The Happy Return

“I shall go down and visit the wounded at once,” he said, and checked himself and looked searchingly at his first lieutenant. “What about you, Bush? You don’t look fit for duty.”

“I am perfectly fit, sir,” protested Bush. “I shall take an hour’s rest when Gerard comes up to take over the deck from me.”

“As you will, then.”

Down below decks in the orlop it was like some canto in the Inferno. It was dark; the four oil lamps whose flickering, reddish yellow glimmer wavered from the deck beams above seemed to serve only to cast shadows. The atmosphere was stifling. To the normal stenches of bilge and a ship’s stores were added the stinks of sick men crowded together, of the sooty lamps, of the bitter powder smell which had drifted in yesterday and had not yet succeeded in making its way out again. It was appallingly hot; the heat and the stink hit Hornblower in the face as he entered, and within five seconds of his entry his face was as wet as if it had been dipped in water, so hot was it and so laden was the atmosphere with moisture.

As complex as the air was the noise. There were the ordinary ship noises—the creaking and groaning of timber, the vibration of the rigging transmitted downward from the chains, the sound of the sea outside, the wash of the bilge below, and the monotonous clangour of the pumps forward intensified by the ship-timbers acting as sounding boards. But all the noises acted only as accompaniment to the din in the cockpit, where seventy-five wounded men, crammed together, were groaning and sobbing and screaming, blaspheming and vomiting. Lost souls in hell could hardly have had a more hideous environment, or be suffering more.

Hornblower found Laurie, standing aimlessly in the gloom.

“Thank God you’ve come, sir,” he said. His tone implied that he cast all responsibility, gladly, from that moment on the shoulders of his captain.

“Come round with me and make your report,” snapped Hornblower. He hated this business, and yet, although he was completely omnipotent on board, he could not turn and fly as his instincts told him to do. The work had to be done, and Hornblower knew that now Laurie had proved his incompetence he himself was the best man to deal with it. He approached the last man in the row, and drew back with a start of surprise. Lady Barbara was there; the wavering light caught her classic features as she knelt beside the wounded man. She was sponging his face and his throat as he writhed on the deck.

It was a shock to Hornblower to see her engaged thus. The day was yet to come when Florence Nightingale was to make nursing a profession in which women could engage. No man of taste could bear the thought of a woman occupied with the filthy work of a hospital. Sisters of Mercy might labour there for the good of their souls; boozy old women might attend to women in labour and occasionally take a hand at sick nursing, but to look after wounded men was entirely men’s work—the work of men who deserved nothing better, either, and who were ordered to it on account of their incapacity or their bad record like men ordered to clean out latrines. Hornblower’s stomach revolted at the sight of Lady Barbara here in contact with dirty bodies, with blood and pus and vomit.

“Don’t do that!” he said, hoarsely. “Go away from here. Go on deck.”

“I have begun this work now,” said Lady Barbara indifferently. “I am not going to leave it unfinished.”

Her tone admitted no possibility of argument; she was apparently talking of the inevitable—much as she might say that she had caught cold and would have to bear with it until it had run its course.

“The gentleman in charge here,” she went on, “knows nothing of his duties.”

Lady Barbara had no belief in the nobility of nursing, to her mind it was a more degrading occupation than cooking or mending clothes (work which had only occasionally, when the exigencies of travel demanded it, engaged her capable fingers) but she had found a job which was being inefficiently done when there was no one save herself to do it better, at a time when the King’s service depended in part on its being done well. She had set herself to work with the same wholehearted attention to detail and neglect of personal comfort with which one of her brothers had governed India and another had fought the Mahrattas.

“This man,” went on Lady Barbara, “has a splinter of wood under his skin here. It ought to be extracted at once.”

She displayed the man’s bare chest, hairy and tattooed. Under the tattooing there was a horrible black bruise, stretching from the breast bone to the right armpit, and in the muscles of the armpit was a jagged projection under the skin; when Lady Barbara laid her fingers on it the man writhed and groaned with pain. In fighting between wooden ships splinter wounds constituted a high proportion of the casualties, and the hurtling pieces of wood could never be extracted by the route by which they entered, because their shape gave them natural barbs. In this case the splinter had been deflected by the ribs so as to pass round under the skin, bruising and lacerating, to its present place in the armpit.

“Are you ready to do it now?” asked Lady Barbara of the unhappy Laurie.

“Well, madam—”

“If you will not, then I will. Don’t be a fool, man.”

“I will see that it is done, Lady Barbara,” interposed Hornblower. He would promise anything to get this finished and done with.

“Very well, then, Captain.”

Lady Barbara rose from her knees, but she showed no sign of any intention of retiring in a decent female fashion. Hornblower and Laurie looked at each other.

“Now, Laurie,” said Hornblower, harshly. “Where are your instruments? Here, you, Wilcox, Hudson. Bring him a good stiff tot of rum. Now, Williams, we’re going to get that splinter out of you. It is going to hurt you.”

Hornblower had to struggle hard to keep his face from writhing in disgust and fear of the task before him. He spoke harshly to stop his voice from trembling; he hated the whole business. And it was a painful and bloody business, too. Although Williams tried hard to show no weakness, he writhed as the incision was made, and Wilcox and Hudson had to catch his hands and force his shoulders back. He gave a horrible cry as the long dark strip of wood was dragged out, and then fell limp, fainting, so that he uttered no protest at the prick of the needle as the edges of the wound were clumsily sewn together.

Lady Barbara’s lips were firmly compressed. She watched Laurie’s muddled attempts at bandaging, and then she stooped without a word and took the rags from him. The men watched her fascinated as with one hand firmly behind Williams’ spine she passed the roll dexterously round his body and bound the fast-reddening waste firmly to the wound.

“He will do now,” said Lady Barbara, rising.

Hornblower spent two stifling hours down there in the cockpit going the round with Laurie and Lady Barbara, but they were not nearly such agonising hours as they might have been. One of the main reasons for his feeling so unhappy regarding the care of the wounded had been his consciousness of his own incompetence. Insensibly he came to shift some of his responsibility on to Lady Barbara’s shoulders; she was so obviously capable and so unintimidated that she was the person most fitted of all in the ship to be given the supervision of the wounded. When Hornblower had gone round every bed, when the five newly dead men had been dragged out, he faced her under the wavering light of the last lamp in the row.

“I don’t know how I can thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I am as grateful to you as any of these wounded men.”

“There is no gratitude needed,” said Lady Barbara, shrugging her slim shoulders, “for work which had to be done.”

A good many years later her ducal brother was to say “The King’s government must be carried on,” in exactly the same tone. The man in the bed beside them waved a bandaged arm.