Chapter 134.00: CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.

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CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
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It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly
separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and
man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest
in his sleep.

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but
to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty
leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled,
murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.

But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were,
that distinguished them.

Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air
to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling
line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen here at
the equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms,
with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and
unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of
ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting
his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.

Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged
creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! How
oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen
little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the
marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and
watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more
and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely
aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the
cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did
at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now
threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously
sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could
yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched
hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such
wealth as that one wee drop.

Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that
stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him,
or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.

Ahab turned.

“Starbuck!”

“Sir.”

“Oh, Starbuck! It is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a
day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a
boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago! —ago!
Forty years of continual whaling! Forty years of privation, and peril, and
storm-time! Forty years on the pitiless sea! For forty years has Ahab
forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of
the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent
three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of
solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s
exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the
green country without—oh, weariness! Heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery
of solitary command! —when I think of all this; only half-suspected,
not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed
upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil! —when
the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the
world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away,
from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn
the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? Wife? —rather
a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I
married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling
blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab
has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man! —aye,
aye! What a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab
been! Why this strife of the chase? Why weary, and palsy the arm at the
oar, and the iron, and the lance? How the richer or better is Ahab now?
Behold. Oh, Starbuck! Is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear,
one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old
hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never
grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old,
Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam,
staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! —crack
my heart! —stave my brain! —mockery! Mockery! Bitter, biting
mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and
feel thus intolerably old? Close! Stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look
into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than
to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! This is
the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no;
stay on board, on board! —lower not when I do; when branded Ahab
gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! Not with
the far away home I see in that eye!”

“Oh, my Captain! My Captain! Noble soul! Grand old heart, after all! Why
should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! Let us fly
these deadly waters! Let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s—wife
and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine,
sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age!
Away! Let us away! —this instant let me alter the course! How
cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see
old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days,
even as this, in Nantucket.”

“They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the
morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy
vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of
cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to
dance him again.”

“’Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning,
should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s
sail! Yes, yes! No more! It is done! We head for Nantucket! Come, my
Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! The boy’s face
from the window! The boy’s hand on the hill!”

But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and
cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.

“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what
cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands
me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and
crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready
to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?
Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great
sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single
star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small
heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that
beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man,
we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and
Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! That smiling sky, and this
unsounded sea! Look! See yon Albicore! Who put it into him to chase and
fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the
judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a
mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away
meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes,
Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping?
Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye,
and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in
the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!”

But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two
reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly
leaning over the same rail.