The Commodore

Chapter Thirteen

Hornblower turned over in his cot with a groan; the effort of turning brought back the pain into his temples, although he moved very cautiously. He was a fool to have drunk so much—it was the first time he had had this sort of headache for half a dozen years. Yet it had been hard to avoid, just as everything else had been hard to avoid; he did not know what else he could have done, once events had him in their grip. He raised his voice and shouted for Brown—it hurt his head again to shout, and his voice was a hoarse croak. He heard the voice of the sentry at the door passing on the word, and with an infinity of effort he sat up and put his legs out of bed, determined that Brown should not find him prostrate.

“Bring me some coffee,” he said when Brown came in.

“Aye aye, sir.”

Hornblower continued to sit on the edge of his cot. Overhead he heard the raucous voice of Hurst blaring through the skylight, apparently addressing a delinquent midshipman.

“A fine young flibberty-gibbet you are,” said Hurst “Look at that brasswork! D’you call that bright? Where d’you keep your eyes? What’s your division been doing this last hour? God, what’s the Navy coming to, when warrants are given to young jackanapes who couldn’t keep their noses clear with a marline-spike! You call yourself a King’s officer? You’re more like a winter’s day, short, dark, and dirty!”

Hornblower took the coffee Brown brought in.

“My compliments to Mr. Hurst,” he croaked, “and ask him kindly not to make so much noise over my skylight.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The first satisfaction that day was to hear Hurst cut his tirade abruptly short. Hornblower sipped at the scalding coffee with some degree of pleasure. It was not surprising that Hurst should be in a bad temper to-day. He had been through a harassing evening the night before; Hornblower remembered Hurst and Mound carrying Braun, unconscious and reeking with spirits, into the carriage at the palace door. Hurst had been strictly sober, but apparently the mental strain of keeping guard over a secret assassin in the Tsar’s palace had been too much for his nerves. Hornblower handed his cup back to Brown to be refilled when Brown reappeared, and pulled his nightshirt over his head as he waited. Something caught his eye as he laid his nightshirt on his cot; it was a flea, leaping high out of the sleeve. In a wave of disgust he looked down at himself; his smooth round belly was pockmarked with flea-bites. That was a striking commentary on the difference between an Imperial palace and one of His Britannic Majesty’s ships of the line. When Brown returned with his second cup of coffee Hornblower was still cursing fiercely both at Imperial uncleanness and at the dreary prospect of the nuisance of having to rid himself of vermin to which he was peculiarly susceptible.

“Take that grin off your face,” snapped Hornblower, “or I’ll send you to the grating to see if you grin there!”

Brown was not grinning; all that could be said about his expression was that he was too obviously not grinning. What irritated Hornblower was the knowledge that Brown was enjoying the superior and paternal state of mind of one who has not a headache while the man who is with him has.

His shower-bath restored some of Hornblower’s peace of mind, and he put on clean linen, gave Brown orders for the disinfection of his clothes, and went up on deck, where the first person on whom he laid eyes was Wychwood, bleary-eyed and obviously with a far worse headache than he had himself. Yet the keen air of the Russian morning was invigorating and refreshing. The normal early-morning ship’s routine, the sight of the rows of men holystoning the decks, the pleasant swish of the water over the planking, were comforting and restorative as well.

“Boat coming off to us, sir,” reported a midshipman to the officer of the watch.

It was the same pinnace as had taken them ashore yesterday, and it brought a naval officer with a letter in French—

Hornblower showed the letter to Wychwood, who confirmed his suspicions.

“That’s Alexander,” he said. “He used the title of Comte du Nord when he was travelling on the continent as Tsarevitch, He’ll be corning incognito, so that there’ll be no need for royal honours.”

“Yes,” said Hornblower dryly, a little nettled at this soldier giving him advice beyond what he was asked for. “But an Imperial Minister of Marine must rank with a First Lord of the Admiralty. That’ll mean nineteen guns and all the other honours. Midshipman of the watch! My compliments to the captain, and I shall be very obliged if he will be good enough to come on deck.”

Bush heard the news with a low whistle, and instantly turned to sweep decks and rigging with his glance, anxious that his ship should be in the perfection of condition for this Imperial visit.

“How can we take in water,” asked Bush piteously, “and be in a fit state for the Tsar to come on board, sir? What will he think of us? Unless we water the flotilla first.”

“The Tsar’s a man of sense,” said Hornblower, briskly. “Let’s show him the hands at work. He doesn’t know the difference between the mizzen-stay and the flying jib-boom, but he’ll recognize efficient work if we show it to him. Start watering while he’s on board.”

“And the food?” asked Bush. “We’ll have to offer him something, sir.”

Hornblower grinned at his anxiety.

“Yes, we’ll offer him something.”

It was typical of Hornblower’s contrary temperament that the more difficulties other people foresaw the more cheerful he became; the only person really capable of depressing Hornblower was Hornblower himself. His headache had left him completely, and he was positively smiling now at the thought of a busy morning. He ate his breakfast with appetite, and put on his full-dress uniform once more and came on deck to find Bush still fussing round the ship, with the crew all in clean white frocks and duck trousers, the accommodation ladder rigged, with hand-ropes as white as snow, the marines pipeclayed and polished, the hammocks stowed in mathematical tiers. It was only when the midshipman of the watch reported a cutter approaching that he felt a little twinge of nervousness, a sudden catch in his breath, at the thought that the next few hours might have a decided bearing on the history of the world for years to come.

The calls of the boatswain’s mates shrilled through the ship, and the ship’s company fell in by divisions, officers to the front with epaulettes and swords, and Hornblower at the quarterdeck rail looked down at the assembly. British seamen on parade could not possibly rival the Prussian Guard in exactitude and uniformity, and to drill them into any approach to it would be likely to expel from them the very qualities that made them the valuable men they were; but any thinking man, looking down the lines of intelligent, self-reliant faces, could not fail to be impressed.

“Man the yards!” ordered Bush.

Another squeal from the pipes, and the topmen poured the rigging in an orderly upward torrent, without a break in their speed as they hung back-downward from the futtock-shrouds, going hand-over-hand up the topgallant-shrouds like the trained gymnasts they were, running out along the yards like tight-rope walkers, each man taking up his position on the foot-ropes the moment he reached it.

Various emotions warred in Hornblower’s breast as he watched. There was a momentary feeling of resentment that these men of his, the cream of the service, should be put through their paces like performing bears to gratify an Oriental monarch. Yet as the evolution was completed, when each man reached his place, as though by some magic a gust of wind had whirled a heap of dead leaves into the air and left them suspended in a pattern of exquisite symmetry, his resentment was swamped by artistic satisfaction. He hoped that Alexander, looking on, would have the sense to realize that these men could be relied upon to perform the same feat in any conditions, in a black night with a howling gale blowing, on a raging sea with the bowsprit stabbing at the invisible sky and the yard-arms dipping towards the invisible sea.

The boatswain, looking with one eye over the starboard rail, gave an infinitesimal jerk of his head. A little procession of officers was coming up the accommodation ladder. The boatswain’s mates put their calls to their lips. The sergeant-drummer of marines contrived to snap his fingers beside the seams of his trousers as he stood at attention, and the six side-drums roared out in a bold ruffle.

“Present arms!” bellowed Captain Norman, and the fifty muskets with fixed bayonets of the marines left the fifty scarlet shoulders and came down vertically in front of fifty rows of gleaming buttons, while the swords of the three marine officers swept in the graceful arc of the military salute.

Alexander, followed by two aides-de-camp, came slowly on board side by side with the Minister of Marine to whom nominally all this ceremony was dedicated. He put his hand to his hat-brim while the pipes died away in a final squeal, the drums completed their fourth ruffle, the first gun of the salute banged out forward, and the fifes and drums of the marine band burst into ‘Heart of Oak’. Hornblower walked forward and saluted.

“Good morning, Commodore,” said the Minister of Marine. “Permit me to present you to the Comte du Nord.”

Hornblower saluted again, his face as expressionless as he could manage it even while he fought down a smile at Alexander’s queer liking to be incognito.

“Good morning, Commodore,” said Alexander; with a shock Hornblower realized that he was speaking English of a sort. “I hope our little visit does not discommode you too much?”

“Not in any way to compare with the honour done to the ship, sir,” said Hornblower, wondering as he said it whether ‘sir’ was the right way to address a Tsar incognito. Apparently it sufficed.

“You may present your officers,” said Alexander.

Hornblower brought them up one by one, and they saluted and bowed with the uneasy stiffness to be expected of junior officers in the presence of a Tsar of all the Russias, and an incognito one at that.

“I think you can give orders to prepare the ship for watering now, Captain,” said Hornblower to Bush, and then he turned back to Alexander. “Would you care to see more of the ship, sir?”

“I would indeed,” said Alexander.

He lingered on the quarter-deck to watch the preparations begin. The topmen came pouring down from aloft; Alexander blinked in the sunlight with admiration as half a dozen hands came sliding down the mizzen-backstays and the mizzen-topsail halliards to land on their feet on the quarter-deck beside him. Under the petty officers’ urging the men ran hither and thither about their tasks; it was a scene of activity like a disturbed ants’ nest, but far more orderly and purposeful. The hatches were whipped off, the pumps made ready, tack rigged at the yard-arms, fenders dropped over the port side. Alexander stared at the sight of a half-company of marines tailing on to a fall and walking away with it in flat-footed rhythm.

“Soldiers and sailors too, sir,” explained Hornblower, deprecatingly, as he led the way below.

Alexander was a very tall man, an inch or two taller than Hornblower, and he bent himself nearly double as he crouched under the low deck beams below decks and peered about with short-sighted eyes. Hornblower took him forward along the lower gun-deck, where the head clearance was no more than five feet six inches; he showed him the midshipmen’s berth, and the warrant officers’ mess, all the unlovely details of the life of a sailor. He called away a group of seamen, had them unstow and sling their hammocks, and get into them, so that Alexander could see more clearly what twenty-two inches per man really meant, and he gave a graphic description of a whole deck full of hammocks swinging together in a storm, with the men packed in a solid mass. The grins of the men who made the demonstration were proof enough to Alexander not merely of the truth of what Hornblower was saying, but also of the high spirits of the men, far different from the patient uneducated peasants whom he was accustomed to see in the ranks of his army.

They peered down through the hatchway to see the working party down there breaking out the water casks and preparing the tiers for refilling, and a whiff of the stench of the orlop came up to them—bilge-water and cheese and humanity intermingled.

“You are an officer of long service, I believe, Commodore?” said Alexander.

“Nineteen years, sir,” said Hornblower.

“And how much of that time have you spent at sea?”

“Sixteen years, sir. For nine months I was a prisoner in Spain, and for six months in France.”

“I know of your escape from France. You went through much peril to return to this life.”

Alexander’s handsome forehead was wrinkled as he puzzled over the fact that a man could spend sixteen years of his life living in these conditions and still be sane and healthy.

“How long have you held your present rank?”

“As Commodore, sir, only two months. But I have nine years’ seniority as Captain.”

“And before that?”

“I was six years lieutenant, and four years midshipman.”

“Four years? You lived four years in a place like the midshipmen’s berth you showed me?”

“Not quite as comfortable as that, sir. I was in a frigate nearly all the time, under Sir Edward Pellew. A battleship is not quite as crowded as a frigate, sir.”

Hornblower, watching Alexander closely, could see that he was impressed, and he could guess at the line of thought Alexander was following. The Tsar was not so much struck by the miserable conditions of life on board ship—if he knew anything about his people at all he must be aware that nearly all of them lived in conditions a good deal worse—as by the fact that those conditions could train an officer of ability.

“I suppose it is necessary,” sighed Alexander, revealing for a moment the humane and emotional side of his nature which rumour had long hinted that he possessed.

By the time they came on deck again the water-boat was already alongside. Some of the Nonsuch’s hands were down on her decks, mingling with the Russians to help with the work. Working parties were swinging away lustily at the pumps, and the long snake-like canvas hoses pulsated at each stroke. Forward they were swaying up bundles of firewood, the men chanting as they hauled.

“Thanks to your generosity, sir,” said Hornblower, “we will be able to keep the sea for four months if necessary without entering port.”

Luncheon was served in Hornblower’s cabin to a party of eight, Hornblower, Bush, the two senior lieutenants, and the four Russians. Bush was sweating with nervousness at the sight of the inhospitable table; at the last moment he had drawn Hornblower aside and pleaded unavailingly for Hornblower to change his mind and serve some of his remaining cabin delicacies as well as the plain ship’s fare. Bush could not get out of his mind the obsession that it was necessary to feed the Tsar well; any junior officer entertaining an admiral would blast all his hopes of future promotion if he put the men’s ration beef on the table, and Bush could only think in terms of entertaining admirals.

The Tsar looked with interest at the battered pewter tureen which Brown set before Hornblower.

“Pea soup, sir,” explained Hornblower. “One of the great delicacies of shipboard life.”

Carlin, of long habit, began to rap his biscuit on the table, stopped when he realized what he was doing, and then started rapping again, guiltily. He remembered the orders Hornblower had given, that everyone should behave as if no distinguished company were present; Hornblower had backed up those orders with the direct threat of punishment should they be forgotten, and Carlin knew that Hornblower did not threaten in that way without every intention of doing what he promised. Alexander looked at Carlin and then inquiringly at Bush beside him.

“Mr. Carlin is knocking out the weevils, sir,” explained Bush, almost overcome with self-consciousness. “If you tap gently they come out of their own accord, this way, you see, sir.”

“Very interesting,” said Alexander, but he ate no bread; one of his aides-de-camp repeated the experiment, peered down at the fat white weevils with black heads that emerged, and exploded into what must have been a string of Russian oaths—almost the first words he had said since boarding the ship.

The visitors, after this inauspicious beginning, gingerly tasted the soup. But in the British Navy pea soup, as Hornblower had remarked, was the best dish served; the aide-de-camp who had sworn at the weevils exclaimed with surprised gratification when he had tasted it, speedily consumed his plateful, and accepted another. There were only three dishes served as the next course, boiled salt ribs of beef, boiled salt-beef tongue, and boiled salt pork, with pickled cabbage to accompany the meat. Alexander studied the three dishes, and wisely accepted the tongue; the Minister of Marine and the aides-de-camp, at Hornblower’s suggestion, took a mixed plateful, carved for them by Hornblower and Bush and Hurst. The once silent but now talkative aide-de-camp set himself to chew on the salt beef with a truly Russian appetite and found it a long hard struggle.

Brown was now serving rum.

“The life-blood of the Navy, sir,” said Hornblower, as Alexander studied his tumbler. “May I offer you gentlemen a toast which we can all drink with the heartiest goodwill? The Emperor of All the Russias! Vive l’Eempéreur!”

All rose except Alexander to drink the toast, and they were hardly seated before Alexander was on his feet in turn.

“The King of Great Britain.”

The aide-de-camp’s French broke down again when he tried to explain how deep an impression Navy rum made on him at this, his first encounter with it. Eventually he gave the clearest proof of his appreciation by draining his tumbler and holding it out for Brown to refill. As the table was cleared Alexander was ready with another toast.

“Commodore Sir Horatio Hornblower, and the British Royal Navy.”

As the glasses were drained Hornblower, looking round him, saw that he was expected to reply in form.

“The Navy,” he said. “The guardian of the liberties of the world. The unswerving friend, the unremitting enemy. When the tyrant of Europe looks about him, seeking by fair means or foul to extend his dominion, it is the Navy that he finds in his path. It is the Navy which is slowly strangling that tyrant. It is the Navy which has baulked him at every turn, which is draining the life-blood from his boasted Empire and which will bring him down in ruin at the end. The tyrant may boast of unbroken victory on land, but he can only deplore unbroken defeat at sea. It is because of the Navy that every victory only leaves him weaker than before, forced, like Sisyphus, to roll his rock once more up towards an unattainable summit. And one day that rock will crush him. May it be sooner rather than later!”

Hornblower ended his speech amid a little fierce murmur from the others at the table. He was in an exalted mood again; this present occasion for making a speech had taken him a little by surprise, but he had hoped when he had first heard of the intended visit of the Tsar to have an opportunity sometime during the day of calling his attention once more to the aid which the British alliance could afford him. Alexander was young and impressionable. It was necessary to appeal to his emotions as well as to his intellect. Hornblower stole a glance at the Tsar to see if he had attained his end; Alexander was sitting rapt in thought, his eyes looking down at the table. He raised them to meet Hornblower’s with a smile, and Hornblower felt a wave of exultation, of sublime confidence that his plan had succeeded. He had had plain fare served at luncheon of set purpose; he had shown Alexander exactly how the Navy lived and slept and worked. The Tsar could not be ignorant of the British Navy’s glory, and Hornblower’s intuitive mind told him that proof of the hardship of naval life would be a subtle appeal to the Tsar’s emotions; it would be hard to explain exactly how it would appeal, but Hornblower was sure of it. Alexander would be moved both to help men who won glory at such a cost and also would desire to have such tough fighters on his side.

Alexander was making a move to leave; the aide-de-camp hurriedly drained his fifth tumbler of rum, and it and its predecessors so worked upon him as to make him put his arm round Bush’s shoulders as they came up on the quarter-deck and pat him on the back with wholehearted affection, while the long row of medals and orders on his chest jingled and clinked like tinkers working on pots and kettles. Bush, keenly aware of the eyes of the ship’s company upon him, tried to writhe away from the embrace, but unavailingly. He was red in the face as he bawled the order for the manning of the yards, and sighed with evident relief as Alexander’s departure down the accommodation ladder made it necessary for the aide-de-camp to follow him.