Chapter XXIX: 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, griping at the
iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considerating 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 odd 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 did'st 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 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
day-light.