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- 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.
“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what
cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor
commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep
pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly
making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not
so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this
arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy
in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible
power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain
think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does
that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round
in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all
the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon
Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where
do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged
to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and
the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have
been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and
the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we
how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust
amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the
half-cut swaths—Starbuck!”
But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at
two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly
leaning over the same rail.
CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at
intervals—stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went
to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some
barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that
peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living
sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner
surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane,
and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as
possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship’s course to be slightly
altered, and the sail to be shortened.
The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated
at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and
lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery
wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift
tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.
“Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”
Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle
deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they
seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear
with their clothes in their hands.
“What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.
“Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.
“T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”
All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for
swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were
hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and
while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the
main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the
air. “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is
Moby Dick!”
Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three
look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final
perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just
beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian’s
head was almost on a level with Ahab’s heel. From this height the whale
was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing
his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into
the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they
had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched men
all around him.
“I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I
cried out,” said Tashtego.
“Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate
reserved the doubloon for me. _I_ only; none of ye could have raised
the White Whale first.