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 of 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,
and 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 unforeseen 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. How he flashed at me!—his eyes like powder-pans! is he
mad! Anyway there's something's on his mind, as sure as there must be
something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either,
more than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then.
Didn't that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always
finds the old man's hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the
sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and
the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on
it? A hot old man! I guess he's got what some folks ashore call a
conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say— worse nor a
toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord keep me
from catching it. He's full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the
after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's
that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in
the hold? Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old
game— Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to
be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I
think of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort
of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em.
But that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh
commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So here goes again.
But how's that? didn't he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times
a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of that! He might as well
have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he did kick me, and I didn't
observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed
like a bleached bone. What the devil's the matter with me? I don't
stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of
turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming,
though—How? how? how?— but the only way's to stash it; so here goes to
hammock again; and in the morning, I'll see how this plaguey juggling
thinks over by daylight."