- end_line
- 1236
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.981Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1174
- text
- 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.’
- title
- Chunk 2