Admiral Hornblower

by C. S. Forester

  ‘All right, I’ll come,’ said Hornblower. ‘Forgive me, my dear.’

  ‘Boney’s been beaten again,’ said Dobbs, gleefully, the moment they were out of the bedroom. ‘The Prussians have taken Soissons and cut up two of Boney’s army corps. But that’s not all.’

  By now they were in the office and Dobbs produced another despatch for Hornblower’s perusal.

  ‘London’s going to put some force at our disposal at last, sir,’ explained Dobbs. ‘The militia have begun to volunteer for foreign service – now that the war’s nearly over – and we can have as many battalions as we want. This should be answered by tonight’s packet, sir.’

  Hornblower tried to shake from his mind thoughts about hair powder, about Hebe’s amorous proclivities, to deal with this new problem regarding the launching of a campaign up the Seine valley against Paris. What did he know about the military capacity of the militia? He would have to have a general to command them, who would certainly be senior in rank to himself. What was the law regarding seniority as between a governor appointed by letters-patent and officers commanding troops? He ought to know, but it was not easy to remember the wording. He read the despatch through once without comprehending a word of it and had to apply himself to it again seriously from the beginning. He put aside the temptation that momentarily assailed him, to throw the despatch down and tell Dobbs to act according to his own judgment; mastering himself, he began soberly to dictate his reply. As he warmed to his work he had to restrain himself so as to give Dobbs’ flying pen a chance to keep up with him.

  When it was all done, and he had dashed off his signature on a dozen documents, he went back to the bedroom. Barbara was before the mirror, looking herself over in a white brocade gown, feathers in her hair and jewels at her throat and ears; Hebe was standing by her with the train ready to attach. Hornblower stopped short at sight of Barbara, lovely and dignified, but it was not only her distinguished appearance that checked him. It was also the sudden realisation that he could not have Brown in to help him dress, not here. He could not exchange his trousers for breeches and stockings with Barbara and Hebe and Brown all present. He made his apologies, for Brown, aware by his usual sixth sense that Hornblower had finished his office work, was already tapping at the door. They gathered up whatever they thought they might need and went into the dressing-room – even here women’s perfumes were instantly noticeable – and Hornblower began hurriedly to dress. The breeches and stockings, the gold-embroidered sword-belt. Brown had already, as might have been expected, found a woman in the town who could starch neckcloths admirably, stiff enough to retain their curves when folded, and yet soft enough not to snap in the bending. Brown hung a dressing-gown over Hornblower’s shoulders, and Hornblower sat with his head lowered while Brown plied the flour-dredger and comb. When he straightened up and looked in the mirror he felt a sneaking pleasure at the result. He had allowed what was left of his curls to grow long lately, simply because he had been too busy to have his hair cropped, and Brown had combed the snow-white mop to the best advantage so that no trace of bare scalp was visible. The powdered hair set off his weather-beaten face and brown eyes admirably. The cheeks were a little hollow and the eyes a little melancholy, but it was by no means the face of an old man, so that the white hair made a most effective contrast, giving him the youthful appearance and calling that attention to his personality which presumably the fashion had in mind when it began. The blue and gold of the uniform, the white of neckcloth and powder, the ribbon of the Bath and the glittering star set him off as a very personable figure. He could wish he had more calf inside the stockings; that was the only fault he could find with his appearance. He made sure that his belt and sword were properly adjusted, put his hat under his arm, picked up his gloves, and went back into the bedroom, remembering in the nick of time to pound on the door before he turned the handle.

  Barbara was ready; stately, almost like a statue, in her white brocade. The likeness to a statue was something more than what a casual simile implied; Hornblower remembered a statue of Diana that he had seen somewhere – was it Diana? – with the end of her robe caught up over her left arm exactly the way Barbara was carrying her train. Her powdered hair made her face seem a little cold in its expression, for the style did not suit her colouring and features. A glance at it reminded Hornblower of Diana again. She smiled when she saw him.

  ‘The handsomest man in the British Navy,’ she said.

  He gave her a clumsy bow in return.

  ‘I only wish I were worthy of my lady,’ he said.

  She took his arm and stood beside him in front of the mirror. Because of her height her feathers overtopped him; she nicked open her fan with an effective gesture.

  ‘How do you think we look?’ she asked.

  ‘As I said,’ repeated Hornblower, ‘I only wish I were worthy of you.’

  Brown and Hebe were gaping at them behind them, as he could see in the mirror, and Barbara’s reflection smiled at him.

  ‘We must go,’ she said, with a pressure upon his arm.’ It would never do to keep Monseigneur waiting.’

  They had to walk from one end of the Hôtel de Ville to the other, through corridors and ante-rooms filled with a multitude dressed in every type of uniform – it was a curious chance that had made this not very distinguished building a seat of government, the palace of a regent, the headquarters of an invading army, and the flagship of a squadron, too, for that matter, all at the same time. People saluted and drew aside respectfully against the walls as they went by – Hornblower had a clear notion of what it felt like to be royalty as he acknowledged the compliments on either side. There was noticeable an obsequiousness and a subservience very unlike the disciplined respect he was accustomed to receive in a ship. Barbara sailed along beside him; the glances that Hornblower stole at her sidelong showed her to him as struggling conscientiously against the artificiality of her smile.

  A silly wave of feeling came over him; he wished he were some simple-minded fellow who could rejoice naturally and artlessly in the unexpected arrival of his wife, who could take lusty pleasure of her without self-consciousness. He knew himself to be absurdly sensitive to minute influences, even influences that did not exist except in his own ridiculous imagination but which were none the less powerful. His mind was like a bad ship’s-compass, not sufficiently deadbeat, wavering uncertainly and swinging to every little variation of course, swinging more widely in response to the correction, until at the hands of a poor helmsman the ship would find herself chasing her tail or taken all aback. He felt as if he were chasing his tail at the present moment; it made no difference to the complexity of his relations with his wife to know that it was all his fault, that her emotions towards him would be simple and straightforward did they not reflect his own tangled feelings – on the contrary, thinking about that made confusion worse confounded.

  He tried to fling off his melancholy, to cling to some simple fact or other to steady himself, and with frightful clarity one of the central facts in his consciousness made its appearance in his mind, horribly real – like the memory of a man he had once seen hanged, writhing with handkerchief-covered face at the end of a rope. He had not yet told Barbara about it.

  ‘Dear,’ he said, ‘you didn’t know. Bush is dead.’

  He felt Barbara’s hand twitch on his arm, but her face still looked like that of a smiling statue.

  ‘He was killed, four days back,’ babbled on Hornblower with the madness of those whom the gods wish to destroy.

  It was an insane thing to say to a woman about to walk into a royal reception, on the very point of setting her foot across the threshold, but Hornblower was sublimely unconscious of his offence. Yet he had at that last moment the perspicacity to realise – what he had not realised before – that this was one of the great moments of Barbara’s life; that when she had been dressing, when she had smiled at him in the mirror, her heart had been singing with anticipation. It had not occurred to his stupidity that she could e
njoy this sort of function, that it could give her pleasure to sail into a glittering room on the arm of Sir Horatio Hornblower, the man of the hour. He had been taking it for granted that she would extend to these ceremonies the same sort of strained tolerance that he felt.

  ‘Their Excellencies the Governor and Milady Barbara ’Ornblor,’ blared the major-domo at the door.

  Every eye turned towards them as they entered. The last thing that Hornblower was conscious of, before he plunged into the imbecilities of a social function, was that he had somehow spoiled his wife’s evening, and there was some angry resentment in his heart; against her, not against himself.

  XV

  The militia had arrived, pouring, still green with seasickness, from the close-packed transports. They were something better than a rabble in their scarlet uniforms; they could form line and column, and could march off smartly enough behind the regimental bands, even though they could not help gaping at the strangeness of this foreign town. But they drank themselves into madness or stupor at every opportunity, they insulted the women either innocently or criminally, they were guilty of theft and of wanton damage and of all the other crimes of imperfectly disciplined troops. The officers – one battalion was commanded by an earl, another by a baronet – were not sufficiently experienced to keep their men in hand. Hornblower, facing the indignant protests of the Mayor and the civil authorities, was glad when the horse-transports came in bringing the two regiments of yeomanry that had been promised him. They provided the cavalry he needed for an advanced guard, so that now he could send his little army out in its push towards Rouen, towards Paris itself.

  He was at breakfast with Barbara when the news arrived; Barbara in a grey-blue informal garment with the silver coffee-pot before her, pouring his coffee, and being helped by him to bacon and eggs – a domesticity that was still unreal to him. He had been hard at work for three hours before he had come in to breakfast, and he was still too set in his ways to make the change easily from a military atmosphere to one of connubial intimacy.

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ said Barbara, accepting the plate from him.

  A thump at the door.

  ‘Come in!’ yelled Hornblower.

  It was Dobbs, one of the few people privileged to knock at that door when Sir Horatio was at breakfast with his wife.

  ‘Despatch from the army, sir. The Frogs have gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Up-stick and away, sir. Quiot marched for Paris last night. There’s not a French soldier in Rouen.’

  The report that Hornblower took from Dobbs’ hand merely repeated in more formal language what Dobbs had said. Bonaparte must be desperate for troops to defend his capital; by recalling Quiot he had left all Normandy exposed to the invader.

  ‘We must follow him up,’ said Hornblower to himself, and then to Dobbs, ‘Tell Howard – no I’ll come myself. Excuse me, my dear.’

  ‘Is there not even time,’ said Barbara to him, sternly, ‘to drink your coffee and eat your breakfast?’

  The struggle on Hornblower’s face was so apparent that she laughed outright at him.

  ‘Drake,’ she went on, ‘had time to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too. I was taught that in the schoolroom.’

  ‘You’re quite right, my dear,’ said Hornblower. ‘Dobbs, I’ll be with you in ten minutes.’

  Hornblower applied himself to bacon and eggs. Maybe it would be good for discipline, in the best sense of the term, if it became known that the legendary Hornblower, the man of so many exploits, was human enough to listen sometimes to his wife’s protests.

  ‘This is victory,’ he said, looking at Barbara across the table. ‘This is the end.’

  He knew it in his soul now; he had arrived at this conclusion by no mere intellectual process. The tyrant of Europe, the man who had bathed the world in blood, was about to fall. Barbara met his eyes, and their emotion admitted of no words. The world which had been at war since their childhood was about to know peace, and peace had something of the unknown about it.

  ‘Peace,’ said Barbara.

  Hornblower felt a little unsteady. It was impossible for him to analyse his feelings, for he had no data from which to begin his deductions. He had joined the Navy as a boy, and he had known war ever since; he could know nothing of the Hornblower, the purely hypothetical Hornblower, who would have existed had there been no war. Twenty-one years of frightful strain, of peril and hardship, had made a very different man of him from what he would have become otherwise. Hornblower was no born fighting man; he was a talented and sensitive individual whom chance had forced into fighting, and his talents had brought him success as a fighter just as they would have brought him success in other walks of life, but he had had to pay a higher price. His morbid sensitiveness, his touchy pride, the quirks and weaknesses of his character might well be the result of the strains and sorrows he had had to endure. There was a coldness between him and his wife at the moment (a coldness masked by camaraderie; the passion to which both of them had given free rein had done nothing to dispel it) which might in large part be attributed to the defects of his character – a small part of it was Barbara’s fault, but most of it was his.

  Hornblower wiped his mouth and stood up.

  ‘I really should go, dear,’ he said. ‘Please forgive me.’

  ‘Of course you must go if you have your duty to do,’ she answered, and held up her lips to him.

  He kissed her and hurried from the room. Even with the kiss on his lips he knew that it was a mistake for a man to have his wife with him on active service; it was liable to soften him, to say nothing of the practical inconveniences, like the occasion two nights ago when an urgent message had to be brought in to him when he was in bed with Barbara.

  In the office he read the reconnaissance report again. It stated unequivocally that no contact could be made with any Imperial troops whatever, and that prominent citizens of Rouen, escaping from the town, assured the outposts that not a Bonapartist soldier remained there. Rouen was his for the taking, and obviously the tendency to desert Bonaparte and join the Bourbons was becoming more and more marked. Every day the number of people who came into Le Havre by road or by boat to make their submission to the Duke grew larger and larger.

  ‘Vive le Roi!’ was what they called out as they neared the sentries. ‘Long live the King!’

  That was the password which marked the Bourbonist – no Bonapartist, no Jacobin, no republican would soil his lips with those words. And the number of deserters and refractory conscripts who came pouring in was growing enormous. The ranks of Bonaparte’s army were leaking like a sieve, and Bonaparte would find it difficult to replace the missing ones, when his conscripts were taking to the woods or fleeing to English protection to avoid service. It might be thought possible that a Bourbonist army could be built up from this material, but the attempt was a failure from the start. Those runaways objected not merely to fighting for Bonaparte, but to fighting at all. The Royalist army which Angoulême had been sent here to organise still numbered less than a thousand men, and of these thousand more than half were officers, old émigrés sent here after serving in the armies of the enemies of France.

  But Rouen awaited a conqueror, nevertheless. His militia brigade could tramp the miry roads to the city, and he and Angoulême could get into carriages and drive after them. He would have to make the entrance as spectacular as possible; the capital of Normandy was no mean city, and beyond it lay Paris, quivering and sensitive. A fresh idea struck him. In eastern France the allied monarchs were riding every few days into some new captured town. It was in his power to escort Angoulême into Rouen in more spectacular fashion, demonstrating at the same time the long arm of England’s sea-power, and rubbing in the lesson that it was England’s naval strength which had turned the balance of the war. The wind was westerly; he was a little vague about the state of the tide, but he could wait until it should serve.

  ‘Captain Howard,’ he said, looking up, ‘warn Flame and Porta Coeli
to be ready to get under way. I shall take the Duke and Duchess up to Rouen by water. And their whole suite – yes, I’ll take Lady Barbara too. Warn the captains to make preparations for their reception and accommodation. Send me Hau to settle the details. Colonel Dobbs, would you be interested in a little yachting trip?’

  It seemed indeed like a yachting trip next morning, when they gathered on the quarterdeck of the Porta Coeli, a group of men in brilliant uniforms and women in gay dresses. Porta Coeli had already warped away from the quay, from which they rowed out to her, and Freeman, at a nod from Hornblower, had only to bellow the orders for sail to be set and the anchor hove in for them to start up the broad estuary. The sun was shining with the full promise of spring, the wavelets gleamed and danced. Down below decks, Hornblower could guess from the sounds, there was trouble and toil, while they were still trying to rig accommodation for the royal party, but here by the taffrail all was laughter and expectancy. And it was heavenly to tread a deck again, to feel the wind on his cheeks, to look aft and see Flame under all fore-and-aft sail in her station astern, to have the white ensign overhead and his broad pendant hoisted, even though the Bourbon white and gold flew beside it.

  He met Barbara’s eye and smiled at her; the Duke and Duchess condescended to step to his side and engage him in conversation. The fairway led close by the northern shore of the estuary; they passed Harfleur, and the battery there exchanged salutes with them. They were bowling up the channel at a full eight knots, faster than if they had gone in carriages, but of course when the river began to narrow and to wind it might be a different story. The southern shore came northward to meet them, the flat green shore becoming more and more defined, until in a flash, as it seemed, they were out of the estuary and between the banks of the river, leaving Quillebœuf behind and opening up the long reach that led to Caudebec, the left bank green pasture-land studded with fat farms, the right bank lofty and wooded. Over went the helm, the sheets were hauled in. But with the wind tending to funnel up the valley it was still well over their quarter, and with the racing tide behind them they fairly tore along the river. Luncheon was announced, and the party trooped below, the women squealing at the lowness of the decks and the difficulty of the companion. Bulkheads had been ripped out and replaced to make ample room for royalty – Hornblower guessed that half the crew would be sleeping on deck in consequence of the presence of the Duke and Duchess. The royal servants, assisted by the wardroom stewards – the former as embarrassed by their surroundings as the latter by the company on whom they had to wait – began to serve the food, but luncheon had hardly begun when Freeman came in to whisper to Hornblower as he sat between the Duchess and the dame d’honneur.