Chapter Chapter 26 · 第26章

Everything is for a season remarkable in navies. Any tangible object

associated with some striking incident of the service, is converted into

a monument. The spar from which the foretopman was suspended, was for

some few years kept trace of by the blue-jackets. Then knowledge

followed it from ship to dockyard and again from dockyard to ship, still

pursuing it even when at last reduced to a mere dockyard boom. To them a

chip of it was as a piece of the Cross. Ignorant though they were of the

real facts of the happening, and not thinking but that the penalty was

unavoidably inflicted from the naval point of view, for all that they

instinctively felt that Billy was a sort of man as incapable of mutiny

as of wilful murder. They recalled the fresh young image of the Handsome

Sailor, that face never deformed by a sneer or subtler vile freak of the

heart within! This impression of him was doubtless deepened by the fact

that he was gone, and in a measure mysteriously gone. On the gun-decks

of the _Indomitable_ the general estimate of his nature and its

unconscious simplicity eventually found rude utterance from another

foretopman, one of his own watch, gifted as some sailors are, with an

artless poetic temperament. The tarry hands made some lines, which,

after circulating among the shipboard crew for a while, finally got

rudely printed at Portsmouth as a ballad. The title given to it was the

sailor’s.

BILLY IN THE DARBIES

Good of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay

And down on his marrow-bones here and pray

For the likes just o’ me, Billy Budd.--But look:

Through the port comes the moon-shine astray!

It tips the guard’s cutlass and silvers this nook;

But ’twill die in the dawning of Billy’s last day,

A jewel-block they’ll make of me to-morrow,

Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end

Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol-Molly--

Oh, ’tis me, not the sentence, they’ll suspend.

Ay, ay, all is up; and I must up too

Early in the morning, aloft from alow.

On an empty stomach, now, never it would do.

They’ll give me a nibble--bit o’ biscuit ere I go.

Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup;

But turning heads away from the hoist and the belay,

Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!

No pipe to those halyards--But aren’t it all sham?

A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.

A hatchet to my panzer? all adrift to go?

The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know?

But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank;

So I’ll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.

But--no! It is dead then I’ll be, come to think.

I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.

And his cheek it was like the budding pink.

But me, they’ll lash me in hammock, drop me deep

Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.

I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?

Just ease these darbies at the wrist,

And roll me over fair.

I am sleepy and the oozy weeds about me twist.

END OF BOOK,

April 19, 1891.

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