Bab Bab 8 · 第8章

Life in the foretop well agreed with Billy Budd. There, when not

actually engaged on the yards yet higher aloft, the topmen, who as such

had been picked out for youth and activity, constituted an aerial club,

lounging at ease against the smaller stun’-sails rolled up into

cushions, spinning yarns like the lazy gods, and frequently amused with

what was going on in the busy world of the decks below. No wonder then

that a young fellow of Billy’s disposition was well content in such

society. Giving no cause of offence to anybody, he was always alert at a

call. So in the merchant service it had been with him. But now such

punctiliousness in duty was shown that his topmates would sometimes

good-naturedly laugh at him for it. This heightened alacrity had its

cause, namely: the impression made upon him by the first formal

gangway-punishment he had ever witnessed, which befell the day following

his impressment. It had been incurred by a little fellow, young, a

novice, an afterguardsman absent from his assigned post when the ship

was being put about, a dereliction resulting in a rather serious hitch

to that manœuvre, one demanding instantaneous promptitude in letting go

and making fast. When Billy saw the culprit’s naked back under the

scourge gridironed with red welts, and worse; when he marked the dire

expression in the liberated man’s face, as with his woollen shirt flung

over him by the executioner he rushed forward from the spot to bury

himself in the crowd, Billy was horrified. He resolved that never

through remissness would he make himself liable to such a visitation, or

do or omit aught that might merit even verbal reproof. What then was his

surprise and concern when ultimately he found himself getting into petty

trouble occasionally about such matters as the stowage of his bag, or

something amiss in his hammock, matters under the police oversight of

the ship’s corporals of the lower decks, and which brought down on him a

vague threat from one of them.

So heedful in all things as he was, how could this be? He could not

understand it, and it more than vexed him. When he spoke to his young

topmates about it, they were either lightly incredulous, or found

something comical in his unconcealed anxiety. ‘Is it your bag, Billy?’

said one; ‘well, sew yourself up in it, Billy boy, and then you’ll be

sure to know if anybody meddles with it.’

Now there was a veteran aboard who, because his years began to

disqualify him for more active work, had been recently assigned duty as

mainmast-man in his watch, looking to the gear belayed at the rail round

about that great spar near the deck. At off-times the foretopman had

picked up some acquaintance with him, and now in his trouble it occurred

to him that he might be the sort of person to go to for wise counsel. He

was an old Dansker long anglicised in the service, of few words, many

wrinkles and some honourable scars. His wizened face, time-tinted and

weather-stormed to the complexion of an antique parchment, was here and

there peppered blue by the chance explosion of a gun-cartridge in

action. He was an _Agamemnon_ man; some two years prior to the time of

this story having served under Nelson, when but Sir Horatio, in that

ship immortal in naval memory, and which, dismantled and in parts broken

up to her bare ribs, is seen a grand skeleton in Haydon’s etching. As

one of a boarding-party from the _Agamemnon_ he had received a cut

slantwise along one temple and cheek, leaving a long pale scar like a

streak of dawn’s light falling athwart the dark visage. It was on

account of that scar and the affair in which it was known that he had

received it, as well as from his blue-peppered complexion, that the

Dansker went among the _Indomitable’s_ crew by the name of

‘Board-her-in-the-smoke.’

Now the first time that his small weasel eyes happened to light on Billy

Budd, a certain grim internal merriment set all his ancient wrinkles

into antic play. Was it that his eccentric unsentimental old sapience,

primitive in its kind, saw, or thought it saw, something which in

contrast with the warship’s environment looked oddly incongruous in the

Handsome Sailor? But after slyly studying him at intervals, the old

Merlin’s equivocal merriment was modified by now. For now when the twain

would meet, it would start in his face a quizzing sort of look, but it

would be but momentary and sometimes replaced by an expression of

speculative query as to what might eventually befall a nature like that,

dropped into a world not without some man-traps and against whose

subtleties simple courage lacking experience and address and without any

touch of defensive ugliness, is of little avail; and where such

innocence as man is capable of does yet in a moral emergency not always

sharpen the faculties or enlighten the will.

However it was, the Dansker in his ascetic way rather took to Billy. Nor

was this only because of a certain philosophic interest in such a

character. There was another cause. While the old man’s eccentricities,

sometimes bordering on the ursine, repelled the juniors, Billy,

undeterred thereby, would make advances, never passing the old

_Agamemnon_ man without a salutation marked by that respect which is

seldom lost on the aged, however crabbed at times, or whatever their

station in life. There was a vein of dry humour, or what not, in the

mastman; and whether in freak of patriarchal irony touching Billy’s

youth and athletic frame, or for some other and more recondite reason,

from the first in addressing him he always substituted Baby for Billy.

The Dansker, in fact, being the originator of the name by which the

foretopman eventually became known aboard ship.

Well then, in his mysterious little difficulty going in quest of the

wrinkled one; Billy found him off duty in a dog-watch ruminating by

himself, seated on a shot-box of the upper gun-deck, now and then

surveying with a somewhat cynical regard certain of the more swaggering

promenaders there. Billy recounted his trouble, again wondering how it

all happened. The salt seer attentively listened, accompanying the

foretopman’s recitals with queer twitchings of his wrinkles and

problematical little sparkles of his small ferret eyes. Making an end of

his story, the foretopman asked, ‘And now, Dansker, do tell me what you

think of it.’ The old man, shoving up the front of his tarpaulin and

deliberately rubbing the long slant scar at the point where it entered

the thin hair, laconically said, ‘Baby Budd, _Jemmy Legs_’ (meaning the

master-at-arms) ‘is down on you.’

‘_Jemmy Legs!_’ ejaculated Billy, his welkin eyes expanding; ‘what for?

Why, he calls me _the sweet and pleasant young fellow_, they tell me.’

‘Does he so?’ grinned the grizzled one; then said, ‘Ay, Baby lad, a

sweet voice has _Jemmy Legs_.’

‘No, not always. But to me he has. I seldom pass him but there comes a

pleasant word.’

‘And that’s because he’s down upon you, Baby Budd.’

Such reiteration, along with the manner of it, incomprehensible to a

novice, disturbed Billy almost as much as the mystery for which he had

sought explanation. Something less unpleasingly oracular he tried to

extract; but the old sea-Chiron, thinking perhaps that for the nonce he

had sufficiently instructed his young Achilles, pursed his lips,

gathered all his wrinkles together, and would commit himself to nothing

further.

Years, and these experiences which befall certain shrewder men

subordinated life-long to the will of superiors, all this had developed

in the Dansker the pithy guarded cynicism that was his leading

characteristic.

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