“Oh! calling; are you mad?” he said sharply, “it isn’t the calling! Never will the captain of a vessel be forced to turn executioner, unless when there come governments of murderers and thieves, who take advantage of a poor man’s habit of obeying blindly, obeying always, obeying like a wretched machine, in spite of his heart.”
At the same time he drew from his pocket a red handkerchief, into which he began to cry like a child. I stopped a minute as if to arrange my stirrup, and, staying behind the cart, I walked after it for some time, feeling that he would be humiliated if I saw too plainly his copious tears.
I had guessed rightly, for after about a quarter of an hour he also came behind his poor conveyance, and asked me if I had any razors in my portmanteau; to which I merely answered that, not yet having any beard, they were of no use to me. But he did not mind, it was so that he could speak of something else. I noticed with pleasure, however that he was coming back to his story, for he said to me suddenly:
“You’ve never seen any ships in your life, have you?”
“I have only seen them,” I said, “at the Panorama in Paris, and I have not much confidence in the naval knowledge I gathered there.”
“You don’t know, then, what the cat-head is?”
“I can’t imagine,” I said.
“It is a kind of terrace of beams projecting from the bows of the ship, and from which they throw the anchor into the sea. When a man is shot, he is generally placed there,” he added in a lower voice.
“Ah! I understand, because from there he falls into the sea.”
He did not answer, and began to describe all the kinds of boat that a brig can carry, and their place in the vessel; and then, without any order in his ideas, he continued his story with that affected air of carelessness which always results from long service, because a man must show his inferiors his contempt of danger, contempt of men, contempt of life, contempt of death, and contempt of himself; and all this nearly always hides, under a hard exterior, a profound sensibility.—The hardness of the man of war is like an iron mask over a noble face, like a stone dungeon that shuts in a royal prisoner.