CHAPTER 114
The Gilder
Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising
ground the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild, pleasant
weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the stretch, they
were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the
whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their
uprising; though with but small success for their pains.
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably
mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr
against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when
beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets
the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that
this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it
as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her
masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling waves, but
through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the western emigrants’
horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade
through the amazing verdure.
The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there
steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie
sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the
woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that
fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless
whole.
Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as
temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to
open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them
prove but tarnishing.
Oh, grassy glades! oh ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—
though long parched by the dead drought of the earthly life,— in ye, men
yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few
fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to
God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of
life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for
every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not
advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:— through
infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt
(the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in
manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the
round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies
the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the
world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s
father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers
die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we
must there to learn it.
And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that
same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—
“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eyes!—
Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways.
Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down
and do believe.”
And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same golden
light:—
“I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he
has always been jolly!”
