Hornblower and the Atropos h-6

by Cecil Scott Forester

  “I can hazard a good guess as to how she bears from us,” interposed the English captain, “I saw—oh!”

  He broke off exactly as Lebon had done, but from surprise. He was staring at Hornblower. It was like the denouement scene in some silly farce. The lost heir was at last revealed. The idea of now accepting the admiration of his unwitting fellow players, of modestly admitting that he was not the monster of ferocity he had pretended to be, irritated Hornblower beyond all bearing. All his instincts and good taste rose against the trite and the obvious. Now that he had acquired the information he had sought he could please himself as long as he acted instantly on that information. The scowl he wished to retain rested the more easily on his features with this revulsion of feeling.

  “I’d be sorry to miss a hanging,” he said, half to himself, and he allowed his eye to wander again from the dangling noose to the shrinking group of Frenchmen who were still ignorant of what had just happened. “If that thick neck were stretched a little—”

  He broke off and took a brief turn up and down the deck, eyed by every man who stood on it.

  “Very well,” he said, halting. “It’s against my better judgment, but I’ll wait before I hang these men. What was the approximate bearing of that trawler when she anchored, captain?”

  “It was at slack water,” began the captain, making his calculations. “We were just beginning to swing. I should say—”

  The captain was obviously a man of sober judgment and keen observation. Hornblower listened to what he had to say.

  “Very well,” said Hornblower when he had finished. “Leadbitter, I’ll leave you on board with two men. Keep an eye on these prisoners and see they don’t retake the brig. I’m returning to the ship now. Wait here for further orders.”

  He went down into his gig; the captain accompanying him to the ship’s side was clearly and gratifyingly puzzled. It was almost beyond his belief that Hornblower could be the demoniac monster that he had appeared to be, and if he were it was strange good fortune that his ferocity should have obtained, by pure chance, the information that the prisoners had just given him. Yet on the other hand it was almost beyond his belief that if Hornblower had employed a clever ruse to gain the information he should refuse to enjoy the plaudits of his audience and not to bask in their surprise and admiration. Either notion was puzzling. That was well. Let him be puzzled. Let them all be puzzled—although it seemed as if the sobered hands pulling at the oars of the gig were not at all puzzled. Unheeding of all that had been at stake they were clearly convinced that their captain had shown himself in his true colours, and was a man who would sooner see a man’s death agonies than eat his dinner. Let ‘em think so. It would do no harm. Hornblower could spare them no thought in any case, with all his attention glued upon the compass card. It would be ludicrous—it would be horribly comic—if after all this he were to miss Atropos on his way back to her, if he were to blunder about in the fog for hours looking for his own ship. The reciprocal of North by East half East was South by West half West, and he kept the gig rigidly on that course. With what still remained of the ebb tide behind them it would only be a few seconds before they ought to sight Atropos. It was a very great comfort when they did.

  Mr. Jones received Hornblower at the ship’s side. A glance had told him that the gig’s crew was two men and a coxswain short. It was hard to think of any explanation of that, and Mr. Jones was bursting with curiosity. He could not help but wonder what his captain had been doing, out there in the fog. His curiosity even overcame his apprehension at the sight of the scowl which Hornblower still wore—now that he was back in his ship Hornblower was beginning to feel much more strongly the qualms that should have influenced him regarding what Their Lordships might think of his absence from his ship. He ignored Jones’s questions.

  “You got those tops’l yards across, I see, Mr. Jones.”

  “Yes, sir. I sent the hands to dinner when you didn’t come back, sir. I thought—”

  “They’ll have five minutes to finish their dinners. No longer. Mr. Jones, if you were in command of two boats sent to capture a hostile vessel at anchor in this fog, how would you set about it? What orders would you give?”

  “Well, sir, I’d—I’d—”

  Mr. Jones was not a man of quickness of thought or rapid adaptability to a new situation. He hummed and he hawed. But there were very few officers in the Navy who had not been on at least one cuttingout and boarding operation. He knew well enough what he should do, and it slowly became apparent.

  “Very well, Mr. Jones. You will now hoist out the long boat and the launch. You will man them and see that the boats’ crews are fully armed. You will proceed North by East half East—fix that in your mind, Mr. Jones, North by East half East—from this ship for a quarter of a mile. There you find a West India brig the Amelia Jane. She has just been recaptured from a French prize crew, and my coxswain is on board with two men. From her you will take a new departure. There’s a French privateer, the Vengeance. She’s a Dunkirk trawler disguised as a Ramsgate trawler. She is probably heavily manned—at least fifty of a crew left—and she is anchored approximately three cables’ lengths approximately northwest of the Amelia Jane. You will capture her, by surprise if possible. Mr. Still will be in command of the second boat. I will listen while you give him his instructions. That will save repetition. Mr. Still!”

  The despatch that Hornblower wrote that evening and entrusted to the Amelia Jane for delivery to the Admiralty was couched in the usual Navy phraseology.

  Sir

  I have the honour to report to you for the information of Their Lordships that this day while anchored in dense fog in the Downs I became aware that it seemed likely that some disturbance was taking place near at hand. On investigating I had the good fortune to recapture the brig Amelia Jane, homeward bound from Barbados, which was in possession of a French prize crew. From information gained from the prisoners I was able to send my first lieutenant, Mr. Jones, with the boats of H.M. ship under my command, to attack the French private ship of war Vengeance of Dunkirk. She was handsomely carried by Mr. Jones and his officers; and men including Mr. Still, second lieutenant, Messrs. Horrocks and Smiley, and His Serene Highness the Prince of SeitzBunau, midshipmen, after a brief action in which our loss was two men slightly wounded while the French Captain, Monsieur Ducos, met with a severe wound while trying to rally his crew. The Vengeance proved to be a French trawler masquerading as an English fishing boat. Including the prize crew she carried a crew of seventyone officers and men, and she was armed with one fourpounder carronade concealed under her net.

  I have the honour to remain,

  Your obed’t servant,

  H. Hornblower, Captain.

  Before sealing it Hornblower read through this report with a lopsided smile on his face. He wondered if anyone would ever read between the lines of that bald narrative, how much anyone would guess, how much anyone would deduce. The fog, the cold, the wet; the revolting scene on the deck of the Amelia Jane; the interplay of emotion; could anyone ever guess at all the truth? And there was no doubt that his gig’s crew was already spreading round the ship horrible reports about his lust for blood. There was some kind of sardonic satisfaction to be derived from that, too. A knock at the door. Could he never be undisturbed?

  “Come in,” he called.

  It was Jones. His glance took in the quill in Hornblower’s fingers, and the inkwell and papers on the table before him.

  “Your pardon, sir,” he said. “I hope I don’t come too late.”

  “What is it?” asked Hornblower; he had little sympathy for Jones and his undetermined manners.

  “If you are going to send a report to the Admiralty, sir—and I suppose you are, sir—”

  “Yes, of course I am.”

  “I don’t know if you’re going to mention my name, sir—I don’t want to ask if you are, sir—I don’t want to presume—”

  If Jones was soliciting a special mention of himself in the Admir
alty letter he would get none at all.

  “What is it you’re saying to me, Mr. Jones?”

  “It’s only that my name’s a common one, sir. John Jones, sir. There are twelve John Jones’s in the lieutenants’ list, sir. I didn’t know if you knew, sir, but I am John Jones the Ninth. That’s how I’m known at the Admiralty, sir. If you didn’t say that, perhaps—”

  “Very well, Mr. Jones. I understand. You can rely on me to see that justice is done.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  With Jones out of the way Hornblower sighed a little, looked at his report, and drew a fresh sheet towards him. There was no chance of inserting “the Ninth” legibly after the mention of Jones’s name. The only thing to do was to take a fresh sheet and write it all over again. An odd occupation for a bloodthirsty tyrant.

  Chapter IX

  Hornblower watched with a keen eye his crew at work as they took in sail while Atropos came gliding into Gibraltar Bay. He could call them welldrilled now. The long beat down the Channel, the battles with the Biscay gales, had made a correlated team of there. There was no confusion and only the minimum number of orders. The men came hurrying off the yards; he saw two figures swing themselves on to the main backstays and come sliding down all the way from the masthead, disdaining to use the shrouds and ratlines. They reached the deck simultaneously and stood grinning at each other for a moment—clearly they had been engaged in a race. One was Smiley, the midshipman of the maintop. The other—His Serene Highness the Prince of SeitzBunau. That boy had improved beyond all expectation. If ever he should sit on his throne again in his princely German capital he would have strange memories to recall.

  But this was not the time for a captain to let his attention wander.

  “Let go, Mr. Jones! “ he hailed, and the anchor fell, dragging the grumbling hawser out through the hawsehole; Hornblower watched while Atropos took up on her cable and then rode to her anchor. She was in her assigned berth; Hornblower looked up at the towering Rock and over at the Spanish shore. Nothing seemed to have changed since the last time—so many years ago—that he had come sailing into Gibraltar Bay. The sun was shining down on him, and it was good to feel this Mediterranean sun again, even though there was little warmth in it during this bleak winter weather.

  “Call away my gig, if you please, Mr. Jones.”

  Hornblower ran below to gird on his sword and to take the better of his two cocked hats out of its tin case so as to make himself as presentable as possible when he went ashore to pay his official calls. There was a very decided thrill in the thought that soon he would be reading the orders that would carry him forward into the next phase of his adventures—adventures possibly; more probably the mere dreariness of beating about on eternal blockade duty outside a French port.

  Yet in Collingwood’s orders to him, when he came to read them, there was a paragraph which left him wondering what his fate was to be.

  You will take into your ship Mr. William McCullum, of the Honourable East India Company’s Service, together with his native assistants, and you will give them passage when, in obedience to the first paragraph of these orders, you come to join me.

  Mr. McCullum was awaiting him in the Governor’s anteroom. He was a burly, heavyset man in his early thirties, blueeyed and with a thick mat of black hair.

  “Captain Horatio Hornblower?” there was a roll to the “r’s” which betrayed the county of his origin.

  “Mr. McCullum?”

  “Of the Company’s Service.”

  The two men eyed each other.

  “You are to take passage in my ship?”

  “Aye.”

  The fellow carried himself with an air of vast independence. Yet judging by the scantiness of the silver lace on his uniform, and by the fact that he wore no sword, he was not of a very lofty position in the Company’s hierarchy.

  “Who are these native assistants of yours?”

  “Three Sinhalese divers.”

  “Sinhalese?”

  Hornblower said the word with caution. He had never heard it before, at least pronounced in that way. He suspected that it meant something to do with Ceylon, but he was not going to make a display of his ignorance.

  “Pearl divers from Ceylon,” said McCullum.

  So he had guessed right. But he could not imagine for one moment why Collingwood, at grips with the French in the Mediterranean, should need Ceylonese pearl divers.

  “And what is your official position, Mr. McCullum?”

  “I am wreckmaster and salvage director of the Coromandel Coast.”

  That went far to explain the man’s ostentatious lack of deference. He was one of those experts whose skill made them too valuable to be trifled with. He might have drifted out to India as a cabin boy or apprentice; presumably he had been treated like a menial while young, but he had learned a trade so well as now to be indispensable and in a position to repay the slights he had endured earlier. The more the gold lace he was addressing the brusquer was likely to be his manner.

  “Very well, Mr. McCullum. I shall be sailing immediately and I shall be glad if you will come on board with your assistants at the earliest possible moment. Within an hour. Do you have any equipment with you to be shipped?”

  “Very little besides my chest and the divers’ bundles. They are ready, along with the food for them.”

  “Food?”

  “The poor bodies”—McCullum narrowed the vowel sound until the word sounded like “puir”—“are benighted heathen, followers of Buddha. They wellnigh died on the voyage here, never having known what it was to have a full belly before. A scrap of vegetable, a drop of oil, a bit of fish for a relish. That’s what they’re used to living on.”

  Oil? Vegetables? Ships of war could hardly be expected to supply such things.

  “I’ve a puncheon of Spanish olive oil for them,” explained McCullum. “They’ve taken kindly to it, although it’s far removed from their buffalo butter. Lentils and onions and carrots. Give them salt beef and they’d die, and that would be poor business after shipping them all round the Cape of Good Hope.”

  The statement was made with apparent callousness, but Hornblower suspected that the manner concealed some consideration for his unfortunate subordinates so far from their homes. He began to like McCullum a little better.

  “I’ll give orders for them to be well looked after,” he said.

  “Thank you.” That was the first shade of politeness that had crept into McCullum’s speech. “The poor devils have been perishing of cold here on the Rock. That makes them homesick, like, and a long way they are from home, too.”

  “Why have they been sent here in any case?” asked Hornblower. That question had been striving for utterance for some time; he had not asked it because it would have given McCullum too good an opportunity to snub him.

  “Because they can dive in sixteen and a half fathoms,” said McCullum, staring straight at him.

  It was not quite a snub; Hornblower was aware that he owed the modification to his promise that they would be well treated. He would not risk another question despite his consuming curiosity. He was completely puzzled as to why the Mediterranean Fleet should need divers who could go down through a hundred feet of water. He contented himself with ending the interview with an offer to send a boat for McCullum and his men.

  The Ceylonese when they made their appearance on the deck of the Atropos were of an appearance to excite pity. They held their white cotton clothes close about them against the cold; the keen air that blew down from the snowclad Spanish mountains set them shivering. They were thin, fraillooking men, and they looked about them with no curiosity, but with only a dull resignation in their dark eyes. They were of a deep brown colour, so as to excite the interest of the hands who gathered to stare. They spared no glances for the white men, but conversed briefly with each other in high piping musical voices.

  “Give them the warmest corner of the ‘tween decks, Mr. Jones,” said Hornblower. “See that they are comfor
table. Consult with Mr. McCullum regarding anything they may need. Allow me to present Mr. McCullum—Mr. Jones. I would be greatly obliged if you will extend to Mr. McCullum the hospitality of the wardroom.”

  Hornblower had to phrase it that way. The wardroom theoretically was a voluntary association of officers, who could make their own choice as to what members they might admit. But it would be a bold set of officers who decided to exclude a wardroom guest recommended by their captain, as Jones and Hornblower both knew.

  “You must provide a cot for Mr. McCullum, too, Mr. Jones, if you please. You can decide for yourself where you will put it.”

  It was comforting to be able to say that. Hornblower knew perfectly well—and so did Jones, as his slightly dismayed expression revealed—that in a twentytwo gun sloop there was not a square foot of deck space to spare. Everyone was already overcrowded, and McCullum’s presence would add seriously to the overcrowding. But it was Jones who would have to find a way round the difficulty.

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Jones; the interval that elapsed before he said it was the best indication of the involved train of thought he had been following out.

  “Excellent,” said Hornblower. “You can attend to it after we’re under way. No more time to waste, Mr. Jones.”

  Minutes were always valuable. The wind might always shift, or drop. An hour wasted now might mean the loss of a week. Hornblower was in a fever to get his ship clear of the Gut and into the wider waters of the Mediterranean, where he would have sea room in which to beat against a head wind should a Levanter come blowing out of the East. Before his mind’s eye he had a picture of the Western Mediterranean; the northwesterly blowing at present could carry him quickly along the southern coast of Spain, past the dangerous shoal of Alboran, until at Cape de Gata the Spanish coast trended away boldly to the northward. Once there he would be less restricted; until Cape de Gate was left behind he could not be happy. There was also—Hornblower could not deny it—his own personal desire to be up and doing, to find out what was awaiting him in the future, to put himself at least in the possible path of adventure. It was fortunate that his duty and his inclination should coincide in this way; one of the few small bits of good fortune, he told himself with amused grimness, that he had experienced since he had made his original choice of the career of a naval officer.