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- unaffected in his intellect. To argue his order to him would be
insolence. To resist him would be mutiny. In obedience to Captain Vere
he communicated to the lieutenants and captain of marines what had
happened, saying nothing as to the captain’s state. They stared at him
in surprise and concern. Like him, they seemed to think that such a
matter should be reported to the admiral.
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the
orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colour, but
where exactly does the first one visibly enter into the other? So with
sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about
them. But in some cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced,
to draw the line of demarcation few will undertake, though for a fee
some professional experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some
men will undertake to do for pay. In other words, there are instances
where it is next to impossible to determine whether a man is sane or
beginning to be otherwise.
Whether Captain Vere, as the surgeon professionally surmised, was really
the sudden victim of any degree of aberration, one must determine for
himself by such light as this narrative may afford.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVIII
The unhappy event which has been narrated could not have happened at a
worse juncture. For it was close on the heel of the suppressed
insurrections, an after-time very critical to naval authority, demanding
from every English sea-commander two qualities not readily
interfusable--prudence and rigour. Moreover, there was something crucial
in the case.
In the jugglery of circumstances preceding and attending the event on
board the _Indomitable_, and in the light of that martial code whereby
it was formally to be judged, innocence and guilt, personified in
Claggart and Budd, in effect changed places.
In the legal view, the apparent victim of the tragedy was he who had
sought to victimise a man blameless; and the indisputable deed of the
latter, navally regarded, constituted the most heinous of military
crimes. Yet more. The essential right and wrong involved in the matter,
the clearer that might be, so much the worse for the responsibility of a
loyal sea-commander, inasmuch as he was authorised to determine the
matter on that primitive legal basis.
Small wonder then that the _Indomitable’s_ captain, though in general a
man of rigid decision, felt that circumspectness not less than
promptitude was necessary. Until he could decide upon his course, and in
each detail, and not only so, but until the concluding measure was upon
the point of being enacted, he deemed it advisable, in view of all the
circumstances, to guard as much as possible against publicity. Here he
may or may not have erred. Certain it is, however, that subsequently in
the confidential talk of more than one or two gun-rooms and cabins he
was not a little criticised by some officers, a fact imputed by his
friends, and vehemently by his cousin Jack Denton, to professional
jealousy of Starry Vere. Some imaginative ground for invidious comment
there was. The maintenance of secrecy in the matter, the confining all
knowledge of it for a time to the place where the homicide occurred--the
quarter-deck cabin; in these particulars lurked some resemblance to the
policy adopted in those tragedies of the palace which have occurred more
than once in the capital founded by Peter the Barbarian, great chiefly
by his crimes.
The case was such that fain would the _Indomitable’s_ captain have
deferred taking any action whatever respecting it further than to keep
the foretopman a close prisoner till the ship rejoined the squadron, and
then submitting the matter to the judgment of his admiral.
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