CHAPTER 132
The Symphony
It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly
separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently
pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and 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 were the strong, troubled,
murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
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 this gentle 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 stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his
splintered helmet 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’s close-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 marge of
that burnt-out crater of his brain.
Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and
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
threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously
sob 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 measureless sobbing that
stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him, or be
noticed by him, he yet drew near to 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 struck my first whale—a boy-
harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty— forty years ago!—ago! Forty years
of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time!
forty years on the 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 not spent three ashore.
When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been;
the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but
small entrance to any sympathy 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 poorest landsman has had fresh
fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy
crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past
fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my
marriage pillow— wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive?
Aye, I widowed that 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! what a forty years’ fool—fool—
old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and
palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better
is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load
I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush
this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did
never grow but 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 centuries since Paradise. God! God!
God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!— mockery! mockery! bitter,
biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough 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
gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is 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 branded Ahab 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 of his 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 bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir,
they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
“They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the
morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now— the boy
vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him 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 first glimpse 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 emperor
commands 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 him to 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 airs smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow;
they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes,
Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.
Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep?
Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in
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 side; but started at two
reflected, fixed eyes in the water there, Fedallah was motionlessly leaning
over the same rail.
