📔 Billy Budd

Quotes from this book

"Slip into the lee forechains, Billy; there is something in the wind. […] " Now the first time that his small weazel-eyes happened to light on Billy Budd, a certain grim internal merriment set all his ancient wrinkles into antic play. But Claggart's was no vulgar form of the passion. Nor, as directed toward Billy Budd, did it partake of that streak of apprehensive jealousy that marred Saul's visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David. Claggart's envy struck deeper. It never entered his mind that here was a matter which from its extreme questionableness, it was his duty as a loyal blue-jacket to report in the proper quarter. Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did ever anybody seriously confess to envy? The salt seer attentively listened, accompanying the Foretopman's recital with queer twitchings of his wrinkles and problematical little sparkles of his small ferret eyes. "I found an afterguardsman in our part of the ship here and I bid him be off where he belongs." He refrained too from making the occasion an opportunity for any preachment as to the maintenance of discipline […] Discontent foreran the Two Mutinies, and more or less it lurkingly survived them. Now Billy […] 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. But after the little matter at the mess Billy Budd no more found himself in strange trouble at times about his hammock or his clothesbag or what not. Up through the great hatchways rimmed with racks of heavy shot, the watch below came pouring […] […] in the last dog-watch when the drawing near of twilight induced revery […] He descended to the cabin to bid a ceremonious, and, it may be, tacitly rebukeful adieu. Guns and carriages, together with the long rammers and shorter lintstocks lodged in loops overhead—all these, as customary, were painted black […] a genial young fellow enough to look at, and something of a rattlebrain, to all appearance. Such an episode in the Island's grand naval story her naval historians naturally abridge; one of them (G.P.R. James) candidly acknowledging that fain would he pass it over did not "impartiality forbid fastidiousness." "Never mind that!" here peremptorily broke in the superior, his face altering with anger […] something even in the official's self-possessed and somewhat ostentatious manner in making his specifications strangely reminded him of a bandsman, a perjurous witness in a capital case before a courtmartial ashore of which when a lieutenant, he, Captain Vere, had been a member. Those lights of human intelligence losing human expression, gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep. Now each proceeding that follows a mortal sentence pronounced at sea by a drum-head court is characterised by promptitude not perceptibly merging into hurry, tho' bordering that. A hatchet to my hawser? all adrift to go? For suddenly the drum beat to quarters, which familiar sound happening at least twice every day, had upon the present occasion a signal peremptoriness in it. But as ashore, knightly valor, tho' shorn of its blazonry, did not cease with the knights, neither on the seas, […] did the nobler qualities of such naval magnates as Don John of Austria, Doria, Van Tromp, Jean Bart, the long line of British Admirals and the American Decaturs of 1812 become obsolete with their wooden walls. For it was close on the heel of the suppressed insurrections, an aftertime very critical to naval authority, demanding from every English sea-commander two qualities not readily interfusable—prudence and rigour. And for some of these averments, he added, substantiating proof was not far. The bonfire in his heart made luminous the rose-tan in his cheek. […] he had received a cut slantwise along one temple and cheek, leaving a long scar like a streak of dawn's light falling athwart the dark visage. […] the patriotic zeal officially evinced by Claggart had somewhat irritated him as appearing rather supersensible and strained.