Captain Hornblower R. N.

by C. S. Forester

  XXII

  Lady Barbara and Lieutenant Bush were sitting talking in the warm moonlight night beside the taffrail. It was the first time that Bush had happened to share a tête-à-tête with her, and he had only drifted into it by chance – presumably if he had foreseen it he would have avoided it, but now that he had drifted into conversation with her he was enjoying himself to the exclusion of any disquietude. He was sitting on a pile of the oakum-filled cushions which Harrison had had made for Lady Barbara, and he nursed his knees while Lady Barbara leaned back in her hammock chair. The Lydia was rising and falling softly to the gentle music of the waves and the harping of the rigging in the breeze. The white sails glimmered in the brilliant moon; overhead the stars shone with strange brightness. But Bush was not talking of himself, as any sensible man would do under a tropic moon with a young woman beside him.

  ‘Aye, ma’am,’ he was saying. ‘He’s like Nelson. He’s nervous, just as Nelson was, and for the same reason. He’s thinking all the time – you’d be surprised, ma’am, to know how much he thinks about.’

  ‘I don’t think it would surprise me,’ said Lady Barbara.

  ‘That’s because you think, too, ma’am. It’s us stupid ones who’d be surprised, I meant to say. He has more brains than all the rest of us in the ship put together, excepting you, ma’am. He’s mighty clever, I do assure you.’

  ‘I can well believe it.’

  ‘And he’s the best seaman of us all, and as for navigation – well, Crystal’s a fool compared with him, ma’am.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Of course, he’s short with me sometimes, the same as he is with everyone else, but bless you, ma’am, that’s only to be expected. I know how much he has to worry him, and he’s not strong, the same as Nelson wasn’t strong. I am concerned about him sometimes, ma’am.’

  ‘You are fond of him.’

  ‘Fond, ma’am?’ Bush’s sturdy English mind grappled with the word and its sentimental implications, and he laughed a trifle self-consciously. ‘If you say so I suppose I must be. I hadn’t ever thought of being fond of him before. I like him, ma’am, indeed I do.’

  ‘That is what I meant.’

  ‘The men worship him, ma’am. They would do anything for him. Look how much he has done this commission, and the lash not in use once in a week, ma’am. That is why he is like Nelson. They love him not for anything he does or says, but for what he is.’

  ‘He’s handsome, in a way,’ said Barbara – she was woman enough to give that matter consideration.

  ‘I suppose he is, ma’am, now you come to mention it. But it wouldn’t matter if he were as ugly as sin as far as we was concerned.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But he’s shy, ma’am. He never can guess how clever he is. It’s that which always surprises me about him. You’d hardly believe it, ma’am, but he has no more faith in himself than – than I have in myself, ma’am, to put it that way. Less, ma’am, if anything.’

  ‘How strange!’ said Lady Barbara. She was accustomed to the sturdy self-reliance of her brothers, unloved and unlovable leaders of men, but her insight made her comment only one of politeness – it was not really strange to her.

  ‘Look, ma’am,’ said Bush, suddenly, dropping his voice.

  Hornblower had come up on deck. They could see his face, white in the moonlight, as he looked round to assure himself that all was well with his ship, and they could read in it the torment which was obsessing him. He looked like a lost soul during the few seconds he was on deck.

  ‘I wish to God I knew,’ said Bush as Hornblower retreated again to the solitude of his cabin, ‘what those devils did to him or said to him when he went on board the lugger. Hooker who was in the cutter said he heard someone on board howling like a madman. The torturing devils! It was some of their beastliness, I suppose. You could see how it has upset him, ma’am.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lady Barbara softly.

  ‘I should be grateful if you could try to take him out of himself a little, ma’am, begging your pardon. He is in need of distraction, I suspicion. Perhaps you could – if you’ll forgive me, ma’am.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Lady Barbara, ‘but I don’t think I shall succeed where you have failed. Captain Hornblower has never taken a great deal of notice of me, Mr Bush.’

  Yet fortunately the formal invitation to dine with Lady Barbara, which Hebe conveyed to Polwheal and he to his captain, arrived at a moment when Hornblower was just trying to emerge from the black fit which had engulfed him. He read the words as carefully as Lady Barbara had written them – and she had devoted much care to the composition of the note. Hornblower read Lady Barbara’s pretty little apology for breaking in upon him at a time when he was obviously engrossed in his work, and he went on to read how Lady Barbara had been informed by Mr Bush that the Lydia was about to cross the Equator, and that she thought such an occasion merited some mild celebration. If Captain Hornblower, therefore, would give Lady Barbara the pleasure of his company at dinner and would indicate to her which of his officers he considered should be invited at the same time, Lady Barbara would be delighted. Hornblower wrote back to say that Captain Hornblower had much pleasure in accepting Lady Barbara’s kind invitation to dinner, and hoped that Lady Barbara would invite whomever she pleased in addition.

  Yet even in the pleasure of returning to society there was some alloy. Hornblower had always been a poor man, and at the time when he commissioned the Lydia he had been at his wits’ end about where to turn for money in the need for leaving Maria comfortably provided for. In consequence he had not outfitted himself satisfactorily, and now, all these months later, his clothes were in the last stages of decay. The coats were all patched and darned; the epaulettes betrayed in their brassy sheen the fact that they had begun life merely coated with bullion; the cocked hats were all wrecks; he had neither breeches nor stockings fit to be seen; his once white scarves were all coarsened now, and could never be mistaken again for silk. Only the sword ‘of fifty guineas’ value’ retained its good appearance, and he could not wear that at a dinner party.

  He was conscious that his white duck trousers, made on board the Lydia, had none of the fashionable appearance to which Lady Barbara was accustomed. He looked shabby and he felt shabby, and as he peered at himself in his little mirror he was certain that Lady Barbara would sneer at him. There were grey hairs in his brown curls, too, and then, to his horror, as he straightened his parting, he caught a glimpse of pink scalp – his baldness had increased beyond all measure of late. He eyed himself with complete disgust, and yet he felt that he would gladly give a limb or his remaining hair in exchange for a ribbon and star with which to dazzle Lady Barbara; yet even that would be of no avail, for Lady Barbara had lived all her life in an atmosphere of Garters and Thistles, orders which he could never hope to wear.

  He was on the verge of sending a message to Lady Barbara to say that he had changed his mind and would not dine with her that evening, until he thought that if he did so, after all these preparations, Polwheal would guess that it was the result of his realisation of his shabbiness and would laugh at him (and his shabbiness) in consequence. He went into dinner and had his revenge upon the world by sitting silent and preoccupied at the head of the table, blighting with his gloomy presence all attempts at conversation, so that the function began as a frigid failure. It was a poor sort of revenge, but there was a slight gratification to be found in observing Lady Barbara looking down the table at him in concern. In the end he was deprived even of that, for Lady Barbara suddenly smiled and began talking lightly and captivatingly, and led Bush into describing his experiences at Trafalgar – a tale she had heard, to Hornblower’s certain knowledge, twice at least already.

  The conversation became general, and then animated, for Gerard could not bear to leave all the talking to Bush, and he had to break in with the story of his encounter with an Algerine corsair off Cape Spartel in his old slaving days. It was more than Hornblower’s flesh and
blood could stand, to stay silent with everyone talking in this fashion. Against his will he found himself entering into the conversation, and an artless question from Lady Barbara about Sir Edward Pellew inveigled him still further in, for Hornblower had been both midshipman and lieutenant in Pellew’s ship, and was proud of it. Not until the end of dinner was he able to steady himself, and decline, after the drinking of the King’s health, Lady Barbara’s invitation to a rubber of whist. That at least, he thought, would make an impression on her – it certainly did upon his officers, for he saw Bush and Gerard exchange startled glances on hearing their captain refuse to play whist. Back in his cabin again he listened through the bulkhead to the uproarious game of vingt-et-un which Lady Barbara had suggested instead. He almost wished he was playing, too, even though in his opinion vingt-et-un was a game for the feeble-minded.

  The dinner had served its purpose, however, in making it possible to meet Lady Barbara’s eye again on deck. He could converse with her, too, discussing with her the condition of the few wounded who remained upon the sick list, and after a few morning encounters it was easy to fall into conversation with her during the breathless afternoons and the magic tropical nights as the Lydia held her course over the calm Pacific. He had grown hardened again to his shabby coats and his shapeless trousers; he was forgetting the resentful plans he had once turned over in his mind to confine Lady Barbara to her cabin; and mercifully, his memory was no longer being so acutely troubled by the pictures of el Supremo chained to the deck, of Galbraith dying, and of poor little Clay’s body sprawled headless on the bloody planks – and when those memories lapsed he could no longer accuse himself of being a coward for being worried by them.

  Those were happy days indeed. The routine of the Lydia progressed like clockwork. Almost every hour of every day there was enough wind to give her steerage way, and sometimes it blew just hard enough to relieve the monotony. There were no storms during that endless succession of golden days, and the mind could contemplate its endlessness with tranquillity, for 50 degrees South Latitude seemed impossibly far away; they could enjoy the blissfulness of eternity, disregarding the constant warning conveyed to them as every noontide showed the sun lower in the sky and every midnight showed the South Cross higher.

  They could be friends during those heavenly nights when the ship’s wake showed as a long trail or fire on the faintly luminous water. They learned to talk together, endlessly. She could chatter about the frivolities of the Vice-Regal court at Dublin, and of the intrigues which could enmesh a Governor-General of India; of penniless French émigrés putting purse-proud northern iron-masters in their places; of Lord Byron’s extravagancies and of the Royal Dukes’ stupidities; and Hornblower learned to listen without a twinge of envy.

  He could tell, in return, of months spent on blockade, combating storms off the ironbound Biscay coast, of how Pellew took his frigates into the very surf to sing the Droits-de-l’homme with two thousand men on board, of hardship and cruelty and privation – a monotonous toilsome life as fantastic to her as hers appeared to him. He could even tell her, as his self-consciousness dwindled, of the ambitions which he knew would seem to her as trivial as those of a child yearning for a hobby horse; of the two thousand pounds in prize money which he had decided would be all that he would require to eke out his half-pay, the few acres and the cottage and the shelves and shelves of books.

  And yet she heard without a smile, with even a trace of envy in her calm face as the moon shone down on them; for her own ambitions were far more vague and far less likely to be realised. She hardly knew what it was that she wanted, and she knew that whatever it was, she could only hope to attain it by ensnaring a husband. That an earl’s daughter could envy a penniless frigate captain moved Hornblower inexpressibly, as he watched her face in the moonlight; he was glad even while he was unhappy that Lady Barbara should have to envy anything of anyone.

  They could talk of books and of poetry, and Hornblower championed the cause of the classical school who looked back to the days of Queen Anne against the barbarous leaders of the revolt who seemed to delight in setting every established rule at defiance. She heard him with patience, even with approval, as he talked of Gibbon (the object of his sincerest admiration) and Johnson and Swift, when he quoted from Pope and Gray, but she could approve of the barbarians as well. There was a madman called Wordsworth of whose revolutionary opinions in literature Hornblower had heard with vague horror; Lady Barbara thought there was something to be said for him. She turned the tables neatly on Hornblower by claiming Gray as a precursor of the same school; she quoted Campbell and that Gothic innovator, Scott, and she won Hornblower’s grudging approval of an ungainly poem called ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ although he maintained sturdily, in the last ditch, that its only merit lay in its content, and that it would have been infinitely better had Pope dealt with the theme in heroic couplets – especially if Pope had been assisted by someone who knew more about navigation and seamanship than did this Coleridge fellow.

  Lady Barbara wondered vaguely, sometimes, whether it was not strange that a naval officer should be so earnest a student of literature, but she was learning rapidly. Sea captains were not all of a class, as the uninitiated might carelessly decide. From Bush and Gerard and Crystal as well as from Hornblower she had heard of captains who write Greek elegiacs, of captains who cluttered up their cabins with marbles looted from the Greek islands, captains who classified sea-urchins and corresponded with Cuvier – these on the one hand, just as there were captains who delighted in seeing human back lacerated with the cat-o’-nine-tails, captains who drank themselves insensible every night and who raised hell in their ships during bouts of delirium tremens, captains who starved their crews and captains who turned up all hands at every bell, night and day. She found that she was sure, all the same, that Hornblower was an outstanding member of a class which people on shore tended not to credit with nearly as much ability as they actually possessed.

  She had, from the time of her first arrival on board, found pleasure in Hornblower’s society. Now they had formed a habit of each other, as though they were insidious drugs, and were vaguely uneasy when out of sight of each other. The voyage had been monotonous enough, as the Lydia held steadily southwards, for habits to be easily formed; it had become a habit to exchange a smile when they met on the quarterdeck in the morning – a smile illumined by secret memories of the intimacy of the conversation of the night before. It was a habit now for Hornblower to discuss the ship’s progress with Lady Barbara after he had taken the noon sights, a habit now for him to drink coffee with her in the afternoons, and especially was it a habit for them to meet at sunset by the taffrail, although no appointment had been made and no hint of their meeting had ever been suggested, and to lounge in the warm darkness while conversation grew up, seemingly from no roots at all, and blossomed and flowered exotically, under the magic brilliance of the stars until with a reluctance of which they were hardly conscious they drifted off to bed, hours after midnight.

  They could even sit silent together now, watching, wordlessly, the mastheads circling amid the stars with the rolling of the ship, listening to the faint orchestra of the ship’s fabric, and their thoughts paralleling each other’s so that when eventually one of them spoke it was to harmonise completely with what was in the other’s mind. At those times Lady Barbara’s hand, like a healthy young woman’s, was at her side where it could be touched without too great effort. When she had not wanted them to do so men had taken her hand often before, at London balls and Governor-Generals’ receptions, but now, conscious though she was of how reckless and imprudent it would be to encourage the slightest physical intimacy on this voyage with months more to last, she still was reckless and imprudent enough to risk it without attempting to analyse her motives. But Hornblower seemed unconscious of that hand. She would see her face lifted to the stars, peaceful and immobile, and she found pleasure in giving herself credit for the change in it from that evening when she
had talked with Bush and seen Hornblower’s torment.

  For happy weeks that phase of the voyage lasted, while the Lydia ran steadily south and still more south, until the evenings grew chill and the mornings misty, until the blue sky changed to grey and the first rain they had known for three weeks wetted the Lydia’s decks, and the west wind blew more blustering and searching, so that Lady Barbara had to wrap herself in a boat cloak to be able to sit on deck at all. Those evenings by the taffrail came to an imperceptible end, and the Lydia thrashed along through half a gale, and it grew steadily colder, even though this was the Antipodean summer. For the first time in her life Lady Barbara saw Hornblower dressed in tarpaulins and sou’wester, and she thought oddly, how well those hideous garments suited him. There were times when he would come sauntering into the cabin, his eyes bright and his cheeks flushed with wind, and she felt her pulses leap in sympathy with his.

  She knew she was being foolish. She told herself that this weakness of hers only arose because Hornblower was the one man with any culture or any trace of eligibility on board the Lydia, and because life in close contact with him for four continuous months was bound to make her either love him or hate him – and as there was no room for hatred in her system the other thing was inevitable. She told herself, too, that as soon as she returned to civilisation, as soon as she could see Hornblower against that usual background of hers which had faded with the passage of the months almost out of her memory, he would lose his interest and his charm.

  On board ship one saw things in a false perspective, she informed herself. Salt beef and salt pork, weevilly bread and dried peas, with a glass of lemon juice twice a week; that meant monotony. Trifles assumed an exaggerated importance when leading a life like that. Just as toothache tended to disappear when something occurred to distract the mind, so would this heartache of hers disappear when she had other things to think about. It was all very true; but strangely it made not the least difference to her present feelings.