Kabanata Kabanata 6 · 第6章

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 him

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, philosophise

upon realities.

In this love of reading he found confirmation of his own more reserved

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 felt would abide

in him essentially unmodified so long as his intelligent part remained

unimpaired. In view of the humbled 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, Captain Vere disinterestedly opposed them not alone because

they seemed to him incapable of embodiment in lasting institutions, but

at war with the world and the peace 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 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 through 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 any point touching the stirring personages

and events of the time, he would cite some historical character or

incident of antiquity with the same easy air that he would cite from the

moderns. He seemed unmindful of the circumstance that to his bluff

company such 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 in 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.

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