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- XXVI
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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OTHER PROSE PIECES
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- title
- XXVI