12 Hornblower and the Crisis

below his left ear.

“What’s this?” she asked. “It looks like paint. Black paint. You haven’t looked after yourself very well, dear.”

“Very likely it’s paint,” agreed Hornblower.

He had repressed the almost automatic reaction to draw back from a public caress, before he realized what it was that Maria had observed. Now there was a flood of recollection. The night before last he had stormed on to the deck of the Guepe with a gang of yelling madmen with blackened faces. He had heard a cutlass blade crunch on bone, he had heard screams for mercy, he had seen nine pounds of canister fired down into a crowded ‘tweendecks. Only the night before last, and here was Maria, simple and innocent and ignorant, and his child, and the staring onlookers, in the English sunshine. It was only a step out of one world into another, but it was a step infinitely long, over a bottomless chasm.

“Horry, darling?” said Maria, inquiringly, and broke the spell.

She was looking at him anxiously, studying him and frightened by what she saw; he felt he must have been scowling, even snarling, as his expression revealed the emotions he was re-experiencing. It was time to smile.

“It wasn’t easy to clean up in Princess,” he said. It had been hard to apply turpentine to his face before a mirror in the leaping waterhoy with the wind on the quarter.

“You must do it as soon as ever you can,” said Maria. She was scrubbing at his jaw with her handkerchief. “It won’t come off for me.”

“Yes, dear.”

He realized that what had been a death’s head grin was softening into something more natural, and this was the moment, with reassurance restored to Maria’s face, to tear himself from her.

“And now goodbye, dear,” he said gently.

“Yes, dear.”

She had learned her lesson well during half a dozen farewells since their marriage. She knew that her incomprehensible husband disliked any show of emotion even in private, and disliked it twenty times as much with a third party present. She had learned that he had moments of withdrawal which she should not resent because he was sorry for them afterwards. And above all that she had learned that she weighed in the scale nothing, nothing at all, against his duty. She knew that if she were to pit herself and her child against this it would only end in a terrible hurt which she could not risk because it would hurt him as much or more.

It was only a few steps to the waiting chaise; he took note that his sea chest and ditty bag were under the seat on which he put his precious bundle, and turned back to his wife and child.

“Goodbye, son,” he said. Once more he was rewarded with a smile instantly concealed. “Goodbye my dear. I shall write to you, of course.”

She put up her mouth for kissing, but she held herself back from throwing herself into his arms, and she was alert to terminate the kiss at the same moment as he saw fit to withdraw. Hornblower climbed up into the chaise, and sat there, feeling oddly isolated. The postilion mounted and looked back over his shoulder.

“London,” said Hornblower.

The horses moved forward and the small crowd of onlookers raised something like a cheer. Then the hoofs clattered on the cobbles and the chaise swung round the corner, abruptly cutting Maria off out of his sight.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“This’ll do,” said Hornblower to the landlady.

“Bring ‘em up, ‘Arry,” yelled the landlady over her shoulder, and Hornblower heard the heavy feet of the idiot son on the uncarpeted stairs as he carried up his sea chest.

There was a bed and a chair and a wash-hand stand; a mirror on the wall; all a man could need. These were the cheap lodgings recommended to him by the last postilion; there had been a certain commotion in the frowsy street when the post-chaise had turned into it from the Westminster Bridge Road and had pulled up outside the house — it was not at all the sort of street where post-chaises could be expected to be seen. The cries of the children outside who had been attracted by the sight could still be heard through the narrow window.

“Anything you want?” asked the landlady.

“Hot water,” said Hornblower.

The landlady looked a little harder at the man who wanted hot water at nine in the morning.

“Or right. I’ll get you some,” she said.

Hornblower looked round him at the room; it seemed to his disordered mind that if he were to relax his attention the room would have revolved round him on its own. He sat down in the chair; his backside felt as if it were one big bruise, as if it had been beaten with a club. It would have been far more comfortable to stretch out on the bed, but that he dared not do. He kicked off his shoes and wriggled out of his coat, and became aware that he stank.

“‘Ere’s your ‘ot water,” said the landlady, re-entering.

“Thank you.”

When the door closed again Hornblower pulled himself wearily to his feet and took off the rest of his clothes. That was better; he had not had them off for three days, and this room was sweltering hot with the June sun blazing down on the roof above. Stupid with fatigue, he more than once had to stop to think what he should do next, as he sought out clean clothing and unrolled his housewife. The face he saw in the mirror was covered with hair on which the dust lay thick and he turned away from it in disgust.

It was a grisly and awkward business to wash himself inch by inch in the wash basin, but it was restorative in some small degree. Everything he had been wearing was infiltrated with dust, which had penetrated everywhere — some had even seeped into his sea chest and pattered out when he lifted out his clothes. With his final pint of hot water he applied himself to shave.