บทที่ บทที่ 21 · 第21章

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 workaday 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 appreciate. It was like a gift

placed in the palm of an outstretched 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 on 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 judgment, 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 in 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, 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 force.[7]

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Footnote 7:

There is an author’s note in the margin of the MS. reading:--_An

irruption of heretic thought hard to suppress._

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