Billy Budd - Herman Melville (iphone ebook reader .txt) 📗
- Author: Herman Melville
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With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, tho’ readily enough he could hide it; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; a nature like Claggart’s surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part allotted it.
Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power. In the present instance the stage is a scrubbed gun deck, and one of the external provocations a man-of-war’s-man’s spilled soup.
Now when the Master-at-arms noticed whence came that greasy fluid streaming before his feet, he must have taken it—to some extent wilfully, perhaps—not for the mere accident it assuredly was, but for the sly escape of a spontaneous feeling on Billy’s part more or less answering to the antipathy on his own. In effect a foolish demonstration he must have thought, and very harmless, like the futile kick of a heifer, which yet were the heifer a shod stallion, would not be so harmless. Even so was it that into the gall of Claggart’s envy he infused the vitriol of his contempt. But the incident confirmed to him certain telltale reports purveyed to his ear by Squeak, one of his more cunning Corporals, a grizzled little man, so nicknamed by the sailors on account of his squeaky voice, and sharp visage ferreting about the dark corners of the lower decks after interlopers, satirically suggesting to them the idea of a rat in a cellar.
From his Chief’s employing him as an implicit tool in laying little traps for the worriment of the Foretopman— for it was from the Master-at-arms that the petty persecutions heretofore adverted to had proceeded—the Corporal having naturally enough concluded that his master could have no love for the sailor, made it his business, faithful understrapper that he was, to foment the ill blood by perverting to his Chief certain innocent frolics of the goodnatured Foretopman, besides inventing for his mouth sundry contumelious epithets he claimed to have overheard him let fall. The Master-at-arms never suspected the veracity of these reports, more especially as to the epithets, for he well knew how secretly unpopular may become a master-at-arms, at least a master-at-arms of those days zealous in his function, and how the blue-jackets shoot at him in private their raillery and wit; the nickname by which he goes among them (Jimmy Legs) implying under the form of merriment their cherished disrespect and dislike.
But in view of the greediness of hate for patrolmen, it hardly needed a purveyor to feed Claggart’s passion. An uncommon prudence is habitual with the subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide. And in case of an injury but suspected, its secretiveness voluntarily cuts it off from enlightenment or disillusion; and, not unreluctantly, action is taken upon surmise as upon certainty. And the retaliation is apt to be in monstrous disproportion to the supposed offence; for when in anybody was revenge in its exactions aught else but an inordinate usurer? But how with Claggart’s conscience? For though consciences are unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not excluding the Scriptural devils who “believe and tremble,” has one. But Claggart’s conscience being but the lawyer to his will, made ogres of trifles, probably arguing that the motive imputed to Billy in spilling the soup just when he did, together with the epithets alleged, these, if nothing more, made a strong case against him; nay, justified animosity into a sort of retributive righteousness. The Pharisee is the Guy Fawkes prowling in the hid chambers underlying the Claggarts. And they can really form no conception of an unreciprocated malice. Probably, the Master-at-arms’ clandestine persecution of Billy was started to try the temper of the man; but it had not developed any quality in him that enmity could make official use of or even pervert into plausible self-justification; so that the occurrence at the mess, petty if it were, was a welcome one to that peculiar conscience assigned to be the private mentor of Claggart. And, for the rest, not improbably it put him upon new experiments.
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 goodnatured ones had some of the weaknesses inseparable from essential goodnature; 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 warship 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 mainmast 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.
This incident sorely puzzled Billy Budd. It was an entirely new experience; the first time in his life that he had ever been personally approached in underhand intriguing fashion. Prior to this encounter he had known nothing of the afterguardsman, the two men being stationed wide apart, one forward and aloft during his watch, the other on deck and aft.
What could it mean? And could they really be guineas, those two glittering objects the interloper had held up to his eyes? Where could the fellow get guineas? Why even spare buttons are not so plentiful at sea. The more he turned the matter over, the more he was nonplussed, and made uneasy and discomforted. In his disgustful recoil from an overture which
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