A Ship of the Line. C. S. Forester

They fell apart, panting and tousled. Every eye was turned towards Hornblower as he walked forward in the patchy light, his head bowed under the deck above.

“The next woman fighting will be put ashore instantly,” growled Hornblower. The dark woman swept her hair from her eyes and sniffed with disdain.

“You needn’t put me ashore, Cap’n,” she said. “I’m goin’. There ain’t a farden to be had out o’ this starvation ship.”

She was apparently expressing a sentiment which was shared by a good many of the women, for the speech was followed by a little buzz of approval.

“Ain’t the men never goin’ to get their pay notes?” piped up the woman in the hammock.

“Enough o’ that,” roared Bush, suddenly. He pushed forward anxious to save his captain from the insults to which he was exposed, thanks to a government which left its men still unpaid after a month in port. “You there, what are you doing in your hammock after eight bells?”

But this attempt to assume a counter offensive met with disaster.

“I’ll come out if you like, Mr Lieutenant,” she said, flicking off her blanket and sliding to the deck. “I parted with my gown to buy my Tom a sausage, and my petticoat’s bought him a soop o’ West Country ale. Would you have me on deck in my shift, Mr Lieutenant?”

A titter went round the deck.

“Get back and be decent,” spluttered Bush, on fire with embarrassment.

Hornblower was laughing, too — perhaps it was because he was married that the sight of a half-naked woman alarmed him not nearly as much as it did his first lieutenant.

“Never will I be decent now,” said the woman, swinging her legs up into the hammock and composedly draping the blanket over her, “until my Tom gets his pay warrant.”

“An’ when he gets it,” sneered the fair woman. “What can he do with it without shore leave? Sell it to a bumboat shark for a quarter!”

“Fi’ pound for twenty-three months’ pay!” added another. “An me a month gone a’ready.”

“Avast there,” said Bush.

Hornblower beat a retreat, abandoning — forgetting, rather — the object of his visit of inspection below. He could not face those women when the question of pay came up again. The men had been scandalously badly treated, imprisoned in the ship within sight of land, and their wives (some of them certainly were wives, although by Admiralty regulations a simple verbal declaration of the existence of a marriage was sufficient to allow them on board) had just cause of complaint. No one, not even Bush, knew that the few guineas which had been doled out among the crew represented a large part of Hornblower’s accumulated pay — all he could spare, in fact, except for the necessary money to pay his officers’ expenses when they should start on their recruiting journeys.

His vivid imagination and absurd sensitiveness between them perhaps exaggerated part of the men’s hardships. The thought of the promiscuity of life below decks, where a man was allotted eighteen inches’ width in which to swing his hammock, while his wife was allowed eighteen inches next to him, all in a long row, husbands, wives, and single men, appalled him. So did the thought of women having to live on the revolting lower deck food. Possibly he made insufficient allowance for the hardening effect of long habit.

He emerged through the fore hatchway on to the maindeck a little unexpectedly. Thompson, one of the captains of the forecastle, was dealing with the new hands.

“P’raps we’ll make sailors of you,” he was saying, “and p’raps we won’t. Overside with a shot at your feet, more likely, before we sight Ushant And a waste o’ good shot, too. Come on wi’ that pump, there. Let’s see the colour o’ your hides, gaol-birds. When the cat gets at you we’ll see the colour o’ your backbones, too, you —”

“Enough of that, Thompson,” roared Hornblower, furious.

In accordance with his standing orders the new hands were being treated to rid them of vermin. Naked and shivering, they were grouped about the deck. Two of them were having their heads shorn down to the bare skin; a dozen of them, who had already submitted to this treatment (and looking strangely sickly and out of place with the prison pallor still on them) were being herded by Thompson towards the wash-deck pump which a couple of grinning hands were working. Fright was making them shiver as much as cold — not one of them, probably, had ever had a bath before, and what with the prospect, and Thompson’s bloodcurdling remarks and the strange surroundings, they were pitiful to see.

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