The Commodore. C. S. Forester

“Let her drop down to leeward,” ordered Hornblower. “I want soundings taken at every log.”

Vickery handled the boat well. He kept her bows to the wind after shoving off, and with a couple of oars pulling steadily he manoeuvred her past each cable as the boat drifted to leeward. Brown stood amidships, balancing himself against the boat’s extravagant plunges, while he took soundings with the awkward thirty-foot sounding pole. It called for a powerful man to handle that thing in this wind, but properly used it was quicker and far less noisy than a hand lead. Four fathoms — three and a half — four — the boom was laid right across the fairway, as was only to be expected. At the windward end it was not more than a couple of hundred yards — a cable’s length — from the beach at Pillau, and Hornblower, staring into the night, more than suspected a supplementary boom from that shore which, overlapping this one, would compel any vessel entering to go about so as to make the turn. That meant that any ship trying to enter with hostile intentions would be sunk or set afire for certain by the heavy guns in Pillau.

They reached the leeward end of the boom; a stretch of clear water extended from here towards the sandspit — the Nehrung, to use the curious German word for it — which divided the Haff from the Baltic for twenty miles. The open stretch must be a quarter of a mile wide, but it was useless for navigation. Brown’s pole recorded a depth of ten feet for a couple of soundings, and then the water shallowed to no more than six or eight.

Vickery suddenly put his hand on Hornblower’s arm and pointed to the land. There was a nucleus of greater darkness there — a guard-boat beating out through the shallows to keep watch over the boom.

“Out oars,” said Hornblower. “Get out to sea.”

There were thrum mats round the looms of the oars to muffle the noise they made against the thole-pins; the men put their backs into their work, and the cutter crept out to sea as the guard-boat continued its course. When the two boats were far enough apart for the sail to be invisible Hornblower gave orders for the lug to be set and they began the beat back to Lotus, with Hornblower shivering uncontrollably in his wet clothes, bitterly ashamed though he was that Vickery should be aware that his Commodore should shiver on account of a mere wet jacket which any tough seaman would think nothing of. It was irritating, though it was no more than was to be expected, that the first attempt to find Lotus in the darkness should be unsuccessful, and the cutter had to go about and reach to windward on the other tack before at last they picked up the loom of her in the night. When her hail reached their ears Brown made a speaking-trumpet of his hands.

“Commodore!” he shouted, and Vickery turned the cutter into the Lotus’s lee, and Hornblower went up the sloop’s low side as the two came together. On the quarter-deck Vickery turned to him for orders.

“Haul up and make an offing, Mr Vickery,” said Hornblower. “Make sure Raven follows us. We must be out of sight of land by dawn.”

Down in Vickery’s tiny cabin, stripping off his wet clothes, with Brown hovering round him, Hornblower tried to make his dulled mind work on the problem before him. Brown produced a towel and Hornblower rubbed a little life into his chilled limbs. Vickery knocked and entered, coming, as soon as he had seen his ship on her proper course, to see that his Commodore had all that he needed. Hornblower straightened up after towelling his legs and hit his head with a crash against the deck beams; in this small sloop there was hardly more than five feet clearance. Hornblower let out an oath.

“There’s another foot of headroom under the skylight, sir,” said Vickery, diplomatically.

The skylight was three feet by two, and standing directly beneath it Hornblower could just stand upright, and even then his hair brushed the skylight. And the lamp swung from a hook in a deck beam beside the aperture; an incautious movement on Hornblower’s part brought his bare shoulder against it so that warm stinking oil ran out of the receiver on to his collarbone. Hornblower swore again.

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