“Damn you!” he said. “Damn you! Damn you to Hell!”
“Easy there!” said the captain hastily. “Let’s fill the glasses. A brimmer there, Mr. Buckland. Now, our country! Noble England! Queen of the waves!”
Buckland’s anger was drowned in the fresh flood of liquor, yet later in the session his sorrows overcame him and he sat at the table weeping quietly, with the tears running down his cheeks; but Bush was too happy to allow Buckland’s misery to affect him. He always remembered that afternoon as one of the most successful dinners he had ever attended. He could also remember Hornblower’s smile at the end of dinner.
“We can’t send you back to the hospital today,” said Hornblower. “You’d better sleep in your own cot tonight. Let me take you there.”
That was very agreeable. Bush put both arms round Hornblower’s shoulders and walked with dragging feet. It did not matter that his feet dragged and his legs would not function while he had this support; Hornblower was the best man in the world and Bush could announce it by singing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ while lurching along the alleyway. And Hornblower lowered him on to the heaving cot and grinned down at him as he clung to the edges of the cot; Bush was a little astonished that the ship should sway like this while at anchor.
Chapter XVII
That was how Hornblower came to leave the Renown. The coveted promotion was in his grasp, and he was busy enough commissioning the Retribution, making her ready for sea, and organising the scratch crew which was drafted into her. Bush saw something of him during this time, and could congratulate him soberly on the epaulette which, worn on the left shoulder, marked him as a commander, one of those gilded individuals for whom bosuns’ mates piped the side and who could look forward with confidence to eventual promotion to captain. Bush called him ‘sir’, and even when he said it for the first time the expression did not seem unnatural.
Bush had learned something during the past few weeks which his service during the years had not called to his attention. Those years had been passed at sea, among the perils of the sea, amid the everchanging conditions of wind and weather, deep water and shoal. In the ships of the line in which he had served there had only been minutes of battle for every week at sea, and he had gradually become fixed in the idea that seamanship was the one requisite for a naval officer. To be master of the countless details of managing a wooden sailing ship; not only to be able to handle her under sail, but to be conversant with all the petty but important trifles regarding cordage and cables, pumps and salt pork, dry rot and the Articles of War; that was what was necessary. But he knew now of other qualities equally necessary: a bold and yet thoughtful initiative, moral as well as physical courage, tactful handling both of superiors and of subordinates, ingenuity and quickness of thought. A fighting navy needed to fight, and needed fighting men to lead it.
Yet even though this realization reconciled him to Hornblower’s promotion, there was irony in the fact that he was plunged back immediately into petty detail of the most undignified sort. For now he had to wage war on the insect world and not on mankind; the Spanish prisoners in the six days they had been on board had infested the ship with all the parasites they had brought with them. Fleas, lice, and bedbugs swarmed everywhere, and in the congenial environment of a wooden ship in the tropics full of men they flourished exceedingly. Heads had to be cropped and bedding baked; and in a desperate attempt to wall in the bedbugs woodwork had to be repainted—a success of a day or two flattered only to deceive, for after each interval the pests showed up again. Even the cockroaches and the rats that had always been in the ship seemed to multiply and become omnipresent.
It was perhaps an unfortunate coincidence that the height of his exasperation with this state of affairs coincided with the payment of prize money for the captures at Samaná. A hundred pounds to spend, a couple of days’ leave granted by Captain Cogshill, and Hornblower at a loose end at the same time—those two days were a lurid period, during which Hornblower and Bush contrived to spend each of them a hundred pounds in the dubious delights of Kingston. Two wild days and two wild nights, and then Bush went back on board the Renown, shaken and limp, only too glad to get out to sea and recover. And when he returned from his first cruise under Cogshill’s command Hornblower came to say goodbye.