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- was traced half-way along the pole’s length, and firmly secured so,
with intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the
Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with
the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory
pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his
cabin, light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was
heard. Oh, Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy
strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the
melancholy ship, and mocked it!
CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising
ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild,
pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on
the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or
sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or
seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small
success for their pains.
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so
sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone
cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy
quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the
ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and
would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a
remorseless fang.
These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he
regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing
only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high
rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when
the western emigrants’ horses only show their erected ears, while their
hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.
The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these
there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied
children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when
the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most
mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate,
and form one seamless whole.
Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as
temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem
to open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath
upon them prove but tarnishing.
Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in
ye,—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye,
men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some
few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them.
Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling
threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a
storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this
life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one
pause:—through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless
faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then
disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But
once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and
men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor
no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will
never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like
those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of
our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that
same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—
“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s
eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping
cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep
down and do believe.”
And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same
golden light:—
“I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that
he has always been jolly!”
CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down
before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab’s harpoon had been welded.
It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her
last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in
glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously,
sailing round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous
to pointing her prow for home.
The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red
bunting at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended,
bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long
lower jaw of the last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks
of all colours were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways
lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm;
above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of
the same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen
lamp.
As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most
surprising success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in
the same seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without
securing a single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been
given away to make room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional
supplemental casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met;
and these were stowed along the deck, and in the captain’s and
officers’ state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been knocked
into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of an
oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In the
forecastle, the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests,
and filled them; it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a
head on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged
his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the
sockets of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was
filled with sperm, except the captain’s pantaloons pockets, and those
he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of
his entire satisfaction.
As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge
try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like _poke_ or stomach skin
of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the
clenched hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and
harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with
them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat,
firmly secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long
Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were
presiding over the hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship’s
company were tumultuously busy at the masonry of the try-works, from
which the huge pots had been removed.