Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb
Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern,
the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito
spring, which at sea, almost perpetually reigns on
the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic.
The warmly cool, clear, ringing perfumed, overflowing,
redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian
sherbet, heaped up— flaked up, with rose-water
snow. The starred and stately nights seemed
haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home
in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering
Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping
man, ’twas hard to choose between such winsome
days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries
of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells
and potencies to the outward world. Inward they
turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild
hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals
as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.
And all these subtle agencies, more and more they
wrought on Ahab’s texture.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked
with life, the less man has to do with aught that
looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old
greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit
the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab;
only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live
in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were
more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks.
“It feels like going down into one’s tomb,”—he
would mutter to himself—“for an old
captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle,
to go to my grave-dug berth.”
So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches
of the night were set, and the band on deck sentinelled
the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope
was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors
flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some
cautiousness dropt it to its place for fear of disturbing
their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady
quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent
steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long
the old man would emerge, gripping at the iron banister,
to help his crippled way. Some considering touch
of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he
usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck;
because to his wearied mates, seeking repose within
six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been
the reverberating crack and din of that bony step,
that their dreams would have been of the crunching
teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him
too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy,
lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail
to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came up from
below, and with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness,
hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the
planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might
be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something
indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow,
and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel.
Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.
