The Happy Return hh-7

by Cecil Scott Forester

  Hornblower came by degrees to realise that now he had to start a new chapter in the history of the Lydia, to make fresh plans. And there was a long line of people waiting for immediate orders, too—Bush, here, and the boatswain and the carpenter and the gunner and that fool Laurie. He had to force his tired brain to think again. He estimated the wind’s force and direction, as though it were an academic exercise and not a mental process which for twenty years had been second nature to him. He went wearily down to his cabin and found the shattered chart cases amid the indescribable wreckage, and he pored over the torn chart.

  He must report his success at Panama as soon as he could; that was obvious to him now. Perhaps he could refit there, although he saw small chance of it in that inhospitable roadstead, especially with yellow fever in the town. So he must carry the shattered Lydia to Panama. He laid off a course for Cape Mala, by a supreme effort compelled his mind to realise that he had a fair wind, and came up again with his orders to find that the mass of people who were clamouring for his attention had miraculously vanished. Bush had chased them all away, although he never discovered it. He gave the course to Bush, and then Polwheal materialised himself at his elbow, with boat cloak and hammock chair. Hornblower had no protest left in him. He allowed himself to be wrapped in the cloak, and he fell half fainting into the chair. It was twenty-one hours since he had last sat down. Polwheal had brought food, too, but he merely ignored that. He wanted no food! all he wanted was rest.

  Then for a second he was wide awake again. He had remembered Lady Barbara, battened down below with the wounded in the dark and stifling bowels of the ship. But he relaxed at once. The blasted woman could look after herself—she was quite capable of doing so. Nothing mattered now. His head sank on his breast again. The next thing to disturb him was the sound of his own snores, and that did not disturb him long. He slept and he snored through all the din which the crew made in their endeavour to get the Lydia ship-shape again.

  Chapter XVIII

  What awoke Hornblower was the sun, which lifted itself over the horizon and shone straight into his eyes. He stirred and blinked, and for a space he tried, like a child, to shield his eyes with his hands and return to sleep. He did not know where he was, and for that time he did not care. Then he began to remember the events of yesterday, and he ceased trying to sleep and instead tried to wake up. Oddly, at first he remembered the details of the fighting and could not recall the sinking of the Natividad. When that recollection shot into his brain he was fully awake.

  He rose from his chair, stretching himself painfully, for all his joints ached with the fatigues of yesterday. Bush was standing by the wheel, his face grey and lined and strangely old in the hard light Hornblower nodded to him and received his salute in return; Bush was wearing his cocked hat over the dirty white bandage round his forehead. Hornblower would have spoken to him, but all his attention was caught up immediately in looking round the ship. There was a good breeze blowing which must have backed round during the night, for the Lydia could only just hold her course close hauled. She was under all plain sail; Hornblower’s rapid inspection revealed to him innumerable splices both in standing and running rigging; the jury mizzenmast seemed to be standing up well to its work, but every sail that was spread seemed to have at least one shot hole in it—some of them a dozen or more. They gave the ship a little of the appearance of a tattered vagabond. The first part of today’s work would be spreading a new suit of sails; new rigging could wait for a space.

  It was only then, after weather and course and sail set had been noted, that Hornblower’s sailor’s eye came down to the decks. From forward came the monotonous clangour of the pumps; the clear white water which was gushing from them was the surest indication that the ship was making so much water that it could only just be kept in check. On the lee side gangway was a long, long row of corpses, each in its hammock. Hornblower flinched when he saw the length of the row, and it called for all his will to count them. There were twenty-four dead men along the gangway; and fourteen had been buried yesterday. Some of these dead might be—probably were—the mortally wounded of yesterday, but thirty-eight dead seemed certainly to indicate at least seventy wounded down below. Rather more than one-third of the Lydia’s company were casualties, then. He wondered who they were, wondered whose distorted faces were concealed beneath those hammocks.

  The dead on deck outnumbered the living. Bush seemed to have sent below every man save for a dozen men to hand and steer, which was sensible of him, seeing that every one must be worn out with yesterday’s toil while one man out of every seven on board would have to be employed at the pumps until the shot holes could be got at and plugged. The rest of the crew, at first glance, were all asleep, sprawled on the main deck under the gangways. Hardly anyone had had the strength to sling a hammock (if their hammocks had survived the battle); all the rest lay as they had dropped, lying tangled here and there, heads pillowed on each other or on more unsympathetic objects like ring bolts and the hind axletrees of the guns.

  There were still evident many signs of yesterday’s battle, quite apart from the sheeted corpses and the dark stains, not thoroughly swabbed, which disfigured the white planking. The decks were furrowed and grooved in all directions, with jagged splinters still standing up here and there. There were shot holes in the ship’s sides with canvas roughly stretched over them. The port sills were stained black with powder; on one of them an eighteen-pounder shot stood out, half buried in the tough oak. But on the other hand an immense amount of work had been done, from laying out the dead to securing the guns and frapping the breechings. Apart from the weariness of her crew, the Lydia was ready to fight another battle at two minutes’ notice.

  Hornblower felt a prick of shame that so much should have been done while he slept lazily in his hammock chair. He forced himself to feel no illwill on that account. Although to praise Bush’s work was to admit his own deficiencies he felt that he must be generous.

  “Very good indeed, Mr. Bush,” he said, walking over to him; yet his natural shyness combined with his feeling of shame to make his speech stilted. “I am both astonished and pleased at the work you have accomplished.”

  “Today is Sunday, sir,” said Bush, simply.

  So it was. Sunday was the day of the captain’s inspection, when he went round every part of the ship examining everything, to see that the first lieutenant was doing his duty in keeping the ship efficient. On Sunday the ship had to be swept and garnished, all the falls of rope flemished down, the hands fallen in by divisions in their best clothes, divine service held, the Articles of War read—Sunday was the day when the professional ability of every first lieutenant in His Britannic Majesty’s Navy was tried in the balance.

  Hornblower could not fight down a smile at this ingenious explanation.

  “Sunday or no Sunday,” he said, “you have done magnificently, Mr. Bush.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And I shall remember to say so in my report to the Admiralty.”

  “I know you’ll do that, sir.”

  Bush’s weary face was illuminated by a gleam of pleasure. A successful single ship action was usually rewarded by promotion to Commander of the first lieutenant, and for a man like Bush, with no family and no connections, it was his only hope of making that vitally important step. But a captain who was anxious to enhance his own glory could word his report so that it appeared that he had won his victory despite of, instead of by the aid of, his first lieutenant—instances were known.

  “They may make much of this in England, when eventually they hear about it,” said Hornblower.

  “I’m certain of it, sir. It isn’t every day of the week that a frigate sinks a ship of the line.”

  It was stretching a point to call the Natividad that—sixty years ago when she was built she may have been considered just fit to lie in the line, but times had changed since then. But it was a very notable feat that the Lydia had accomplished, all the same. It was only now that Hornblow
er began to appreciate how notable it was, and his spirit rose in proportion. There was another criterion which the British public was prone to apply in estimating the merit of a naval action, and the Board of Admiralty itself not infrequently used the same standard.

  “What’s the butcher’s bill?” demanded Hornblower, brutally, voicing the thoughts of both of them—brutally because otherwise he might be thought guilty of sentiment.

  “Thirty-eight killed, sir,” said Bush, taking a dirty scrap of paper from his pocket. “Seventy-five wounded. Four missing. The missing are Harper, Dawson, North, and Chump the negro, sir—they were lost when the launch was sunk. Clay was killed in the first day’s action—”

  Hornblower nodded; he remembered Clay’s headless body sprawled on the quarterdeck.

  “—and John Summers, master’s mate, Henry Vincent and James Clifton, boatswain’s mates, killed yesterday, and Donald Scott Galbraith, third lieutenant, Lieutenant Samuel Simmonds of the Marines, Midshipman Howard Savage and four other warrant officers wounded.”

  “Galbraith?” said Hornblower. That piece of news prevented him from beginning to wonder what would be the reward of a casualty list of a hundred and seventeen, when frigate captains had been knighted before this for a total of eighty killed and wounded.

  “Badly, sir. Both legs smashed below the knees.”

  Galbraith had met the fate which Hornblower had dreaded for himself. The shock recalled Hornblower to his duty.

  “I shall go down and visit the wounded at once,” he said, and checked himself and looked searchingly at his first lieutenant. “What about you, Bush? You don’t look fit for duty.”

  “I am perfectly fit, sir,” protested Bush. “I shall take an hour’s rest when Gerard comes up to take over the deck from me.”

  “As you will, then.”

  Down below decks in the orlop it was like some canto in the Inferno. It was dark; the four oil lamps whose flickering, reddish yellow glimmer wavered from the deck beams above seemed to serve only to cast shadows. The atmosphere was stifling. To the normal stenches of bilge and a ship’s stores were added the stinks of sick men crowded together, of the sooty lamps, of the bitter powder smell which had drifted in yesterday and had not yet succeeded in making its way out again. It was appallingly hot; the heat and the stink hit Hornblower in the face as he entered, and within five seconds of his entry his face was as wet as if it had been dipped in water, so hot was it and so laden was the atmosphere with moisture.

  As complex as the air was the noise. There were the ordinary ship noises—the creaking and groaning of timber, the vibration of the rigging transmitted downward from the chains, the sound of the sea outside, the wash of the bilge below, and the monotonous clangour of the pumps forward intensified by the ship-timbers acting as sounding boards. But all the noises acted only as accompaniment to the din in the cockpit, where seventy-five wounded men, crammed together, were groaning and sobbing and screaming, blaspheming and vomiting. Lost souls in hell could hardly have had a more hideous environment, or be suffering more.

  Hornblower found Laurie, standing aimlessly in the gloom.

  “Thank God you’ve come, sir,” he said. His tone implied that he cast all responsibility, gladly, from that moment on the shoulders of his captain.

  “Come round with me and make your report,” snapped Hornblower. He hated this business, and yet, although he was completely omnipotent on board, he could not turn and fly as his instincts told him to do. The work had to be done, and Hornblower knew that now Laurie had proved his incompetence he himself was the best man to deal with it. He approached the last man in the row, and drew back with a start of surprise. Lady Barbara was there; the wavering light caught her classic features as she knelt beside the wounded man. She was sponging his face and his throat as he writhed on the deck.

  It was a shock to Hornblower to see her engaged thus. The day was yet to come when Florence Nightingale was to make nursing a profession in which women could engage. No man of taste could bear the thought of a woman occupied with the filthy work of a hospital. Sisters of Mercy might labour there for the good of their souls; boozy old women might attend to women in labour and occasionally take a hand at sick nursing, but to look after wounded men was entirely men’s work—the work of men who deserved nothing better, either, and who were ordered to it on account of their incapacity or their bad record like men ordered to clean out latrines. Hornblower’s stomach revolted at the sight of Lady Barbara here in contact with dirty bodies, with blood and pus and vomit.

  “Don’t do that!” he said, hoarsely. “Go away from here. Go on deck.”

  “I have begun this work now,” said Lady Barbara indifferently. “I am not going to leave it unfinished.”

  Her tone admitted no possibility of argument; she was apparently talking of the inevitable—much as she might say that she had caught cold and would have to bear with it until it had run its course.

  “The gentleman in charge here,” she went on, “knows nothing of his duties.”

  Lady Barbara had no belief in the nobility of nursing, to her mind it was a more degrading occupation than cooking or mending clothes (work which had only occasionally, when the exigencies of travel demanded it, engaged her capable fingers) but she had found a job which was being inefficiently done when there was no one save herself to do it better, at a time when the King’s service depended in part on its being done well. She had set herself to work with the same wholehearted attention to detail and neglect of personal comfort with which one of her brothers had governed India and another had fought the Mahrattas.

  “This man,” went on Lady Barbara, “has a splinter of wood under his skin here. It ought to be extracted at once.”

  She displayed the man’s bare chest, hairy and tattooed. Under the tattooing there was a horrible black bruise, stretching from the breast bone to the right armpit, and in the muscles of the armpit was a jagged projection under the skin; when Lady Barbara laid her fingers on it the man writhed and groaned with pain. In fighting between wooden ships splinter wounds constituted a high proportion of the casualties, and the hurtling pieces of wood could never be extracted by the route by which they entered, because their shape gave them natural barbs. In this case the splinter had been deflected by the ribs so as to pass round under the skin, bruising and lacerating, to its present place in the armpit.

  “Are you ready to do it now?” asked Lady Barbara of the unhappy Laurie.

  “Well, madam—”

  “If you will not, then I will. Don’t be a fool, man.”

  “I will see that it is done, Lady Barbara,” interposed Hornblower. He would promise anything to get this finished and done with.

  “Very well, then, Captain.”

  Lady Barbara rose from her knees, but she showed no sign of any intention of retiring in a decent female fashion. Hornblower and Laurie looked at each other.

  “Now, Laurie,” said Hornblower, harshly. “Where are your instruments? Here, you, Wilcox, Hudson. Bring him a good stiff tot of rum. Now, Williams, we’re going to get that splinter out of you. It is going to hurt you.”

  Hornblower had to struggle hard to keep his face from writhing in disgust and fear of the task before him. He spoke harshly to stop his voice from trembling; he hated the whole business. And it was a painful and bloody business, too. Although Williams tried hard to show no weakness, he writhed as the incision was made, and Wilcox and Hudson had to catch his hands and force his shoulders back. He gave a horrible cry as the long dark strip of wood was dragged out, and then fell limp, fainting, so that he uttered no protest at the prick of the needle as the edges of the wound were clumsily sewn together.

  Lady Barbara’s lips were firmly compressed. She watched Laurie’s muddled attempts at bandaging, and then she stooped without a word and took the rags from him. The men watched her fascinated as with one hand firmly behind Williams’ spine she passed the roll dexterously round his body and bound the fast-reddening waste firmly to the wound.
r />   “He will do now,” said Lady Barbara, rising.

  Hornblower spent two stifling hours down there in the cockpit going the round with Laurie and Lady Barbara, but they were not nearly such agonising hours as they might have been. One of the main reasons for his feeling so unhappy regarding the care of the wounded had been his consciousness of his own incompetence. Insensibly he came to shift some of his responsibility on to Lady Barbara’s shoulders; she was so obviously capable and so unintimidated that she was the person most fitted of all in the ship to be given the supervision of the wounded. When Hornblower had gone round every bed, when the five newly dead men had been dragged out, he faced her under the wavering light of the last lamp in the row.

  “I don’t know how I can thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I am as grateful to you as any of these wounded men.”

  “There is no gratitude needed,” said Lady Barbara, shrugging her slim shoulders, “for work which had to be done.”

  A good many years later her ducal brother was to say “The King’s government must be carried on,” in exactly the same tone. The man in the bed beside them waved a bandaged arm.

  “Three cheers for her leddyship,” he croaked. “Hip hip, hurrah!”

  Some of the shattered invalids joined him in his cheers—a melancholy chorus, blended with the wheezing and groaning of the delirious men around them. Lady Barbara waved a deprecating hand and turned back to the captain.

  “We must have air down here,” she said. “Can that be arranged? I remember my brother telling me how the mortality in the hospital at Bombay declined as soon as they began to give the patients air. Perhaps those men who can be moved can be brought on deck?”

  “I will arrange it, ma’am,” said Hornblower.

  Lady Barbara’s request was strongly accented by the contrast which Hornblower noticed when he went on deck—the fresh Pacific air, despite the scorching sunshine, was like champagne after the solid stink of the orlop. He gave orders for the immediate re-establishment of the canvas ventilating shafts which had been removed when the decks were cleared for action.