“Aye aye, sir,” said Wellard, and departed.
The pipes twittered through the ship.
“All hands! All hands!” roared the bosun’s mates. “All hands fall in abaft the mainmast! All hands!”
Buckland went nervously up on deck, but he acquitted himself well enough at the moment of trial. In a harsh, expressionless voice he told the assembled hands that the accident to the captain, which they all must have heard about, had rendered him incapable at present of continuing in command.
“But we’ll all go on doing our duty,” said Buckland, staring down at the level plain of upturned faces.
Bush, looking with him, picked out the grey head and paunchy figure of Hobbs, the acting‑gunner, the captain’s toady and informer. Things would be different for Mr Hobbs in future — at least as long as the captain’s disability endured. That was the point: as long as the captain’s disability endured. Bush looked down at Hobbs and wondered how much he knew, how much he guessed — how much he would swear to at a court‑martial. He tried to read the future in the fat old man’s face, but his clairvoyance failed him. He could guess nothing.
When the hands were dismissed there was a moment of bustle and confusion, as the watches resumed their duties and the idlers streamed off below. It was there, in the noise and confusion of a crowd, that momentary privacy and freedom from observation could best be found. Bush intercepted Hornblower by the mizzenmast bitts and could ask the question that he had been wanting to ask for hours; the question on which so much depended.
“How did it happen?” asked Bush.
The bosun’s mates were bellowing orders; the hands were scurrying hither and thither; all round the two of them was orderly confusion, a mass of people intent on their own business, while they stood face to face, isolated, with the beneficent sunshine streaming down on them, lighting up the set face which Hornblower turned towards his questioner.
“How did what happen, Mr Bush?” said Hornblower.
“How did the captain fall down the hatchway?”
As soon as he had said the words Bush glanced back over his shoulder in sudden fright lest he should have been overheard. These might be hanging words. When he looked back Hornblower’s face was quite expressionless.
“I think he must have overbalanced,” he said, evenly, looking straight into Bush’s eyes; and then he went on, “If you will excuse me, sir, I have some duties to attend to.”
Later in the day every wardroom officer was introduced in turn to the captain’s cabin to see with his own eyes what sort of wreck lay there. Bush saw only a feeble invalid, lying in the half‑light of the cabin, his face almost covered with bandages, the fingers of one hand moving minutely, the other hand concealed in a sling.
“He’s under an opiate,” explained Clive in the wardroom. “I had to administer a heavy dose to enable me to try and set the fractured nose.”
“I expect it was spread all over his face,” said Lomax brutally. “It was big enough.”
“The fracture was very extensive and comminuted,” agreed Clive.
There were screams the next morning from the captain’s cabin, screams of terror as well as of pain, and Clive and his mates emerged eventually sweating and worried. Clive went instantly to report confidentially to Buckland, but everyone in the ship had heard those screams or had been told about them by men who had; the surgeon’s mates, questioned eagerly in the gunroom by the other warrant officers, could not maintain the monumental discretion that Clive aimed at in the wardroom. The wretched invalid was undoubtedly insane; he had fallen into a paroxysm of terror when they had attempted to examine the fractured nose, flinging himself about with a madman’s strength so that, fearing damage to the other broken bones, they had had to swathe him in canvas as in a strait‑jacket, leaving only his left arm out. Laudanum and an extensive bleeding had reduced him to insensibility in the end, but later in the day when Bush saw him he was conscious again, a weeping, pitiful object, shrinking in fear from every face that he saw, persecuted by shadows, sobbing — it was a dreadful thing to see that burly man sobbing like a child — over his troubles, and trying to hide his face from a world which to his tortured mind held no friendship at all and only grim enmity.