The Quarter-Deck
It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe,
that one morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as
was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck.
There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour,
as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a
few turns in the garden.
Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and
fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so familiar
to his tread, that they were all over dented, like
geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk.
Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented
brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints—the
foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked
deeper, even as his nervous step that morning left
a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought was
Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now
at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could
almost see that thought turn in him as he turned,
and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing
him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould
of every outer movement.
“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered
Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks
the shell. ’Twill soon be out.”
The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within
his cabin; anon, pacing the deck, with the same intense
bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came
to a halt by the bulwarks, and inserting his bone
leg into the auger-hole there, and with one hand grasping
a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.
“Sir!” said the mate, astonished at an
order seldom or never given on ship-board except in
some extraordinary case.
“Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab.
“Mast-heads, there! come down!”
When the entire ship’s company were assembled,
and with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces,
were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather
horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly
glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes
among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as
though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy
turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched
hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering
whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered
to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned them there
for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat.
But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing,
he cried:—
“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive
rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval
in his tones; observing the hearty animation into
which his unexpected question had so magnetically
thrown them.
