บทที่ บทที่ 12 · 第12章

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 hillside stretched under the lee

of the _booms_, a piled ridge of spare spars, and among which the ship’s

largest boat, the launch, was stowed. Alongside of three other

slumberers from below, he lay near one end of the booms which approached

from the foremast; his station aloft on duty as a foretopman being just

over the deck station of the forecastleman, 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 fore-chains, 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 had not the phlegm

to negate 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 drouse 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 to the ample hull’s magnitude; a tarry balcony, in short,

overhanging the sea, and so secluded that one mariner of the

_Indomitable_, a nonconformist 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 starlight. 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 shaking off his drouse.

‘Hist, hist!’ the hurried whisper now growing husky; ‘see here,’ and the

man held up two small objects faintly twinkling in the night light;

‘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-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-t-oss 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 recognised by him, ‘Ah, _Beauty_,

is it you? Well, something must have been the matter, for you

st-st-stuttered.’

‘Oh,’ 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-coloured 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 marling-spike or turn in a _dead-eye_, say.

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