CHAPTER 38
Dusk
By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it.
My soul is more than matched; she’s over-manned; and by a madman!
Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he
drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his
impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable
thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.
Horrible old man! Who’s over him, he cries;—aye, he would be a democrat
to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my
miserable office,— to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of
pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it.
Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round
watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His
heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it
not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling
weight, I have no key to lift again.
[A burst of revelry from the forecastle.]
Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of
human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The
white whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is
forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life.
Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering
bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his
sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and further on,
hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through! Peace!
ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! ’tis in an hour like this, with soul
beat down and held to knowledge,— as wild, untutored things are forced to
feed—Oh, life! ’tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but ’tis not
me! that horror’s out of me, and with the soft feeling of the human in me,
yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me,
bind me, O ye blessed influences!
