Yet there were some minutes of grace left him, during which he could stand balancing on the deck and allow his mind to wander free. Not that Bush was conscious of any need for meditation — he would have smiled at such a suggestion were anyone to make it to him. But the last few days had passed in a whirl, from the moment when his orders had arrived and he had said goodbye to his mother and sisters (he had had three weeks with them after the Conqueror had paid off) and hurried to Plymouth, counting the money he had left in his pockets to make sure he could pay the post‑chaise charges. The Renown had been in all the flurry of completing for the West Indian station, and during the thirty‑six hours that elapsed before she sailed Bush had hardly time to sit down, let alone sleep — his first good night’s rest had come while the Renown clawed her way across the bay. Yet almost from the moment of his first arrival on board he had been harassed by the fantastic moods of the captain, now madly suspicious and again stupidly easygoing. Bush was not a man sensitive to atmosphere — he was a sturdy soul philosophically prepared to do his duty in any of the difficult conditions to be expected at sea — but he could not help but be conscious of the tenseness and fear that pervaded life in the Renown. He knew that he felt dissatisfied and worried, but he did not know that these were his own forms of tenseness and fear. In three days at sea he had hardly come to know a thing about his colleagues: he could vaguely guess that Buckland, the first lieutenant, was capable and steady, and that Roberts, the second, was kindly and easygoing; Hornblower seemed active and intelligent, Smith a trifle weak; but these deductions were really guesses. The wardroom officers — the lieutenants and the master and the surgeon and the purser — seemed to be secretive and very much inclined to maintain a strict reserve about themselves. Within wide limits this was right and proper — Bush was no frivolous chatterer himself — but the silence was carried to excess when conversation was limited to half a dozen words, all strictly professional. There was much that Bush could have learned speedily about the ship and her crew if the other officers had been prepared to share with him the results of their experience and observations during the year they had been on board, but except for the single hint Bush had received from Hornblower when he came on board no one had uttered a word. If Bush had been given to Gothic flights of imagination he might have thought of himself as a ghost at sea with a company of ghosts, cut off from the world and from each other, ploughing across an endless sea to an unknown destination. As it was he could guess that the secretiveness of the wardroom was the result of the moods of the captain: and that brought him back abruptly to the thought that the wind was still freshening and a second reef was now necessary. He listened to the harping of the rigging, felt the heave of the deck under his feet, and shook his head regretfully. There was nothing for it.
“Mr Wellard,” he said to the volunteer beside him. “Go and tell the captain that I think another reef is necessary.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
It was only a few seconds before Wellard was back on deck again.
“Cap’n’s coming himself, sir.”
“Very good,” said Bush.
He did not meet Wellard’s eyes as he said the meaningless words; he did not want Wellard to see how he took the news, nor did he want to see any expression that Wellard’s face might wear. Here came the captain, his shaggy long hair whipping in the wind and his hook nose turned this way and that as usual.
“You want to take in another reef, Mr Bush?”
“Yes, sir,” said Bush, and waited for the cutting remark that he expected. It was a pleasant surprise that none was forthcoming. The captain seemed almost genial.