CHAPTER 130
The Hat
And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a
preliminary cruise, Ahab,—all other whaling waters swept— seemed to
have chased his foe into an oceanfold, to slay him the more securely there;
now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude where
his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken
which on the very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;—
and now that all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly
concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale
tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there
lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for
feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong,
arctic, six months’ night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab’s
purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the
gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts,
misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth
a single spear or leaf.
In this foreshadowing interval, too, all humor, forced or natural,
vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to
check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest
dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul.
Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the
old man’s despot eye was on them.
But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours when
he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that
even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance
awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it. Such
an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such
ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half
uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else
a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being’s body. And
that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night, even, had
Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would
stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did
plainly say— We two watchmen never rest.
Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the
deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or
exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,—the main-mast
and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,—his
living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched heavily
over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, however the days and
nights were added on, that he had not swung in his hammock; yet hidden
beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly whether, for all
this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether he was still intently
scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour
on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon
that stone-carved coat and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next
day’s sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night;
he went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin
that thing he sent for.
He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,— breakfast and
dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew
all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on
at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole
life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee’s mystic
watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to
speak—one man to the other—unless at long intervals some passing
unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent spell seemed
secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed
pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word; by night,
dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange.
At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far parted in
the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the main-mast; but still
fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown
shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance.
And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,— Ahab
seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both
seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade
siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was
solid Ahab.
At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard
from aft,—”Man the mast-heads!”—and all through the day, till after sunset
and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of the
helmsman’s bell, was heard—”What d’ye see?— sharp! sharp! sharp!”
But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the children-
seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac old man
seemed distrustful of his crew’s fidelity; at least, of nearly all except the
Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether Stubb and Flask
might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if these suspicions
were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally expressing them,
however his actions might seem to hint them.
“I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”— he said. “Aye! Ahab
must have the doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest of
basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to
secure to the mainmast head, he received the two ends of the
downwardreeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for
the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end yet in
his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew,
sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo,
Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm
relying eye upon the chief mate, said,—”Take the rope, sir—I give it into
thy hands, Starbuck.” Then arranging his person in the basket, he gave the
word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being the one who
secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one
hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for
miles and miles,—ahead astern, this side, and that,—within the wide
expanded circle commanded at so great a height.
When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in
the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted
up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these circumstances,
its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge to some one man
who has the special watch of it. Because in such a wilderness of running
rigging, whose various different relations aloft cannot always be infallibly
discerned by what is seen of them at the deck; and when the deck-ends of
these ropes are being every few minutes cast down from the fastenings, it
would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with a constant watchman, the
hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall
all swooping to the sea. So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not
unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck,
almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with
anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision— one of those too,
whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat; it
was strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman;
freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person’s hands.
Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in
a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight
up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round
his head.
But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it
much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least
heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every
sight.
“Your hat, your hat, sir!” suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being
posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though
somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them.
But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long
hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his
prize.
An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it,
and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of
Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good.
Ahab’s hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in
advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that
disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that
vast height into the sea.
