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- Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to
pass, so he muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the
dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the
livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly
noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the
barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come
to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished
bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said
the old Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted craft, he shipped
another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.”
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of
the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds,
there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the
plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and
holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out
beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest
fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and
fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor
did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest
gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not
painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not
only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion
in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some
mighty woe.
Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.
But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either
standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or
heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to
grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if,
when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry
bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it
came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet,
for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he
seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was only
making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling
preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so
that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite
Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that
layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose
the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the
pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him
from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and
May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest,
ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some
few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did,
in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish
air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look,
which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went
rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost
perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the
Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing,
redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped
up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights
seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely
pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted
suns! For sleeping man, ’twas hard to choose between such winsome days
and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning
weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward
world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild
hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice
most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more
and more they wrought on Ahab’s texture.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less
man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders,
the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the
night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he
seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits
were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels
like going down into one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to himself—“for an
old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my
grave-dug berth.”
So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were
set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below;
and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors
flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt
it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when
this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the
silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old
man would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled
way. Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like
these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because
to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory
heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony
step, that their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of
sharks. But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings;
and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from
taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below,
with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if
Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say
nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting
something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the
insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know
Ahab then.
“Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me that
fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave;
where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at
last.—Down, dog, and kennel!”
Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly,
“I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half
like it, sir.”
“Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away,
as if to avoid some passionate temptation.
“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be
called a dog, sir.”
“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone,
or I’ll clear the world of thee!”
As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors
in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
“I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,”
muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. “It’s
very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don’t well know whether to go
back and strike him, or—what’s that?—down here on my knees and pray for
him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the
first time I ever _did_ pray. It’s queer; very queer; and he’s queer
too; aye, take him fore and aft, he’s about the queerest old man Stubb
ever sailed with.