Admiral Hornblower

by C. S. Forester

  ‘Ahoy! Cap’n, Cap’n! Oh, Cap’n!’

  ‘I’m here,’ moaned Hornblower, and Brown came and knelt over him.

  ‘Thank God, sir,’ he said, and then, raising his voice ‘The cap’n’s here, Mr Bush.’

  ‘Good!’ said a feeble voice five yards away.

  At that Hornblower fought down his nauseating weakness and sat up. If Bush were still alive he must be looked after at once. He must be naked and wet, exposed in the snow to this cutting wind. Hornblower reeled to his feet, staggered, clutched Brown’s arm, and stood with his brain whirling.

  ‘There’s a light up there, sir,’ said Brown, hoarsely. ‘I was just goin’ to it if you hadn’t answered my hail.’

  ‘A light?’

  Hornblower passed his hands over his eyes and peered up the bank. Undoubtedly it was a light shining faintly, perhaps a hundred yards away. To go there meant surrender – that was the first reaction of Hornblower’s mind. But to stay here meant death. Even if by a miracle they could light a fire and survive the night here they would be caught next morning – and Bush would be dead for certain. There had been a faint chance of life when he planned the escape from the coach, and now it was gone.

  ‘We’ll carry Mr Bush up,’ he said.

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  They plunged through the snow to where Bush lay.

  ‘There’s a house just up the bank, Bush. We’ll carry you there.’

  Hornblower was puzzled by his ability to think and to speak while he felt so weak; the ability seemed unreal, fictitious.

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  They stooped and lifted him up between them, linking hands under his knees and behind his back. Bush put his arms round their necks; the flannel nightshirt dripped a further stream of water as they lifted him. Then they started trudging, knee deep in the snow, up the bank towards the distant light.

  They stumbled over obstructions hidden in the snow. They slipped and staggered. Then they slid down a bank and fell, all together, and Bush gave a cry of pain.

  ‘Hurt, sir?’ asked Brown.

  ‘Only jarred my stump. Captain, leave me here and send down help from the house.’

  Hornblower could still think. Without Bush to burden them they might reach the house a little quicker, but he could imagine all the delays that would ensue after they had knocked at the door – the explanations which would have to be made in his halting French, the hesitation and the time-wasting before he could get a carrying party started off to find Bush – who meanwhile would be lying wet and naked in the snow. A quarter of an hour of it would kill Bush, and he might be exposed for twice as long as that. And there was the chance that there would be no one in the house to help carry him.

  ‘No,’ said Hornblower cheerfully. ‘It’s only a little way. Lift, Brown.’

  They reeled along through the snow towards the light. Bush was a heavy burden – Hornblower’s head was swimming with fatigue and his arms felt as if they were being dragged out of their sockets. Yet somehow within the shell of his fatigue the inner kernel of his brain was still active and restless.

  ‘How did you get out of the river?’ he asked, his voice sounding flat and unnatural in his ears.

  ‘Current took us to the bank at once, sir,’ said Bush, faintly surprised. ‘I’d only just kicked my blankets off when I touched a rock, and there was Brown beside me hauling me out.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Hornblower.

  The whim of a river in flood was fantastic; the three of them had been within a yard of each other when they entered the water, and he had been dragged under while the other two had been carried to safety. They could not guess at his desperate straggle for life, and they would never know of it, for he would never be able to tell them about it. He felt for the moment a bitter sense of grievance against them, resulting from his weariness and his weakness. He was breathing heavily, and he felt as if he would give a fortune to lay down his burden and rest for a couple of minutes; but his pride forbade, and they went on through the snow, stumbling over the inequalities below the surface. The light was coming near at last.

  They heard a faint inquiring bark from a dog.

  ‘Give ’em a hail, Brown,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘Ahoy!’ roared Brown. ‘House ahoy!’

  Instantly two dogs burst into a clamorous barking.

  ‘Ahoy!’ yelled Brown again, and they staggered on. Another light flashed into view from another part of the house. They seemed to be in some kind of garden now; Hornblower could feel plants crushing under his feet in the snow, and the thorns of a rose tree tore at his trouser leg. The dogs were barking furiously. Suddenly a voice came from a dark upper window.

  ‘Who is there?’ it asked in French.

  Hornblower prodded at his weary brain to find words to reply.

  ‘Three men,’ he said. ‘Wounded.’

  That was the best he could do.

  ‘Come nearer,’ said the voice, and they staggered forward, slipped down an unseen incline, and halted in the square of light cast by the big lighted window in the ground floor, Bush in his nightshirt resting in the arms of the bedraggled other two.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Prisoners of war,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘Wait one moment, if you please,’ said the voice politely.

  They stood shuddering in the snow until a door opened near the lighted window, showing a bright rectangle of light and some human silhouettes.

  ‘Come in, gentlemen,’ said the polite voice.

  VII

  The door opened into a stone-flagged hall; a tall thin man in a blue coat with a glistening white cravat stood there to welcome them, and at his side was a young woman, her shoulders bare in the lamplight. There were three others, too – maidservants and a butler, Hornblower fancied vaguely, as he advanced into the hall under the burden of Bush’s weight. On a side table the lamplight caught the ivory butts of a pair of pistols, evidently laid there by their host on his deciding that his nocturnal visitors were harmless. Hornblower and Brown halted again for a moment, ragged and dishevelled and daubed with snow, and water began to trickle at once to the floor from their soaking garments; and Bush was between them, one foot in a grey worsted sock sticking out under the hem of his flannel nightshirt. Hornblower’s constitutional weakness almost overcame him again and he had to struggle hard to keep himself from giggling as he wondered how these people were explaining to themselves the arrival of a nightshirted cripple out of a snowy night.

  At least his host had sufficient self-control to show no surprise.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. He put his hand to a door beside him and then withdrew it. ‘You will need a better fire than I can offer you in the drawing-room. Felix, show the way to the kitchen – I trust you gentlemen will pardon my receiving you there? This way, sirs. Chairs, Felix, and send the maids away.’

  It was a vast, low-ceilinged room, stone-flagged like the hall. Its grateful warmth was like Paradise; in the hearth glowed the remains of a fire and all round them kitchen utensils winked and glittered. The woman without a word piled fresh billets of wood upon the fire and set to work with bellows to work up a blaze. Hornblower noticed the glimmer of her silk dress; her piled-up hair was golden, nearly auburn.

  ‘Cannot Felix do that, Marie, my dear? Very well, then. As you will,’ said their host. ‘Please sit down, gentlemen. Wine, Felix.’

  They lowered Bush into a chair before the fire. He sagged and wavered in his weakness, and they had to support him; their host clucked in sympathy.

  ‘Hurry with those glasses, Felix, and then attend to the beds. A glass of wine, sir? And for you, sir? Permit me.’

  The woman he had addressed as ‘Marie’ had risen from her knees, and withdrew silently; the fire was crackling bravely amid its battery of roasting spits and cauldrons. Hornblower was shivering uncontrollably, nevertheless, in his dripping clothes. The glass of wine he drank was of no help to him; the hand he rested on Bush’s shoulder shook like a leaf.
/>   ‘You will need dry clothes,’ said their host. ‘If you will permit me, I will—’

  He was interrupted by the re-entrance of the butler and Marie, both of them with their arms full of clothes and blankets.

  ‘Admirable!’ said their host. ‘Felix, you will attend these gentlemen. Come, my dear.’

  The butler held a silken nightshirt to the blaze while Hornblower and Brown stripped Bush of his wet clothes and chafed him with a towel.

  ‘I thought I should never be warm again,’ said Bush, when his head came out through the collar of the nightshirt. ‘And you, sir? You shouldn’t have troubled about me. Won’t you change your clothes now, sir? I’m all right.’

  ‘We’ll see you comfortable first,’ said Hornblower. There was a fierce perverse pleasure in neglecting himself to attend to Bush. ‘Let me look at that stump of yours.’

  The blunt seamed end still appeared extraordinarily healthy. There was no obvious heat or inflammation when Hornblower took it in his hand, no sign of pus exuding from the scars. Felix found a cloth in which Hornblower bound it up, while Brown wrapped him about in a blanket.

  ‘Lift him now, Brown. We’ll put him into bed.’

  Outside in the flagged hall they hesitated as to which way to turn, when Marie suddenly appeared from the left-hand door.

  ‘In here,’ she said; her voice was a harsh contralto. ‘I have had a bed made up on the ground floor for the wounded man. I thought it would be more convenient.’

  One maid – a gaunt old woman, rather – had just taken a warming pan from between the sheets; the other was slipping a couple of hot bottles into the bed. Hornblower was impressed by Marie’s practical forethought. He tried with poor success to phrase his thanks in French while they lowered Bush into bed and covered him up.

  ‘God, that’s good, thank you, sir,’ said Bush.

  They left him with a candle burning at his bedside – Hornblower was in a perfect panic now to strip off his wet clothes before that roaring kitchen fire. He towelled himself with a warm towel and slipped into a warm woollen shirt; standing with his bare legs toasting before the blaze he drank a second glass of wine. Fatigue and cold fell away from him, and he felt exhilarated and lightheaded as a reaction. Felix crouched before him tendering him a pair of trousers, and he stepped into them and suffered Felix to tuck in his shirt tails and button him up – it was the first time since childhood that he had been helped into his trousers, but this evening it seemed perfectly natural. Felix crouched again to put on his socks and shoes, stood to buckle his stock and help him on with waistcoat and coat.

  ‘Monsieur le Comte and Madame la Vicomtesse await monsieur in the drawing room,’ said Felix – it was odd how, without a word of explanation, Felix had ascertained that Brown was of a lower social level. The very clothes he had allotted to Brown indicated that.

  ‘Make yourself comfortable here, Brown,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Brown, standing at attention with his black hair in a rampant mass – only Hornblower had had an opportunity so far of using a comb.

  Hornblower stepped in to look at Bush, who was already asleep, snoring faintly at the base of his throat. He seemed to have suffered no ill effects from his immersion and exposure – his iron frame must have grown accustomed to wet and cold during twenty-five years at sea. Hornblower blew out the candle and softly closed the door, motioning to the butler to precede him. At the drawing-room door Felix asked Hornblower his name, and when he announced him Hornblower was oddly relieved to hear him make a sad hash of the pronunciation – it made Felix human again.

  His host and hostess were seated on either side of the fire at the far end of the room, and the Count rose to meet him.

  ‘I regret,’ he said, ‘that I did not quite hear the name which my major-domo announced.’

  ‘Captain Horatio Hornblower, of His Britannic Majesty’s ship Sutherland,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘It is the greatest pleasure to meet you, Captain,’ said the Count, sidestepping the difficulty of pronunciation with the agility to be expected of a representative of the old régime. ‘I am Lucien Antoine de Ladon, Comte de Graçay.’

  The men exchanged bows.

  ‘May I present you to my daughter-in-law? Madame la Vicomtesse de Graçay.’

  ‘Your servant, ma’am,’ said Hornblower, bowing again, and then felt like a graceless lout because the English formula had risen to his lips by the instinct the action prompted. He hurriedly racked his brains for the French equivalent, and ended in a shamefaced mumble of ‘Enchanté.’

  The Vicomtesse had black eyes in the maddest contrast with her nearly auburn hair. She was stoutly – one might almost say stockily – built, and was somewhere near thirty years of age, dressed in black silk which left sturdy white shoulders exposed. As she curtseyed her eyes met his in complete friendliness.

  ‘And what is the name of the wounded gentleman whom we have the honour of entertaining?’ she asked; even to Hornblower’s unaccustomed ear her French had a different quality from the Count’s.

  ‘Bush,’ said Hornblower, grasping the import of the question with an effort. ‘First lieutenant of my ship. I have left my servant, Brown, in the kitchen.’

  ‘Felix will see that he is comfortable,’ interposed the Count. ‘What of yourself, Captain? Some food? A glass of wine?’

  ‘Nothing, thank you,’ said Hornblower. He felt in no need of food in this mad world, although he had not eaten since noon.

  ‘Nothing, despite the fatigues of your journey?’

  There could hardly be a more delicate allusion than that to Hornblower’s recent arrival through the snow, drenched and battered.

  ‘Nothing, thank you,’ repeated Hornblower.

  ‘Will you not sit down, Captain?’ asked the Vicomtesse.

  They all three found themselves chairs.

  ‘You will pardon us, I hope,’ said the Count ‘if we continue to speak French. It is ten years since I last had occasion to speak English, and even then I was a poor scholar, while my daughter-in-law speaks none.’

  ‘Bush,’ said the Vicomtesse. ‘Brown. I can say those names. But your name, Captain, is difficult. Orrenblor – I cannot say it.’

  ‘Bush! Orrenblor!’ exclaimed the Count, as though reminded of something. ‘I suppose you are aware, Captain, of what the French newspapers have been saying about you recently?’

  ‘No,’ said Hornblower. ‘I should like to know, very much.’

  ‘Pardon me, then.’

  The Count took up a candle and disappeared through a door; he returned quickly enough to save Hornblower from feeling too self-conscious in the silence that ensued.

  ‘Here are recent copies of the Moniteur,’ said the Count. ‘I must apologise in advance, Captain, for the statements made in them.’

  He passed the newspapers over to Hornblower, indicating various columns in them. The first one briefly announced that a dispatch by semaphore just received from Perpignan informed the Ministry of Marine that an English ship of the line had been captured at Rosas. The next was the amplification. It proclaimed in triumphant detail that the hundred-gun ship Sutherland which had been committing acts of piracy in the Mediterranean had met a well-deserved fate at the hands of the Toulon fleet directed by Admiral Cosmao. She had been caught unawares and overwhelmed, and had ‘pusillanimously hauled down the colours of perfidious Albion under which she had committed so many dastardly crimes’. The French public was assured that her resistance had been of the poorest, it being advanced in corroboration that only one French ship had lost a topmast during the cannonade. The action took place under the eyes of thousands of the Spanish populace, and would be a salutary lesson to those few among them who, deluded by English lies or seduced by English gold, still cherished notions of resistance to their lawful sovereign King Joseph.

  Another article announced that the infamous Captain Hornblower and his equally wicked lieutenant Bush had surrendered in the Sutherland, the latter being one of the few wo
unded in the encounter. All those peace-loving French citizens who had suffered as a result of their piratical depredations could rest assured that a military court would inquire immediately into the crimes these two had committed. Too long had the modern Carthage sent forth her minions to execute her vile plans with impunity! Their guilt would soon be demonstrated to a world which would readily discriminate between the truth and the vile lies which the poisoned pens in Canning’s pay so persistently poured forth.

  Yet another article declared that as a result of Admiral Cosmao’s great victory over the Sutherland at Rosas English naval action on the coasts of Spain had ceased, and the British army of Wellington, so imprudently exposed to the might of the French arms, was already suffering seriously from a shortage of supplies. Having lost one vile accomplice in the person of the detestable Hornblower, perfidious Albion was about to lose another on Wellington’s inevitable surrender.

  Hornblower read the smudgy columns in impotent fury. ‘A hundred-gun ship’, forsooth, when the Sutherland was only a seventy-four and almost the smallest of her rate in the list! ‘Resistance of the poorest’! ‘One topmast lost’! The Sutherland had beaten three bigger ships into wrecks and had disabled a fourth before surrendering. ‘One of the few wounded’! Two-thirds of the Sutherland’s crew had given life or limb, and with his own eyes he had seen the blood running from the scuppers of the French flagship. ‘English naval action had ceased’! There was not a hint that a fortnight after the capture of the Sutherland the whole French squadron had been destroyed in the night attack on Rosas Bay.

  His professional honour had been impugned; the circumstantial lies had been well told, too – that subtle touch about only one topmast being lost had every appearance of verisimilitude. Europe might well believe that he was a poltroon as well as a pirate, and he had not the slightest chance of contradicting what had been said. Even in England such reports must receive a little credit – most of the Moniteur’s bulletins, especially the naval ones, were reproduced in the English press. Lady Barbara, Maria, his brother captains, must all be wondering at the present moment just how much credence should be given to the Moniteur’s statements. Accustomed as the world might be to Bonaparte’s exaggerations people could hardly be expected to realise that in this case everything said – save for the bare statement of his surrender – had been completely untrue. His hands shook a little with the passion that consumed him, and he was conscious of the hot flush in his cheeks as he looked up and met the eyes of the others. It was hard to grope for his few French words while he was so angry.