Yes, despite the Dansker's pithy insistence as to the Master-at-arms being at
the bottom of these strange experiences of Billy on board the Indomitable, the
young sailor was ready to ascribe them to almost anybody but the man who, to use
Billy's own expression, "always had a pleasant word for him." This is to be
wondered at. Yet not so much to be wondered at. In certain matters, some sailors
even in mature life remain unsophisticated enough. But a young seafarer of the
disposition of our athletic Foretopman, is much of a child-man. And yet a
child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or
less wanes as intelligence waxes. But in Billy Budd intelligence, such as it
was, had advanced, while yet his simplemindedness remained for the most part
unaffected. Experience is a teacher indeed; yet did Billy's years make his
experience small. Besides, he had none of that intuitive knowledge of the bad
which in natures not good or incompletely so foreruns experience, and therefore
may pertain, as in some instances it too clearly does pertain, even to youth.
And what could Billy know of man except of man as a mere sailor? And the
old-fashioned sailor, the veritable man-before-the-mast, the sailor from boyhood
up, he, tho' indeed of the same species as a landsman, is in some respects
singularly distinct from him. The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse.
Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head; no intricate game
of chess where few moves are made in straightforwardness, and ends are attained
by indirection; an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle
burnt out in playing it.
Yes, as a class, sailors are in character a juvenile race. Even their
deviations are marked by juvenility. And this more especially holding true with
the sailors of Billy's time. Then, too, certain things which apply to all
sailors, do more pointedly operate, here and there, upon the junior one. Every
sailor, too, is accustomed to obey orders without debating them; his life afloat
is externally ruled for him; he is not brought into that promiscuous commerce
with mankind where unobstructed free agency on equal terms- equal superficially,
at least- soon teaches one that unless upon occasion he exercise a distrust keen
in proportion to the fairness of the appearance, some foul turn may be served
him. A ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness is so habitual, not with
business-men so much, as with men who know their kind in less shallow relations
than business, namely, certain men-of-the-world, that they come at last to
employ it all but unconsciously; and some of them would very likely feel real
surprise at being charged with it as one of their general characteristics.
|