Cecil Forester: Lieutenant Hornblower

“Yes, sir,” said Bush, a little surprised.

“Who told you I was on shore?”

“No one, sir.”

“How did you guess it, then?”

“I didn’t guess it, sir. I didn’t know you were on shore until Mr. Hornblower told me.”

“Mr. Hornblower? So you know each other already?”

“No, sir. I reported to him when I came on board.”

“So that you could have a few private words without my knowledge?”

“No, sir.”

Bush bit off the ‘of course not’ which he was about to add. Brought up in a hard school, Bush had learned to utter no unnecessary words when dealing with a superior officer indulging in the touchiness superior officers might be expected to indulge in. Yet this particular touchiness seemed more unwarranted even than usual.

“I’ll have you know I allow no one to conspire behind my back, Mr—ah—Bush,” said the captain.

“Aye aye, sir.”

Bush met the captain’s searching stare with the composure of innocence, but he was doing his best to keep his surprise out of his expression, too, and as he was no actor the struggle may have been evident.

“You wear your guilt on your face, Mr. Bush,” said the captain. “I’ll remember this.”

With that he turned away and went below, and Bush, relaxing from his attitude of attention, turned to express his surprise to Hornblower. He was eager to ask questions about this extraordinary behaviour, but they died away on his lips when he saw that Hornblower’s face was set in a wooden unresponsiveness. Puzzled and a little hurt, Bush was about to note Hornblower down as one of the captain’s toadies—or as a madman as well—when he caught sight out of the tail of his eye of the captain’s head reappearing above the deck. Sawyer must have swung round when at the foot of the companion and come up again simply for the purpose of catching his officers off their guard discussing him—and Hornblower knew more about his captain’s habits than Bush did. Bush made an enormous effort to appear natural.

“Can I have a couple of hands to carry my seachest down?” he asked, hoping that the words did not sound nearly as stilted to the captain as they did to his own ears.

“Of course, Mr. Bush,” said Hornblower, with a formidable formality. “See to it, if you please, Mr. James.”

“Ha!” snorted the captain, and disappeared once more down the companion.

Hornblower flicked one eyebrow at Bush, but that was the only indication he gave, even then, of any recognition that the captain’s actions were at all unusual, and Bush, as he followed his seachest down to his cabin, realised with dismay that this was a ship where no one ventured on any decisive expression of opinion. But the Renown was completing for sea, amid all the attendant bustle and confusion, and Bush was on board, legally one of her officers, and there was nothing he could do except reconcile himself philosophically to his fate. He would have to live through this commission, unless any of the possibilities catalogued by Hornblower in their first conversation should save him the trouble.

HMS Renown was clawing her way southward under reefed topsails, a westerly wind laying her over as she thrashed along, heading for those latitudes where she would pick up the northeast trade wind and be able to run direct to her destination in the West Indies. The wind sang in the taut weather-rigging, and blustered around Bush’s ears as he stood on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, balancing to the roll as the roaring wind sent one massive grey wave after another hurrying at the ship; the starboard bow received the wave first, beginning a leisurely climb, heaving the bowsprit up towards the sky, but before the pitch was in any way completed the ship began her roll, heaving slowly over, slowly, slowly, while the bowsprit rose still more steeply. And then as she still rolled the bows shook themselves free and began to slide down the far side of the wave, with the foam creaming round them; the bowsprit began the downward portion of its arc as the ship rose ponderously to an even keel again, and as she heeled a trifle into the wind with the send of the sea under her keel her stern rose while the last of the wave passed under it, her bows dipped, and she completed the corkscrew roll with the massive dignity to be expected of a ponderous fabric that carried five hundred tons of artillery on her decks. Pitch—roll—heave—roll; it was magnificent, rhythmic, majestic, and Bush, balancing on the deck with the practiced ease of ten years’ experience, would have felt almost happy if the freshening of the wind did not bring with it the approaching necessity for another reef, which meant, in accordance with the ship’s standing orders, that the captain should be informed.

Yet there were some minutes of grace left him, during which he could stand balancing on the deck and allow his mind to wander free. Not that Bush was conscious of any need for meditation—he would have smiled at such a suggestion were anyone to make it to him. But the last few days had passed in a whirl, from the moment when his orders had arrived and he had said goodbye to his mother and sisters (he had had three weeks with them after the Conqueror had paid off) and hurried to Plymouth, counting the money he had left in his pockets to make sure he could pay the postchaise charges. The Renown had been in all the flurry of completing for the West Indian station, and during the thirtysix hours that elapsed before she sailed Bush had hardly time to sit down, let alone sleep—his first good night’s rest had come while the Renown clawed her way across the bay. Yet almost from the moment of his first arrival on board he had been harassed by the fantastic moods of the captain, now madly suspicious and again stupidly easygoing. Bush was not a man sensitive to atmosphere—he was a sturdy soul philosophically prepared to do his duty in any of the difficult conditions to be expected at sea—but he could not help but be conscious of the tenseness and fear that pervaded life in the Renown . He knew that he felt dissatisfied and worried, but he did not know that these were his own forms of tenseness and fear. In three days at sea he had hardly come to know a thing about his colleagues: he could vaguely guess that Buckland, the first lieutenant, was capable and steady, and that Roberts, the second, was kindly and easygoing; Hornblower seemed active and intelligent, Smith a trifle weak; but these deductions were really guesses. The wardroom officers—the lieutenants and the master and the surgeon and the purser—seemed to be secretive and very much inclined to maintain a strict reserve about themselves. Within wide limits this was right and proper—Bush was no frivolous chatterer himself—but the silence was carried to excess when conversation was limited to half a dozen words, all strictly professional. There was much that Bush could have learned speedily about the ship and her crew if the other officers had been prepared to share with him the results of their experience and observations during the year they had been on board, but except for the single hint Bush had received from Hornblower when he came on board no one had uttered a word. If Bush had been given to Gothic flights of imagination he might have thought of himself as a ghost at sea with a company of ghosts, cut off from the world and from each other, ploughing across an endless sea to an unknown destination. As it was he could guess that the secretiveness of the wardroom was the result of the moods of the captain: and that brought him back abruptly to the thought that the wind was still freshening and a second reef was now necessary. He listened to the harping of the rigging, felt the heave of the deck under his feet, and shook his head regretfully. There was nothing for it.