- end_line
- 1856
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.879Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1789
- text
- 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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XV
But after the little matter at the mess Billy Budd no more found himself
in strange trouble at times about his hammock or his clothes-bag, or
what not. While, as to that smile that occasionally sunned him, and the
pleasant passing word, these were if not more frequent, yet if anything
more pronounced than before.
But for all that, there were certain other demonstrations now. When
Claggart’s unobserved glance happened to light on belted Billy rolling
along the upper gun-deck in the leisure of the second dog-watch,
exchanging passing broadsides of fun with other young promenaders in the
crowd, that glance would follow the cheerful sea-Hyperion with a settled
meditative and melancholy expression, his eyes strangely suffused with
incipient feverish tears. Then would Claggart look like the man of
sorrows. Yes, and sometimes the melancholy expression would have in it a
touch of soft yearning, as if Claggart could even have loved Billy but
for fate and ban. But this was an evanescence, and quickly repented of,
as it were, by an immitigable look, pinching and shrivelling the visage
into the momentary semblance of a wrinkled walnut. But sometimes
catching sight in advance of the foretopman coming in his direction, he
would, upon their nearing, step aside a little to let him pass, dwelling
upon Billy for the moment with the glittering dental satire of a guise.
But upon any abrupt unforeseen encounter a red light would flash forth
from his eye, like a spark from an anvil in a dusk smithy. That quick
fierce light was a strange one, darted from orbs which in repose were of
a colour nearest approaching a deeper violet, the softest of shades.
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