Her tone admitted no possibility of argument; she was apparently talking of the inevitable — much as she might say that she had caught cold and would have to bear with it until it had run its course.
“The gentleman in charge here,” she went on, “knows nothing of his duties.”
Lady Barbara had no belief in the nobility of nursing, to her mind it was a more degrading occupation than cooking or mending clothes (work which had only occasionally, when the exigencies of travel demanded it, engaged her capable fingers) but she had found a job which was being inefficiently done when there was no one save herself to do it better, at a time when the King’s service depended in part on its being done well. She had set herself to work with the same wholehearted attention to detail and neglect of personal comfort with which one of her brothers had governed India and another had fought the Mahrattas.
“This man,” went on Lady Barbara, “has a splinter of wood under his skin here. It ought to be extracted at once.”
She displayed the man’s bare chest, hairy and tattooed. Under the tattooing there was a horrible black bruise, stretching from the breast bone to the right armpit, and in the muscles of the armpit was a jagged projection under the skin; when Lady Barbara laid her fingers on it the man writhed and groaned with pain. In fighting between wooden ships splinter wounds constituted a high proportion of the casualties, and the hurtling pieces of wood could never be extracted by the route by which they entered, because their shape gave them natural barbs. In this case the splinter had been deflected by the ribs so as to pass round under the skin, bruising and lacerating, to its present place in the armpit.
“Are you ready to do it now?” asked Lady Barbara of the unhappy Laurie.
“Well, madam —”
“If you will not, then I will. Don’t be a fool, man.”
“I will see that it is done, Lady Barbara,” interposed Hornblower. He would promise anything to get this finished and done with.
“Very well, then, Captain.”
Lady Barbara rose from her knees, but she showed no sign of any intention of retiring in a decent female fashion. Hornblower and Laurie looked at each other.
“Now, Laurie,” said Hornblower, harshly. “Where are your instruments? Here, you, Wilcox, Hudson. Bring him a good stiff tot of rum. Now, Williams, we’re going to get that splinter out of you. It is going to hurt you.”
Hornblower had to struggle hard to keep his face from writhing in disgust and fear of the task before him. He spoke harshly to stop his voice from trembling; he hated the whole business. And it was a painful and bloody business, too. Although Williams tried hard to show no weakness, he writhed as the incision was made, and Wilcox and Hudson had to catch his hands and force his shoulders back. He gave a horrible cry as the long dark strip of wood was dragged out, and then fell limp, fainting, so that he uttered no protest at the prick of the needle as the edges of the wound were clumsily sewn together.
Lady Barbara’s lips were firmly compressed. She watched Laurie’s muddled attempts at bandaging, and then she stooped without a word and took the rags from him. The men watched her fascinated as with one hand firmly behind Williams’ spine she passed the roll dexterously round his body and bound the fast-reddening waste firmly to the wound.
“He will do now,” said Lady Barbara, rising.
Hornblower spent two stifling hours down there in the cockpit going the round with Laurie and Lady Barbara, but they were not nearly such agonising hours as they might have been. One of the main reasons for his feeling so unhappy regarding the care of the wounded had been his consciousness of his own incompetence. Insensibly he came to shift some of his responsibility on to Lady Barbara’s shoulders; she was so obviously capable and so unintimidated that she was the person most fitted of all in the ship to be given the supervision of the wounded. When Hornblower had gone round every bed, when the five newly dead men had been dragged out, he faced her under the wavering light of the last lamp in the row.
“I don’t know how I can thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I am as grateful to you as any of these wounded men.”
“There is no gratitude needed,” said Lady Barbara, shrugging her slim shoulders, “for work which had to be done.”
A good many years later her ducal brother was to say “The King’s government must be carried on,” in exactly the same tone. The man in the bed beside them waved a bandaged arm.
“Three cheers for her leddyship,” he croaked. “Hip hip, hurrah!”
Some of the shattered invalids joined him in his cheers — a melancholy chorus, blended with the wheezing and groaning of the delirious men around them. Lady Barbara waved a deprecating hand and turned back to the captain.
“We must have air down here,” she said. “Can that be arranged? I remember my brother telling me how the mortality in the hospital at Bombay declined as soon as they began to give the patients air. Perhaps those men who can be moved can be brought on deck?”
“I will arrange it, ma’am,” said Hornblower.
Lady Barbara’s request was strongly accented by the contrast which Hornblower noticed when he went on deck — the fresh Pacific air, despite the scorching sunshine, was like champagne after the solid stink of the orlop. He gave orders for the immediate re-establishment of the canvas ventilating shafts which had been removed when the decks were cleared for action.
“And there are certain of the wounded, Mr Rayner,” he went on, “who would do better if brought up on deck. You must find Lady Barbara Wellesley and ask her which men are to be moved.”
“Lady Barbara Wellesley, sir?” said Rayner, surprised and tactless, because he knew nothing of the last development.
“You heard what I said,” snapped Hornblower.
“Aye aye, sir,” said Rayner hurriedly, and dived away below in fear lest he should say anything further to annoy his captain.
So that on board H.M.S. Lydia that morning divisions were held and divine service conducted a little late, after the burial of the dead, with a row of wounded swaying in hammocks on each side of the maindeck, and with the faint echo of the horrible sounds below floating up through the air shafts.
Chapter XIX
Once more the Lydia held her course along the Pacific coast of Central America. The grey volcanic peaks, tinged with pink, slid past her to the eastward, with the lush green of the coastal strip sometimes just visible at their feet. The sea was blue and the sky was blue; the flying-fish skimmed the surface, leaving their fleeting furrows behind them. But every minute of the day and night twenty men toiled at the pumps to keep her from sinking, and the rest of the able bodied crew worked all their waking hours at the task of refitting.
The fortnight which elapsed before she rounded Cape Mala went far to reduce her list of wounded. Some of the men were by then already convalescent — the hard physical condition which they had enjoyed, thanks to months of heavy work at sea, enabled them to make light of wounds which would have been fatal to men of soft physique. Shock and exhaustion had relieved the ship of others, and now gangrene, the grim Nemesis which awaited so many men with open wounds in those pre-antiseptic days, was relieving her of still more. Every morning there was the same ceremony at the ship’s side, when two or three or six hammock-wrapped bundles were slid over into the blue Pacific.
Galbraith went that way. He had borne the shock of his wound, he had even survived the torture to which Laurie submitted him when, goaded by Lady Barbara’s urgent representations, he had set to work with knife and saw upon the smashed tangle of flesh and bone which had been his legs. He had bade fair to make a good recovery, lying blanched and feeble in his cot, so that Laurie had been heard to boast of his surgical skill and of the fine stumps he had made and of the neatness with which he had tied the arteries. Then, suddenly, the fatal symptoms had shown themselves, and Galbraith had died five days later after a fortunate delirium.