Moby Dick by Herman Melville (read this if txt) đ
- Author: Herman Melville
- Performer: 0142437247
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âSir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled it.â
ââTwill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou seemâst to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.â
âI hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs of mine âtis not worth while disputing, âspecially with a superior, whoâll neâer confess.â
âWhatâs that? There nowâs a patched professor in Queen Natureâs granite-founded College; but methinks heâs too subservient. Where wert thou born?â
âIn the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.â
âExcellent! Thouâst hit the world by that.â
âI know not, sir, but I was born there.â
âIn the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, itâs good. Hereâs a man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man; which is sucked inâby what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So.â
The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.
âHold hard!â
Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging log was gone.
âI crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line. See to it.â
âThere he goes now; to him nothingâs happened; but to me, the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?â
âPip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whaleboat. Pipâs missing. Letâs see now if ye havenât fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess heâs holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off we haul in no cowards here. Ho! thereâs his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it offâwe haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir, sir! hereâs Pip, trying to get on board again.â
âPeace, thou crazy loon,â cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. âAway from the quarter-deck!â
âThe greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,â muttered Ahab, advancing. âHands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
âAstern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!â
âAnd who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou, boy?â
âBell-boy, sir; shipâs-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet highâlooks cowardlyâ quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Whoâs seen Pip the coward?â
âThere can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahabâs cabin shall be Pipâs home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, letâs down.â
âWhatâs this? hereâs velvet shark-skin,â intently gazing at Ahabâs hand, and feeling it. âAh, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had neâer been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go.â
âOh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperorâs!â
âThere go two daft ones now,â muttered the old Manxman. âOne daft with strength, the other daft with weakness. But hereâs the end of the rotten lineâall dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new line altogether. Iâll see Mr. Stubb about it.â
CHAPTER 126
The Life-Buoy
Steering now south-eastward by Ahabâs levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by Ahabâs level log and line; the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.
At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watchâthen headed by Flaskâwas startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthlyâlike half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herodâs murdered Innocentsâthat one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixed by listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxmanâthe oldest mariner of allâdeclared that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.
Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus explained the wonder.
Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men.
But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heardâa cry and a rushingâand looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea.
The life-buoyâa long slender caskâwas dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and the parched wood also filled at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.
And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whaleâs own peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a fore-shadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they 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 shipâs stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin.
âA life-buoy of a coffin!â cried Starbuck, starting.
âRather queer, that, I should say,â said Stubb.
âIt will make a good enough one,â said Flask, âthe carpenter here can arrange it easily.â
âBring it up; thereâs nothing else for it,â said Starbuck, after a melancholy pause. âRig it, carpenter; do not look at me soâ the coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it.â
âAnd shall I nail down the lid, sir?â moving his hand as with a hammer.
âAye.â
âAnd shall I caulk the seams, sir?â moving his hand as with a caulking-iron.
âAye.â
âAnd shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?â moving his hand as with a pitch-pot.
Away! What possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no more.âMr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.â
âHe goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks. Now I donât 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 wonât put his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now Iâm ordered to make a life-buoy of it. Itâs like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I donât like this cobbling sort of businessâ I donât like it at all; itâs undignified; itâs not my place. Let tinkersâ 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 cobblerâs job, thatâs at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end. Itâs the old womanâs 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 thatâs the reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore when I kept my job-shop
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