Lieutenant Hornblower

“Oh, he knows he’s in this ship,” said Clive, cautiously.

Now Buckland turned upon Clive; Buckland was hollow-cheeked, unshaven, weary, but he had seen the captain in his berth, and he was in consequence a little more ready to force the issue.

“In your opinion is the captain fit for duty?” he demanded.

“Well—” said Clive again.

“Well?”

“Temporarily, perhaps not.”

That was an unsatisfactory answer, but Buckland seemed to have exhausted all his resolution in extracting it. Hornblower raised a masklike face and stared straight at Clive.

“You mean he is incapable at present of commanding this ship?”

The other officers murmured their concurrence in this demand for a quite definite statement, and Clive, looking round at the determined faces, had to yield.

“At present, yes.”

“Then we all know where we stand,” said Lomax, and there was satisfaction in his voice which was echoed by everyone in the wardroom except Clive and Buckland.

To deprive a captain of his command was a business of terrible, desperate importance. King and Parliament had combined to give Captain Sawyer command of the Renown, and to reverse their appointment savoured of treason, and anyone even remotely co

“I have here Corporal Greenwood’s statement, sir,” said Hornblower, “signed with his mark and attested by Mr. Wellard and myself.”

“Thank you,” said Buckland, taking the paper; there was some slight hesitation in Buckland’s gesture, as though the document were a firecracker likely to go off unexpectedly. But only Bush, who was looking for it, could have noticed the hesitation. It was only a few hours since Buckland had been a fugitive in peril of his life, creeping through the bowels of the ship trying to avoid detection, and the names of Wellard and Greenwood, reminding him of this, were a shock to his ears. And like a demon conjured up by the saying of his name, Wellard appeared at that moment at the wardroom door.

“Mr. Roberts sent me down to ask for orders, sir,” he said.

Roberts had the watch and must be fretting with worry about what was going on below decks. Buckland stood in indecision.

“Both watches are on deck, sir,” said Hornblower, deferentially.

Buckland looked an inquiry at him.

“You could tell this news to the hands, sir,” went on Hornblower.

He was making a suggestion, unasked, to his superior officer, and so courting a snub. But his ma

“Thank you,” said Buckland.

Anyone could read in his face the struggle that was going on within him; he was still shrinking from committing himself too deeply—as if he was not already committed!—and he was shrinking from the prospect of making a speech to the assembled hands, even while he realised the necessity of doing so. And the necessity grew greater the more he thought about it—rumours must be flying about the lower deck, where the crew, already unsettled by the captain’s behaviour, must be growing more restive still in the prevailing uncertainty. A hard, definite statement must be made to them; it was vitally necessary. Yet the greater the necessity the greater the responsibility that Buckland bore, and he wavered obviously between these two frightening forces.

“All hands, sir?” prompted Hornblower, very softly.

“Yes,” said Buckland, desperately taking the plunge.

“Very well, Mr. Wellard,” said Hornblower.

Bush caught the look that Hornblower threw to Wellard with the words. There was a significance in it which might be interpreted as of a nature only to be expected when one junior officer was telling another to do something quickly before a senior could change his mind—that was how an uninitiated person would naturally interpret it—but to Bush, clairvoyant with fatigue and worry, there was some other significance in that glance. Wellard was pale and weak with fatigue and worry too; he was being reassured. Possibly he was being told that a secret was still safe.

“Aye aye, sir,” said Wellard, and departed.

The pipes twittered through the ship.

“All hands! All hands!” roared the bosun’s mates. “All hands fall in abaft the mainmast! All hands!”

Buckland went nervously up on deck, but he acquitted himself well enough at the moment of trial. In a harsh, expressionless voice he told the assembled hands that the accident to the captain, which they all must have heard about, had rendered him incapable at present of continuing in command.

“But we’ll all go on doing our duty,” said Buckland, staring down at the level plain of upturned faces.

Bush, looking with him, picked out the grey head and paunchy figure of Hobbs, the actinggu

When the hands were dismissed there was a moment of bustle and confusion, as the watches resumed their duties and the idlers streamed off below. It was there, in the noise and confusion of a crowd, that momentary privacy and freedom from observation could best be found. Bush intercepted Hornblower by the mizzenmast bitts and could ask the question that he had been wanting to ask for hours; the question on which so much depended.

“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.