Not many days after the last incident narrated, something befell Billy Budd
that more gravelled him than aught that had previously occurred.
It was a warm night for the latitude; and the Foretopman, whose watch at the
time was properly below, was dozing on the uppermost deck whither he had
ascended from his hot hammock, one of hundreds suspended so closely wedged
together over a lower gun deck that there was little or no swing to them. He lay
as in the shadow of a hill-side, stretched under the lee of the booms, a piled
ridge of spare spars amidships between fore-mast and mainmast and among which
the ship's largest boat, the launch, was stowed. Alongside of three other
slumberers from below, he lay near that end of the booms which approaches the
fore-mast; his station aloft on duty as a foretopman being just over the
deckstation of the forecastlemen, entitling him according to usage to make
himself more or less at home in that neighbourhood.
Presently he was stirred into semi-consciousness by somebody, who must have
previously sounded the sleep of the others, touching his shoulder, and then as
the Foretopman raised his head, breathing into his ear in a quick whisper, "Slip
into the lee forechains, Billy; there is something in the wind. Don't speak.
Quick, I will meet you there"; and disappeared.
Now Billy like sundry other essentially good-natured ones had some of the
weaknesses inseparable from essential good-nature; and among these was a
reluctance, almost an incapacity of plumply saying no to an abrupt proposition
not obviously absurd, on the face of it, nor obviously unfriendly, nor
iniquitous. And being of warm blood he had not the phlegm tacitly to negative
any proposition by unresponsive inaction. Like his sense of fear, his
apprehension as to aught outside of the honest and natural was seldom very
quick. Besides, upon the present occasion, the drowse from his sleep still hung
upon him.
However it was, he mechanically rose, and sleepily wondering what could be in
the wind, betook himself to the designated place, a narrow platform, one of six,
outside of the high bulwarks and screened by the great dead-eyes and multiple
columned lanyards of the shrouds and back-stays; and, in a great war-ship of
that time, of dimensions commensurate with the hull's magnitude; a tarry
balcony, in short, overhanging the sea, and so secluded that one mariner of the
Indomitable, a non-conformist old tar of a serious turn, made it even in daytime
his private oratory.
In this retired nook the stranger soon joined Billy Budd. There was no moon
as yet; a haze obscured the star-light. He could not distinctly see the
stranger's face. Yet from something in the outline and carriage, Billy took him
to be, and correctly, one of the afterguard.
"Hist! Billy," said the man in the same quick cautionary whisper as before;
"You were impressed, weren't you? Well, so was I"; and he paused, as to mark the
effect. But Billy, not knowing exactly what to make of this, said nothing. Then
the other: "We are not the only impressed ones, Billy. There's a gang of us.-
Couldn't you- help- at a pinch?"
"What do you mean?" demanded Billy, here thoroughly shaking off his drowse.
"Hist, hist!" the hurried whisper now growing husky, "see here"; and the man
held up two small objects faintly twinkling in the nightlight; "see, they are
yours, Billy, if you'll only-"
But Billy broke in, and in his resentful eagerness to deliver himself his
vocal infirmity somewhat intruded: "D-D-Damme, I don't know what you are
d-d-driving at, or what you mean, but you had better g-g-go where you belong!"
For the moment the fellow, as confounded, did not stir; and Billy springing to
his feet, said, "If you d-don't start I'll t-t-toss you back over the r-rail!"
There was no mistaking this and the mysterious emissary decamped disappearing in
the direction of the main-mast in the shadow of the booms.
"Hallo, what's the matter?" here came growling from a forecastleman awakened
from his deck-doze by Billy's raised voice. And as the Foretopman reappeared and
was recognized by him; "Ah, Beauty, is it you? Well, something must have been
the matter for you st-st-stuttered."
"O," rejoined Billy, now mastering the impediment; "I found an afterguardsman
in our part of the ship here and I bid him be off where he belongs."
"And is that all you did about it, Foretopman?" gruffly demanded another, an
irascible old fellow of brick-colored visage and hair, and who was known to his
associate forecastlemen as Red Pepper; "Such sneaks I should like to marry to
the gunner's daughter!" by that expression meaning that he would like to subject
them to disciplinary castigation over a gun.
However, Billy's rendering of the matter satisfactorily accounted to these
inquirers for the brief commotion, since of all the sections of a ship's
company, the forecastlemen, veterans for the most part and bigoted in their
sea-prejudices, are the most jealous in resenting territorial encroachments,
especially on the part of any of the afterguard, of whom they have but a sorry
opinion, chiefly landsmen, never going aloft except to reef or furl the mainsail
and in no wise competent to handle a marlinspike or turn in a dead-eye, say.
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