They all would seemingly. Crespo had them all cheering wildly at the end of his speech. Crespo came back to Hornblower.
“Thank you, Captain,” he said. “I think there is no more need for the presence of your prize crew. My officers and I will be able to attend to any insubordination which may arise later.”
“I think you will be quite able to,” said Hornblower, a little bitterly.
“Some of them may not easily be enlightened when the time comes for that,” said Crespo, grinning.
Pulling back to the Lydia Hornblower thought bitterly about the murder of the Spanish master’s mate. It was a crime which he ought to have prevented—he had gone on board the Natividad expressly to prevent cruelty and he had failed. Yet he realised that that kind of cruelty would not have the bad effect on his own men that a coldblooded hanging of the officers would have done. The crew of the Natividad was being forced to serve a new master against their will—but the pressgang had done the same for three-quarters of the crew of the Lydia. Flogging and death were the punishments meted out to Englishmen who refused to obey the orders of officers who had arbitrarily assumed command over them—English sailors were not likely to fret unduly over Dagoes in the same position, even though with English lower-class lack of logic they would have been moved to protest against a formal hanging of officers.
His train of thought was suddenly interrupted by the sound of a gun from the Natividad, instantly answered by another from the Lydia. He almost sprang to his feet in the sternsheets of the launch, but a glance over his shoulder reassured him. A new flag was now flying from the Natividad’s peak. Blue with a yellow star in the middle, he saw. The sound of the saluting guns rolled slowly round the bay; the salute was still being fired as he went up the Lydia’s side. Mr. Marsh, the gunner, was pacing up and down the foredeck mumbling to himself—Hornblower guessed at the jargon.
“If I hadn’t been a born bloody fool I shouldn’t be here. Fire seven. I’ve left my wife; I’ve left my home and everything that’s dear. Fire eight.”
Half an hour later Hornblower was at the beach to meet el Supremo, who came riding down, punctual to the minute, a ragged retinue of a dozen riding with him. El Supremo did not condescend to present his suite to the captain, but bowed and stepped straight into the launch; his suite introduced themselves, in a string of meaningless names, in turn as they came up to Hornblower. They were all nearly pure Indians; they were all Generals save for one or two Colonels, and they were all clearly most devotedly attached to their master. Their whole bearing, every little action of theirs, indicated not merely their fear of him but their admiration—their love, it might be said.
At the gangway sideboys and boatswain’s mates and marines were ready to receive el Supremo with distinguished military formality, but el Supremo astonished Hornblower as he was about to go up the ladder, with the casual words—
“The correct salute for me, Captain, is twenty-three guns.”
That was two more guns than His Majesty King George himself would receive. Hornblower stared for a moment, thought wildly of how he could refuse, and finally salved his conscience with the notion that a salute of that number of guns would be entirely meaningless. He sent a message hurriedly to Mr. Marsh ordering twenty-three guns—it was odd, the way in which the ship’s boy almost reduplicated Hornblower’s reactions, by staring, composing his features, and hurrying off comforted by the thought that it was the Captain’s re-ponsibility and not his own. And Hornblower could hardly repress a grin as he thought of Marsh’s certain astonishment, and the boiling exasperation in his voice when he reached—“If I hadn’t been a born bloody fool I shouldn’t be here. Fire twenty-three.”
El Supremo stepped on to the quarterdeck with a keen glance round him, and then, while Hornblower looked at him, the interest faded from his face and he lapsed into the condition of abstracted indifference in which Hornblower had seen him before. He seemed to listen, but he looked over the heads of Bush and Gerard and the others as Hornblower presented them. He shook his head without a word when Hornblower suggested that he might care to inspect the ship. There was a little awkward pause, which was broken by Bush addressing his captain.
“Natividad hoisting another flag to the main yardarm, sir. No it’s not, it’s—”
It was the body of a man, black against the blue sky, rising slowly, jerking and twisting as it rose. A moment later another body rose at the other end of the yard. All eyes instinctively turned towards el Supremo. He was still gazing away into the distance, his eyes focused on nothing, yet everyone knew he had seen. The English officers cast a hasty glance at their captain for guidance, and followed his lead in lapsing into an uncomfortable pose of having noticed nothing. Disciplinary measures in a ship of another nation could be no affair of theirs.
“Dinner will be served shortly, Supremo,” said Hornblower with a gulp. “Would you care to come below?”
Still without a word el Supremo walked over to the companion and led the way. Down below his lack of stature was made apparent by the fact that he could walk upright. As a matter of fact, his head just brushed the deck beams above him, but the nearness of the beams did nothing to make him stoop as he walked. Hornblower became conscious of a ridiculous feeling that el Supremo would never need to stoop, that the deck beams would raise themselves as he passed rather than commit the sacrilege of bumping his head—that was how el Supremo’s quiet dignity of carriage affected him.
Polwheal and the stewards assisting him, in their best clothes, held aside the screens which still took the place of the discarded bulkheads, but at the entrance to the cabin el Supremo stopped for a moment and said the first words which had passed his lips since he came on board.
“I will dine alone here,” he said. “Let the food be brought to me.”
None of his suite saw anything in the least odd about his request—Hornblower, watching their expressions, was quite sure that their unconcern was in no way assumed. El Supremo might have been merely blowing his noise for all the surprise they envinced.
It was all a horrible nuisance, of course. Hornblower and his other guests had to dine in makeshift fashion in the gunroom mess, and his one linen tablecloth and his one set of linen napkins, and the two last bottles of his old Madeira remained in the after cabin for el Supremo’s use. Nor was the meal improved by the silence that prevailed most of the time; el Supremo’s suite were not in the least talkative, and Hornblower was the only Englishman with conversational Spanish. Bush tried twice, valiantly, to make polite speeches to his neighbours, putting a terminal ‘o’ on the ends of his English words in the hope that so they might be transmuted into Spanish, but the blank stares of the men he addressed reduced him quickly to stammering inarticulation.
Dinner was hardly finished; everyone had hardly lighted the loose brown cigars which had been part of the stores handed over to the Lydia when a new messenger arrived from the shore and was brought in by the bewildered officer of the watch who could not understand his jabbering talk. The troops were ready to come on board. With relief Hornblower put away his napkin and went on deck, followed by the others.
The men whom the launch and the cutter, plying steadily between ship and shore, brought out, were typical Central American soldiers, barefooted and ragged, swarthy and lankhaired. Each man carried a bright new musket and a bulging cartridge pouch, but these were merely what Hornblower had brought for them; most of the men carried in their hands cotton bags presumably filled with provisions—some bore melons and bunches of bananas in addition. The crew herded them on to the maindeck; they looked about them curiously and chattered volubly, but they were amenable enough, squatting in gossiping groups between the guns where the grinning crew pushed them. They sat on the planking and most of them incontinently began to eat; Hornblower suspected them to be half starved and to be devouring the rations which were expected to last them for several days.