الفصل الفصل 29 · 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 on 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,

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 unforseen 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 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.”