Chapter 114.00: CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.

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CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
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Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in
these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits
shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old blacksmith,
had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after concluding his
contributory work for Ahab’s leg, but still retained it on deck, fast
lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost incessantly invoked
by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do some little job for
them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their various weapons and
boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an eager circle, all
waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, harpoons, and
lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled.
Nevertheless, this old man’s was a patient hammer wielded by a patient
arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from him. Silent,
slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back,
he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his
hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was. —Most
miserable!

A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing
yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the
curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted
questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every
one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.

Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter’s midnight, on the road
running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the
deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning,
dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both feet.
Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four acts of
the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act of
the grief of his life’s drama.

He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly
encountered that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. He had been an
artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and
garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe,
ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in
a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in
a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home,
and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith
himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family’s heart. It
was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew
the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for prudent, most wise, and
economic reasons, the blacksmith’s shop was in the basement of his
dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always had the young
and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness, but with
vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old husband’s
hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors and
walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout
Labor’s iron lullaby, the blacksmith’s infants were rocked to slumber.

Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst
thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him,
then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a truly
venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of
them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some virtuous elder
brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of
some other family, and left the worse than useless old man standing, till
the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.

Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more
and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the
wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing
into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked
up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long
church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the
houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every
woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is
only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the
first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the
Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men,
who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide,
does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth
his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life
adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand
mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another
life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders
supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! Bury thyself in a life
which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more
oblivious than death. Come hither! Put up thy gravestone, too, within the
churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!”

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall
of eve, the blacksmith’s soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went
a-whaling.