Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  CHAPTER 132

  The Symphony

  It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea werehardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive airwas transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robustand man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells,as Samson's chest in his sleep.

  Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue,rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these werethe strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.

  But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shadesand shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex,as it were, that distinguished them.

  Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving thisgentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom.And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion--most seen here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing trust,the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

  Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles;haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals,that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stoodforth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splinteredhelmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.

  Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure!Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us!Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab'sclose-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha,laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire;sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the margeof that burnt-out crater of his brain.

  Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the sideand watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze,the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity.But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel,for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad,happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him;the step-mother world, so long cruel--forbidding--now threwaffectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyouslysob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring,she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea;nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.

  Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measurelesssobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around.Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew nearto him, and stood there.

  Ahab turned.

  "Starbuck!"

  "Sir."

  "Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky.On such a day--very much such a sweetness as this--I struckmy first whale--a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty--forty--forty years ago!--ago! Forty years of continual whaling! fortyyears of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years onthe pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land,for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep!Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have notspent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led;the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town ofa Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to anysympathy from the green country without--oh, weariness! heaviness!Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!--when I think of all this;only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before--and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare--fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!--when the poorestlandsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and brokenthe world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts--away, whole oceans away,from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed forCape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow--wife? wife?--rather a widow with her husband alive? Aye, I widowedthat 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! whata forty years' fool--fool--old fool, has old Ahab been!Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the armat the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richeror better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard,that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have beensnatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside;it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never growbut 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 centuriessince Paradise. God! God! God!--crack my heart!--stave my brain!--mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I livedenough 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 gazeupon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! thisis 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 brandedAhab 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 ofhis 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 bowlon our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they havesome such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket."

  "They have, they have. I have seen them--some summer daysin the morning. About this time--yes, it is his noon nap now--the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tellshim 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 firstglimpse 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 emperorcommands 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 himto 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 airssmells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been makinghay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowersare sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we howwe may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rustamid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and leftin the half-cut swarths--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 s
ide;but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there,Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.