Cecil Forester - Lieutenant Hornblower

“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 lieutenant 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.