“Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?—little Alabama 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, Captain! Captain! 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.”
“Hist! What’s that? A knock from astern? It must be another guest here to toast shame upon all cowards; but whence comes this knock? Ah! it comes from behind this great map. Halloa! there is some sort of clever door here. Mayhap it leads to my Captain, or leastways it leads to another dinner guest, I guess. And look, the map swings aside, all stiff on its top, fastened to a long thin strip of hinged iron. And here’s the clever door latch. The thumps come quicker from our dinner guest. Hungry, hungry. Coming, good sir; coming, Commodore.
“Well, hello there, brother. Why are you all tied up tight like that? Why is your head lashed to the decking? Is that so? Well, since we are brothers, though you have no legs, I see, I will free you from this bondage. First let me clear that odd pulsing mushroomy thing sprouted up from this hole in your brow. That’s better. Ah, no need to thank me; no need to thank me, for are we not brothers? Once free, mayhap we can find Pip and sup on some tasty coward flesh, for already has Pip been well toasted, and I hear toasted coward is a tasty dish! Now, first to this rope about your neck!”
Chapter
A Coffin for a Life-Buoy
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 innuendoes 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 balks. 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. And now I’m ordered to make a life-buoy of it.—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 timber, 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.
But heigh-ho! 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 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.
Hem! I’ll do the job, now, tenderly. May as well leave in the ship’s biscuit and the water and tarpaulin and all, as it would be right handy in a pickle, as it were, ha-ha. 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.” Thus muttering to himself, the carpenter went for some rope to fashion his Turk-head life-lines and did not see the eely shape slip up to the coffin and rummage about under the tarpaulin, and then away with a sliding celerity.
A brief moment later, Queequeg approached the coffin, also peering within, as though to check the spelling on all the wild symbols he had so carefully carved within the coffin; and, after leaving some small additional token within, Queequeg moved away before the carpenter—still mumbling— returned with his coil of rope.
“This rope will be fine, fine. 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.”
Ahab’s Log: Chapter
The Starboard Hand of Woe
Ahab’s Log: December 29, 1851
Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and this poor heart throbs, and this poor brain beats too much for that. And yet, of late I’ve thought my brain was very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, as do those tendrils thread their way further up thy spine to populate thy brain, and heat must breed it; but no, it’s like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How thy wild inner winds do blow it; they whip it about within thee as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. And it’s blown by a vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of insane asylums, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it’s tainted.
Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, ‘tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference!
And yet, strong winds or no, on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges, or dashes it from some dumb zomby brain. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, and is only a patriot to heaven’s purpose. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages.
And Oh! poor, noble, heaven-crazed Pip; ma
y eternal delight and deliciousness be his. Ah, Pip! thou heart of my heart, thy darkly fevered brow, in reposing sleep dost appear as unlined as any babe’s, but hot as fire, as that febrile bite does its yeasty unthinking deed! Ah, Pip! Ah, Pip, poor Pip, called me thy God? and knew not that what he called God was more demon and damned than divine; for what god would foist such fate upon his creature? Indeed, Ahab, that is thy own looming question, is it not? If this be the lesson, old man; will ye learn it?
Ah, but the lesson is an empty one, for the White Whale even now awaits to wreak similar destruction on any other, him the blasted primary mover of all this foul circumstance. So: I leave eternity to Thee, thou Uncreated; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God? Whence comes the learning from such woe!
Mayhap this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to thee whose name is more to him than goodness! Woe to thee who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to thee who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to thee who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!
Ah, Pip, thou castaway, Ahab shall forego a portion of his own potion and give it to thee that thou may yet live, after a fashion. Fedallah counsels otherwise, but I tire of his tyranny, and question whence comes his vision, for does he not prophesy only woe; does he not prophesy his own demise, and Ahab’s to boot? This cannot be sooth. I believe him less and less. Yet the palpable power he holds over Ahab—over Ahab!—I have struggled against it, and armed with righteous anger at Pip’s infection—born from Ahab’s own loving kindness—armed with this righteous rage, I have this moment overcome Fedallah’s power and refused him his desire, for he did counsel to bind Pip and use him for the feasting ground of his pale powder, to sow his vile spore in Pip’s brain. I cannot do it; I will not! For the Pequod is but a floating kingdom and Ahab its sole sovereign. Ahab! None other.
There is yet some small medicine to be harvested from that stinking thing that Pip in his lunacy did nearly free from its bonds. Until such time as Ahab’s very life is threatened with the absence of that potion, Pip shall receive a small portion of thine own, though it put thee at risk. Fedallah says it is too little, and too late for Pip, yet will I try to help him nonetheless. It must be so; for though ye could help none of the other millions so infected by thy ignorance, yet will ye strive to steal some small humanity from this for thyself, ere thou forsake all humanity that yet may lie within thy withered breast.
This line I do hereby draw, though it be invisible as that equatorial line toward which we now sail; and like that line, this girdles thy yet unquenchable goodness, vanishingly slight though it be. But lo! as easily and blithely as the equator is crossed, so might this line thou drawest be crossed with equal facility. Oh! cruel Fates, I beg of ye to absent Ahab from the making of such a sad sacrifice.
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, or God, or some murdering fungus, or what, 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.
Still does Moby Dick infectiously swim these waters. And he is close! I can feel him, just as Fedallah said he feels him, that yeasty presence in him bespeaking its kin in these human forms, even now pulling at thy very navel. He is close!
If Fedallah’s re-seeding of the zomby fails to take, we have less than a fortnight till the plague overtakes us both entire and we fall to raving, taking the entire ship with us. Moby Dick must be slain now. Now! or all is lost. Unless—O direness! O abomination!—unless Pip is also thus seeded, and from such unwilling sacrifice might the quest continue to its proper end.
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 through the porthole smells now as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay; and sleeping there,—such sweet sleepings!—they smell not this festering rot from what once was human flesh, they see not that pulsating thing that grows again from the dark spore Fedallah hast sprinkled into that black and festering brain.
Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field.
Chapter
So Man’s Seconds Tick
[Queequeg’s coffin is 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, his voice a weak entreaty, try to follow Ahab on deck.]
“Back, lad; back to bed with ye; and place that damp cloth back on thy feverish brow, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand complies with my humor more genially than that hapless wight. Ah, lad, did I think aught would come of it, I would pray Fedallah be mistaken in his...
“—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 for that, sir; but the reason 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 Galápagos, is cut by the Equator right in the mid
dle. 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 grey-headed 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 on 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; tending to thy fever, I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!”
Chapter
The Pequod Meets Rachel
Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull.
Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale Page 48
