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- 1668
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.879Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1596
- text
- 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.
- title
- Chunk 7