He made for a public-house, and called for some bread and cheese and beer; they were supplied, and then lo! he had no money to pay for them. “I'll owe you till I come back from sea, my bo,” said he coolly. On this the landlord collared him, and David shook him off into the road, much as a terrier throws a rat from him; then there was a row, and a naval officer, who was cruising about for hands, came up and heard it. There was nothing at all unseamanlike in David's conduct, and the gentleman took a favourable view of it, and paid the small demand; but not with unleavened motives. He was the second lieutenant of H. M. frigate Vulture; she had a bad name, thanks to her last captain, and was short of hands: he took David aside and asked him would he like to ship on board the Vulture.
David said yes, and suggested the foretop. “Oh yes,” growled the lieutenant, “you all want to be there.” He then gauged this Jacky Tar's intellects; asked him inter alia how to send a frigate's foretop gallant yard down upon deck: and to show how seamanship sticks in the brain when once it gets there, David actually told him. “You are rather old,” said the lieutenant, “but you are a seaman:” and so took him on board the Vulture at Spithead, before Green began to search the town in earnest. Nobody acts his part better than some demented persons do: and David made a very tolerable sailor notwithstanding his forty-five years: and the sea did him good within certain limits. Between him and the past lay some intellectual or cerebral barrier as impenetrable as the great wall of China; but on the hither side of that wall his faculties improved. Of course, the crew soon found out the gap in his poor brain, and called him Soft Billy, and played on him at first. But by degrees he won their affection; he was so wonderfully sweet-tempered: and besides his mind being in an abnormal state, he loathed grog, and gave his allowance to his messmates. One day he showed an unexpected trait; they were lying becalmed in southern latitudes, and, time hanging heavily, each wiled it how he might: one fiddled, another wrote to his Polly, another fished for sharks, another whistled for a wind, scores fell into the form of meditation without the reality, and one got a piece of yarn and amused himself killing flies on the bulwark. Now this shocked poor Billy: he put out his long arm and intercepted a stroke. “What is the row?” said the operator.
“You mustn't,” said Billy solemnly, looking into his face with great dreamy eyes.
“You be——,” said the other, and lent him a tap on the cheek with the yarn. Billy did not seem to mind this; his skin had little sensibility, owing to his disorder.
Jack recommenced on his flies, and the bystanders laughed. They always laughed now at everything Billy said, as Society used to laugh when the late Theodore Hook asked for the mustard at dinner; and would have laughed if he had said, “You see me sad, I have just lost my poor father.”
David stood looking on at the slaughter with a helpless puzzled air.
At last he seemed to have an idea, he caught Jack up by the throat and knee, lifted him with gigantic strength above his head, and was just going to hurl him shrieking into the sea, when a dozen strong hands interfered, and saved the man. Then they were going to bind Billy hand and foot; but he was discovered to be perfectly calm; so they remonstrated instead, and presently Billy's commander-in-chief, a ship-boy called Georgie White, shoved in and asked him in a shrill haughty voice how he dared do that. “My dear,” said Billy, with great humility and placidity, “he was killing God's creatures, no allowance: * so, ye see, to save their lives, I was obliged.”
*Nautical phrase, meaning without stint or limit, or
niggardly admeasurement as there is of grog.
At this piece of reasoning, and the simplicity and gentle conviction with which it was delivered, there was a roar. It subsided, and a doubt arose whether Billy was altogether in the wrong.
“Well,” said one, “I daresay life is sweet to them little creatures, if they could speak their minds.”