrounds the captain of a ship of war. This was Buckland’s sole responsibility, and the wardroom could watch Buckland wrestling with it, as they would watch a prizefighter in the ring; there even were bets laid on the result, as to whether or not Buckland would take the final plunge, whether or not he would take the ultimate step that would proclaim himself as in command of the Renown and the captain as incurable.

  Locked in the captain’s desk were the captain’s papers, and among those papers were the secret orders addressed to him by the Lords of the Admiralty. No other eyes than the captain’s had seen those orders as yet; not a soul in the ship could make any guess at their contents. They might be merely routine orders, directing the Renown perhaps to join Admiral Bickerton’s squadron; but also they might reveal some diplomatic secret of the kind that no mere l
ieutenant could be entrusted with. On the one hand Buckland could continue to head for Antigua, and there he could turn over his responsibilities to whoever was the senior officer. There might be some junior captain who could be transferred to the Renown, to read the orders and carry off the ship on whatever mission was allotted her. On the other hand Buckland could read the orders now; they might deal with some matter of the greatest urgency. Antigua was a convenient landfall for ships to make from England, but from a military point of view it was not so desirable, being considerably to leeward of most of the points of strategic importance.

  If Buckland took the ship down to Antigua and then she had to beat back to windward he might be sharply rapped on the knuckles by My Lords of the Admiralty; yet if he read the secret orders on that account he might be reprimanded for his presumption. The wardroom could guess at his predicament and each individual officer could congratulate himself upon not being personally involved while wondering what Buckland would do about it.

  Bush and Hornblower stood side by side on the poop, feet wide apart on the heaving deck, as they steadied themselves and looked through their sextants at the horizon. Through the darkened glass Bush could see the image of the sun reflected from the mirror. With infinite pains he moved the arm round, bringing the image down closer and closer to the horizon. The pitch of the ship over the long blue rollers troubled him, but he persevered, decided in the end that the image of the sun was just sitting on the horizon, and clamped the sextant. Then he could read and record the measurement. As a concession to newfangled prejudices, he decided to follow Hornblower’s example and observe the altitude also from the opposite point of the horizon. He swung round and did so, and as he recorded this reading he tried to remember what he had to do about half the difference between the two readings. And the index error, and the ‘dip’. He looked round to find that Hornblower had already finished his observation and was standing waiting for him.

  “That’s the greatest altitude I’ve ever measured,” remarked Hornblower. “I’ve never been as far south as this before. What’s your result?”

  They compared readings.

  “That’s accurate enough,” said Hornblower. “What’s the difficulty?”

  “Oh, I can shoot the sun,” said Bush. “No trouble about that. It’s the calculations that bother me—those damned corrections.”

  Hornblower raised an eyebrow for a moment. He was accustomed to taking his own observations each noon and making his own calculations of the ship’s position, in order to keep himself in practice. He was aware of the mechanical difficulty of taking an accurate observation in a moving ship, but—although he knew plenty of other instances he still could not believe that any man could really find the subsequent mathematics difficult. They were so simple to him that when Bush had asked him if he could join him in their noontime exercise for the sake of improving himself he had taken it for granted that it was only the mechanics of using a sextant that troubled Bush. But he politely concealed his surprise.

  “They’re easy enough,” he said, and then he added “sir.” A wise officer, too, did not make too much display of his superior ability when speaking to his senior. He phrased his next speech carefully.

  “If you were to come below with me, sir, you could check through my calculations.”

  Bush listened in patience to Hornblower’s explanation. They made the problem perfectly clear for the moment—it was by a hurried lastminute reading up that Bush had been able to pass his examination for lieutenant, although it was seamanship and not navigation that got him through—but Bush knew by bitter experience that tomorrow it would be hazy again.

  “Now we can plot the position,” said Hornblower, bending over the chart.

  Bush watched as Hornblower’s capable fingers worked the parallel rulers across the chart; Hornblower had long bony hands with something of beauty about them, and it was actually fascinating to watch them doing work at which they were so supremely competent. The powerful fingers picked up the pencil and ruled a line.

  “There’s the point of interception,” said Hornblower. “Now we can check against the dead reckoning.”

  Even Bush could follow the simple steps necessary to plot the ship’s course by dead reckoning since noon yesterday. The pencil in the steady fingers made a tiny x on the chart.

  “We’re still being set to the s’uth’ard, you see,” said Hornblower. “We’re not far enough east yet for the Gulf Stream to set us to the nor’ard.”

  “Didn’t you say you’d never navigated these waters before?” asked Bush.

  “Yes.”

  “Then how—? Oh, I suppose you’ve been studying.”

  To Bush it was as strange that a man should read up beforehand and be prepared for conditions hitherto unknown as it was strange to Hornblower that a man should find trouble in mathematics.

  “At any rate, there we are,” said Hornblower, tapping the chart with the pencil.

  “Yes,” said Bush.

  They both looked at the chart with the same thought in mind.

  “What d’ye think Number One’ll do?” asked Bush.

  Buckland might be legally in command of the ship, but it was too early yet to speak of him as the captain—‘the capain’ was still that weeping figure swathed in canvas on the cot in the cabin.

  “Can’t tell,” answered Hornblower, “but he makes up his mind now or never. We lose ground to loo’ard every day from now, you see.”

  “What’d you do?” Bush was curious about this junior lieutenant who had shown himself ready of resources and so guarded in speech.

  “I’d read those orders,” said Hornblower instantly. “I’d rather be in trouble for having done something than for not having done anything.”

  “I wonder,” said Bush. On the other hand a definite action could be made the subject of a courtmartial charge far more easily than the omission to do something; Bush felt this, but he had not the facility with words to express it easily.

  “Those orders may detach us on independent service,” went on Hornblower. “God, what a chance for Buckland!”

  “Yes,” said Bush.

  The eagerness in Hornblower’s expression was obvious. If ever a man yearned for an independent command and the consequent opportunity to distinguish himself it was Hornblower. Bush wondered faintly if he himself was as anxious to have the responsibility of the command of a ship of the line in troubled waters. He looked at Hornblower with an interest which he knew to be constantly increasing. Hornblower was a man always ready to adopt the bold course, a man who infinitely preferred action to inaction; widely read in his profession and yet a practical seaman, as Bush had already had plenty of opportunity to observe. A student, yet a man of action; a fiery spirit and yet discreet—Bush remembered how tactfully he had acted during the crisis following the captain’s injury and how dexterously he had handled Buckland.

  And—and—what was the truth about that injury to the captain? Bush darted a more searching glance than ever at Hornblower as he followed up that train of thought. Bush’s mind did not consciously frame the words ‘motive’ and ‘opportunity’ to itself—it was not that type of mind—but it felt its way along an obscure path of reasoning which might well have been signposted with those words. He wanted to ask again the question he had asked once before, but to do so would not merely invite but would merit a rebuff. Hornblower was established in a strong position and Bush could be sure that he would never abandon it through indiscretion or impatience. Bush looked at the lean eager face, at the long fingers drumming on the chart. It was not right or fit or proper that he should feel any admiration or even respect for Hornblower, who was not merely his junior in age by a couple of years—that did not matter—but was his junior as a lieutenant. The dates on their respective commissions really did matter; a junior was someone for whom it should be impossible to feel respect by the traditions of the service. Anything else would be unnatural, might even savour of the equalitarian French ideas which they were engaged in
fighting. The thought of himself as infected with Red Revolutionary notions made Bush actually uneasy, and yet as he stirred uncomfortably in his chair he could not wholly discard those notions.

  “I’ll put these things away,” said Hornblower, rising from his chair. “I’m exercising my lowerdeck guns’ crews after the hands have had their dinner. And I have the first dogwatch after that.”

  Chapter VI

  The lowerdeck guns had been secured, and the sweating crews came pouring up on deck. Now that the Renown was as far south as 30° north latitude the lower gundeck, even with the ports open for artillery exercise, was a warm place, and hauling those guns in and running them out was warm work. Hornblower had kept the crews hard at it, one hundred and eighty men, who afterwards came pouring up into the sunshine and the fresh air of the trade wind to receive the goodhumoured chaff of the rest of the crew who had not been working so hard but who knew perfectly well that their turn would come soon.

  The guns’ crews wiped their steaming foreheads and flung jests—jagged and unpolished like the flints in the soil from which they had sprung—back at their tormentors. It was exhilarating to an officer to see the high spirits of the men and to be aware of the good temper that prevailed; in the three days that had elapsed since the change in command the whole atmosphere of the ship had improved. Suspicion and fear had vanished; after a brief sulkiness the hands had found that exercise and regular work were stimulating and satisfactory.

  Hornblower came aft, the sweat running down him, and touched his hat to Roberts, who was officer of the watch, where he stood chatting with Bush at the break of the poop. It was an unusual request that Hornblower made, and Roberts and Bush stared at him with surprise.

  “But what about the deck, Mr. Hornblower?” asked Roberts.

  “A hand can swab it off in two minutes, sir,” replied Hornblower, wiping his face and looking at the blue sea overside with a longing that was obvious to the most casual glance. “I have fifteen minutes before I relieve you, sir—plenty of time.”