- end_line
- 1548
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.981Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1510
- text
- 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.
- title
- Chunk 2