บทที่ บทที่ 14 · 第14章

Long experience had very likely brought this old man to that bitter

prudence which never interferes in aught, and never gives advice.

Yet, 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 simple-mindedness 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, though 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, but 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 exercises 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.

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