Chương Chương 11 · 第11章

Pale ire, envy and despair.

That Claggart’s figure was not amiss, and his face, save the chin, well

moulded, has already been said. Of these favourable points he seemed not

insensible, for he was not only neat but careful in his dress. But the

form of Billy Budd was heroic; and if his face was without the

intellectual look of the pallid Claggart’s, not the less was it lit,

like his, from within, though from a different source. The bonfire in

his heart made luminous the rose-tan in his cheek.

In view of the marked contrast between the persons of the twain, it is

more than probable that when the master-at-arms in the scene last given

applied to the sailor the proverb ‘_Handsome is as handsome does_,’ he

there let escape an ironic inkling, not caught by the young sailors who

heard it, as to what it was that had first moved him against Billy,

namely, his significant personal beauty.

Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless

in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is envy

then such a monster? Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes

of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did ever

anybody seriously confess to envy? Something there is in it universally

felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime. And not only does

everybody disown it, but the better sort are inclined to incredulity

when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man. But since its

lodgment is in the heart, not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies

a guarantee against it. But Claggart’s was no vulgar form of the

passion. Nor, as directed toward Billy Budd, did it partake of that

streak of apprehensive jealousy that marred Saul’s visage perturbedly

brooding on the comely young David. Claggart’s envy struck deeper. If

askance he eyed the good looks, cheery health, and frank enjoyment of

young life in Billy Budd, it was because these happened to go along with

a nature that, as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity

never willed malice, or experienced the reactionary bite of that

serpent. To him, the spirit lodged within Billy and looking out from his

welkin eyes as from windows, that ineffability which made the dimple in

his dyed cheek, suppled his joints, and danced in his yellow curls, made

him pre-eminently the Handsome Sailor. One person excepted, the

master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually

capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in

Billy Budd, and the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming

various secret forms within him, at times assumed that of cynic

disdain--disdain of innocence. To be nothing more than innocent! Yet in

an æsthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous free-and-easy

temper of it, and fain would have shared it, but he despaired of it.

With no power to annul the elemental evil in himself, though he could

hide it readily enough; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it;

what recourse is left to a nature like Claggart’s, surcharged with

energy as such natures almost invariably are, but to recoil upon itself,

and, like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act

out to the end its allotted part.

Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a

palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings,

among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is

enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean,

are no measure of its power. In the present instance the stage is a

scrubbed gun-deck, and one of the external provocations a man-of-war’s

man’s spilled soup.

Now when the master-at-arms noticed whence came that greasy fluid

streaming before his feet, he must have taken it--to some extent

wilfully perhaps--not for the mere accident it assuredly was, but for

the sly escape of a spontaneous feeling on Billy’s part more or less

answering to the antipathy on his own. In effect a foolish demonstration

he must have thought, and very harmless, like the futile kick of a

heifer, which yet were the heifer a shod stallion, would not be so

harmless. Even so was it that into the gall of envy Claggart infused the

vitriol of his contempt. But the incident confirmed to him certain

tell-tale reports purveyed to his ear by Squeak, one of his more cunning

corporals, a grizzled little man, so nicknamed by the sailors on account

of his squeaky voice and sharp visage ferreting about the dark corners

of the lower decks after interlopers, satirically suggesting to them the

idea of a rat in a cellar.

Now his chief’s employing him as an implicit tool in laying little traps

for the worriment of the foretopman--for it was from the master-at-arms

that the petty persecutions heretofore adverted to had proceeded--the

corporal, having naturally enough concluded that his master could have

no love for the sailor, made it his business, faithful understrapper

that he was, to ferment the ill blood by perverting to his chief certain

innocent frolics of the good-natured foretopman, besides inventing for

his mouth sundry contumelious epithets he claimed to have overheard him

let fall. The master-at-arms never suspected the veracity of these

reports, more especially as to the epithets, for he well knew how

secretly unpopular may become a master-at-arms--at least, a

master-at-arms in those days, zealous in his function--and how the

blue-jackets shoot at him in private their raillery and wit; the

nickname by which he goes among them (_Jemmy Legs_) implying under the

form of merriment their cherished disrespect and dislike.

In view of the greediness of hate for provocation, it hardly needed a

purveyor to feed Claggart’s passion. An uncommon prudence is habitual

with the subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide. And in case

of any merely suspected injury, its secretiveness voluntarily cuts it

off from enlightenment or disillusion; and not unreluctantly, action is

taken upon surmise as upon certainty. And the retaliation is apt to be

in monstrous disproportion to the supposed offence; for when in anybody

was revenge in its exactions aught else but an inordinate usurer. But

how with Claggart’s conscience? For though consciences are unlike as

foreheads, every intelligence, not excluding the Scriptural devils who

‘believe and tremble,’ has one. But Claggart’s conscience being but the

lawyer to his will, made ogres of trifles, probably arguing that the

motive imputed to Billy in spilling the soup just when he did, together

with the epithets alleged, these, if nothing more, made a strong case

against him; nay, justified animosity into a sort of retributive

righteousness. The Pharisee is the Guy Fawkes prowling in the hid

chambers underlying some natures like Claggart’s. And they can really

form no conception of an unreciprocated malice. Probably, the

master-at-arms’ clandestine persecution of Billy was started to try the

temper of the man; but it had not developed any quality in him that

enmity could make official use of, or ever pervert into even plausible

self-justification; so that the occurrence at the mess, petty if it

were, was a welcome one to that peculiar conscience assigned to be the

private mentor of Claggart; and for the rest, not improbably, it put him

upon new experiments.

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