It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous,while three of the stranger’s boats were engaged with a shoal of whales,which had led them some four or five miles from the ship;and while they were yet in swift chase to windward,the white hump and head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the water,not very far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat—a reserved one—had been instantly lowered in chase.After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat—the swiftest keeled of all—seemed to have succeeded in fastening—at least,as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it.In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of bubbling white water;and after that nothing more; whence it was concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers,as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet.The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on;and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats—ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction—the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail—stunsail on stunsail—after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.
The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in boarding the Pequod.He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search;by sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines,and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.
“I will wager something now,” whispered Stubb to Flask,“that some one in that missing boat wore off that Captain’s best coat; mayhap,his watch—he’s so cursed anxious to get it back.Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season?See, Flask, only see how pale he looks—pale in the very buttons of his eyes—look—it wasn’t the coat—it must have been the—”
“My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg,I conjure”—here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab,who thus far had but icily received his petition.“For eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship—I will gladly pay for it,and roundly pay for it—if there be no other way—for eight-and-forty hours only—only that—you must,oh, you must, and you _shall_ do this thing.”
“His son!” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost!I take back the coat and watch—what says Ahab?We must save that boy.”
“He’s drowned with the rest on ’em, last night,” said the old Manx sailor standing behind them;“I heard; all of ye heard their spirits.”
Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel’s the more melancholy,was the circumstance, that not only was one of the Captain’s sons among the number of the missing boat’s crew;but among the number of the other boat’s crews, at the same time, but on the other hand,separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase,there had been still another son; as that for a time,the wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity;which was only solved for him by his chief mate’s instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies,that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the majority first.But the captain, for some unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this,and not till forced to it by Ahab’s iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad,but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer’s paternal love,had thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race.Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them,for a protracted three or four years’ voyage in some other ship than their own;so that their first knowledge of a whaleman’s career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father’s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.
Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab;and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock,but without the least quivering of his own.
“I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say _aye_ to me.Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case. For _you_ too have a boy,Captain Ahab—though but a child, and nestling safely at home now—a child of your old age too—Yes,yes, you relent; I see it—run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.”
“Avast,” cried Ahab—“touch not a rope-yarn”;then in a voice that prolongingly moulded every word—“Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself,but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch,and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.”
Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin,leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit.But starting from his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side;more fell than stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship.
Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in view,she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on the sea.This way and that her yards were swung round; starboard and larboard, she continued to tack;now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while,her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees,when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way,you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort.She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
(_Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow._)
“Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now.The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him.There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like;and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here,where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad,thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.”
“No, no, no!ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir;I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.”
“Oh!spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man!—and a black!and crazy!—but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again.”
“They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white,for all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye.”
“If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.”
“Oh good master, master, master!”
“Weep so, and I will murder thee!have a care, for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck,and still know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met!True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless thee;and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will befall.”
(_Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward._)
“Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone.Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip!Pip!Ding, dong, ding!Who’s seen Pip?He must be up here; let’s try the door. What?neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no opening it. It must be the spell;he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me,against the transom, in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me. Here,our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table,and lord it over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha!what’s this?epaulets!epaulets!the epaulets all come crowding!Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs!What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!—Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?—a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly!Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen him?No!Well then, fill up again, captains, and let’s drink shame upon all cowards!I name no names. Shame upon them!Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.—Hist!above there, I hear ivory—Oh, master!master!I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I’ll stay, though this stern strikes rocks;and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me.”
CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab,—all other whaling waters swept—seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold,to slay him the more securely there; now,that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted;now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;—and now that all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months’ night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.
In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished.Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow,hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time,in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck,ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was on them.
But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours;when he thought no glance but one was on him;then you would have seen that even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s,the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way,at times affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now;such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain,as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance,or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being’s body.And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night, even,had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours:but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.
Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the deck,unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole,or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,—the main-mast and the mizen;or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,—his living foot advanced upon the deck,as if to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood,however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his hammock;yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly whether, for all this,his eyes were really closed at times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter,though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch,and the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat.The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day,and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks;whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.
He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,—breakfast and dinner:supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled,as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base,though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck;and though the Parsee’s mystic watch was without intermission as his own;yet these two never seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary.Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew,they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word; by night,dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times,for longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight;Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other;as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance.
And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly, and every instant,commandingly revealed to his subordinates,—Ahab seemed an independent lord;the Parsee but his slave. Still again both seemed yoked together,and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the solid rib.For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab.
At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft, —“Man the mast-heads!”—and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour,at the striking of the helmsman’s bell, was heard—“What d’ye see?—sharp!sharp!”
But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the children-seeking Rachel;and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac old man seemed distrustful of his crew’s fidelity;at least, of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even,whether Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought.But if these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally expressing them,however his actions might seem to hint them.
“I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”—he said. “Aye!Ahab must have the doubloon!” and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft,with a single sheaved block, to secure to the main-mast head,he received the two ends of the downward-reeved rope;and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for the other end,in order to fasten it at the rail. This done,with that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew,sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego;but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,—“Take the rope, sir—I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.” Then arranging his person in the basket,he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch,Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it. And thus,with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles,—ahead, astern, this side, and that,—within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.
When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the rigging,which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that spot,and sustained there by the rope; under these circumstances,its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it.Because in such a wilderness of running rigging,whose various different relations aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck;and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down from the fastenings,it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with a constant watchman,the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea.So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not unusual;the only strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck,almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision—one of those too,whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;—it was strange,that this was the very man he should select for his watchman;freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person’s hands.
Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten minutes;one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these latitudes;one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings.Then it darted a thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his head.
But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not to mark this wild bird;nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance;only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.
“Your hat, your hat, sir!” suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being posted at the mizen-mast-head,stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than his level,and with a deep gulf of air dividing them.
But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long hooked bill at his head:with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.
An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil,his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome.But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab’s hat was never restored;the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared;while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned,falling from that vast height into the sea.
CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by;the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight,was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which,in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet;serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.
Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some few splintered planks,of what had once been a whale-boat; but you now saw through this wreck,as plainly as you see through the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail;and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
“Hast killed him?”
“The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,” answered the other,sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck,whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.
“Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye,Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death!Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs;and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin,where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!”
“Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”—pointing to the hammock—“I bury but one of five stout men,who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only _that_ one I bury;the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.” Then turning to his crew—“Are ye ready there?place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body; so, then—Oh!God”—advancing towards the hammock with uplifted hands—“may the resurrection and the life——”
“Brace forward!Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea;not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.
As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight,the strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.
“Ha!yonder!look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her wake. “In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial;ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!”
CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure;only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look,and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep.
Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds;these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps,far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks;and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without;those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.
Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea;even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon,a soft and tremulous motion—most seen here at the equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust,the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding;his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin;untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn;lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.
Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure!Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us!Sweet childhood of air and sky!how oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe!But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves,heedlessly gambol around their old sire;sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.
Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle,Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze,the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity.But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment,the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky,did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world,so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck,and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring,she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea;nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around.Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.
Ahab turned.
“Starbuck!”
“Sir.”
“Oh, Starbuck!it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky.On such a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a boy-harpooneer of eighteen!Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago!Forty years of continual whaling!forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time!forty years on the pitiless sea!for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land,for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep!Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore.When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned,walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness,which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness!heaviness!Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this; only half-suspected,not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand,and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away,from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day,leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife?wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive!Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy,the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which,for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye, aye!what a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been!Why this strife of the chase?why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance?how the richer or better is Ahab now?Behold. Oh, Starbuck!is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear,one poor leg should have been snatched from under me?Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep.Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes!But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck?I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam,staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God!God!God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery!mockery!bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old?Close!stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye;it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone!this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no!not with the far away home I see in that eye!”
“Oh, my Captain!my Captain!noble soul!grand old heart, after all!why should any one give chase to that hated fish!Away with me!let us fly these deadly waters!let us home!Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s—wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth;even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age!Away!let us away!—this instant let me alter the course!How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again!I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
“They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the morning. About this time—yes,it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me,of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”
“’Tis my Mary, my Mary herself!She promised that my boy, every morning,should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail!Yes, yes!no more!it is done!we head for Nantucket!Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away!See, see!the boy’s face from the window!the boy’s hand on the hill!”
But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.