Then he could come on deck again to see how the work was progressing and fume for a space before Jones and Carslake appeared with the documents they had been preparing. Amid the confusion and din he had to clear his head again to read them with care before signing them with a bold “H. Hornblower, Captain.”
“Mr. Carslake, you can take my gig over to the Victualling Yard. Mr. Jones, I expect the Yard will need hands to man their lighter. See to that, if you please.”
A moment to spare now to observe the hands at work, to settle his cocked hat square on his head, to clasp his hands behind him, to walk slowly forward, doing his best to look quite cool and imperturbable, as if all this wild activity were the most natural thing in the world.
“Avast heaving there on that staytackle. Belay!”
The powder keg hung suspended just over the deck. Hornblower forced himself to speak coldly, without excitement. A stave of the keg had started a trifle. There was a minute trail of powder grains on the deck; more were dribbling very slowly out.
“Sway that keg back into the hulk. You, bos’n’s mate, get a wet mop and swill that powder off the deck.”
An accident could have fired that powder easily. The flash would pass in either direction; four tons of powder in Atropos, forty, perhaps in the hulk—what would have happened to the massed shipping in the Pool in that event? The men were eyeing him; this would be a suitable moment to encourage them with their work.
“Greenwich Hospital is over there, men,” said Hornblower, pointing down river to the graceful outlines of Wren’s building. “Some of us will wind up there in the end, I expect, but we don’t want to be blown straight there today.”
A feeble enough joke, perhaps, but it raised a grin or two all the same.
“Carry on.”
Hornblower continued his stroll forward, the imperturbable captain who was nevertheless human enough to crack a joke. It was the same sort of acting that he used towards Maria when she seemed likely to be in a difficult mood.
Here was the lighter with the shot, coming along the starboard side. Hornblower looked down into it. Ninepounder balls for the four long guns, two forward and two aft; twelvepounder balls for the eighteen carronades that constituted the ship’s main armament. The twenty tons of iron made a pathetically small mass lying in the bottom of the lighter, when regarded with the eye of a man who had served in a ship of the line; the old Renown would have discharged that weight of shot in a couple of hours’ fighting. But this dead weight was a very considerable proportion of the load Atropos had to carry. Half of it would be distributed fairly evenly along the ship in the shotgarlands; where he decided to stow the other ten tons would make all the difference to Atropos, could add a knot to her speed or reduce it by a knot, could make her stiff in a breeze or crank, handy or awkward under sail. He could not reach a decision about that until the rest of the stores were on board and he had had an opportunity of observing her trim. Hornblower ran a keen eye over the nets in which the shot were to be swayed up at the starboard foreyardarm, and went back through his mind in search of the data stored away there regarding the breaking strain of Manila line—this, he could tell, had been several years in service.
“Sixteen rounds to the load,” he called down into the lighter, “no more.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
It was typical of Hornblower’s mind that it should spend a moment or two thinking about the effect that would be produced if one of those nets was to give way; the shot would pour down into the lighter again; falling from the height of the yardarm they could go clear through the bottom of the lighter; with all that deadweight on board, the lighter would sink like a stone, there on the edge of the fairway, to be an intolerable nuisance to London’s shipping until divers had painfully cleared the sunken wreck of the shot, and camels had lifted the wreck clear of the channel. The vast shipping of the Port of London could be seriously impeded as a result of a momentary inattention regarding the condition of a cargo net.
Jones was hastening across the deck to touch his hat to him.
“The last of the powder’s just coming aboard, sir.”
“Thank you. Mr. Jones. Have the hulk warped back to her moorings. Mr. Owen can send the powder boys here to put the shot in the garlands as they come on board.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
And the gig was coming back across the river with Carslake sitting in the stern.
“Well, Mr. Carslake, how did the Victualling Yard receive those indents?”
“They’ve accepted them, sir. They’ll have the stores on the quayside tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Didn’t you listen to my orders, Mr. Carslake? I don’t want to have to put a black mark against your name. Mr. Jones! I’m going over to the Victualling Yard. Come back with me, Mr. Carslake.”
The Victualling Yard was a department of the Navy Office, not of the Admiralty. The officials there had to be approached differently from those of the dockyard. One might almost think the two organizations were rivals, instead of working to a common patriotic end against a deadly enemy.
“I can bring my own men to do the work,” said Hornblower. “You needn’t use your own gangs at all.”
“M’m,” said the victualling superintendent.
“I’ll move everything to the quayside myself, besides lightering it over.”
“M’m,” said the victualling superintendent again, a trifle more receptively.
“I would be most deeply obliged to you,” went on Hornblower. “You need only instruct one of your clerks to point out the stores to the officer in command of my working party. Everything else will be attended to. I beg of you, sir.”
It was highly gratifying to a Navy Office official to have a captain, metaphorically, on his knees to him, in this fashion. Equally gratifying was the thought that the Navy would do all the work, with a great saving of timetallies to the Victualling Yard. Hornblower could see the satisfaction in the fellow’s fat face. He wanted to wipe it off with his fist, but he kept himself humble. It did him no harm, and by this means he was bending the fellow to his will as surely as if he was using threats.
“There’s the matter of those stores you have condemned,” said the superintendent.
“My court of inquiry was in due form,” said Hornblower.
“Yes,” said the superintendent thoughtfully.
“Of course I can return you the hogsheads,” suggested Hornblower. “I was intending to do so, as soon as I had emptied the beef over into the tide.”
“No, please do not go to that trouble. Return me the full hogsheads.”
The working of the minds of these government Jacksinoffice was beyond normal understanding. Hornblower could not believe—although it was just possible—that the superintendent had any personal financial interest in the matter of those condemned stores. But the fact that the condemnation had taken place presumably was a blot on his record, or on the record of the yard. If the hogsheads were returned to them no mention of the condemnation need be made officially, and presumably they could be palmed off again on some other ship—some ship that might go to sea without the opportunity of sampling the stuff first. Sailors fighting for their country might starve as long as the Victualling Yard’s records were unsmirched.
“I’ll return the full hogsheads gladly, sir,” said Hornblower. “I’ll send them over to you in the lighter that brings the other stores over.”
“That might do very well,” said the superintendent.
“I am delighted, and, as I said, intensely obliged to you, sir. I’ll have my launch over here with a working party in ten minutes.”
Hornblower bowed with all the unction he could command; this was not the moment to spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar. He bowed himself out before the discussion could be reopened. But the superintendent’s last words were: