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- designing the seizure of the brig. Which resolution was carried out
though in a time of peace and within not many days’ sail of home. An act
vindicated by a naval court of inquiry subsequently convened ashore.
History, and here cited without comment. True, the circumstances on
board the _Somers_ were different from those on board the _Indomitable_.
But the urgency felt, well warranted or otherwise, was much the same.
Says a writer whom few know, ‘Forty years after a battle it is easy for
a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is
another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while
involved in the obscuring smoke of it. Much so with respect to other
emergencies involving considerations both practical and moral, and when
it is imperative promptly to act. The greater the fog the more it
imperils the steamer, and speed is put on though at the hazard of
running somebody down. Little ween the snug card-players in the cabin of
the responsibilities of the sleepless man on the bridge.’
In brief, Billy Budd was formally convicted and sentenced to be hung at
the yard-arm in the early morning-watch, it being now night. Otherwise,
as is customary in such cases, the sentence would forthwith have been
carried out. In war-time on the field or in the fleet, a mortal
punishment decreed by a drum-head court--on the field sometimes decreed
by but a nod from the general--follows without delay on the heel of
conviction without appeal.
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XIX
It was Captain Vere himself who of his own motion communicated the
finding of the court to the prisoner; for that purpose going to the
compartment where he was in custody, and bidding the marine there to
withdraw for the time.
Beyond the communication of the sentence what took place at this
interview was never known. But, in view of the character of the twain
briefly closeted in that state-room, each radically sharing in the rarer
qualities of one nature--so rare, indeed, as to be all but incredible to
average minds, however much cultivated--some conjectures may be
ventured.
It would have been in consonance with the spirit of Captain Vere should
he on this occasion have concealed nothing from the condemned one;
should he indeed have frankly disclosed to him the part he himself had
played in bringing about the decision, at the same time revealing his
actuating motives. On Billy’s side it is not improbable that such a
confession would have been received in much the same spirit that
prompted it. Not without a sort of joy indeed he might have appreciated
the brave opinion of him implied in his captain making such a confidant
of him. Nor as to the sentence itself could he have been insensible that
it was imparted to him as to one not afraid to die. Even more may have
been. Captain Vere in the end may have developed the passion sometimes
latent under an exterior stoical or indifferent. He was old enough to
have been Billy’s father. The austere devotee of military duty, letting
himself melt back into what remains primeval in our formalised humanity,
may in the end have caught Billy to his heart, even as Abraham may have
caught young Isaac on the brink of resolutely offering him up in
obedience to the exacting behest. But there is no telling the
sacrament--seldom if in any case revealed to the gadding world wherever
under circumstances at all akin to those here attempted to be set
forth--two of great Nature’s nobler order embrace. There is privacy at
the time, inviolable to the survivor, and holy oblivion, the sequel to
each diviner magnanimity, providentially covers all at last.
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