Cecil Forester: Hornblower and the Atropos

Now they were gliding down the summit level of the canal; the cutting was growing deeper and deeper, so that the echo of the sound of the horses’ hoofs came ringing from the rocky banks. Round the shallow curve must surely be Sapperton Tunnel.

“Hold hard, Charlie!” suddenly yelled the steersman. A moment later he sprang to the after towline and tried to cast it off from the timber head, and there was wild confusion. Shouts and yells on the towpath horses whinnying, hoofs clattering. Hornblower caught a glimpse of the lead horse leaping frantically up the steep slope of the cutting—just ahead of them was the castellated but gloomy mouth of the tunnel and there was no other way for the horse to turn. The Queen Charlotte lurched hideously against the bank to the accompaniment of screams from the second-class cabin; for a moment Hornblower was sure she would capsize. She righted herself and came to a stop as the towlines slackened; the frantic struggles of the second horse, entangled in two towlines, ended as it kicked itself free. The steersman had scrambled on to the towpath and had dropped the after line over a bollard.

“A pretty kettle o’ fish,” he said.

Another man had shown up, running down the bank from the top whence spare horses looked down at them, whinnying. He held the heads of the Queen Charlotte ’s horses, and near his feet lay Charlie, the boatmanpostillion, his face a mask of blood.

“Get ye back in there!” bellowed the steersman to the women who were all scrambling out of the secondclass cabin. “All’s well. Get ye back! Once let them loose on the country”—he added to Hornblower—“and they’d be harder to catch than their own chickens.”

“What is it, Horatio?” asked Maria, standing at the door of the first-class cabin with the baby in her arms.

“Nothing to alarm yourself about, my dear,” said Hornblower. “Compose yourself. This is no time for agitation.”

He turned and looked at the onehanded steersman, who bent down to examine Charlie; taking a hold of the breast of his coat with his steel hook he hauled up, but Charlie’s head only hung back helplessly, the blood running over his cheeks.

“Not much use out of Charlie,” said the steersman, letting him drop with a thump. As Hornblower stooped to look he could catch the reek of gin three feet from the bleeding mouth. Half stunned and half drunk—more than half of both for that matter.

“We’ve the tunnel to leg through,” said the steersman. “Who’s up at the Tunnel House?”

“Ne’er a soul,” replied the man with the horses. “The trade all went through in the early morning.”

The steersman whistled.

“You’ll have to come wi’ us,” he said.

“Not I,” said the householder. “I’ve sixteen horses—eighteen with these two. I can’t leave ‘em.”

The steersman swore a couple of astonishing oaths—astonishing even to Hornblower, who had heard many in his time.

“What d’you mean by ‘legging’ through the tunnel?” Hornblower allied.

The steersman pointed with his hook at the black, forbidding tunnel mouth in the castellated entrance.

“No towpath through the tunnel, o’ course, Captain,” he said. “So we leaves our horses here an’ we legs through. We puts a pair o’ ‘wings’ on the bows—sort o’ catheads, in a way. Charlie lies on one an’ I lies on the other, wi’ our heads inboard an’ our feet agin the tunnel wall. Then we sort o’ walks, and we gets the boat along that way, and we picks up another pair o’ horses at the south end.”

“I see,” said Hornblower.

“I’ll souse this sot wi’ a couple o’ buckets o’ water,” said the steersman. “Mebbe it’ll bring him round.”

“Maybe,” said Hornblower.

But buckets of water made no difference to the unconscious Charlie, who was clearly concussed. The slow blood flowed again after his battered face had been washed clean. The steersman produced another couple of oaths.

“The other trade’ll be coming up arter you,” said the householder.

“’Nother couple o’ hours, mebbe.”

All he received in reply was a further series of oaths.

“We have to have daylight to run the Thames stauncher,” said the steersman. “Two hours? We’ll only just get there by daylight if we go now.”

He looked round him, at the silent canal cut and tunnel mouths at the chattering women in the boat and the few doddering old gaffers along with them.

“Twelve hours late, we’ll be,” he concluded, morosely.

A day late in taking up his command, thought Hornblower.

“Damn it,” he said, “I’ll help you leg through.”

“Good on ye, sir,” said the steersman, significantly dropping the equalitarian “captain” for the “sir” he had carefully eschewed so far. “D’ye think you can?”

“Likely enough,” said Hornblower.

“Let’s fit those wings,” said the steersman, with sudden decision.

They were small platforms, projecting out from either bow.

“Horatio,” asked Maria, “whatever are you doing?”

That was just what Maria would ask. Hornblower was tempted to make use of the rejoinder he had heard used once in the Renown , to the effect that he was getting milk from a male ostrich, but he checked himself.

“Just helping the boatman, dear,” he said patiently.

“You don’t think enough of your position,” said Maria.

Hornblower was by now a sufficiently experienced married man to realize the advantages of allowing his wife to say what she liked as long as he could continue to do as he liked. With the wings fitted he and the steersman on board, and the horseholder on the bank, took their places along the side of the Queen Charlotte . A strong united shove sent the boat gliding into the cut, heading for the tunnel.

“Keep ‘er goin’, sir,” said the steersman, scrambling forward to the port side wing. It was obvious that it would be far easier to maintain gentle way on the boat than to progress in fits and starts of alternate stopping and moving. Hornblower hurried to the starboard side wing and laid himself down on it as the bows of the boat crept into the dark tunnel. Lying on his right side, with his head inboard, he felt his feet come into contact with the brick lining of the tunnel. He pressed with his feet, and then by a simple backwards walking motion he urged the boat along.

“Hold hard, sir,” said the steersman—his head was just beside Hornblower’s—“there’s two miles an’ more to go.”

A tunnel two miles long, driven through the solid rock of the Cotswolds! No wonder it was the marvel of the age. The Romans with all their aqueducts had achieved nodding to compare with this. Farther and farther into the tunnel they went, into darkness that increased in intensity, until it was frightfully, astonishingly dark, with the eye recording nothing at all, strain as it might. At their entrance into the tunnel the women had chattered and laughed, and had shouted to hear the echoes in the tunnel.

“Silly lot o’ hens,” muttered the steersman.

Now they fell silent, oppressed by the darkness, all except Maria.

“I trust you remember you have your good clothes on, Horatio,” she said.

“Yes, dear,” said Hornblower, happy in the knowledge that she could not possibly see him.

It was not a very dignified thing he was doing, and not at all comfortable. After a few minutes he was acutely aware of the hardness of the platform on which he was lying; nor was it long before his legs began to protest against the effort demanded of them. He tried to shift his position a little, to bring other muscles into play and other areas of himself into contact with the platform, but he learned fast enough that it had to be done with tact and timing, so as not to disturb the smooth rhythm of the propulsion of the boat—the steersman beside him grunted a brief protest as Hornblower missed a thrust with his right leg and the boat baulked a little.