In a seventy-four of the old order the deck known as the upper gun deck was
the one covered over by the spar-deck which last though not without its armament
was for the most part exposed to the weather. In general it was at all hours
free from hammocks; those of the crew swinging on the lower gun deck, and
berth-deck, the latter being not only a dormitory but also the place for the
stowing of the sailors' bags, and on both sides lined with the large chests or
movable pantries of the many messes of the men.
On the starboard side of the Indomitable's upper gun deck, behold Billy Budd
under sentry, lying prone in irons, in one of the bays formed by the regular
spacing of the guns comprising the batteries on either side. All these pieces
were of the heavier calibre of that period. Mounted on lumbering wooden
carriages they were hampered with cumbersome harness of breechen and strong
side-tackles for running them out. Guns and carriages, together with the long
rammers and shorter lintstocks lodged in loops overhead- all these, as
customary, were painted black; and the heavy hempen breechens, tarred to the
same tint, wore the like livery of the undertakers. In contrast with the
funereal hue of these surroundings the prone sailor's exterior apparel, white
jumper and white duck trousers, each more or less soiled, dimly glimmered in the
obscure light of the bay like a patch of discolored snow in early April
lingering at some upland cave's black mouth. In effect he is already in his
shroud or the garments that shall serve him in lieu of one. Over him, but scarce
illuminating him, two battle-lanterns swing from two massive beams of the deck
above. Fed with the oil supplied by the war-contractors (whose gains, honest or
otherwise, are in every land an anticipated portion of the harvest of death),
with flickering splashes of dirty yellow light they pollute the pale moonshine
all but ineffectually struggling in obstructed flecks thro' the open ports from
which the tompioned cannon protrude. Other lanterns at intervals serve but to
bring out somewhat the obscurer bays which, like small confessionals or
side-chapels in a cathedral, branch from the long dim-vistaed broad aisle
between the two batteries of that covered tier.
Such was the deck where now lay the Handsome Sailor. Through the rose-tan of
his complexion, no pallor could have shown. It would have taken days of
sequestration from the winds and the sun to have brought about the effacement of
that. But the skeleton in the cheekbone at the point of its angle was just
beginning delicately to be defined under the warm-tinted skin. In fervid hearts
self-contained, some brief experiences devour our human tissue as secret fire in
a ship's hold consumes cotton in the bale.
But now lying between the two guns, as nipped in the vice of fate, Billy's
agony, mainly proceeding from a generous young heart's virgin experience of the
diabolical incarnate and effective in some men- the tension of that agony was
over now. It survived not the something healing in the closeted interview with
Captain Vere. Without movement, he lay as in a trance. That adolescent
expression previously noted as his, taking on something akin to the look of a
slumbering child in the cradle when the warm hearth-glow of the still chamber at
night plays on the dimples that at whiles mysteriously form in the cheek,
silently coming and going there. For now and then in the gyved one's trance a
serene happy light born of some wandering reminiscence or dream would diffuse
itself over his face, and then wane away only anew to return.
The Chaplain coming to see him and finding him thus, and perceiving no sign
that he was conscious of his presence, attentively regarded him for a space,
then slipping aside, withdrew for the time, peradventure feeling that even he
the minister of Christ, tho' receiving his stipend from Mars, had no consolation
to proffer which could result in a peace transcending that which he beheld. But
in the small hours he came again. And the prisoner, now awake to his
surroundings, noticed his approach, and civilly, all but cheerfully, welcomed
him. But it was to little purpose that in the interview following the good man
sought to bring Billy Budd to some godly understanding that he must die, and at
dawn. True, Billy himself freely referred to his death as a thing close at hand;
but it was something in the way that children will refer to death in general,
who yet among their other sports will play a funeral with hearse and mourners.
Not that like children Billy was incapable of conceiving what death really
is. No, but he was wholly without irrational fear of it, a fear more prevalent
in highly civilized communities than those so-called barbarous ones which in all
respects stand nearer to unadulterate Nature. And, as elsewhere said, a
barbarian Billy radically was; as much so, for all the costume, as his
countrymen the British captives, living trophies, made to march in the Roman
triumph of Germanicus. Quite as much so as those later barbarians, young men
probably, and picked specimens among the earlier British converts to
Christianity, at least nominally such, and taken to Rome (as to-day converts
from lesser isles of the sea may be taken to London), of whom the Pope of that
time, admiring the strangeness of their personal beauty so unlike the Italian
stamp, their clear ruddy complexion and curled flaxen locks, exclaimed,
"Angles-" (meaning English the modern derivative) "Angles do you call them? And
is it because they look so like angels?" Had it been later in time one would
think that the Pope had in mind Fra Angelico's seraphs some of whom, plucking
apples in gardens of the Hesperides, have the faint rose-bud complexion of the
more beautiful English girls.
If in vain the good Chaplain sought to impress the young barbarian with ideas
of death akin to those conveyed in the skull, dial, and cross-bones on old
tombstones; equally futile to all appearance were his efforts to bring home to
him the thought of salvation and a Saviour. Billy listened, but less out of awe
or reverence perhaps than from a certain natural politeness; doubtless at bottom
regarding all that in much the same way that most mariners of his class take any
discourse abstract or out of the common tone of the work-a-day world. And this
sailor-way of taking clerical discourse is not wholly unlike the way in which
the pioneer of Christianity full of transcendent miracles was received long ago
on tropic isles by any superior savage so called- a Tahitian say of Captain
Cook's time or shortly after that time. Out of natural courtesy he received, but
did not appropriate. It was like a gift placed in the palm of an outreached hand
upon which the fingers do not close.
But the Indomitable's Chaplain was a discreet man possessing the good sense
of a good heart. So he insisted not in his vocation here. At the instance of
Captain Vere, a lieutenant had apprised him of pretty much everything as to
Billy; and since he felt that innocence was even a better thing than religion
wherewith to go to Judgement, he reluctantly withdrew; but in his emotion not
without first performing an act strange enough in an Englishman, and under the
circumstances yet more so in any regular priest. Stooping over, he kissed on the
fair cheek his fellow-man, a felon in martial law, one who though on the
confines of death he felt he could never convert to a dogma; nor for all that
did he fear for his future.
Marvel not that having been made acquainted with the young sailor's essential
innocence (an irruption of heretic thought hard to suppress) the worthy man
lifted not a finger to avert the doom of such a martyr to martial discipline. So
to do would not only have been as idle as invoking the desert, but would also
have been an audacious transgression of the bounds of his function, one as
exactly prescribed to him by military law as that of the boatswain or any other
naval officer. Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace
serving in the host of the God of War- Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a
musket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why then is he there? Because he
indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends
the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the
abrogation of everything but brute Force.
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