“You gettee in,” he added, motioning to
me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to
one side. He really did this in not only a civil
but a really kind and charitable way. I stood
looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings
he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.
What’s all this fuss I have been making about,
thought I to myself—the man’s a human
being just as I am: he has just as much reason
to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better
sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
“Landlord,” said I, “tell him to
stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you
call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I
will turn in with him. But I don’t fancy
having a man smoking in bed with me. It’s
dangerous. Besides, I ain’t insured.”
This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied,
and again politely motioned me to get into bed—rolling
over to one side as much as to say— I won’t
touch a leg of ye.”
“Good night, landlord,” said I, “you
may go.”
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
The Counterpane
Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s
arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate
manner. You had almost thought I had been his
wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full
of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles;
and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable
Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which
were of one precise shade— owing I suppose
to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun
and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up
at various times— this same arm of his,
I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that
same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on
it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly
tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues
together; and it was only by the sense of weight and
pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging
me.
My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain
them. When I was a child, I well remember a
somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether
it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely
settle. The circumstance was this. I had
been cutting up some caper or other— I
think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had
seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my
stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time
whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,—
my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney
and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o’clock
in the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day
in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully.
But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to
my little room in the third floor, undressed myself
as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with
a bitter sigh got between the sheets.
