The Commodore

Chapter Three

Hornblower sat in his private sitting-room in the Golden Cross inn. There was a fire burning, and on the table at which he sat there were no fewer than four wax candles lighted. All this luxury—the private sitting-room, the fire, the wax candles—gave Hornblower uneasy delight. He had been poor for so long, he had had to scrape and economize so carefully all his life, that recklessness with money gave him this queer dubious pleasure, this guilty joy. His bill to-morrow would contain an item of at least half a crown for light, and if he had been content with rush dips the charge would not have been more than twopence. The fire would be a shilling, too. And you could trust an innkeeper to make the maximum charges to a guest who obviously could afford them, a Knight of the Bath, with a servant, and a two-horse chariot. To-morrow’s bill would be nearer two guineas than one, Hornblower touched his breast pocket to reassure himself that his thick wad of one-pound notes was still there. He could afford to spend two guineas a day.

Reassured, he bent again to the notes which he had made during his interview with the Foreign Secretary. They were in irregular order, jotted down as first one thing and then another had come into Wellesley’s mind. It was quite clear that not even the Cabinet knew for certain whether the Russians were going to fight Bonaparte or not. No, that was the wrong way to put it. Nobody knew whether Bonaparte was going to fight the Russians or not. However much ill will the Tsar bore towards the French—and obviously it was great—he would not fight unless he had to, unless Bonaparte deliberately attacked him. Certainly the Tsar would make every possible concession rather than fight, at least at present while he was still trying to build up and reorganize his army.

“It’s hard to think Boney will be mad enough to pick a quarrel,” Wellesley had said, “when he can get practically all he wants without fighting.”

But if there was going to be war it was desirable that England should have a striking force in the Baltic.

“If Boney chases Alexander out of Russia, I want you to be on hand to pick him up,” said Wellesley. “We can always find a use for him.”

Kings in exile were at least useful figureheads for any resistance that might still be maintained by countries which Bonaparte had overrun. Under her protecting wing England had the rulers of Sicily and Sardinia, the Netherlands and Portugal and Hesse, all of them helping to keep alive hope in the bosoms of their former subjects now ground beneath the tyrant’s heel.

“So much depends on Sweden,” was another remark of Wellesley’s. “No one can guess what Bernadotte will do. Russia’s conquest of Finland has irritated the Swedes, too. We try and point out to them that of the two Bonaparte’s the worse menace to ‘em. He’s at the mouth of the Baltic, while Russia’s only at the top. But it can’t be comfortable for Sweden, having to choose between Russia and Bonaparte.”

That was a pretty tangle, one way and the other—Sweden ruled by a Crown Prince who only three years before had been a French general, and some sort of connexion by marriage with Bonaparte at that; Denmark and Norway in the tyrant’s hands, Finland newly conquered by Russia, and the south shore of the Baltic swarming with Bonaparte’s troops.

“He has army camps at Danzig and Stettin,” Wellesley had said, “and South German troops echelonned all the way back to Berlin, to say nothing of the Prussians and the Austrians and the other allies.”

With Europe at his feet Bonaparte was able to drag in his train the armies of his late enemies; if he were to make war upon Russia it seemed as though a substantial part of his army would be foreigners—Italians and South Germans, Prussians and Austrians, Dutchmen and Danes.

“There are even Spaniards and Portuguese, they tell me,” said Wellesley. “I hope they have enjoyed the recent winter in Poland. You speak Spanish, I understand?”

Hornblower had said “Yes.”

“And French too?”

“Yes.”

“Russian?”

“No.”

“German?”

“No.”

“Swedish? Polish? Lithuanian?”

“No.”

“A pity. But most of the educated Russians speak French better than Russian, they tell me—although in that case, judging by the Russians I have met, they must be very ignorant of their own language. And we have a Swedish interpreter for you—you will have to arrange with the Admiralty how he will be rated in the ship’s books—I believe that is the correct nautical expression.”

It was typical of Wellesley to put in that little sneer. He was an ex-Governor-General of India, and the present Foreign Secretary, a man of blue blood and of the height of fashion. In those few words he had been able to convey all his sublime ignorance and his consequent sublime contempt for matters nautical, as well as the man of fashion’s feeling of lordly superiority over the uncouth seadog, even when the seadog in question happened to be his own brother-in-law. Hornblower had been a little nettled, and was still feeling sufficiently above himself to endeavour to irritate Wellesley in return.

“You are a master of all trades, Richard,” he said, evenly.

It was just as well to remind the man of fashion that the seadog was closely enough related to be entitled to use the Christian name, and, in addition to that, it might annoy the Marquis to suggest he had anything to do with a trade.

“Not of yours, Hornblower, I’m afraid. Never could learn all those ports and starboards and back-your-lees and things of that sort. One has to learn those as a schoolboy, like hic, haec, hoc.”

It was hard to prick the Marquis’s sublime complacency; Hornblower turned away from that memory back to serious business. The Russians had a fair navy, as many as fourteen ships of the line, perhaps, at Reval and Kronstadt; Sweden nearly as many. The German and Pomeranian ports swarmed with French privateers, and an important part of Hornblower’s duty would be to help protect British shipping from these wolves of the sea, for the Swedish trade was vital to England. From the Baltic came the naval stores that enabled England to rule the sea—the tar and the turpentine, the pine trees for masts, cordage and timber, rosin and oil. If Sweden were to ally herself with Bonaparte against Russia, the Swedish contribution to the trade—far more than half—would be lost, and England would have to struggle along with the little that could be gleaned from Finland and Estonia, convoyed through the Baltic in the teeth of the Swedish Navy, and somehow got out through the Sound even though Bonaparte was master of Denmark. Russia would want those stores for her own navy, and she must be persuaded, one way or another, to part with enough to maintain the British Navy at sea.

It was as well that England had not come to the rescue of Finland when Russia had attacked her; if she had, there would be far less chance of Russia going to war with Bonaparte. Diplomacy backed by force might perhaps protect Sweden from allying herself with Bonaparte, and might make the Baltic trade safe and might open the North German coastline to raids against Bonaparte’s communications—under that sort of pressure, if by any miracle Bonaparte should sustain a reverse, even Prussia might be persuaded to change sides. That would be another of Hornblower’s tasks, to help woo Sweden from her hereditary distrust of Russia, and to woo Prussia from her enforced alliance with France, while at the same time he must do nothing to imperil the Baltic trade. A false step could mean ruin.

Hornblower laid his notes down on the table and stared unseeing at the wall across the room. Fog and ice and shoals in the Baltic; the Russian Navy and the Swedish Navy and the French privateers; the Baltic trade and the Russian alliance and the attitude of Prussia; high politics and vital commerce; during the next few months the fate of Europe, the history of the world, would be balanced on a knife-edge, and the responsibility would be his. Hornblower felt the quickening of his pulses, the tensing of his muscles, which he had known of old at the prospect of danger. Nearly a year had gone by since the last time he had experienced those symptoms, when he had entered the great cabin of the Victory to hear the verdict of the court martial which might have condemned him to death. He felt he did not like this promise of peril, this prospect of enormous responsibility; he had visualized nothing like this when he drove up at noon that day so gaily to receive his orders. It would be for this that he would be leaving Barbara’s love and friendship, the life of a country squire, the tranquillity and peace of his newly-won home.

Yet even while he sat there, almost despairing, almost disconsolate, the lure of the problems of the future began to make itself felt. He was being given a free hand by the Admiralty—he could not complain on that score. Reval froze in December; Kronstadt often in November. While the ice lasted he would have to base himself farther down the Baltic. Did Lubeck ever freeze? In any case it would be better to—Hornblower abruptly pushed his chair back from the table, quite unconscious of what he was doing. For him to think imaginatively while sitting still was quite impossible; he could do it for no longer than he could hold his breath; such a comparison was the more apt because if he was compelled to sit still when his brain was active he exhibited some of the characteristic symptoms of slow strangulation—his blood pressure mounted, and he thrashed about restlessly.

To-night there was no question of having to sit still; having pushed back his chair he was able to pace up and down the room, from the table to the window and back again, a walk quite as long and perhaps more free from obstacles than he had known on many a quarter-deck. He had hardly begun when the sitting-room door opened quietly and Brown peered in through the crack, his attention attracted by the sound of the chair scraping on the floor. For Brown one glance was enough. The Captain had begun to walk, which meant that he would not be going to bed for a very long time.

Brown was an intelligent man who used his brains on this job of looking after the Captain. He closed the door again quietly, and waited a full ten minutes before entering the room. In ten minutes Hornblower had got well into the swing of his walk and his thoughts were pursuing a torrential course from which they could not easily be diverted. Brown was able to creep into the room without distracting his master—indeed, it would be very hard to say if Hornblower knew he entered or not. Brown, timing his moves accurately against the Captain’s crossings of the room, was able to reach the candles and snuff them—they had begun to gutter and to smell horribly—and then to reach the fireplace and put more coal on the fire, which had died down to red embers. Then he was able to make his way out of the room and settle down to a long wait; usually the Captain was a considerate master who would not dream of keeping his servant up late merely eventually to put his master to bed. It was because Brown was aware of this that he did not resent the fact that to-night Hornblower had forgotten for once to tell him that he might go to bed.

Up and down the room walked Hornblower, with a regular, measured stride, turning with his foot two inches from the wainscoting under the window on one side, and on the other with his hip just brushing the end of the table as he turned. Russians and Swedes, convoys and privateers, Stockholm and Danzig, all these gave him plenty to think about. It would be cold in the Baltic, too, and he would have to make plans for conserving his crews’ health in cold weather. And the first thing he must do the moment his flotilla was assembled must be to see that in every vessel there was an officer who could be relied upon to read and transmit signals correctly. Unless communications were good all discipline and organization was wasted and he might as well not try to make any plans at all. Bomb-ketches had the disadvantage of—

At this point Hornblower was distracted by a knocking at the door.

“Come in,” he rasped.

The door opened slowly, and revealed to his gaze both Brown and a scared innkeeper in a green baize apron.

“What is it?” snapped Hornblower. Now that he had halted in his quarter-deck walk he was suddenly aware that he was tired; much had happened since the Squire of Smallbridge had been welcomed by his tenants that morning, and the feeling in his legs told him that he must have been doing a fair amount of walking.

Brown and the innkeeper exchanged glances, and then the innkeeper took the plunge.

“It’s like this, sir,” he began, nervously. “His Lordship is in number four just under this sitting-room, sir. His Lordship’s a man of hasty temper, sir, beggin’ your pardon, sir. He says—beggin’ your pardon again, sir—he says that two in the morning’s late enough for anyone to walk up and down over his head. He says—”

“Two in the morning?” demanded Hornblower.

“It’s nearer three, sir,” interposed Brown, tactfully.

“Yes, sir, it struck the half-hour just when he rang for me the second time. He says if only you’d knock something over, or sing a song, it wouldn’t be so bad. But just to hear you walking up and down, sir—His Lordship says it makes him think about death and Judgement Day. It’s too regular, like. I told him who you was, sir, the first time he rang. And now—”

Hornblower had come to the surface by now, fully emerged from the wave of thought that had engulfed him. He saw the nervous gesticulations of the innkeeper, caught between the devil of this unknown Lordship downstairs and the deep sea of Captain Sir Horatio Hornblower upstairs, and he could not help smiling—in fact it was only with an effort that he prevented himself from laughing outright. He could visualize the whole ludicrous business, the irascible unknown peer down below, the innkeeper terrified of offending one or other of his two wealthy and influential guests, and as a crowning complication Brown stubbornly refusing to allow until the last possible moment any intrusion upon his master’s deliberations. Hornblower saw the obvious relief in the two men’s faces when he smiled, and that really made him laugh this time. His temper had been short of late and Brown had expected an explosion, while the wretched innkeeper never expected anything else—innkeepers never looked for anything better than tantrums from the people fate compelled them to entertain. Hornblower remembered damning Brown’s eyes without provocation only that very morning: Brown was not quite as clever as he might be, for this morning Hornblower had been fretting as an unemployed naval officer doomed to country life, while this evening he was a Commodore with a flotilla awaiting him and nothing in the world could upset his temper—Brown had not allowed for that.

“My respects to His Lordship,” he said. “Tell him that the march of doom will cease from this moment. Brown, I shall go to bed.”

The innkeeper fled in huge relief down the stairs, while Brown seized a candlestick—the candle in it was burned down to a stump—and lit his master through into the bedroom. Hornblower peeled off his coat with the epaulettes of heavy bullion, and Brown caught it just in time to save it falling to the floor. Shoes and shirt and trousers followed, and Hornblower pulled on the magnificent nightshirt which was laid out on the bed; a nightshirt of solid China silk, brocaded, with faggoting at the cuffs and neck, for which Barbara had sent a special order all the way to the East through her friends in the East India Company. The blanket-wrapped brick in the bed had cooled a good deal, but had diffused its warmth gratefully over much of the area; Hornblower snuggled down into its mild welcome.

“Good night, sir,” said Brown, and darkness rushed into the room from out of the corners as he extinguished the candle. Tumultuous dreams rushed with it. Whether asleep or awake—next morning Hornblower could not decide which—his mind was turning over all through the rest of the night the endless implications of this coming campaign in the Baltic, where his life and his reputation and his self-respect would be once more at stake.