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- had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.
The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see
to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in
the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the
voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly
connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be;
therefore, they were going to leave the ship’s stern unprovided with a
buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a
hint concerning his coffin.
“A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck, starting.
“Rather queer, that, I should say,” said Stubb.
“It will make a good enough one,” said Flask, “the carpenter here can
arrange it easily.”
“Bring it up; there’s nothing else for it,” said Starbuck, after a
melancholy pause. “Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so—the coffin,
I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it.”
“And shall I nail down the lid, sir?” moving his hand as with a hammer.
“Aye.”
“And shall I caulk the seams, sir?” moving his hand as with a
caulking-iron.
“Aye.”
“And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?” moving his hand
as with a pitch-pot.
“Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and
no more.—Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.”
“He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he
baulks. Now I don’t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he
wears it like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he
won’t put his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with
that coffin? And now I’m ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It’s like
turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I
don’t like this cobbling sort of business—I don’t like it at all; it’s
undignified; it’s not my place. Let tinkers’ brats do tinkerings; we
are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin,
fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at
the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at
the conclusion; not a cobbler’s job, that’s at an end in the middle,
and at the beginning at the end. It’s the old woman’s tricks to be
giving cobbling jobs. Lord! what an affection all old women have for
tinkers. I know an old woman of sixty-five who ran away with a
bald-headed young tinker once. And that’s the reason I never would work
for lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept my job-shop in the
Vineyard; they might have taken it into their lonely old heads to run
off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let
me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with
pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring over
the ship’s stern. Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some
superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere
they would do the job. But I’m made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I
don’t budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard
tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and
card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or
by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask the why and wherefore
of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling, and then we stash it
if we can. Hem! I’ll do the job, now, tenderly. I’ll have me—let’s
see—how many in the ship’s company, all told? But I’ve forgotten. Any
way, I’ll have me thirty separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines, each three
feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then, if the hull go down,
there’ll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight
not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer, caulking-iron,
pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let’s to it.”
CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
_The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the
open hatchway; the Carpenter caulking its seams; the string of twisted
oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of
his frock.—Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip
following him._
“Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand
complies with my humor more genially than that boy.—Middle aisle of a
church! What’s here?”
“Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the
hatchway!”
“Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.”
“Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does.”
“Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy
shop?”
“I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?”
“Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?”
“Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but
they’ve set me now to turning it into something else.”
“Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,
monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the
next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those
same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
jack-of-all-trades.”
“But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.”
“The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a
coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the
craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in
hand. Dost thou never?”
“Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough, sir, for that; but
the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there
was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark
to it.”
“Aye, and that’s because the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what in
all things makes the sounding-board is this—there’s naught beneath. And
yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter.
Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against
the churchyard gate, going in?
“Faith, sir, I’ve——”
“Faith? What’s that?”
“Why, faith, sir, it’s only a sort of exclamation-like—that’s all,
sir.”
“Um, um; go on.”
“I was about to say, sir, that——”
“Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?
Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight.”
“He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot
latitudes. I’ve heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the
Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some
sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He’s always
under the Line—fiery hot, I tell ye! He’s looking this way—come, oakum;
quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I’m the
professor of musical glasses—tap, tap!”
(_Ahab to himself_.)
“There’s a sight! There’s a sound! The greyheaded woodpecker tapping
the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that
thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag,
that fellow. Rat-tat! So man’s seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all
materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here
now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the
expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A
life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some
spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!
I’ll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth,
that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain
twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed
sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return again.
Now, then, Pip, we’ll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous
philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds
must empty into thee!”
CHAPTER 128.