Hornblower and the Atropos h-6

by Cecil Scott Forester

  You are hereby requested and required to receive into your ship His Serene Highness Ernst Prince of SeitzBunau, who has been rated as midshipman in His Majesty’s Navy. You will employ your diligence in instructing His Serene Highness in his new profession as well as in continuing his education in readiness for the day which under Providence may not be far distant, when His Serene Highness will again assume the government of his hereditary dominions. You will also receive into your ship His Excellency the Baron Otto von Eisenbeiss, Chamberlain and First Secretary of State to His Serene Highness. His Excellency was until recently practicing as a surgeon, and he has received from the Navy Office a warrant as such in His Majesty’s Navy. You will make use of His Excellency’s services, therefore, as Surgeon in your ship while, as far as naval discipline and the Articles of War allow, he continues to act as Chamberlain to His Serene Highness.

  “I see,” he said. He looked at the odd pair in their resplendent uniforms. “Welcome aboard, Your Highness.”

  The prince nodded and smiled, clearly without understanding.

  Hornblower sat down again, and Eisenbeiss began to speak at once, his thick German accent stressing his grievances.

  “I must protest, sir,” he said.

  “Well?” said Hornblower, in a tone that might well have conveyed a warning.

  “His Serene Highness is not being treated with proper respect. When we reached your ship I sent my footman on board to announce us so that His Highness could be received with royal honours. They were absolutely refused, sir. The man on the deck there—I presume he is an officer—said he had no instructions. It was only when I showed him that letter, sir, that he allowed us to come on board at all.”

  “Quite right. He had no instructions.”

  “I trust you will make amends, then. And may I remind you that you are sitting in the presence of royalty?”

  “You call me ‘sir’,” snapped Hornblower. “And you will address me as my subordinate should.”

  Eisenbeiss jerked himself upright in his indignation, so that his head came with a shattering crash against the deckbeam above; this checked his flow of words and enabled Hornblower to continue.

  “As officers in the King’s service you should have worn the King’s uniform. You have your dunnage with you?”

  Eisenbeiss was still too stunned to answer, even if he understood the word, and Horrocks spoke for him.

  “Please, sir, it’s in the boat alongside. Chests and chests of it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Horrocks. Now, doctor, I understand you have the necessary professional qualifications to act as surgeon in this ship. That is so?”

  Eisenbeiss still strove to retain his dignity.

  “As Secretary of State I am addressed as ‘Your Excellency’,” he said.

  “But as surgeon in this ship you are addressed as ‘doctor’. And that is the last time I shall overlook the omission of the word ‘sir’. Now. Your qualifications?”

  “I am a surgeon—sir.”

  The last word came out with a jerk as Hornblower’s eyebrows rose.

  “You have been in practice recently?”

  “Until a few months ago—sir. I was surgeon to the Court of Seitz-Bunau. But now I am—”

  “Now you are surgeon in H.M.S. Atropos, and we can leave off the farce of your being Secretary of State.”

  “Sir—”

  “Silence, if you please, doctor. Mr. Horrocks!”

  “Sir!”

  “My compliments to Mr. Still. I’ll have these two gentlemen’s baggage swayed up. They are to make immediate selection of their necessities to the extent of one sea chest each. You will be able to help them in their choice. The remainder is to leave the ship within ten minutes by the boat in which it came. Is that quite clear, Mr. Horrocks?”

  “Aye aye, sir. If you please, sir, there’s a couple of footmen with the baggage.”

  “Footmen?”

  “Yes, sir, in uniforms like these,” Horrocks indicated the green and gold of the Germans.

  “That’s two more hands, then. Read ‘em in and send ‘em for’rard.”

  The Navy could always use more men, and a couple of fat, wellfed footmen would make useful hands in time to come.

  “But sir—” said Eisenbeiss.

  “Speak when you’re spoken to, doctor. Now Mr. Horrocks, you will take the prince and settle him into the midshipmen’s berth. I’ll introduce you. Mr. Midshipman Horrocks—er, Mr. Midshipman Prince.”

  Horrocks automatically offered his hand, and the prince as automatically took it, displaying no immediate change at the contamination of a human touch. He smiled shyly, without understanding.

  “And my compliments to the master’s mate, too, Mr. Horrocks. Ask him to be good enough to show the doctor where he berths for’rard.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Now, doctor, in half an hour I wish to see you both in the King’s uniform. You can take up your duties then. There will be a court of inquiry opened at that time, consisting of the first lieutenant, the purser, and yourself, to decide whether certain hogsheads of beef are fit for human consumption. You will be secretary of that court and I want your written report by noon. Go with Mr. Horrocks now.”

  Eisenbeiss hesitated a moment under Hornblower’s sharp glance before he turned to leave the cabin, but at the curtain his indignation overcame him again.

  “I shall write to the Prime Minister, sir,” he said. “He shall hear about this treatment of His Majesty’s Allies.”

  “Yes, doctor. If you contravene the Mutiny Act you’ll swing at the yardarm. Now, Mr. Jones, with regard to these station and quarter bills.”

  As Hornblower turned to Jones to reenter into the business of getting Atropos ready for sea he was conscious of feeling some contempt for himself. He could browbeat a silly German doctor effectively enough; he could flatter himself that he had dealt adequately with what might have been a difficult though petty situation. But that was nothing to be proud of, when he had to realize that with regard to his real duties he had been found wanting. He had wasted precious hours. During the last two days he had twice played with his little son; he had sat by his wife’s bedside and held his little daughter in his arms, when really he should have been on board here looking after his ship. It was no excuse that it was Jones’s duty to have attended to the matters under consideration; it had been Hornblower’s duty to see that Jones had attended to them. A naval officer should not have a wife or children—this present situation was the proof of that trite saying. Hornblower found himself setting his mouth hard as he came to that conclusion. There were still eight hours of daylight left today. He began an orderly planning of those eight hours. There were the matters that would call for his own personal activity like appealing to the superintendent of the dockyard; there were the matters he could safely leave to his subordinates. There was work that could be done on one side of the ship, leaving the other side clear; there was work that would demand the services of skilled seamen, and work that landsmen could do. There were some jobs that could not be started until other jobs were finished. If he was not careful some of his officers would have to be in two places at once, there would be confusion, delay, ridiculous disorder. But with good planning it could be done.

  Purser and gunner, boatswain and cooper, each in turn was summoned to the after cabin. To each was allotted his tasks; to each was grudgingly conceded a proportion of the men that each demanded. Soon the pipes were shrilling through the ship.

  “Launch’s crew away!”

  Soon the launch was pulling across the river, full of the empty barrels the cooper and his mates had made ready, to begin ferrying over the twenty tons of water necessary to complete the ship’s requirements. A dozen men went scurrying up the shrouds and out along the yards under the urging of the boatswain; yardarm tackles and stay tackles had to be readied for the day’s work.

  “Mr. Jones! I am leaving the ship now. Have that report on the beef ready for me by the time I return from the dock
yard.”

  Hornblower became aware of two figures on the quarterdeck trying to attract his attention. They were the prince and the doctor. He ran his eye over their uniforms, the white collar patches of the midshipman and the plain coat of the surgeon.

  “They’ll do,” he said, “your duties are awaiting you, doctor. Mr. Horrocks! Keep Mr. Prince under your lee for today. Call away my gig.”

  The captain superintendent of the dockyard listened to Hornblower’s request with the indifference acquired during years of listening to requests from urgent officers.

  “I’ve the men ready to send for the shot, sir. Port side’s clear for the powder hulk to come alongside—slack water in half an hour, sir. I can send men to man her too if necessary. It’s only four tons that I need. Half an hour with the hulk.”

  “You say you’re ready now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The captain superintendent looked across at the Atropos lying in the stream.

  “Very well. I hope what you say is quite correct, captain, for your sake. You can start warping the hulk alongside—I warn you I want her back at her moorings in an hour.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Back in the Atropos the cry went round the ship.

  “Hands to the capstan! Waisters! Sailmakers! Loblolly boys!”

  The inmost recesses of the ship were cleared of men to man the capstan bars—any pairs of arms, any stout backs, would serve for that purpose. A drum went roaring along the deck.

  “All lights out!”

  The cook and his mates dumped the galley fire overside and went reluctantly to man the yardarm and stay tackles. The powder hulk came creeping alongside. She had stout sheers and wide hatchways, efficient equipment for the rapid transfer of explosives. Four tons of powder, eighty kegs of one hundredweight each, came climbing out of the hulk’s holds to be swayed down the hatchways of the Atropos, while down below the gunner and his mates and a sweating working party toiled in near darkness—barefooted to avoid all chance of friction or sparks—to range the kegs about the magazines. Some day Atropos might be fighting for her life, and her life would depend on the proper arrangement of those kegs down below so that the demands of the guns on deck might be met.

  The members of the court of inquiry, fresh from their investigation of the defective beef barrels, made their appearance on deck again.

  “Mr. Jones, show the doctor how to make his report in due form.” Then to the purser, “Mr. Carslake, I want to be able to sign your indents as soon as that report is ready.”

  One final look round the deck, and Hornblower could dive below, take pen and ink and paper, and devote himself single-mindedly to composing a suitable covering letter to the Victualling Yard (worded with the right urgency and tactfully coaxing the authorities there into agreement without annoying them by too certain assumption of acquiescence) beginning: “Sir, I have the honour to enclose—” and concluding: “—in the best interests of His Majesty’s service, Your Obedient Servant—”

  Then he could come on deck again to see how the work was progressing and fume for a space before Jones and Carslake appeared with the documents they had been preparing. Amid the confusion and din he had to clear his head again to read them with care before signing them with a bold “H. Hornblower, Captain.”

  “Mr. Carslake, you can take my gig over to the Victualling Yard. Mr. Jones, I expect the Yard will need hands to man their lighter. See to that, if you please.”

  A moment to spare now to observe the hands at work, to settle his cocked hat square on his head, to clasp his hands behind him, to walk slowly forward, doing his best to look quite cool and imperturbable, as if all this wild activity were the most natural thing in the world.

  “Avast heaving there on that staytackle. Belay!”

  The powder keg hung suspended just over the deck. Hornblower forced himself to speak coldly, without excitement. A stave of the keg had started a trifle. There was a minute trail of powder grains on the deck; more were dribbling very slowly out.

  “Sway that keg back into the hulk. You, bos’n’s mate, get a wet mop and swill that powder off the deck.”

  An accident could have fired that powder easily. The flash would pass in either direction; four tons of powder in Atropos, forty, perhaps in the hulk—what would have happened to the massed shipping in the Pool in that event? The men were eyeing him; this would be a suitable moment to encourage them with their work.

  “Greenwich Hospital is over there, men,” said Hornblower, pointing down river to the graceful outlines of Wren’s building. “Some of us will wind up there in the end, I expect, but we don’t want to be blown straight there today.”

  A feeble enough joke, perhaps, but it raised a grin or two all the same.

  “Carry on.”

  Hornblower continued his stroll forward, the imperturbable captain who was nevertheless human enough to crack a joke. It was the same sort of acting that he used towards Maria when she seemed likely to be in a difficult mood.

  Here was the lighter with the shot, coming along the starboard side. Hornblower looked down into it. Ninepounder balls for the four long guns, two forward and two aft; twelvepounder balls for the eighteen carronades that constituted the ship’s main armament. The twenty tons of iron made a pathetically small mass lying in the bottom of the lighter, when regarded with the eye of a man who had served in a ship of the line; the old Renown would have discharged that weight of shot in a couple of hours’ fighting. But this dead weight was a very considerable proportion of the load Atropos had to carry. Half of it would be distributed fairly evenly along the ship in the shotgarlands; where he decided to stow the other ten tons would make all the difference to Atropos, could add a knot to her speed or reduce it by a knot, could make her stiff in a breeze or crank, handy or awkward under sail. He could not reach a decision about that until the rest of the stores were on board and he had had an opportunity of observing her trim. Hornblower ran a keen eye over the nets in which the shot were to be swayed up at the starboard foreyardarm, and went back through his mind in search of the data stored away there regarding the breaking strain of Manila line—this, he could tell, had been several years in service.

  “Sixteen rounds to the load,” he called down into the lighter, “no more.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  It was typical of Hornblower’s mind that it should spend a moment or two thinking about the effect that would be produced if one of those nets was to give way; the shot would pour down into the lighter again; falling from the height of the yardarm they could go clear through the bottom of the lighter; with all that deadweight on board, the lighter would sink like a stone, there on the edge of the fairway, to be an intolerable nuisance to London’s shipping until divers had painfully cleared the sunken wreck of the shot, and camels had lifted the wreck clear of the channel. The vast shipping of the Port of London could be seriously impeded as a result of a momentary inattention regarding the condition of a cargo net.

  Jones was hastening across the deck to touch his hat to him.

  “The last of the powder’s just coming aboard, sir.”

  “Thank you. Mr. Jones. Have the hulk warped back to her moorings. Mr. Owen can send the powder boys here to put the shot in the garlands as they come on board.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  And the gig was coming back across the river with Carslake sitting in the stern.

  “Well, Mr. Carslake, how did the Victualling Yard receive those indents?”

  “They’ve accepted them, sir. They’ll have the stores on the quayside tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? Didn’t you listen to my orders, Mr. Carslake? I don’t want to have to put a black mark against your name. Mr. Jones! I’m going over to the Victualling Yard. Come back with me, Mr. Carslake.”

  The Victualling Yard was a department of the Navy Office, not of the Admiralty. The officials there had to be approached differently from those of the dockyard. One might almost think the two organizations were ri
vals, instead of working to a common patriotic end against a deadly enemy.

  “I can bring my own men to do the work,” said Hornblower. “You needn’t use your own gangs at all.”

  “M’m,” said the victualling superintendent.

  “I’ll move everything to the quayside myself, besides lightering it over.”

  “M’m,” said the victualling superintendent again, a trifle more receptively.

  “I would be most deeply obliged to you,” went on Hornblower. “You need only instruct one of your clerks to point out the stores to the officer in command of my working party. Everything else will be attended to. I beg of you, sir.”

  It was highly gratifying to a Navy Office official to have a captain, metaphorically, on his knees to him, in this fashion. Equally gratifying was the thought that the Navy would do all the work, with a great saving of timetallies to the Victualling Yard. Hornblower could see the satisfaction in the fellow’s fat face. He wanted to wipe it off with his fist, but he kept himself humble. It did him no harm, and by this means he was bending the fellow to his will as surely as if he was using threats.

  “There’s the matter of those stores you have condemned,” said the superintendent.

  “My court of inquiry was in due form,” said Hornblower.

  “Yes,” said the superintendent thoughtfully.

  “Of course I can return you the hogsheads,” suggested Hornblower. “I was intending to do so, as soon as I had emptied the beef over into the tide.”

  “No, please do not go to that trouble. Return me the full hogsheads.”

  The working of the minds of these government Jacksinoffice was beyond normal understanding. Hornblower could not believe—although it was just possible—that the superintendent had any personal financial interest in the matter of those condemned stores. But the fact that the condemnation had taken place presumably was a blot on his record, or on the record of the yard. If the hogsheads were returned to them no mention of the condemnation need be made officially, and presumably they could be palmed off again on some other ship—some ship that might go to sea without the opportunity of sampling the stuff first. Sailors fighting for their country might starve as long as the Victualling Yard’s records were unsmirched.