In view of the part that the Commander of the Indomitable plays in scenes
shortly to follow, it may be well to fill out that sketch of his outlined in the
previous chapter.
Aside from his qualities as a sea-officer, Captain Vere was an exceptional
character. Unlike no few of England's renowned sailors, long and arduous service
with signal devotion to it, had not resulted in absorbing and salting the entire
man. He had a marked leaning toward everything intellectual. He loved books,
never going to sea without a newly replenished library, compact but of the best.
The isolated leisure, in some cases so wearisome, falling at intervals to
commanders even during a war-cruise, never was tedious to Captain Vere. With
nothing of that literary taste which less heeds the thing conveyed than the
vehicle, his bias was toward those books to which every serious mind of superior
order occupying any active post of authority in the world naturally inclines;
books treating of actual men and events no matter of what era- history,
biography and unconventional writers, who, free from cant and convention, like
Montaigne, honestly and in the spirit of common sense philosophize upon
realities.
In this line of reading he found confirmation of his own more reasoned
thoughts- confirmation which he had vainly sought in social converse, so that as
touching most fundamental topics, there had got to be established in him some
positive convictions, which he forefelt would abide in him essentially
unmodified so long as his intelligent part remained unimpaired. In view of the
troubled period in which his lot was cast this was well for him. His settled
convictions were as a dyke against those invading waters of novel opinion,
social, political and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds
in those days, minds by nature not inferior to his own. While other members of
that aristocracy to which by birth he belonged were incensed at the innovators
mainly because their theories were inimical to the privileged classes, not alone
Captain Vere disinterestedly opposed them because they seemed to him incapable
of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the peace of the world
and the true welfare of mankind.
With minds less stored than his and less earnest, some officers of his rank,
with whom at times he would necessarily consort, found him lacking in the
companionable quality, a dry and bookish gentleman, as they deemed. Upon any
chance withdrawal from their company one would be apt to say to another,
something like this: "Vere is a noble fellow, Starry Vere. Spite the gazettes,
Sir Horatio" (meaning him with the Lord title) "is at bottom scarce a better
seaman or fighter. But between you and me now, don't you think there is a queer
streak of the pedantic running thro' him? Yes, like the King's yarn in a coil of
navy-rope?"
Some apparent ground there was for this sort of confidential criticism; since
not only did the Captain's discourse never fall into the jocosely familiar, but
in illustrating of any point touching the stirring personages and events of the
time he would be as apt to cite some historic character or incident of antiquity
as that he would cite from the moderns. He seemed unmindful of the circumstance
that to his bluff company such remote allusions, however pertinent they might
really be, were altogether alien to men whose reading was mainly confined to the
journals. But considerateness in such matters is not easy to natures constituted
like Captain Vere's. Their honesty prescribes to them directness, sometimes
far-reaching like that of a migratory fowl that in its flight never heeds when
it crosses a frontier.
|