Bab Bab 20 · 第20章

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 breeching 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 breechings tarred to the same tint,

wore the like livery of the undertaker. In contrast with the funereal

tone of these surroundings the prone sailor’s exterior apparel, white

_jumper_ and white duck trowsers, each more or less soiled, dimly

glimmered in the obscure light of the bay like a patch of discoloured

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

through 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 cheek-bone 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 of 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, though receiving his

stipend from wars, 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 civilised

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; quite 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 complexions 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 Hesperides, have the faint rosebud complexion of the more

beautiful English girls.

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