Chapter 116.00: CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.

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CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
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Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising
ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild,
pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the
stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing, or
paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy minutes
calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success for their
pains.

At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so
sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone
cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy
quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s
skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not
willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.

These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he
regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only
the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling
waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the
western emigrants’ horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden
bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.

The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there
steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie
sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of
the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so
that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one
seamless whole.

Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as
temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to
open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them
prove but tarnishing.

Oh, grassy glades! Oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though
long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet
may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few
fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to
God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of
life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for
every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do
not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through
infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’
doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last
in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the
round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies
the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the
world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s
father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die
in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we
must there to learn it.

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that
same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—

“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye! —Tell
me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let
faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”

And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same golden
light:—

“I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he
has always been jolly!”