The Commodore h-10

by Cecil Scott Forester

  He could tell, down here in his cabin, that the Nonsuch was still close-hauled to the strong northwesterly breeze; she was lying over to it so steadily that there was little roll in her motion, although she was pitching deeply as she met the short North Sea rollers. The tell-tale compass over his head showed that she was making good her course for the Skaw; and the whole cabin was resonant with the harping of the taut rigging transmitted through the timbers of the ship, while she creaked positively thunderously as she pitched, loud enough to make conversation difficult. There was one frame that made a noise like a pistol shot at one particular moment of each pitch, and he had already grown so used to the sound as to be able to anticipate it exactly, judging it by the ship’s motion.

  He had been puzzled for a space by a peculiar irregular thud over his head; in fact, he had been so piqued at his inability to account for it that he had put on his hat and gone up on the quarter-deck to find out. There was nothing in sight on the deck which seemed likely to have made that rhythmical noise, no pump at work, nobody beating out oakum—even if it were conceivable that such a thing could be done on the quarter-deck of a ship of the line; there were only Bush and the officers of the watch, who immediately froze into inconspicuous immobility when the great man appeared on the companion. Heaven only knew what made that thumping; Hornblower began to wonder if his ears had deceived him and if the noise really came from a deck below. He had to make a pretence of having come on deck for a purpose—interesting to find that even a Commodore, First Class, still had to sink to such subterfuges—and he began to stride up and down the weather side of the quarter-deck, hands behind him, head bowed forward, in the old comfortable attitude. Enthusiasts had talked or written of pleasures innumerable, of gardens or women, wine or fishing; it was strange that no one had ever told of the pleasure of walking a quarter-deck.

  But what was it that had made that slow thumping noise? He was forgetting why he had come upon deck. He darted covert glances from under his brows as he walked up and down and still saw nothing to account for it. The noise had not been audible since he came on deck, but still curiosity consumed him. He stood by the taffrail and looked back at the flotilla. The trim ship-rigged sloops were beating up against the strong breeze without difficulty, but the bomb-ketches were not so comfortable. The absence of a foremast, the huge triangular foresail, made it hard to keep them from yawing, even in a wind. Every now and then they would put their stumpy bowsprits down and take the green sea in over their bows.

  He was not interested in bomb-ketches. He wanted to know what had been thumping the deck over his head when he was in his cabin, and then common sense came to help him fight down his ridiculous self-consciousness. Why should not a Commodore ask a simple question about a simple subject? Why in the world had he even hesitated for a moment? He swung round with determination.

  “Captain Bush?” he called.

  “Sir!” Bush came hastening aft to him, his wooden leg thumping the deck.

  That was the noise! With every second step Bush took, his wooden leg with its leather button came down with a thump on the planking. Hornblower certainly could not ask the question he had just been forming in his mind.

  “I hope I shall have the pleasure of your company at dinner this evening,” said Hornblower, thinking rapidly.

  “Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, indeed,” said Bush. He beamed with pleasure at the invitation so that Hornblower felt positively hypocritical as he made his way down into the cabin to supervise the last of his unpacking. Yet it was as well that he had been led by his own peculiar weaknesses to give that invitation instead of spending the evening, as he would otherwise have done, dreaming about Barbara, calling up in his mind the lovely drive through springtime England from Smallbridge to Deal, and making himself as miserable at sea as he had managed to make himself on land.

  Bush would be able to tell him about the officers and men of the Nonsuch, who could be trusted and who must be watched, what was the material condition of the ship, if the stores were good or bad, and all the hundred other things he needed to know. And to-morrow, as soon as the weather moderated, he would signal for ‘All Captains’, and so make the acquaintance of his other subordinates, and size them up, and perhaps begin to convey to them his own particular viewpoints and theories, so that when the time came for action there would be need for few signals and there would be common action directed speedily at a common objective.

  Meanwhile, there was one more job to be done immediately; the present would be the best time, he supposed with a sigh, but he was conscious of a faint distaste for it even as he applied himself to it.

  “Pass the word for Mr. Braun—for my clerk,” he said to Brown, who was hanging up the last of the uniform coats behind the curtain against the bulkhead.

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Brown.

  It was odd that his clerk and his coxswain should have names pronounced in identical fashion; it was that coincidence which had led him to add the unnecessary last three words to his order.

  Mr. Braun was tall and spare, fair, youngish, and prematurely bald, and Hornblower did not like him, although typically he was more cordial to him than he would have been if he had liked him. He offered him the cabin chair while he himself sat back on the locker, and when he saw Mr. Braun’s eyes resting curiously on the case of pistols—Barbara’s gift—he condescended to discuss it with him as a conversational preliminary, pointing out the advantages of the percussion caps and the rifled barrels.

  “Very good weapons indeed, sir,” said Mr. Braun, replacing them in their velvet case.

  He looked across the cabin at Hornblower, the dying light which came through the stern windows shining on his face and reflected in curious fashion from his pale-green eyes.

  “You speak good English,” said Hornblower.

  “Thank you, sir. My business before the war was largely with England. But I speak Russian and Swedish and Finnish and Polish and German and French just as well. Lithuanian a little. Estonian a little because it is so like Finnish.”

  “But Swedish is your native language, though?”

  Mr. Braun shrugged his thin shoulders.

  “My father spoke Swedish. My mother spoke German, sir. I spoke Finnish with my nurse, and French with one tutor and English with another. In my office we spoke Russian when we did not speak Polish.”

  “But I thought you were a Swede?”

  Mr. Braun shrugged his shoulders again.

  “A Swedish subject, sir, but I was born a Finn. I thought of myself as a Finn until three years ago.”

  So Mr. Braun was one more of these stateless individuals with whom all Europe seemed to be peopled nowadays—men and women without a country, Frenchmen, Germans, Austrians, Poles who had been uprooted by the chances of war and who dragged out a dreary existence in the hope that some day another chance of war would re-establish them.

  “When Russia took advantage of her pact with Bonaparte,” explained Mr. Braun, “to fall upon Finland, I was one of those who fought. What use was it? What could Finland do against all the might of Russia? I was one of the fortunate ones who escaped. My brothers are in Russian gaols at this very minute if they are alive, but I hope they are dead. Sweden was in revolution—there was no refuge for me there, even though it had been for Sweden that I was fighting. Germany, Denmark, Norway were in Bonaparte’s hands, and Bonaparte would gladly have handed me back to oblige his new Russian ally. But I was in an English ship, one of those to which I sold timber, and so to England I came. One day I was the richest man in Finland where there are few rich men, and the next I was the poorest man in England where there are many poor.”

  The pale-green eyes reflected back the light again from the cabin window, and Hornblower realized anew that his clerk was a man of disquieting personality. It was not merely the fact that he was a refugee, and Hornblower, like everybody else, was surfeited with refugees and their tales of woe although his conscience pricked him about them—the first ones had begun to arrive twenty yea
rs ago from France, and ever since then there had been an increasing tide from Poland and Italy and Germany. Braun’s being a refugee was likely to prejudice Hornblower against him from the start, and actually had done so, as Hornblower admitted to himself with his usual fussy sense of justice. But that was the reason that Hornblower did not like him. There was less reason even than that—there was no reason at all.

  It was irksome to Hornblower to think that for the rest of this commission he would have to work in close contact with this man. Yet the Admiralty orders in his desk enjoined upon him to pay the closest attention to the advice and information which he would receive from Braun, ‘a gentleman whose acquaintance with the Baltic countries is both extensive and intimate’. Even this evening it was a great relief when Bush’s knock at the cabin door, heralding his arrival for dinner, freed Hornblower from the man’s presence. Braun slid unobtrusively out of the cabin with a bow to Bush; every line of his body indicated the pose—whether forced or natural Hornblower could not guess—of the man who has seen better days resignedly doing menial duties.

  “How do you find your Swedish clerk, sir?” asked Bush.

  “He’s a Finn, not a Swede.”

  “A Finn? You don’t say, sir! It’d be better not to let the men know that.”

  Bush’s own honest face indicated a disquietude against which he struggled in vain.

  “Of course,” said Hornblower.

  He tried to keep his face expressionless, to conceal that he had completely left out of account the superstition that prevailed about Finns at sea. In a sailor’s mind every Finn was a warlock who could conjure up storms by lifting his finger, but Hornblower had quite failed to think of the shabby-genteel Mr. Braun as that kind of Finn, despite those unwholesome pale-green eyes.

  Chapter Six

  “Eight bells, sir.”

  Hornblower came back to consciousness not very willingly; he suspected he was being dragged away from delightful dreams, although he could not remember what they were.

  “Still dark, sir,” went on Brown remorselessly, “but a clear night. Wind steady at west-by-north, a strong breeze. The sloops an’ the flotilla in sight to looard, an’ we’re hove to, sir, under mizzen-t’s’l, maint’mast stays’l an’ jib. An’ here’s your shirt, sir.”

  Hornblower swung his legs out of his cot and sleepily pulled off his nightshirt. He was minded at first just to put on those few clothes which would keep him warm on deck, but he had his dignity as Commodore to remember, and he wanted to establish a reputation as a man who was never careless about any detail whatever. He had left orders to be called now, a quarter of an hour before it was really necessary, merely to be able to do so. So he put on uniform coat and trousers and boots, parted his hair carefully in the flickering light of the lantern Brown held, and put aside the thought of shaving. If he came on deck at four in the morning newly shaved everyone would guess that he had been at pains regarding his appearance. He clapped on his cocked hat, and struggled into the pea-jacket which Brown held for him. Outside his cabin door the sentry snapped to attention as the great man appeared. On the half-deck a group of high-spirited youngsters coming off watch subsided into awed and apprehensive silence at the sight of the Commodore, which was a fit and proper thing to happen.

  On the quarter-deck it was as raw and unfriendly as one might expect before dawn in the Kattegat on a spring morning. The bustle of calling the watch had just subsided; the figures which loomed up in the darkness and hurriedly moved over to the port side, leaving the starboard side clear for him, were unrecognizable. But the thump of Bush’s wooden leg was unmistakable.

  “Captain Bush!”

  “Sir?”

  “What time is sunrise this morning?”

  “Er—about five-thirty, sir.”

  “I don’t want to know about what time it will be. I asked ‘What time is sunrise?’”

  A second’s silence while the crestfallen Bush absorbed this rebuke, and then another voice answered:

  “Five-thirty-four, sir.”

  That was that fresh-faced lad, Carlin, the second lieutenant of the ship. Hornblower would have given something to be sure whether Carlin really knew when sunrise was, or whether he was merely guessing, taking a chance that his Commodore would not check his figures. As for Bush, it was bad luck on him that he should be rebuked publicly, but he should have known what time was sunrise, seeing that last night Hornblower had been making plans with him based on that very point. And it would do the discipline of the rest of the force no harm if it were known that the Commodore spared no one, not even the captain of a ship of the line, his best friend.

  Hornblower took a turn or two up and down the deck. Seven days out from the Downs, and no news. With the wind steady from the westward, there could be no news—nothing could have got out from the Baltic, or even from Gothenburg. He had not seen a sail yesterday after rounding the Skaw and coming up the Kattegat. His last news from Sweden was fifteen days old, then, and in fifteen days anything could happen. Sweden might have easily changed from unfriendly neutrality to open hostility. Before him lay the passage of the Sound, three miles wide at its narrowest point; on the starboard side would be Denmark, undoubtedly hostile under Bonaparte’s domination whether she wanted to be or not. On the port side would be Sweden, and the main channel up the Sound lay under the guns of Helsingborg. If Sweden were England’s enemy the guns of Denmark and Sweden—of Elsinore and of Helsingborg—might easily cripple the squadron as they ran the gauntlet. And retreat would always be perilous and difficult, if not entirely cut off. It might be as well to delay, to send in a boat to discover how Sweden stood at the present moment.

  But on the other hand, to send in a boat would warn Sweden of his presence. If he dashed in now, the moment there was light enough to see the channel, he might go scathless, taking the defences by surprise even if Sweden were hostile. His vessels might be knocked about, but with the wind west-by-north, in an ideal quarter, even a crippled ship could struggle along until the Sound widened and they would be out of range. If Sweden’s neutrality were still wobbling it would do no harm to let her see a British squadron handled with boldness and decision, nor for her to know that a British force were loose in the Baltic able to threaten her shores and ravage her shipping. Should Sweden turn hostile he could maintain himself one way or the other in the Baltic through the summer—and in a summer anything might happen—and with good fortune might fight his way out again in the autumn. There certainly were arguments in favour of temporizing and delay and communicating with the shore, but there were more cogent arguments still in favour of prompt action.

  The ship’s bell struck one sharp note; hardly more than an hour before dawn, and already over there to leeward there was a hint of grey in the sky. Hornblower opened his mouth to speak, and then checked himself. He had been about to issue a sharp order, consonant with the tenseness of the moment and with the accelerated beating of his pulse; but that was not the way he wanted to behave. While he had time to think and prepare himself he could still pose as a man of iron nerves.

  “Captain Bush!” he managed to make himself drawl the words, and to give his orders with an air of complete indifference. “Signal all vessels to clear for action.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Two red lights at the main yard-arm and a single gun; that was the night signal for danger from the enemy which would send all hands to quarters. It took several seconds to bring a light for the lanterns; by the time the signal was acknowledged the Nonsuch was well on the way to being cleared for action—the watch below turned up, the decks sanded and the fire-pumps manned, guns run out and bulkheads knocked down. It was still a pretty raw crew—Bush had been through purgatory trying to get his ship manned—but the job could have been worse done. Now the grey dawn had crept up over the eastern sky, and the rest of the squadron was just visible as vessels and not as solid nuclei in the gloom, but it was still not quite light enough to risk the passage. Hornblower turned to Bush and Hurst, the
first lieutenant.

  “If you please,” he drawled, dragging out every word with all the nonchalance he could muster, “I will have the signal bent ready for hoisting, ‘Proceed to leeward in the order of battle’.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Everything was done now. This last two minutes of waiting in inactivity, with nothing left to do, were especially trying. Hornblower was about to walk up and down, when he remembered that he must stand still to maintain his pose of indifference. The batteries on shore might have their furnaces alight, to heat shot red-hot; there was a possibility that in a few minutes the whole force of which he was so proud might be no more than a chain of blazing wrecks. Now it was time.

  “Hoist,” said Hornblower. “Captain Bush, I’ll trouble you to square away and follow the squadron.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Bush.

  Bush’s voice hinted at suppressed excitement; and it came to Hornblower, with a blinding flash of revelation, that his pose was ineffective with Bush. The latter had learned, during years of experience, that when Hornblower stood still instead of walking about, and when he drawled out his words as he was doing at present, then in Hornblower’s opinion there was danger ahead. It was an intensely interesting discovery, but there was no time to think about it, not with the squadron going up the Sound.

  Lotus was leading. Vickery, her commander, was the man Hornblower had picked out as the captain with the steadiest nerves who could be trusted to lead without flinching. Hornblower would have liked to have led himself, but in this operation the rear would be the post of danger—the leading ships might well get through before the gunners on shore could get to their guns and find the range—and the Nonsuch as the most solidly built and best able to endure fire must come last so as to be able to succour and tow out of action any disabled ship. Hornblower watched Lotus set topsails and courses and square away. The cutter Clam followed—she was the feeblest of all; a single shot might sink her, and she must be given the best chance of getting through. Then the two ugly bomb-ketches, and then the other sloop, Raven, just ahead of Nonsuch; Hornblower was not sorry to have the opportunity to watch how her commander, Cole, would behave in action. Nonsuch followed, driving hard with the strong breeze on her starboard quarter. Hornblower watched Bush shaking the wind out of the mizzen-topsail so as to keep exact station astern of the Raven. The big two-decker seemed a lumbering clumsy thing compared with the grace and elegance of the sloops.